How to feed our city

What’s the most important question you can ask that city council candidate, when they come a-knocking at your door? How about: “How do we feed this city?”

When I was about 3, my "back to the earth" parents joined with other St. John’s hippies and brought in a boatload of goats. We had one goat, some chickens and geese. We grew some vegetables in our rocky patch of earth. And, like most people who move to Toronto whether from Jamaica or Nova Scotia, the gap between the chicken that laid the eggs and the omelette before me, widened when I came here.

Too many Toronto neighbourhoods are food deserts, where walking to a grocery store can be far more difficult for a single working parent than taking the car to the fast food joint down the road. And too few families can actually afford to buy food, period, after they pay rent.

Still, much of Toronto is experiencing a food renaissance.

More people are growing food in their backyard, asking for advice from those families that have been growing tomatoes and peppers in every square inch of earth they could uncover, from the day they arrived here 40 years ago. Toronto is a foodie mecca, with a multitude of food choices and a crop of chefs and shop owners with a passion for locally produced, ecologically sound food. On Friday nights, my urban kids can join our neighbours for a pay-what-you-can supper cooked in a brick oven by park staff, made from food purchased at the park farmers’ market. Friendships are made while the seeds of community action are sown.

All neighbourhoods should have a taste of this. More than a taste… a big sustaining gulp.

Well, not all is lost. Check out the Urban Food Strategy released by Toronto Public Health. It celebrates what already exists throughout the city. Foodshare. The Stop. Who knew there was a network of Community Food Animators to help establish community gardens? How awesome is that?

It challenges the City to develop policies that will make it easier to create those community gardens or bake ovens and place fresh food markets in parks and other public lands. Don’t close down the pizza oven, stoke that fire!

It challenges us to think outside the box. Why not demand that Transit City add grocery stores at transit stops so riders can get good food on the way home, and give them another reason to take public transit instead of driving? Use those planning, zoning and licensing powers to ensure ALL residents of this city have access to healthy, safe and culturally appropriate food.

Of course, this won’t make a hill of beans' difference if the provincial and federal governments don’t do their part…in so many ways. Most importantly, let’s make sure people who need income support can actually feed their families.

Hunger in this city is not due to lack of food but lack of money. 82 per cent of Toronto’s social assistance recipients have to pay rent in the private market, and that rent averages 100 per cent of their benefits. That leaves exactly $0 to feed the kids.

Can the City of Toronto do anything about that? I say, how can they not?

Not one mayoral candidate in this election, or city councillor for that matter, should escape your doorstep without answering that question.

About Marit Stiles

Comments

[Lela]

If the City screws up community projects like they did in the Dufferin Park fiasco
a few days ago, Ms. Stiles' promoting will end up on deaf ears not to mention their tunnel vision.

[Steve Stojanovich]

The city and Ontario should buy several farms in Ontario, employ people, and send all the food produced to food banks across Ontario. This way, people without money could still go to food banks for food. Food security can be achieced.

[Sonny Yeung]

Dear Marit; we are feeding the City through TRADE with the Global South & East Asia this past winter and to some degree local green houses. How about fair trade where the farmer in the developing world can get a good price compared to our farmers who are subsidized in the West.

We gorge ourselves on more than our fair share of food and would be best to eat small meals and create less waste & lose weight.

As for the poor & working poor, there could be food stamps OR offering up TTC passes to help people get around in off peak times...

P.S. Ontario gov't will replace the $63.5 million childcare subsidy that the feds let lapse...

[Carol E. Harris]

Marit; Thank you for bringing me up-to-date on some urban food initiatives. With considerable interest when last in Toronto, I noticed the growth of "home" front and back gardens.

For my part, I'm working of the issue of food as an educational focus in rural studies. Why? First, it's a social justice issue, as kids in rural areas tend to follow an urban-centered curriculum. We needs issues that are of relevance to rural, as well as urban kids. And I think food will provide a super starting point. Second, food security -- and the space to provide it -- will become ever-increasingly important as climates continue to change and transportation costs soar.
Food is not something one "teaches" but,rather, an area to be researched (by children as well as community members)both historically and, as you indicate, as present-day initiatives.