THE CITY FOOD DINNER

A diverse group of Rotterdam specialists wants to make food and the city's food chain visable again. In the upcoming weeks local dinners are organised with food that is produced in and around the city of Rotterdam. When foods grows closer to home people can experience the production process again, which can contribute to a more healthy and durable society. According to Dutch scientists ecological food communities close to cities is the model of the future.

On the 4th of November and the 16th of December 2012 Architects organise so called local dinners. These dinners promote the cultivation, use and consumption of local products. The menus still have to be formulated, but the organisers state that the courses will be made with wild city vegetables and fresh biological vegetables, cheese, meat, wine and beers from in and around the city of Rotterdam.

The city agriculture group Edible Rotterdam, a diverse group of experts from politics, entrepreneurs, artists and inhabitants, want to promote city agriculture in Rotterdam. The inhabitants get the possibility to see, feel, smell and touch food to rediscover, understand and experience the food production process. Edible Rotterdam sees chances for urban agriculture as a future trademark for the harbour city. The group wants urban agriculture to be part of the local town planning and they want to give active inhabitants the possibility to realise projects with the food cycle as a central theme.

Edible Rotterdam wants to make use of the unexpected and unused space in the city. Urban agriculture can be an extra dimension in the realisation of durable housing and public space in a town. Floating gardens, vegetable gardens on roofs, self-supporting restaurants and innovative buildings as a basis of closed food cycles. The urban farming group wants the city of Rotterdam to change into a futuristic ecological, durable town where knowledge can be exchanged, shared and spread.

After research scientists of the Agricultural University of Wageningen already concluded that our food system will have to change drastically to fight the problems of pollution and the future shortage of raw materials like oil. The future model will be a few cities with farmland and nature in the middle. The agricultural produce is ecological and durable and comes from the centre of the region and is supplying the surrounding cities. Through this transport is reduced to a minimum, especially when the livestock is also fed with feed from neighbouring farmers.

In this future food community model it is all about cooperation in the fields of agriculture and food, nature and landscape and recreation and tourism. Inhabitants of a city can rediscover where food comes from and how it is produced. Besides farming farmers can also maintain nature and receive citizens for courses and tours. In the Netherlands there are already regions where these new farming and living principles are tested very successfully. Instead of a larger increase in scale, mega farms and specialisation, people should eat small scale produced natural, healthy and tasty food from which everybody knows where it comes from.
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November 2, 2009