Effects of High-Tech Urban Agriculture on Cooking and Eating in Dutch Nursing Homes

Abstract

<jats:p>Questions have arisen about the sustainability of the industrialised food system. Alternatives like urban agriculture have emerged to reduce the negative social, environmental and health impacts of industrial agriculture. Such new food supply chains can change the way that people acquire and process food. This study looks at high-tech indoor gardening practices in nursing homes for elderly people, studying four nursing homes in the Dutch city of Velp. We used both qualitative and quantitative approaches to collect data, using site visits, a survey amongst employees, and semi-structured interviewees with residents and decision makers. Inspired by social practice theory, we aimed to understand the transformation of existing practices, investigating how the gardens affect cooking and eating practices, and how their constitutive elements of meaning, material and competences enable these transformations. Our work shows that the indoor gardens resulted in an integration of gardening and the resulting harvest into cooking practices, which in turn transformed residents’ eating practices. Appreciation of the taste of fresh vegetables and appearance of the meal decorated by fresh vegetables, as well as observing the growth of plants and their use, holds value for the elderly residents. Employees welcome the possibility to serve healthier meals. The integration of indoor gardens in existing cooking practices is more successful when employees have gardening and/or cooking competences, when they enjoy cooking and when they do not already cook with fresh ingredients. The gardens are more easily integrated when they are easily accessible. The materiality of the gardens does not require fully equipped kitchens.</jats:p>

Introduction to the Special Issue “A Systemic Perspective on Urban Food Supply: Assessing Different Types of Urban Agriculture”

“…Looking at this broad picture of potential measurements of UA impacts and implementation, there is further no clear preference for either quantitative or qualitative methods (see Figure 2). While two studies relied on pure qualitative analysis [25,34] and five on quantitative analysis [30,31,35,40,41], the majority of eight studies used mixed-methods approaches and combined qualitative methods (e.g., focus group discussions, stakeholder workshops, on-site visits, or expert interviews) with quantitative methods (e.g., online questionnaires or on-site surveys) [29,32,33,[36][37][38][39]42]. Given the multidimensional impacts of UA and its general multifunctionality [2,43], a mixed-methods approach often seems to be an advisable choice to tackle the different dimensions.…”

“…It contains contributions on sociocultural [25,[29][30][31][32], commercial [33][34][35] and self-supply [36,37] UA types, along with studies focusing on either varying or mixed UA types [38][39][40][41]. Comparing the scope of the studies in terms of focusing on technology-or nature-based UA, the majority of the papers deal with nature-based forms of UA [25,[29][30][31]36,39,40,42], while only three papers investigate technology-oriented types of UA [33,35,37] (see Figure 1). All in all, the case studies cover towns and cities all over the world and address a wide range of various types of UA, its impact and implementation dimensions, research objectives, and methodologies reflecting the interdisciplinarity and international research of UA.…”

“…In the case study of Houessou et al [36] in Benin, the authors highlight that in addition to an insecure access to urban land, restricted marked access and inequality issues, insufficient government support is hindering the expansion of UA in Benin [36]. The authors suggest that the assessment of the benefits provided by UA (such as conducted by [29,32,33,35,37,39,40], see Section 2.2) can strengthen the political will to consider UA as an important part of an ecologically, economically, and socially sound urban development.…”

“…Eight papers in this Special Issue focus on impacts of UA, its assessment, and related recommendations for sustainable urban development. Similar to the studies in this Special Issue dealing with the implementation of UA, the focus of the papers on UA impacts is on the social dimension [32,37,39] and related multidimensional impacts [33,41]. Two papers deal with environmental impacts [35,40], and one takes a socioeconomic perspective [29].…”

“…Thus, the authors tend to differ in their opinions of endogenously induced effects for UA users and exogenously induced effects for non-users such as urban residents or passersby in areas where UA is located. As another example for a social endogenously induced effect for UA users, a Dutch study on high-tech indoor gardens located in care facilities for elderly found that indoor gardens resulted in a transformation of the seniors' eating practices, and the staff were happy to serve healthier meals to the elderly residents [37]. Furthermore, van de Vlasakker and Veen highlighted that the indoor gardens were valued by the seniors in terms of the taste and appearance of the fresh vegetables served and the possibility to observe the growth of the edible plants.…”