Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Food Forests and Prosperity without Growth
Via NPR's Food Blog comes word of an urban foraging project in Seattle called the Beacon Food Forest. The concept is simple: Populate vacant space with fruit trees, vegetables and other healthy foods so that nearby residents can simply go out and pick fresh fruits and vegetables as needed. The project offers an early, and incredibly creative signal of ways to reimagine community health and well-being that don't necessarily include economic development or growth.
As NPR describes the project:
The idea is to give members of the working-class neighborhood of Beacon Hill the chance to pick plants scattered throughout the park – dubbed the Beacon Food Forest. It will feature fruit-bearing perennials — apples, pears, plums, grapes, blueberries, raspberries and more…
After some community outreach, local support came pouring in for the idea. Herlihy and the Friends of Beacon Food Forest community group received a $22,000 grant to hire a certified designer for the project.
A local utility, Seattle Public Utilities, offered up the 7-acre plot, which could make it the largest, urban food forest on public land in the U.S., Glenn Herlihy, a steering committee member for the project, tells The Salt.
The group is currently working with $100,000 in seed money to set up the first phase: a 1.75-acre test zone to be planted by the end of the year. After a few years, if that section is deemed successful by the city, the remaining acreage will be converted to food trees.
As Good notes, the project won't just help bring healthy, low-cost produce into the area but will also help give the community more open parks and green space.
What's also notable here is the incredibly low cost of set up--just $100,000, far cheaper than most traditional development projects, which invest much larger sums of money into attracting businesses or otherwise looking for local growth strategies.
The Food Forest, in other words, is an example that fits well with a book I'm reading, Prosperity Without Growth, which focuses on questions of how do we enhance human prosperity and well-being without simply relying on producing more economic output.
It's also an interesting signal of the role of community development in health. Last year, I highlighted a New England Journal of Medicine study that found that helping low-income people move to better neighborhoods was as effective at reducing medical risk as traditional medical interventions - and at the time, noted that the study suggests that we need to be thinking far more concretely about how to use our social and physical spaces as medical intervention points.
And the Food Forest project points to one intriguing idea to help improve health, particularly in food deserts: Simply turn vacant space into a community resource to feed people.