Ten Years After Closure, Fresh Kills Is Still a Landfill in Transition

Monday, March 21, 2011 - 03:51 PM

By Amy Eddings

Posted by roz
http://www.wnyc.org/blogs/wnyc-news-blog/2011/mar/21/fresh-kills/

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Ten years ago Tuesday the last barge of garbage was delivered to Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. The closure of the dump — visible from space, taller than the Statue of Liberty and once the world's largest landfill — was a watershed moment for Staten Islanders, who had lived with its odor and stigma for 54 years.

But the repercussions of Fresh Kills' closure are still being felt by the rest of the city and its sanitation department. 

"It was always one of those things, 'Well, Fresh Kills will be around for a long time,'" Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty said. "And then, all of a sudden, it got the notice that it was going to close down. And that required a major change in the department's operation.  How are we going to get rid of garbage?"

Fresh Kills was not shut down because it was at capacity.  It was closed as a thank you from Rudolph Giuliani to the borough that helped make him the first Republican to be elected mayor since John Lindsey in 1965.  In 1996, two years after he took office, Giuilani and fellow Republican George Pataki signed an agreement to close Fresh Kills by the end of 2001.

 Eric Goldstein, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, remembered being pleased and puzzled by the move.

"There were many good things about closure," Goldstein said. "The removal of noxious odors, a significant decrease in local water pollution and a redefining of the borough's identity and a restoration of community pride. But we were concerned because there was no comprehensive, long-term plan for what to do with the city's waste."

The sanitation department scrambled, and came up with an interim plan that relied on private waste companies and their out-of-state landfills. It's still in use today. 

City sanitation trucks drop trash off at 13 privately owned waste transfer stations located in a handful of neighborhoods that are mostly populated by minorities: Red Hook, Hunts Point, Greenpoint, Jamaica. From there, long-haul trucks take our garbage far away from Fresh Kills to landfills in Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Disposal costs have soared from $43 a ton to dump at Fresh Kills to $60 a ton when the interim plan went into effect in 2001. Now it is $97 a ton. Multiply that by the 11,000 tons of trash the sanitation department collects every day. Doherty, the sanitation commissioner, said this is the biggest negative consequence of closing Fresh Kills.

"Eventually, the people have, in New York City,  to recognize what the cost is of getting rid of garbage," Doherty said. "I mean, we have a billion dollar budget, and we probably have a third of that budget is for exporting waste."

And what did it use be?

"Oh, probably less than 20 percent," he said.

And then there are what NRDC's Eric Goldstein calls the true costs: the environmental consequences of switching from barges, to trucks.  Instead of three barges a day taking our trash to Fresh Kills, about 600 18-wheelers head out of the city every day from those 13 transfer stations.

Annette LaMatto, who spent part of the last decade fighting the city's interim plan, said the closure of Fresh Kills transformed the streets in her neighborhood of Greenpoint into a conga line of trucks, and she's still waiting for a reprieve.

"We're still inundated with a large amount of truck traffic," LaMatto said. 

There were already private waste transfer stations handling commercial garbage in Greenpoint, but the closure of Fresh Kills created a deluge of residential garbage, too. 

"It increased the flow [of trucks]," LaMatto said.  And, 10 years later, "basically, it hasn't changed. They closed it and we suffered the burden of it."

Ten years later, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is trying to tackle the truck problem. His solid waste management plan relies on packing garbage into containers, and moving those containers out of the city by barge and train.  Already, three waste containerization facilities are in operation in the Bronx, in Greenpoint and at Fresh Kills. Five more will eventually be built — three have been stalled by litigation.  Once complete, the city promises the system will eliminate six million miles' worth of garbage truck trips a year.

But Doherty said there are still landfills at the end of those truck trips, and all the problems that come with them: smell, drifting waste and greenhouse gas emissions.

"As far as the environmental issues for landfilling, we’re still faced with that," he said. "We have to continue to look for a better method."

Doherty said waste-to-energy, or burning garbage for electricity, won't work here because of stiff public opposition. The sanitation department plans to issue requests for information for new trash-ridding technologies.

Goldstein, with the Natural Resources Defense Council, says the city should be spending more effort on improving the rate of recycling, which has dropped since Fresh Kills was closed, from 20 percent to 16 percent.

"Ultimately, we save the most money and do the best for our planet if we reduce the amount of waste we generate," Goldstein said. "We've got to do more to get an effective recycling program as part of our waste management.  That should be the cornerstone rather than out of state landfills be the cornerstone of solid waste management policy here."

Doherty said the city's taken big strides in recycling, signing a long-term deal to have Sims Metal Management handle metal, glass and plastic.  Sims is building a processing facility in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, that will take the material by barge, which will get even more trucks off the roads.

And as for Fresh Kills, it, too, is being recycled. Over the next 30 years, it will be turned into a park — one nearly three times the size of Central Park. But already, the project is encountering problems.

The first segment — several soccer fields near the edge of the garbage mounds — has been put on hold because the foundation is sinking. But Doherty said the landfill has great potential, and its man-made mountains of garbage, now covered with dirt and vegetation, are already attracting wildlife.

"We have at least one red fox out there now, which is incredible," Doherty said, with a smile.  "A whole herd of deer out there. A lot of ticks!"

He added: "You know, it's a whole new world out there."

Doherty, Bloomberg, Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe and others will hold a ceremony at Fresh Kills to mark the 10-year anniversary of the beginning of that whole new world.  

Doherty says it will take a while for Staten Islanders to reorient themselves to a world where Fresh Kills is a park, not a landfill, an asset, not a nuisance.

"My grandchildren, if I asked them, if I said to them, 'Fresh Kills,' they wouldn't know what I was talking about," he said. "But my children, they would know.  So, it's two generations of forgetting about it."

To Tackle an Invasive Weed, Bringing In the Hooved Pros

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Larry Cihanek, his daughter Lauren, and some of the goats they have leased to the city to clear a stubborn kind of weed in what will soon be Freshkills Park.

By LISA W. FODERARO

Published: June 21, 2012

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Posted by roz

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/nyregion/at-freshkills-park-borrowing-goats-to-tackle-a-weed-problem.html

first the goats are eating the invasive species.

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On a sweltering afternoon on Staten Island, the New York City parks department unveiled its latest weapon in the war on phragmites, an invasive weed that chokes the shoreline: goats. Twenty Anglo-Nubians, to be exact. With names like Mozart, Haydn and Van Goat, and with floppy ears and plaintive bleats, they did not seem fearsome. But on Thursday they were already munching inexorably through the long pale leaves in the first phase of a wetland restoration at what will soon be Freshkills Park.

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Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Van Goat with Mr. Cihanek, who has provided 20 of the animals.

Known for their unending, indiscriminate appetites, the goats are being rented by the city for the next six weeks from a farmer in the Hudson Valley. Parks officials are counting on the goats to clear the phragmites across two acres of wetlands that will eventually be cultivated with native grasses like spartina and black needle rush. The hope is that the goats will weaken the phragmites, setting the stage for another series of assaults on their stubborn rhizomes — applying herbicide, scarifying the earth and laying down sand.

In the short term, the goats are part of an unusual experiment to eradicate the pesky reeds, which were introduced from Europe in the late 19th century and which, once rooted, are almost impossible to eliminate. They have fueled brush fires across the region and pushed out other species along the East Coast.

But the farm animals are also being tested for their lawn-mowing prowess, especially at Freshkills Park, which is in transition from its former life as the world’s largest landfill to its future one — as the largest park to be developed in New York City in more than a century.

“We want to introduce the idea of using goats to help in vegetation management,” Eloise L. Hirsh, the administrator of the park, said. “The sanitation department mows us once a year. But this is 2,200 acres. We need help.”

The goats are perhaps the most vivid example of the lengths to which the city is going to turn a symbol of environmental degradation into one of ecological redemption. As Freshkills Park is developed in phases over the next three decades, it will be a laboratory for green practices; there are plans for composting toilets, green roofs, rain gardens and a native seed farm.

The official opening of the park is two or three years off, though it is open periodically for tours. Three of the four giant mounds formed by garbage are now capped, and the parks department will soon solicit bids on the first stage of development — 21 acres with walking paths and a bird observation tower overlooking the wetlands. Already, the landscape looks impossibly bucolic, with dragonflies and swallows darting amid lanky grasses and the occasional tree.

The goats only add to the pastoral image. On Thursday, Beethoven, with long white ears and a black body, and Van Goat, sporting a black stripe down his chestnut back, were contentedly exploring their new territory, plunging their mouths into dense stands of phragmites. Others trotted down to the shore of Main Creek, a tributary of the Fresh Kill. (In yet another act of environmental rectitude, parks workers will soon arrange logs made of coconut fiber along the banks to attract mussels, which prevent erosion.)

“The first test was to see if they would eat the phragmites, and they’re eating it, so they passed,” said Terry Doss, an ecologist with Biohabitats, a company specializing in ecological restoration that is advising the parks department.

The city received a grant of $350,000 from the state for the wetlands project. (The cost of renting the goats from Larry Cihanek of Rhinebeck, N.Y., is $20,625 for the six weeks.) If the goats prove successful, Freshkills Park may one day have a permanent herd. “It’s exciting to be able to replace what would be a carbon-polluting mowing strategy with a more natural approach,” said Andrew Deer, a landscape architect for the parks department.

While goats have been deployed for phragmite duty elsewhere, some ecologists are skeptical.

“I’m not a big fan of goats,” said Bernd Blossey, an associate professor of natural resources at Cornell University. “I understand why people are desperate to try them. But they will eat the leaves but not the stems, and they also don’t like getting their hooves wet.”

Professor Blossey is experimenting with moth caterpillars, which can weaken phragmites. In the 1990s, he was successful in unleashing leaf beetles against another plant invader, purple loosestrife, which is not nearly the scourge it once was.

But as the goats made their debut this week at Freshkills Park, any such doubts were pushed to the background. Ms. Hirsh was already looking ahead to a day when goats not only keep phragmites in check, but also put Staten Island on the artisanal food map. “We would like to have a cheese manufacturer here,” she said. “I know there will be lots of skepticism. But it would be a pretty eloquent statement about how you really can restore land that was formerly very damaged.”

The Mollusk That Made Manhattan

'THE BIG OYSTER: HISTORY ON THE HALF SHELL,' BY MARK KURLANSKY

Review by ELIZABETH ROYTE

Published: March 5, 2006

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Posted by roz

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/books/review/05royte.html

History of nyc and its waterways

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New Yorkers, it seems, are endlessly fascinated by their city. They can't stop writing books about the place, and so must come up with ever more different angles. Mark Kurlansky, who has formerly looked beyond Gotham to write about cod and salt, in "Cod" and "Salt," now turns his attention to his own backyard. His New York history, "The Big Oyster," takes us from the vague and misty era of the Lenape Indians, through the oyster boom of the late 19th century, to the noxious specifics that closed the city's last oyster beds in 1927.

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Envision/Corbis

The oyster is their world: a spread at the Grand Central Oyster Bar.

THE BIG OYSTER
History on the Half Shell.
By Mark Kurlansky.
Illustrated. 307 pp. Ballantine Books. $23.95.

Related

First Chapter: ‘The Big Oyster’(March 5, 2006)

The story is simple enough: New York became a great city because it sits at the confluence of several great rivers that form a deep and protected harbor. The rivers gave access to natural resources, and the port let merchants ship this stuff out. The estuary of the lower Hudson, which had 350 square miles of oyster beds, was a textbook place for Crassostrea virginica, which thrive in intertidal and subtidal areas rinsed with nutrient-rich river water. The Lenape ate oysters, the Dutch ate oysters, the English ate oysters too. But by the late 18th century, everyone knew this dietary staple wouldn't last forever, that "Eden had its limits." First the city restricted who could harvest oysters, and then when. As technology made it easier to take a lot of oysters quickly, the city moved to limit the use of dredges and steam power as well.

Meanwhile, the population of New York climbed, and the constant discharge of garbage and sewage began to take a different sort of toll on the harbor floor. There were plenty of complaints, especially when cholera and typhoid broke out, but little action. Instead, oystermen perfected the art of transplanting and then cultivating oyster seed in clean places like the Great South Bay. "Such newfound powers were making humankind giddy with science's magical ability to withstand its own foolish excess," Kurlansky writes, almost giddy himself.

The advent of cultivation had tremendous commercial implications. Workers shucked and pickled as fast as they could, shipping barrels of oysters far and wide. Kurlansky's locomotive prose makes it easy to visualize oyster trails pulsing across a world map: north up the Hudson, west to the Pacific, east across the Atlantic. It was the golden age of New York oysterdom: the city was "overtaken by oystermania." In 1860, some 12 million oysters were sold in New York markets; by 1880, the area's oyster beds were producing 700 million a year. New Yorkers rich and poor were slurping the creatures in oyster cellars, saloons, stands, houses, cafes and restaurants, about which we hear a great deal (this in addition to digressions on property rights, steam engines, prostitution, sanitation, slum clearance, the Civil War draft riots and folding beds). Oysters were cheap; they were eaten pickled, stewed, baked, roasted, fried and scalloped; in soups, patties and puddings; for breakfast, lunch and dinner. If a customer on "the Canal Street plan" (all you can eat for 6 cents) consumed too many, the management would give him an oyster with its shell loosely open "in the hopes that after a few minutes, the avaricious client would be eating nothing for several days."

"The Big Oyster" proves that it is possible for a skilled researcher to tell the history of New York — its wealth, excitement, greed, destructiveness and filth — through the history of a single creature. But it's a fallacy to think that the story of oysters is the story of New York. "Before the 20th century, when people thought of New York, they thought of oysters," Kurlansky writes. That's a fair enough, if surprising, assertion, but it's his job to prove it. At times, you can hear the microfilm wheels screeching as Kurlansky, wearing oyster-colored glasses, scours diaries, menus, letters, newspapers and magazines in search of evidence. Sure, this is a book about oysters, but many of the references to oyster-love seem like padding or name-dropping. We learn that Samuel Pepys "mentions oysters 50 times in his diaries" (but we get no more on that topic); we learn the names of, but little more about, various businessmen, actors, politicians and prostitutes who consumed oysters in the city; and we learn that the British prime minister, in 1715, ran up big bills shipping New York oysters to himself. "Uncle!" one cries, wondering if Kurlansky was paid in oysters per word.

For the most part, Kurlansky is a genial and enthusiastic guide. He's often quite funny, making jokes at New Yorkers' expense: we're brash, we're obsessed with money, we eat our food live. He does a decent job on the oyster's peculiar natural history, which allows it to be transplanted, and also to be transported alive. It turns out that most of the oysters we eat in eastern North America, from the Gulf of Mexico to Novia Scotia and north, are biologically identical. If their taste, size, shape and color differ, it's only because of the water they finished growing up in. Oysters, in short, have their own sort of terroir.

But while Kurlansky's city bustles, reeks and gleams, the oyster itself — despite the ecological walk-through — never really comes to life, at least not in the way that William W. Warner's Atlantic blue crabs do in the classic "Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay." The book has too many sentences with a deadening feel: "Shark fishing was a popular sport." Or, "The Prince de Joinville was another Delmonico regular." "The Big Oyster" is often claustrophobic with numbers — prices, tonnages, export rates, market taxes — and sodden with recipes (dozens of them, mostly variations on flour, butter and Crassostrea). Redundancies clog the narrative, and Kurlansky is often vague. He notes the link between sex and oysters — the city's oyster houses sported red balloons, just as bordellos were marked by red lights — but he doesn't address the belief that oysters are aphrodisiacal except to note that they are high in zinc, which promotes testosterone. There are other lapses: he tells us Crepidula fornicata doomed British oysters, but not what Crepidula fornicata is (a slipper limpet). Weirdly, he reports temperatures in Fahrenheit and centigrade and neglects to translate shillings and pounds into money today's American reader can understand.

Such quibbles won't bother the die-hard Kurlansky fan, and they certainly didn't keep me from appreciating that Kurlansky's real subject, the one that raises this book above the story of seafood, is the history of the trashing of New York. It's a cautionary tale that, though often repeated, we seem helpless to learn from. We pay attention to our natural resources only when we start to feel sick — either in the gut or in the wallet. By the middle of the 19th century, "the rivers that filled the harbor with fresh water, making oyster beds grow, were now filling the harbor with deadly chemicals." In 1927, the city's last oyster beds closed, and purveyors switched to cleaner sources. But the fouling of the waters only intensified — with discharges of pesticides, heavy metals, asbestos, solvents, oil and PCB's — until enactment of the Clean Water Act in 1972. Today, the Hudson estuary is too polluted to support oysters one could safely eat. That's bad enough, but for Kurlansky — and all New Yorkers — there's something even worse: the city that once drew its economic and social lifeblood from its waterfront has "lost its direct connection to its own vast and once sweet-smelling sea."

Elizabeth Royte, whose most recent book is "Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash," is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

Is Junk Food Really Cheaper?

By MARK BITTMAN

Published: September 24, 2011

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Posted by roz

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/opinion/sunday/is-junk-food-really-cheaper.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

on the age-old "fast-food is cheaper" argument...(it's not?)

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THE “fact” that junk food is cheaper than real food has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are overweight, particularly those with lower incomes. I frequently read confident statements like, “when a bag of chips is cheaper than a head of broccoli ...” or “it’s more affordable to feed a family of four at McDonald’s than to cook a healthy meal for them at home.”

Daniel Borris for The New York Times

This is just plain wrong. In fact it isn’t cheaper to eat highly processed food: a typical order for a family of four — for example, two Big Macs, a cheeseburger, six chicken McNuggets, two medium and two small fries, and two medium and two small sodas — costs, at the McDonald’s a hundred steps from where I write, about $28. (Judicious ordering of “Happy Meals” can reduce that to about $23 — and you get a few apple slices in addition to the fries!)

In general, despite extensive government subsidies, hyperprocessed food remains more expensive than food cooked at home. You can serve a roasted chicken with vegetables along with a simple salad and milk for about $14, and feed four or even six people. If that’s too much money, substitute a meal of rice and canned beans with bacon, green peppers and onions; it’s easily enough for four people and costs about $9. (Omitting the bacon, using dried beans, which are also lower in sodium, or substituting carrots for the peppers reduces the price further, of course.)

Another argument runs that junk food is cheaper when measured by the calorie, and that this makes fast food essential for the poor because they need cheap calories. But given that half of the people in this country (and a higher percentage of poor people) consume too many calories rather than too few, measuring food’s value by the calorie makes as much sense as measuring a drink’s value by its alcohol content. (Why not drink 95 percent neutral grain spirit, the cheapest way to get drunk?)

Besides, that argument, even if we all needed to gain weight, is not always true. A meal of real food cooked at home can easily contain more calories, most of them of the “healthy” variety. (Olive oil accounts for many of the calories in the roast chicken meal, for example.)In comparing prices of real food and junk food, I used supermarket ingredients, not the pricier organic or local food that many people would consider ideal. But food choices are not black and white; the alternative to fast food is not necessarily organic food, any more than the alternative to soda is Bordeaux.

The alternative to soda is water, and the alternative to junk food is not grass-fed beef and greens from a trendy farmers’ market, but anything other than junk food: rice, grains, pasta, beans, fresh vegetables, canned vegetables, frozen vegetables, meat, fish, poultry, dairy products, bread, peanut butter, a thousand other things cooked at home — in almost every case a far superior alternative.

“Anything that you do that’s not fast food is terrific; cooking once a week is far better than not cooking at all,” says Marion Nestle, professor of food studies at New York University and author of “What to Eat.” “It’s the same argument as exercise: more is better than less and some is a lot better than none.”

THE fact is that most people can afford real food. Even the nearly 50 million Americans who are enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps) receive about $5 per person per day, which is far from ideal but enough to survive. So we have to assume that money alone doesn’t guide decisions about what to eat. There are, of course, the so-called food deserts, places where it’s hard to find food: the Department of Agriculture says that more than two million Americans in low-income rural areas live 10 miles or more from a supermarket, and more than five million households without access to cars live more than a half mile from a supermarket.

Still, 93 percent of those with limited access to supermarkets do have access to vehicles, though it takes them 20 more minutes to travel to the store than the national average. And after a long day of work at one or even two jobs, 20 extra minutes — plus cooking time — must seem like an eternity.

Taking the long route to putting food on the table may not be easy, but for almost all Americans it remains a choice, and if you can drive to McDonald’s you can drive to Safeway. It’s cooking that’s the real challenge. (The real challenge is not “I’m too busy to cook.” In 2010 the average American, regardless of weekly earnings, watched no less than an hour and a half of television per day. The time is there.)

The core problem is that cooking is defined as work, and fast food is both a pleasure and a crutch. “People really are stressed out with all that they have to do, and they don’t want to cook,” says Julie Guthman, associate professor of community studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of the forthcoming “Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice and the Limits of Capitalism.” “Their reaction is, ‘Let me enjoy what I want to eat, and stop telling me what to do.’ And it’s one of the few things that less well-off people have: they don’t have to cook.”

It’s not just about choice, however, and rational arguments go only so far, because money and access and time and skill are not the only considerations. The ubiquity, convenience and habit-forming appeal of hyperprocessed foods have largely drowned out the alternatives: there are five fast-food restaurants for every supermarket in the United States; in recent decades the adjusted for inflation price of fresh produce has increased by 40 percent while the price of soda and processed food has decreased by as much as 30 percent; and nearly inconceivable resources go into encouraging consumption in restaurants: fast-food companies spent $4.2 billion on marketing in 2009.

Furthermore, the engineering behind hyperprocessed food makes it virtually addictive. A 2009 study by the Scripps Research Institute indicates that overconsumption of fast food “triggers addiction-like neuroaddictive responses” in the brain, making it harder to trigger the release of dopamine. In other words the more fast food we eat, the more we need to give us pleasure; thus the report suggests that the same mechanisms underlie drug addiction and obesity.

This addiction to processed food is the result of decades of vision and hard work by the industry. For 50 years, says David A. Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and author of “The End of Overeating,” companies strove to create food that was “energy-dense, highly stimulating, and went down easy. They put it on every street corner and made it mobile, and they made it socially acceptable to eat anytime and anyplace. They created a food carnival, and that’s where we live. And if you’re used to self-stimulation every 15 minutes, well, you can’t run into the kitchen to satisfy that urge.”

Real cultural changes are needed to turn this around. Somehow, no-nonsense cooking and eating — roasting a chicken, making a grilled cheese sandwich, scrambling an egg, tossing a salad — must become popular again, and valued not just by hipsters in Brooklyn or locavores in Berkeley. The smart campaign is not to get McDonald’s to serve better food but to get people to see cooking as a joy rather than a burden, or at least as part of a normal life.

As with any addictive behavior, this one is most easily countered by educating children about the better way. Children, after all, are born without bad habits. And yet it’s adults who must begin to tear down the food carnival.

The question is how? Efforts are everywhere. The People’s Grocery in Oakland secures affordable groceries for low-income people. Zoning laws in Los Angeles restrict the number of fast-food restaurants in high-obesity neighborhoods. There’s the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, a successful Pennsylvania program to build fresh food outlets in underserved areas, now being expanded nationally. FoodCorps and Cooking Matters teach young people how to farm and cook.

As Malik Yakini, executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, says, “We’ve seen minor successes, but the food movement is still at the infant stage, and we need a massive social shift to convince people to consider healthier options.”

HOW do you change a culture? The answers, not surprisingly, are complex. “Once I look at what I’m eating,” says Dr. Kessler, “and realize it’s not food, and I ask ‘what am I doing here?’ that’s the start. It’s not about whether I think it’s good for me, it’s about changing how I feel. And we change how people feel by changing the environment.”

Obviously, in an atmosphere where any regulation is immediately labeled “nanny statism,” changing “the environment” is difficult. But we’ve done this before, with tobacco. The 1998 tobacco settlement limited cigarette marketing and forced manufacturers to finance anti-smoking campaigns — a negotiated change that led to an environmental one that in turn led to a cultural one, after which kids said to their parents, “I wish you didn’t smoke.” Smoking had to be converted from a cool habit into one practiced by pariahs.

A similar victory in the food world is symbolized by the stories parents tell me of their kids booing as they drive by McDonald’s.

To make changes like this more widespread we need action both cultural and political. The cultural lies in celebrating real food; raising our children in homes that don’t program them for fast-produced, eaten-on-the-run, high-calorie, low-nutrition junk; giving them the gift of appreciating the pleasures of nourishing one another and enjoying that nourishment together.

Political action would mean agitating to limit the marketing of junk; forcing its makers to pay the true costs of production; recognizing that advertising for fast food is not the exercise of free speech but behavior manipulation of addictive substances; and making certain that real food is affordable and available to everyone. The political challenge is the more difficult one, but it cannot be ignored.

What’s easier is to cook at every opportunity, to demonstrate to family and neighbors that the real way is the better way. And even the more fun way: kind of like a carnival
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Proposed Hunts Point Rooftop Farm Could Be World's Largest

Updated June 12, 2012 1:51pm

June 12, 2012 1:51pm | By Patrick Wall, DNAinfo Reporter/Producer

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http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20120612/hunts-point/proposed-hunts-point-rooftop-farm-could-be-worlds-largest

Posted by roz

hunt's point bus depot roof to become the largest urban farm....?

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 The proposed rooftop farm in Hunts Point's food distribution area could fill a nearly 10-acre, 200,000-square-foot space. (NYC Economic Development Corporation)

HUNTS POINT — Only green thumbs with deep pockets need apply.

Private developers are being sought by the city to build a farm atop the 200,000-square-foot roof of a warehouse in the neighborhood's sprawling food distribution zone, creating the potential for one of the largest rooftop farms in the world.

"I welcome the development of a rooftop farm in Hunts Point with open arms," said Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr., whose office has financed 13 green roofs in The Bronx. "This new proposal will not only create much-needed jobs, but will also provide fresh produce for countless Bronxites."

In March, BrightFarms, Inc. unveiled plans to build a hydroponic greenhouse atop a former Navy warehouse in Brooklyn's Sunset Park. The private company said its farm, occupying up to 100,000 square-feet, would be the largest in the US and possibly the world.

The city's Economic Development Corporation has put out a request for proposals for the Hunt's Point rooftop farm, which could cover almost 10-acres of rooftop, twice the size of the proposed Sunset Park farm.

Two food distributors, Sultana Distribution and Citarella, currently occupy the warehouse in Hunts Point, located at 600 Food Center Drive.

Situated at the southeastern edge of the peninsula, along the bank of the East River, the building rests inside a 329-acre food distribution corridor that includes the Hunts Point Terminal Produce Market, the Cooperative Meat Market and the New Fulton Fish Market. The markets' 115 private wholesalers serve more than 23 million customers that reside in the region and together they generate $3 billion in annual sales, according to the city.

Other food and drink distributors, such as Anheuser-Busch, also operate in the area.

The year-round rooftop farm could easily plug into the zone's network of regional distributors, EDC president Seth Pinsky said Tuesday.

“With the opportunity to build one of the world’s largest rooftop farms," Pinsky said, "we will create important new opportunities to connect producers and distributors, greatly enhancing the existing food network and generating new jobs for Bronx residents.”

SEE MORE PHOTOS

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn also expressed support for the plan, which she called an "innovative urban agricultural model." 

With additional reporting by Jill Colvin.

Read more: http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20120612/hunts-point/proposed-hunts-point-rooftop-farm-could-be-worlds-largest#ixzz2Cz0rCMSV