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During his trip to the US this week, our grow-your-own Mayor lobbied his counterpart in New York on the value of growing food in the heart of the appropriately monikered Big Apple.
This 24-hour city has long had an extraordinary food culture. But like London, our sister city is now waking up to the miracle of food production in even the most crowded city. New York's GreenThumb project was founded in 1978 and is now the US's largest urban gardening programme, helping around 700 neighbourhood groups create and manage community gardens.
Like projects flourishing under our own Capital Growth programme, GreenThumb has seen first-hand the immense benefits that can be derived from such endeavours: a community with a common purpose, a chance for children to get out of their highrise, concrete environment and get their hands covered in mud - and plenty of fresh vegetables for all.
This leads to more home cooking and far less food waste: as what you've grown yourself you hate to throw away.
But Mayor Bloomberg will discover there is far more he can do with even the high-rise, urban landscape of New York. As in London, he could help transform small spaces - backyards, rooftops, abandoned building sities - into gardens, all of which could be tended by the city's stressed-out citizens.
You don't need a lot of space to get going: beans and salads will grow in a window box and herbs and tomatoes will flourish in a hanging basket. New York could teem with small (and not so small) empty spaces where rough ground, roofs, balconies and window ledges could be transformed into places where vegetables can grow and where communities can unite around a desire to grow their own.
Cities elsewhere in America are already providing a fine demonstration of what can be achieved. When I was in Chicago two years ago, I was taken on to the roof of City Hall to visit Mayor Daley's garden. No vegetables there, sadly - instead a veritable field of prairie grasses, celebrating the types of plants that once blanketed the Midwest. But down on the ground, in Grant Park, I saw a truly visionary city scheme: a vegetable garden, about a third of an acre in size, in which a wide variety of vegetables were flourishing. The garden was tended by a full-time gardener, her salary provided by selling the produce in downtown Chicago's thriving farmers' markets.
I was especially intrigued by her tale of a homeless man who wintered on the west coast and summered in Chicago. In his rucksack he kept a bottle of vinegar, salt, pepper and olive oil and every day he'd come and pick vegetables and enjoy a fresh and nutritious meal.
Further west, the Mayor of San Francisco recently outlined his new urban food policy. As Mayor Newsom notes: "Most of the food that's consumed in this country is consumed by cities. So, by definition, citizens in urban environments should be designing food policy." I couldn't have put it better myself.
Like Mayor Newsom, Boris Johnson and I are working to encourage vegetable-growing gardens in schools and on any spare bit of land we can find across the city.
In raising these green-fingered issues with Mayor Bloomberg, Boris has perpetuated the transatlantic cross pollination of ideas between our two cities. By creating thriving growing spaces in our great metropolis, we can not only have more tasty, healthy food on our doorstep, we can also help to slow down and reconnect to the most fundamental needs of society.
