Food Secure Canada Conference this weekend!

Great food security conference happening this weekend in Montreal! Hosted by Food Secure Canada, this conference will be discussing the wide range of ways to make Canada more food secure, with a variety of talks and workshops under the theme “Weaving together food policy and community action: an agenda for change”. The conference will look for contributions to the development of Canada’s Food Security Policy and discuss issues such as the impact of biofuels on food security and tecchniques to connect food movements at provincial and local levels.

It looks like it will be a fascinating conference, and anyone who attends is welcome to share their experience in the comments section. To find out more about the conference itself, check out Food Secure Canada’s website here. For more about Food Security groups working in your community and across Canada, check out our Food Security links here.

Talking food at the Ontario Food Terminal

thisaway!

This week, as a member of the Toronto Youth Food Policy Council, I had a unique opportunity not available to the general public: to enter the off-limits to the public, high-stakes world of international security – food security that is, at the Ontario Food Terminal. While it may not sound as glamourous as getting through the doors of the Pentagon or the United Nations, for those interested in the Canadian food system, or even food systems in general, getting into the OFT feels like you’ve hit the big time. After all, the vast majority of fresh fruits and vegetables you can find in this city have passed through its doors at some point, and the machinations involved in moving 5.1 million lbs of food a day are definitely impressive.

The outdoor flower market

The Ontario Food Terminal is the central distribution and wholesale hub for the entire province, serving markets in the Prairies and the East Coast as well. The largest market of its kind in Canada (and the third largest in North America), the Food Terminal houses both an international warehouse market and a local wholesale farmer’s market on 162,000 m² beside the Gardiner Expressway.

History

As Bruce Nicholas, OFT Manager and our tour guide explained, the Terminal was founded in the early 1950’s to address the difficulty in distributing food throughout the city from congested St. Lawrence Market (the former hub). The food system was not only struggling with distribution at that time, but pricing as well. Chain grocery stores had begun dropping prices to outcompete mom and pop grocers and at the same time the US had completed construction of interstate highways, making it easy to dump low-priced American products onto the Canadian market. The OFT was born of a time when farmers were a major voting force in Ontario; it was designed to protect farmers and small grocers by bringing them together and providing fair, transparent pricing competition. The Stockyards at Keele and St. Clair was opened at the same time to provide a similar venue for meat producers, but has since closed, the majority of meat production and commerce moving to Kitchener.

The Food Terminal in 2010

Zipping along the corridor

Our tour began at 8:30 am, by which time most of the activity in the market had died down for the day. Since the OFT provides fresh produce to restaurants and green grocers, selling is done before regular business hours, which vendors opening their doors at around 4am. Buyers, whether they are shop owners, “jobbers” who buy and resell at a variety of locations or representatives chains like Longo’s arrive even earlier to get first pickings. Buyers talk and haggle with local producers in the farmers’ market area and international wholesalers inside to find out who has what products, and where the food is freshest and the prices best. Young guys zip around on forklifts, seeming almost to race eachother as they bring pallets of produce looking fresher than you’ll ever see in stores from trucks to vendors and vice versa 

Ontario-Grown Sweet Potatoes

Bruce Nicholas views the OFT as a place that incubates new businesses and new innovations. Many of his Ontario growers started out bringing truckloads and are now supplying tractor-trailers of produce to the Ontario market. He proudly showed us evidence of import-substitution: the sandy soils that used to grow Ontario’s tobacco now being used to produce local sweet potatoes, removing the need to ship them from Louisiana. The support of innovation is seen elsewhere too, in their decades-old waste management system which sends compost back to farmers and was recycling before the blue bin system. This seems to stem more from financial necessity than environmental consciousness, though the OFT is an arms-length organization it receives no government funding, and Bruce makes it clear that the six american cents he gets for returning each of hundreds of plastic pallet corners to the US are definitely worth the trouble.

Food Bank Pickup

Like the Toronto Food Policy Council, the OFT is an important part of what makes Toronto a world-renowned city in the food security sphere, and groups come from across Canada and the US to find out what makes it tick. The end of the day sees social service groups come in for a share of the produce, the Daily Bread Food Bank arrives for a pickup as I’m leaving and Mr. Nicholas tells us about a group of gleaners who purchase and freeze dry food in bulk to send to hunger programs abroad.

Piles of Peppers

Making Connections

It’s clear that the Food Terminal is connected to a variety of players in Ontario’s food web, but exactly how it fits into the picture of a food secure province is complicated. Mr. Nicholas volunteers his frustration about the policy of many farmers’ markets that all vendors must also be growers, farmers are not allowed to pay someone else to sell their products, or products from a variety of farms, at most Toronto markets. Many markets have a policy of “grower-only” vendors, which allows customers to meet their farmer and ask questions, ensures a short chain of accountability, and provides a venue for small-scale and niche farmers who don’t produce enough for grocery stores, to sell their goods. However, as Bruce Nicholas argues, if the whole point is to help Ontario farmers and get people eating as much local produce as possible, should we bother being strict or should we just make like the OFT and allow anyone who wants to vend access to an affordable space? The topic sparked a great deal of discussion among those of us at the tour, we discussed the toll it takes on farmers to drive in and market their goods instead of being on the farm working and yet the potential impacts of not regulating re-selling at markets. We’d love to hear from you, how you think markets can best promote food security and any other impressions or questions about the OFT too!

Honeybee Tour 2

keepin' bees

In my September 23rd post I discussed the Honeybee tour I attended in Grey County, and some beekeeping and farming organizations in the area. Today I’m going to share a bit of what I learned on the tour, things about bee colonies, honey extraction, and beekeeping basics. It’s fascinating stuff – read on!

Bee Basics

Honeybees live in colonies made up of three types of bees: workers, drones, and the queen. The most common type of bee is workers, who are all female, and take care of everything necessary to keep the hive going, collecting pollen, making honey, cleaning, feeding, defense – everything!

Drone Cells (centre)

Second most common, drones are slightly larger, and come from specialized drone cells. They are male, and basically laze around the hive all day eating honey until at one point they mate with the queen and die. Those who don’t get the chance to mate get thrown out of the hive when winter comes to save resources and are left for dead. There is only one Queen, and she is selected as a larva and fed royal jelly so that she becomes extra large. When she mates with the drones she stores sperm inside her body,  allowing her to produce new bees for the next 2-7 years.  To survive the winter, the bees huddle around the Queen, moving their wings to create warmth. They eat up their honey stores to stay alive through the winter, though in large-scale beekeeping facilities the majority of the honey is harvested and the bees are fed sugar water. Whether or not this is good practice is open to debate, some argue it’s healthier as it causes less waste buildup over the winter, while others say it’s not natural.

Honey Production

Honey Varieties

Honey is made from pollen that bees harvest, partially digest and store in cells. The bees fan their wings over the cells, causing water to evaporate from the nectar, until the point where it turns to honey. Then they cap the cells with wax, allowing the honey to store without fermenting. Because bees only travel within 3-5 km of their hives to gather pollen, it is possible to produce different varieties of honey depending what plants are in the region. Honey from different flowers have different colours and flavours, for example blueberry honey being light and thin, orange honey (my favourite!) medium colour and extra flavourful, and chestnut honey being dark, thick, and very strong-flavoured. The average honey you buy in the grocery store is wildflower honey, meaning the bees have foraged from a variety of sources.

Yellow Brood Boxes and green Honey Supers

In order to ensure that the hive is creating surplus honey for harvesting, beekeepers provide a brood box on the bottom for laying eggs and a honey super on top for storing honey. A Queen Separator is included between the two to ensure that the Queen cannot get through and lay eggs in the super. Some colonies are more productive than others, so when the first super is 3/4 full, another may be added.

Honey Extraction

Smoking the hive

When extracting, you want to consider the mood of the bees. If the hive has recently been attacked or weather has been bad, there’s a good chance they’ll be agitated, but generally a hive with a good queen will be docile. Light the smoker with wood shavings or pine needles, and approach the hive from the side so you don’t enter the bee’s flight path. A hive tool is used to crack the top cover open, it will usually be sealed with wax and propolis. You can begin to smoke the hive,

Hive Tool

which signals to the bees that they should start eating honey rather than stinging you. If the honey cells are capped they are ready for harvesting, and can be brushed free of bees and taken for extraction. It’s important to extract at a good distance from the hive,

Robbed Honeycomb

because bees rob honey – they will try to steal it back from you by eating it! (take a look at this picture of comb left near the hive – this is a great way to clean off honey extraction tools with little effort).  Moving farther away means less bees will follow you and less honey can be robbed.

Commercial Comb Cutting

The first step in extraction is removing the caps from the honey, either with a sharp tool or with heated blades, as in the commercial system. The room must be kept at at least 30 degrees C for honey to be extracted, though it shouldn’t spill out of the uncapped comb as the cells are sloped at a 15 degree angle which keeps the honey inside. The comb is then put in a centrifuge, forcing the honey to spin out and collect at the bottom, to be released by a spigot, or pumped elsewhere in larger operations.

Look at that 15 degree angle!

Honey can then be directly bottled,  innoculated with “seed” crystals to form creamed honey, or pasteurized, an unnecessary step that gives honey a longer shelf life without crystallizing, but removes some health benefits. Unpasteurized honey can be reliquified by placing the jar in boiling water for a few minutes. An interesting fact I learned from Catherine at Chatsworth Honey was that honey from different sources crystallizes at different rates; canola honey can crystallize in the comb, whereas honey from fireweed won’t crystallize for five years!

I was going to go into bee diseases and hive problems in this post, but I’ll save it for another day, this post is long enough! Please feel free to email or post with any bee-related questions, and I’ll do my best to answer them!

Honeybee tour 1

Last weekend I was lucky enough to participate in a beekeeping tour being held by FarmStart up near Owen Sound.  FarmStart is a fantastic organization that I had heard a great deal about but never worked with before. It is an Ontario-based non-profit which works to support and encourage a new generation of farmers to develop viable and environmentally sustainable farms. I really appreciated meeting Gayl Creutzberg who led our workshop because she had the perfect mix of enthusiasm and realism that I think defines the entire organization. FarmStart is very committed to fostering small scale, environmentally conscious farms, but they put just as much emphasis on ensuring that these farms remain economically viable. After all, what good is an organic farm that goes out of business after one season? Economic sustainability is a key part of environmental sustainability, and one which is all too often forgotten by those of us who spend our time envisioning a clean, green, future.

FarmStart runs many different training programs and two incubator farms  (the McVean farm in Burlington and the Ignatius farm near Guelph), which provide land and increasing support for new farmers. For those considering starting farms or diversifying their existing farms, they host workshops focussing on a wide range of topics. Beekeeping, or apiculture, was the topic last weekend, and on Sunday I, along with about 15 other bee-enthusiasts visited two farms keeping bees in Grey County.

Honeybee collecting pollen

Bees are fascinating. I thought so before the workshop, and now I could talk about them all day. I’m interested in learning how to keep them in an urban context, an idea which has recently been gaining in popularity.  The Toronto Beekeepers Coop, who keeps bees at the Evergreen Brickworks and on top of the Royal York Hotel have been featured in the Toronto Star (here), and have done great work making urban beekeeping more accepted and understood.

A little background on bees will help explain why they’re important, both in urban and rural areas. The first thing to keep in mind is that there are many, many different kind of bees out there. There are solitary bees, who live alone, and social bees. There are bees who make nests, and mining bees who live underground. There are leaf-cutter bees, squash bees, and bumblebees (learn more here). Some of these bees are native to Canada and have specialized diets, surviving on only a few plants, while others have been introduced from other countries.  Honeybees (Apis Mellifera), are one such introduced species, originally brought over from Europe.

Honeybees doing their thing

Honey-producing bees, along with all other bees and wasps, are a critical part of our ecosystem. They are the primary pollinators of most crops, helping plants to reproduce while they forage for pollen, and without them many of our native species and food crops wouldn’t survive. We depend on them for our survival which makes it all the more frightening when they are threatened, as they have been lately. Many native bee populations have been declining as a result of habitat loss due to urban sprawl and increased pesticide use on farms and lawns. In my next post, I will discuss  Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)  and varroa mites, two serious problems affecting honeybee populations specifically. I will also go further in depth about beekeeping, honeybee colonies, and honey production, for any aspiring beekeepers reading out there.  Stay tuned!

Food Security: Workers Rights

Though the major focus of this blog tends to be gardening tips and troubleshooting, it is also a venue to discuss food security issues both within Canada and abroad. As discussed in previous posts, a population that is food secure is able to access enough nutritious and appropriate food  that they do not have to fear hunger or  malnutrition. Food Sovereignty is similar to food security, but with a broader focus. It looks not only at the accessibility of food to eaters but at the whole food system, the production, distribution and trade routes and the workers involved at each step of the process. Food Sovereignty is concerned with the farmers who grow the food, the land it is grown on, and the surrounding community as well. Discussions of food issues often focus on the farmers and the portion of money they earn for their crops, calling attention to the surprising fact that they usually receive at most 20% of what you pay at the store. Today, however, I wanted to bring attention to the plight of a group who receive even less attention than farmers, and that’s farm labourers.

Farm labourers are people who are brought in to work on farms, often at harvest time when large amounts of manpower are needed to pick, clean, and weigh produce for distribution. To be sure, this is not an inherently dangerous or exploitative work, many farm workers are well compensated, and many people do this kind of work temporarily to make money or in exchange for room and board while traveling (if you’re interested, check out WWOOF or The Harvest Trail). However, there are many places in which farm labourers are taken advantage of, being paid unfairly or not at all, having substandard living conditions and lacking a voice to protect themselves. These types of violations are frighteningly common on many large, industrial farms in the US and Canada. Two groups which work to publicize the realities of farmworkers’ experiences and push for stricter legislation are the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and Justicia for Migrant Workers.

Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW)

The CIW is an organization of Latino, Hatian and Mayan workers throughout Florida. It began in 1993 in Immokalee, FL, the area with the densest population of farmworkers in the state, most of whom worked harvesting tomatoes and citrus fruits. The group has done outstanding work to protect workers’ rights with their Fair Food Campaign. This campaign brought attention to the low wages received by tomato pickers, who earned 1.3 cents per pound of tomatoes picked in 2005, meaning only 40-45 cents were made for a 32 lb bucket. The CIW focused on corporations which purchase huge quantities of tomatoes, such foodservice companies like Sodexo and Aramark, and fast food chains such as Taco Bell, Mc Donalds and Subway. Using a combination of protests and boycotts, they pushed these organizations to agree only to purchase from growers who paid their workers an additional cent a pound –  a minimal-sounding increase, but one which would increase farmworker incomes by 75%.

Another accomplishment of the CIW is their Anti-Slavery Campaign, which shines a light on the fact that there are still many farms relying on modern-day slavery to get their harvesting work done. These farms hire illegal migrants and exploit them for work through witholding pay, threatening, beating and confiscating their passports. The CIW has received national and international praise for their work, and has led to historic court cases and freedom for more than a thousand workers.

For more on the CIW check out this article from Grist.org

Justicia for Migrant Workers (J4MW)

This is an Ontario-based group which focuses on the approximately 18,000 migrant workers in Canada, many of whom come from Mexico, as well as Jamaica and other Carribbean islands. Though most of these workers come through  government-sanctioned programs, they are not extended the same rights as Canadian farmworkers. This means that many of them work 12-15 hour days without overtime, live in overcrowded, unsanitary accommodations, lack access to health care, and use dangerous chemicals without proper protection. J4MW is a volunteer-run group working to bring attention to these issues, and work with migrant workers to struggle for individual and collective rights and create a safe environment to agitate for change.

Please learn more about these campaigns by visiting their websites and consider sharing what you learn with people you know. The fact that these problems exist isn’t a reason to feel powerless – on the contrary, it shows why its so important to be aware of what is happening within our food system, and to continue to work on developing a new one, whether through gardening, buying sustainable food, or getting involved politically!

Cuba: An Urban Agriculture Utopia?

Urban Agriculture in Havana

In 2009 I was lucky enough to participate in a three-week sustainable agriculture tour in Cuba organized through the University of British Columbia by a woman named Wendy Holm. Wendy is a dynamo who has been running tours to Cuba for Canadian students and farmers since 1999, facilitating the exchange of information about techniques for growing food and raising livestock without chemical inputs. 

Growing greens under a shade cloth

Cuba is a country of special focus for people interested in sustainable agriculture because it has developed an extensive and innovative system of food production that is not dependant on oil – a fact made more impressive when you consider that oil is used not only to power vehicles, but as the base ingredient in most fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides used in Canada and the US. This system developed following the fall of the Soviet Empire. Due to the US embargo, the USSR had been Cuba’s major trading partner for many years and the source of oil for their industrialized agriculture. Once the USSR collapsed, Cuba was left without an oil supply and without a system for importing food in place. 

Urban Medicinal Plant Garden

This plunged the country into a time called the “Special Period” wherein Cuba had to completely redesign their system for producing and distributing goods, moving people, and feeding its citizens. The government turned much of the state owned land in and around cities over to agriculture which, by virtue of the lack of imports, had to be done following organic principles, without chemical fertilizers, herbicides, or pesticides. Backyard gardening was also strongly promoted, and supported by governmental agricultural extension agents who were dispatched to farms in the cities and countryside to educate and build connections between growers. The result of this is that Cuba is home to one of the most highly developed systems of sustainable agriculture in the world, and is a country which many look to as a model for how we will deal with the upcoming oil shortages of the future, or “Peak Oil”. 

Horses grazing a mango orchard

My 3 weeks in Cuba allowed me to learn a great deal about this fascinating country and its remarkable transition away from oil dependency, especially in light of its unique geopolitical situation. We travelled to urban and rural farms, growing crops for domestic consumption and export. What was fascinating to see was the level of thought put into each aspect of the agricultural system there, both on individual farms, and in terms of the governmental support structure. 

Large Scale Worm Composting

Farms in Cuba all had extensive composting systems, many including vermicomposting beds up to 100 feet long. They produced compost for their plants as well as worm leachate which was used as a pest repellent. Every farm utilized a variety of techniques for pest control, from organic sprays and companion planting of repellent plants, to a variety

Composting: Greens, Sawdust, and Cachaza (sugar cane)

of traps. Scent traps, to hide the odour of a pest’s target plant, and colour traps, yellow or blue plastic (depending on the colour of the pest’s target plant) distributed throughout the garden on stakes and covered with a sticky substance to catch insects. Another common practice was pasturing animals in orchards, allowing them to graze on grass and weeds growing between the trees. This meant the animals were fed, the trees were fertilized and the weeds were suppressed with no real effort from the farmer. 

Using Sunflower as a trap crop for aphids

The importance of governmental support in Cuba cannot be underemphasized. It was the governmental extension agents who disseminated this information among farmers and the government-funded research stations and schools that developed and researched things like tabaquina, a pesticidal spray made of residue from tobacco processing, and mycorrhiza, fungi which grow on plant roots and improve the plant’s ability to absorb water and nutrients from the soil. The amount of land under governmental control was also a decisive factor in the success of urban agriculture in Cuba, as they had huge areas of unoccupied urban land available to be turned over to food production, something that would be impossible with the private landownership in Canada and the US. This vast area under cultivation allows Havana to produce 90% of its fruit and vegetable requirements to be produced within the city’s borders (although, before you’re too impressed by this statistic, keep in mind that the most common meal in Cuba is 

Medicinal Uses of Fruits - Posted at a market

rice, beans and pork, with vegetables playing a minor role in the country’s food culture). In addition, governmental control of markets assists farmers in planning and distributing their crops for the season, and educating the public about the medicinal and health benefits of various agricultural products. 

Regardless of the fact that the Cuban climate and political structure are very different from our own, there is a lot to be learned from this country, in terms of techniques for growing, systems for supporting farmers, and the wide range of cooperative farming systems seen throughout the country, which I will discuss further in a future post. If you are interested in learning more about Cuba and its experience with “Peak Oil” and sustainable agriculture, check out the links below. 

Very Urban Agriculture

Wendy Holm’s Website 

 Student Cuban Agricultural Tour Course Site 

The Power of Community: Film on Cuba’s Experience with Peak Oil 

Sustainable Agriculture and Resistance, Transforming Food Production in Cuba, 2002, Fernando Funes, et al.

What is Food Security? New Metcalf Food Solutions published for Ontario

One of the stated purposes of this blog is to discuss Food Security concepts and practices coming out of the city of Toronto. A few previous posts have mentioned food security organizations and events in the city, but I haven’t ever taken the time to describe what it is this term really means.

Food Security is something completely separate from Food Safety, but the two terms are often confused. Food Safety is the domain of Toronto Public Health and deals with not getting e-coli, avoiding botulism, and regulating how food products are processed, stored, and distributed. Food Security, on the other hand, is the domain of the Toronto Food Policy Council (website , facebook) and is assuring that all people in the city have access to sufficient nutritous and culturally appropriate food at all times. While food safety deals with avoiding contamination and disease, food security deals with avoiding hunger and more recently overnutrition, that is the overabundance of processed, food-like products such as Kraft Dinner that are causing increased obesity and diabetes in a great deal of the population.

People interested in increasing food security are generally interested in promoting:

food literacy: knowing  how to prepare nutritious foods in an appetizing way, what foods provide different required nutrients, how foods are grown and how to grow and process them yourself.

urban agriculture: creating food-producing spaces in the city whether through community gardens, backyard sharing, school gardens, rooftop gardens or container/home gardens. Food security organizations and individuals ask how much of the city’s food can be grown within our borders, and what we can do to ensure those who need access to fresh produce can get it.

local food: this term has become the buzzword to end all buzzwords in recent months, which is indicative of a good thing but can lead to confusion. When Food Security supporters discuss local food, they often focus on two primary factors.

1)  that the farmers receive a fair price for their food ( since farmers generally see only 10% of the price you pay for food items), which makes farming a more viable business and keeps families and young people on farms.

2) that the food is also processed locally. As in, those Ontario-grown green beans don’t have to be shipped to the States to be cut and canned, because we return to having the infrastructure to do it here, saving fossil fuels in shipping, and saving the provincial food system at the same time. An important part of Food Security is that Canada and its provinces can feed ourselves as best we can. If the country can’t process and distribute the food its citizens require, then if there is a disruption of the international food provision system we will find we are not very food secure after all.

With this basic outline of food security under your belts, you may want to take a look at some of the five new publications from the Metcalf Foundation, a group which researches and funds initiatives to help Canadians “imagine and build a just, healthy and creative society”. These publications describe innovative and necessary methods to improve Ontario’s food security and long term sustainability. The recommendations include:

food hubs: That is, support facilities for food production. These facilities could offer areas for washing and preparing produce,canning stations and canning supplies, dehydrators, and tool-lending facilities,as well as meeting spaces, experts who could provide advice on technical matters, educational workshops, and a library.

Support of Farmers as environmental stewards: That is, Alternative Land Use Services (ALUS). The program pays farmers for carrying out activities such as planting trees for buffer zones, retiring sensitive land from cultivation, building fences to keep livestock away from watercourses, and practising farming in a way that conserves land and reduces greenhouse gas emissions.

Community Food Centres: Like the Stop in Toronto, CFCs provide emergency food supplies through a food bank, and offer programs to teach healthy eating habits as well as cooking and gardening skills.

The Metcalf Food Solutions propose many more interesting ideas as well, all of which are summed up in Menu 2020: 10 Good Food Ideas for Ontario , though the other articles are also available. Take a look and let us know what food security initiatives you’d like to see as a part of Toronto Green Community.

Heritage seeds and community environment days

An excellent day in the garden on Thursday saw us planting up all of our available space and begging to break some new ground as well!This week our workbee coincided with a community environment day at Eglinton Park. Community environment days are put on by the city throughout the summer and are an opportunity for neighbourhood residents to dispose of toxic products, recycle electronics and access free leaf compost provided by the city. An online listing shows when and where community environment days take place in your neighbourhood here.  We took advantage of this free compost supply to prepare a new bed at the garden, which will be a dedicated space for the Great Garden Adventure, our children’s gardening program that will be taking place in July and August. It was hard work breaking through the grass roots and clay soil, but with the great conversation that came up, volunteers ended up staying 20 minutes past the end of the workbee, chatting and breaking up soil!

A lot of great planting got done as well, yellow and green zucchinis, hot and sweet peppers, turnips, and popcorn (the special type of corn needed to make popcorn kernels). In addition, we received a generous donation of heritage tomatoes from a community member, which allowed us to plant 4 different varieties and have many more left over to donate to other gardens. She gave us tomatoes of all colours and sizes, including Tigerella, a red and orange striped variety, Cherokee Purple, a dusky purple tomato, Black Krim, a dark and flavourful Russian variety, and many more.

Heritage varieties are important for many reasons, and have been growing in popularity in recent years, especially since many varieties have been becoming commercially available through farmers’ markets and Community Supported Agriculture. These are varieties of seeds that have been saved for generations due to desirable qualities such as suitability to a specific climate, excellent taste or cultural relevance. This is in stark contrast to the criteria of the industrial food production system. In his 2006 book The End of Food, author Thomas F. Pawlick interviewed tomato industry experts on the most desirable qualities of industrially produced tomatoes. The general consensus was that the most important qualities were: yield, size, firmness (in order to allow long-distance shipping), disease resistance, heat/cold tolerance, uniformity of shape and uniformity in time of ripening.

You may notice, as did Pawlick, that taste and nutritional content did not make the list. In industrial food production flavour and nutrients are not priorities, as evidenced by the fact that vitamin A content in tomatoes has dropped 43% since 1950, with a shift toward prioritizing these industrial-friendly qualities. The same is true of many other vitamins and minerals in all fruits and vegetables; the varieties that can last longer and ship farther  have become the only ones the grocery stores provide. For me, this is the major reason heritage varieties are so important, they allow food to be food, something that nourishes us and tastes good. Beyond that, they also make gardens more biodiverse, providing food and habitat for good bugs and birds, and supporting heritage seeds and their producers is a way to resist the industrial food chain and ensure that these seeds will be available in the future, either by buying them and helping to create a market, or by saving your own and sharing them with other growers.

Environmental and Food Security Events in Toronto

Now that it’s June and gardening season is in full swing, there are lots of events taking place across the city for the environmentally-minded citizen. Here’s a brief list of things I know are coming up, and some info about where to find more events in the future.

Ongoing: Toronto Farmers’ Markets: Get out and meet your neighbours and your farmers and support sustainable agriculture in Ontario. Visit the Apple Tree Market at Eglinton Park on Thursdays 3-7 or check out other markets in the city at the Toronto Farmers’ Market Network.

Tuesday June 1 to June 31 – Bike Month: Bike-friendly talks, rides, and garden tours! http://bikingtoronto.com/bikemonth/

Wednesday June 9 – Toronto Food Policy Council Meeting: Look back on 10 years of the TFPC and discuss the next 10 based on the new Toronto Food Strategy. 2pm at City Hall, Committee Rm. 1

Saturday June 12 – Toronto Tree Festival: Family-friendly Tree Tour, tree planting, eco-art and more. Come visit TGC at our info booth! http://www.toronto.ca/parks/treefestival.htm

Friday June 18 and Friday June 25 –  West End Food Co-op Community Canning: Learning how to preserve not only jams, but ethnic and low sugar canning techniques as well. http://westendfood.coop/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=27

Saturday June 19 – FoodShare Open House: information about the many food security projects being undertaken by this great Toronto organization, and a discussion of how to increase food literacy in schools. http://www.foodshare.net/upcoming-agm2010.htm

Tuesday June 22-29 – LEAF Tree Tenders Training: Learn how to care for and identify trees in the urban forest in four workshops provided by Local Enhancement and Appreciation of Forests (LEAF)  http://yourleaf.org/tree-tenders-volunteer-training-and-stewardship

Thursday June 24 – Toronto Green Community AGM and Speakers Series: Annual General Meeting and talk on Transition Towns: Ontario towns that are preparing for Peak Oil through increasing local resilience and production. AGM at 5:30, Speakers at 7. 40 Orchard View Blvd, Rm 200.

Sunday June 27 – Evergreen Brickworks Pollinators Festival: Learning about how to attract pollinators to your garden, making cities bee-friendly, and urban beekeeping info.  http://ebw.evergreen.ca/cal/event/the-pollinators-festival

Event Resources

Good Works event listings: Green event listings from across Canada http://www.planetfriendly.net/calendar/

Toronto Community Garden Network Event listings: Excellent resource of garden and food security events  http://www.tcgn.ca/wiki/wiki.php?n=EventsWorkshopAndCourses.FrontPage

Green GTA: Monthly Green Events Listing http://greengta.ca/greater-toronto-area-environmental-events

Why we garden

A journalist for the National Post recently contacted us here at Toronto Green Community for an article about community gardening in the city: why its important, how Toronto stacks up against the rest of Canada, and who’s getting involved. Check out the article online here: http://www.nationalpost.com/related/topics/story.html?id=3003137

Reading over the article made me start thinking about the reasons why growing food is so important for city dwellers. The experience of growing food gives the gardener (as hokey as it sounds) an awareness of the many interconnected aspects of our food system. For starters:

1) How plants work. Growing your own food provides you with an understanding of the natural processes of germination, pollination, and propagation that the vast majority of people living in cities lack. When first beginning to garden many people are extremely excited by the starring role flowers play in the process – there are apple flowers, pea flowers, eggplant flowers; anything that forms a fruit has to have a flower at some point. On an early farm visit I remember asking the name of a beautiful flowering vine only to have the farmer break off  me a flower and tell me the name of this pretty little species: Cucumber. For city people who’ve only ever seen vegetables in their final stages, in the supermarket or on a plate, seeing  that  planting a single pea can yield hundreds of peas to eat or replant can be a heady feeling.

2) Respect. Growing your own food is an extremely rewarding pursuit, especially because there’s the potential for so many things to go wrong. Making it through the season without forgetting to water or losing a fair chunk of your harvest to pests and disease can sometimes feel worthy of a lifetime achievement award. But for most of us, if the harvest fails, we can always go to the store or market and supplement our dinners. That’s thanks to the work of farmers, who take the stresses implicit in gardening and multiply them a thousandfold. A gardener who has coddled a stubborn eggplant all season to produce six edible fruits becomes aware of how mindboggling our food system really is, and how thankless the job that farmers do. This awareness is one of the most important things that urban agriculture can bring to people. When citizens and governments take for granted that food will be available to them cheaply and consistently, respect for the work that farmers do begins to decrease.

3) Self-Reliance.  Knowing that you can feed yourself gives a sense of self-confidence and usefulness that many people yearn for. Whether it’s the knowledge that you could survive the apocalypse or just the comfort of knowing how to turn a packet of seeds into a salad, food production has a clear and tangible purpose. As urban society has developed, it’s separation from the rural world has seen all of the work that goes into providing our food, water, shelter and clothing outsourced, first beyond the city and then beyond the country. Many of us work in jobs based around doing things you are told for reasons you may or may not understand. Getting back into growing and preserving food, and creating the other necessities of daily life grounds people; the concepts are simple, and they make sense. Why do we garden? Because we need to eat.

If you’re interested in learning more about growing food in the city, check out some of the following books:

 City Bountiful: A Century of Community Gardening in America by Laura J. Lawson

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter

On Good Land: The Autobiography of an Urban Farm by Michael Ableman

Or Online : http://www.cityfarmer.info/ 

Let us know reasons why you grow food, or other resources you’ve found about urban gardening!