‘It’s time for food advocates to say that the dogma of each city doing the one thing it does best, while each rural area does the one thing it does best — and so “urban is urban, and rural is rural, and never the twain shall meet” – belongs in the museum of bad ideas.’ —Wayne Roberts It takes two…
Category: Newsletter
Return to Sender: Food for Social Return on Food Investments
‘Being in a social justice group doesn’t mean being indifferent to how much money a program costs taxpayers and other investors, or how much the taxpayers and other investors get back in return. In fact, the more social justice programs “pay off,” the more we’ll see of them. ‘ —Wayne Roberts Field notes this week:In this issue, I’d like to…
30 Ways Cities Can Prepare for Global Warming
‘In the era of global warming, urban agriculture’s ability to generate spaces for the development of social skills and adaptability is likely more important than its ability to produce food.’ —Wayne Roberts Field notes this week: There’s a good reason (actually, 30 good reasons covered here, plus at least 90 others to be discussed in later issues) why no-one has been…
Culture! That’s subsidiarity to you, bud
‘Food policy and legal policy mean the same thing in North America, but that isn’t the only way to do food policy. Italians can decouple food policy and food law because they have a rich culture.’ —Wayne Roberts Field notes this week: When I’m having dinner and a drink at a restaurant in my home town of Toronto, I’m used to…
Food as a City Lens & Lever
‘If we thought the purpose of a city transportation department was to reduce unnecessary trips, rather than build roads and highways for unnecessary trips — or do unnecessary road repairs of damage done by unnecessary trips (Toronto spends 100 million a year on this) – such departments would surely look at food trips as the ones to reduce.’ —Wayne Roberts…
Ten Good Reasons For Your Food Project
‘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…
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…