Farm.One's underground Tribeca location grows over 100 different varieties of edible flowers, herbs and microgreens at any one time.
By the time you reach for that head of lettuce at the grocery store, it's already probably traveled hundreds of miles and spent almost two weeks sitting in a truck.
"Food is no longer grown for human beings, it's grown for a truck to support a supply chain," says the president of Metropolis Farms in Philadelphia.
But everyone likes fresh produce, so the closer your veggies are grown to your favorite supermarket or restaurant, the better. With the recent outbreak of E.coli contaminating romaine lettuce across the United States, it's especially appealing to know that your produce has been grown nearby in a safe environment. How about a farm right on top of a grocery store in Philadelphia? Or one underground in the heart of Manhattan? Or one inside an iconic restaurant in Australia?
Hyper-local urban farming is providing some consumers with instant access to seriously fresh produce. It's also a way for restaurants and food suppliers to save on costs, eliminating the need for expensive packaging and shipping, experts say. Tour five of the world's coolest vertical farms in pictures below.
NEW YORK
(Courtesy)
Farm.One's underground Tribeca location grows over 100 different varieties of edible flowers, herbs and microgreens at any one time.
Farm.One's vision is to build small indoor farms in cities around the country that provide rare herbs and produce to high-end restaurants. Their farm in the heart of Manhattan occupies 1200 square feet in a basement beneath the two-Michelin-starred restaurant Atera, which is conveniently one of their customers. All of the 20 to 25 restaurants they supply to are within a three-mile radius, making delivery possible by subway or bike.
"We have a direct connection with the chefs," says the CEO and founder Robert Laing. "For very perishable produce like herbs and leafy greens, hyper-local vertical farming works really well. It's literally dying the moment you cut it, and this is designed to be fresh."
PHILADELPHIA
(Courtesy)
Jack Griffin, president of Metropolis Farms, atop sunflowers grown at his indoor farm.
"Restaurants are important," says Jack Griffin, the president of the indoor vertical Metropolis Farms in Philadelphia. "But not the most important, because they don't feed the majority of people."
Griffin is on a mission to standardize the indoor farming industry so supermarkets and communities around the world can benefit from the technology in a cost-effective and accessible way. Right now, Metropolis Farms supplies to a local grocer, Di Brunos Bros, that is less than two miles from their facility. In the future, they have plans to build a rooftop greenhouse atop a new supermarket in Philadelphia, plus indoor farms in Baltimore, Oklahoma, and as far away as India.
One advantage of their farms, says Griffin, is their proprietary technology. An adaptive lighting system allows them to grow almost any size crop, including tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, strawberries, and even giant sunflowers.
"It's bigger than just food," he explains. "We are working on growing specialty crops like wine, chocolate, and coffee. All these plants are within reach, and we can cut the cord between supply chains that are difficult to deal with. Can you imagine if you grew Napa wines in Camden, New Jersey?"
BERLIN
(Courtesy)
GOOD BANK at lunch: the first vertical farm-to-table restaurant in the world.
GOOD BANK, in Berlin, bills itself as the world's first farm-to-table vertical restaurant. They grow their many of their own vegetables and salads onsite using farming system technology from another German company called INFARM. The latter's co-founder and CEO, Erez Galonska, cites a decline in traditional farming, an increase in urban populations, and the inefficiency of the current food system as motivation for turning to vertical farming to produce food where people actually eat and live.
"INFARM is pioneering on-demand farming services to help cities become self-sufficient in their food production, while eliminating waste and reducing their environmental impact," Galonska says.
MELBOURNE
(Photo credit: Matters Journal)
Geert Hendrix, founder and CEO, looking at the first Farmwall prototype.
Melbourne-based Farmwall leases indoor vertical farms the size of small bookshelves to restaurants and cafes. The farms are designed to be visually appealing, with fish tanks at the bottom supplying nutrient-rich water to the hemp media in which herbs and microgreens grow under LED lights. As part of the subscription model, urban farmers come once a week to check water levels, bring new trays of greens, and maintain the system. So far, two restaurants have signed up -- Top Paddock, in the suburb of Richmond, and Higher Ground, an internationally recognized restaurant in Melbourne.
"It's worth it to the restaurants because they get fresh produce at their fingertips and it has all the benefits of having a garden out back without any of the work," says Serena Lee, Farmwall's co-founder and chief communications officer.
The sky's the limit for future venue possibilities: nursing homes, schools, hotel lobbies, businesses, homes.
"Urban farming is never going to feed the world," Lee acknowledges. "We understand that and we're not saying it will, but when people are able to watch their food grow onsite, it triggers an awareness of local food production. It teaches people about how technology and science can work in coherence with nature to create something super-efficient, sustainable, and beautiful."
LOS ANGELES
(Otium)
Chef Timothy Hollingsworth at the Los Angeles restaurant Otium's rooftop garden.
At the restaurant Otium in Los Angeles, a peaceful rooftop garden sits atop a structure of concrete and steel that overlooks the hustle and bustle of downtown LA. Vegetables and herbs grown on the roof include Red Ribbon Sorrel, fennel fronds, borage blossoms, nasturtium, bush basil, mustard frills, mustard greens, kale, arugula, petit leaf lettuce, and mizuna. Chef Timothy Hollingsworth delights in Otium's ability to grow herbs that local purveyors don't offer, like the wild Middle Eastern Za'atar he uses on grilled steak with onions and sumac.
"I don't think this growing trend [of urban farming] is something that will be limited to a handful of restaurants," says Hollingsworth. "Every business should be concerned with sustainability and strive to protect the environment, so I think we will be seeing more and more gardening efforts throughout the country."
Whether a garden is vertical or horizontal, indoors or outdoors, on a roof or in a basement, tending to one provides not only fresh food, but intangible benefits as well.
"When you put your time and love into something," says Hollingsworth, "it really makes you respect and appreciate the produce from every stage of its life."
Often called the window to the soul, the eyes are more sacred than other body parts, at least for some.
Eye transplants are desperately needed, but they're nowhere in sight. About 12.7 million people worldwide need a corneal transplant, which means that only one in 70 people who require them, get them. The gaps are international. Eye banks in the United Kingdom are around 20 percent below the level needed to supply hospitals, while Indian eye banks, which need at least 250,000 corneas per year, collect only around 45 to 50 thousand donor corneas (and of those 60 to 70 percent are successfully transplanted).
As for retinas, it's impossible currently to put one into the eye of another person. Artificial devices can be implanted to restore the sight of patients suffering from severe retinal diseases, but the number of people around the world with such “bionic eyes” is less than 600, while in America alone 11 million people have some type of retinal disease leading to severe vision loss. Add to this an increasingly aging population, commonly facing various vision impairments, and you have a recipe for heavy burdens on individuals, the economy and society. In the U.S. alone, the total annual economic impact of vision problems was $51.4 billion in 2017.
Even if you try growing tissues in the petri dish route into organoids mimicking the function of the human eye, you will not get the physiological complexity of the structure and metabolism of the real thing, according to Cosma. She is a member of a scientific consortium that includes researchers from major institutions from Spain, the U.K., Portugal, Italy and Israel. The consortium has received about $3.8 million from the European Union to pursue innovative eye research. Her team’s goal is to give hope to at least 2.2 billion people across the world afflicted with a vision impairment and 33 million who go through life with avoidable blindness.
Their method? Resuscitating cadaveric eyes for at least a month.
If we succeed, it will be the first intact human model of the eye capable of exploring and analyzing regenerative processes ex vivo. -- Maria Pia Cosma.
“We proposed to resuscitate eyes, that is to restore the global physiology and function of human explanted tissues,” Cosma said, referring to living tissues extracted from the eye and placed in a medium for culture. Their ECaBox is an ex vivo biological system, in which eyes taken from dead donors are placed in an artificial environment, designed to preserve the eye’s temperature and pH levels, deter blood clots, and remove the metabolic waste and toxins that would otherwise spell their demise.
Scientists work on resuscitating eyes in the lab of Maria Pia Cosma.
Courtesy of Maria Pia Cosma.
“One of the great challenges is the passage of the blood in the capillary branches of the eye, what we call long-term perfusion,” Cosma said. Capillaries are an intricate network of very thin blood vessels that transport blood, nutrients and oxygen to cells in the body’s organs and systems. To maintain the garland-shaped structure of this network, sufficient amounts of oxygen and nutrients must be provided through the eye circulation and microcirculation. “Our ambition is to combine perfusion of the vessels with artificial blood," along with using a synthetic form of vitreous, or the gel-like fluid that lets in light and supports the the eye's round shape, Cosma said.
The scientists use this novel setup with the eye submersed in its medium to keep the organ viable, so they can test retinal function. “If we succeed, we will ensure full functionality of a human organ ex vivo. It will be the first intact human model of the eye capable of exploring and analyzing regenerative processes ex vivo,” Cosma added.
A rapidly developing field of regenerative medicine aims to stimulate the body's natural healing processes and restore or replace damaged tissues and organs. But for people with retinal diseases, regenerative medicine progress has been painfully slow. “Experiments on rodents show progress, but the risks for humans are unacceptable,” Cosma said.
The ECaBox could boost progress with regenerative medicine for people with retinal diseases, which has been painfully slow because human experiments involving their eyes are too risky. “We will test emerging treatments while reducing animal research, and greatly accelerate the discovery and preclinical research phase of new possible treatments for vision loss at significantly reduced costs,” Cosma explained. Much less time and money would be wasted during the drug discovery process. Their work may even make it possible to transplant the entire eyeball for those who need it.
“It is a very exciting project,” said Sanjay Sharma, a professor of ophthalmology and epidemiology at Queen's University, in Kingston, Canada. “The ability to explore and monitor regenerative interventions will increasingly be of importance as we develop therapies that can regenerate ocular tissues, including the retina.”
Seemingly, there's no sacred religious text or a holy book prohibiting the practice of eye donation.
But is the world ready for eye transplants? “People are a bit weird or very emotional about donating their eyes as compared to other organs,” Cosma said. And much can be said about the problem of eye donor shortage. Concerns include disfigurement and healthcare professionals’ fear that the conversation about eye donation will upset the departed person’s relatives because of cultural or religious considerations. As just one example, Sharma noted the paucity of eye donations in his home country, Canada.
Yet, experts like Sharma stress the importance of these donations for both the recipients and their family members. “It allows them some psychological benefit in a very difficult time,” he said. So why are global eye banks suffering? Is it because the eyes are the windows to the soul?
Seemingly, there's no sacred religious text or a holy book prohibiting the practice of eye donation. In fact, most major religions of the world permit and support organ transplantation and donation, and by extension eye donation, because they unequivocally see it as an “act of neighborly love and charity.” In Hinduism, the concept of eye donation aligns with the Hindu principle of daan or selfless giving, where individuals donate their organs or body after death to benefit others and contribute to society. In Islam, eye donation is a form of sadaqah jariyah, a perpetual charity, as it can continue to benefit others even after the donor's death.
Meanwhile, Buddhist masters teach that donating an organ gives another person the chance to live longer and practice dharma, the universal law and order, more meaningfully; they also dismiss misunderstandings of the type “if you donate an eye, you’ll be born without an eye in the next birth.” And Christian teachings emphasize the values of love, compassion, and selflessness, all compatible with organ donation, eye donation notwithstanding; besides, those that will have a house in heaven, will get a whole new body without imperfections and limitations.
The explanation for people’s resistance may lie in what Deepak Sarma, a professor of Indian religions and philosophy at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, calls “street interpretation” of religious or spiritual dogmas. Consider the mechanism of karma, which is about the causal relation between previous and current actions. “Maybe some Hindus believe there is karma in the eyes and, if the eye gets transplanted into another person, they will have to have that karmic card from now on,” Sarma said. “Even if there is peculiar karma due to an untimely death–which might be interpreted by some as bad karma–then you have the karma of the recipient, which is tremendously good karma, because they have access to these body parts, a tremendous gift,” Sarma said. The overall accumulation is that of good karma: “It’s a beautiful kind of balance,” Sarma said.
For the Jews, Christians, and Muslims who believe in the physical resurrection of the body that will be made new in an afterlife, the already existing body is sacred since it will be the basis of a new refashioned body in an afterlife.---Omar Sultan Haque.
With that said, Sarma believes it is a fallacy to personify or anthropomorphize the eye, which doesn’t have a soul, and stresses that the karma attaches itself to the soul and not the body parts. But for scholars like Omar Sultan Haque—a psychiatrist and social scientist at Harvard Medical School, investigating questions across global health, anthropology, social psychology, and bioethics—the hierarchy of sacredness of body parts is entrenched in human psychology. You cannot equate the pinky toe with the face, he explained.
“The eyes are the window to the soul,” Haque said. “People have a hierarchy of body parts that are considered more sacred or essential to the self or soul, such as the eyes, face, and brain.” In his view, the techno-utopian transhumanist communities (especially those in Silicon Valley) have reduced the totality of a person to a mere material object, a “wet robot” that knows no sacredness or hierarchy of human body parts. “But for the Jews, Christians, and Muslims who believe in the physical resurrection of the body that will be made new in an afterlife, the [already existing] body is sacred since it will be the basis of a new refashioned body in an afterlife,” Haque said. “You cannot treat the body like any old material artifact, or old chair or ragged cloth, just because materialistic, secular ideologies want so,” he continued.
For Cosma and her peers, however, the very definition of what is alive or not is a bit semantic. “As soon as we die, the electrophysiological activity in the eye stops,” she said. “The goal of the project is to restore this activity as soon as possible before the highly complex tissue of the eye starts degrading.” Cosma’s group doesn’t yet know when they will be able to keep the eyes alive and well in the ECaBox, but the consensus is that the sooner the better. Hopefully, the taboos and fears around the eye donations will dissipate around the same time.
