Urban farms and community gardens produce more than just food, fiber, and medicines—they also provide broader ecosystem and cultural services, many of which convey public benefits beyond the actual farm or garden in question. This layering of services is referred to as multifunctionality, and is intrinsic to the belief that investing in urban agriculture can be a keystone for fostering sustainability, resilience, and equity in city regions.

Yet that multifunctional character may run into direct conflict with a long legacy of purity politics in agrifood systems. Questions of purity have proven particularly poignant on the subject of food. The ingestion of food is a key moment in which each of us regularly must allow foreign substances to transgress the boundary of our body, blurring the self|environment binary. Moreover, most people rely on food produced, processed, distributed, and often prepared by others. In contemporary food systems, therefore, purity politics is driven by fears about who has done what to our food on its way to our tables. Purity politics today is culturally embedded in public policies meant to ensure that food is properly grown, harvested, and handled to prevent contamination that might harm consumers. This is known as food safety. While the public health mission of food safety is good, its entanglement with purity politics can drive a “purity treadmill” that results in both ecological and socioeconomic harms.

This research project is concerned with opportunities to step off that treadmill. Urban food provisioning systems may provide critical insights into organizational strategies, value systems, and policy mechanisms to defuse purity politics in food and farming and center food safety within the broader multifunctional benefits that we expect of our agricultural systems.

We are asking:

• How do urban agricultural practitioners experience food safety?
• How does this experience vary by place, operational type, and other characteristics of the interviewee and operation?
• How does food safety affect the multifunctionality of urban agriculture?