Mack et al. find that 68 urban gardens in Phoenix, AZ are currently serving just 8.4% of “food desert” residents, and through spatial analysis, 53 gardens sited strategically could serve 96.4% of such residents. From these studies, it is clear that UA projects are not necessarily occurring where they are most needed to increase food security. When it comes to spatial analyses, “while a macro-level quantitative study of the potential in terms of land availability shows that it would be feasible to grow the basic daily vegetable needs for the urban poor in the United States, current evidence from urban farms located within lower-income communities shows that such farms are not necessarily feeding the communities in which they are located,” due to a variety of factors including cost of produce and cultural desirability.Barriers to access are not just due to geographic distance, but rather an array of intersecting factors including the high costs of some urban produced foods, especially from commercial or for-profit operations. Fresh, local produce from vertical or rooftop farms such as Gotham Greens , Plenty Higher Ground Farm , Freight Farms or AeroFarms are often sold at a premium to restaurants and grocery stores, and thus unaffordable to low income households . Despite claims that vertical farms can “feed the world in the 21st century” , it remains to be seen if vertical farms can address food access and food justice. Such farms are often following a corporate food system model of profit maximization and resource use efficiency, subscribing to capitalist logics rather than alternative, social-justice-oriented practices. Among for-profit farms, “the few profitable operations tend to be those selling to high-end restaurants and consumers, not to lower-income residents” . The cost of food, especially healthy fresh produce, is often in tension with other high costs of living in urban areas , causing low-income residents to become dependent on emergency food services and food pantries. This intersects with poor nutrition and diet-related diseases- according to the Alameda County Community Food Bank Hunger Study report,vertical towers for strawberries “food is often the most critical factor in our clients’ health”, and 40% of clients are in fair or poor health .
Food banks and food pantries fill important “access gaps” that urban farms could better supplement or address if cost of urban produced food was made more affordable, or through donations to food banks . Low-income households can circumvent the high costs of urban produced food from commercial farms by establishing their own backyard gardens , or adopting plots in community gardens. Through direct participation in UA, in particular food insecure individuals can offset significant percentages of fresh vegetable expenditures , and enhance food security through improved healthy food access . Access via UA participation is certainly enabled when urban farms and gardens are physically proximate to low income neighborhoods, demonstrating the intersection of cost and geography in expanding access. There are abundant examples of non-profit farms that give food away for free or at reduced rates , yet there is little scholarship on the consumption or impact of donations/discounted offerings specifically.High costs of land and development pressures also play a significant role in limiting access to both farming and locally-produced foods, as seen in studies of Chicago, New York City, and the San Francisco Bay Area . High cost of land prevents community gardens from being established in the urban core in Chicago, leads to hundreds of community gardens in NYC slated for redevelopment annually, and drives gentrification and displacement in neighborhoods around urban farms. Land tenure insecurity directly contributes to lack of access as many urban farms formerly serving minority and immigrant populations have been forcibly closed due to development priorities for privately owned lots . A recent article on land security indicators among California urban farmers showed that farms with higher land security also had “more financial and institutional support, and are located in census tracts with higher economic opportunity” . This highlights the necessity of devoting publicly owned lands to urban agriculture in low income and minority neighborhoods, as private lands are highly vulnerable to development pressures, thus jeopardizing any gains realized by social justice oriented urban farms. In contexts where urban farms strive to provide living wage jobs and career or educational opportunities for low-income communities, youth, or formerly incarcerated individuals, it is often challenging to also provide food access to these same communities.
Unless significant grant funding or donations exist, the goals of boosting food security are in tension with capitalist economic realities to pay living wages and sell the product at below-market costs . This speaks to the “unattainable trifecta of urban agriculture,” that is the idea that UA can simultaneously achieve community food security, provide on-the job training and fair living wages, and generate revenue through sales to cover these costs without substantial outside investment , as well as the tension between farm security and food security . In examples such as City Growers and Higher Ground Farms in Boston, organizational efforts to provide jobs and job training lead to marketing of produce to high-end restaurants, retail establishments, farmers markets, and CSAs at prices unaffordable to food insecure households .A fourth important food access barrier cited in the literature relates to cultural acceptability and nutrition education, widely accepted as part of food security definitions . Access to culturally appropriate foods is known to be an important factor , yet little is understood about the effects of urban farms growing culturally relevant foods and its relation to food access. More qualitative research is needed on the cultural acceptability of urban produced foods and how that might correlate with improvements in access. There is increasing evidence of the importance of culturally relevant educational materials around nutrition, food literacy, and culinary skills for improving access and actual consumption of healthy, fresh, urban-produced foods among low income, minority, or immigrant households . Culinary skills and food literacy are becoming focal points of school garden programs , and innovative organizations such as the Green Bronx Machine show how urban agriculture embedded into high-needs schools can directly improve food education,vertical growing which translates into increased access and consumption . Additional research is needed to quantify the impact of educational school gardens on community food security. Recent urban foraging literature is exploring stewardship practices and culturally relevant products gathered by foragers in cities around the world, as well as the sociocultural benefits that result .
From Mien immigrants gathering dandelion bud-shoots in urban parks , to informal urban foragers helping maintain trees and parks in Seattle, WA ranging in age from 23 to 83 , to the value of edible weeds urban foraging is an activity that recognizes certain agroecosystems as “commons” for public access and management. Urban forest justice scholars “recognize the rights of local people to have control over their own culturally appropriate wild food and health systems, including access to natural resources and to the decision-making processes affecting them” . The potential to address food insecurity with foraging and gleaning activities is being explored by organizations such as Ample Harvest and The Urban Farmers in Northern California; Ample Harvest’s online platform supports over 42 million backyard and community gardeners in ending food waste by channeling excess produce to 1 out of every 4 food banks across the country . While some food justice scholars conclude that current shifts toward local, organic, sustainably produced foods are only accessible and affordable to those with higher economic means “or at least the cultural cachet necessary to obtain such foods through barter, trade, or other means of exchange” , the examples above illustrate successful alliances of food justice advocates and local government working to enable sustainable, healthy food access for all urban residents. Through strategic planning and policy design, it may be possible to move beyond ad-hoc successes in linking urban agriculture with food access. The articles reviewed in this section provide a mix of academic studies, theoretical arguments, and policy literature. Additional empirical evidence and longitudinal studies are needed to demonstrate the ability of UA to significantly improve nutrition and food insecurity among urban low-income households over time. Furthermore, consumer preference surveys of urban produced foods are a conspicuous absence in the reviewed access literature. We turn next to food distribution, and the question of how urban produced foods get from the farm to the consumer through various distribution mechanisms.While many articles reviewed mechanisms for channeling rural or peri-urban produced foods into urban areas to increase fresh produce access , very little scholarly data exists on the distribution and accessibility of urban produced foods, and what does exist is largely under-theorized. In fact, very few sources reviewed explicitly name “food distribution” as a key term. Urban agriculture remains a relatively small, yet important percentage of the larger food distribution system in cities: “few, if any, urban agriculture projects, are intended to replace traditional food retail or would claim to lead to food self sufficiency for individuals or for cities” . As such, very little is understood about where and how urban farmers distribute their food including modes of transportation delivery, either individually or in aggregate, and to whom .
It is important to focus on the means through which food produced by different types of farm operations travels from farm to consumer, and the processes through which that food is exchanged , as this directly impacts access and consumption. The scholarly literature as well as media stories describe various modes by which fresh produce is distributed in the city to address fresh food access including both formal and informal distribution channels . Applying a distribution lens to the existing literature yields similar results to the food access analysis in that several articles theorize idealized distribution systems, showing the capacity of hypothetical urban and peri-urban farms to supply distribution networks that meet most urban food demands . Others highlight barriers and challenges farmers face in practice around distributing their produce to those in need while maintaining their operations . None, in our search, focus analysis on distribution flows of urban produced foods across a city. Rather, a more common focus is on which distribution channels are best for getting produce, not necessarily urban produced, into the hands of food insecure households or residents of “food deserts” . Is it a corner store, a large supermarket, or small local farm stand within a mile radius that households need to access fresh produce?In the case of corner stores, several studies have built on analyses of the prevalence of corner stores and liquor stores in low-income census tracts and endeavored to study the effects of providing fresh local produce in these stores otherwise carrying largely processed foods and sugary beverages. Results have been mixed, with some cases of pairing urban farms with corner store retailers yielding increases in sales of fresh produce , but others showing no increase and even resistance from corner store operators who feel that this produce will not sell and therefore become a waste disposal issue . Small Farmers markets as distribution sites receive critical assessments in the literature for their ability to serve as distribution channels to low-income consumers. Alison Hope Alkon writes about the closing of a farmers’ market in West Oakland, a historically African American neighborhood, juxtaposed with the white spaces of farmers markets that are thriving in neighboring Berkeley in her book Black, White and Green: Farmers Markets, Race and the Green Economy . She theorizes the promise and limitations of the “green economy” and chronicles the food movement’s anti-capitalist roots yet ultimate manifestation as reproducing capitalist inequalities. Lucan et al.’s study of farmers markets in the Bronx took issue with limited hours of operation, seasonality, affordable common produce, and availability of predominantly healthy foods among farmers markets compared to nearby stores . Accepting Electronic Benefit Transfer payments is a basic prerequisite for farmers markets to be considered accessible to low-income consumers, a concept pioneered by the GrowNYC’s Greenmarket program . While farmers markets in all 50 states now accept food stamps , the price of offerings such as a bunch of kale still exceeds the price of nearby fast food options that may offer a more filling but less nutritious meal option. Some states are moving in the direction of matching EBT funds through various “market match” policies, a step towards improving food distribution and access at farmers markets .