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…
Category: Local Food
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…
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…
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.…
THOUGHT FOR FOOD: Big Food Gets Bigger
The latest on food monopoly trends is that 2015′s merger and acquisition deals added up to $516.5 billion — 54.7 per cent more than in 2014, according to a report in Merger Sector Trend Report. This trend is hard on farmers and rural communities, according to a recent study by senior academic watchdogs of food monopolies — William Heffernan, Mary…
THOUGHT FOR FOOD: Vote Food Democracy
If I say “food” and ask you to say the first word that comes into your mind, I expect it might be agriculture, or maybe health, or hungry, or yummy, or water, or maybe even diet. But I’ll bet you a dollar to donuts (notwithstanding donuts are probably worth more than dollars now, so I should say donuts to dollars)…
Food Meditations: Taking the Pulse of a New Food Trend
My dad often said he ate enough beans and rice pudding during the 1930s Depression and 1940s World War to last him a lifetime. If I never see them again, it will be too soon, he’d tell anyone thinking of serving them to him. Those habits have carried over until today across North America and Europe, even though there are…
Food Meditations: A Mysterious Object Lesson in Food
I often wonder about the mystery of the modern food movement, at least in the urbanized Global North. Why did it emerge so late in history — so long after the labor movement or women’s movement, for instance? And why do people care so much more about local food than about local cars or clothes or energy? I think the…