The Sustainable Food Hub

We tend to think of hubs in terms of tires or perhaps bus stations: not the most sustainable of images. However, there's a new concept emerging in urban planning, and this makes the hub into something both sustainable and delicious - it's all about local and sustainable food. The food hub brings together producers and consumers of food and all of the people in between.

Overall, cities were not designed to be food hubs. That was the role of the rural areas, and those rural areas were supposed to provide a consistent flow of food into the center, where hungry consumers would eat it up. The role of the rural area was to make food. The role of the urban area was to cook it up in fancy restaurants and eat it in urban apartments.

Later, the concept of the rural food hinterland expanded. Soon, cities were gathering food from just about anywhere in the world. Shipped in boats and transported to urban centers on trucks and trains, this food from anywhere was eaten by the people from everywhere who gathered in the cities around the world, hungry for a global cuisine.

The problem? This model relies on large amounts of oil to keep it going and emits a lot of fossil fuels as the strawberries and mangoes fly around the world. This model also divorces people from the foods that grow well locally and keeps them at arms' length from local farmers. Disconnected from the realities of farming locally, urban people begin to undervalue farming as a sustainable, local practice and begin to feel all right about selling off farmland to support more urban growth.

Stop! That's what the sign at the food hub says. In fact, food hubs ask for a turnaround in the connections between agriculture and cities. What does a food hub look like? It brings farmers into the city to sell produce. It brings urban farming to the eye, pairing community gardens with restaurants that serve the best in local cuisine. It brings together those who produce food, whether they are rural or urban farmers, and has them sell their food in farmers' markets and pocket markets. A food hub brings together growing food, cooking, and eating it and adds in a healthy dose of learning, both structured and unstructured.

What does a food hub look like in real life? In Athens, Ohio, the food hub centers around the farmers' market. The market features such local and sustainable delicacies as pawpaw popsicles and it has been instrumental in bringing back some of these native fruits to the table. The farmers' market is supported by community kitchens that provide inputs to the market. A program called Community Food initiatives sponsors seed saving and school programs and works to bring fresh fruits and vegetables to those in need. The local restaurants and the university use fresh food from the market as well.

Food hubs remove the isolation of a single farmer or a single community gardening activist and bring people together to enjoy the most sustainable and local of food.