Study Unit 5: Urban Food Systems: The Role of the Market and Urban Agriculture.

This unit will focus on many of the activities we will be doing in Rome. We will be touring markets where we will be purchasing ingredients and cooking group meals. We will also be learning about urban agriculture through the community gardening movement that has undergone a renewed resurgence in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, which hit Italy rather hard.

The Role of the Market

At the beginning of Food, Inc. the film puts us in the driver's seat, pushing a shopping cart through the aisles of a supermarket. As a viewer, we are thrust into the space of the film and the experience of being in that space. The film is slightly in slow-motion with hypnotic music in the background as if to capture how we experience that space as a highly controlled environment teaming with invitations to consume a bewildering diversity of products that are mostly rearrangements of corn and soy produced in a globally integrated food economy.

The readings by Carolyn Steel and Raj Patel will help us to think about the supermarket as a relatively recent technology in how we access the food we eat. Steel's chapter and the essay by Thomas Tiemann will give us some reference points to compare and contrast the supermarket with a much older form of the local food market as a meeting place between producer and consumer, a place of direct encounter and communication between a town and its rural hinterland. The revival of local markets is an important movement in the efforts to "re-localize food" by helping to build vibrant local and regional food economies to ensure resilience in securing access to food, which as biological beings we need to survive.

I remember taking my group to Turin in 2018 where we were given a tour of the Porto Palazzo Market, one of Italy's most famous market places, and learning that the market had existed from antiquity in the same place next to one of the main gates: a portal between the city and the country. The point is that markets tend not to move. They anchor the city in a very material kind of way. If you were to go to Palermo, you would discover that the market system put in place by the Arabs in the 10th Century still remains in place. In Rome, you will find a network of neighborhood markets (mercato rionale) that was established in the late 19th Century although some of them existed long before then. 

We will be touring a few of the most famous marketplaces in Rome, purchasing ingredients, and bringing them to the kitchen to assemble meals that incorporate local seasonal ingredients. To a certain extent, this requires us to be somewhat improvisational in our approach to cuisine. We start with what is available rather than with a recipe that is a list of ingredients disconnected with the place where we are and the time of year we are in!

Rachel Black's chapter on the Porto Palazzo Market in Turin is a recommended reading to give you background on how markets in Italy reflect what is becoming an increasingly multicultural space. Italy has become a crossroads of immigration from the Middle East, South Asia, China, and Africa. We will be touring Esquilino Market in Rome, which is the most multicultural market in the city.

Urban Agriculture and Food Sovereignty

In the film "Happy as Lazzaro" Links to an external site. (2018), a group of peasants who have moved to the city and are living in conditions of dire poverty discover that one can still find some the wild and foraged foods familiar from their rural past. Peasant diets all over the world rely not just on crops that are grown but also which are gathered in the common spaces. This is no less true for Italy today. You can find ancient grannies collecting cicoria (chicory greens) in the public parks. Bitter greens are an important part of the so-called Mediterranean diet, providing important phytonutrients and fiber. Almost every restaurant menu will have on their list of "contorni" (vegetable sides) a heap of chicory, or spinach, or brocoletti (a kind of turnip top). 

Rome has an interesting history as an agricultural city. In the famous painting by Giovanni Paolo Panini, View of Rome from Monte Mario, we can see that as late as 1749, much of the city was still agricultural. The foreground of the painting shows the area that is now called Prati, meaning fields, which is the neighborhood where we will be staying in Rome. Prati, with its beaux arts architecture and broad avenues was developed in the late 19th Century to resemble Paris. The first community garden we will visit is located on Monte Mario, so we will have a chance to view the urban landscape from the very same vantage point in Panini's painting!

People having been growing food in the city since ancient times. As recently as the 1950s, there were vegetable gardens in the Circo Massimo, the ancient chariot racing course near the Colosseum. In the years following World War Two, Rome grew rapidly as rural people moved to the city. The development of the Roman suburbs was quite sprawling and chaotic, in which pockets of agricultural land became engulfed by new housing development. In 1997, there was some effort by the Municipality of Rome to incorporate this green space into a park system called Roma Natura Links to an external site., including farms that were preserved as agricultural parks and agricultural cooperatives.

Following the economic crisis of 2008, there was a resurgence of urban farming in the form of community gardening. Silvia Cioli, who will be our guide in our tour of some of these gardens, was instrumental in setting up a google mapping project called Zappata Romana Links to an external site. in 2010. She had no idea how this simple act of mapping would build connections among the individual isolated projects around the periphery of the city. Much of the post-war peri-urban real estate development was devoid of the creation of public spaces. Urban agriculture has provided residents with a new kind of "piazza," a place for citizens to meet and work together to address the needs of their community. The gardens provide opportunities not just to grow food, but also reverse the degradation of the urban environment and also provide opportunities for social inclusion, especially recent migrants to Italy from areas of the world affected by climate crisis and armed conflict.

Community gardens are a good illustration of food sovereignty, a term that emerged in the 1990s as a cry of resistance to the globalization of our food systems. Globalization has led to the environmental destruction of indigenous homelands, land grabbing, and volatile food prices leading to loss of access to food, especially for poor people, as we discovered in Learning Module One. In the debates on global hunger, the terms food sovereignty and food security exist in a combative tension between them. Framing the issue as one of food sovereignty emphasizes the social and political forces that are producing world hunger. Whereas "food security" frames the issue in terms of needing new technologies to produce more food, which is why this framing is preferred by the agro-industrial corporations seeking to control the food supply. The irony is that we already produce more than enough food for everyone. It is lack of food access that is the problem. Should communities have the power to define their own food systems? Or should these decision be made by the World Bank and the World Trade Organization? The word sovereignty defines the power of decision: who gets to choose. The pamphlet published by Via Campesina (the way of the peasant), a world-wide network of grass-roots advocates for protection of local food systems, is a good introduction to how "food sovereignty" has become a core concept in resistance against corporate power over our food since the WTO protests of the late 1990s and early 2000s.