The Greenest City

Growing my own food stems from something much bigger; a realisation

that I had about why we eat the way we do and it comes down to one thing:

cities.

Cities are very new in terms of human history, and they have done amazing things for us. These are the hubs of science, education, medicine and technology. They have connected us in ways that are invaluable to the human race, but there is a down side to all this. Our cities place tremendous pressures on the environment and separate us from the rural biomes which we all still depend on. The truth is that we actually don’t know how to live in cities yet.

As we moved into cities, we left our farmers behind, and as the saying goes, “out of sight, out of mind”. We’ve forgotten about the farmers and more and more people are jumping in between us as the consumer and our food producers, placing more and more pressure on them and forcing them to make cost cuts which ultimately results in bad food for us. It’s ridiculous when you think of the bigger picture, and that we import certain fruits, that fruit and vegetables are ripened on the shelves, and that lettuce can last for weeks without going off. However convenient, it’s not natural, and more importantly it’s not good for us.

The solution is to make food local again. Like we’ve done for centuries before with our veggie patches and fruit gardens in our back yards, we need to produce our food where we live and work – and that doesn’t mean we have to go back to being hunter-gatherers. We can do all this with technology that we have today without compromising the way that we live in cities. In two words: Green Town.

Making Cape Town the greenest city in the world,

one urban farm at a time.

This is my mission; to revolutionise the way we eat in cities, starting at home, so join me in this endeavour to make this city the greenest city in the world. It’s a big idea, but no one ever changed the world without one. We’re going to start small; take baby steps and slowly build to a better and healthier future for all of us.

“How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”