Posts tagged ‘apartheid’

May 6

Good Neighbours

At the beginning of this year Michael Olivier asked me to contribute an article to his online magazine Crush!. It could be on whichever topic I fancied, and because I had recently spent rather a lot of time at food markets both abroad and in South Africa, and had been thinking a great deal about the relationship between these markets and the communities in which they were held, I decided to write about Woodstock.

The point that I wanted to make in the piece is that there is considerably more to Woodstock than the Neighbourgoods Market at the Old Biscuit Mill: that this multiracial inner-city suburb has a long and complicated history, and that its transformation into the embodiment of Capetonian hipster cool is not only a relatively recent phenomenon, but has profound implications for the community who lives there.

Woodstock – originally called Papendorp after the farmer on whose land it was founded – has never been a wealthy suburb. Situated in the teeth of the Cape Doctor – the southeasterly wind which blasts the city during summer – its population has tended to be poor and working class. With its low rents and easy proximity to the city’s industrial and business districts, it drew many of the thousands of immigrants who arrived in Cape Town from southern Africa and the rest of the world during South Africa’s industrial revolution at the end of the nineteenth century.

Cape Town’s first factories – which manufactured jam, matchsticks, artificial feathers and flowers, sweets, and cigars – were established in Woodstock, and employed a large proportion of the people who lived in the suburb’s growing slums. In the 1880s and 1890s, a collection of ministers, city councillors, and philanthropic organisation launched a campaign to clean up the appalling conditions in which people lived in Woodstock – with many calling it Cape Town’s ‘East End’.

Given the racial politics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Africa, much of the concern about Woodstock stemmed from the fact that it was racially mixed. As a result of the Group Areas Act (1950), one of the keystones of apartheid legislation, black and coloured (or racially mixed) people were forced to move out of the parts of Woodstock which were declared ‘white’. Those people who, according to the Population Registration Act (1950), were not white, were required to move to areas classified ‘black’ or ‘coloured’.

My mother grew up in Fairview Avenue, which was part of an area zoned as white. During the early 1960s, several families in her street left for other parts of Cape Town, or immigrated to other countries, because they were deemed officially to be black or coloured. But other parts of Woodstock were allowed to remain racially mixed. It’s worth understanding the social make-up of Woodstock geographically: above the Main Road – where Fairview Avenue is located – it is lower-middle- to middle-class with a largely white population which includes many Portuguese and Jewish families.

Below Main Road and above the railway, Woodstock becomes poorer and more racially mixed. And it is lower Woodstock which has experienced the brunt of the recent gentrification of the suburb. The revitalising of the businesses along Sir Lowry Road – developments like the Palms Centre and Buchanan Square, and the cluster of cafes, restaurants, and shops which have emerged between these two business hubs – have drawn relatively little criticism, as far as I can see (although do please let me know if it has).

Most criticism has been levelled at the Biscuit Mill development in Albert Road in lower Woodstock. The consortium responsible for the development, Indigo Properties, has recently come under fire for its revamp of the Woodstock Industrial Centre, which provided cheap rents and space for the small collective of artists who work in the suburb. On the one hand, the restoration of buildings – and Woodstock has some lovely, albeit crumbling, Victorian and Edwardian architecture – and the attraction of business to an otherwise poor area could be seen as a Good Thing. In Sir Lowry Road, for instance, the increase of pedestrian traffic between the Kitchen, the Deli, and the various agencies and offices along the road has made the area feel decidedly safer.

But on the other, it is questionable whether the Biscuit Mill and, now, the Industrial Centre developments benefit the community who lives in lower Woodstock.

On a ferociously hot Saturday towards the end of January, I parked as near to the Neighbourgoods Market at the Biscuit Mill – as near as I could, given its phenomenal popularity on weekends – and then made my way down Albert Road. Cars of eager market-goers zip down Albert Road on Saturdays, making only for the Biscuit Mill and the shops and restaurants which have opened around it. They ignore the large section of lower Woodstock which they pass through to get to the end of Albert Road.

My aim was to talk to the owners of the cafes and corner shops who actually sell to the people who live in lower Woodstock. I asked several what they thought about the Neighbourgoods Market and the response was similar: a shrug, followed by a comment that the people who go to the Market don’t really seem to be all that interested in the rest of the suburb. One or two laughed when I asked if they had benefitted from the opening of the development.

Just as I was nearing Gympie Street – infamous for its association with the gangs which have long blighted life in lower Woodstock – a man standing outside Saleem’s Café beckoned to me. He was Rashied, the brother-in-law of the owner of the café, and seated comfortably indoors on upturned plastic crates, we had a chat about the development on the area. Rashied was deeply critical of the Neighbourgoods Market and the Biscuit Mill, making the point that they had done little to regenerate an extremely poor suburb. What profits they do make – and there is good reason to believe that the development is lucrative – benefit the shopkeepers, stall owners, and, of course, Indigo Properties.

Rashied is involved with I Art Woodstock, a project launched by Ricky Lee Gordon of A Word of Art last year. I Art Woodstock brings artists from around the world to paint murals in lower Woodstock. The project involves the suburb’s children, and it aims partly to encourage more people to visit the area, to look at the murals – and they are truly magnificent. Rashied invited me to take a look at the murals with him: he was due to check up on two artists, one from Sao Paulo, the other from New York, who were at work on a new mural, and he wanted to distribute yogurts to the area’s children.

The state does not exist in lower Woodstock. There are houses owned by gangs where drugs are sold and taken. There are people who live in shacks, with no hope of ever moving into houses with electricity and plumbing. It is unlikely that most of the children playing in the streets are attending school. These streets are dirty and unkempt. When incidences of domestic violence occur, the chances of police being called – or, if they are called, of arriving – are very slim.

As a recent, powerful editorial in the Mail and Guardian argued, South Africa’s policy makers and politicians must recognise the link between the appalling conditions in which people live, and the very high rates of violent crime which characterise so many poor communities:

we are building settlements that reproduce sexual violence, crime and xenophobia: shoddily constructed, disconnected from economic opportunity, home to failing schools that sit cheek by jowl with shebeens on shit-soaked streets.

It is certainly true that there are people in lower Woodstock who are employed, who send their children to school, and who manage to save a little towards their retirement. Their children will go on to tertiary education and to employment. They will move out of lower Woodstock and join South Africa’s growing middle class. But these constitute only one, small group of people within a much larger population, most of whom live in desperate poverty.

And within ten minutes’ walk of lower Woodstock – with its murals, yes, but also with its population of shack dwellers who do not have access to flushing toilets – is the incredible wealth and luxury of the Neighbourgoods Market, and the thousands of wealthy Capetonians who drive past lower Woodstock every Saturday morning to buy ice cream and artisanal, free-range bacon.

I don’t object to gentrification per se. Salon has reported recently on the so-called ‘Whole Foods effect’, where the opening of a new branch of Whole Foods – the US-based chain of organic supermarkets – is an indicator, and also cause, of the revitalisation of suburbs which have become crime-ridden, grimy, and run-down. The business is about to open a Whole Foods store in Midtown Detroit – signalling to many that the city’s long decline is now in reverse.

As Will Doig writes:

the Whole Foods Effect isn’t caused by the store itself, it’s caused by the events it sets into motion. And one thing Whole Foods does is stay open later than a lot of the other shops around it, laying the groundwork for expanding the length of that neighbourhood’s day.

The Neighbourgoods Market in Braamfontein – the sister of the market in Woodstock – is doing precisely this in Joburg. Situated in the parking lot of a skyscraper, that Neighbourgoods Market attracts footfall to an inner-city suburb which would usually be deserted – and dangerous – over the weekend. Similarly, the Hope Street Market in Cape Town brings life into an otherwise quiet corner of the CBD on Saturdays.

What angers me about the Biscuit Mill and the Neighbourgoods Market in Woodstock is that they exist within a community which desperately needs investment: which needs housing, plumbing, and, above all, jobs. Of course, it is primarily the function of the state to provide basic services, policing, and social welfare – but where there is so much wealth, there is a moral imperative to improve the lives of so many who have so little.

The Neighbourgoods Market’s success has grown partly as a result of an increased interest in the provenance and production of good, ‘whole’, food among Cape Town’s middle classes. This is excellent. But how do these customers – who desire to live and eat ethically – drive past such incredible poverty every Saturday, without thinking twice about the people who live there?

Tangerine and Cinnamon by Sarah Duff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Apr 8

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Feed the Children

There has been some fuss recently around the publication of Charles Murray’s new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. Murray, who co-authored The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life in 1994, has a reputation for annoying left-leaning academics and public policy makers. His description of the Bell Curve was accused of being blind to cultural and social influences on learning and childhood development, and his most recent polemic has been criticised for its rose-tinted view of the American white working class during the mid-twentieth century.

One of the best criticisms of the book which I’ve come across is Nell Irvin Painter’s article for the New York Times, ‘When Poverty was White.’ Painter, whose History of White People (2010) I urge you to read, makes the point that America has a well-hidden and very recent history of white poverty. She accuses Murray of ‘historical blindness’ caused by his

narrow focus on the cultural and policy changes of the 1960s as the root of white America’s decline. The story of white poverty…is much longer and more complex than he and his admirers realise or want to admit.

Her point is that to understand the nature of poverty – why some families seem incapable of escaping it, why certain members of society seem to be particularly susceptible to it – we need to historicise it.

There is a similar argument to be made about white poverty in South Africa. One of the reasons why photographs of poor whites in South Africa draw such attention is because South Africans tend to think of poverty as being black. Poor whites are a strange anomaly in the economic and racial politics of post-1994 South Africa.

But ‘poor whiteism’ as a social and political phenomenon only disappeared during the economic boom of the early 1960s. Since at least the 1920s, South African governments were preoccupied by the ‘poor white problem’ – by the existence of a substantial group of people who, as the popular author Sarah Gertrude Millin wrote in 1926, could not support themselves ‘according to a European standard of civilisation’ and who could not ‘keep clear the line of demarcation between black and white.’

South Africa’s earliest soup kitchens were not for black, but, rather, for white children. The first child welfare organisations aimed their work not at black families, but, rather, at white families who were poor. South Africa’s attempts to introduce compulsory elementary education in the 1910s and 1920s pertained only to white, not to black, children. This isn’t to suggest that black poverty was somehow less acute or widespread than white poverty. Far from it. State concern about poor whiteism was borne out of a eugenicist belief that, as Millin suggested, white poverty signalled a decline in white power.

The first attempts to eradicate white poverty were directed at families and children. Although we tend to associate the poor white problem with the 1920s and 1930s, there had been a large group of impoverished white farmers in the country’s rural interior since at least the middle of the nineteenth century. By the 1880s and 1890s, colonial politicians, and particularly those in the Cape, were increasingly anxious about this class of whites. This was partly because the numbers of impoverished whites – both in rural and urban areas – had increased during the region’s industrialisation after the discovery of diamonds and gold, but it was also the result of decades of poor education which had produced at least two generations of unemployable whites.

Both in South Africa and in the rest of the world, poverty was racialised during the 1880s and 1890s. The existence of unemployed and unemployable poor whites challenged the association of ‘natural’ supremacy and the exercise of power with whiteness. The term ‘poor white’ no longer simply referred to white people who lived in poverty, but, rather, invoked a set of fears around racial mixing and white superiority.

Impoverished white adults were believed to be beyond saving, as one Cape industrialist argued in 1895: ‘the adults are irreclaimable. You must let them die off, and teach the young ones to work.’ The Cape government poured money into schools for poor white children. In 1905, education became compulsory for all white children in the Cape between the ages of seven and fourteen. Politicians also passed legislation to allow these children to be removed from parents deemed to be unable to care for them appropriately. After the declaration of the Union of South Africa in 1910, government spending on education grew from 14 per cent of the national budget to 28 per cent in 1930.

But the problem did not go away. Industrialisation and economic expansion, as well as the effects of the Great War, two depressions, and urbanisation in the 1920s and 1930s increased the numbers of impoverished whites. By the end of the 1920s, it was estimated that out of a total of 1,800,000 whites, 300,000 were ‘very poor’, and nearly all of these were Afrikaans. The Carnegie Commission of Investigation on the Poor White Question (1929-1932) concluded that an inability to adapt to a changing economic climate, outdated farming methods, and poor education were to blame for the existence of such a large population of impoverished whites.

In 1929, the South African government devoted 13 per cent of its budget to the eradication of white poverty. Much of this went to education, social welfare, and housing. The introduction of more stringent segregationist legislation progressively disenfranchised blacks, and reserved skilled work for whites.

There was also a shift in emphasis in how child welfare societies – the numbers of which had mushroomed during the 1920s – dealt with poor white children. No longer did they only work to ensure that white children were sent to school and adequately cared for by their parents, but they began to focus on how these children were fed.

I’m still trying to account for this new concern about the effects of malnutrition on white children. I think that it was due largely to an international scientific debate about the significance of nutrition in raising both physically and intellectually strong children. Louis Leipoldt – Medical Inspector for Schools in the Transvaal, food writer, Buddhist, poet, and Afrikaner culture broker – was particularly aware of this new thinking about childhood development and nutrition, and wrote about it extensively in publications on child health and welfare in South Africa.

In a report of a survey of the health of children in the Cape published in 1922, the province’s Medical Inspector of Schools, Elsie Chubb, argued that malnutrition was widespread in the Cape’s schools for white children. In most schools, around 10% of the pupils were malnourished. In one school in the rural Karoo, 79% of children were found to be severely malnourished.

Chubb recognised that malnutrition was not purely the result of an inadequate supply of food – although it was certainly the case that many poor parents simply couldn’t afford to buy enough food to feed their children – but of poor diet. Some child welfare volunteers wrote of children sent to school on coffee and biltong, and who returned home at the end of the day for a basic supper of maize meal and cheap meat. Chubb wrote that far too many children were fed on a diet heavy in carbohydrates and animal protein. Children did not eat enough fresh fruit and vegetables, and milk. She recommended that feeding schemes be established to supplement children’s diets with these foodstuffs.

Helen Murray, the headmistress of a girls’ school in Graaff Reinet and active member of the town’s child welfare society explained the contemporary understanding of the link between malnutrition and poor whiteism particularly well in 1925:

In the winter of 1918 our schools had regular medical inspection for the first time. The doctor who inspected told some of us that he had found some fifty children in our poor school suffering from malnutrition and spoke strongly of the results of such a condition. The children were not in danger of dying of starvation, they had dry bread and black coffee enough to prevent that, but they were in danger of growing up to be ‘poor whites’ of the most hopeless type. The body insufficiently nourished during the years of growth would develop physically weak, and the brain as a result would be unfit for real mental effort. The child suffering from years of wrong feeding could not be expected to grow into the strong, healthy, clearheaded man or woman our country needs today, and will need ten and twenty years hence. To see that the underfed child is well fed is not a matter of charity, but must be undertaken in self-defence.

As a result of the inspection, the child welfare society found a room in the town where between fifty and ninety children could be provided with ‘a good, hot meal’ on every school day:

We had been told that these children could be saved from growing up weaklings if they could have one good meal of fat meat, vegetables or fruit, on every school day of the year….

We have the satisfaction of knowing that there has been a marked improvement in the health of the children and of hearing from a Medical Inspector that she has found the condition of the children here better than in many other schools of the same class.

Murray’s experience in Graaff Reinet was not unique. As child welfare societies were established in the towns and villages of South Africa’s vast interior, their first work was usually to establish soup kitchens, either in schools or in a central locations where schoolchildren could be sent before the school day – for porridge and milk – and at lunchtime, for soup or a more substantial meal, depending on the resources of the local society.

In Pietersburg (now Polokwane), to eliminate the stigma of free meals for poor children, all white children were provided with a mug of soup at lunchtime. Better-off parents paid for the soup, thus subsidising those children whose parents could not contribute. In Reitz, local farmers, butchers, and grocers donated meat and vegetables to the soup kitchen, and in Oudtshoorn children were encouraged to bring a contribution – onions, carrots, or cabbage – to their daily meal.

The National Council for Child Welfare, the umbrella body established in 1924 which oversaw the activities of local child welfare societies, liked to emphasise the fact that it was concerned for the welfare of all children, regardless of class or race. Some welfare societies, and particularly those in areas which had large ‘locations’ for black residents, did establish clinics and crèches for black children. But most of the NCCW’s work was aimed at white children in the 1920s and 1930s, and the same was true of the South African state. By the 1920s, most municipalities in towns and cities made free milk available to poor white mothers with babies and very young children.

Increasing state involvement in child welfare, alongside the work of independent societies, had a significant impact on the health of white children in South Africa during the early twentieth century. But it was only because of the growing prosperity and better education of the majority of white South Africans after World War II that white poverty and malnutrition were gradually eradicated in the 1950s and 1960s.

By historicising poverty – by understanding that white prosperity in South Africa is a relatively recent phenomenon – we can understand it as a phenomenon which is not only eradicable, but which is also the product of a range of social, economic, and political forces. As South African governments and welfare organisations were able to reduce white poverty and malnutrition dramatically during the early twentieth century, so it is possible for contemporary governments to do the same.

But charity and soup kitchens were not the sole cause of the disappearance of white poverty and malnutrition. Jobs, education, and better living conditions were as – if not more – significant in ensuring that white children no longer went hungry.

Eat the Rich

Today’s City Press includes a fantastically interesting article about the increased incidence of obesity in post-1994 South Africa. The piece explores the links between the country’s transition to democracy and the fact that 61% of all South Africans – 70% of women over the age of 35, 55% of white men 15 years and older, and a quarter of all teenagers – are obese or overweight.

The reasons for these incredibly high levels of obesity are, as the article acknowledges, complex. In many ways, South Africa conforms to a pattern emerging throughout the developing world. In a report published a few months ago, the World Health Organisation noted that lifestyle-related diseases – like diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and obesity – are now among the main causes of death and disease in developing nations. These diseases of affluence are no longer limited to the West.

For the new South African middle classes, fast food and branded processed products, like Coke, are markers of sophistication: of having ‘made it’ in this increasingly prosperous society. But, as in the rest of the world, those at the top of the social scale tend not to be overweight:

contrary to popular myth, obesity is not a ‘rich man’s disease’.

Indeed, the most affluent urbanites can get into their SUVs and drive to gym or to Woolies food hall where, for a price, they can load up their trolleys with fresh, top-quality groceries – from free-range chickens to organic lemons.

This means, says [Prof Salome] Kruger, that ‘the highest income earners are thinner’.

For urban dwellers who earn less, fresh food is usually more difficult, and expensive, to buy than processed non-food:

But for your average city dweller – earning money, but not necessarily enough to own a car to get them out to the major supermarket malls – food is where you find it.

Typically, this is in small corner shops selling a limited, and often more expensive, range of fresh foods. Fruit and veg can be hard to find among the toothpaste and toilet paper spaza staples.

‘R15!’ It’s taxi fare from Orlando to the Pick n Pay in Soweto’s Maponya Mall – and it was 25-year-old road worker Lindiwe Xorine’s reply when City Press asked her how far it was to the nearest supermarket.

We call these areas where access to fresh food is limited, ‘food deserts’. It’s entirely possible to buy fruit, vegetables, and free-range meat in South African cities, but high prices and bad transport infrastructure limit people’s ability to purchase these products.

We’re dealing, effectively, with the effects of mass urbanisation since the ending of influx control in the mid-1980s and the 1994 elections.

The migration of South Africans from rural to urban areas has been a key factor in the nation’s radical change of lifestyle habits.

Twenty years ago, restricted by apartheid laws, just 10% of black South Africans lived in urban areas. Today, more than 56% do.

Alison Feeley, a scientist at the Medical Research Council, says this massive shift to a fast-paced urban life has resulted in dietary patterns shifting just as dramatically from ‘traditional foods to fast foods’.

But this isn’t the first time that South Africa, or indeed other countries, has had to cope with the impact of urbanisation on people’s diets. During the nineteenth century, industrialisation caused agricultural workers to abandon farming in their droves, and to move to cities in search of employment, either in factories or in associated industries. In Britain, this caused a drop in the quality of urban diets. Food supplies to cities were inadequate, and the little food that the new proletariat could afford was monotonous, meagre, and lacking in protein and fresh fruit and vegetables.

One of the effects of this inadequate diet was a decrease in average height – one of the best indicators of childhood health and nutrition – among the urban poor in Victorian cities. In fact, British officers fighting the South African War (1899-1902) had to contend with soldiers who were physically incapable of fighting the generally fitter, stronger, and healthier Boer forces, most of whom had been raised on diets rich in animal protein.

This link between industrialisation, urbanisation, and a decline in the quality of city dwellers’ diets is not inevitable. For middle-class Europeans in cities like London, Paris, and Berlin, industrialised transport and food production actually increased the variety of food they could afford. In the United States, from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, a burgeoning food industry benefitted poorer urbanites as well. Processed food was cheap and readily available. Impoverished (and hungry) immigrants from Eastern Europe, Ireland, and Italy were astonished by the variety and quantity of food they could buy in New York, Detroit, and San Francisco.

It’s difficult to identify similar patterns in South Africa. We know that the sudden growth of Kimberley and Johannesburg after the discovery of diamonds (1867) and gold (1882) stimulated agriculture in Griqualand West and the South African Republic. Farmers in these regions now supplied southern Africa’s fastest growing cities with food. The expansion of Kimberley and Johannesburg as a result of the mineral revolution was different from that of London or New York because their new populations were overwhelmingly male – on the Witwatersrand, there were roughly ninety men for every woman – and highly mobile. These immigrants from the rest of Africa, Europe, Australia, and the United States had little intention of settling in South Africa. As a result of this, it’s likely that these urban dwellers weren’t as badly effected by poor diets as their compatriots in the industrialised cities of the north Atlantic.

Cape Town’s slums and squatter settlements were, though, populated by a new urban poor who migrated with their families to the city during the final three decades of the nineteenth century. Most factory workers were paid barely enough to cover their rent. Mr W. Dieterle, manager of J.H. Sturk & Co., a manufacturer of snuff and cigars, said of the young women he employed:

It would seem incredible how cheaply and sparsely they live. In the mornings they have a piece of bread with coffee, before work. We have no stop for breakfast, but I allow them to stand up when they wish to eat. Very few avail themselves of this privilege. They stay until one o’clock without anything, and then they have a piece of bread spread with lard, and perhaps with the addition of a piece of fish.

This diet – heavy on carbohydrates and cheap stimulants (like coffee), and relatively poor in protein and fresh produce – was typical of the city’s poor. It wasn’t the case that food was unavailable: it was just that urban workers couldn’t afford it.

In fact, visitors to the Cape during this period commented frequently on the abundance and variety of fruit, vegetables, and meat on the tables of the middle classes. White, middle-class girls at the elite Huguenot Seminary in Wellington – a town about 70km from Cape Town – drank tea and coffee, ate fruit, and smeared sheep fat and moskonfyt (syrupy grape jam) on their bread for breakfast and supper. A typical lunch consisted of soup, roasted, stewed, curried, or fried meat (usually mutton), three or four vegetables, rice, and pudding.

It’s also worth noting that the Seminary served its meals during the morning, the middle of the day, and in the evening – something which was relatively new. Industrialisation caused urban workers’ mealtimes to change. Breakfast moved earlier in the day – from the middle of the morning to seven or eight o’clock – lunch (or dinner) shifted to midday from the mid-afternoon, and dinner (or tea) emerged as a substantial meal at the end of the day.

Factory workers in Cape Town ate according to this new pattern as well. The difference was the quality of their diet. A fifteen year-old white, middle-class girl in leafy Claremont who had eaten an ample, varied diet since early childhood was taller and heavier than her black contemporaries in Sturk’s cigar factory. In all likelihood, she would have begun menstruating earlier, and would have recovered from illness and, later, childbirth far more quickly than poorer young women of the same age. She would have lived for longer too.

Urbanisation changes the ways in which we eat: we eat at different times and, crucially, we eat new and different things. By looking at a range of examples from the nineteenth century, we can see that this change isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The industrial revolution contributed to the more varied and cheaper diets of the middle classes. Industrialised food production and transport caused the urban poor in the United States to eat better than many of those left behind in rural areas, for example. But it’s also clear that it exacerbates social inequality. In the 1800s, the poor had too little to eat and that which they did have was not particularly nutritious. Children raised on these diets were shorter and more prone to illness than those who ate more varied, plentiful, and protein-rich food. Now, the diets available to the poor in urbanising societies are as bad, even if the diseases they contribute to are caused by eating too much rather than too little.

Most importantly, we have an abundance of food in our growing cities. Just about everyone can afford to eat. The point is that only a minority can afford good, fresh food, and have the time, knowledge, and equipment to prepare it. Food mass produced in factories helped Europe and North America’s cities to feed their urban poor a hundred years ago. I’m not sure if that’s the best solution for the twenty-first century.

Tangerine and Cinnamon by Sarah Duff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.