What if we really got serious about urban farming and eating healthful food?  Serious as in building greenhouses on empty lots in urban areas - where there are five layers of plants growing organically; literally tons of composting going on; fish growing in tanks and providing waste for recycling back into plants; worms galore; and people streaming in to learn how to do more?  The NYT has a great article on an urban farmer in Milwaukee, Will Allen, who does just that.

Allen, who grew up on a farm, played basketball in college, then professionally, won many sales awards for jobs down in several large companies, finally settled in to grow healthy food in the inner city of Milwaukee, a task that he seems completely suited for.   

"Like others in the so-called good-food movement, Allen, who is 60, asserts that our industrial food system is depleting soil, poisoning water, gobbling fossil fuels and stuffing us with bad calories. Like others, he advocates eating locally grown food. But to Allen, local doesn’t mean a rolling pasture or even a suburban garden: it means 14 greenhouses crammed onto two acres in a working-class neighborhood on Milwaukee’s northwest side, less than half a mile from the city’s largest public-housing project."

Allen's company, Growing Power, has received several large grants and Allen was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award last year.  He teaches workshops to people from all over the country on how to do urban gardening.  So, the operation isn't self-sufficient.  But, as Elizabeth Royte, the NYT reporter says, "neither is industrial agriculture, which relies on price supports and government subsidies. Moreover, industrial farming incurs costs that are paid by society as a whole: the health costs of eating highly processed foods, for example, or water pollution."

It's a wonderful story.  Take a read.  Pay particular attention to his Food Manifesto.  Here's a couple of key paragraphs from it:

"Over the past century, we allowed our agriculture to become more and more industrialized, more and more reliant on unsustainable practices, and much more distant from the source to the consumer. We have allowed corn and soybeans, grown on the finest farmland in the world, to become industrial commodities rather than foodstuffs. We have encouraged a system by which most of the green vegetables we eat come from a few hundred square miles of irrigated semi-desert in California.

When fuel prices skyrocket, as they did last year, things go awry. When a bubble like ethanol builds and then bursts, things go haywire. When drought strikes that valley in California, as is happening right now, things start to topple. And when the whole economy shatters, the security of a nation’s food supply teeters on the brink of failure."