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 area, the Beach Food Mart,…
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.
Stimulate This! Whole New Field of Vision for Farm Environmental Services
A newly-formed Ontario-wide coalition will work to convince governments to pay farmers for environmental services. That’s a promising sign a whole new environmental economy may be in birth, based on giving back to nature so it can lay more golden eggs. If the people concocting infrastructure investments that governments can sink taxpayers’ money into gave a thought to the enduring…
Buycotting
On the occasion of its 40th birthday in November 2006, This Magazine asked 40 past and present contributors—and some distinguished guests—for a big idea whose time has come. This is my idea. In a knowledge economy, few people know how to make things that can actually be used. That’s why shopping has a bright future, especially among the intelligentsia and other specialists…
Fusion Power
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 surprise ingredients from around the…
Changing the Food System is Just What the Doctor Ordered
It’s unsettling that an authoritative and transformative report on cancer released in February, 2009 has to hearken back to the horse and buggy days of a century ago by calling for a return to “classic public health.” The most authoritative grouping of medical experts in the world released Policy and Action for Cancer Prevention, which identifies cancer as an environmental…
Sharing Food and Work Creates an Upside to the Economic Down
Unlike most people, Thomas Homer-Dixon doesn’t think today’s world economic crisis is very complicated. He thinks it’s very complex, which makes for a world of difference in understanding which government anti-recession programs will fail (most of them) and deciding which ones can help.Homer-Dixon, who chairs a centre for global systems analysis at the University of Waterloo, is one of the…
Hopeless Romantics Do Valentine’s Day Chocolate One Better
Traipsing through the jungles of Mexico in January with Michael Sacco, a Toronto-based fair trader partnering with Indigenous people in Oaxaca, I got a taste of the bittersweet romantic adventure behind the romantic and sweet treat recently branded to symbolize Valentine’s Day. Chocolate goes to the heart of the Indigenous experience in Mexico, a testimony to the high level of…
Life Is a Picnic
The scene was just as I remembered from many decades ago, when my grade 5 teacher asked us to name one of the seven wonders of the world, and I stuck up my hand and blurted out “the Scarboro bluffs.” My wife Lori and good friend Harriet joined me for a trip down memory lane on Canada Day when we…