‘By making cities a strategic government sector to manage food, we bring food back to earth and down to earth, to a level where communities can decide their food sovereignty.’ —Wayne Roberts First, Happy New Year to my subscribers and friends. Second, you’ll be happy to hear of my new year’s resolution – to make the newsletter shorter, more stand-alone…
Category: Newsletter
Food Can Make Michegan Great Again
‘I identified gratitude as the major virtue of a food leader, and love for your little corner of the world, and a desire to make it better, as the ideal motivation for food activism.’ —Wayne Roberts I’ve lived next door to Michigan for most of my life, but its reputation (or my own simplistic stereotypes) kept me from getting to…
Ways to go to Urban Agricultures
‘The success of all forms of food activities, including urban agricultures, rests on the economies of scope, not the economies of scale….When we understand that breakthrough method of measuring progress in urban food matters, we will come to see the potential of totally different methods of managing and rewarding food activities.’ —Wayne Roberts When Socrates, Plato and the gang had…
Being Strategic About Food and Jobs
‘By challenging the obsolete food-as-commodity understanding of food that comes from silo-style thinking in today’s fragmented departments of agriculture, water, environment and health, good food advocates will play the same central role in creative disruption that was once the norm in automotive and computer industries.’ —Wayne Roberts This report from the field comes from sunny Alberta, where the people are…
Proof Positive
‘Cities should see themselves as labs, moving toward best practice as quickly as it is tested and passes the proof test.’ —Wayne Roberts In this newsletter, I’m taking you along with me to a December conference of food insecurity researchers from all over North America, the UK, and Australia — all concerned with proving a progressive diagnosis and remedy for…
Getting to Yay!
‘Understand that you pick your issues, in the dead-serious way people mean when they say “pick your battles” and “I don’t want to die on that hill.” You pick an issue because it allows you to make some progress, for both you and the person you want to pick a bone with. If it only works for you, it won’t…
Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion: The Guerilla Update
‘Neo-liberal governments have shut down action much more than they have shut down research and policy, and that’s one of the reasons why peaceful guerilla methods need to be explored.’ —Wayne Roberts This week’s dispatch from the field comes from Ottawa, where I spoke at a conference celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion — a brief, bold, feisty…
Time to call it Quito! Food & The New Urban Agenda
‘Food denial is no longer more forgivable than climate change denial.’ —Wayne Roberts For this week’s dispatch from the field, I’d like to take you to Quito, where an exciting UN conference will take place in mid-October around a new urban agenda. I’d like to, but I can’t. So the next best thing is to introduce you to an excellent website that…
Unused Capacity
‘Working on community gardens and community kitchens or similar projects promotes life skills and employment skills among many so-called “high needs people” (I prefer “highly-unmet-needs people”). Food’s many gifts in this respect, its full spectrum multi-functionality, are among the most grievous expressions of unused capacity.’ —Wayne Roberts THE SECRET STASH THAT CAN FUEL THE NEXT GENERATION OF CITY FOOD ENTREPRENEURS…
The Big Picture versus Big Meme of Wasted Food
‘Food waste is very photogenic. Food scattered around a landfill site is an attention-grabbing, if repulsive, photo-op. Oddly shaped veggies and fruit can be re-imagined as cute and cuddly conversation pieces. A picture is worth a thousand words. But a meme that sticks in the brain is worth a thousand appeals to reason.’ —Wayne Roberts For our field trip in…