The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People, and Communities

Allen begins this chapter with a description of the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network, created by the U.S. government in 2007, as a way to discuss the reasons why fewer young people are choosing farming as a profession. He asserts the necessity of “creat[ing] new models for growing and distributing food that are emotionally satisfying” (185) so that more young people can experience the “lifelong education that engages you physically, intellectually, and spiritually” (185) that is the farming life.

Allen details his process as the chapter continues, explaining how he came to change his goals and adapt his ideas based on the opportunities that made themselves available to him in an urban landscape. He urges readers to stop “expect[ing] our food of the future to be produced only by traditional farming families in rural areas” (187). Allen expands his ideas from farming to “a new urban ecology, where a city’s waste could connect to its food-producing stream” (187), ideas which have the potential to “meet one of the biggest challenges of growing food in an urban environment: the problem of the land’s fertility” (189). As well, Allen began to consider growing sprouts and developing a vertical farm, “with pots hanging on several levels” (192).