Smart Growth or Smart Food?

"Slow Food...a movement once associated with European elites will be convening in San Francisco over Labor Day weekend, bringing an advertised 50,000 devotees along to celebrate the virtues of thinking globally but eating locally.

But there’s a catch, a big one. The commendable push to get you to eat food grown near home, especially in your city backyard, is likely to run smack up against another equally Greenish cause, urban infill.

The problem is that it’s all too easy for all of us to march in different directions, all flying our personal green flags. Plausible-sounding plans to fill up every remaining open space in our already developed urban areas could mean that there will be nowhere left to put our victory gardens.

If the 'locavore' idea is to get any major traction, its proponents will have to come to terms with the prospect that city back yards, front yards and vacant lots are becoming endangered species, just like family farms."