Josh Viertel is president of Slow Food USA. He will discuss slow food and the sustainable food movement at this Thursday’s Edible Evening.

I’ve been a farmer and now I live in a city. A really big city. It was an easy decision to move to New York to run Slow Food USA. I have never been presented with a more exciting opportunity. But trading my big garden for Brooklyn this past fall was hard. Cities have their up sides. Particularly this city. I am blown away by the music, art, food, and friends in close proximity. Though I miss living out of my own garden, the farmers markets in New York bring me in contact with real food and real people who grow it. And the fish vendor has changed my life. More than anything, though, I am touched by the green space in New York.

When our concrete landscape tires me, Greenwood Cemetery, Prospect Park, and The New York Botanical Garden all make it possible to slip back into a quasi-natural world. They aren’t strictly natural places—the human hand is all over them—but nature happens there. And the overlay between nature and culture makes the two indistinguishable. As it should be.

But in our city’s green spaces there is one aspect of this link between nature and culture that I miss. It is the oldest one. It is food growing. Urban community gardens and rooftop farms do this beautifully, but their reach is limited when compared to the iconic green spaces in our cities—Prospect Park, Central Park. When we enter these spaces we enter an environment where nature is idealized and where the human hand intervenes to make ballparks, but not food. This teaches a strange lesson to city dwellers. It teaches that the natural world is for inspiration (beautiful, without humans) or it is for recreation (skate trails, t-ball), but it is not for food. (Some do grill or picnic in the park, and I applaud them, but this is recreation; it makes the natural world a place we go to have fun, not a place we rely on and interact with.) Thus, we miss a fundamental link to our natural world. read more »