Earlier this week the indoor agriculture pioneer Gotham Greens announced the opening of a new ten acre, state-of-the-art greenhouse in Northern California. Located in the area of the University of Califorinia-Davis, where they will be working with the university’s environmental sciences and natural resources departments. This will be a similar but much larger facility to the Gotham Greens greenhouse located in our own Aurora, Colorado that’s only 30,000 square feet that opened in 2020. Gotham Greens is responsible for one of North America’s leading networks of indoor hydroponic greenhouses, providing customers, restaurants, and distributors with fresh greens and herbs in their urban community. It’s Innovation in agriculture like these hydroponic greenhouses from the creators of Gotham Greens that is vital for our communities now.
Our current food and agriculture system in the U.S. is flawed, with an emphasis on processed foods and animal products. This ends up causing food insecurity and health consequences that disproportionately affect low income and minority group individuals (and families) especially those in urban communities.
There are millions of Americans, 566,490 of which are in Colorado that struggle with food insecurity according to Feeding America’s 2020 assessment. This is a result of the high cost and lack of accessibility to fresh and more health conscious food options. The failures in both education on nutrition and socioeconomic interactions in our nation have left many people malnourished. But often there’s one side of the issue that is left out as both obesity and hunger are matters of malnutrition. In recent years we’ve seen struggling communities go from one to another in record time as a result of the cheapness of processed food compared to fresh, whole food. Harvard School of Public Health conducted research to determine exactly how much more expensive this difference is. Taking into consideration portion, calories, price, and other factors they determined that the healthiest diet consisting of fruits and vegetables costs $1.50 more than the least nutritional. This may not seem like much but it would add up to around an extra $550 a year, this is a real burden for some families. It’s important to note that this has to do with highly efficient infrastructure in our nation, built to support the processed, packaged food industry that favors quantity over quality. Researchers concluded that the cost inequity may go down if similar infrastructure was built to support healthier foods.
Food deserts are a tragic result of our failing agriculture system as well as our society’s failure to value the health of all of its members. The USDA defines food deserts as county subdivisions that meet both a low-income and a low-access thresholds. Which are quantified by either a poverty rate of 20 percent or an intermediate income less than or equal to 80 percent of the nearby intermediate income, and 33% of the population living more than a mile from the supermarket. In these food deserts people are consuming high amounts of saturated and trans fatty acids, cholesterol, excessive amounts of sodium, unnatural sugar/sweetener, and other processed goods at a dangerous rate and it’s simply because it’s all they can access and/or afford. Not only is fast food and frozen, boxed, or canned food often their only option it is also ruthlessly advertised at these communities with billions of dollars spent to trigger a physiological response.
Not only is our current agriculture system a cause for concern for our health it is also a cause for concern for our environment. Especially when it comes to our meat consumption. Meat production is responsible for much of the deforestation on our planet as well as a large amount of our greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution and scarcity. With our global population growing our planet is faced with the issue of how to feed everyone. A report from the British medical journal The Lancet compiled of 30 scientists worldwide, devised that a largely plant-based diet can help to do just that. This would require something like a 50% reduction in meat and sugar consumption, which is very possible but will take a reinvention of our agriculture system.
The well known documentary directed by Lee Fulkerson, “Forks over Knives” presented me with an alarming fact that opened my eyes to the failure of our agriculture system. There are 1 billion people in the world living in hunger today while our cattle alone consumes enough grain to nourish 8.7 billion. Could it be true that we value our steaks and burgers as a society more than the livelihood of billions? This is how it looks but, I don’t believe that’s an accurate reflection of what we really want. This as well as other failures in agriculture are only a reflection of a lack of proper education on nutrition, businesses that yearn to make more money, and a lack of policy protecting our right to a whole diet. One of the biggest nutritional misconceptions that we would benefit from disassembling in our youth, would be the necessity of meat protein compared to that of plant-based protein. We need to change the way that we view food, food is our fuel. As a whole we’re lucky to have community members like the founders of Gotham Greens, urban farmers, guerilla gardeners, food pantry workers, environmental educators, and simply community members that are willing to educate themselves to find a solution.
