How do you do your weekly food shopping? You do buy each day what you feel like? Or do you make a list and bring some big bags to fill up your fridge and storage room only once a week? Both have its pro’s and con’s. Either you buy what you feel like eating each day and forget about your leftovers (which eventually will be thrown away). Or you buy too much which probably has the same effect as the option named before. Why can we not see the city as one big fridge?
Supermarkets try to find a balance between offering a wide range of products to their customers without having to throw away too much unsold products at the end of the day since. If they fail to have enough stock, modern city people will not accept this and go and find another supermarket. If its stock is too wide, he will lose profit.
In France there are organizations called Prud’Homie*. These groups represent a special group of fisherman. This group knows how important it is to keep nature in balance while also offering making sure they keep their hunger away. They therefore only catch as many fish as they can sell. They see the oceans as a fridge from which we can pick what we need.
When more urban farming is practiced, we can take over the idea of a Prud’Homie: The ‘supermarket’ is at the edge of a field. As soon as a certain product is sold out, the farmer can pick new fruit or vegetables. And if some food isn’t eaten at all, or very little, it just stays on the land for a couple more days.
This leaves us many advantages; we can always have fresh food (even milk can be sold like this), transport distances are kept to a minimum and the producer hardly needs to dispose of any of his products.
Before we can reach this type of society, we need to incorporate this city-as-fridge-strategy in urban planning. Thanks to the crisis some initiatives have already started to prepare it. Empty plots or buildings are now arranged to grow food. Not only giving people the advantages mentioned before but many more; greener areas, social wealth and health, more beautiful neighborhoods. Did you ever realize a fridge could be this multi-functional?
*A Prud’Homie is an institute established in the 14th century which amongst others regulates rights for local fisherman.
