Harry Hayman on Growing Philadelphia's Food Where People Live

North Broad Street on an overcast weekday morning does not look like farmland. Traffic moves past brick warehouses and shuttered storefronts, a church sits quiet behind its own locked doors, and a surface lot holds nothing but parked cars. That is what most people see, and I understand why. My name is Harry Hayman, I have spent my working life in Philadelphia hospitality, and I founded the Feed Philly Coalition because I got tired of treating hunger in this city as somebody else’s emergency. When I walk that street I see something different, and I made a short film to show you exactly what.

What I See When I Walk North Broad Street

The film is a new short documentary about growing food inside Philadelphia, and it is a walk rather than a lecture. I go north along Broad and I say out loud what each building could be doing instead of what it is doing. A greenhouse on the roof at SOUTH. A dormant church feeding the blocks around it again. Osteria’s lot growing produce instead of holding cars. The building transformations you see on screen are concept visualizations rather than approved projects, I say so in the film, and nothing was altered to suggest that any existing green space would come down. I want to add urban green, never cut it.

I am not asking anyone to go find new land. That is the part I need you to hear. We are already standing on everything we need, and we have simply never asked these buildings to grow anything.

We Built a Gas Works and a Water Works, and Never a Food Works

This city has been in the utility business a very long time. Philadelphia Gas Works was founded in 1836 and it is still the largest municipally owned gas utility in the United States, running roughly 6,000 miles of gas mains and service pipes to about 500,000 customers. The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia traces it back to a plain civic decision in the 1830s. Philadelphia wanted gas lighting, decided the market alone would not deliver it evenly, and built the works itself.

Water came even earlier and followed the same logic. This city treated clean water as a public obligation and engineered its way to one, and what it built became a landmark rather than merely a plant.

So here is my question, and I ask it in the film standing on the pavement. We have a gas works. We have a water works. Food is at least as fundamental as either one, and we have no food works. Nothing in the history of the other two tells me the third is impossible. It tells me somebody has to decide to build it.

Why I Keep Talking About Controlled Environment Agriculture

Controlled environment agriculture is the technical name for growing food indoors under managed conditions. Instead of depending on weather, season and soil, you regulate light, temperature, humidity and nutrient delivery directly, usually with hydroponics and tuned LED lighting standing in for sunlight. The consequences matter more to me than the definition. Production runs year round instead of seasonally. Water use drops sharply because the same water recirculates rather than draining away. Yield per square foot climbs far above what a field does, because the growing surface stacks vertically.

For a dense city that last part is everything. We have very little farmland and an enormous amount of underused interior space. That observation is what my venture Veggie Graffiti is built on, combining controlled environment agriculture with hydroponic growing and treating the installations as public art as much as food production. I am not interested in a demonstration project that impresses people and feeds nobody. The goal is commercial proof, with produce moving into Philadelphia grocery stores. I laid out the longer version of that case in an earlier video, Indoor Agriculture Is the Now and the Future, and this new film is the neighborhood scale version of the same argument.

The Dutch Made a Choice, and So Can We

I lean on the Netherlands in the film because it settles the question of whether any of this is realistic. A small, densely populated country ranks as the second largest exporter of agricultural products in the world by value, behind only the United States, and it got there through greenhouse horticulture rather than acreage. Statistics Netherlands recorded agricultural exports worth 122.3 billion euros in 2022, more than 17 percent above the year before. Growers there have cut water dependence for key crops dramatically since 2000 and have nearly eliminated chemical pesticides inside their greenhouses. None of that came from geography. It came from a choice about what to build.

Set that against how far our produce travels before it reaches anyone’s plate. I use the figure of 1,500 miles, and it deserves an honest caveat, so here it is. Slate traced where that number came from: a 2001 study out of Iowa State University’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture measured produce arriving at a Chicago terminal market and landed near 1,518 miles. It covered a limited set of fruits and vegetables, it left out meat and dairy, and it was calculated for one city. The precise number is softer than its popularity suggests. The condition underneath it is not. We eat a great deal of food grown a long way from here, and every one of those miles is cost, fuel, spoilage and lost freshness that a rooftop three blocks from the table never pays.

Father Divine Fed This Street Before Anyone Called It Food Policy

The moment in the film that moves me most is not technical. I stop at the Divine Lorraine, because that building carries a precedent most people walk right past. In 1948 the International Peace Mission Movement, led by Father Divine, bought the Lorraine outright and made it the first racially integrated hotel in Philadelphia. The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia records a movement organized around racial equality, communal living and economic self sufficiency, and WHYY has written about how visibly Father Divine still sits over this city. The detail that matters for my argument is the ground floor. The Peace Mission ran a public dining room there where anyone could eat for twenty five cents.

That was food infrastructure operating on North Broad Street decades before we had the phrase, run by people who decided that feeding the neighborhood at scale was a normal thing for a building to do. I am not proposing we recreate it. I am pointing out that this street has already done this, which makes what I am asking for a good deal less exotic than it sounds.

Why I Will Not Call This Charity

The urgency underneath all of it is measurable, and it is ugly. Child food insecurity in Philadelphia reached 30.4 percent in 2022, up from 25.5 percent the year before, which means roughly one in three children in this city faced hunger, and overall food insecurity here hit 15.2 percent, according to Philabundance reading Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap data. WHYY has documented how unevenly that lands, with Black and Hispanic households carrying it at markedly higher rates than the city average.

That is why I refuse the charity frame. Emergency food responds to a shortage after it has already happened to somebody. Building growing capacity inside the city changes what is available in the first place, and it creates jobs, shortens supply chains and puts fresh produce in neighborhoods that currently have almost none of it while it does so. Food is infrastructure, it is jobs, it is medicine, and it is the strongest link in the chain that connects every one of us here.

The film ends on an invitation rather than a plan, because that is honestly where the work stands right now. The buildings on North Broad are still just buildings. What I hope I have done is make it harder for you to look at them and see nothing. See the vision, embrace the vision, and let us write the future instead of waiting for it. More of what I am working on across food, jazz and civic life is at harryhayman.com.