The Dangers of Urban Gardens
The Dangers of Urban Gardens
In recent years, every city worth its salt that has had a system of urban gardens. It's a very good idea: an almost perfect combination of green spaces, community activities and food education.
The problem is almost everything else: in the midst of the horticultural fever people have forgotten that urban agriculture has challenges that seriously compromise the food security of its crops. If we do not take this problem seriously, we will find ourselves promoting tasty, ecological toxins.
The dangers of urban gardens
A few years ago, the United States experienced a controversy that illustrates the problems and dangers that urban gardens can entail. Ryan Kuck, the director of Greengrow, an urban farm located in the industrial zone of Philadelphia since the eighties, said that his two newborn twins had high levels of lead in their blood due to the consumption of fruits and vegetables from their own garden.
Lead, for example, is especially harmful to children. In high concentrations it can have a very damaging effect on the nervous system and can cause mental retardation, developmental disorders or behavioral problems. According to the World Health Organization, in reality, there are no known safe levels of lead for children or adults: almost any concentration has detrimental effects on a lot of systems and parts of the body.
As Kuck himself acknowledged, "I was worried, but not surprised." The use of land in urban areas constantly changes with the city's cycles and development. A clear example is lead: for decades millions of cars used leaded fuels, thousands of buildings were painted with lead paint. Of course the soil of the cities is contaminated! There is pollution in the environment!
In addition, the plants we use in horticulture have the property of accumulating potentially toxic elements and compounds, such as heavy metals or derivatives of the use of hydrocarbons.
"The perfect salad"
That is, we are putting 'accumulators' of toxins in a contaminated soil. According to Andres Rodriguez, people are blindly planting gardens because of the urban gardens are fashionable. That is to say, they are installing the gardens without analyzing if the conditions of the land are suitable for cultivation (and, later, consumption).
According to Rodríguez, who investigates lead pollution in urban soils, despite their pedagogical and leisure potential, most urban gardens are a completely unnecessary ecological risk. They are also a sanitary risk. The scientific research that has been carried out on the subject supports it.
Natural = safe
The foods that enters the 'food circuit' is very controlled but there are few controls on the fruits and vegetables that we can find in urban gardens. It's paradoxical that the search for healthier foods has led us to producing food without any controls, cultivating it in contaminated lands and putting the health of those who consume it at risk.
These are not theories, the analyses that have been carried out in urban gardens in Madrid, as Rodriguez pointed out, are clear: land is not safe. Nothing justifies continuing with the projects to expand them if there are no minimum guarantees of security.
In addition, the data is so worrying that it seems inadvisable that the urban gardens movement should claim food security as one of its central ideas. It would be a pity if one of the most successful movements of community dynamism in recent years was lost due to health problems.
Source: magnet.xakata.com
Publication date: 11/22/2017