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From garden city to edible garden city

Reporter: Miro Lu 丨 CCTV.com

11-29-2016 00:53 BJT

The world will need to produce a lot more food to feed the estimated 9 billion people in 2050. The question is how this can be achieved sustainably while also tackling climate change. One way to do it is to cut down your food miles and eat locally grown food.

When it comes to food miles, meaning how far the food we eat travels from farm to table, Singapore has nothing to be proud of. The city-state imports more than 90 per cent of its food. Thanks to the country’s superb logistics network, this food crazy nation consumes produce from as far as the other side of the world.

Bjorn Low wants to change that. In the past four years, his company has helped clients like hotels, restaurants and schools build 50 food gardens. Some on rooftops, some in backyards, and some even indoors with the help of special growing lights. He aims to educate more and more people on how to grow their own food.

"It's important that we sort of work on our food sustainability and our food security issue. We have a very good backbone of a garden city. We've done really well. But if we can change a lot of these ornamental landscapes into productive foodscapes, perhaps there'll be a chance for us to produce enough food to make Singapore food sustainable," Low said.

A step further from cutting down food miles, Edible Garden City works with chefs to help bring back some forgotten vegetables that have gone out of favour in Singapore. The idea is for people to take advantage of what mother nature has to offer in their own backyard.

Part of growing sustainably is to grow indigenously. Bjorn is working with chefs and restaurants to set up edible gardens like this right next to their kitchens, where they grow local vegetables that are best suited for this climate.

For chefs like Russell, who focuses on locally sourced, seasonal and innovative dishes, he is constantly looking into his garden for inspiration.

"It's very amazing. You get to see the ingredients grow. You get to learn how it grows. With the gardeners we do every week a walkabout. So the gardeners will let us know like what's coming in season or what's able to harvest, and we can put it on as a set special or something like that," Russell said.

Some of the ingredients on this plate, like kangkong, sweet potato and chilly are from their in-house garden. Eating locally grown food is not only good for the environment, it's also delicious.

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