Re:Open-sourced food production – the future of urban diets?
by barney54 on Thursday November 12, 2015 @07:06AM
(#10552634)
It sounds especially inefficient when you consider the bad example brought up in the article--apples. There is a reason apples are mass-produced--lots of land and the right climate conditions. You can't grow too many apples in urban areas. I love real apples, but I grew up in an exurban area across the street from an apple orchard.
You won't taste apples that good through mass production, but you will be able to get apples year around. Those are the trade offs.
Re:Open-sourced food production – the future of urban diets?
by bryanlarsen on Thursday November 12, 2015 @09:17AM
(#10553215)
Apples are great in an urban environment -- they're a nice looking tree that gives a spectacular flower show in the spring.
But I don't know what relation apples have to the OP, though. A controlled growing environment is generally associated with small vulnerable vegetable crops like lettuce, not huge hardy apple trees.
Re:Open-sourced food production – the future of urban diets?
by saiya-jin on Thursday November 12, 2015 @10:47AM
(#10553816)
considering how polluted urban areas are, and how good are apples in retaining pollution in them (no sources at hand now, sorry), I would not touch those unless situation got serious.
Seriously, there's not a single real argument or piece of data in the article, just a bunch of complaints about "first world problems".
- How does growing food locally in sub-optimal scale in urban environments stack against high-efficiency farms?
- Cities' water systems are strained and wasteful due to old infrastructure, and require that water is brought from hundreds of miles away, while some agricultural areas face similar issues, how does this compares with the average agricultural area?
- Why would someone try to grow anything in San Francisco using tap water?
“Everyone wants transparency in food. Anyone right now that’s building opacity in the offering to consumers is going to die.”
AFAIK, starving people are more worried with finding the next meal, not with the terroir of the wheat in the bread. Sounds too much like many SV startups: solving first world problems first.
"including boxes that create controlled environments to grow specific types of food"
So, instead of growing crops where they grow best, and efficiently shipping them around the country (freight accounts for 6% of the total food chain emissions), we'll use energy to create boxes that maintain controlled temperature, humidity and luminosity so we can grow our favorite crops just next door? That sounds totally inefficient for me (but I'd love to see data on that).