For New Orleans, the great food apocalypse is now. At the Superdome September 1, crowds broke into the complex's storage to loot super-processed Tetra Paks of juice-what masquerades as nutrition in a crisis. At least seven dead bodies lay scattered outside. Throughout the city, the scene duplicated itself at grocery stores and Wal-Marts as hungry and thirsty citizens filled shopping carts with chips and cereal.

Locally, Hurricane Katrina sparked a sense of urgency for one ambitious Fairview-area apiarist. Beekeeper Bob Rudachyk, who is a construction-site first-aid attendant and owner of May Queen Honey Enterprises, told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview that bees are part of a bigger, sustainable food-supply lifestyle that he wants to encourage. This would help Vancouverites deal with the city's own pending apocalypse: an earthquake.

"There's no excuse in a city for not being able to provide enough food to feed itself during an emergency," he said. "Urban agriculture is going to save lives while we're waiting to get roads and airports back up."

The Vancouver-pioneered concept of urban agriculture is growing like summer blackberries at Jericho Beach. It sprang out of City Farmer, which formed in 1978, the first group of its kind in North America. Outside emergencies, growing food in the city is a way to ensure safe, clean fruit and vegetables, combat rising fuel prices that will certainly have an impact on the cost and availability of imported produce, say a big "fuck you" to the corporatization of our food supply, and encourage us to enjoy the spiritual contemplation of digging our fingers in dirt.

It's a healthy deal all around, and about 45 per?cent of Vancouverites already grow some of their own food, according to a 2002 Ipsos-Reid poll. The executive director of City Farmer, Michael Levenston, attributes the blossoming interest in urban agriculture to the Internet and concern about climate change and pollution.

"There's a natural yearning in an urban population to commune with the earth," he told the Straight. "We want to be part of the food system."

For Levenston, who has nurtured gardening among Vancouverites for 28 years, this isn't new. But across the city, the metaphorical seeds he has sown have germinated. City Council passed a new bylaw July 21 allowing apiaries in single- and double-family homes. This is the first time the city has allowed beekeeping.

Since 2003, the city has funded a food-policy council to "review how the production, distribution, access, consumption, and waste management of food impacts our lives and our neighbourhoods", according to the Web site. "Food policy initiatives typically focus on areas including urban agriculture, community gardens, farmers' markets, emergency food distribution, food retail access, and local food economies."

UBC's School of Social Work is hosting a conference September 28 and 29 called Food and Human Rights: Hunger, Health and Social Well-Being. (See Health Notes for more information.) It will touch on urbanites' ability to grow their own food.

At Ferndale Institution, a minimum-security prison in Mission, inmates grew four tonnes of produce last year on a new organic farm. That bounty went towards feeding residents of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside 33,000 meals. (According to the project's proposal, a similar project in San Francisco contributed to prisoners' recidivism rate dropping from 55 percent to 24 percent.)

And when Vancouver hosts the 5,000-delegate World Urban Forum next year, this city's best-developed-in-the-world urban agri?culture will be on display for city administrators and planners from Brazil to Bhutan.

Even with all this going on, Levenston reports that the provincial Ministry of Health has not contacted him, or supported the growing movement in a public way. In the 1970s, he said, the province was involved in a school gardens project. Students who grew the food were more likely to choose healthy meals, he said. However, the school gardens depend heavily on volunteers and local enthusiasm now.

Urban agriculture doesn't need the government, though. Small actions-literally planting seeds and nurturing them as they grow-can show as radical a commitment to health as the Liberals' ActNow BC.

In Sorrento, B.C., Food Democracy Network coordinator Cathleen Kneen knows she is enormously privileged to grow a huge garden. An orchard and rows of vegetables grace her property, and she raises pigs, chickens, and sheep. About 70 percent of her diet comes from her own yard; the other 30 percent consists of grains, which she doesn't grow.

"The industrial food-production system will give you something that looks the same, for a fraction of the real cost of growing it yourself," she told the Straight, adding that the industrial system fails to provide a nutritious diet to the entire population. In addition, she said, the system doesn't pay those who produce food a living wage; nor ensure that the food on our tables is healthy or safe; nor keep the land, air, and water safe for the next generation.

Growing your own food "is about the health of the whole society, mentally and physically. It's about food sovereignty. Do you have any control over the food system at all?" Kneen asked.

Urban agriculture is about answering that question, not with a placard protest but with a lot of bees.

Beekeeper Bob hopes willing Vancouver?ites with back yards will help his enterprise. Currently building up a stock of 1,000 hives, Rudachyk urges Vancouver's gardeners to volunteer by becoming back-yard beekeepers, in exchange for some honey. He can be reached at mayqueenhoney@hotmail.com.

"It's ironic, but it's true," Rudachyk said, reflecting that the cement-ridden, polluted city, with its man-made biodiversity, yields almost double the honey volume he gets in the country. "My East Van hives produce the most flavourful and fragrant honey I've had in a long time."