Corn Is as High as a Cabdriver’s Eye

But Mr. Santana, 66, and other Seaman drivers spend their downtime tending a small farm off Johnson Avenue in the Spuyten Duyvil section of the Bronx, near Riverdale.

“It was just a few guys,” Daniel Montes, a driver, said of the farm’s origins. “They just got together and started doing this.”

The farm began about 15 years ago with a few tomatoes and beans planted along a thin, unused strip of land behind a 30-story apartment building. It has grown into a thicket that stretches about a quarter-mile.

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Architecture fighting obesity

A 1950s-era elementary school in rural Buckingham, Virginia was redesigned to help kids lose weight. The architects worked directly with public health researchers to change a long list of details based on current research, from designing a kitchen with dedicated storage space for local, seasonal fruit, to placing healthy meals at kids'-eye level in the checkout line. In a teaching kitchen, third-graders can learn to make healthy meals from the foods they grow in the school garden.

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mega food parks

42 mega food parks to start operations by 2019: Harsimrat Kaur Badal 

The Mega Food Park Scheme, based on the cluster approach, is modelled on hub-and-spoke architecture, which follows principles from the spoke-hub distribution paradigm.

It aims at facilitating the establishment of a strong food processing industry backed by an efficient supply chain, which includes collection centres, a central processing centre (CPC) and cold chain infrastructure. 

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food inventions

7 food magicians who'll melt your mind

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Personal Food Computer

The personal food computer looks like a fish tank. It’s the right shape and size, but there’s no water. Inside the two-foot-long box, under glowing purple LED lights, lettuces and legumes sprout up, their roots, free of dirt, misted by digitally-controlled sprayers. It’s a tiny, low-water, climate-controlled agriculture system, designed for growing food in cramped city quarters. The machine is plugged into a network, so all the environmental information runs into a database, where other farmers can see how much water and light the plants are getting, and use that data to tweak the way they grow their own crops.

Call it open-source farming or data-driven agriculture. Either way, it’s a way to program how we grow what we eat. Caleb Harper, an engineer with a background in architecture and design, developed the personal food computer. He also runs the City Farm group, which looks at innovative ways to grow food in urban areas, at MIT’s Media Lab. He thinks his contraption is the future of food.

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