The Vegetable Orchestra recording their third album ONIONOISE.

The parts of the vegetables which are left over after preparing the instruments go into a vegetable soup which is served to the audience after the concert.

Worldwide one of a kind, the Vegetable Orchestra performs on instruments made of fresh vegetables. The utilization of various ever refined vegetable instruments creates a musically and aesthetically unique sound universe.

The Vegetable Orchestra was founded in 1998. Based in Vienna, the Vegetable Orchestra plays concerts in all over the world.

There are no musical boundaries for the Vegetable Orchestra. The most diverse music styles fuse here – contemporary music, beat-oriented House tracks, experimental Electronic, Free Jazz, Noise, Dub, Clicks’n'Cuts – the musical scope of the ensemble expands consistently, and recently developed vegetable instruments and their inherent sounds often determine the direction.

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The number of empty plots and abandoned homes, and estimates vary wildly, going as high as 100,000

By Nick Carey
Reuters
February 19, 2013

Excerpt:

There are also an estimated 2,000 city gardens, which environmental activist Shea Howell says popped up years before the idea of urban farming surfaced. “They are operated extra-legally or illegally, but the city has bigger things to worry about than going after someone raising a few chickens,” she said.

Kirk Mayes of the Brightmoor Alliance, in one of the city’s poorest areas, says there are 200 community gardens in Brightmoor alone. As farming is imagined for Detroit’s future, abandoned land would provide fruit and vegetables to the city’s inhabitants, for whom fresh food is often not accessible because grocery stores are few and far between.

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Illustration by Virginia Poltrack.

The potential for urban agriculture to contribute to food sovereignty as defined by Via Campesina, with a case study set in Kampala

By Christopher Yap
Email: chriskyap@gmail.com
Masters dissertation, supervised by Professor Yves Cabannes
Development Planning Unit, University of London
2012

Excerpt from Conclusion:

It appears that urban agriculture is making a significant contribution to the realization of the Right to Food in low-income households in Kampala. At the Outcome level, there is a clear link between urban farming and child nutrition in low-income households. Moreover it is possible to legitimately suggest that urban agriculture is increasing physical and economic access to food at a household level through a combination of income generation activities and substance farming, although there is insufficient data to quantify the rate at which the process is happening.

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