sam chalmersUrbanisation will put our food supplies under pressure.
November 27th 2010 08:34
When I was a kid, one of the people I loved most in the world was known to me only as Mrs Francis. She had thick, bandaged ankles, permanent men's slippers, clattery false teeth, pudding-basin hair in a no-nonsense Harbour-Bridge grey and a face whose criss-cross furrows moved with a crocodilian action that entranced me. She was unimaginably old, but until the day she died she grew her own vegetables, boiled her clothes in a copper and made her own soap from animal fat. She had rooms that were never used and a jar of striped peppermint sweets for a sick husband we never saw.
Mrs Francis was our next-door neighbour, and when we were lucky enough to nip through the fence she would sit us beside her on the painted wooden bench at her table and tell us tales of the time before the city, the time when her spreading, verandahed bungalow was the farmhouse around there, and our house - inconceivable! - did not exist.
In new cities like ours, this is generally taken as the natural march of progress. Cities, like trees, grow in annular rings, with farmland inexorably peripheralised by houses. Put thus, it sounds like a simple question of agriculture versus housing, and in a way it is a contest between humanity's two most basic needs, food and shelter.
Mrs Francis was our next-door neighbour, and when we were lucky enough to nip through the fence she would sit us beside her on the painted wooden bench at her table and tell us tales of the time before the city, the time when her spreading, verandahed bungalow was the farmhouse around there, and our house - inconceivable! - did not exist.
In new cities like ours, this is generally taken as the natural march of progress. Cities, like trees, grow in annular rings, with farmland inexorably peripheralised by houses. Put thus, it sounds like a simple question of agriculture versus housing, and in a way it is a contest between humanity's two most basic needs, food and shelter.
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