For thousands of years, every element of the food system was visible in cities – growing food and raising animals, processing raw ingredients and making food, storing food, selling food, eating food, celebrating food and learning about food. In the past century, with the rise of the engine and the automobile / trucking, we have inadvertently buried or hidden so much of the food system.
Food is raised or grown elsewhere – often thousands of miles away. It is processed and warehoused far away. If it is more local, it is hidden deep in an industrial area. In today’s urban fabric, we rarely encounter any aspect of the food system but food retail at a grocery store and the eating of food in a restaurant.
A significant opportunity to create more animated and resilient cities in the future is to consciously make the whole food system more present and visible in our urban areas. It’s not a matter of becoming locally self-sufficient for growing and raising food – that will never happen in our modern cities and isn’t necessary, but having some food grown or raised in the urban fabric adds a deep archetypal experience and depth to our urban experience. Likewise with watching workers process and pack food stuffs. And the same goes for all the other aspects of the system.
For more on the whole food system perspective, see the work being done on Agricultural Urbanism, Agrarian Urbanism and others.