At the last census in 2006, just over 80 percent of Canada’s population lived in urban centres. How we feed that population and protect its food sources is an enduring subject of debate in food security circles these days. As consumers and citizens, we all need to take a hard look at the deficiencies in Canada’s ability to feed the urban poor; our dependence on imported foods and centralized food processing; our detachment from our food sources; the often problematic solutions to food security devised by governments, municipalities and non-profit groups; and where we are headed if we change nothing in these times when change is urgently needed. Many efforts are being made to introduce urban agriculture initiatives all across the country, to address the problems we’ve created and to protect our cities from real and potential crises in the food supply.

With passion and lyricism, Digging the City addresses the problems facing urban omnivores in the 21st century and looks at various policy, grassroots and utopian solutions being developed and implemented, while considering the pros and cons of plans such as vertical farms, urban fish farms, transition-town initiatives, seed banks, permaculture and water conservation projects.

Rhona McAdam was born in Duncan—a great-granddaughter of the town's namesake—and grew up on Vancouver Island. She lives in Victoria, BC. She has post-graduate degrees in communications planning, adult education and library and information science, and has worked in Canada, England and throughout Europe. Her poetry has been published in Canada, the US, Ireland and England and has been praised for her unique and engaging voice, her clarity, and her ability to balance the ethereal with the real. She has a gift for creating vivid landscapes, both actual and emotional.

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This book stands out from other attempts to solve environmental crises for being so engagingly written. It's a quiet book, a book of sadness even through its anger, so it reads a little like a manual, a little like a memoir, and a little like testimony. It's personal, in the end, for all its careful detail about global crises and about local crises from around the world, and I mean that as praise for how neatly McAdam manages in Digging the City to sound like she's chatting with her reader, rather than lecturing.—Book Addiction

You don’t need to be a “Guerrilla Gardener” to enjoy reading Digging the City. The book is appealing for its personal narrative, informative analysis, and for its contribution to the growing literature on the sustainable food movement that seeks to change the way we eat.—Susan Hawkins, The Coastal Spectator

This book is beautifully crafted, moving seamlessly from wonderful and witty lyrical phrases to horrifying and shocking facts about the food we eat. Covering theory as well as practice, it may make you simultaneously angry, scared and inspired.—Jeanette Longfield, Co-ordinator of Sustain and former Co-ordinator of the National Food Alliance

McAdam's tone is impassioned and unapologetic. She covers a barrage of ideas and examples including spaces suited to growing, snippets of food history, food sovereignty, examples of food related community groups, and some of the challenges faced by urban growers, such as finding a veterinarian for urban chickens. Then, when considering the relationship of Canadians to their food, she talks about the addiction to big-box stores, and how this leads to decisions to purchase food on the basis of price alone. She boils these disparate yet related threads down to a very simple goal, saying, This manifesto is a less a breaking of new ground than a re-examination of the rightness of the garden. Digging the City seeds questions and shares ideas about the role urbanites can play in the food system and in facilitating change.—Steven Biggs, Small Farm Canada

McAdam not only gives us hope for tomorrow but ample ideas for action and reminds us that often the simplest of things, like the humble act of planting a seed, can be the most powerful.—Linda Geggie, Co-ordinator of Capital Region Food and Agriculture Initiatives Roundtable and Founder of LifeCycles

From community gardens and small plot farms, to individual front and back yards, this book provides us with a glimpse into a movement that is changing our world one bucket of compost, one handful of seeds, one garden at a time.—Michael Ableman, Founder of Cultivate Canada and author of Fields Of Plenty

This book helps us to understand how to become urban farmers and is a good source of inspiration for those who wish to change the world through food: a revolution that is good, simple and slow.—Carlo Petrini, President and Founder of Slow Food International