Where Local Sustainable Food Policy Meets Action
I was fortunate to be asked to contribute to Alison Blay-Palmer’s new book, Imagining Sustainable Food Systems. It’s a terrific read — I encourage you to pick it up. For a sample of what you might expect, you can download my chapter for free. A review of the book appeared in the May 2011 issue [...]
Join the discussion on how green and vegan issues relate; see my intro to the issues in this debate with PETA member Bruce Friedrich: http://www.newint.org/argument/2011/01/01/vegan-green-debate/
There’s something a tad self-absorbed about the outpouring of media grief and analysis over a shooting rampage that left six dead in Arizona. Analysis is normally reserved for things that have larger numbers attached to them, like the uneventful and painfully slow death from starvation each day of at least 16,000 children (some reputable agencies [...]
Robert Assange need to be free so he can create some wikileaks buzz around all-but-secret but all-but- done trade deals that will lock Canada into policies that ban most of the tools needed to protect a local and sustainable food supply, no matter who wins the next federal elections. Discussions leading to an all-embracing “bilateral” [...]
Ontario’s recently-tabled Long-Term Energy Plan confirms the Liberal government’s commitment to both nuclear power and renewable sourcing of new electricity — with price offers and open grids that invite some 11000 megawatts of green power. That’s more than enough to allow the province to go coal-free within ten years — a big break for clean [...]
As a local food enthusiast, I often wonder: why is it that places most removed in their landscape from farms, most outward-turning in their economy, most cosmopolitan in their culture, most multicultural in their backgrounds, most futuristic in their outlook — North American cities such as San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, Chicago, Toronto, New York and [...]
I wrote most of this as an assessment of Toronto’s election during the day of October 25, before the polls were closed and any votes counted in Toronto’s city elections. I didn’t know who won, but I already knew what lost — Toronto’s longstanding consensus around the “radical middle” of city responsibilities for social belonging [...]
Politics has changed so much since I grew up that I still have trouble coping with modern conservatives who are usually outraged by the way things are going and are very militant and venomous about the need for abrupt changes. I find today’s radicals equally out of character with my memories. Many old-time Toronto activists [...]
LECTURE 2:30 – 4 PM STUFFED & STARVED THE HIDDEN BATTLE FOR THE WORLD’S FOOD SYSTEM Gardiner Museum Terrace Room* 111 Queen’s Park Crescent *NEW VENUE $12 General Admission / $10 Students TICKETS AT THE DOOR LIMITED SEATING, ARRIVE EARLY TO AVOID DISAPPOINTMENT PS — It’s moderated by the lovely and talented Lori Stahlbrand [...]
The narrow defeat of Canadian Conservative efforts to de-register rifle ownership will produce a lingering hangover for positive political and social movements, as Conservatives gear up to foment rural-urban divisions. The urban-rural divide that emerged during the rifle registration debate has been manufactured by slick urban bluebloods as a political gift that they hope will [...]
Driving from Toronto to Halifax last week to help move my daughter Anika into King’s College, I had a lot of quiet time to rehearse a rant against a recent flurry of attacks against local food systems by right-wing extremists across North America. I was pretty happy with some of my vitriolic lines until we [...]
It’s a pretty strong sign that we live in an information economy and society when the Conservative cancellation of the longform census became one of the hot button political issues of the summer season. I was stupefied when the Harper Conservatives dug in their heels, refusing to budge despite a chorus of harsh criticisms from [...]
With Labor Day just a few weeks away and badly in need of an event to celebrate, an historic agreement was signed on August 24. Written in legalese, the statement commits Sodexo, a gigantic global food service company employing some 500,000 workers to partner with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a tiny organization of [...]
Yellowknife and Hay River “We’re so far behind up here that we’re ahead,” Evellyn Coleman told me, explaining why her Territorial Farmers Association, the first in North America to consider accepting backyard and community gardeners as full members, was inviting me up to speak in the Northwest Territories. Just south of the Arctic tundra, where [...]
Imitation is the highest form of flattery, and the intricate form of food production practiced by peasants through much of Asia and South America still express that flattery in relation to Nature. In the Global North, all food production except hunting and gathering is commonly referred to as agriculture. But in the Global South, the [...]
By sheer luck, our family stumbled on a little-known urban success story while looking for a place to crash in Quebec City that offered direct access to the throughway to northern Quebec, where our daughter was going to learn French. Right next to Quebec City’s famous central core, preserved as a walled monument of an [...]
British Petroleum and the U.S. government can’t figure out how to cover up an underwater oil leak that’s spewing tens of thousands of gallons of oil day into the formerly rich fishery off the Gulf coast of Louisiana. But between the two of them, they’ve done a masterful job of covering up a hole in [...]
I’m out on this limb because, when it comes to making green food choices, the beginning of wisdom is knowing how complex the whole matter has become. While the 100-mile diet makes for a dramatic storyline and expresses the green aspirations of today’s shoppers, it doesn’t necessarily say a great deal about sustainable or equitable [...]
A crack lets the light in, the song goes, and a first crack has just appeared in the corporate walls of Canada’s top food retailers. Sobeys — a chain that flies the banner “the Hometown Advantage,” and which ten years ago took over a chain that called itself “Hometown Proud”– now confronts nine formerly locked-in [...]
It takes a village to raise a neighborhood grocery store, I’ve always figured. So I went to hear Mary Choi deliver the valedictory address to her graduating class of naturopathic doctors, thinking I would share the joy of her mom and dad, Suzie and Charlie Choi, who run the mom and pop grocery in our [...]
From Wayne’s archives. Fall 2008. I’m hanging out in the crowded back yard of a community recreation centre in Toronto’s west end on a warm and sunny fall day, listening to the reggae/funk/country sounds of a local band called Nine Mile, getting ready to cheer on two cooking teams in an Iron Chef competition featuring [...]
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