Edible City Warsaw
Web documentary on the future of nutrition
What is the future of our nutrition? Will Warsaw join cities like Vienna, London, or Paris that map out trends in urban agriculture and horticulture? Edible City Warsaw is a futuristic, multi-media tale of how Warsaw could reclaim food sovereignty. The web documentary will premiere online on 23 July 2021.
The global system based on industrial agriculture, monoculture planting, and soil exploitation deprives people of food sovereignty, i.e. the human right to healthy, local food produced in a sustainable, ecological manner, in harmony with the natural rhythm of the planet.
We give voice to five initiatives that can give a new direction to the municipal food policy. This story shows that projects carried out on a small scale have a big impact. Community supported agriculture, food cooperatives, family garden allotments, community gardens, and gastronomy which uses local, seasonal and ecological produce become an important part of the edible city. Boosting them means also supporting real environmental and social change. Representatives of these initiatives talk about how they operate, and discuss the values and ideas behind them.
Imagine a city in which fruit and vegetables grow on urban farms, in community gardens, on rooftops and in backyards. Imagine that your food does not have to travel hundreds or thousands of kilometres, and instead, you have access to fresh produce from local, ecological farms. Imagine that Warsaw, the edible city of the future, transforms into a healthier, more liveable and resilient place.
Which future will you choose?
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Website development: Łukasz Grochowski
Voiceover: Justyna Gardzińska
Editing: Justyna Chmielewska
Translation: Klementyna Dec
Translation of the poem: Konrad Hetel
Acknowledgments:
Joanna Humka (Dobrze Cooperative)
Maciej Łepkowski (“Motyka i Słońce” Community Garden)
Marcin Migała i Katarzyna Grzybek (CSA Marianka)
Marta Traczyk (W Domu Restaurant)
Hanna Wielgus (Family Garden Allotments)
Cooperation with Agro-Perma-Lab Foundation
Food is one of the most important needs for every human being. The upcoming food crisis is not a fiction. Today’s dominant model of industrial agriculture creates dangerously fragile societies and ecosystems. It is focused on elimination of farmers, globalization of the countryside and its transformation into global food factories. Yet its accumulated negative effects causing the exhaustion of natural resources remain disconcertingly imperceptible to significant parts of society.
We need solutions that enable producing and enjoying healthier food, living in harmony with nature and its rhythm, and healing the planet so it can heal us in turn. The COVID-19 pandemic, mass migration, and the climate crisis are showing, like never before, that we have to look for new solutions as well as give voice to those that already exist. Worldwide, new initiatives that operate on the borders of the mainstream or in niches are pioneering the way to attune a new, more sensible and ecologically informed societal DNA to the biosphere of our planet.
Edible City Warsaw and The Supermarket Museum are the fruits of the intersecting collaboration between two entities: Biennale Warszawa and Agro-Perma-Lab Foundation. We propose two different reflections on how we can recover independency from big food industry and how we can develop and support urban agriculture and gardening, local food initiatives and existing farmers that appreciate regenerative and ecological principles. Small visions matter. The work of weaving our creative imaginations has the potential to redirect “growth” towards non-material, non-destructive and not profit-driven paths. Let’s act on it now.
