The world's urban population surpassed the non-urban population for the first time in 2009. This marks what has been a steady global shift of providing more food to places it is not grown. Because food accounts for over 10 percent of the carbon footprint for the typical American city, this study adopts a social-ecological-infrastructural systems framework, a large component of which is recognizing urban activities and sectors belonging to infrastructure inside and outside the urban boundary. This is a key way to examine the embodied, life-cycle properties of the food we eat in cities. Preliminary results of scenarios of land use change and vegetable production for both distant farmland and urban settings found that shifts resulting from urban vegetable production are favorable in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, water use, and soil organic carbon. The results to-date indicate that state and local policy could remove hurdles to urban agricultural production with these data supporting claims that benefits outweigh costs.
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