Urban Kitchen Gardening: Rethinking sustainable food access in cities

Our rooftop is enlivened by a variety of vibrant plants, which my mother carefully tends to and which flourish in various pots.

In the hot summers of 2012, a bitter gourd sapling sprouted in a plant pot that my mother nurtured amidst the hoarded things on our terrace. Most of these pots included very old gamlas, broken buckets, and vessels. She would usually spend her evening tea time in the garden, turning the soil with water and some kitchen waste. I would join her now and then, but never get my hands dirty. Nonetheless, learning about the bitter gourd that summer intrigued me. I would guard it, water every leaf, and fix the supporting stick every now and then. A week or so later, I saw a small bud. A bitter gourd at last, I rejoiced!

In the numerous soliloquies that the bitter gourd featured in, the joy of its sight remained inexplicable. Until one day, I saw a bunch of ants eating away at my baby bitter gourd. Although after that, my mother’s experiments with the kitchen waste resulted in many unintended bursts of cherry-sized tomatoes, chillies, onions, and of course some bitter gourds, we never sustained a viable produce. 

The 'vegetable' of our sweat, toil and nature. Image credit: Lalitha

Lately, however, I was lured by the idea of having a terrace garden as a pressing need. With no guarantee of quality and no promise of health, and frequent price hikes and supply disruptions, affordable grocery access keeps sprinting away for most city dwellers. Statistically speaking, with an estimated 68% rise in urban areas by 2050, city conglomerates would likely continue to exert pressure on shrinking agricultural land and often overwhelm supply. Add climate shocks to this equation, and that would further distance affordable food access to a large majority of city people. But with various people-led initiatives to reclaim the soil, kitchen garden, and rooftop terrace gardens reinstill glimmers of hope. 

For many, it started with the pandemic. A reemphasis on health, mitigate supply issues, or just a fling. With hacks on composting to pest control, social platforms are flooded with experimenters. Many of them offer kitchen gardens as tangible alternatives that reimagine food sovereignty and sustainable living in the urban paradigm. Its proven benefits beg a shift from carbon-intensive food supply and energy-intensive storage facilities to water-efficient and waste-reducing gardening solutions that even build resilience to climate extremes like urban heat. The composted waste eventually enriches the soil and fosters insects and pollinating birds. 

For the marginal communities in the urban peripheries, kitchen gardens can be a means to repurpose their limited resources and reduce their socio-economic vulnerabilities, if not more. Evidence from the slums of Agra and Indore provides an exemplary display of social cohesion among poor urban communities that can find adoption across sections of urban society. By collaborating to nurture small patches of soil with vegetables, communities were able to build new exchange economies that helped to overcome uncertain income and food insecurity. 

These benefits are, however, not to overrule the difficulties associated with actualizing kitchen gardens in our severely space-constrained city houses. But available studies and individual experiments point to long-term returns that far surpass the initial effort and investments. This makes a case for at least an attempt to rethink the overlooked margin in our house. With understanding and innovation, our learning can plant the seeds of action in others as well, snowballing into a shift in behavior that germinates in a plant pot in the sunlit corner of their house.