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Re: Cities/rural--resources (was Yuri receives hypocrite of the week award)



On 13 Dec 1996 17:11:36 GMT, "Richard W. Tarara"
<rtarara@saintmarys.edu> wrote:
>David Lloyd-Jones <dlj@inforamp.net> wrote in article   
><snipped>
>> Actually the last tomatoes I grew, I grew on the porch on the south
>> side of my apartment block in Tokyo.  I mixed them with the lettuce
>> from a farm which I cycled to at dawn every morning.  I paid something
>> like $15 to have two square meters for the season, and got tomatoes,
>> cucumbers, spring onions, a couple of lettuces, and a few other nice
>> surprises out of it.
>>  
>But a few vegetables do not a diet make.  To support your claim (if indeed
>you are really claiming) that a large city can supply its own food, you'll
>have to show that cities with population densities of 30-50 people per acre
>(NYC--the whole thing, is 41/acre) can feed that many.  

The general proposition is that cities feed themselves (and others) by
organizing and supplying the countryside.
 
My examples of New York and Leningrad, Manila and Tokyo, are intended
only to illustrate the very large variety of resources available.
 
Your picture of New York will change very greatly if you include the
bedroom suburbs -- or if you consider that the actual city involved is
Boswash.  I used to commute to work on the Bird With A Yellow Tail,
living in Washington and working every other week in Cambridge.
Thousands of people commute from Philadelphia to New York daily.
 
You are quite right that Manhattan alone would have problems, probably
a die-back like Leningrad's.  But Central and Riverside parks could
grow an awful lot of potatoes, and there are major bean-sprout, cactus
and maijuana farms already operating there.
 

-dlj
 


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