‘If you speak before food has been served, you understand how hunger interferes with the ability to concentrate and learn. If you speak after people have eaten, you understand that eating food is about way more than addressing a hunger issue.’ —Wayne Roberts Field notes this week: Many people know what it feels like to be slotted in as a…
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.
Asking the Right Food-City/ City-Food Question
‘It’s time for advocacy movements to consider the benefits of shifting their questions and checking into the possibilities of releasing the brakes.’ -Wayne Roberts Field notes this week:Last week, a keynote presentation I gave at a University of Western Ontario conference about agriculture and the Great Lakes gave me a chance to feature 20 pivotal lessons that friends and colleagues…
Getting down to Business
‘Just as humans didn’t move beyond the Stone Age because the world ran out of stones, it’s unlikely we will go beyond a corporate food system because we have run out of monopoly corporations. We will return food to small and public organizations because that is the most logical way to manage a food system designed to provide primarily local and…
Earth Day Water
‘I don’t want to do a list of what cities could do if people in them cared about water. Frankly, it would be demeaning to do a list. Before we do a list, we must make water visible, and must make it intelligible to our narcissistic and departmentalized minds.’ —Wayne Roberts Field notes this week: This idea might seem all…
Re: City Policy
‘Whoever thought that food banks should be the first responders to food insecurity was certainly not thinking in terms of the subsidiarity principle, let alone nutritional principles, or empowerment of people principles.’ —Wayne Roberts Field notes this week: Pandemonium & City Food Security I supervised a university-level food studies class last week that, partly by design and partly by sheer…
Montreal FPC Newsletter
‘It’s about going with the flow of what is there for the taking – as in taking from the early adopter to early majority stage. It’s about intervening to seize opportunities, or as a food advocate might put it, making hay while the sun shines. It’s about being a Solutionary.’ —Wayne Roberts Field notes this week: Pinning Big Hopes On…
Rod MacRae Newsletter
‘If we grew the oats we should eat for breakfast or baking, we would plant 25000 more hectares in oats that would generate 241 new jobs and $3.8 million in taxes. (Isn’t arithmetic interesting?) However, it might cause a decline in sales of laxatives.’ —Wayne Roberts Field notes this week: It’s the Food Economy, Stupid Bill Clinton claims the big…
Terry Marsden Special
“In Terry Marsden’s words, local is no longer just about physical location, but a ‘space for rearranging possibilities which attempt to counter the prevailing forces in the agrarian landscape,’ a place for new networks and relationships. Producer-consumer food relations can be both re-rooted and rerouted, he says.” -Wayne Roberts Field notes this week: New Equations of Regions, People, Nature and Food…
How to grow a local job rich economy
‘Thinking about Shuman’s idea of looking for holes to plug, I was reminded of a close friend who had a stroke. During rehab, my friend complained about his bad arm. Don’t blame your bad arm, his rehab worker replied. The problem is in your brain, which has to be retrained. We need to retrain our minds to think of how…
It Takes Two to Tango
‘The physical distance that has to be travelled by food from afar is difficult. But it’s less challenging than the social and entrepreneurial distance that has to be travelled by food from down the road.’ —Wayne Roberts Field notes this week:It Takes Two To Tango Boosting the amount of local food that’s eaten is not as simple as persuading more people…