foodforcommons

It is the need for expansion of land for agriculture that drives the deforestation. Due to the limited space, as mentioned before, cities will have to find new and smart ways to grow their food. Thus, we need to have found a way keep the forests as they are, while finding simultaneously new ways to retrieve food (FAO, 2017). Moreover, we need to find new ways of dieting. With the transitions to diets milk and meat based and its heavy production of carbon dioxide, environmental footprints are expanded. Agriculture as of now, uses up to a third of the land of the Earth. There is a vast variety of root causes that tie into the agricultural industry. Some important ones to mention are, the impacts of climate change in terms of extreme weather effects, pests and diseases, increased migration, persisting food losses and waste and a rapidly increasing world population (Calicioglu et al, 2019, pp. 1, 7). In order to act for a better food system, we thus need to have gone beyond the normal agricultural measures, including socio-economic policies.
A different way to look at certain resources would be to see them as a common (Thackera, 2015, p. 146 - 147). This implies that no one has a right to claim them as theirs, instead, they are inherent to our relationship we have with mother earth. It is a practice of solidarity. One of these public goods, water, is scarce. Technological solutions to prevent the scarcity of drink water might be available, but have not yet reached those who need them the most. The crisis of drink water encompasses the issues of poverty, inequality, power and water scarcity (Thackera, 2015, p. 110).
Back in the beginning of the 21st century, a rooftop garden or plantation was deemed newsworthy, while simultaneously 800 million people in the southern hemisphere have been growing their food in the cities. If the patterns of diet and consumption that we currently follow will continue all the way to 2050, we would have to produce almost just as much food as we had in the last 8-10,000 years (Giovannucci et al., 2012, Thackera, 2015, p. 69).
In order to feed the increasing population, we need to distribute food on a large scale, while simultaneously minimizing the emissions. As of right now, these systems might be efficient, but ever so linked to a negative footprint and animal and plant diseases, and primarily focused on urban areas. It is therefore vital that we also look at local communities for the production of food, while continue to try and minimize the environmental impact (Calicioglu et al, 2019, pp. 6). As of now, a significant amount of food is wasted globally, causing a big environmental burden, thus we need to invest in mechanisms of food loss reduction, in the form of efficient food systems (Calicioglu et al, 2019, p. 8). Much like common food kitchens today, people will now actively work together in the food industry. This takes place in the form of gardens on top of roofs, with kitchens attached to them. Local markets take the food grown from the rooftops to sell, while schools teach children from a young age to grow their own food, through educational programs funded by the government.
We will try and preserve food in different, more sustainable ways, for instance through fermentation. Fermentation is the opposite of canning and pasteurization. Instead of killing microorganisms, it endorses growth of bacteria and yeast. In these forms of natural life, microorganisms that are harmful to us humans are not able to survive.