March, when next season’s crops are due to be planted in Haiti, is less than a month away. For the tens of thousands who have left the rubble and despair of Haiti’s capital to find shelter in some 500 camps throughout the countryside, it could be their chance to plant a new life for themselves – if only a trickle…
The Problem Behind the Obesity Problem Keeps Getting Bigger
I went to school at a time when overweight was much rarer than sensitivity. We used to play a prank where we asked newcomers if they knew a way to lose ten pounds of ugly fat. Cut off your head, we’d roar. The error in scientific method that underlies this feeble joke is called “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” Long…
Women Ignored in Climate Change at Copenhagen
Women hold up half the sky, claims an old saying, coined long before the world’s skies were filled with global warming gases. My sense is that from now on, they will have to hold up a lot more. The absence of debate on this gendered slant to global warming is a silence piled upon silences in the warm-up to the…
Video: Food Policy and the New Urban Vision
Here is a video of Wayne speaking about food policy at the Toledo Public Library, from September 28, 2009. Thanks to the WGTE-TV (PBS) and Knowledge Stream for making it possible.
TIME FOR AN ALTERNATIVE TO CHEAP FOOD
Only Time will tell if we’re at the point in the food debate to pop the taboo question: how come, despite all the squawking about food being too expensive these days, food is so incredibly cheap? What hidden force lies behind all the obvious problems. To give credit where it’s due, Time magazine, a showpiece of glossy conventional wisdom since 1924, is…
Let me be the first to say it: I think it might be okay for you to eat that mango?
I’m out on this limb because, when it comes to making green food choices, the beginning of wisdom is knowing how complex the whole matter has become. While the 100-mile diet makes for a dramatic storyline and expresses the green aspirations of today’s shoppers, it doesn’t necessarily say a great deal about sustainable or equitable food. Most people see me…
LOCAL FARMERS HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT THEIR CHAINS
A crack lets the light in, the song goes, and a first crack has just appeared in the corporate walls of Canada’s top food retailers. Sobeys — a chain that flies the banner “the Hometown Advantage,” and which ten years ago took over a chain that called itself “Hometown Proud”– now confronts nine formerly locked-in franchisees from farm country in…
Flic This! What Farmers and Food Artisans Can learn From Hollywood North
If only food were like the movies. If anyone in the Ontario government should ever want to do something to encourage quality jobs in local food production, there’s no need to look any further than the government’s own Ontario Media Development Corporation and its Ontario Film and Television Tax Credit, which has just boosted the already generous incentives for hiring cultural…
Red Ink: A Canadian View of Food Inc.
I read about Chef Jamie Kennedy possibly going broke on the front-page news (not bad profile for someone who’s not a banker or carmaker getting bailed out by the government) at the same time I got an invite to see the preview of Food Inc. So the chance to think about the two food happenings together gobsmacked me. Food Inc and Food…
Feed the economy by eating locally and sustainably
If a friend said he’d like to give up tobacco or booze but it cost too much to switch to alternative pleasures, most people would call that a sorry excuse for addiction. But people can still get away with saying they can’t afford the switch to healthier and more sustainable foods. That’s usually considered a reasonable, if unfortunate, explanation, not…