Urban Farms. Despite the name sounding like an oxymoron, these farms seem to be popping up all over Manchester. In recent years, the City Council has supported projects like The Secret Garden Allotment in Rochdale and Vitality Gardens in Tameside. The Council also supports 100 other community food-growing projects across the city through its Growing Manchester program, and this number is only increasing.
So, community farms and meals are becoming increasingly popular, but what does this mean for our wider food system?
Victoria Holden runs the award-winning community interest company Northern Lily and has been transforming urban community gardens like the one in Oldham, which opened three years ago.
Tucked between housing estates and an old factory, this garden looks very different from the large rural farms we usually picture. Despite its small size, the one-acre farm— with goats, chickens, an orchard, greenhouses, and a tiny kitchen— has produced enough food for 12,700 meals in 2024.
The award-winning nutritional scientist Haleh Moravej has worked alongside Northern Lily for the past two years. Haleh has dedicated her life and career to improving our food systems, a goal which seems more important than ever: COVID, a cost of living crisis, and wars affecting global supply chains have led 3.12 million people in the UK to turn to food banks in the last year. Moreover, 1.2 million people are estimated to live in food deserts, meaning healthy food options are notably sparse.
However, this issue does not only affect lower-income earners. Misleading labelling and the rapid pace of modern life have brought the average consumer to the point where price and convenience take precedence over nutrition and sustainability in their weekly shop.
The Food and Drink Federation has said that “around a quarter of the UK’s carbon emissions comes from the food we consume”. We can no longer ignore the effect of our food systems on the climate crisis.
I spoke with Haleh to discuss how our food systems are evolving in 2024.
“With a lot more urban farms popping up in Manchester, lots of community groups are taking over pieces of land and actually starting to grow [food]”, she told me as we spoke over Zoom.
These farms offer spaces for people to improve their mental and physical health as well cutting down on the cost of healthy produce. Furthermore, the food grown in urban farms is nutritionally dense and has an almost nonexistent carbon footprint.
“When people are brought together, you realise the richness of the skills that people bring to the table. And I think when we focus too much on policy and getting it perfect, we miss the opportunity to actually enjoy the simplicity of our instinctive human drive for healthy food”, said Haleh, her excitement around the topic evident.
It is clear that good food can bring many social benefits in terms of making us healthier, aiding our fight against the climate crisis and supporting families struggling with the rapidly rising cost of living. Yet for Haleh, the true magic comes from the relationships urban farms and community projects forge.
It isn’t just growing food together that facilitates these relationships; Haleh told me about conceptualised bulk cooking initiatives that allow communities to cook together in a community kitchen and freeze some of the food they make to bring home. They would aim to give people healthy and convenient food which is in tune with sustainable food systems.
“Bringing people together to cook together – that is really exciting”.
Whilst this would rely on goodwill from entrepreneurs within the food industry to fund it, Haleh seemed unendingly positive about the community spirit, which she thinks could fuel this.
“We’re relying on the goodwill of some of the entrepreneurs within the food system. We need to be experimental… the positivity is there, the community spirit is there, the community is asking for it”.
Community spirit seems crucial to many of these schemes. Haleh wants to set up bulk buying schemes in which a group can buy food directly from farmers and distribute it throughout the community. This would cut out supermarkets and thus allow farmers to receive a fair price for their produce, as well as make it more affordable for lower-income families.
What Haleh appeared to be offering me was a vision of a non-capitalist food system that knows the value of the produce it circulates and places health, sustainability and, most of all, good food right at its heart. Is this utopian? Possibly. Unachievable? Perhaps only to an extent.
Haleh recognised that supermarkets will likely always play a role in our food systems but highlighted how they could do this more positively; for example, they could work with more local producers to give consumers better quality, more sustainable and cheaper food.
Maybe the rise of the urban farm is heralding a move to this more holistic food system.
This will not be an easy move, however. One of the first questions I asked Haleh was what she sees as the biggest issue with our modern food systems, and while her answer was simple, it is hard to imagine a solution.
“The biggest issue with food at this moment in time is the disconnect between consumers and where their food comes from”.
The era of Uber Eats, 24/7 supermarkets and ready meals seems to have stopped people from understanding the value and impact of their food.
“Supermarkets are not here to make us healthy, supermarkets are here to make money… We pay a premium price for our mobile phones… but when it comes to our daily fruit and veg, we want the cheapest”.
Haleh was right: most people are feeling the pinch. Nonetheless, solving this issue may not require us to sell our iPhones to pay for organic apples. Perhaps these urban farms can finally offer the solution to how we can get affordable yet healthy and sustainable food. If all we have to do is accept less aesthetic food and eat more seasonally, then is this really too much to ask?
As I shut my computer to finish our Zoom call, Haleh left me with the impression that our food systems in Manchester are already changing, and it is our mindsets that need to catch up. Urban farms are no longer a futuristic idea but a reality. I am left praying that the city can keep up.
