How to create a better food system (+video)

Many people think about plans and promises to improve their diet and health. But we think a broader collection of farmers, policy-makers, and consumers need new, bigger resolutions for fixing the food system – real changes with long-term impacts in fields, boardrooms, and on plates all over the world. These are resolutions that the world can’t afford to break with nearly 1 billion people still facing hunger and more than 1 billion suffering from the effects of being overweight and obese. We have the tools – let’s use them!

Rogan Ward/Reuters/File
A rooftop garden on a building in Durban, South Africa. In Johannesburg a nonprofit group is using rooftop gardens to teach farming skills to urban youths and to inform them about the effects of global warming.

1. Grow food in cities

Rogan Ward/Reuters/File
A rooftop garden on a building in Durban, South Africa. In Johannesburg a nonprofit group is using rooftop gardens to teach farming skills to urban youths and to inform them about the effects of global warming.

Food production doesn’t only happen in fields or factories. Nearly 1 billion people worldwide produce food in cities. In Kenya's Kibera slum, the largest in Africa, farmers are growing seedlings of indigenous vegetables and selling them to rural farmers. At Bell Book & Candle restaurant in New York, customers are served rosemary, cherry tomatoes, romaine, and other produce grown from the restaurant’s aeroponic rooftop garden.

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