‘Instead of asking if we can feed the world, we need to ask if we can nourish the world.’ -Wayne Roberts Field notes this week: Feeding the world one region at a time If you Google “can we feed the world,” you will get 721 million results in less than .83 of a second. That tells me a lot of people have…
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.
City and Country Farms Can Grow Infrastructure
‘The old saying that money doesn’t grow on trees is now totally obsolete.’ —Wayne Roberts Field notes from this week Please stay with me through five outlandish and seemingly unrelated lead-off statements, because in fewer than three pages, you will see some powerful connections to the future of food, farming and cities.1. One of the great fallacies of our age…
A Report Stirs the Agriculture Pot
Farms occupy half the landmass of Ontario’s Greater Golden Horseshoe, and are the foundation of the biggest employment sector in the province – food, beverage and agriculture – a highly effective cluster that rates third in North America in terms of output. The central role that agriculture plays in society, the economy and environment rarely gets its due. But David…
Food and Community: Complete Works
David Crombie was known as Toronto’s “tiny perfect mayor” during the 1970s, when he started turning the international reputation of a bickering place renowned as Toronto the Good into “the city that worked” — at a time when few did. Now a veteran elder statesman, he’s just served as the tiny perfect commissioner for Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe area to figure…
Regional Food Doesn’t Have To Go Far
‘In terms of countryside-city relations, we are at the dawn of a new era where the two harmonize by complementing each other’s strengths and weaknesses. ‘ —Wayne Roberts Field notes from this week For the last few months, I’ve been working closely with three very different groups, each keen to hitch their wagon to a regional food system. Thanks to…
Food Meditations: HOW TO PLAN A FOOD SNOWBALL
One of many problems caused by global warming is that fewer people know what it means to say something “snowballs.” How will people understand how food works? When I was a kid, all of my friends loved starting with a small fistfull of snow and rolling it along as it gathered enough snow to become a huge ball that could…
Food Meditations: Food Democracy Is All Greek to Me
Food and city policy advocates owe a lot to ancient Athens. Even someone as ill-informed as me knows we owe them the root word of policy, politics and metropolis, and the first example of city states. Most people also refer to Athens as the birthplace of democracy, at least for Greek males. But I just found out that the Athenian…
City Food Keeps Digging Deeper
‘Commons sense tells us it’s time to turn to cities to protect common resources that make food and city life come to life.’ —Wayne Roberts Field notes from this week First the bad news: The world is in deep trouble. Now the good news: Maybe cities have what it takes to dig us out. I just read a grim article…
THOUGHT FOR FOOD: Bigger Than Both Of Us
The basic math of food advocacy is to put two and two together, and come up with at least 5. The secret of effective policy is to turn the solution to 2 + 2 problems into at least 5 benefits. That way, any quantitative efficiencies we lose by not binging out on scale and specialization, we more than make up…
THOUGHT FOR FOOD: Finding Space for Food
In this digital age, our respect for the world we can’t see is greatly increased. We talk of the value of a company’s brand, not just its assets, for example, or we discuss soft power, as well as hard power. I think that applies to food in two ways. First, most of the important things about food can’t be seen.…