Edible Cities? Food Forests Foster Community Connection & Healing
By Samphe brulé
Food sovereignty, the ability to control one’s food production, distribution, and consumption, is a cornerstone of a healthy, equitable society (Mihesuah, 2019, p. 62). It offers a framework to achieve food security, wherein every person has adequate physical and economic access to healthy, safe and culturally appropriate food.
Across North America, barriers to food sovereignty are emblematic of a colonialist society that denies independence to Black and Indigenous communities. As Mihesuah (2019) writes in their chapter, “You can’t be sovereign if you can’t feed yourself”, “[...] food sovereignty is not just a goal in and of itself but a tool to achieve other aspects of cultural restoration that are connected to health and language” (p. 66). Similarly, in discussions of Black self-determination, White (2018) posits that “any strategy that sought self-reliance had to have food access as a building block” (p. 120). Food serves as a path to healing, autonomy, and cultural resilience.
Food forests are often considered the ultimate gardens — once established based on permaculture design principles, these forests become self-sustaining, capable of nourishing communities with relatively little labour.
Proponents of industrial agriculture focus on dilemmas such as, “Does it ship well? Does it have a long shelf life?” Food forest advocates, on the other hand, pose a different set of questions, “Does it provide habitat and nourishment for pollinators? Does it maintain the integrity and health of the soil?” And the benefits of food forests extend beyond the ecological realm, as urban agriculture brings together neighbours and encourages connection with nature.
Shelley Lambert is a Chief Food Forester at the forefront of establishing food forests here in Ottawa, Ontario. Lambert describes her home food forest as base camp, but she has also proven instrumental in establishing food forests on the Just Food Farm, on corporate land around Riverside, on a cottage property outside of Ottawa, and on a handful of other sites across the city.
Food forests can provide immediate sustenance, if annuals are dispersed amongst fruit- and nut-bearing trees, but they also have the potential to facilitate long-term food production. Dormant or unattended food forests might be used to feed a community if global supply chains were all of a sudden unable to deliver goods to local markets.
A creative solution to challenges facing cities around the world, food forests lie at the heart of creating more resilient communities, especially in the face of climate change and potential disruptions to global supply chains. Lambert describes her own experience cultivating food forests:
“I think there’s also a big aspect of creativity. We are creating spaces, we are helping foster things to grow from seed to its full potential. [...] When we as humans think and invent, we often do that by observing nature. I feel that very much in food forests, because there’s so much wild, raw energy.”
In Atlanta, Georgia, the Browns Mill community has established the city’s first food forest. Browns Mill is classified as a food desert and the closest grocery store for residents is a 30-minute bus ride away (Ryan, 2021). Scholars blame Browns Mills’ food desert on an urban planning process known as “supermarket redlining.”
Supermarket redlining refers to segregation in food access between White and non-White neighborhoods, specifically targeting Black and low-income communities. Despite its lack of grocery stores, Browns Mill is flush with agricultural land. The Urban Food Forest at Browns Mill delivers “around 40 boxes of food to people in the community a week, with each box weighing about 40 lbs — amounting to 1,600 pounds of food per month to the immediate community” (Lomax in Buckley, 2021).
Celeste Lomax, an organizer of the Urban Food Forest at Browns Mill in Atlanta, Georgia, sees the Browns Mill food forest as an opportunity to heal the community.
“We are eating more chemicals than we are food. Something’s the matter with that picture. This is why we do all of our composting at the site, we don’t use any chemicals or pesticides on the whole acreage,” says Lomax, “When you break into our soil, you see worms, you see rich soil that we have cultivated, that has already been cultivated before we even got there.”
The food forest in Browns Mill, Atlanta, exemplifies how Black farmers can leverage food forests and community-owned land to combat systemic food insecurity. It shows how a shift in food production can prioritize community health and wellness. While food forests cannot solve food injustice in its entirety — the Browns Mill food desert is an inequity that must be addressed by American lawmakers — they help to achieve greater food security through food sovereignty principles — notably, control over production, distribution, and consumption of local production.
Food forests are not a new concept: Indigenous peoples have cultivated wild gardens long before food forests became part of the zeitgeist for food studies and environmental scholars. Beyond cultural and nutritional benefits, food forests foster more resilient cities by creating a reliable agricultural base that could be drawn upon during times of crisis, such as a pandemic or supply chain disruptions. Integrating food forests into communities across North America, in collaboration with Black and Indigenous farmers, might provide a stepping stone towards decolonizing and localizing food systems.
REFERENCES
Buckley, S. (2021). “Atlanta’s food forest pioneering potential solution to urban food deserts.” In Sustainable Brands. Retrieved from: https://sustainablebrands.com/read/product-service-design-innovation/atlanta-s-food-forest-pioneering-potential-solution-to-urban-food-deserts
Mihesuah, D. A., Mihesuah, D. A., Hoover, E., & LaDuke, W. (2019). “Indigenous food sovereignty in the United States: Restoring cultural knowledge, protecting environments, and regaining health.” University of Oklahoma Press.
Shannon, J. ( 2018, August 14). “From food deserts to supermarket redlining: Making sense of food access in Atlanta.” Atlanta Studies. Retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.18737/atls20180814
Ryan, C. (March 2, 2021). “Atlanta creates the nation's largest free food forest with hopes of addressing food insecurity.” In Cable News Network. Retrieved from: https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/22/us/atlanta-free-food-forest-trnd/index.html
White, M. M. (2018). Freedom farmers agricultural resistance and the Black freedom movement. University of North Carolina Press.
About the Author
Samphe Brulé (she/her) is a documentary filmmaker, podcaster and writer, sharing stories of climate justice, community organizing, and sustainable urban design.
