Where Local Sustainable Food Policy Meets Action
Can food tweets go viral amidst COVID-19? #coronavirus has been teaching us what viral means in terms of a scary communicable disease, not just the communicable media scene we’ve grown comfortable with. But a hyper-modern pandemic requires hyper-modern communications. The Twitterverse has come through the #COVID-19, #CoronaVirusUpdates experience with flying colours — providing a communications universe where health experts [...]
Cuts to Government Services, But not to Double Standards By Wayne Roberts Politicians at all levels are promising more cuts to government expenses without any cut to services. For politicians, this is better than a gift that keeps on giving. It’s a promise they can keep on promising. For most of the past 40 years, [...]
The worldwide price level of food is taking a great leap upward for the second time in less than five years. My bet is that this food price hike will match a rise in oil prices for wrenching impact on geopolitics, especially as the two are intimately connected. Food cannot be fertilized and shipped without [...]
Wayne’s spoke in Red Deer, Alberta, at their exciting Pathways2Sustainability conference; a reporter’s preview of the talk is available here: http://permaculturebc.com/Wayne-Roberts-Food-Security-Organic Watch Wayne’s Keynote:
I grew up with the habit of Thursday nights as the time when family shopped together at the local supermarket, and I always assumed, for good or ill, that supermarkets were permanent. It’s now clear that old style super-markets are on their way out. Beginning this month, Wal-Mart Canada kicks off its one-year agenda to [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]