How Will We Eat and Produce in the Cities of the Future? From Edible Insects to Vertical Farming—A Study on the Perception and Acceptability of New Approaches

Kathrin Specht,Julia Bela,Felix Zoll,Julia Kachel,Marcel Robischon,Henrike Schümann

doi:10.3390/su11164315

Abstract

Global challenges such as climate change, increasing urbanization and a lack of transparency of food chains, have led to the development of innovative urban food production approaches, such as rooftop greenhouses, vertical farms, indoor farms, aquaponics as well as production sites for edible insects or micro-algae. Those approaches are still at an early stage of development and partly unknown among the public. The aim of our study was to identify the perception of sustainability, social acceptability and ethical aspects of these new approaches and products in urban food production. We conducted 19 qualitative expert interviews and applied qualitative content analysis. Our results revealed that major perceived benefits are educational effects, revaluation of city districts, efficient resource use, exploitation of new protein sources or strengthening of local economies. Major perceived conflicts concern negative side-effects, legal constraints or high investment costs. The extracted acceptance factors deal significantly with the “unknown”. A lack of understanding of the new approaches, uncertainty about their benefits, concerns about health risks, a lack of familiarity with the food products, and ethical doubts about animal welfare represent possible barriers. We conclude that adaptation of the unsuitable regulatory framework, which discourages investors, is an important first step to foster dissemination of the urban food production approaches.

Highlights

A special form of local food production is urban agriculture, which is related to a variety of sustainability benefits such as access to fresh, healthy and transparently produced food, strengthening local communities, recreation, fewer food miles, and an improvement of the micro-climate [10,11,12]
This paper focuses on six different urban food production approaches
Four experts were interviewed for indoor farming and rooftop greenhouses, while only two experts on aquaponics were included in the analysis

Summary

Introduction

There is a widespread perception that ‘local’ is more sustainable than ‘global’ [4] This often goes hand-in-hand with strong opposition to conventionally produced food [5] which indicates that the prevailing food system is increasingly associated with unsustainable practices and the respective negative environmental impacts such as land and water degradation, the acceleration of climate change or a loss in biodiversity [6,7]. The creative and adaptive force of cities can add innovative characteristics to existing growing methods or can result in completely new ways of producing food such as indoor farming, vertical farming, rooftop greenhouses, aquaponics, the farming of edible insects or the production of algae All of these approaches can address the problems of current food production to a certain degree and have the potential to contribute to more sustainable food production in the future. Both sides have to be explored and evaluated to fully understand the approaches

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Conclusion