March, when next season’s crops are due to be planted in Haiti, is less than a month away. For the tens of thousands who have left the rubble and despair of Haiti’s capital to find shelter in some 500 camps throughout the countryside, it could be their chance to plant a new life for themselves – if only a trickle…
Author: Wayne Roberts
Wayne Roberts is a Canadian food policy analyst and writer, widely respected for his role as the manager of the Toronto Food Policy Council, a citizen body of 30 food activists and experts that is widely recognized for its innovative approach to food security, from 2000-2010.
As a leading member of the City of Toronto’s Environmental Task Force, he helped develop a number of official plans for the city, including the Environmental Plan and Food Charter, adopted by Toronto City Council in 2000 and 2001 respectively. Many ideas and projects of the TFPC are featured in Roberts’ book The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food (2008).
Since 1989, Roberts has written a weekly column for Toronto’s NOW Magazine, generally on themes that link social justice, public health and green economics.
In 2002, he received the Canadian Environment Award for his contributions to sustainable living. NOW Magazine named Roberts one of Toronto’s leading visionaries of the past 20 years. In 2008, he received the Canadian Eco-Hero Award presented by Planet in Focus. In 2011, he received the University of Toronto Arbor Award for his role in establishing food studies as a field of study at University of Toronto.
Roberts earned a Ph.D. in social and economic history from the University of Toronto in 1978, and has written seven books, including Get A Life! (1995), a manual on green economics, and Real Food For A Change (1999), which promotes a food system based on the four ingredients of health, joy, justice and nature.
Roberts chaired the influential and Toronto-based Coalition for a Green Economy for 15 years. He has also served on the Board of the U.S.-based Community Food Security Coalition and Food Secure Canada. He is on the board of Green Enterprise Toronto, an organization of local eco-businesses that’s associated with the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies across North America. He has been invited to speak around the world on strategies that combine food security, community empowerment, environmental improvement, social equity and job creation.
Prior to his involvement with environmental issues, Roberts worked for two decades in the fields of community organizing, university teaching, media, labour education, industrial relations and union administration.
The Problem Behind the Obesity Problem Keeps Getting Bigger
I went to school at a time when overweight was much rarer than sensitivity. We used to play a prank where we asked newcomers if they knew a way to lose ten pounds of ugly fat. Cut off your head, we’d roar. The error in scientific method that underlies this feeble joke is called “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” Long…
Women Ignored in Climate Change at Copenhagen
Women hold up half the sky, claims an old saying, coined long before the world’s skies were filled with global warming gases. My sense is that from now on, they will have to hold up a lot more. The absence of debate on this gendered slant to global warming is a silence piled upon silences in the warm-up to the…
Video: Food Policy and the New Urban Vision
Here is a video of Wayne speaking about food policy at the Toledo Public Library, from September 28, 2009. Thanks to the WGTE-TV (PBS) and Knowledge Stream for making it possible.
TIME FOR AN ALTERNATIVE TO CHEAP FOOD
Only Time will tell if we’re at the point in the food debate to pop the taboo question: how come, despite all the squawking about food being too expensive these days, food is so incredibly cheap? What hidden force lies behind all the obvious problems. To give credit where it’s due, Time magazine, a showpiece of glossy conventional wisdom since 1924, is…
Let me be the first to say it: I think it might be okay for you to eat that mango?
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 food. Most people see me…
LOCAL FARMERS HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT THEIR CHAINS
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 franchisees from farm country in…
Flic This! What Farmers and Food Artisans Can learn From Hollywood North
If only food were like the movies. If anyone in the Ontario government should ever want to do something to encourage quality jobs in local food production, there’s no need to look any further than the government’s own Ontario Media Development Corporation and its Ontario Film and Television Tax Credit, which has just boosted the already generous incentives for hiring cultural…
Red Ink: A Canadian View of Food Inc.
I read about Chef Jamie Kennedy possibly going broke on the front-page news (not bad profile for someone who’s not a banker or carmaker getting bailed out by the government) at the same time I got an invite to see the preview of Food Inc. So the chance to think about the two food happenings together gobsmacked me. Food Inc and Food…
Feed the economy by eating locally and sustainably
If a friend said he’d like to give up tobacco or booze but it cost too much to switch to alternative pleasures, most people would call that a sorry excuse for addiction. But people can still get away with saying they can’t afford the switch to healthier and more sustainable foods. That’s usually considered a reasonable, if unfortunate, explanation, not…