Wayne’s Weekly Hacks: Plan to Eat? Plan for Food!

There are a whole lot of us with a big load of talent. When we boost our skills, we will accomplish wonders.

CONSTRUCTION SKILLS

I have always presented myself as a food “solutionary.” There’s more to that than putting on a happy face. Solutionaries have a skill set – an opportunity-recognizing, problem-solving, collaboration-building, campaigning and outreach set of changemaker skills. 

Solutionary skills are at a premium when a growing majority wants climate protection action.

Case in point: leading soil scientists just issued an appeal for building out a “solution space” on ways to nurture soil health to protect endangered ecosystems.  

Construction of solutionary infrastructure is the skill of the hour.

Can planners help with this infrastructure? If so, what skills will bring them along? That’s the theme of this edition.

My hacks come out of 55 years as a social change leader, 45 years as a writer of 13 books, thousands of articles and hundreds of broadcasts, and ten years as a coach for emerging food leaders.

OUTSMARTING
THE GRAND PLAN

It’s tempting to bash planners who ignore food issues. 

Irresponsible planning comes to mind as I read about Quebec’s alarm at running out of propane during a transportation strike, coinciding with electrical lines knocked down by stormy weather. The combo of social and environmental distress will typify perfect storms of the Climate Emergency era.

Planners have  no Plan Bs for delivery, storage or cooking of food during such emergencies. 

I was once a planner-basher. In 2001, I issued a polemic called The Way to a City’s Heart is Through its Stomach, It became a cult classic for a while.

It made some good points, but missed the big point. 

Planners don’t ignore food any than do doctors, teachers, social workers, environmentalists, unionists, journalists and civil servants. 

Frustration must be spread thinly if it’s to cover the terrain inhabited by all the professionals who don’t get food.

Why am I making a belated apology?

While fretting about a commentary I owe on a seminal article on food planning, I came across a blog about emotional  skills, and it made me think about the spread of ideas from early adopters to early majorities.  

This idea-equivalent of a tossed salad led me to realize the priority of avoiding toxic polarization and divisiveness in the days ahead.  

Many people want to solve pressing problems they know something about, but are still finding their sea legs about how to connect their expertise to other problems they know squat about. 

In short, we need to be nicer to each other, and forgive ignorance of our own all-important subject.

There are reasons why planners and other experts don’t see food’s importance, even though its priority as a biological and social necessity should be as plain as the nose on their face.

The food system is founded on an imaginary that food stands by itself. The assumption deems that food companies sell a commodity and have no obligations to health, the environment, social cohesion, life cycle costing, or the whole ball of wax of the public good. 

Some people believe we have a food literacy problem because kids think food comes from a store, not a farm.

But adults have a food literacy problem because they don’t know a food system has brainwashed them into believing food companies sell a commodity that has nothing to do with the public good. This notion crystallized in 1954 (see here) with the coining of the term “agribusiness” – as in agriculture with the culture removed and replaced by business supply chain. 

This notion is pervasive and virtually unchallenged. Planners have drunk the Kool-Aid but so have all the other professions.  

What can good food enthusiasts do?  Hate the sin, love the sinner!!

Start by pouring yourself a karma cocktail. Replace polemical skills with the skills of emotional maturity, as explained here. 

Prepare yourself to be multi-skilled. If you are doing food waste, know and respect the basics known by people you’re talking to in the garbage department. Do the same with doctors, social workers, teachers and journalists. Talk to people at their level, however low or high that may be.

“Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good,” it’s been said.  “Luckily, this is not difficult.”

The same discipline applies to good food leaders.

Enjoy the opportunity of championing ideas as they move from the margins to an early majority. 

“For decades the human dimension has been an overlooked and haphazardly addressed urban planning topic, while many other issues, such as accommodating the rocketing rise in car traffic, have come more strongly into focus. In addition, dominant planning ideologies — modernism in particular — have specifically put a low priority on public space, pedestrianism and the role of city space as a meeting place for urban dwellers.”
― Jan Gehl, Cities for People 

 How To Put Food in City Plans

There’s a great new toolkit on squeezing Food into Urban Planning. It’s based on African examples, but applies everywhere.

The kit identifies “three broad opportunities” (note the word “opportunities,” not “problems”).

First, help with direct interventions. If there’s an existing market that already supports both small scale food producers and low-income shoppers, give them a hand up.

Two, apply food thinking to non-food issues. If a building application is being considered, ask how it will  — or could be tweaked to include – create positive food impacts.   

Three, support existing channels that support food access. If informal projects already support food access, find an informal way to help them ( as in, use one of their partners to cater a city event.)

If you had to boil this down to two words, they would be… food mindfulness.

My own feedback: since planners are expected to prioritize the needs of powers-that-be, a sensitive to-do plan should include a fourth item, explicitly directed to the needs of everyone in the city. Feature food in place-making activities designed to promote public celebrations and culinary tourism. 

The more that the city-as-a-whole is identified as beneficiary of food interventions, the easier food security measures are to promote. 

As I argued in my book, Food for City Building, food not only addresses problems IN the city (such as poverty, inequality, chronic disease, racism), but also problems OF the city (anonymity, cohesion, sense of place, communicable disease, flooding). Problems OF the city are everyone’s problems and should be addressed in food planning.

“Forget the damned motor car and build cities for lovers and friends.”
― Lewis Mumford

How To Perk Up a City

Not one but two terrific coffee shop articles will perk up your understanding of cities. 

Coffee shops are the engine room of the invisible force that makes cities centres of innovation in the realms of ideas and technologies. As urbanist Jeb Brugmann explains, the once-astronomical costs of collaboration and information exchange are brought down to zero in cities – or at least as close to zero as a cup of coffee gets.

“Each step of the way, throughout modern American history, coffee houses and cafes have been there,” says David Landsel, “fostering entrepreneurship and creativity, encouraging community, and promoting debate.” 

He reviews over 80 shops, all run by real entrepreneurs and not chains. An evocative writer, he lapses into sighs in some places. “If every neighbourhood in America had a coffee shop this joyfully dedicated to its mission, we’d be a sight better off.”

Tracing his story back to Oxford, England in 1654, Tim Wu links the rise of the coffee house in England to the rise of newspapers and of what we now call  civil society – a common room as important to the informal everyday life of the city community as the commons were in agriculture and House of Commons was to formal politics. 

When planners “wake up and smell the coffee,” they will inhale a whiff of social capital, the indispensable crazy glue of the city. In planning lingo, the term is “third place,” after home and work, a place where, as the famous TV series Cheers had it, “everybody knows your name.” 

It is almost impossible to imagine third places without food and beverages. 

I explore here how such a third place works in my Toronto neighbourhood.

Same Difference

See the food future as seen from the drawing board in this nifty article on how architects can shape future cities. 

“The main challenge of designing new spaces or even modernizing existing ones lies in the fast-changing needs of humanity and the even faster-evolving technologies that surround and support these needs.”

Yes, food advocates face these challenge too.

Architects “will have to pivot, embracing multidisciplinary collaboration and adopting new technologies into their workflows to tackle this new interface of opportunities.”

Yes, we face these opportunities too. 

Food Creatives

When Richard Florida started working on cities and the creative class, he glimpsed an opportunity to further social equity. The opposite is happening, presenters at this conference on smart cities argued. 

More attention to the business ecosystem needed by food creatives might help. Chefs, civil society and public health leaders, food and beverage artisans, social enterprises, culinary tour guides, and so on can help anchor creative efforts in equity. 

Cities are now more attentive to sustainability, which recognizes equity as a cornerstone. 

Add food to the creative economy, and stir!!

Happy Birthday to Jane

Jane Jacobs was born 100 years ago, and She’s More Relevant Than Ever. As she understood, gritty density is still central to innovation. 

Spread the Word

“Content marketing,” as it’s called, is made for good food advocates. We’ve never been short of content that is fresh, informed, and well-researched!! Marketing is what we missed out on! 

I do content marketing (I used to call it public education) for free on Quora, where many people ask basic questions about life and health. My time costs nothing, but can be leveraged for meaningful results.

Here’s my piece on aging well. So far, it’s netted 51 upvotes and 7400 viewers. A more recent post on food stamps and junkfood has earned 123 upvotes and 2500 views.  Both are still climbing, so it’s not over yet.  Please join in.

Two added bonuses. First, I can recycle and reuse such posts on list-servs, Linked in, Twitter and Facebook,  sharing them in newsletters (ahem!), and including them in blogs. Two, I get to promo this newsletter at the end of the Quora piece.  PR guru Cheryl Snapp-Conner calls this method of amplifying a post “polyphonic.” 

Content marketing is made for polyphonic public education!  Please spread my words with an upvote.

Request for Action