Is a vegetable garden essential? Toronto gardens as culinary infrastructure

A recurring debate in cities and in the literature is whether gardening food to eat is essential or recreational. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, some political jurisdictions closed gardens, deeming them non-essential to life - including the province of Ontario where fieldwork for this study was conducted. This paper analyzes mixed methods data generated pre-pandemic to understand the role of urban agriculture in the lives of gardeners in Toronto, Canada. When people produce food for the home, is their activity recreational or an essential source of food? We employ a social-ecological lens and find that gardening supported health and wellbeing and provided participants with an important food source, oftentimes culturally significant. Qualitative and quantitative data describes the rich experiences of gardener participants in the diverse city. We argue that gardens are essential and seeing them as part of culinary infrastructure makes space for nonmarket food production in food systems analyses. Viewing gardens as essential should prompt policy decisions, particularly during crises, which support social-ecological, nonmarket food sources as important parts of culinary infrastructure.