Outstanding examples of rooftop agriculture can be seen in cities like New York, Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles. The Eagle Street Farm in Greenpoint Brooklyn is possibly one of the best examples of rooftop gardening in the nation. This farm sits on top of an old warehouse covering 6,000 square feet. Kale, lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, radishes, peas, and herbs all grown on the roof are delivered to residents and local restaurants through a community supported agriculture model.

What about the rooftop farm possibilities right here in Spokane? Our built environment boasts a variety of roofs and walls that could support urban farm operations. There are a few rooftop container gardens and the Main Market Co-op greenhouse, but there are yet to be any food growing endeavors that produce on a large enough scale to regularly supply residents and restaurants. Imagine an urban farm on top of the Jensen-Byrd building, the Wonderbread building on Lincoln and Broadway, or even on top of the Spokane Transit Authority storage and maintenance center!

Local developers, property owners, universities and community colleges could be engaged to assist in developing rooftop farms and other forms of urban agriculture in our city. Supportive developers and property owners are essential to the success of urban farming; they hold the keys that open onto the roofs of Spokane. The City and the County could help by writing or re-writing ordinances that are conducive to urban agriculture.

The universities could bring their programs together to develop an “Urban Agriculture Institute of Spokane” which would research and develop best practices and models that could be applied in other cities. Urban farming would greatly benefit the people, natural environment, food culture, and local economy, as well as reinforcing Spokane’s reputation as an innovative and creative city.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately … I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.

The reasons Thoreau once gave for his retreat into the forest near Walden Pond are eerily similar to our own reasons for moving to Spokane last month after ten years spent living abroad. My wife and I wanted a more measured pace of life without sacrificing the arts and culture that enrich our existence. We sought a place that wasn’t stagnant, that was reinventing itself without falling victim to vanity and greed and therefore losing sight of the things that mattered — things like the environment and a strong sense of community. We were looking for somewhere we could easily concentrate on the essentials and not, as that surly transcendentalist dismissively wrote all those years ago, fritter our life away on a headlong rush of insignificant details.

You could be forgiven at this point for snickering at our naiveté. Deliberate living? Arts and culture? Spokane? There’s a prevalent strain of thought that will grant the city just one concession when it comes to positive attributes: “It’s a good place for families.” In other words, it’s quaint. Predictable. Stodgy. Dull. And, for better or worse, maybe it is. This city could certainly use a few more bookstores, bands, and exhibitions.

But right now there’s a week-before-Christmas kind of vibe in Spokane, a feeling that something’s on the verge of happening; or maybe it’s already been happening for a while and the effects are only now starting to become apparent: the Main Market Co-op and the larger slow/organic food movement, the push for bike- and pedestrian-friendly “complete streets,” the resurgence of community-oriented and sustainability-minded businesses such as Roast House, the one hundred blocks of free Wi-Fi coverage at the city center, the development of the long-dormant and dilapidated Kendall Yards area, the moves to protect the aquifer.

To us Spokane appears to have, for the first time since the mid-’70s, the requisite impetus and desire to reflect and decide precisely what form it will take in the twenty-first century. And unlike those enduringly beguiling destinations of Seattle and Portland, whose powerful cultural tractor beams continue to entice some of Spokane’s finest away (I’m looking at you, Sherman Alexie et al.), this city still has the ability to do just that, to collectively re-imagine itself in whole or in part. Its reputation and fate are not yet so fixed.

That’s a unique position for a city of this size to be in. It has the opportunity to maintain the back-to-basics qualities that attracted us in the first place and still adopt the very best amenities that cities such as Seattle and Portland have to offer: bike lanes, arts funding, music and film festivals, architectural highlights, the proliferation of public parks. And it can grow and evolve in this way while resolutely avoiding what are so often viewed as the inevitable by-products of progress: a grotesque sprawl at its periphery, a blight of exclusive upmarket condominiums, a wanton pursuit of white-collar job creation that often succeeds only in raising the cost of living, poorly planned traffic thoroughfares and expensive public transportation.

Spokane is indeed a diamond in the rough, and we’re excited about the ways it’s begun to shine. If it were to take the right steps and channel the right resources, Spokane could exert a cultural influence to rival that of its more cosmopolitan coastal cousins. Stem that creative drain and it won’t be long before this city shakes off its parochial stigma altogether. A vibrant creative class attracts a vibrant business class. Which in turn cultivates a vibrant middle class. A city like that doesn’t need to woo location scouts and CEOs; they come of their own accord.

To truly live deep and suck the marrow from life… that would be a challenge even in Eden itself. But to live simply, to live deliberately; to live in a place where your farmer has a Facebook page, where you can drop in unannounced at a specialist coffee roaster and be invited to “cup” before they even learn your name, where you can stroll down to the most popular citywide annual event and not have to fight for a front-row spot, where more than ten cars at a stoplight constitutes heavy traffic, where the symphony orchestra plays to an annual audience almost as large as that of the Oregon Symphony operating out of Portland, where there’s a local public radio station for every 100,000 inhabitants, where the historical buildings haven’t been razed or yuppified, where there’s a postcard-perfect waterfall and rapids running right through the heart of downtown, for heaven’s sake — these are the things that drew us to Spokane. And as this city in flux attempts to augment those qualities with much-needed technological, creative, and environmental assets, our active support is with those who will ensure that any changes are carried out for the sake of those existing qualities and not at their expense.

So what do independently owned food carts and generic multinational chain restaurants have in common? They are both forms of “fast food.” After placing an order your meal is served within minutes. One offers a great degree of culinary variety, “sidewalk spunk,” potentially healthy dishes, circulates money through the local economy more efficiently, and provides management and staff more tangible pathways to career advancement in the food industry.

The other is tightly managed and unimaginative, creates cultural dead zones in urban environments, causes diabetes, inflates the corporate consolidation of agribusiness, and promotes working environments that position employees to be a drain on social systems. I’ll let you guess which is which. Why would you want to scarf down this while you could savor that?

L: Burger King on PictureMyFood.com, R: Pop-Up Spokane

Distasteful as it may be, traditional fast food is not the only food cart-killing culprit in Spokane. Excessive regulation seems to be an issue as well.

To get a year long permit to operate on the street you have to go to the environmental health office and fill out the paperwork, bring approved plans by an engineer regarding your cart, get it approved, and pay the fee. Total turnaround time of about three weeks. Compared to other counties, Spokane is very expensive. A temporary permit that costs $15 in  Colville costs $130 here. To sell meat is four hundred eighty something. Prices double if you don’t get it in two weeks early.

-Local Food Vendor

It seems as if Spokane is determined to cram its entire food cart scene into one week of maniacal caloric consumption: Pig Out in the Park. What exactly is standing in our way of having a more sustained sidewalk presence?

The biggest factor is that the county requires vendors to have a state certified truck or trailer to operate with a mobile food permit.  Bathroom access is another hurdle along with the need to use a commercial kitchen other than the truck or trailer to prepare and store the food. The reality is that none of these necessarily rule out a larger street food scene in this town which leads me to believe that Spokane just lacks the people motivated enough to get it done.

The entire food scene is marked by one hard to ignore fact: we have a small percentage of chef-owned restaurants. Innovation and advancement of food culture in a community tends to be driven by people who have motivations other than just making money. Jeremy Hansen has been able to grab the city’s attention because he has not played to the middle.

The trend that will make the greatest impact on this community will be when more cooks get the entrepreneurial bug. Food carts are a less expensive way of getting this done but with an unproven marketplace, some worry whether they can cover the cost of a certified truck or trailer. The good thing is that change is happening, albeit at a slower pace than some of us might like.

-Chef David Blaine

Why should we care about the lack of food carts in Spokane? Because they indicate a kind of social environment that speaks volumes about our region’s chosen lifestyle and culture. Portland has almost 400 food carts, compared to less than a dozen around here. The Portland food carts are so vibrant they have garnered national attention. This is a tangible homing beacon to creative class types all across the world. This is not just about making people who already live in Spokane happier, it is about being competitive in a global marketplace. Note to any antsy vendors in the 503: Spokane is ready to embrace your business. Now pack up and move on over, we are ready for you! Or better yet, young local entrepreneurs, here is your chance!

• SpoCOOL covers Tacos del Sol.
• Taste of the Town on Jon Howard’s hot dogs.
• SpoCOOL on Pop-Up.
• Luke’s “Mobile Feasts” article, coincidentally written while I was away. The fact that multiple people are thinking about this all at once is just more proof that Spokane’s mass consciousness is shifting.
• Nifty Inlander food cart locator tool.
• Maybe the City could rip off this packet.
• “Food carts take the curse off Portland’s parking lots.”

One aspect of the community clean-up was having a dumpster available for people to bring their excess garbage, old furniture or large items they might not be able to afford to bring to the town dump. The huge dumpster filled in about three hours. It surprised and pleased me how people from the neighborhood helped each other load and empty their cars full of stuff, and stopped by to take an interest in the One World organic garden.

I was pulling weeds when someone asked me if I was “artistic,” and I responded, “Sure, why not?” The volunteer coordinator led me to a very old trailer. The corrugated metal siding was rusting in places where the paint had chipped off. It had certainly seen better days. I’m not sure how this trailer was important to the operations of the restaurant or garden, but I said, “Sure! I’ll paint it.” It is amazing how a coat of cream colored paint can make a difference in how something looks: old, dilapidated, or clean and well-cared for.

After finishing the paint job, clearing most of the weeds out of the garden, and picking up trash in the neighborhood, we had some hot dogs and potato salad donated by Sonnenberg’s, an awesome local deli just down the block. I felt like I’d done something good for my neighborhood and for people I don’t know very well who live pretty close to me.

The concept of “stewardship” comes up a lot in conversations about how human beings should live in relationship to the earth. How do we use natural resources and how do we care for the people and earth around us? While I acted locally, the real benefit was a new connection to the place where I live.

Scout’s book is a collection of essays that explore the emerging rewilding renaissance in which civilized people are awakening to their domestication through thousands of years of sedentary life. This lifestyle is posited as the root of all environmental destruction and social injustice.

Urban Scout has a wisdom and intelligence far beyond his years. He is helping us move away from this culture of death and toward a sane culture that will not kill the planet. -Derrick Jensen

Rewild Camp Skill-Share, Thursday May 20, 4-6pm

If you’ve got a skill you want to share or a craft you’re working on, let us know about it in the comments section. Example topics might include archery, bow-drill fires, nettle cordage, ivy basket weaving, story telling, language games, martial arts or herbal medicine, etc. Rewilding differs from other skills and crafts in its emphasis on respecting the natural world. The park does not allow harvesting of any material and we want to make nice with the park people if they are there, so come prepared!

Stuff To Bring:

• Raw materials for your project
• Water
• Snacks (to share?)
• A carving knife
• Dress for variations in the weather (cold and rainy!)
• A chair or something to sit on
• Some donation dollars
• Any materials you need for your demonstration

Rewild Camp Reading & Discussion, Thursday May 20, 6-8pm

At age 16 Urban Scout left high school to begin his life-long unschooled journey of rewilding. He keeps a popular blog detailing his rewilding projects and writings and created an international internet forum and wiki for fellow people-who-rewild. He has received local press (The Oregonian, The Portland Mercury, Willamette Week, The Portland Tribune), national press (ReadyMade Magazine) and international press (Chain Reaction AU, Positive News UK) for his efforts to promote rewilding. Using thoughtful, humorously cynical and at times angry prose, Urban Scout explores how the ideology of civilization clashes with the wild and how thinking, feeling and most importantly living wild is the only way to achieve lasting sustainability.

When I feel like surfing a bit nearer the edge, I check out Scout’s latest. It’s irreverent, angry, informative, and sometimes he’s not even nice. Urban Scout is out there exploring and inventing rewilding and contemporary tribal skills with style, and I admire that he doesn’t claim to know it all. Scout always takes me down an unanticipated path. We civilized folk have forgotten what he’s trying to remember for us. -Toby Hemenway, author of Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture

One of Scout’s dreams is to create a network of rewilding communities across Cascadia. Rewilding is already happening in bigger cities like Portland and Seattle, but what about inland towns that account for the rest of the Northwest? It is in these places that there is a vibrant rural culture celebrating craft, localism, and environmental stewardship – a combination ripe for rewilding!

Urban Scout will be at Wentel Grant Park (1900 S. Inland Empire Way) from 4-8pm. This event is free and open to the public, visitors may come and go. All ages are welcome.

Since mid-February I’ve been meeting with a small group to share dinner and trade portions of our leftovers so we can enjoy a variety of homemade goods throughout the week. I can tell you that as a single, busy, picky, cheap vegetarian with a penchant for locally-sourced products, constantly cooking from scratch can become quite the chore. Any one of those factors can make cooking into a hassle, and thus the Great Food Swap was born.

The food swapping concept was the brain child of Brian Estes, a young local farmer who works at the Vinegar Flats Community Garden.

I’m writing you today to propose an idea which I’ve been toying with for the past month or so. I’m looking to get together a group of people who would be interested in a weekly food exchange. I guess you could think about it as an evolution of the traditional potluck. Instead of getting together for a meal in which each participant provides a dish, a community would gather on a regular basis with each member bringing a food item or set of items of which portions could be exchanged for whatever goodies others have brought.

Each dinner was delightful with new recipes learned and friendships formed. People talked about how to grow some of the different ingredients we were eating, and plans were discussed on ways to scale the swap to include a larger number of participants. Since Sundays are ideal for cooking, we decided first and third Mondays would be best to swap our goods. Picking a location right across the street from the Main Market allowed for friends who wanted to join in but weren’t able to make something on their own.

As much interest and promise as there is in this concept, sometimes you just have to admit that you can’t do it all. You’ve got to pick your battles, as the saying goes, so I am issuing a challenge of my own. If I can find someone to commit to regularly promoting, recruiting and playing a leadership role in developing this activity, I’ll set you up with a mailing list, a flier design, and a friendly conference room with an attached kitchen to boot.

Please message me at thespovangelist [at] gmail [dot] com with your interest and contact information. Happy swapping!

]]> http://spovangelist.com/the-great-food-swap/feed/ 0 http://spovangelist.com/chicken-sh-the-party/ http://spovangelist.com/chicken-sh-the-party/#comments Thu, 28 Jan 2010 07:01:37 +0000 The Spovangelist http://spovangelist.com/?p=1465 They say an effective communication technique is to “tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em, tell ‘em, and then tell ‘em what you told ‘em.” That is what I appreciate about Gabriel and Rimas’s proactive three-pronged approach to marketing Chicken Sh@#: Exploring Urban Ecosystems. Instead of issuing a wan invitation to an opening night event and then waiting around for the crowds to show up like some damsel in distress, Chicken Sh@# hits you over the head and dares you to explore a whole new kind of exhibit format.

It’s been great to watch all the pedestrian double takes out in front of the gallery where I lock and unlock my bike. On any other given month people have a hard time acknowledging that the gallery is even there. Not only do I get to mention the interesting and relevant concepts behind the current show, I’m able to invite them to participate in the exhibit’s next event. This is how you build a buzz machine, beehives not included.

A recent review completely failed to address the participatory elements of this exhibit. Thankfully, Spokane Arts provided people with some heads up on the exciting events that were held in the gallery. Did you know that the now open Main Market Co-op hosted Curt Ellis (co-producer of King Corn) to speak about his new follow-up documentary? This and other attractions helped draw a whole new audience to the gallery: the gardening set, an otherwise mixed bag and beyond. Let’s admit it, the catchy conflation between the gallery co-op model and the novelty of the show in this article subtitle didn’t read well at all.

Is it art? As long as it is relevant, fun to look at and interesting, who gives a crap? The reviewer says “Chickens, food, fertilizer. Recycling. Rethinking. OK, we get it.” But do we? My take home message from this exhibit was that if you truly get it, you’ll be doing it. In San Francisco the city requires compost separation to achieve their goal of zero wast by 2020. In Spokane, we can’t even embrace a framework to help set goals for the future. Hopefully that will have changed with the local elections, but I digress…

Last time we talked about what is next for golden boy Gabe, but what about Mr. Rimas? In the long term we will be loosing him to the lack of fine art grad school programs in the area (Eastern, we’re looking at you!) but in the interim he is on to an interesting, albeit less participatory, group show at SOIL in Seattle.

Through lenses of industrialization, environmentalism, consumerism, and scientific advancement, the artists in Fertilizing Utopias examine the ideals of Western culture with a playful and critical eye. Dark realities are placed in counterpoint to utopian goals as these artists inspect the possible futures our civilization is cultivating.

In the end I hope you’ll be able to come to the gallery for the closing reception of Chicken Sh@#: Exploring Urban Ecosystems! Especially if you haven’t been in yet. Tomorrow between 6-10pm at 25 W. Main.

• RSVP to Chicken Sh@#: The Party! on Facebook

It all started when my neighbor down in Peaceful Valley showed me the bin he kept in his kitchen for table scraps. His students at West Valley City School were selling these bins as a fundraiser, so I purchased one along with a $20 can of worms. This was all fine and good until I accidentally froze the critters during a winter season move between apartments. Determined to set things right, I poached a pile of new worms from my mother’s compost and started over. To my surprise, the half-processed material I dumped next to my porch in a (failed) attempt to grow beans yielded a pumpkin vine,  a squash plant and several tomatoes that actually ended up producing fruit. This stuff is like the miracle whip of soils, it is so fecund it literally grows itself!

I heard it said that Spokane spends much more money per capita on gardening and yard supplies than most places. Now I haven’t done the research to corroborate this claim, but if you consider our love affair with lawns and our water usage compared to other cities, it seems plausible enough. Combine these “yard people” with winter, frugality, a burgeoning interest in growing food and treading lightly on the soil, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for a worm bin explosion in Spokane.

The missing ingredients are information and encouragement to overcome the “Ew!” factor associated with worms. Taking my own advice, I set out to do just that by hosting a worm bin workshop during a Community Roots Market at Fresh Abundance.  Where I thought I’d be lucky if a few of my friends showed up, fifteen eager workshoppers sat around for over an hour while I improvised the curriculum and assembled a new bin. While DIY bins are easy to make, I had to go around to three different hardware stores to find the right components for my preferred design. Miller’s on 29th was the most helpful by far.

By Slide Sideways with a penchant for birthday designs.

Not wanting all those dark, loamy coffee grounds to go to waste, I’ve also set up a worm bin in the office. This took some care to convince my co-workers that our clients wouldn’t be grossed out by funky smells or fruit flies, but now that the bin has made it past the one month “equilibration phase” the population is well established and the worms are multiplying daily. After a while you start thinking of them like pets. It is comparable to the maintenance of a fish bowl with the intrigue of an ant terrarium. The result of all this poking around is a rich, dark substance with the consistency of a half-baked brownie and the texture to match. In the colloquial words of my father, this super soil can “work wonders and crap cucumbers.” In this case, quite literally.

The next worm bin workshop will be held on December 12th at 2015 N Division from 2-4pm. To RSVP or inquire about purchasing bins/worms, please contact: mariah[dot]mckay[at]gmail[dot]com.

Behind the podium in black and a recycled sari silk scarf, she was upfront and comfortable about her urban cultural leanings, citing a hipster-driven tour through some of America’s most recited “cool” cities: Portland, Brooklyn, Austin, Seattle, and now the up-and-coming Oakland of all places.

But how many of the audience’s middle-aged green thumbs were able to fully grasp the reference? I will never forget in college the awkward moments where I had to explain to my parents the difference between 40′s jazz hipsters and the modern hipster. It was like the day I tried to teach my sweet old grandmother how to text. Futile.

A reoccurring theme throughout the talk was Novella’s juxtaposition of urban and rural experience. She even got to crack a few jokes about being an Orofino Maniac. Before starting in on her first passage she paused to explain “Sometimes I get a little nervous around audiences like you. My New York audience is a lot different than in places like this. They are all like ‘Whoa!’ whereas… How many of you have been to a pig auction before?” No one that I could see raised their hand. “Oh, well I guess this is my New York audience after all!”

This honest little miscalculation says a lot about Spokane’s identity issues. Are we urban? Are we rural? Why can’t people seem to comprehend the gaping chasm in between? Defying the polarity doesn’t just create confusion, however, in the world of grant writing it can carry a cost. Being neither urban or rural can make it difficult to qualify for certain types of funding, especially when it comes to agricultural projects. No one seems interested in earmarking resources for “suburban renewal” or “suburban development.” It just isn’t as sexy or poignant as the categorized extremes.

Another thing that got me thinking about Spokane was the author’s comment that she tends to gravitate towards places that present a challenge. This played nicely into the theme of being a pioneer, or a homesteader of sorts. She spoke blithely about gun shots and prostitution in the neighborhood. All elements that contribute to a graphic, gripping tale.

But what about the challenges of the mid-sized city? The challenge of a community that is just functional enough that the majority of its problems are simmering right below the radar? What about the challenges of social isolation, boredom and homogeneity? These are themes that simply go untreated when your Yemeni neighbor is coming over with his family to butcher a goat for dinner.

Think about the examples of Riverfront Farm and One World Cafe. They are both doing exceptional work for exceptional causes. They’ve received some much-deserved local press, but what are their publicity prospects much beyond that? If Ghost Town were located out in Hillyard by the new freeway, would the story retain it’s tantalizing appeal?

Regardless we can’t wait to read the book and start shopping at the new co-op. It was touching to observe how Novella used the word “honor” in the same sincere way as our own Jennifer Hall. We’re telling you, these Slow Foodists are really on to something!

The plans for the store will simply blow you away. Their/our website (I say “our” as a reminder that membership means partial ownership) is chalk full of interesting information and other opportunities for learning. Check it out and support with an early membership to hasten the grand opening of the store!