Occupying Wall Street
"Occupy Torrance" activists for the last two weeks have been protesting in Torrance's Finanical District outside the Wells Fargo Bank on Hawthorne Boulevard. Photo courtesy of Occupy Torrance Last Sunday, the New York City Community Garden Coalition occupied Wall Street. It was a good day to do it. October 16 is World Food Day, commemorating the founding of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization on that date in 1945. The focus this year in meetings and rallies across the globe was to address the swings in food prices caused by commodities speculation, a dynamic that threatens the hungry from the Horn of Africa to the South Bronx. Community gardens, usually dismissed as whimsical patches of green where claustrophobic apartment-dwellers do fantasy farming, play a surprisingly large role in maintaining urban food security. A two-year-old research project oxymoronically named Farming Concrete, which tracks the amount of food harvested by New York City gardeners, reports that last year the 110 participating gardens produced about 87,700 pounds of fresh fruit and vegetables. Extrapolate that figure to the 400 or so gardens that didn’t participate in the data-gathering, and…
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