By Kate Rix

One of Berkeley’s classrooms gets so much sun during class discussions that students hunker down on a bench made of mud and straw under the shade of an apple tree. It’s Berkeley’s Student Organic Garden, an outdoor learning lab. The size of a city block, it is conceived especially for the study of how food is grown in a urban environment.

Just a few blocks west of campus, the garden at Virginia and Walnut streets is more than a big patch of mustard, herbs, vegetables, and flowers arranged in a circle of pie-piece shaped plots. It is a place where a range of disciplines come together, from sociology to earth science, to teach a growing number of students how to develop innovative solutions to social challenges — in this case, access to nutritious food and healthy eating in inner cities.

Here in the Bay Area, where farmers’ markets and organic produce are ubiquitous, many urban residents still have limited access to affordable, nutritious food. Conceived by geography graduate student Nathan McClintock, the Urban Food Project tackles the problem of urban food supplies and nutritional health with an interdisciplinary lens. Ecologically, how much food could be grown in urban Oakland? And, from a social scientific point of view, why are there natural food “deserts” in Oakland, and further, why has urban agriculture sprouted up as a response?

McClintock poses these research questions while leading undergraduate geography course discussions sections, on-site — in a garden. Before coming to Cal, McClintock was a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali, Africa, where he worked with urban farmers. He also conducted urban farming research in Senegal.

He has migrated his learning and approach to world health issues back to Berkeley where students are so enthusiastic about the possibilities of urban farming that their initiative has, in turn, fed back into McClintock’s graduate research.

“I watched students help build gardens as part of their community service requirement and I realized that I need to do this at home,” says McClintock, fingering the silvery leaves of a tall sage plant. “So I am asking whether urban agriculture can be scaled up in Oakland.”

McClintock and his undergraduate research assistants are working to assess how much arable public land there is in Oakland, how much food that land could produce and how many people it could feed. Their inventory also involves analyzing soil samples of some 100 sites throughout the city. The research involves looking at Oakland’s agricultural past and tracing the residual footprints of past uses. Mustard, McClintock says, will extract toxins from the soil over time.

His work has also led him to get his hands dirty on a policy level. His project explores the rise of urban farming, specifically in Oakland, as well as the obstacles and opportunities city farmers face.

The research design includes following the work of local urban farms such as City Slicker Farms, which grows and sells fruits and vegetables in West Oakland. On about an acre of arable land near a recycling center, City Slicker Farms grows artichokes, blueberries, oranges, apples, lemons, and pomegranates.

In the garden classroom in Berkeley, McClintock ambles slowly through beds where fruiting peach apple and fig trees grow alongside leafy greens, potatoes, herbs, and a prickly pear cactus fruit that is called "tuna" in Spanish.

“Our food system is part of a much larger system,” he says. “What I’m looking at is why there are ‘food deserts’ in Oakland, where the nearest food sources is the corner liquor store.”

Last fall McClintock, in collaboration with a consortium of urban agriculture and food justice organizations, released a study identifying 1,200 acres of vacant and underutilized public land in Oakland that could be used for farming. This empty land, however, is too often encumbered by socio-political roadblocks to cultivation. As an applied aspect of his research, McClintock sits on Oakland’s Food Policy Council, a body that will ultimately make recommendations to the city’s Zoning Commission about measures to promote equitable access to healthy food, including ways to foster urban agriculture in the city.

Public farms contribute more than food, he notes. More broadly, they bring green space, biodiversity, a home for birds, insects, soil microbes and native plant species that attract beneficial insects that help control pests. Also, public farms present an opportunity for city dwellers to learn about food production and biodiversity.

 “This garden by itself is home to 45 different species of bees,” McClintock says. “Here we can study how to manage insects without pesticides but also, because it is an urban setting, we provide a place where neighbors can think about where their food comes from.”