FARM: shop – East London’s radical experiment in food growing and community building
FARM: shop is many things, but foremost it is a radical experiment in how we feed ourselves and how we use space.
As soon as you enter the building it's clear that every corner has been thoroughly investigated for its growing potential; there are plants everywhere, sprouting from unlikely angles, twisting in the lights, floating on rafts. 'The idea here is to grow the maximum amount of food as efficiently as possible, keeping the labor to minimum', says Paul Smyth, one of the co-founders.
In a hot room upstairs there are chillies and tomatoes, the excess heat from which is piped to other parts of the building.
Chickens live in a coop on the flat roof, two pigs roam between raised beds and a polytunnel in the yard, mushrooms are coming in the basement and kefir bacteria for fermenting fine drinks swarm in jars in the entrance corridor.
The shop is the brainchild of three individuals from diverse backgrounds: Sam is primarily a farmer, Paul is an engineer and designer, third member Andy Merritt an artist.
The Future Kitchen is Urban Homesteading
Designers are becoming fascinated with urban farming and developing products including ‘Cultivation Cabinets’ – a cupboard in which young edible plants can be grown – such as the one by Bureau Marije van der Park and Maarten Kolk & Guss Kusters. By placing the process of growth into an interior product designers are encouraging us to bring vegetation back into our daily life.
Why We Should Question Walmart’s Latest PR Blitz
Walmart made big news Thursday with a press conference alongside the First Lady to announce new company commitments. Most of the mainstream media coverage of the Walmart announcement seemed to buy the company PR that it was taking valiant steps to improve the affordability and health qualities of the food it sells. Among these commitments, Walmart said it will be working with food suppliers to reduce sodium, sugars, and trans fat in certain products by 2015; developing its own seal to help consumers identify healthier products; and addressing hunger by opening Walmart stores in the nation’s “food deserts.”
Do these Walmart promises really hold big upsides for health and food insecurity?
With the typically little critical coverage in the mainstream media, we are left to ponder the impact of these Walmart commitments ourselves.
Eating Liberally: What about those smarmy Monsanto ads?
Now that the Supreme Court has declared that corporations are people, too (happy birthday, Citizens United!), Monsanto is apparently out to put a friendly, slightly weatherbeaten, gently grizzled face on industrial agriculture (see above photo, taken at a DC bus stop just outside USDA headquarters.)
This guy looks an awful lot like Henry Fonda playing Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, which seems only fitting since Agribiz may be helping to create a 21st century Dust Bowl.
After decades of boasting about how fossil-fuel intensive industrial agriculture has made it possible for far fewer farmers to produce way more food, Monsanto is now championing the power of farming to create jobs and preserve land. Does this attempt by a biotech behemoth to wrap itself in populist plaid flannel give you the warm and fuzzies, or just burn you up?
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