Imagining Sustainable Food Systems

Imagining Sustainable Food Systems Theory and Practice Edited by Alison Blay-Palmer Imagining Sustainable Food System...

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Imagining Sustainable Food Systems Theory and Practice

Edited by Alison Blay-Palmer

Imagining Sustainable Food Systems

To our families, friends and communities of food with thanks

Imagining Sustainable Food Systems Theory and Practice

Edited by Alison Blay-Palmer Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada

© Alison Blay-Palmer 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Alison Blay-Palmer has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Imagining sustainable food systems : theory and practice. 1. Food supply. 2. Nutrition policy. 3. Food industry and trade--Moral and ethical aspects. 4. Sustainable agriculture. 5. Food supply--Case studies. I. Blay-Palmer, Alison, 1961 338.1'9-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Blay-Palmer, Alison, 1961 Imagining sustainable food systems : theory and practice / by Alison Blay-Palmer. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-7546-7816-8 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-0-7546-9609-4 (ebook) 1. Sustainable agriculture. 2. Food supply--International cooperation. 3. Food security. I. Title. S494.5.S86B587 2010 630--dc22 2010015520 ISBN 9780754678168 (hbk) ISBN 9780754696094 (ebk) I

Contents List of Figures

vii

Notes on Contributors

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Part 1: Interrogating Sustainable Food Systems 1

Imagining Sustainable Food Systems Alison Blay-Palmer

2

Conceptualizing and Creating Sustainable Food Systems: How Interdisciplinarity can Help Clare Hinrichs

3

Sustainability: A Tool for Food System Reform? Mustafa Koc

3

17 37

Part 2: Inclusion and Exclusion in Sustainable Food Systems 4 Greening the Realm: Sustainable Food Chains and the Public Plate 49 Kevin Morgan 5

Thinking About Labour in Alternative Food Systems Yael Levitte

6 The Urban Food Desert: Spatial Inequality or Opportunity for Change? Ellen Desjardins

71

87

PART 3: The Case for Sustainable Food Systems 7 Food Systems Planning and Sustainable Cities and Regions: The Role of the Firm in Sustainable Food Capitalism Betsy Donald

115


vi

8 The Nexus between Alternative Food Systems and Entrepreneurism: Three Local Stories Hélène St. Jacques 9 Scaling Up: Bringing Public Institutions and Food Service Corporations into the Project for a Local, Sustainable Food System in Ontario Harriet Friedmann 10

Food Policy Encounters of a Third Kind: How the Toronto Food Policy Council Socializes for Sustain-Ability Wayne Roberts

135

157

173

11 Food Insecurity in the Land of Plenty: The Windermere Valley Paradox Alison Bell

201

12 Imagining Sustainable Food Systems: The Path to Regenerative Food Systems Alison Blay-Palmer and Mustafa Koc

223

Index

247

List of Figures 4.1

Commonly cited barriers to sustainable procurement

63

8.1 ONFC warehouse 8.2 Mapletons’ logo 8.3 Mapleton sales sheet 8.4 Arwa hillside 8.5 Inside the Mapleton’s store 8.6 Wagon ride 8.7 Tractor ride 8.8 Long Point Regional Conservation Authority tour 8.9 Prairie grass 8.10 Bee in a bore hole

138 142 143 144 145 148 149 152 153 154

12.1 Policy, socio-communal, economic and environmental spaces through a Sustainable Food Systems lens

225

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Notes on Contributors Alison Bell, Chef Training Teacher and Program Co-ordinator at the David Thompson Secondary School, Invermere, British Columbia. Alison Blay-Palmer, Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. Ellen Desjardins, Registered dietitian (R.D.) and Doctoral student in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University. Betsy Donald, Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Queen’s University. Harriet Friedmann, Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga and the Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto. Clare Hinrichs, Associate Professor of Rural Sociology at The Pennsylvania State University. Mustafa Koc, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Ryerson University, Toronto. Yael Levitte, Executive Director in the ADVANCE Center at Cornell University. Kevin Morgan, Professor of Governance and Development in the School of City and Regional Planning at Cardiff University. Wayne Roberts, Manager, Toronto Food Policy Council, Public Health, City of Toronto. Hélène St. Jacques, M.Ed., President, Informa Market Research Co. Ltd.


Acknowledgements The Imagining Sustainable Food Systems conference was generously funded by the Canada Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Wilfrid Laurier University particularly the Office of Research Services, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and the Vice President, Academic. Their support made the conference and this volume possible. My sincere thanks to all the Imagining Sustainable Food Systems conference participants. Without you there would not be a book. Those who made the most substantial contributions are included in this volume. It has been a privilege to work with all of you. Thanks are also due to those who attended the conference but are not represented in this collection. In particular I am grateful to Sarah Wakefield, Robert Feagan, Karen Landman, Steffanie Scott, Tony Winson, Katherine Pigott, Alex Lovell, Melanie Bedore, Jennifer Sumner, Veronika Mogyorody, John Smithers, Rod MacRae, Marc Xuereb and Reiko Omoto who contributed their thoughts and insights throughout the conference and afterwards. I am also grateful to Valerie Rose, Katy Low and Elaine Couper for their editorial expertise. I am indebted to my family and friends for their support and patience – thank you. I am especially grateful to Walt Palmer for helping me go the distance.


Part 1 Interrogating Sustainable Food Systems


Chapter 1

Imagining Sustainable Food Systems Alison Blay-Palmer As a relatively new concept, sustainable agriculture does not yet reflect a coherent vision of possible and preferable modes of agricultural production and distribution. In the current moment we have the opportunity to create conceptual and practical forms that eliminate exploitive conditions in agriculture, both for the environment and for human beings. (Allen and Sachs 1993: 162)

As the current global political gridlock repeatedly thwarts attempts to develop consensus on pressing issues including climate change, global hunger and poverty the world screams out for reform. The need for change is particularly acute in the realm of food systems as over 1 billion people are malnourished and another 1.3 billion are overweight (Popkin 2009). Before launching the World Food Summit in Rome in November 2009, Jacques Diouf, head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization went on a 24hour hunger strike proclaiming, ‘We have the technical means and the resources to eradicate hunger from the world so it is now a matter of political will, and political will is influenced by public opinion’ (UN FAO 2009). Confronted with these frustrating contradictions, the question becomes how to ignite change? Sustainable food systems loom large as a key dimension in addressing many of these challenges (Friedmann 2009, Sustainable Development Commission 2009, Marsden 2008, Maxey 2007). The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) multistakeholder, global assessment group asserts that, … the widespread realization that despite significant scientific and technological achievements in our ability to increase agricultural productivity, we have been less attentive to some of the unintended social and environmental consequences of our achievements. We are now in a good position to reflect on these consequences and to outline various policy options to meet the challenges ahead, perhaps best characterized as the need for food and livelihood security under increasingly constrained environmental conditions from within and outside the realm of agriculture and globalized economic systems. (IAASTD 2008:3)

As we search for answers, Friedmann and McMichael’s visionary work on food regimes points to the potential for wholesale structural change as systems shift from one regime to another (Friedmann and McMichael 1989, Friedmann 1993a


2005 2009, McMichael 2005 2009). Existing structures that need to be challenged include: 1. The increasing consolidation of corporate interests; 2. Underinvestment in grounded, scale- appropriate agricultural research for developing countries; 3. Demand side pressures on food supplies from declining food reserves, increasing meat consumption and biofuel use; 4. Supply side pressures stemming from poor harvests arguably linked to climate change; and, 5. The emergence of food commodities as a source of international speculative investment (Clapp and Cohen 2009, IAASTD 2008, Friedmann 1993a). However, within the context of so much uncertainty and discord, there may be the seeds for germinating more sustainable global structures. While the exact pathway of the next regime is not clear, two possibilities warrant our attention. On the one hand, Friedmann suggests new directions are emerging along trajectories of corporate versus democratic governance (Friedmann 1993b). In the wake of decades of trade disputes between the US/EU and North/South, and an awakening of environmental consciousness, the next regime may be coalescing around corporate-environmental lines. In the face of stalled international multilateral trade talks corporations have done an end run around the state to create their own set of standards in a move to shape the food system on their terms. Friedmann (2005) suggests that this emerging trend threatens to further bifurcate consumer markets into rich and poor. On the rich end, traceability programs such as EUREP-GAP and its successor GLOBAL-GAP require ‘elaborate technologies of quality control and documentation’ (2005: 259). Not only do these technologies risk embedding an elite food chain in countries and regions that are able to comply with quality assurance requirements (e.g. north eastern Brazil, South Africa ad New Zealand) it also draws lines between people who are privileged enough to engage and those who are unable to partake (e.g. some people can fill out the forms and others who cannot). This leaves the poor with the food and opportunity remnants from the ‘standard’ (Friedmann 2005: 260) commodified, industrial food system. On the other hand, social movements such as Slow Food and Via Campesina resist corporate domination, unfair WTO trade rules and marginalization (Friedmann and McNair 2008, Morgan 2008, Chapter 10). The value of these new institutions is reflected in the Coyote Rojo initiative in the Mexican western highland region of Michoacan, The Coyote Rojo bioregional label, linked intellectually to Slow Food and concretely to Mexican agricultural and environmental politics, is a practical project by one community to help safeguard regional biodiversity and cultural practices. The ability of people to maintain themselves and their families on


their lands and rebuild regional ecology by marketing their products locally but, importantly, also in distant markets. (Friedmann and McNair 2008: 424)

In these cases food is a site for solidarity in the quest for social and environmental justice through new democratic forms of governance. These food groups resist property seizure (both land and intellectual) through coalitions that have stalled multilateral agricultural negotiations. They have united North and South through the valuation of agro-ecological growing and by ‘relinking consumption in municipal regions and protecting, reviving or creating regional food cultures’ (Friedmann 2005: 253). These new spaces offer the chance to ‘reassert the deeper meanings of agroecology and community in ways that do not reject markets but rather seek to “multiple niches” as an alternative strategy to the expansion of one set of products at the expense of all others’ (Fonte and Boccia 2004, Friedmann 2005: 261). These new approaches embed food in ecologically and socially defined localities and regions by ‘making known’ food quality and origins through institutional innovation in the form of new certification programs that link the North and South (Friedmann and McNair 2008: 409). The accompanying modes of regulation and social engagement may provide an opening for increased attention to social and environmental justice in line with principles of sustainability and a new role for public as governance is reconstituted (Friedmann 2005, 2009) so that, Interstitial social transformation is an idea that invites us to depart from a polar divide between autonomous oppositional movements on one side, and a cooptation by powerful corporations and states on the other. It is a muddy terrain into which one can sink at any time, yet perhaps one from which one can renew and redirect the journey as swamps are mapped. (Friedmann and McNair 2008: 430)

This is one hopeful crack in the neo-liberal sidewalk (Leyshon et al. 2001). A second space may be emerging in the form of food policy. According to Friedmann (1993b) there are opportunities for food policy – as opposed to the agricultural policy that framed the second regime – to contribute to re-regulation in the third regime. Food policy shows promise as a more inclusive foundation for new food relationships giving marginalized participants in the global food system voice through consumer and urban communities (Chapter 10). While food policy is still largely linked to municipal governments across North America and the UK (Chapters 9 and 10), there are a handful of examples of national food policies (Chapter 4). In Canada an NGO founded on principles of food security is using a participatory process to draft a national food security policy. In the UK, the Strategy Unit reporting to the Cabinet Office published ‘Food Matters: Towards a Strategy for the 21st Century’ (2008). The power of and challenges for consumers are described as,

Imagining Sustainable Food Systems Diet and attitudes to food have changed markedly in recent years in the UK – and will continue to do so. Demand for better quality food has risen, and people aspire to eat both more healthily and to buy food that has a reduced impact on the environment. But consumers also want affordability and food that fits their lifestyles – as demonstrated by the demand for convenience and by people eating outside of the home more often. Over the longer term, food prices have fallen relative to incomes and to the prices of other goods and services, although recent rises in food prices have put a brake on this trend. The less well off continue to devote a significantly higher proportion of their income to buying food than the better off. (Cabinet Office 2008: i)

The intention to implement a consistent UK food policy is reflected as, The Government’s vision for the food system is one that is more sustainable – economically, socially and environmentally. The future strategic policy objectives for food should be to secure: fair prices, choice, access to food and food security through open and competitive markets; continuous improvement in the safety of food; a further transition to healthier diets; and a more environmentally sustainable food chain. (Cabinet Office 2008: i)

This signals a commitment in the UK from upper levels of government to move towards a substantive sustainable national food policy. However, we must heed Morgan’s well-taken cautions about public procurement as representative of the challenges to enacting sustainable policy. As Morgan reminds us, policy is only the first step and needs to be underpinned by processes, knowledge and leadership to translate the lofty goals into reality (Chapter 4). The case of Brazil provides important insights into the potential successes and problems of food policy from a developing country perspective (Rocha 2009). Brazil’s groundbreaking food policy draws on a national strategy to reduce food security challenges by providing families with conditional monetary transfers, school and community meal programs, and the creation of local distribution opportunities for family farmers. Where feasible, actual governance is devolved to local, tripartite social councils through participatory responsibilities and processes that include budgeting. These councils are supported at the national scale by the National Council for Food and Nutrition Security and the national legislation that entrenched food and nutrition security as a right (Rocha 2009: 51-52). These starting points provoke questions about what would be needed to create and support an equitable, viable food system that accounts for social, economic and environmental concerns for citizens in developing and developed countries, rural and urban regions alike. One of the primary challenges is to unpack the reconstitutive dynamic between the global structures and the spaces for change at the local level. As part of the thinking about the challenges at the community scale, there is an emerging focus in the literature on civil society as a driver of change (Chapters 2, 3 and 10, Hinrichs and Lyson 2008, Morgan et al. 2006, Sumner


2005). Lyson anchors this idea to food through his vision for civic agriculture that ‘represents a broad-based movement to democratize the agriculture and food system.’ (Lyson 2008: 19). In these contexts local, grassroots movements emerge to champion individual and community rights and responsibilities in the face of global pressures. The consequent redistribution of power has the potential to create food centric polities, conventions and institutions. These emerging alternative relational networks could then be a platform to reconfigure local social, environmental and economic structures (Blay-Palmer 2007, Hall and Mogyorody 2007, Sonnino and Marsden 2006). Food systems offer a lens to dissect these new relationships. As a fundamental human need and right (UN 1948) food offers a prism to consider and address sustainability challenges as it translates complicated issues into meaningful ideas, policy and actions. First, as we all eat, food is something everyone can relate to and understand. Second, food unites all dimensions of sustainability – environmental, economic, and socio-cultural spaces – and allows us to explore the interconnected, fluid relationships simultaneously. We can grasp the importance of environmental stewardship when we consider the need for healthy food, soil and biodiversity, all of which can be achieved through ecologically sensitive, enabled farmers. It becomes clear through local food consumption that we can diminish our impact on the environment by reducing food miles. And, it is now more widely understood that buying food from nearby farmers, food processors and retailers keeps money in local economies. Further, social justice issues are more sharply defined as we compare access to healthy, culturally appropriate food across different communities and simultaneously consider the need to support fairly-traded food from developing countries (Morgan 2008). As Kloppenberg and his colleagues explain, to bring about a societal transformation, ‘We start with food. Given the centrality of food in our lives and its capacity to connect us materially and spiritually to each other and to the earth, we believe that it is a good place to start’ (1996: 40). This book offers a window into how we do/can create and theorize sustainable communities through food systems. On the practical side we explore the role of planning, social inclusion, public procurement and innovation as lenses for understanding sustainable food systems. Theoretically the book merges rural sociology, geographies of food, the greening of the economy and the politics of care as we expand our discussions about the connections and pull of/on food in society, the environment and the economy. The book adds to international scholarship through the identification of best practices for sustainable food systems. Importantly, the volume provides a grounded interdisciplinary approach to how we think about and create sustainable, flexible food systems by merging thinking from multiple disciplines with insights from practitioners. Imagining Sustainable Food Systems builds on papers presented at a workshop at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo Ontario Canada in May 2008. The workshop brought together EU and North American academics and practitioners to consider questions about envisioning a sustainable food system from the


perspective of developed countries. While questions of food security are not as dire in developed countries, equitable access to quality food is extremely uneven. In Canada, for example, nearly 15% of Canadians report being food insecure. This is reflected in a recent food bank study that reported nearly 800,000 Canadians used a food bank in March 2009 (CAFB 2009). In considering the creation and delivery of a more sustainable food system, caution is required. Behind the hype about the benefits of sustainability lurk critical questions that need to be fore grounded as we try to move to more progressive food relationships. To this end, it is important to ask: What defines a sustainable food system? How can it be more inclusive? What are the trade-offs and how do we weave sustainability into food systems? To what extent can local and global scales interact without one swamping the other? How do we leverage an interdisciplinary approach to realize sustainable food system goals? And, how do we activate for change? These are some of the questions explored in Imagining Sustainable Food Systems. Overview The book is divided into three sections. In Part 1, we tackle contextual questions and begin by asking how to define ‘sustainable’, ‘food’ and ‘systems’ given the baggage that is associated with each of these terms. We are particularly interested in the role the global scale plays and explore how debates about and pressures from social injustice realities, the need for food democracy and the environmental and economic pressures that impact food systems. In Chapter 2 Hinrichs launches the book with a critical reflection on the meaning, scope and utility of the notion of ‘sustainable food systems’. Briefly tracing the movement from farming to food systems studies, the chapter goes on to examines scholarship on sustainability and systems. Considering the legacies and interplay of discourses of sustainable agriculture, sustainable development, sustainable livelihoods, and more recently sustainability transitions produces more nuanced understandings of sustainability than have generally been evident in food systems scholarship and practice. Hinrichs suggests themes that could enrich food systems scholarship and practice include the emergent and provisional character of knowledge, the inevitability of ‘trade-offs’ and the significance of power and politics. The term ‘systems’ has intuitive appeal, given its attention to comprehensiveness, connections and feedback. Yet despite these contributions, food systems scholarship and practice have generally overlooked critical systems issues, including how to draw boundaries for the system and how to remove the blinders that obscure internal differences within any designated system. The chapter concludes by demonstrating the rising importance of interdisciplinarity if both research and practice on sustainable food systems are to meet and transcend these various challenges.


Koc’s chapter explores the global food system and the ways that sustainability feeds and perpetuates the neo-liberal discourse related to large scale, commodity based agriculture. He questions the usefulness and potentially counter-productive effects of using the sustainability concept. As others have pointed out, employing ‘sustainable development’ to draw attention to the equal consideration of social, ecological and environmental factors may in fact be irreconcilable. Koc points to the contradictions between the modern food system and the resulting devastation of farmland and displacement of millions world-wide. Drawing on documents from the UN and elsewhere, Koc links sustainability and neo-liberal discourse with claims about ‘market failure’ to calls for an even more intensified approach to food production. In Koc’s analysis, an intensification of agriculture would serve to entrench the growing divide between those who have food and those who do not with the call for sustainability providing the rationale for ‘stability’. Koc tells us what is needed is fundamental and sweeping structural reform to address poverty and food security in a meaningful and lasting way. To accomplish this, he challenges us to be more precise in our definitions so that terms like sustainability cannot be hijacked. As Koc explains, ‘This is the time for re-evaluating our current practices, learning from our strengths and also weaknesses.’ (Chapter 3: 42) As a cornerstone of moving forward, Koc posits the need for increased food democracy so that all people participate in food (re)production/consumption and have voice in the realm of food by transforming the food system and its social institutions, practices and related governance structures. In Part 2, the book drills down to address specific questions from the perspective of inclusion/exclusion. The topics addressed focus on social justice issues particularly the potential role for public procurement, labour in alternative food systems, and food access. Questions asked in this section probe the dividends that accrue from new food systems, and at what cost? The second part of the book begins with Kevin Morgan’s chapter on public procurement. In this chapter, Morgan makes an extremely coherent and convincing case for public procurement as a springboard for sustainable economic development. Starting with the fact that British public purchasing power equals £150 billion annually, Morgan uses the school food service program to illustrate how public purchasing can lead to a more sustainable society. He makes a clear case for public procurement as one of the most promising levers to improve the health and well-being of all citizens. By activating the public procurement lever, the ‘state was in effect fashioning new markets in the public sector for more sustainable products by creating opportunities for local farmers and growers to supply locally-produced fresh produce’ (Chapter 4: 59). However, Morgan is also clear that public procurement – as a form of sustainable policy in action – needs to be built on organizational capacity founded on skills, knowledge, regulation, diffused good practice and devolved power (subsidiarity) so sustainability policy is translated into reality. In Chapter 5, Levitte assesses the existing literature on labour in organic and alternative agriculture. While the bulk of her review focuses on developed countries,

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she does engage with developing countries and presents instructive examples for developed countries. Issues tackled include the rapid growth and consolidation within mainstream and sustainable food systems and how this impacts labour conditions and opportunities. Her review points out contradictions so that, for example, while sustainable agriculture as a whole offers better compensation and benefits to workers this applies mostly for larger, market garden organic farms. Levitte identifies multiple challenges and tensions including compensation, benefits, working standards and conditions, and the financial viability and quality of life of farm owners and farm workers. Levitte provocatively concludes by suggesting that lessons about learning and knowledge transfer from the biotechnology industry could have relevance for those working in sustainable food systems. Given the common process of ‘creative destruction’ in both biotechnology and sustainable agriculture, Levitte argues that face-to-face interaction and the importance of farmer/trade associations and networks as critical information sharing nodes needs to be further explored as a way to uncover learning pathways and the power structures of farmers and farm workers that underpin sustainable food systems. Desjardins engages with the literature on food deserts to identify gaps in the thinking and assumptions in this now well-established area of inquiry. Through the analysis of two case studies, one in Harlem New York and the other in Los Angeles, Desjardins focuses on the dangers of oversimplification. Pointing to the need for a much more nuanced and broadly informed approach to food access, she highlights the need to consider: the commitment and critical role of small retailers including corner stores, bodegas and farmers’ markets as community food purveyors; the delicate balance between small business opportunities for dispersed community employment and food provisioning with the need for appropriate food access; and, opportunities for civic engagement as a focal point for addressing food desert challenges. Using examples from the UK including Glasgow and Coventry, Desjardins challenges assumptions about food access and large-scale grocery stores as the panacea for food security. The third part of the book presents case studies as specific examples of doing food in a new way. Our case studies draw on the unique perspectives of their authors and explore issues of: planning and the role of the firm; entrepreneurialism and innovation; certification programs as a vehicle to scale up SFSs; the intersection of sustain-ability and social capital through the eyes of the Toronto Food Policy Council; and, the paradox of food insecurity in rural communities. The section begins with Donald’s innovative take on food systems that links sustainable regional development, food systems planning with the role of the firm. The chapter uses research in the Toronto organic, ethnic and specialty food industry to assess the opportunities to merge thinking in economic geography about the role of the firm with food systems planning. By fusing these multiple perspectives Donald overlays firm dynamics with the emerging realities of food systems planning to offer important insights about how to create more SFSs. In Chapter 8, St. Jacques documents three case studies as she explores the intersection between growing consumer awareness and the demand for local and


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organic food with opportunities for market development, communications and branding. The first case describes the Ontario Natural Food Co-op (ONFC), a ‘flagship’ co-operative distributor with over 400 natural and health food stores in central and eastern Canada. As part of its mission, the co-op makes food accessible and educates people about their food as a way to empower them as food citizens. St. Jacques recounts the journey ONFC embarked upon as they launched a new brand and describes the process and thinking that supports a successful new product. Mapleton’s Organic Dairy is the second case study. Through the lens of diversification and managed risk-taking, the chapter outlines how the family run dairy evolved a successful, national ice cream brand. The final case study tells the story of YU Ranch – a tobacco farm turned eco-champion. The family who owns the farm now raises Texas long-horns for local consumption and helps to run a program that compensates farmers for responsible environmental stewardship. Together, the three cases speak to the merits of building linkages with customers and providing them with food that enhances local SFSs. Friedmann’s chapter puts flesh on the public procurement model bones by sharing the story of Local Food Plus (LFP) – an emerging Toronto success story – that is helping to scale up local food by linking institutions with local farmers. The chapter elaborates how LFP used its third party-certification program to create step-up opportunities that build a more sustainable food system. This project is firmly rooted in nearly three decades of food security-related work that nurtured the social capital and institutions needed to build these new food relationships. The initiative is a testament to the ‘communities of food’ in Toronto. Understanding LFP is especially germane to this volume and SFSs as it has created certification standards that attend to biodiversity, energy use, fair labour practices, animal welfare and regional food sourcing from farms that seek to tread as lightly as possible on the land. In Chapter 10, Roberts challenges us to consider the role of the food policy council as an agent of social innovation for sustainable change. Through his personal account about and frank insights into the dynamics of the Toronto Food Policy Council, Roberts shares his vision and experience of food policy councils as empowering catalysts for societal transformation. Roberts makes a convincing case for food policy councils as engines for sustainable change at all levels of government and institutions demonstrating how FPCs develop social and problemsolving skills and connect people across departments, sectors, communities and approaches. Roberts explains sustain-ability needs to be ‘an action verb, not a passive noun, and food councils are the agencies to activate this change’ (Chapter 10: 174). He describes the challenges encountered by FPCs as they undertake their SFSs missions and puts forward ways to meet and overcome these challenges. Services and programs top the list, as does relationship/ally building. He spells out the nuts and bolts of running an effective FPC ‘to brand sustainable food security policy emotively as well as logically’ (Chapter 10: 181) and the importance of building relationships. Roberts clearly demonstrates the multifunctional benefits of SFSs and the role subsidiarity – illustrated by something Roberts calls

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‘linktanking’ – can play in making food policy work. With inimitable verve Roberts challenges us to, ‘get on with rolling up their [our] sleeves for the real policy and practice of animating, supporting, facilitating, connecting, educating, advocating for, championing and celebrating existing and emergent projects, all the while building strategic bridges for cooperative relations with people who work on projects that either link to or border on food systems.’ (Chapter 10: 177) Bell brings a historical approach to the subject of food access as she contrasts food security in the early 1900s and current levels for the inhabitants of a town in British Columbia, Canada. Her research describes the settling of the region by the British and the creation of award-winning orchards through the development of a vast irrigation system. However, despite earlier food security and related prosperity, in the last two decades the region has seen a decline in the number of farms and a related threat to local food security. The fore grounded contributing factor is decreased farming capacity due to land development pressure as the region has became a site for recreational properties layered onto ineffective land protection policy and the loss of farm autonomy. Bell suggests increased food access and education through CSAs and community gardens as a way to raise the profile about local food security and to stimulate more civic engagement through food. The final chapter ties together the themes discussed throughout the book. The chapter introduces a framework that builds from the literature and empirical work presented in the volume. The framework applies a sustainable food system lens to existing policy and global food structures. Through this prism (Morgan et al. 2006) we are able to envision the socio-communal, economic and environmental spaces that could emerge by framing questions and challenges through the eyes of a SFS. The framework elaborates the guiding principles, practices and institutions central to each space. To test the relevance of the framework, it is applied to a community produce market pilot project. The analysis allows us to identify areas of improvement for both the community markets project and the framework. This underscores the dynamic, hybrid nature of SFS as they are constantly being adapted and reconstituted in the places they evolve. Through the case study we unpack how and where theory and practice converge to produce more sustainable food systems. This final chapter explores the commonalities between sustainable food systems while acknowledging the need for flexible, adaptive food systems. The framework provides a vision for how to move forward as we think and act to increase sustainability. Acknowledgements I am very grateful to Harriet Friedmann for her thoughtful comments. As well, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council is recognized for their


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generous support of the workshop that inspired this book. That said, all errors and omissions are my responsibility. References Allen, P. and Sachs, C. 1993. Sustainable Agriculture in the United States: Engagements, Silences and Possibilities for Transformation. In Food for the Future: Conditions and Contradictions of Sustainability ed. P. Allen, 139168. Toronto: Wiley. Blay-Palmer, A. 2007. Relational Local Food Networks: The Farmers’ Market @ Queen’s. In M. Koc and K. Bronson (eds): 111-120. Buttel, F. and McMichael, P. (eds) 2005. New Directions in the Sociology Of International Development: Research in Rural Sociology and Developments Vol. 11. Oxford: Elsevier. Cabinet Office, Strategy Unit 2008. Food Matters: Towards a Strategy for the 21st Century. Accessed online January 26, 2010 at: http://www.cabinetoffice. gov.uk/media/cabinetoffice/strategy/assets/food/food_matters_es.pdf. Canadian Association of Food Banks 2009. Hunger Counts 2009. Accessed online January 24, 2010 at: http://www.cafb-acba.ca/main2.cfm?id=107185CBB6A7-8AA0-6FE6B5477106193A. Clapp, J. and Cohen, M. (eds) 2009. The Global Food Crisis: Governance Challenges and Opportunities. Waterloo, ON: WLU Press. Friedmann, H. 2009. Discussion: Moving food regimes forward: Reflections on symposium essays. Agriculture and Human Values 26: 335-344. Friedmann, H. and McNair, A. 2008. Whose rules rule? Contested projects to certify ‘local production for distant consumers’. Journal of Agrarian Change 8(2&3): 408-434. Friedmann, H. 2005. From Colonialism to Green Capitalism: Social Movements and the Emergence of Food Regimes. In F. Buttel and P. McMichael (eds): 227-264. Friedmann, H. 1993a. The political economy of food: A global crisis. New Left Review Jan-Feb: 29-57. Friedmann, H. 1993b. After Midas’s Feast: Alternative Food Regimes for the Future. In Food for the Future: Conditions and Contradictions of Sustainability ed. P. Allen, 213-234. Toronto, Wiley: . Friedmann, H., and P. McMichael 1989. Agriculture and the state system: The rise and decline of national agricultures, 1870 to the present. Sociologia Ruralis 29: 2, 93-117. Hall A. and V. Mogyorody. 2007. Organic farming, gender and the labour process. Rural Sociology. 722: 289-316. Hinrichs, C. and Lyson, T. (eds) 2008. Remaking the North American Food System. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press.

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International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD). 2008. Agriculture at a Crossroads: Synthesis Report. Washington: Island Press. Accessed online January 24, 2010 at: http://www.agassessment.org/reports/IAASTD/EN/Agriculture%20at%20a %20Crossroads_Synthesis%20Report%20English..pdf. Kloppenberg, J., Hendricskon, J., and Stevenson, G. 1996. Coming into the Foodshed. Agriculture and Human Values 133: 33-42. Leyshon, A. et al. (eds). 2003. Alternative Economic Spaces. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lyson, T. 2008. Civic Agriculture and the North American Food System. In C. Hinrichs and T. Lyson (eds): 19-32. Marsden, T. 2008. (ed.) Sustainable Communities: New Spaces for Planning, Participation and Engagement. Oxford: Elsevier. Maxey, L. 2007. ‘From ‘Alternative’ to ‘Sustainable’ Food’. In Maye et al. (eds). Maye, D. et al. (eds) 2007. Constructing Alternative Food Geographies: Representation and Practice London: Elsevier Press. McMichael, P. 2009. A food regime analysis of the ‘world food crisis’. Agriculture and Human Values 26: 281-295. McMichael, P. 2005. Global development and the corporate food regime. In New directions in the sociology of international development: Research in rural sociology and developments, Vol. 11, ed. F.H. Buttel, and P.D. McMichael, 227–264. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Morgan, K. and Sonnino, R. 2008. The School Food Revolution: Public Food and the Challenge of Sustainable Development. London: Earthscan. Morgan et al. 2006. Worlds of Food: Place, Power and Provenance in the Food Chain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Popkin, B. 2009. The World Is Fat: The Fads, Trends, Policies and Products that Are Fattening the Human Race. New York: Penguin. Rocha, C. 2009. Enhancing Engagement in Civil Society. Presentation to the UN High level meeting on Food Security for all. January 26-27. Madrid, Spain. Sonnino, R. and Marsden, T. 2006. Beyond the Divide: Rethinking the Relationships Between Alternative and Conventional Food Networks in Europe. Journal of Economic Geography 6:2: 181-199. Sumner, J. 2005. Sustainability and the Civil Commons: Rural Communities in the Age of Globalization. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sustainable Development Commission. 2009. Setting the Table: Advice to Government on priority elements of sustainable diets. Report to the Prime Minister, the First Ministers of Scotland and Wales and the First Minister and Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland. Accessed online January 24, 2010 at: http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/publications/downloads/Setting_ the_Table.pdf.


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UN – FAO. 2009. FAO Head Starts Hunger Strike. Will be joined by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. Accessed online January 24, 2010 at: http://www.fao. org/news/story/en/item/37338/icode/. UN. 1948. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Accessed online February 21, 2010 online at: http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/.


Chapter 2

Conceptualizing and Creating Sustainable Food Systems: How Interdisciplinarity can Help Clare Hinrichs

Introduction The cynical and fatigued may suggest that, however well-intentioned, the term ‘sustainable food systems’ is fairly thin gruel. It may be comforting and familiar in the winter of our concern about the food system, but how well does it fortify us for the hard intellectual or practical work that needs to be done? The term appears widely and disparately – on both longstanding and newcomer university websites dealing with food and agriculture, in the titles of more than a few academic publications, in the documents and displays of various NGOs, and even in the marketing pitches of food service consultants. Despite its varied use and the perils of trend-inspired overuse, I argue in this chapter that the notion of ‘sustainable food systems’ presents conceptual merits and opportunities that, overall, justify its retention. Indeed, with care, caution and some creativity, ‘sustainable food systems’ can provide a useful springboard for thinking about theory and practice surrounding food and agriculture. How then do we conceptualize and create ‘sustainable food systems’? To begin, it can be instructive to pull apart the terms comprising ‘sustainable food systems’. We should grapple with several issues associated with the first term – ‘sustainable’ – and the third term – ‘systems’. (The middle term ‘food’ has its own conceptual and analytical complications, but they will be a minor focus in this chapter.) This excursus on ‘sustainable food systems’ will be unavoidably selective, reflecting issues towards the end of the first decade of the 21st century, ideas borrowed from assorted other writers, questions emerging in my own work, chance conversations and just a little of the 24/7 news that washes over us all now. In this chapter, I suggest that devising an ironclad definition of ‘sustainable food systems’ is neither possible nor desirable. Rather, we need to forge commitment to ongoing critical reflection about this term and the interplay of goals that shape it, as well as the tensions between them. I examine the legacies and interplay of different discourses on sustainability to deepen reflection on sustainable food systems. I further suggest that recognizing and developing the possibilities for

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interdisciplinarity in our own research and practice will help move us forward in the work of conceptualizing and creating more sustainable food systems. Excursus: Sustainable Food Systems The movement for sustainable food systems has become one of the more exciting and pivotal movements of our time, tying together issues of urgent importance and animating growing numbers of sometimes disparate people and social groups (Wright and Middendorf 2008, Hinrichs and Lyson 2007, Kloppenburg et al. 2000). In broad terms, this movement sees much that is worrying and wrong in the current large scale, industrialized, consolidating and increasingly global food system. Outsized, standardized, environmentally degrading, wasteful, unjust, unhealthy, placeless, disempowering – these are a few of the tags that the industrialized, globalized food system invites (Blay-Palmer 2008). Public and academic concerns about the implications of industrialization and globalization in the food system now find some relief (and hope) in the gathering signs of new trends and different directions. Such encouraging signs include large increases in organic acreage worldwide; the proliferation of farmers’ markets, community supported agriculture, and farm-to-school and -college programs; growing public demand for fairly traded products; and other developments, some documented in this book. Various labels, such as ‘local’, ‘alternative’, ‘quality’, ‘transformative’ and ‘sustainable’ have been affixed to these new manifestations. But in the rush of documenting and fostering these encouraging changes in the food system, we may not ask how well these labels work as broad equivalents or whether they, in fact, represent distinct content. And why ask? Under any of these labels, an emerging and different food system faces the onerous assignment of challenging that dominant and dominating food system. Isn’t that work enough? Yet this food system picture, however heroic and stirring, is both simplistic and misleading. First, it resorts to those stark, easy binaries such as global vs local (Hinrichs 2003) or conventional vs alternative (Maye, Holloway and Kneafsey 2007) that ultimately caricaturize the settings and actors in food system struggles and politics. This minimizes the extent to which thinking and practice about food systems have now moved away from essentialized and potentially static formulations. Second, the picture above misses important temporal and spatial aspects of food system change. For example, Selfa and Qazi (2005) demonstrate that patterns, processes and understandings of food system localization have varied across sub-regions of Washington State in the US due to differing sociospatial and agricultural histories. Similarly, in their book Worlds of Food, Morgan, Marsden and Murdoch (2006) trace and explain how food and agricultural networks, conventions and regional legacies and structures interact differently in Tuscany, Wales and California. This approach generates more nuanced, variegated and useful accounts of actually existing and changing food systems, and the possibilities for sustainability.

Conceptualizing and Creating Sustainable Food Systems

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Sustainability in food systems is unlikely to result from one blue ribbon recipe, publicized, circulated and followed to the letter. Instead, multiple recipes need to be located, tested, perused, adapted and shared. With the steady press of recent news about changing land uses, changing diets, changing climate, new appropriations of agriculture for energy feedstocks, rising food prices worldwide, record numbers of visits to emergency food pantries in the global North and the re-ignition of food riots in parts of the global South, it is clear that issues surrounding food, agriculture and environment remain central and urgent. If anything, the evidence also suggests that these issues are more complex, connected and frequently contested than we may have previously recognized. How then does the concept of sustainable food systems provide insight for the work before us? Food That middle term – ‘food’ – requires some brief discussion. It offers its own interesting, conceptual complications, which cannot be explored at length in this chapter. The growing hold of food as an analytical, practical and experiential touchstone remains most important. In my field, rural sociology, historical trends and theoretical shifts have retrained our gaze from agriculture and farming to the larger food system. First, the new political economy of agriculture that took hold in the 1970s and 1980s gave research centered on farms, farmers and farming a more critical cast. From a focus on farm production emerged analytical attention to how upstream and downstream economic relations and the role of the state at multiple levels shape the structures and outcomes of agriculture. Such concerns became situated within the quickening and often contradictory forces of globalization. Rural sociologists entered new and productive conversations with geographers and anthropologists initially, and later with nutritionists, planners and others about the food and farming system. A focus on food, indeed the ‘power of food’ as McMichael (2000) puts it, helped to place these concerns within a framework taking into account both production and consumption relations. Food sits at the socio-ecological nexus in this framework. In production, it ties us to the land – land in its broadest, indeed its Leopoldian land-as-community sense. And in consumption, food nourishes bodies, both human and non-human, with crucial implications for health. In this respect, food’s material and cultural salience, and its extraordinary reach into and through our lives, makes it a compelling focus for research and practice. We know food as those materials produced and gathered, sometimes processed and traded and ultimately eaten and imbibed by humans. We turn to food most fundamentally for nourishment, but pleasure figures too. As biological necessity, but also cultural expression, as personal taste and group tradition, as profit opportunity and as human right, food serves as fulcrum for endless analysis. Given its material and social importance, food beckons as an entry point to questions of sustainability that involve joining environmental and socio-economic concerns. However, the further jump to ‘sustainable food systems’ sometimes

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elaborates the set of concerns in broader, visionary directions. ‘Sustainable food systems’ have been characterized by those working in the field with lengthy, encompassing lists of attributes ranging from ‘more environmentally sound, more economically viable for a larger percentage of community members, and more socially, culturally and spiritually healthful’ (Feenstra 2002: 100) to ‘relational, proximate, diverse, ecologically sustainable, economically sustaining, just/ethical, knowledgeable/communicative, seasonal/temporal, healthful, participatory, culturally nourishing, and sustainably regulated’ (Kloppenburg et al. 2000: 181). Such lists are helpful in underscoring that people understand and value food systems according to multiple, sometimes finely grained dimensions. They eschew simple compartments and reach for comprehensiveness. But does the sweeping normative ambition of such sustainable food system characterizations render them difficult to bring to earth, for either research or practice? You expect all of that? Exactly how? Looking more closely now at ‘sustainability’ and at ‘systems’ can offer further insights. Discourses of Sustainability Not long ago, I was invited to join a task force working to devise a suite of indicators to track the progress of sustainable agriculture and food systems in my state of Pennsylvania. The effort was organized by a prominent Pennsylvania sustainable agriculture NGO and funded by some of the ubiquitous private foundations behind many sustainable agriculture and food initiatives in the US. Participating in that task force were farmers, activists, public educators, and researchers, among others – a thoughtful and engaged group. Nonetheless, our discussions never moved very far beyond the familiar ‘three-legged stool’ of sustainability – with its assumption of compartmentalized and more or less balanced attention to environmental quality, economic vitality and social/community equity and health. Some of the difficulty arose because good data measuring what seemed to matter were just not available. But more often it was difficult to agree on what outcomes mattered most for sustainable food systems. As no one in the group felt satisfied with the results of our efforts, the NGO decided to shelve the sustainable food system indicators project for the time being, with plans to resume sometime in the future. The qualified and still incomplete experience in Pennsylvania measuring and monitoring sustainability-relevant trends in the food system illustrates some of the broad challenges of reductionism, agenda-setting and politics that Bell and Morse (1999) identify in efforts to develop sustainability indicators. How well can any one set of indicators capture, communicate and advance the sustainability However, this is not to suggest that it is impossible or futile to develop sustainable food system indicators. Some efforts have achieved more resolution. In the US, see, for example, the Charting Growth project of the Wallace Center, in partnership with the Kellogg Foundation’s Food and Society Project (http://www.wallacecenter.org/our-work/currentinitiatives/sustainable-food-indicators). For a critique of the neoliberal underpinnings of


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of a given region’s food and agricultural system? Buttel (2006: 214) stresses that ‘sustainability is a contested notion’ that ‘remains [ ] useful [ ] – partly on account of the fact that it is not so static or formulaic that it cannot be debated and contested.’ Sustainability’s uptake across domains, time and national settings certainly demonstrates its pliability. This broad use (and in some cases, it could be argued, appropriation) suggests why ‘many analysts have come to regard it [sustainability] as an insubstantial and clichéd platitude unworthy of further interest or research’ (Drummond and Marsden 1999: 1). However, I believe it would be premature to abandon sustainability as a concept. Instead, more consideration of the shifting currents of sustainability discourse and politics can inform and potentially strengthen our research and practice on food systems. In particular, discourses on sustainable agriculture, on sustainable development, on sustainable livelihoods and on sustainability transitions highlight the flux, contest and possibilities in sustainability. Sustainable agriculture has most readily focused on the ‘environmental or ecological soundness of the production system or agro-food commodity chain’ (Buttel 2006: 214). From its earliest activist glimmers to the institutionalization of formal (though still modest) government programs (at least in the US) to support sustainable agriculture, making farm production practices more energy efficient and protective of natural resources have been paramount priorities for sustainable agriculture. Pretty (1998: 25-26) maintains that sustainable agriculture eschews any ‘concretely defined set of technologies, practices or policies’ aiming instead for the general goal of replacing external inputs with more site-specific agro-ecological processes that reduce environmental harm and depletion. Allen (2004) has long argued that the discourse of sustainable agriculture has largely subordinated any consideration of social equity and justice in its concern for more environmentally sound production. She and other researchers (e.g. Shreck, Getz and Feenstra 2006) have helped to legitimize attention to community food security, farm labor, hunger and poverty, and more importantly to establish their relevance and connection to production agriculture. Yet even so, sustainable agriculture still carries its historical legacy of privileging production practices and relations over those of consumption. Sustainable development gained global prominence with the 1987 publication of Our Common Future by the U.N. World Commission on Environment and Development. That report provided the now iconic definition of sustainable development as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’ The definition’s recognition of intergenerational obligations represented something new, encoding an ethical logic for the preservation of ecological resources and such efforts, see Guthman’s (2008) assessment of the process undertaken by the Vivid Picture project in California.

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integrity. But the unqualified reference to ‘needs’ offered little guidance on how to negotiate differing constructions of ‘need’ vs. ‘want’ in the global North and the global South nor on how to accommodate the possibility that ‘needs’ of future generations might not resemble those of present generations (Redclift 2005). Indeed, skirting the critical question of what exactly is to be sustained and for whom facilitated growing embrace of sustainable development, on their own terms, by some corporate businesses after the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro (Redclift 2005). As a contradictory discourse, sustainable development retains core commitments to economic growth within its loose call to link and address human poverty and environmental deterioration (Kemp and Martens 2007). As many have noted, the term ultimately stands as something of an oxymoron (Redclift 2005). Dryzek (2005: 157) observes that sustainable development involves ‘a rhetoric of reassurance. We can have it all: economic growth, environmental conservation, social justice; and not just for the moment, but in perpetuity.’ Among other things, sustainable development bequeaths to sustainable food systems such approaches as green business, green marketing, and green consumption. The sustainable livelihoods framework, which gained favor with international development-focused NGOs and agencies in the 1990s, offers a sustainability discourse with a different, more micro inflection. Arising from recognition of the intractable food and income security challenges facing the rural poor in many developing countries, sustainable livelihoods are to be analyzed and facilitated at the household and community levels. Sustainable livelihoods share the multi-dimensionality of other sustainability discourses. In a much-cited paper, Scoones (1998: 5) builds the definition of sustainable livelihood: A livelihood comprises the capabilities, assets (including both material and social resources) and activities required for a means of living. A livelihood is sustainable when it can cope with and recover from stresses and shocks, maintain or enhance its capabilities and assets, while not undermining the natural resource base.

Within this sustainability discourse, the amelioration of poverty is central. But rather than making income growth an end in itself, sustainable livelihoods prioritize the well-being and capabilities of people, as they themselves understand them (Scoones 1998). The approach highlights the complex portfolios of activities (agricultural and otherwise) that households engage in and underscores the implications of how activities are clustered and sequenced. But despite the utility of a sustainable livelihoods framework for describing how production and consumption activities intersect to create particular sustainability outcomes, the framework has been applied almost exclusively to poor people and communities in the global South, despite the potential for parallel analysis of livelihoods


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(and lifestyles) in the richer global North (Chambers 2009). The discourse of sustainable livelihoods emphasizes possibilities for rebalancing and integrating food production and consumption at the micro and household level, but any such efforts need to marry inquiry seeking to understand and improve the situation of the poor with critical analysis of the sustainability impacts of affluent lifestyles and practices. Sustainability transition (or transitions) is the most recent variant of sustainability discourse, emanating from the global North, and thus far, mostly researched and applied there. More developed (and discussed) among academics in Europe than in North America, sustainability transition implies steering and management of technology, economy and resources to effect more sustainable outcomes for society (O’Riordan and Church 2001). The concept originated in Dutch policy circles, as a partnership approach to longterm policymaking to transform entire sectors, such as energy (Heiskanen et al. forthcoming), in light of challenges such as shifting resource availability and climate change. The term has a decided whiff of social engineering, in the idea that large-scale socio-technical transitions can be rationally managed. But that may be offset to some degree by recognition that transitions are plural. The distinctive interactions of global forces and structures with specific local contexts necessitate multiple pathways, plural transitions, rather than cookiecutter approaches to sustainability. Such transitions, as explored in the EU context, entail complex and shifting multiple tier governance, by different government entities and civil society groups (O’Riordan and Church 2001). Furthermore, Heiskanen et al. (forthcoming) observe that different national cultures and policy histories necessitate translation and hybridization of the original Dutch transition management model. Others point back to the goals of sustainable development, which remain ‘ambivalent’ and suggest that any transition management can only handle such ambivalence through ‘strategies of reflexive governance’ (Walker and Shove 2007). Related to this, Shove and Walker (2007) caution that the politics of who defines and manages sustainability transitions needs far greater scrutiny. Nonetheless, while not yet widely applied to food systems, the discourse of sustainable transitions emphasizes deliberative planning and ‘constructive dialogue’ (Heiskanen et al., forthcoming) across levels and actors to design and chart more sustainable pathways.

However, grassroots activist and charity initiatives to support ‘transition towns ‘ have now emerged in both North America and Europe, as well as elsewhere around the globe. Prompted by concerns about peak oil and climate change, transition efforts in specific places often center on relocalization of food economies, health services, and education; appropriate technology; community-building and cooperation, with the aim of developing local community self-reliance. See http://transitiontowns.org and http://www.transitionus.org/.

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These somewhat compressed accounts of four discourses of sustainability offer distinct emphases, based on the sector of initial interest, national and institutional origins and historical context. Across these sustainability discourses, three themes can be detected: the emergent and provisional character of knowledge, the inevitability of ‘trade-offs’ and the significance of power and politics. Taken together, these three themes underscore the ongoing tensions in conceptualizing and creating sustainable food systems. Tensions of Knowledge, Trade-offs and Power Recognition of the emergent and provisional character of knowledge has shaped both well-established work on sustainable agriculture practices and newer policy attention to sustainable transitions. The very complexity of food and agricultural systems has stimulated strong reservations, at least in some quarters, about the limits of normal science and traditional models of technical expertise. Work on multi-scalar sustainability analysis of agroecosystems builds on recognition of uncertainty and underscores the emergent, partial and provisional character of any knowledge about the system (Giampetro 2004). It may seem, for example, that sustainability in urban food systems rests less on the hard sciences, than on logistical matters of distribution, exchange and access. But the emergent and contested character of scientific knowledge remains relevant. How, for example, should new knowledge asserting specific nutritional benefits in organic produce over conventional be factored in to the design of community food security programs? What if the next study overturns or complicates that claim? ‘To the best of our knowledge at the present time…’ becomes the critical qualifier for research and practice on sustainable food systems. But, if we are honest with ourselves, one’s best knowledge today may look somewhat dog-eared by next year, as we witness or become further aware of the complexity and uncertainties in food and agricultural systems. This emergent quality is captured in understandings of sustainability that stress its undetermined, rather than prescribed character: Most current efforts to define a sustainable food system assume a steady-state situation; i.e., if we just tweak our current food system so it causes less pollution, promotes conservation, regulates food safety more effectively, and includes more of the ingredients that a healthy diet requires, then it will be sustainable. Probably nothing could be further from the truth. Since nature is full of emergent properties, sustainability is always an emerging concept. Sustainability is about maintaining something indefinitely into the foreseeable future. Consequently, to be sustainable we have to anticipate and successfully adapt to the changes ahead. Sustainability is a process, not a prescription. This process always requires social and ecological as well as economic dimensions. There is therefore no simple definition. It is a journey we embark on together, not a formula upon which we agree (Kirschenmann 2008: 113).


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Because of the emergent character of knowledge, and growing recognition now of different kinds of knowledge, sustainability requires thoughtful and more explicit engagement with the question of ‘trade-offs’ (Gibson 2005). While our utopian visions of sustainable food systems construct long comprehensive lists of desirable attributes, how are the inevitable compromises negotiated and experienced on the ground? With some ring of calculated exchange, the notion of trade-offs means we allow for some effects that may be adverse for sustainability in order to ensure other valued sustainability gains (Gibson 2005). Canadian researcher Robert Gibson (2005) provides guidelines for how to handle such sustainability trade-offs in the context of resource development projects. Trade-off guidelines include prioritizing maximum net gains, putting the burden of argument on the trade-off proponent, avoiding significant adverse effects, protecting future options and explicitly justifying all trade-offs. Starting to think more seriously about trade-offs seems a necessary next step for food system practice. However, any actual implementation and use of trade-off guidelines will be complicated, given tensions and contest around the knowledge necessary to embark on productive discussion of trade-offs. While needing more focused and creative attention, the issue of trade-offs inevitably brings divergent values into play, as suggested in work addressing the carbon footprint and energy implications of local food systems (Mariola 2008). Does an environmental criterion for sustainable food systems trump the importance of more direct relationships between farmers and consumers? If it does, I may need to reconsider meandering the countryside in my private automobile to an array of local markets and farms where I experience that farmer connection. But who decides? Whose values matter? Ultimately, the issue of trade-offs leads directly to one of the most significant tensions in sustainability – the crucial importance of power and politics. For example, decisions about sustainability trade-offs could end up being handled by ‘transition managers’ whose procedures and politics do not incorporate the range of divergent social interests. If that were to happen, sustainability would become a largely top-down, mechanistic and technical-administrative project. However, genuine democratic process and unfamiliar models of more reflexive governance could well be slower and messier for designing, negotiating and working for sustainability, precisely when the problems we face seem more urgent than ever. Because values inform the varied criteria constituting sustainability, the privileging of certain criteria over others has political implications, even when technical considerations might be invoked to justify that decision. In this respect, the rise of public fora on food and agriculture issues, food policy councils, and other expressions of civil society represent important and promising, though still experimental social instruments for creating more sustainable food systems. This fuller consideration of sustainability – its history, variants and tensions – enables us to accept that sustainable food systems represent visions whose empirical reality cannot be captured by fixed, assured knowledge. That does not mean that sustainable food systems are only a shimmering utopian goal at the gates of heaven. As Wakefield points out in this volume, inclusive, flexible

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‘food utopias’ are possible. Ultimately, sustainable food systems will emerge from participation in everyday practice. They must involve a collaborative and inevitably political process of inquiry and adjustment. This means incremental and collective tinkering, work that agroecologists call adaptive management. As Buttel (2006: 214) writes, ‘sustainability is not so much an end-point as it is a process; the notion of sustainability reminds us that there will always be new ways that agro-food systems can be rendered more ecologically sound, more economically viable and more socially just.’ Systems Following this consideration of sustainability, the term ‘systems ‘ in sustainable food systems also merits attention. Referring to food and agricultural systems may be more common in North America than in Europe, where ‘chains’ and ‘networks’ have been favored handles. Perhaps none of these terms is ideal. I’ll cautiously make the case here for ‘systems’. I earlier described rural sociology’s shifting focus from farm to the broader food system. That resonates with varied efforts to provide more comprehensive accounting of the flows and sustainability impacts of the many spheres of social and economic activity depending on and supporting the agricultural sector (Dahlberg 1993, Heller and Keoleian 2003). Life cycle-type approaches, for example, attempt to account for material and energy inputs and outputs, as well as environmental impacts, across the entire system (Heller and Keoleian 2003). In some respects, life cycle assessment is an engineer’s version of commodity chain analysis, but with the human actors (indeed any actors) submerged beneath the material resource flows and impacts. What commends many ‘systems’ approaches is their attention to comprehensiveness, connections, juxtapositions, places of leverage, and potential feedback (Sundkvist, Milestad and Jannson 2005). They avoid the implied linearity of ‘food chains’ and conjure a bigger picture than ‘food networks’. Complexity registers in ‘systems’ and sometimes it’s daunting. Yet ‘systems’ metaphors also trigger concern on the part of some social scientists. Bell (2005) warns of the functionalist tendencies in many systems approaches, and hence an inherent leaning to the status quo, and argues against the sweeping holism and unity privileged in systems-type theory. Writing more specifically about agrifood systems, Bell (2008: 84) claims we ‘miss much potential for a transformative progressivism by focusing on connectedness without an equal focus on disconnectedness.’ Shove and Walker (2007) note that the very process of defining any complex system for analysis can, through sheer weight of the technical abstractions, obscure the significance of unequal social power. Brief consideration of two ideas – boundaries and blinders – helps to clarify some of these systems issues in conceptualizing sustainable food systems. It is well recognized that setting the boundaries of the system has implications for any assessment of that system (Heller and Keoleian 2003). If the system is drawn expansively so that multiple and overlapping relationships of influence


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must be considered, it becomes more difficult to get our hands (or minds) around it. Everything relates to everything! But conversely, if a smaller, more comprehensible ‘system ‘ is drawn, we risking missing critical influences and impacts, and possibly trivialize our efforts. This issue of boundaries poses particular challenges for assessing sustainable food systems. Born and Purcell (2006) write convincingly about the peril of the ‘local trap’ in food systems planning research, where local serves as a presumed stand-in for other sustainability goals. Edwards-Jones et al. (2008) test that assumption empirically by widening the system boundaries within which the impacts of ‘local food’ should be considered. They assess carbon footprints and livelihood impacts associated with vegetables produced in the UK and overseas. Within a larger system perspective, they conclude that the ‘food miles’ advantage of local produce masks a more complex picture of sustainability trade-offs, including farmworker health and well-being. Another challenge to conceptualizing and creating sustainable food systems is what Patricia Allen and I have described as the ‘blinders’ problem (Hinrichs and Allen 2008). Drawing system boundaries, in a sense, sets up the field of concern. It means that those processes within the boundaries are subject to active consideration and analysis, and those outside are designated ‘context’. However, human perception can remain incomplete and uneven in its acuity and interest, even across a specific field of concern, such as ‘the system’. Sociologically, this results in bracketing out – not seeing or not fully seeing – particular social actors and groups within the system. For example, in an ongoing research project examining US Buy Local Food campaigns, we identified tendencies towards social justice ‘blinders’ in the organization and practice of these local food initiatives. We found that more disadvantaged farmworkers and consumers, arguably within the system, have still remained largely outside the scope of these efforts to move the food system in more sustainable directions (Hinrichs and Allen 2008). Local food campaigns have social justice models in other historical ‘selective patronage’ campaigns urging consumers to ‘Buy Union’ or ‘Buy Black’ but participants may wear blinders to important differences within the construction of ‘local’. It may not be entirely possible to overcome these boundary and blinder challenges. But we can be more aware of how they affect our conceptualizations of sustainable food systems. The Interdisciplinary Turn Given the evident flux, complexity and contest in the food and agricultural system, where should we turn theoretically to guide our research? Even within the social sciences, we see less rigid adherence to particular theories now, and more of what we might consider theoretical bricolage. Researchers mine political economy veins, posit actor-networks, provide a dash of conventions theory, dip their toes in political ecology waters. Some of the results may be ad hoc, perhaps misguided.

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But some represent creative efforts to develop more comprehensive theoretical frameworks for understanding both complexity and change in food systems. Academic social science offers rich insights about the food and agricultural system, but alone, social science can only go so far in apprehending food systems and their possibilities for sustainability. We’ve reached a point where the challenges facing the food and agricultural system require more interaction and collaboration across disciplines. We know it’s fruitful to have more exchange across various social science disciplines, as demonstrated by the range of participation in the workshop that inspired this volume. But beyond mobilizing a broader community of social scientists, work on sustainable food systems also requires social scientists to work in new, more productive ways with natural and technical scientists. We’ve arrived at a more pressing interdisciplinary moment, one that reconceives knowledge, innovation and problem-solving as arising from improved (though not necessarily easy) collaboration between the social and the natural and technical sciences. In North America, the academic institutionalization of interdisciplinary approaches to the food and agricultural system is evident in the vigor of professional societies such as the US-based Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society, and the more recently inaugurated Canadian Association for Food Studies. In both the UK and US, we now see increasing dedication of public funding streams to specifically interdisciplinary research on food, agricultural and environmental issues. Furthermore, there is more formal discussion and even research about interdisciplinary practice (see Hinrichs 2008, Lowe and Phillipson 2006, Lowe, Phillipson and Lee 2008 for elaboration). Both the pushes and pulls towards interdisciplinarity are complicated, historically situated, and not entirely the same in different national contexts, where research norms and institutional resources and incentives may differ. What exactly do we mean by interdisciplinarity? Definitions abound, but for purposes of work on sustainable food systems, knowledge and integration are critical components. We can think of multi-disciplinary research as involving one or more academic disciplines. Each addresses a common problem, working to generate its own discipline-based knowledge, which is then shared at the end, arraying the different disciplinary contributions to the problem. Interdisciplinary research is more integrative of effort and knowledge. It entails more collaboration between researchers at the outset. Throughout the research process, there is greater integration of knowledge and theory from the participating disciplines, with final results more cross-fertilized. But more fully interdisciplinary research on certain issues may also integrate other less typical research partners. In the case of food systems, non-academic participants – citizens, practitioners, activists, farmers, ‘stakeholders’ if you will – can have important roles in problem definition, knowledge generation and integration (Lowe and Phillipson 2006). This kind of interdisciplinary research breaks with many longstanding norms in the academy. For a fuller discussion of the typology of interdisciplinary research, on which I base this discussion, see Tress, Tress and Fry (2006).


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However, sustainability questions arguably require a more complex ‘ecosystem of expertise’ to produce relevant and useful knowledge (Brand and Karvonen 2007). What then does interdisciplinarity look like in sustainable food systems research and practice? Interdisciplinarity and Sustainable Food Systems Research Thus far, my own interdisciplinary food systems research experiences have more often involved collaborations with other social science disciplines. My work has benefited, I think, from that cross-disciplinary friction and engagement. The challenges of sustainable food systems, however, necessitate finding ways to generate more creative collaborative friction between the social and the natural sciences. To highlight the innovative research possibilities when social scientists and natural scientists join forces, I will describe one specific research project of the UK’s RELU (Rural Economy and Land Use) Programme. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to shadow a research project called ‘Eating Biodiversity: An Investigation into the Links Between Quality Food Production and Biodiversity Production.’ Henry Buller, a geographer at the University of Exeter was principal investigator. His collaborators included three additional geographers, two animal scientists and two grassland ecologists, some based at other institutions in England. So how was this a sustainable food systems research project? I’ll borrow from the project’s official profile: ‘the research seeks to develop opportunities for ‘win-win-win’ situations where farm enterprises can gain added value from producing high-quality products in terms of taste and nutrition from significant biodiverse pasture types, such as moorland, heathland and salt-marshes, in ecologically sustainable ways.’ At the time I visited, the researchers were studying lamb and beef systems; they hoped also to examine cheese. This project involved agro-ecological analysis of species abundance and richness in pastures, scientific indicators of meat quality and consumer assessments of taste, farmers’ accounts of land use management and livelihood practices, description of processing and retailing enterprises, and analysis of regulatory barriers and opportunities. The research was still midstream when I visited, though it has since concluded. I saw a project that demonstrated innovative practices and approaches holding promise for sustainable food systems research. The research team deliberately constructed cross-disciplinary exchanges from the outset that served to open team members to other members’ disciplinary world-views and improve working RELU is a landmark £24 million interdisciplinary research initiative, funded through contributions from the UK’s main research councils (Economic and Social Research Council, Natural Environment Research Council, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council). Its first year cycle funded 8 projects on ‘sustainable food chains. ‘ Through an ESRC/SSRC Fellowship in 2006, I spent 10 weeks visiting investigators with four of the projects and observing their practice.

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relationships. For example, the research team found resources that enabled them to travel together to France to visit agricultural settings where the unique biodiversity attributes of place contribute to the valorization of particular (or typical) products. As described to me by members of the research team, there were social and intellectual benefits in terms of sharing informal downtime on long train rides, eating out together as a way to probe assumptions about food, and making sense of the French ‘context’ through a common ‘foreigner’ experience. The opportunity to spend time in a topically relevant, but non-British and non-academic environment allowed interdisciplinary research partners to see each other (and themselves in interaction) as other than disciplinary cogs in the academic machine. This research team also recognized the challenge in their interdisciplinary enterprise, including the most basic disciplinary-inflected assumptions about their object of study – food products from animals. Shortly after I left, they planned a team ‘retreat’ session to work specifically on the interdisciplinary aspects of their research process. Among the plans were to put a large cut of meat in the middle of a table around which they all would sit. They would then speak in turn about their respective perceptions of that meat – what it was, what it represented, how it should be used. While this may sound like a rather novel research encounter session, it can be seen as a serious effort to bring their different disciplinary assumptions, ontological readings and epistemological bents into more explicit conversation. Such an exercise demonstrates the partiality of disciplinary knowledge and also new openings for understanding the larger system. Interdisciplinarity and Sustainable Food Systems Practice Incorporating knowledge and concerns of non-academic stakeholders is another way interdisciplinary research can improve understanding of the food system and create possibilities for change. Concerns for accountability, legitimacy and relevance have helped to create openings for including more non-academic stakeholders in the research process (Lowe and Phillipson 2006). Non-academic stakeholders from farmers to consumers may offer edifying definitions of the ‘research problem’ or highlight complexities or contingencies in the system that researchers have overlooked. To posit interdisciplinarity as including partners outside formal academic disciplines throws down the gauntlet to those who see research as the preserve of the academy. It may be jarring, given academic and disciplinary training, and risky, given the structure of rewards and incentives in the academy. But for many, this aspect of interdisciplinarity will be invigorating and consistent with commitments to ‘real-world’ application.

See Buller (forthcoming) for the principal investigator’s own more recent account of how the research group experienced and enlivened interdisciplinary process by considering the representation, translation and mediation of two ‘intermediate objects’ crucial to the research – grass and sheep.


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I could highlight several compelling examples of stakeholder engagement undertaken by the RELU research projects I observed in the UK. Instead, to bring in a North American example, I’ll point to the less formalized, but still notable efforts recently made by some US food systems researchers within our land grant university system, who have participated in interdisciplinary ‘multi-state research projects’ set up by the US Department of Agriculture. The USDA’s Multi-state Projects are governed by the Hatch Act of 1888, which established agricultural experiment stations in each state to conduct research to support and strengthen the nation’s then developing agricultural sector. The mandate has broadened over the years to address environment and natural resources, food and nutrition, family and youth, and rural community development. USDA intends that these Multi-State Research funds encourage cross-state collaborations on critical, often emerging issues that are of high national or regional priority. Specific Multi-state Projects frequently begin with stakeholder groups and concerned faculty or staff at particular land grant universities who have identified problems, potentially also of concern in other states, that would benefit from interdisciplinary research (Lund et al. 2004). The projects bring together researchers working on some specific problem concerning food systems, agriculture and/or environment. They are not generally as deliberate or reflexive about interdisciplinary research, and certainly not as well funded, as the RELU research projects in the UK. However, the US model does create durable communities of research interest, where researchers across disciplines and states commit to conversation and coordination, sharing of research protocols and results toward a common purpose. I participated for 10 years in two related and now concluded projects addressing the development of local food systems in a globalizing environment. I am now participating in another that investigates the opportunities and barriers for mid-scale values-based food chains. In both cases, a noteworthy feature of the research project has been commitment to non-academic stakeholder input, participation and partnership. The local food systems project obtained foundation monies early on to bring food system activists and practitioners to our annual meeting for discussion about the information and research needs they saw. The session was enormously productive for the academics in terms of refocusing research questions and illuminating unseen issues. It also produced several humbling moments. Researcher jargon, the non-academics respectfully submitted, got in the way. Some of what we researchers saw as brilliant, career-advancing theoretical work brought yawns from the activists and practitioners, who wanted marketing information and policy reforms, as well as locally appropriate and at that time unavailable information on varieties, breeds, processing, storage and handling that could better serve emerging local food systems. Nonetheless, partnerships emerged from this session and ongoing interactions. In a book that resulted from the project, non-academic partners collaborated on several of the chapters (see Hinrichs and Lyson 2007). Interdisciplinarity in sustainable food systems practice, however, is not a simple story of everyone happily holding hands. As Harriet Friedmann notes

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in this volume, discussing the collaboration between the University of Toronto and Local Food Plus, productive relationships grow, sometimes slowly, from a history of interaction and receptivity to organizational learning. Nonetheless, some researchers may wrestle with issues of who is steering the work, given rewards and incentives structures of the academy alluded to earlier. And some non-academic researchers may chafe with the slowness of results, or results that question cherished programmatic agendas. Interdisciplinary partnerships take work to nurture and sustain. They offer encouraging possibilities, though no panacea, for advancing sustainable food systems practice. Conclusion We do need to imagine sustainable food systems, to consider possibilities we’ve not yet seen, reflect on the options for getting there, and learn from our designs and our accidents. Ultimately, there can be no ironclad, all-purpose definition of ‘sustainable food systems’. While environmental integrity, economic viability and social equity are likely part of the mix, sustainable food systems in the making are perhaps more tellingly characterized by places of creative tension, including the emergent and provisional knowledge, the inevitability of ‘tradeoffs ‘ that may not be easy or obvious, and the ongoing significance of power and politics. Because sustainability is a process, rather than an endpoint, a tightly drawn definition is not only difficult, but undesirable. Sustainability may look different, depending on how we draw boundaries on the system of interest and what kind of blinders we wear or successfully remove in studying that system. Our success in conceptualizing and creating more sustainable food systems will also depend on new experimentation and continued reflection about the place of interdisciplinarity in this important work. References Allen, P. (ed.) 1993. Food for the Future: Conditions and Contradictions of Sustainability. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Allen, P. 2004. Together at the Table: Sustainability and Sustenance in the American Agrifood System. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Bell, M. 2005. The vitality of difference: Systems theory, the environment and the ghost of Parsons. Society and Natural Resources18: 471-478. Bell, M. 2008. Shifting agrifood systems: A comment. GeoJournal 73: 83-85. Bell, S. and Morse, S. 1999. Sustainability Indicators: Measuring the Immeasurable. London: Earthscan. Blay-Palmer, A. 2008. Food Fears: From Industrial to Sustainable Food Systems. Aldershot: Ashgate.


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Born, B. and Purcell, M. 2006. Avoiding the local trap: Scale and food systems in planning research. Journal of Planning Education and Research 26: 195-207. Brand, R. and Karvonen. A. 2007. The ecosystem of expertise: Complementary knowledges for sustainable development. Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy 3(1): 1-11 (available on-line at: http://ejournal.nbii.org). Buller, H. (forthcoming) The lively process of interdisciplinarity. Area [doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2008.00856.x]. Buttel, F. 2006. Sustaining the unsustainable: Agro-food systems and the environment in the modern world. In Cloke et al.: 213-229. Chambers, R. 2009. Practising what we preach? ID Viewpoints 21 (July). (available on-line at: http://www.id21.org/viewpoints/PDFs/ChScoones.pdf ). Cloke, P., Marsden, T. and Mooney, P. (eds) 2006. The Handbook of Rural Studies Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Dahlberg, K. 1993. Regenerative food systems: Broadening the scope and agenda of sustainability. In Allen: 75-102. Drummond, I. and Marsden, T. 1999. The Condition of Sustainability. London and New York: Routledge. Dryzek, J. 2005. The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourse (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edwards-Jones, G., Mila I., Canals, L., Hounsome, N., Truninger, M., Koerber, G., Hounsome, B. 2008. Testing the assertion that ‘local food is best’: The challenges of an evidence based approach. Trends in Food Science and Technology 19(5): 265-274. Feenstra, G. 2002. Creating spaces for sustainable food systems. Lessons from the field. Agriculture and Human Values 19: 99-106. Giampietro, M. 2004. Multi-scale Integrated Analysis of Agroecosystems. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Gibson, R. 2005. Sustainability Assessment: Criteria and Processes. London: Earthscan. Guthman, J. 2008. Thinking inside the neoliberal box: The micro-politics of agrofood philanthropy. Geoforum 39(3): 1171-1183. Heiskanen, E., Kivisaari, S., Lovio, R. and Mickwitz, P. (forthcoming) Designed to travel: Transition management encounters environmental and innovation policy histories in Finland. Policy Sciences [doi: 10.1007/s11077-009-90942]. Heller, M. and Keoleian, G. 2003. Assessing the sustainability of the US food system: A life cycle perspective. Agricultural Systems 76: 1007-1041. Hinrichs, C. 2003. The practice and politics of food system localization. Journal of Rural Studies 19: 33-45. Hinrichs, C. 2008. Interdisciplinarity and boundary work: Challenges and opportunities for agrifood studies. Agriculture and Human Values 25(2): 209213.

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Hinrichs, C. and Allen, P. 2008. Selective patronage and social justice: Local food consumer campaigns in historical context. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 21: 329-352. Hinrichs, C. and Lyson, T. (eds). 2007. Remaking the North American Food System: Strategies for Sustainability. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Kirschenmann, F. 2008. Food as relationship. Journal of Hunger and Environmental Nutrition 3(2): 106-121. Kloppenburg, J., Lezberg, S., DeMaster, K., Stevenson, G. and Hendrickson, J. 2000. Tasting food, tasting sustainability: Defining the attributes of an alternative food system with competent, ordinary people. Human Organization 59(2): 177-186. Lowe, P. and Phillipson, J. 2006. Reflexive interdisciplinary research: The making of a research programme on the rural economy and land use. Journal of Agricultural Economics 57(2): 165-184. Lowe, P., Phillipson, J. and Lee, R. 2008. Socio-technical innovation for sustainable food chains: Roles for social science. Trends in Food Science and Technology 19: 226-233. Lund, D., Fretz, T., Harrington, M. and Young, E. 2004. Multistate Research Fund: A Research Program that Promotes Relevance, Excellence and Accountability (available online at: www.agnr.umd.edu/users/NERA/LandGrant/ MultistateR esearchFund%20Article11-09-2004.pdf) Mariola, M. 2008. The local industrial complex? Questioning the link between local foods and energy use. Agriculture and Human Values 25: 193-196. Maye, D., Holloway, L. and Kneafsey, M. (eds). 2007. Alternative Food Geographies: Representation and Practice. Oxford: Elsevier. McMichael, P. 2000. The power of food. Agriculture and Human Values 17(1): 21-33. Morgan, K., Marsden, T. and Murdoch, J. 2006. Worlds of Food: Place, Power and Provenance in the Food Chain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Riordan, T. and Church, C. 2001. Synthesis and context. O’Riordan: 3-24. O’Riordan (ed.) 2001. Globalism, Localism and Identity: Fresh Perspectives on the Transition to Sustainability. London: Earthscan. Pretty, J. 1998. Supportive policies and practice for scaling up sustainable agriculture. In Röling and Wagermakers: 23-45. Redclift, M. 2005. Sustainable development (1987-2005): An oxymoron comes of age. Sustainable Development 13(4): 212-227. Röling, N. and Wagermakers, M. (eds) 1998. Facilitating Sustainable Agriculture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schreck, A., Getz, C., and Feenstra, G. 2006. Social sustainability, farm labor and organic agriculture: Findings from an exploratory analysis. Agriculture and Human Values 23: 439-449. Scoones, I. 1998. Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: A Framework for Analysis. Institute for Development Studies Working Paper #72. University of Sussex.


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Selfa, T. and Qazi, J. 2005. Place, taste or face-to-face? Understanding producerconsumer networks in ‘local’ food systems in Washington State. Agriculture and Human Values 22: 451-464. Shove, E. and Walker, G. 2007. Caution! Transitions ahead: Politics, practice and sustainable transition management. Environment and Planning A 39: 763-770. Sundkvist, A, Milestad, R. and Jansson, A. 2005. On the importance of tightening feedback loops for sustainable development of food systems. Food Policy 30: 224-239. Tress, B., Tress, G. and Fry, G. 2006. Defining concepts and process of knowledge production in integrative research. Tress et al.: 13-26. Tress, B., Tress, G., Fry, G. and Opdam, P. (eds) 2006. From Landscape Research to Landscape Planning: Aspects of Integration, Education and Application Dordrecht: Springer. Walker, G. and Shove, E. 2007. Ambivalence, sustainability and the governance of socio-technical transitions. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning 9(3): 213-225. Wright, W. and Middendorf, G. (eds). 2008. The Fight Over Food: Producers, Consumers and Activists Challenge the Global Food System. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.


Chapter 3

Sustainability: A Tool for Food System Reform? Mustafa Koc

The concept of sustainability has been one of the key alternative food discourses challenging the limitations of the current practices in the agri-food system. Yet, like many other alternative food discourses certain institutionalized interpretations of sustainability have been subverting sustainability into a legitimizing tool to justify current practices. As a concept, recognizing the need for balance among environmental, social and economic priorities, sustainability seem to be particularly vulnerable to the interventions of pro-market visionaries during the neo-liberal era. By looking at some of the mainstream reactions to the global food crisis in 2008, I will argue that sustainability needs to be seen as a discursive tool, concurrently aiming to legitimize and transform the structures and institutional practices of the modern capitalist system. If we exclude foraging societies where the primary focus of human activity has been subsistence, it is not an exaggeration to claim that the modern food system is the most efficient, most productive and most profitable food system humans have had in the last 20,000 years. Despite this efficiency and productivity and despite the huge profits made in a commodified food economy, the modern food system suffers three main problems: unequal access to means of livelihood, concerns about the sustainability of current practices in the agri-food system, and worries about the health and safety of modern foods and dietary practices. These problems affect the quality of life of the majority of the world’s population and raise concerns about global food security in the long term. As a researcher studying discourses of alternative food systems, I find the terms ‘food security’, ‘food sovereignty’ or ‘sustainability’ only useful as discursive tools to identify problems with current practices, and for describing an ideal state that may change over time. In this chapter, I will focus my attention on my reservations with the particular interpretations of sustainability, but most of my criticism may apply equally to other ‘alternative food discourses’ such as ‘food security’. My first concern has to do with conceptual clarity. Similar to many other ‘alternative discourses of food’ such as food security, food sovereignty, or food democracy, sustainability has been a vague concept defining a condition that changes depending on the political and ideological perspective of the user. In a way, it can be argued that there are multiple competing and often contradictory

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definitions of sustainability. Compare the definition of sustainability by the Conference Board of Canada ‘“as strategy of choice” for Canadian corporations to promote a better bottom line and long-term prosperity’ (cited in Sumner 2007: 86) with Mendes’ (2007) who talks about ‘a “just and sustainable food system” … as one in which food production, processing, distribution, consumption and recycling are integrated to enhance the environmental, economic, social and nutritional health of a particular place’ (Mendes 2007: 98). In this sense, sustainability needs to be seen not as an objective condition, but as a discourse that can imply different goals depending on the political, ideological or paradigmatic approach one may take (Owens 2003). Talking about sustainability of the modern food system that has systematically encouraged destruction of rural livelihoods while turning millions of people into urban consumers suffering from either malnutrition, eating disorders, or obesity should be a seen as an alarming tendency rather than a societal objective. Development, as we currently understand and practice it, destroys the environment and social forms and should be problematized not legitimized. Sifting through the pages of Food Sustainability: A Guide to Private Sector Action (2008), a document prepared in collaboration with a number of UN and Breton Woods institutions in response to the food price crisis of 2008, one can empathize with the conservative columnist Terence Corcoran: We are now by all accounts in the midst of a global food crisis: key grain prices were up 40% to 130% in the last year, people are protesting and hardship is mounting. But it could soon be worse. Governments and agencies all over the world are gearing up for a global ‘New Deal’ on agriculture policy to solve the food crisis, which means the people who brought us the food crisis are the same people who now want to fix it [my emphasis]. (Corcoran, 2008)

A cursory look at some of the recommendations of the UN report demonstrate that what is being defined as food sustainability is nothing but an intensification of the existing commodity relations that are responsible for the problems that created poverty and hunger in the first place: Investing and improving access to agricultural inputs such as locally adapted seeds, fertilizer and pesticides … Strengthening market linkages and integrating local producers and smallholder farmers into supply chains...Engaging in policy dialogues with stake holders to ensure that the development of economic, regulatory and administrative policies that address the concerns of the private sector, and contribute to better functioning markets. (UN 2008: 5)

As we can see from the above suggestions, in its conservative use, the sustainability discourse serves as a legitimizing ideology to justify commodification,

Sustainability: A Tool for Food System Reform?

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industrialization, and globalization of the agri-food system (Cleaver 1997). Whether this was due to a deliberate neo-liberal attempt to subvert the sustainability agenda, or to reformist efforts to offer sustainable alternatives to the dominant market forces in a language that they can relate to, by not challenging the dominant structures and institutional practices, sustainability discourse loses its power to transform and instead turns into a legitimizing ideology. In its liberal version, the sustainability discourse identifies structural problems of the market economy as ‘market failures’ that need to be remedied with proper policy initiatives. This view gets further exaggerated by neo-liberal discourse that identifies union politics, environmental regulations, and social programs as price distortions. In neo-liberal discourse, privatization and deregulation become crucial practices for sustainable and fiscally responsible development. Since the early 1980s, as a result of the neo-liberal reforms, the gap between the rich and poor widened globally (Koc and Dahlberg 1999). A recent study of global inequalities reported that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total while the bottom half of the world’s adult population owned barely 1% of global wealth (Davies et al. 2008: 3). Globally, there are now over one billion people suffering from hunger and malnutrition, and almost all of these individuals are either producers themselves or descendents of producers who lost their capacity to produce livelihoods on their land in the last few hundred years. The United Nations Development Program estimated that 2.6 billion people survive on less than US$2 a day (UNDP 2008). According to the World Bank figures, the wealthiest 20% of the world population accounted for 76.6% of total private consumption while the poorest fifth accounted for just 1.5% in 2005 (World Bank 2008). The poorest 40% of the world’s population accounts for 5% of global income while the richest 20% accounts for threequarters (World Bank 2008). In addition to social and geographic inequalities in terms of income, wealth and consumption patterns between the North and the South, and between the poor and the rich, there are inequalities in terms of market power that effect livelihoods of the great majority of the worlds population. Neoliberal reforms created the optimum conditions for intensification of corporate concentration (Qualman 2007, Winson 1993). For example, in the US, in beef packing, control of the top four firms increased from 72% in 1990 to 83.5% in 2006. In pork packing, these figures jumped from 37% in 1986 to 66% in 2006. Likewise in broilers, the top four firm shares jumped from 35% in 1986 to 58.5% in 2006 where the top two, Pilgrim’s Pride and Tyson, controlled 47% of the market (Hendrickson and Heffernan 2007). High levels of concentration and vertical integration can also be observed in different sectors of the food system such as seeds, agro-chemicals and retailing, affecting producers and consumers alike. The advantages of the modern food system are unevenly distributed wherein the inequalities are not due to market failure but rather systemic problems created by the current structures of the market economy (Friedmann 1993). One wonders

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about the sincerity of sustainability discourses that would seek ways to protect these structures instead of dismantling them. Food Crisis: Stability as Sustainability In recent years, where blatant violations of human rights have been justified as fiscal prudence and national security, and sustainability subsumed under free market ideology, there was nothing surprising about the food crisis of 2008. It was only a few years ago, when an international consensus to reduce hunger by half by the year 2015 was reached at the World Food Summit (WFS) in 1996 (Koc et al. 2008). The Rome Declaration on World Food Security and the WFS Plan of Action were reading sustainability manifestos identifying ‘sustainable food security for all’, ‘sustainable progress in poverty eradication’, ‘sustainable agriculture, fisheries, forestry and rural development’, and ‘sustainable management of natural resources’ as prime objectives. All of these required ‘further large increases in world food production’ while pursuing ‘food trade and overall trade policies’ and ‘technology transfer consistent with international trade rules’ of course ‘through the sustainable management of natural resources’. What accompanied this commitment to sustainability was also a commitment to stability. ‘Stable and enabling political, social and economic environment’, ‘stable food supplies’, ‘stable employment’, and ‘stable funding from private and public, domestic and foreign sources.’ As the WFS Plan of Action stated ‘A peaceful and stable environment in every country is a fundamental condition for the attainment of sustainable food security’ (FAO 1996: Action #3). Yet, only six years later at the WFS-Five Years Later meeting in 2002, the FAO would announce that the commitment to reduce the amount of global hunger by half by 2015 was no longer attainable. The distributionist anti-poverty approach of WFS reformism was effectively conceiving of sustainability as stability by not offering any structural or institutional changes in the current practices of the food system. When the hungry masses went out to the streets in several Third World cities protesting rising food prices, there was little reason for the world leaders, the UN experts or the media to be surprised. Of course, multi-factor explanations were offered ranging from the rising price of oil, to the increasing consumption of meat in middle class India and China, to the demand as a result of gasohol in response to sustainability concerns. But, following the news trail, one can wonder if the real concern was sustainability or food security, or the political stability of the regimes that continued to feed the world with their cheap labour. As a recent document produced by the Human Security Unit at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affair (2009: 1) states, [f]ood insecurity is inherently interlinked with political security, socio-economic development, human rights and the environment. Consequently, a sharp rise in


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food prices can have significant impact on human security reaching far beyond the immediate effects of hunger and malnutrition.

In his response to the crisis caused by rising food prices, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned that the ‘international community will also need to take urgent and concerted action in order to avoid the larger political and security implications of this growing crisis’ (UN Radio 2008). Similar concerns were raised by John Holmes, Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator of the UN, ‘[r]iots today mean you need a solution tomorrow’ and ‘[g]overnments with no ‘policy space’ and under pressure from organized discontent in urban centres ‘is not likely to be the best decision’ in trying to solve the problem’ (Surk 2008). As an editorial in Time magazine summarized, The idea of the starving masses driven by their desperation to take to the streets and overthrow the ancien regime has seemed impossibly quaint since capitalism triumphed so decisively in the Cold War. … And yet, the headlines of the past month suggest that skyrocketing food prices are threatening the stability of a growing number of governments around the world. (Karon 2008)

Yet, the UN report on ‘Food Sustainability’ (2008) in response to the food crisis would argue that ‘a precondition for food sustainability is a stable climate offering suitable conditions for agriculture and animal farming’ (UN 2008: 14). What was offered as ‘food sustainability’ was institutional legitimization of current practices, ensuring a public that ‘[o]ver the course of time, fair market pricing and understanding of supply and demand will help the poor become better business people and enhance their sustainability in terms of food production and livelihood’ (UN 2008: 37). Democratizing Institutions and Food Democracy Sustainability is a crucial discursive tool in the struggle for a democratic and just food system, as it is quite simply one of the most effective tools to demonstrate the irrationality of the food system (Allen 2004, Feenstra 2002, Heintzman and Solomon 2004, Schlosser 2001), capital’s inability to deal with food provisioning and rational agriculture (Albritton 2009), and structural nature of the problems, such as the farm crisis, hunger and obesity (Blay-Palmer 2008, Roberts 2008, Simontacchi 2001, Riches 1997). Yet, by aiming to offer a balance among social, economic and environmental priorities, sustainability discourse can become open to more conservative interpretations that turn it into a legitimizing tool of the status quo. In our effort to use sustainability as a discursive tool for a democratic and just food system, we need to go beyond developing objective measures, indicators and indices of sustainability and instead ‘transform the premises and ideology of sustainability discourse’ (Allen 1993: 14) to one that ‘proscribes the exploitation

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of people as well as that of nature’ and ‘working toward emancipatory social strategies while at the same time building on the work already done to learn about nature-constrained boundaries on social possibilities’ (Allen 1993:14). There is no doubt that the modern food system has been one of the most efficient, productive and profitable human endeavors ever. Yet, as we are entering into a new century, we have increasing concerns about hunger and malnutrition, about sustainability of the agri-food system, and the health and safety of foods we consume. As the current accumulation and fiscal crisis of the state deepens, we are likely to see some of these problems deepen as well (Koc 2009). This is the time for re-evaluating our current practices, learning from our strengths and also weaknesses. An honest re-evaluation necessitates identifying how the structures of the modern society and the food system contribute to these problems. Change, however, cannot come without democratization and an opening up of space for individual creativity and social innovation in existing institutions. Using the concept of ‘food democracy’ Lang (2007) emphasizes the need for democratizing the food system. This means looking at ‘food as a locus of the democratic process... to ensure that all have access to affordable, decent healthenhancing food’. This means going beyond ‘adequacy of supply and stresses decency and social justice in the food system wages, working conditions and internal equity. Against food democracy, we can posit ‘food control’, using food as vehicle of control’ (Lang 2007: 12-13). In a similar way, Busch (2000: 3) defends the need for deepening ‘our practice of democracy in the political sphere by making it more participatory and deliberative’. Busch proposes ‘networks of democracy’ that create ‘individual autonomy while defining and reaching for the common good, in a manner that embeds moral responsibility’ while informed individuals can participate in the decision making process and political debates (2000: 186-87). This notion of democratization may sound redundant for those who see democracy simply as an electoral process. Yet, in the first decade of the 21st century, we have already observed disastrous examples of political and corporate irresponsibility that have brought the world economy to near collapse, widened income gaps among the haves and have-nots, and led to blatant violation of basic human rights and dignities, in addition to declining social citizenship. To counter neo-liberal assault on democratic citizenship, we need to demand democratization of all social institutions in modern society including the science, the state, the market, the media, the education, and the civil society. For sustainability of any social system, we need to create spaces for public participation and structures to embed public responsibility and vision of public good in all institutions. Lyson (2004) and DuPuis (2006) point out the importance of alternative institutional practices and governance as part of their sustainability agenda. As Lyson’s ‘civic agriculture’ or DuPuis’ ‘civic markets’ concepts demonstrate, no matter how small they might be, what makes the community based solutions so significant is that they not only offer alternatives against the socially, economically and environmentally destructive practices of conventional agriculture and markets, but


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also set examples of alternative ways for democratic engagement and governance structures (Hinrichs 2003, 2000). Alternative discourses of food, such as ‘food security’, ‘food democracy’, ‘food sovereignty’ or sustainability are important tools in this democratic engagement for transforming the food system and existing social institutions and practices. However, we need to see them as evolving societal goals that can have multiple different interpretations, and as vulnerable to becoming legitimizing tools in the arsenal of the dominant forces. For this reason, rather than defining them as ‘ends’ that can be reduced to a number of indicators, we need to open them to a critical scrutiny and define them as means but not ends for a more democratic society. References Albritton, R. 2009. Let Them Eat Junk: How Capitalism Creates Hunger and Obesity. New York: Pluto Press. Allen, P. 2004. Together at the Table: Sustainability and Sustenance in the American Agrifood System. University Park, Penna.: Pennsylvania State University Press. Allen P. (ed.) 1993. Food for the Future: Conditions and Contradictions of Sustainability. New York: Wiley. Blay-Palmer, A. 2008. Food Fears: From Industrial to Sustainable Food Systems. Aldershot: Ashgate. Busch, L. 2000. The Eclipse of Morality: Science, State, and Market. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Cleaver, H. 1997. Nature, neoliberalism and sustainable development: Between Charybdis and Scylla. Paper prepared for the 4th Ecology Meeting Economy and Ecology held by the Instituto Piaget, Viseu, Portugal, April 17-19, 1997. Available at http://libcom.org/library/nature-neoliberalism-sustainabledevelopment-cleaver [accessed September 14, 2009]. Corcoran, T. 2008. Who caused the world food crisis? National Post. April 8. Accessed online July 21 2010 at: http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/ columnists/story.html?id=428913. Davies, J., Sandstrom, S., Shorrocks, A. and Wolff, E. 2008. The world distribution of household wealth. Discussion Paper No. 2008/03, UNUWIDER. Available at http://www.wider.unu.edu/research/2006-2007/20062007-1/wider-wdhw-launch-5-12-2006/wider-wdhw-report-5-12-2006.pdf [accessed August 21, 2007]. Denis, A. and Kalekin Fishman, D. (eds) The New ISA Handbook in Contemporary International Sociology: Conflict, Competition, Cooperation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. DuPuis, E. 2006. Civic markets: Alternative value chain governance as civic engagement. Online. Crop Management doi:10.1094/CM-2006-0921-09RV.

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Heintzman A. and Solomon E. (eds) 2004. Feeding the Future: From Fat to Famine, How to Solve the World’s Food Crises. Toronto: House of Anansi Press. FAO 1996. Rome declaration on world food security and world food summit plan of action. Rome: FAO available at http://www.fao.org/docrep/003/w3613e/ w3613e00.HTM (accessed August 14 2009). Feenstra, G. 2002. Creating space for sustainable food systems: Lessons from the field. Agriculture and Human Values 19(2): 99–106. Friedman H. 1993. The political economy of food: A global crisis. New Left Review. I/197:29-57. Hendrickson, M. and Heffernan, W. 2007. An Overview of Concentration in the Food System. Available at http://www.foodcircles.missouri.edu/leopold/index. htm [accessed August 21, 2007] Hinrichs, C. 2003. The practice and politics of food system localization. Journal of Rural Studies 19: 33-45. Hinrichs, C. 2000. Embeddedness and local food systems: Notes on two types of direct agricultural market. Journal of Rural Studies 16: 295-303. Karon, T. 2008. How Hunger Could Topple Regimes. Time Friday, Apr. 11, 2008, available at http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1730107,00.html Koc, M. 2009. Hunger and Plenty: Fragmented Integration in the Global Food System. In Denis et al.: 323-335. Koc, M. and Dahlberg, K. 1999. The restructuring of food systems: Trends and research and policy issues. Agriculture and Human Values, 16(2): 109-16. Koc, M., MacRae R, Bronson K. (eds). 2007. Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Food Studies. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Koc, M., MacRae, R., Desjardins E. and Roberts, W. 2008. Getting civil about food: The interactions between civil society and the state to advance sustainable food systems in Canada. Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition 3(2/3): 122-144. Lang, T. 2007. Food security or food democracy. Pesticides News, 78, 12-16. Lyson, T. 2004. Civic Agriculture: Reconnecting Farm, Food and Community. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Mendes, W. 2008. Implementing social and environmental policies in cities: The case of food policy in Vancouver, Canada. Ideas 32 (4): 942-967. Morgan, K., Marsden, T., and Murdoch, J. 2006. Worlds of Food: Place, Power, and Provenance in the Food Chain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Owens, S. 2003. Is there a meaningful definition of sustainability? Plant Genetic Resoruces 1 : 5-9. Qualman D. 2007. The Farm Crisis and Corporate Profits. In Koc M. et al.: 95-110. Riches, G. (ed.) (1997) First World Hunger: Food Security and Welfare Politics. London: Macmillan. Roberts, W. 2008. The No-nonsense Guide to World Food. Oxford: New Internationalist. Schlosser, E. 2001. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.


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Simontacchi, C. 2001. The Crazy Makers: How the Food Industry is Destroying Our Brains and Harming our Children. New York: Tarcher/Putnam. Sumner, J. 2007. Sustainability and the Civil Commons: Rural Communities in the Age of Globalization. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Surk, B. 2008. UN: Food riots ’warning sign,’ Toronto Star April 8, 2008 available at, http://www.thestar.com/article/411406#survey. United Nations. 2008. Food Sustainability: A Guide to Private Sector Action, September 2008, UN Global Compact Office available at http://www. unglobalcompact.org/docs/news_events/9.1_news_archives/2008_09_24/ food_sustainability.pdf on September 3, 2009. UNOCHA. 2009. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs – Human Security Unit. Human Security at the United Nations Newsletter Issue 5, Spring 2009. UN Radio. 2008. UN hosts high-level meeting to tackle growing food crisis. UN Radio 14/04/2008 available at http://www.unmultimedia.org/radio/english/ detail/37265.html. UNDP (United Nations Development Program). 2005. Human Development Report 2005: International Cooperation at a Crossroads: Aid, Trade and Security in an Unequal World. New York: The United Nations Development Programme. Winson A. 1993. The Intimate Commodity: Food and the Development of the Agri-Industrial Complex in Canada. Toronto: Garamond Press. World Bank. 2008. World development report 2008: Agriculture for development. Washington, DC: World Bank.


Part 2 Inclusion and Exclusion in Sustainable Food Systems


Chapter 4

Greening the Realm: Sustainable Food Chains and the Public Plate Kevin Morgan

Introduction Recent debates on the state in urban and regional studies have paid too much attention to spatial scale and too little to organizational capacity. With an increasingly complex multi-level polity emerging in the European Union, embracing sub-national as well as national and supra-national political scales, it is hardly surprising that the spatial structure of the state has commanded so much attention of late (Brenner 2004). However, in this article I want to suggest that the state’s organizational capacity – its capacity to regulate the economy, deliver public services and procure goods and services – needs to be better understood if we are to arrive at a finer appreciation of the scope for, and the limits to sustainable development in advanced capitalist countries. Sustainable development, it is always worth stressing, needs to be understood in a multiple sense to include the social, economic and environmental dimensions of development because all too often it is reduced to the third of these dimensions. As we will see later, this narrow and emasculated conception of sustainable development is becoming all too apparent in the UK, where it is justified by the claim that the environmental dimension is easier to measure and manage compared to the social and economic dimensions. It is also the case, however, that the environmental side is perceived, by governments and corporations alike, as less threatening and more easily contained than the social and economic dimensions, which open up questions of social justice and economic democracy that constitute more of a challenge to the status quo. In other words ‘greening the realm’ can be understood in one of two ways. In a minimalist sense it refers to the narrow environmentalist interpretation of sustainability identified above. On a broader interpretation, it also refers to the political project of creating a ‘green state’, which has been defined in generic terms as ‘a democratic state whose regulatory ideals and democratic procedures are informed by ecological democracy rather than liberal democracy’ (Eckersley 2004: 2). In substantive terms, this means a state that accords parity of esteem to This chapter first appeared as a journal article in 2008 in Regional Studies, 42(9), 1237-1250. Reprinted with kind permission from Taylor & Francis.

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all three dimensions of sustainable development, a state that seeks to implement sustainable practices not merely in the public sector but also, through the powers at its disposal, in the private sector as well. The very possibility of a ‘green state’ under capitalist conditions is, of course, open to question; indeed, it is the subject of a lively debate between ecologicallyminded Marxists (Hay 1996, O’Connor, 1998) and ecological modernizers (Hajer 1995, Eckersley 2004). While the former tend to argue that ‘sustainable capitalism’ is something of an oxymoron, the latter contend that the prospects for ‘green growth’ under capitalism may be better than the critics allow, even if some of them concede that a deeply green democratic state would be tantamount to ‘a postcapitalist state’ (Eckersley 2004: 84). The prospects for sustainable development under capitalism will clearly also vary from one country to another, depending on the strength of the ecological coalition in the nation-state. Where there is a strong ecological coalition, it is more likely that the state will be pressured to exercise its powers in favour of sustainable development. The key powers of the state – particularly its power to levy differential taxes, its power to regulate and its power to deploy its procurement budget – can be used to favour some activities over others. Potentially, this amounts to a powerful set of incentives and sanctions to change the behaviour of the public, private and third sectors, as well as the behaviour of individuals and households. Of all the powers at the disposal of the UK state, I shall argue that none has been as neglected as the power of public procurement. This is more surprising than it may seem because the public procurement budget amounts to some £150 billion per annum, and this constitutes an incredibly powerful mechanism for the state to promote sustainable practices throughout the national economy. As we will see, however, this power is more apparent than real because it is fragmented across hundreds of functionally distinct bodies which have little or no incentive to collaborate for common ends. The state’s organizational capacity to engage in green or sustainable public procurement is further compromised by a lack of skills, which means that procurement managers have neither the competence nor the confidence to play a catalytic role in greening the realm – certainly not in the stronger sense discussed above. There are exceptions to this generalization of course, and the case of public food provisioning may be one of them. The public provision of food – in schools, hospitals, care homes, prisons and so forth – is arguably a litmus test of the state’s commitment to sustainable development in the fullest sense of the term because, depending on the nature of the provisioning, it can address social justice, human health, economic development and environmental goals, the main domains of sustainable development. Food is an especially good prism through which to explore these domains because agri-food has a unique status. Although it is invariably treated as one ‘sector’ or ‘industry’ among others, food is actually unlike any other for the simple reason that we ingest its output. Accessing the products of the agri-food ‘sector’ is therefore essential to human health and well being in a way that access to other products is not, which is why

Greening The Realm: Sustainable Food Chains And The Public Plate

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the moral economy aspects of food are so important (Morgan et al, 2006). The concept of the moral economy has re-emerged in recent years, partly as a response to the excessive utilitarianism of mainstream economics and partly as a vehicle for academics and activists to address the normative issues that they consider to be intrinsically significant (such as health, education and well being), rather than merely instrumentally significant (such as income). According to Andrew Sayer, one of the leading social theorists in this field, the moral economy, embodies norms and sentiments regarding the responsibilities and rights of individuals and institutions with respect to others. These norms and sentiments go beyond matters of justice and equality, to conceptions of the good, for example regarding needs and the ends of economic activity. They might also be extended further to include the treatment of the environment (Sayer 2000: 79).

The moral economy of food is nowhere more apparent than in the case of food provisioning through public canteens, or what I call the ‘public plate’ for short, because it is in these prosaic settings that we find the most vulnerable consumers of all – namely pupils, patients, pensioners and prisoners. The nutritional quality of public food, its organoleptic properties (smell, taste, texture) and its provenance (how and where it is produced) can be used as an indicator of the moral economy of food as well as of the sustainability of the food chain itself. To explore these issues of moral economy and sustainability I shall focus on the recent reform of the school food service in the UK. The barriers to the sustainable procurement of school food are similar in many ways to the barriers facing green procurement more generally in the UK, therefore it is necessary to have some understanding as to why this function of the British state has been so poorly deployed for so long. The Fallible Client: The Paradox of UK Public Procurement One of the puzzling paradoxes of economic policy in the UK is that successive governments have shown an avid interest in areas (like money markets) where they have little or no control, but have virtually ignored other areas (like public procurement) where they enjoy almost complete control. Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, the history of public procurement in the UK is littered with costly and embarrassing delays, especially in the defence, information technology and civil engineering sectors. Far from being a recent phenomenon, the fallibility of the British state in the public procurement arena predates iconic failures like the Millennium Dome, raising deeper questions about the competence of the state to act as an intelligent customer. Long forgotten examples of problematic public procurement projects would include the System X digital exchange and the Advanced Passenger Train, both of which were commercial disappointments despite their innovative technical qualities. In contrast to France, where public procurement power was successfully deployed to modernize key sectors of the economy, particularly mass

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transit, energy and telecommunications, the history of public procurement in the UK is a story of untapped potential (Cawson et al. 1990). The fallibility of the British state as a customer is nowhere more evident than in the defence sector, where the Ministry of Defence (MoD) is ostensibly in charge of the procurement process. The scale of the problems in this sector is without precedent in the UK, even if smaller fiascos like the Dome continue to haunt the popular imagination. In its latest progress report, the National Audit Office disclosed that the largest twenty weapons projects are currently overspent by almost £3 billion and, taken together, they have been delayed by a total of 36 years. Such are the delays and cost overruns on the notorious Eurofighter aircraft (now called Typhoon), that the current cost is no longer even published because it is deemed to be ‘commercially sensitive’ (NAO 2006). There is no easy explanation for this lamentable public procurement performance, though the main reasons would have to be sought in some combination of the following: the lack of project management skills at the highest levels of the civil service; a bureaucratic culture which extolled policy design over project delivery; the silo-based structure in Whitehall, which stymied the dissemination of good practice; and the fact that this lack of technical competence is both cause and consequence of a lack of political confidence, rendering civil servants and their masters reluctant to assert public sector priorities over private sector interests (Cawson et al. 1990, House of Commons 2001, Craig 2006: 206). Although it created more problems than it solved, the Thatcherite offensive against the state was partly an attempt to import private sector business skills into the heart of the public sector, a trend that actually intensified under New Labour. Between 1997 and 2005 for example, the Blair governments are estimated to have spent some £10 billion on management consultancy fees. New Labour’s modernization of government agenda is such a bonanza for private consultants that it amounts, in the words of a whistleblower, to the ‘plundering’ of the public sector in which civil servants have ceded too much control to external private sector suppliers on the advice of their internal private sector consultants (Craig 2006). According to this analysis New Labour convinced itself that it needed private sector skills to deliver more effective public services, a skill set that was beyond the ken of the traditional civil service. Here it was merely echoing the words of a senior partner at Ernst and Young, who said ‘the public sector must have access to the skills needed to perform successfully in this more competitive regime: skills more commonly found in the private sector than in public service’ (Craig 2006). A new era in the history of public procurement began in 2000, when the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) was formed to modernize public purchasing and to secure better value for money from government contracts. The creation of the OGC as an office of the Treasury was the main outcome of a major review of civil procurement in central government conducted by Peter Gershon, the first chief executive of the OGC. The Gershon Review of civil procurement exposed a woefully inadequate if not shocking picture:


• • • • • •

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No one really knew how much was being spent by the government on a whole range of products and services The government was not utilizing effectively its position in the market place, for example through leveraging its relationship with suppliers The fragmented approach to procurement meant that there was enormous variations in performance Public procurement was not regarded as a core competence and its professional status within government suffered as a result There was plenty of scope for government to become a more intelligent and professional customer, but this potential was not being tapped There were major value for money improvements to be gained simply by doing things better (Gershon 1999)

The modernization programme that followed this catalytic review begged an important question that has never been resolved – should procurement be modernized within an old, cost-cutting business model (doing things better) or does modernization embrace a new, more sustainable value-adding business model (doing better things)? According to Gershon (2001), the modernization and greening of public procurement went hand in hand, as he told a Greening Government Procurement conference, Our attention is firmly focused on value for money – not simply the lowest price. This means looking at quality and whole life costs, including disposal and packaging, which are areas where environmentally friendly products tend to score well...Your task is to work out how to procure environmentally friendly goods while retaining value for money. We should not accept a ‘green premium’ as an inevitable consequence of greening Government procurement.

As we will see later, the notion that the ‘green line’ is synonymous with the ‘bottom line’ in public purchasing decisions has proved to be a profoundly difficult claim to substantiate, despite repeated assurances from Whitehall that there is no conflict between them. What threw this issue into sharper relief was the second Gershon review, which claimed to have identified £21.5 billion in ‘efficiency savings’ that could be made over a three year period, all of which could be reinvested in front line services (HM Treasury 2004). This was doubly attractive to New Labour ministers because it promised to increase investment in public services by cutting civil service bureaucracy and public sector inefficiencies. More than a third of the £21.5 billion ‘efficiency savings’ was scheduled to come from public procurement as a result of buying goods and services more cheaply. One of the main mechanisms for realizing cost savings, according to the review, was through the economies of scale that would be achieved by aggregating demand by cutting local government purchasing centres from some 400 separate local centres to perhaps 10 regional centres or even four national centres. Regional purchasing consortia, along with new ‘toolkits’ to help public sector managers to design value

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for money procurement policies, heralded ‘nothing less than a revolution in the way government does business’ (Timmins 2004). Taken together the Gershon reviews constitute a tipping point, signalling the formative moment when the state ceased to be the naïve and fallible client it had been for much of the post-war period. Belatedly, the strategic potential of procurement was beginning to be recognized at the highest levels of government, an epiphany that occurred in the private sector at least a decade earlier, when firms in the auto and electronics sectors woke up to the fact that strategic sourcing was one of the ‘secrets’ behind the success of Toyota and Nissan (Cooke and Morgan 1996). Although the Gershon reviews acknowledged that value for money should not be confused with low cost, the pressure to realize ‘efficiency savings’ often means that, in practice, these can easily become one and the same thing. What constitutes ‘value for money’ has emerged as the central question in the new politics of public procurement because the challenge of sustainable development is first and foremost a challenge to the conventional ways in which we view and value things. The Ecological Client: The Challenge of Green Procurement The political commitment to sustainable development in the UK began with the 1992 Earth Summit, when the UK government signed up to the UN-sponsored Rio Declaration. The first formal sustainable development strategy appeared in 1994, followed by another in 1997 and a third in 2005, underlining the growing significance of sustainability issues in mainstream British politics. Although there were some ad hoc initiatives in the late 1990s, green public procurement emerged in a systemic way in the UK in 2001 with the formation of the Sustainable Procurement Group in Whitehall, an inter-departmental group created to consider how central government procurement could support sustainable development. DEFRA and the OGC took the lead in this process and, in 2003, they jointly announced the first minimum environmental standards for all new central government contracts, covering such aspects as energy efficiency, recycled content and biodegradability. This was said to be ‘a vital first step’ in putting in place the structures and strategies to support and encourage sustainable procurement (DEFRA 2003b). Like charity, ecological behaviour begins at home and therefore one of the key tests of the political commitment to sustainable development is the sustainability of the Government Estate, the collective term for all government departments and their executive agencies. The Framework for Sustainable Development on the Government Estate began to set targets for central government departments in 2002, though it was not until 2004 that public procurement targets were included. Progress in meeting these targets used to be reported annually in the Sustainable Development in Government (SDiG) report, which was originally complied by government itself. This may help to explain the fact that the 2004 SDiG report was charged with exaggerating the progress that the Government Estate was making with its sustainable development targets (NAO 2005). To overcome


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this conflict of interest, where government was effectively assessing itself, the SDiG report is now compiled and analysed independently by the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), which has been given a watchdog role in this area. In its first report the SDC used a ‘traffic lights’ analysis to rate progress and it concluded by giving government red marks against performance on waste, water and commitment to sustainable development, and amber warnings against performance on energy, travel, estate management, biodiversity and public procurement (SDC 2005). Central government’s green procurement efforts began by focusing on a small number of products, in particular paper, timber, electrical products and food, where it was believed that some ‘early wins’ could be secured. Of these products, public sector food purchasing has received the most attention, largely because of the unexpected political salience of school food, an issue addressed in section four. In reality central government had begun to focus on public sector food catering long before school food became a cause celebre in 2005. An official inquiry into the future of farming and food, held in the wake of the foot and mouth crisis, concluded by saying that ‘local food’ offered untapped opportunities for hard pressed primary producers to re-connect with their consumers, and it identified public procurement as one of the means to this end (Policy Commission 2002). It was against this political background that the Public Sector Food Procurement Initiative (PSFPI) was launched by DEFRA in 2003. The main aim of the PSFPI is to encourage public sector purchasers to work in concert with farmers, growers and suppliers to ensure that sustainable food is consumed in public canteens. It has five broad objectives: • • • • •

To raise production and process standards To increase tenders from small and local producers To increase consumption of healthy and nutritious food To reduce adverse environmental impacts of production and supply To increase the capacity of small and local suppliers to meet more exacting demand standards. (DEFRA 2003a)

In addition to these broad objectives, the PSFPI aims to promote the demand for organic food; to improve choice for minority ethnic communities; to enhance working conditions for public sector catering staff; to reduce food waste; and to improve the standard of data collection and monitoring. Despite its modest resources, the PSFPI is an innovative and inclusive programme embracing a wide array of very different actors, including central government and local government, public sector purchasing bodies, farmers, food service companies, NGOs and universities. As we will see, there are major barriers to the design and delivery of sustainable food throughout the food chain, from farm to fork. To help overcome these barriers, the PSFPI offers purchasers and suppliers a one-stop shop of guidance, advice and inspiration through a dedicated web site, which includes

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practical projects, model specifications, training, professional contacts and case studies of sustainable food chains. What constitutes a ‘sustainable food chain’ is of course open to debate, but the key feature would surely be the internalization of the costs that are externalized in conventional food chains by, for example, factoring into the equation the effects on human health and the environment of the entire agri-food cycle from farm to fork. This is clearly what DEFRA had in mind when it launched the initiative by highlighting the multi-dimensional nature of public sector food procurement: If we are what we eat, then public sector food purchasers help shape the lives of millions of people. In hospitals, schools, prisons, and canteens around the country, good food helps maintain good health, promote healing rates and improve concentration and behaviour. But sustainable food procurement isn’t just about better nutrition. It’s about where the food comes from, how it’s produced and transported, and where it ends up. It’s about food quality, safety and choice. Most of all, it’s about defining best value in its broadest sense. (DEFRA 2003a: 2)

For the worlds of policy and practice, this statement succinctly captures the multiple benefits of sustainable food chains. However, at the same time it also identifies two of the biggest challenges to their development when it says that sustainable food chains are about ‘where the food comes from’ and most of all about ‘defining best value in its broadest sense’. The following section examines these two issues – value and provenance – in the highly charged political context of school food. Sustainable School Food Chains: The Potential of the Public Plate Having been marginalized in Westminster and Whitehall for more than 20 years, school food was unexpectedly propelled to the top of the political agenda in the UK in 2005, where it became a litmus test of New Labour’s avowed commitment to public health, social justice and sustainable development. In this section I use the school meal service as a prism through which to explore two key issues in the burgeoning debate about sustainable food chains – namely value for money and the geographical provenance of the food. To understand these issues in the context of the school meal service, one needs to appreciate the regulatory worlds in which the service evolved (Morgan 2006). The Regulatory Worlds of School Food The welfare world of collective provision Given the low political prominence of the school food issue in the 1980s and 1990s one would never know that the school food service was once considered to be one of the foundation stones of the British welfare state. But the origins of school food as a national system owe as much to


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warfare as welfare because it was the Boer War, when the poor physical condition of recruits impaired the campaign, that effectively triggered the Education (Provision of Meals) Act of 1906, which gave all local education authorities the power to provide meals free for children who needed them (Passmore and Harris 2004). Although the origins of the welfare era can be traced back to local initiatives in the 1880s, it was the Education Act of 1944 that inaugurated the welfare era of collective provision in the UK as a whole. Among other things the 1944 Act laid a duty on all LEAs to provide school meals and milk in primary and secondary schools; it specified that the price of meals could not exceed the cost of the food; and it established that the school lunch had to be suitable as the main meal of the day and meet mandatory nutritional standards (Sharp 1992). Whatever the limitations of the welfare era, the fact that it would later appear as a ‘golden era’ spoke volumes for what followed it. The neo-liberal world of choice The neo-liberal era was introduced in stages by successive Conservative governments after 1979 and it was predicated on two totemic Tory values – less public spending and more private choice. The neo-liberal era was enshrined in two radical pieces of legislation. The first was the 1980 Education Act, which transformed the school meals service from a compulsory national, subsidized service for all children, to a discretionary local service. The 1980 Act introduced four fundamental changes: it removed the obligation on LEAs to provide school lunches, except for children entitled to free school meals; it removed the obligation for meals to be sold at a fixed price; it eliminated the requirements for the lunches to meet nutritional standards; and it abolished the entitlement to free school milk. These changes, it was claimed, would help to reduce public expenditure. The second piece of neo-liberal legislation was the 1988 Local Government Act, which introduced compulsory competitive tendering (CCT) into public sector catering and other local services. Under the CCT regime, local authorities were obliged to subject their school meals services to outside competition – a requirement that led to a dramatic reduction in costs (Davies 2005). Lower costs carried a cost of their own because CCT triggered a series of profoundly negative changes in the school meals service, notably a lower skilled workforce, a loss of kitchens in schools, and a service ethos deemed to be inimical to healthy eating. Of all the changes wrought by CCT, however, by far the most important was the debasement of the food itself, which was colourfully described by one leading dinner lady as ‘cheap processed muck’ (Orrey 2003). The net effect of this neo-liberal revolution was a consumer-led school meals service where the menu was based on a simple calculation, namely ‘if a food sold well and was profitable, it was provided. If it did not sell, or was not profitable, it was not provided’ (Passmore and Harris 2004). From today’s vantage point, when there is a moral panic about childhood obesity, the neo-liberal era of food policy appears to be a monstrously myopic mistake. In its desire to make short-term public expenditure savings, it actually contributed


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to the problem of unhealthy eating which now costs the public purse many times what was saved by trimming the school meals budget (Morgan 2006). The ecological world of sustainable provision The fact that a radically new school food policy did not appear (in England) until 2006, nine years after New Labour came to power, illustrates the fallacy of thinking that regulatory eras change when governments change. Although the revolution in British school food policy is generally attributed to a celebrity chef’s popular television series in 2005, the real breakthrough came three years earlier in Scotland, where the Scottish Parliament commissioned an expert panel to design a radically new school meals strategy called Hungry for Success (Scottish Executive 2002). Three of the panel’s recommendations would eventually resonate throughout the UK, namely: (i) the need for a whole school approach to school meal reform to ensure that the message of the classroom was echoed in the dining room; (ii) the need for better quality food to be served in schools, and for this to be underwritten by new nutrient-based standards; and (iii) a plea for the school meals service to be seen more as a health service than a commercial service (Scottish Executive 2002). The ripple effect of this Scottish social policy innovation stimulated the campaign for similar reforms in England and Wales, which took place in 2005 and 2006 respectively (SMRP 2005, WAG 2006). Far from being concerned simply with the environment, the ecological world seeks to address one of the core principles of sustainable development – the need to render visible the costs neglected by conventional cost-benefit analysis, where many of the negative costs of the industrial agri-food system have been externalized (Morgan et al. 2006). Because it appeared so much later than its Scottish counterpart, the English report, Turning the Tables, went further in embracing the ecological approach in the sense that it also included the food procurement process, which it said should be ‘consistent with sustainable development principles and schools and caterers should look to local farmers and suppliers for their produce where possible’ (SMRP 2005). The government accepted the main thrust of these recommendations when it made its seminal announcement that a new regulatory regime would come into effect in September 2006 to ensure that: • • • • • •

School lunches are free from low quality meat products, fizzy drinks, crisps and chocolate or other confectionary High quality meat, poultry or oily fish is available on a regular basis Pupils are served a minimum of two portions of fruit and vegetables with every meal Deep-fried items are restricted to no more than two portions in a week Schools and vending providers are required to promote sales of healthy snacks and drinks such as water, milk and fruit juices Schools will be required to raise the bar even higher when more stringent nutrient-based standards – stipulating essential nutrients, vitamins and


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minerals – are introduced in primary schools by September 2008 and in secondary schools by September 2009 (DfES 2006). In political terms, Turning the Tables is arguably the most radical school food policy statement since the founding of the welfare state, not least because it makes the case for a high quality food system in terms of health, educational and behavioural benefits, in contrast to the narrow commercial values of the neoliberal world. In setting new and more exacting regulatory standards the state was in effect fashioning new markets in the public sector for more sustainable products by creating opportunities for local farmers and growers to supply locally-produced fresh produce. Under pressure from health and environmental NGOs, public bodies throughout the world are coming to similar conclusions about the need for more sustainable food chains. However, such chains face a number of significant barriers, not least the higher costs of better quality food and EU regulations that forbid the explicit purchasing of local food. Accounting for sustainability: From low cost to best value A ‘cheap food’ culture was, as we have seen, systematically introduced into the school meal service in the 1980s, when local authorities were exposed to CCT regulations that spawned a radically new cost-cutting mindset. Although New Labour jettisoned some of the cruder, more debilitating features of the CCT regime when it introduced its own Best Value regime, the ‘cheap food’ culture lingered on, leaving local authorities unsure about how to make the transition from low cost to best value. To illustrate this conundrum it is worth considering the case of Carmarthenshire County Council (CCC), where a Best Value inspection was conducted in 2001 with the aim of improving the quality of the school catering service. On a four point scale embracing poor, fair, good and excellent, the CCC catering service was said to be ‘a good level of service’ because primary school pupils receive healthy and nutritionally balanced food; secondary schools provide a range of food that most pupils considered to be good quality; paid meal uptake was the highest in the country and free school meal uptake was in the upper quartile for all schools; and front line staff had a common sense of purpose and a commitment to quality provision. On the negative side the inspectors were concerned that pupils paid more for a meal (£1.35 in 2000/01) than in other local authorities and, concluded that if ‘productivity’ and ‘competitiveness’ could not be achieved, CCC should engage the private sector to deliver the service. Overall the inspectors found that the catering service was ‘a high quality, high cost service’, the implication being that it should be a high quality and lower cost service (Audit Commission 2001). This Best Value review is not above criticism itself because it takes as resolved what actually needs to be explained. Such terms as ‘high cost’ and ‘low productivity’, for example, may be appropriate to an industrial context, but what validity do they have here? The metric used by the inspectors – meals produced per staff hour – would seem to be more attuned to a widget-making factory than a health-promoting school. Had the council meekly accepted the Best Value

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recommendations it might have found itself in the absurd position of seeking higher productivity at the expense of the children’s well being (Morgan 2004). Fortunately, CCC decided to defend its ‘high quality, high cost service’ by accounting for it in terms of a community health metric, which was radically removed from the industrial-like metric used in the Best Value review. However, without the resolve of senior officers who were committed to maintaining a healthpromoting school meal service, and local politicians who were able to defend the service in terms of the council’s ‘joined-up’ community strategy, the CCC catering service might have been forced to emulate the lower cost services of other local authorities, where lower costs had been achieved at the expense of lower quality school food provision. Even in Carmarthenshire, however, there is a perennial struggle to justify the costs associated with high quality provision because, like local authorities throughout the UK, it is difficult to quantify the benefits of good food and healthy eating, many of which are long term in nature. This raises the question of whole life costing, one of the most important ingredients in the recipe for sustainable food chains. Re-localizing the School Food Chain Sustainable food chains are generally thought to be synonymous with local food chains, though a more robust definition would include fairly-traded global food chains as well. Recent efforts to re-localize the food chain have encountered a whole series of barriers, one of which is the fact that under EU procurement rules it is illegal to specify ‘local’ food in public catering contracts. Although this is less of a barrier than was originally thought, many public procurement managers in the UK believe they are unable to purchase locally-produced food by EU directives that forbade it on the grounds that this would violate the free trade principles of transparency and non-discrimination. While EU procurement rules do indeed outlaw explicit ‘buy local’ policies on the part of public bodies, our research shows that some member states have been far more creative than the UK in how they chose to interpret these EU rules. Public bodies in Italy and France, for example, design contracts that specify certain product qualities – like freshness, seasonality, organic and so forth – which enabled their municipalities to privilege local food because such specifications favoured local producers. Through such creative procurement policies, public bodies in Italy and France are able to purchase local food without specifying it as such (Morgan and Morley 2002, Morgan and Sonnino 2007). What constitutes ‘local food’ is a debate that will never be fully resolved because there is no consensus as to what is meant by ‘local’. At one extreme there is the National Farmers Union, which equates local food with British food, at the other there is the Council for the Protection of Rural England, which defines local food as food that is grown and processed within 30 miles of its point of sale (Morgan and Morley, 2002). Rural areas would have less of a problem meeting the 30 mile radius than urban areas, so one needs to avoid hard and fast rules as to what


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constitutes the ‘local’ when designing re-localization strategies. Specifying the radius of local food is perhaps more art than science and the least of the difficulties involved in creating sustainable food chains. Far more difficult is the problem of calibrating demand and supply. Stimulating demand for local food is a long term endeavour and, to be effective, it needs to be part of a wider process of consumer education, and the latter has to be more imaginative than the conventional injunctions from the health promotion industry. Here the UK has much to learn from Italy, where local food products are used as learning materials for teachers and pupils in a programme called Cultura che Nutre – culture that feeds. Aside from learning about the links between products and places, the key aim of this educational programme is to create knowledgeable consumers who have an awareness of, and a commitment to, locally-produced nutritious food. Discerning and demanding consumers are ultimately the most important factor in the process of creating sustainable food chains (Morgan and Sonnino 2007). However, if more locally-produced food was demanded in school meals tomorrow it could not be delivered because farmers have neither the skills nor the distributional infrastructure to get it from farm to fork. The dangers of creating a new market, by stimulating demand, and doing nothing to create a local source of supply would provoke a flood of imports, which is precisely what happened with the rapid growth of the organic food market in the UK. Farmers and growers have found it difficult if not impossible to break into the public sector catering market, where the barriers to entry include an exacting and time-consuming tendering process and the caterers’ preference for dealing with large food service companies that offer lower transaction costs and sponsorship deals which feature the ‘brands’ to which children are drawn. Equally debilitating is the lack of a localized infrastructure to get local produce from farm to fork. The lack of local processing capacity for fresh meat is an especially acute problem, which has been exacerbated by the inadvertent effects of EU hygiene regulations that are rendering small abbatoirs uneconomic. This implies that locally-reared livestock have to travel long journeys to be processed, creating animal welfare problems as well as unnecessary food miles. Farmers and growers will need to collaborate to a much greater extent if they are ever to overcome the supply-side barriers that continue to keep locally-produced food out of local public sector markets. If sustainable school food chains are to become the norm rather than the exception a more concerted effort will have to be made to calibrate demand and supply because, according to one public procurement director: The food supply chain from farmer, through distributors to schools (and other public sector customers is complex, fragmented, inefficient, distorts markets, under-utilises UK producers, has no planning or coordination, and is far from supporting the need for local fresh food cooked on site (Taylor 2006 n.p.).

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While it is probably true overall, this bleak assessment understates two aspects of the school food chain. Firstly, while there is no public planning of demand and supply, there is certainly a good deal of private planning on the part of food service companies like Brakes and 3663 for example, and there is mounting evidence to suggest that these companies are no longer impervious to local food offers where the latter are available. Secondly, it fails to acknowledge the innovative role of NGOs in calibrating demand and supply at a local level. East Anglia Food Link, Sustain and the Soil Association have taken the lead in nurturing locally integrated school food chains. Especially significant is the Soil Association’s Food for Life programme, which is widely perceived to be the gold standard in sustainable school food chains in the UK (Melchett 2005). The main problem with the Food for Life programme, however, is that it remains a localized phenomenon, confined as it is to the islands of good practice. Although the PSFPI aims to provide a supportive national framework for sustainable food chains, good practice is a notoriously bad traveller because, for whatever reason, it is slow to disseminate from one local authority area to another (Morgan and Morley 2006). Belatedly, mainstreaming good practice has been recognized as one of the key challenges facing the government in its avowed aim of making the UK a leader in sustainable procurement. The Barriers to Sustainable Procurement It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that the British public sector – central government, local government and a wide array of other public bodies – is only now beginning to appreciate the potential of public procurement. As we have seen, the modernization of the public procurement process did not begin until 2000, when the OGC was created to act on the shocking findings of the Gershon review of civil procurement in central government. Although the UK public procurement budget amounts to £150 billion per annum, equivalent to 13% of GDP, the power of this budget is more apparent than real because it is chronically fragmented over hundreds of different public sector bodies, few of whom cooperate to achieve economies of scale or share good practice, though this is beginning to change. The UK government may have announced its intention of being one of the European leaders in sustainable procurement by 2009, but it has a long way to go before it catches up with leading countries like Denmark and Sweden, where green procurement strategies were launched in the 1990s (Erdmenger 2003). Furthermore, central government’s actions to date have been almost entirely focused on the environmental dimension of sustainability, to the exclusion of the social and economic dimensions, which means sustainable procurement in the narrowest sense of the term (NAO 2005). Food is one of the sectors where all three dimensions of sustainable procurement are being pioneered in the UK, thanks to the popular outcry that transformed school food into a serious political issue. The public catering sector in the UK spends


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some £2 billion per annum and this budget has enormous potential to raise the nutritional quality of food provisioning, especially in deprived areas, where poor nutrition is one of the most insidious and least visible signs of multiple deprivation (Dowler and Turner 2001, Lang and Heasman 2004). Over the past decade there has been a revolution in the quality of British food, with the re-discovery of local and regional products and a new cachet attached to fresh ingredients (Ilbery and Kneafsey 2002). However, the customers of public canteens – in schools, hospitals, care homes and the like – have yet to enjoy the benefits of this quality food revolution, unlike their counterparts in other European countries (Peckham and Petts 2003). The barriers to the sustainable procurement of school food are similar in nature to the barriers in other sectors, which are shown in Figure 4.1.

Cost: a perception of increased costs associated with sustainable procurement. Value for money is perceived to be inconsistent with paying a premium to achieve sustainability objectives. Knowledge: a lack of awareness of the need for and processes required to conduct procurement more sustainability. Awareness and information: a lack information about the most sustainable option; a lack awareness of products; a lack of monitoring of supplies; perception of inferior quality Risk: risk-averse buyers prefer to purchase from suppliers with a good track record; organizations fear criticism from the media and are therefore less keen to take innovative approaches Legal issues: uncertainty about what can and cannot be done under existing rules (both UK and European Commission) on public procurement Leadership: a lack of leadership – both organizational and political – leading to a lack of ownership and accountability at all levels Inertia: a lack of appetite for change. A lack of personal or organizational incentives to drive change.

Figure 4.1 Commonly cited barriers to sustainable procurement (National Audit Office 2005) Many of these barriers surfaced again in the most comprehensive study of sustainable procurement ever conducted in the UK, the product of a task force chaired by Sir Neville Simms (SPTF 2006). Of all the barriers identified in the Simms report, two deserve special attention – namely the failure to apply whole life costing and the lack of sustainable procurement skills. As regards the first barrier – whole life costing – the report put it very succinctly when it said that ‘the efficiency message was being interpreted throughout the public sector in ways which drowned out sustainability considerations’ (SPTF 2006: 52). The ‘efficiency message’ is shorthand for the Gershon Efficiency Review that we encountered earlier, which aimed to squeeze savings of £21.5 billion from the

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public sector, over a third of it from procurement savings. To address this problem the Simms report said there needed to be ‘a clear message from the top that value for money must be assessed on a whole life basis’ (SPTF 2006: 53). The second barrier – the lack of sustainable procurement skills – helps to explain why the public sector systematically fails to apply whole life costing to its purchasing decisions. The Simms inquiry argued that ‘many parts of the public sector currently lack professional procurement expertise and that people are routinely allowed to spend money without being appropriately trained’ (SPTF 2006: 47). This knowledge deficit chimes with an earlier inquiry which found that less than a quarter of all procurement staff was fully qualified (NAO 2005). A poorly qualified public sector workforce also helps to explain why ‘examples of good practice are presently not being shared fast enough or widely enough to encourage the dissemination of smarter procurement throughout the public sector’ (SPTF 2006: 60). What all the barriers to sustainable procurement seem to have in common is a conspicuous lack of political leadership. The Simms report freely acknowledged this problem when it said that the ‘lack of leadership from the top is then reflected down the organization in lack of accountability for sustainable procurement’ (SPTF, 2006: 29). These barriers – the failure to apply whole life costing, the knowledge deficit and the lack of political leadership – help to explain why sustainable procurement continues to be more an aspiration than a reality in large swathes of the public sector today. Conclusions and Implications The British public sector currently finds itself torn between two very different political pressures. At the rhetorical level there is a growing official commitment to sustainable procurement, so much so that the government has formally committed itself to becoming one of the leading European practitioners by 2009, a policy that is rationalized in value for money terms. However, the public sector is also being subjected to the ‘efficiency message’ and this is a much more powerful pressure because it is easier to understand, easier to implement and its results are easier to measure. Although Whitehall insists that ‘efficiency gains’ are not to be confused with budget cuts, the latter are invariably interpreted to be synonymous with the former, and this false equation constitutes the biggest single impediment to the development of sustainable public procurement. While public procurement is belatedly being modernized, then, this is occurring within a cost-cutting, rather than a value-adding, business model. Notwithstanding these barriers, some genuine progress has been made in certain areas, most notably with school food. Although government ministers are wont to give the impression that much has been achieved here, the truth is that the UK is merely on the cusp of an ecological school food service in the sense that new services have been designed but not yet delivered on a systemic basis


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throughout the country. In other words, the creation of sustainable school food chains is a process not an event and the UK is merely at the beginning of this process because the implementation of the new service – which crucially depends on financially-strapped local authorities having the wherewithal to deliver – is by no means assured. Yet it is here, in the prosaic realm of the school food service, that the UK government’s avowed commitment to sustainable public procurement will be tested more profoundly than anywhere else because, if ‘greening the realm’ means anything, it must surely mean the provision of fresh, locally-produced nutritious food in schools, where children ought to be able to eat healthy food and learn about the links between food, diet and well being. If the UK cannot ensure an ecological school food service, then it cannot hope to meet the grander visions of its sustainable development strategy. Through an empirical analysis of public procurement, this article has argued that the organizational capacity of the state needs to be given far more prominence if we want to explore the scope for more radical forms of sustainable development. In the case of public procurement, for example, the state’s capacity for action has been stymied by a chronic lack of internal skills to design and deliver sustainable procurement contracts. Significant as it is, however, this knowledge deficit reflects a larger, and much more important drag on the state’s capacity for action, and the source of this problem is the subjugation of the public realm to the marketized norms of the private sector, one of the many consequences of a fashionable but flawed neo-liberal ideology (Marquand 2004, Harvey 2007). Under the guise of ‘modernisation’ the public procurement process in the UK is being reformed through an infusion of marketized knowledge and business models from private management consultants, a sector that is highly adept at persuading state bodies that the latter can overcome their internal knowledge deficit by ‘outsourcing’ their requirements to the private sector (Craig 2006). The public sector urgently needs to redress its internal knowledge deficit, principally by investing in new skill sets and by developing business models that are informed by whole life costing methodologies, thereby ensuring that low cost can no longer masquerade as best value. Reforming public procurement is a challenge that central government must share with the nations, regions and localities of the UK because the public sector straddles all these spatial scales. In terms of the food economy, for example, local government in cities, towns and rural municipalities could play an enormously important role in re-localizing the supply-side if they acquired the competence and the confidence to mobilize the power of the public plate. Under the auspices of the CARPE (Cities as Responsible Purchasers in Europe) project, 12 cities have already begun to explore the potential of green and ethical procurement (Eurocities 2005). With more than 50% of public procurement expenditure deployed at the sub-national level in EU member states, cities could secure multiple dividends by including the food economy as one of their early priorities for promoting sustainable development. As well as helping to tackle

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the epidemic of diet-related diseases, and making a major contribution to human health and well being, a sustainable food economy can be a prism through which to address the burgeoning planning problems associated with food-related waste, food-related transport and food-related retail disputes, especially the growing asymmetry between supermarkets and farmers’ markets. A more sustainable, low carbon food economy also creates new incentives for cities to re-engage with their regional hinterlands, allowing city-regionalism to assume a collaborative rather than a competitive form. Urban planners in the US appear to be ahead of their European counterparts in recognizing the need for what they call food system planning. As they put it recently, As a discipline, planning marks its distinctiveness by a strong claim to be comprehensive in scope and attentive to the spatial interconnections among important facets of community life. Yet among the basic necessities of life – air, food, shelter, water – only food has been given short shrift by the planning community. Given the increasing support among planners for creating more sustainable communities, it’s time for the food vacuum in planning to be filled in. (Born et al. 2006: n.p.)

Greening the realm through sustainable public procurement policies carries threats as well as opportunities, with the biggest threat being a pious and self-referential localism in which the local is always extolled over the global. A sustainable food strategy, by contrast, would involve a judicious combination of ‘local and green’ and ‘global and fair’, the former to reduce the ecological damage of the food system, the latter to improve the prospects of desperately poor commodity producers in developing countries (Morgan 2007). Public sector canteens – in schools, universities, hospitals, care homes, prisons and the like – represent a significant part of the food economy in every country. What happens in these prosaic institutions ought to be at the centre of food system planning because, day in and day out, they constitute a source of demand that is stable and predictable over time, in contrast to the hyper-mobile branch factories that come and go in peripheral regions. To design and deliver more sustainable public procurement strategies, local municipalities need regulatory environments that positively foster food system planning, and national and supra-national regulatory reform ought to facilitate this process at the sub-national level. Even with a more benign regulatory environment, however, the evidence suggests that good practice is a bad traveller, in the sense that it does not diffuse as freely as neo-classical economic theory would have us believe. If good practice is to become the norm rather than the exception as regards green procurement, the public realm will need to devise more creative and more effective diffusion mechanisms. These will take different forms in different countries. In the UK, for example, the diffusion mechanisms would include professional associations of public sector managers, the local authority catering association for school


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cooks, regional centres of excellence in procurement and networks of cities like the Eurocities network. Although the mechanisms will vary from place to place, the goal ought to be the same everywhere – to tap the power of the public plate to deliver the intrinsically significant benefits of human health and sustainable communities. References Born, B. et al. 2006. Food System Planning White Paper, American Planning Association Brenner, N. 2004. New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cawson, A., Morgan, K., Webber, D., and Holmes, P. 1990. Hostile Brothers: Competition and Closure in the European Electronics Industry. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cooke, P. and Morgan, K. 1998. The Associational Economy: Firms, Regions and Innovation, Oxford University Press, Oxford Craig, D. 2006. Plundering the Public Sector. London: Constable. Davies, S. 2005. School Meals, Markets and Quality. London: Unison. DEFRA 2003a. Unlocking Opportunities: Lifting the Lid on Public Sector Food Procurement. London: Defra. DEFRA 2003b. Government Buys into Sustainable Procurement. News Release, 30 October. DfES 2006. Setting the Standard for School Food. Press Notice, 19 May, London: DfES. Dowler, L. and Turner, S. 2001. Poverty Bites: Food, Health and Poor Families. London: Child Poverty Action Group. Eckersley, R. 2004. The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Erdmenger, C. (ed.) 1997. Buying into the Environment. Sheffield: Greenleaf Publishing. Eurocities 2005. The CARPE Guide to Responsible Procurement. Brussels: Eurocities. Gershon, P. 1999. Review of Civil Procurement in Central Government. London: HM Treasury. Gershon, P. 2001. Speech to Greening Government Procurement Conference, 22 May, London Gershon, P. 2004. Releasing Resources to the Front Line: Independent Review of Public Sector Efficiency. London: HM Treasury. Hajer, M. 1995. The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernisation and the Policy Process. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Harvey, D. 2007. A Brief History of Neo-liberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Hay, C. 1996. From crisis to catastrophe? The ecological pathologies of the liberaldemocratic state. Innovations 94: 421-434. Ilbery, B. and Kneafsey, M. 2000. Producer constructions of quality in regional speciality food production: A case study from South West England. Journal of Rural Studies 16: 217-230. Lang, T. and Heasman, M. 2004. Food Wars: The Battle for Minds, Mouths and Markets. London: Earthscan. Marquand, D. 2004. Decline of the Public. Oxford: Polity Press. Melchett, P. (ed.) 2005. Double Dividend? Promoting Good Nutrition and Sustainable Consumption Through Healthy School Meals. London: Sustainable Consumption Roundtable. Morgan, K. 2004. School Meals and Sustainable Food Chains: The Role of Creative Public Procurement. The Caroline Walker Lecture 2004, Royal Society, London. Morgan, K. 2004. Sustainable Regions: Governance, Innovation and Scale, European Planning Studies Volume 12 (6): 871-889. Morgan, K. 2007. The Ethical Foodscape: Local and Green versus Global and Fair, Paper presented to the ESRC Science Week Conference on Local Food, St Asaph, 13 March. Morgan, K. and Morley, A. 2002. Relocalising the Food Chain: The Role of Creative Public Procurement. The Regeneration Institute, Cardiff University. Morgan, K. and Morley, A. 2006. Sustainable Public Procurement: From Good Intentions to Good Practice, Welsh Local Government Association, Cardiff. Morgan, K. and Sonnino, R. 2007. Empowering Consumers: The Creative Procurement of School Meals in Italy and the UK. International Journal of Consumer Studies 31(1): 19-25. Morgan, K., Marsden, T, and Murdoch, J. 2006. Worlds of Food: Place, Power and Provenance in the Food Chain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. National Audit Office 2005. Sustainable Procurement in Central Government. London: NAO. National Audit Office 2006a. Ministry of Defence: Major Projects Report 2006. London: NAO. National Audit Office 2006b. Smarter Food Procurement in the Public Sector: A Good Practice Guide. London: NAO. O’Connor, J. 1998. Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism. New York: Guilford Press. Orrey, J. 2005. The Dinner Lady. Bantam Press, London. Page, L. 2006. Lions, Donkeys and Dinosaurs. London: Heinemann. Passmore, S. and Harris, G. 2004. Education, Health and School Meals. Nutrition Bulletin 29: 221-227. Peckham, C. and Petts, J. 2003. Good Food on the Public Plate. London: Sustain. Policy Commission. 2002. Farming and Food: A Sustainable Future. London: Cabinet Office.


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Sayer, A. 2000. Moral economy and political economy. Studies in Political Economy 62: 79-104. Scottish Executive. 2002. Hungry for Success: A Whole School Approach to School Meals in Scotland. Edinburgh: Scottish Executive. School Meals Review Panel. 2005. Turning the Tables: Transforming School Food, London: Dept of Health. Sharp, I. 1992. Nutritional Guidelines for School Meals. London: Caroline Walker Trust. Sustainable Development Commission 2005. Leading By Example? Not Exactly. London: SDC. Sustainable Procurement Task Force 2006. Procuring the Future: Sustainable Procurement National Action Plan. London: Defra. Taylor, I. 2006. A Modern Integrated and Collaborative Supply Chain for the Supply of Fresh Local Food to Education – Why Not? London: DfES. Timmins, N. 2004. Powerful Message That Has Found its Moment. Financial Times, 17 February. Welsh Assembly Government 2006. Appetite for Life. Cardiff: WAG.


Chapter 5

Thinking About Labour in Alternative Food Systems Yael Levitte

Growth Trends in the Organic Food System The organic food sector has been growing steadily in the past decade. According to the International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements, the global market for organic products reached a value of $38.6 billion in 2006 with the vast majority of products being consumed in North America and Europe (IFOAM 2007). The American Organic Trade Association (OTA) reports that US Organic Food Sales increased 15-20% annually between 1997 and 2006, from around $3.5 billion in 1997 to $23.6 in 2008. Market penetration for organic products also increased from 0.8% to nearly 3% in the same period. OTA’s survey of manufacturers anticipates growth of approximately 18% overall each year on average for 2007 through 2010 for organic food products in the USA. The United States Department of Agriculture reports similar growth trends: Between 1995 and 2005 the total acreage of certified organic crops and livestock increased by approximately 300%, while the number of certified operations has increased by 75% (from 4,856 operations to nearly 8,500). Similar growth trends apply to the EU and Canada. In the UK, for example, evidence shows a 20% annual growth rate in sales. Statistics Canada also reports a market growth of 60% between 2001 and 2006. These trends come with mounting evidence of the corporatization of the organic food sector. Phil Howard (2009) has been tracking the acquisitions of organic food processors by mega processors since 1997 and has also reported on the introductions of new organic lines by the top 30 food processors in the country. Howard documents the consolidation of ownership in organics in the hands of large corporations as independent, family-owned organic processors have been acquired by MNCs. He also explores the idea of ‘stealth ownership’ where the ownership of smaller organic firms by large corporations is not disclosed in an attempt to disguise ownership. He points to examples of corporations that have been exposed in these attempts (e.g. Anhauser-Busch) and the negative image that resulted for companies when they are subjected to public scrutiny (see also Allen and Howard 2008). In this chapter I address a number of issues stemming from these market pressures on organic food. I look first at some trends in the global food system that have driven the expansion of the sector, and then explore the opportunities

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and concerns related to the rapid market growth, highlighting labour implications. From the labour perspective, the opportunities such growth has to increase the number of green jobs (defined below) are elaborated. I also examine the quality of these jobs, looking critically at whether these green jobs are truly sustainable, i.e., are they able to address current concerns related to the working conditions of farm workers in the conventional food system? Finally, the chapter suggests that the sustainable agri-food system is experiencing a similar paradigmatic shift to the one that the biotech industry experienced in the 1980s, where old knowledge bases can be reconfigured, and learning processes have the potential to flow through networks of firms, workers and support institutions. The chapter concludes with highlighting the need to explore the potential for social innovation among actors in the sustainable food network. The Global Food System – Nutrition and Renewable Resources The growth trends in the organic food sector are a response to increasing concern with the performance of the global food system. In a recent report, Renner et al. (2007) document the environmental impacts of the global agri-food system. In their analysis they draw attention to the conflict between nutrition and the imperative to protect renewable resources. Citing the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), they show that although in the last four decades per capita food production has increased by 25%, and food prices in real terms have fallen by 40% (FAO 2002), there are roughly 1 billion people who suffer from food insecurity and a similar number that are obese (World Health Organization 2006 in Renner et al. 2007: 224, also Chapters One and Three). As the earth’s population is predicted to increase to up to 11 billion by 2050, so will the demands on the global food system. Food demands are expected to triple (Renner et al. 2007: 224). In addition, Renner et al. also report that the current food system, which we rely on to address the above nutritional concerns accounts for many environmental challenges. The global industrial agriculture sector is responsible for 15% of global GHG emissions according to emissions inventories submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC in Renner et al. 2007: 224) with fertilizers being the largest single source of emissions from agriculture (38%), followed by livestock (31%). Agriculture emissions are expected to rise almost 30% from 2005-2020 (Stern 2006 in Renner et al. 2007: 224). Other environmental impacts of the current system include deforestation largely caused by agricultural encroachment (13 million hectares of annual deforestation globally World Bank 2007: 37) and overuse of water through irrigation and industrial use (ibid). In addition, the sharp fall in the prices of grains, sugar, and coffee has led producers to move towards higher-value exports like fruit, wine and flowers (ILO 2000 in Renner et al. 2007: 226) some of which are more energy and chemical intensive than many low-value products (Renner et al. 2007: 226). Renner et al. also note that the global nature of food production has added to air, sea and road traffic,

Thinking About Labour in Alternative Food Systems

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all of which worsen pollution and contribute to global warming. Moreover, up to 50% of all food produced is discarded according to some estimates (Lindquist et al. 2008). Thus, the discarded food not only used carbon and chemical inputs that were ultimately thrown away, but the discarded food generates GHGs such as methane when it rots in landfills (Waste and Resource Action Program 2007 in Renner et al. 2007: 227). The global environmental impact of the industrial food system has intensified in tandem with the consolidation in the industry. Consolidation of Farms, Processors and Retailers Those who observe the increased consolidation of actors within the organic food system are concerned that the system mirrors the very problematic mainstream food system which is dominated by the market power of large companies (Guthman 2003, 2004, Winson 1993). Renner et al. observe that the ten largest firms in agriculture control about 80% of the organic market valued at $32 billion (ILO 2003 in Renner et al. 2007: 228) and two companies distribute 80% of the world’s grain (ibid). Similarly, the authors note that food retailing is dominated by a few companies. In the US, between 1997 and 2001 six companies nearly doubled their market hold increasing their market share from 24% in 1997 to 42% in 2001 (Hendrickson et al. 2001 in Renner et al. 2007: 228). This consolidation resulted in a shift in the balance of power away from small farmers and producers and towards large retailers, resulting in lower returns to those who plant and grow the food (Renner et al. 2007: 229). The extent of the challenge for workers is significant. The US has seen a marked decline in agricultural employment in the agriculture sector. For example, consolidation has meant the loss of over 200,000 jobs in the hog industry since the 1990s (Renner et al. 2007: 229). Wages for migrant workers in the US agriculture sector declined by 10% between 1989 and 1998 so that workers earned between $7500 and $10000 annually by the end of the 1990s. Over half these workers do not have work authorization making them libel to exploitation including working over 80 hours a week without additional compensation and they experience inadequate access to unemployment and health benefits (Carroll et al. 2005 in Schrek et al. 2006: 441). Despite this concentration in the mainstream food system, organics seem to still be dominated by small family farms (Schwind, 2007); its increasing consolidation and industrialization seems to be unevenly distributed among crops and across space. A number of studies have explored conventionalization trends (see Hall and Mogyorody 2007 for a review of the literature and current state of affairs in Canada). As a discussion about the scope of consolidation and its future sustainability is outside of the scope of this chapter, instead I explore the challenges and opportunities that the expansion of the sustainable food systems poses for local and global labour markets.

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Opportunities for Wage Labour in the Sustainable Agri-food Business There are 450 million global agriculture wage earners, and many smallholders also work for wages for some or part of the time (Renner et al. 2007: 230). In the US, the Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) counted 859,000 agricultural workers in 2006. Looking out to 2016 the BLS projected that fewer farm workers will be needed as a result of farm consolidation and technological advancements in farm equipment. Moreover, farm workers will increasingly work for farm labour contractors rather than being hired directly by farmers. As a discussion on labour condition below will illustrate, this latter trend has negative implications for daily working conditions on farms. Data on farm workers in sustainable food operations are very hard to come by and the growing interest in sustainable agriculture has not translated to similar interest in employment in this sector. The few efforts to explore the connections between organic farming and labour report that larger organic farms are more likely to provide benefits to their workers, while organic farms in general tend to pay higher wages (Guthman 2004, Schrek et al. 2006). However, organic standards do not necessarily translate into more worker benefits due to economic pressures as according to farmers interviewed, ‘‘We can’t afford to hire help, much less pay beneﬁts.’’ (Shreck et al. 2006: 445) Another wondered, ‘‘How can you think of insurance and paid leaves [for workers] – as a farmer I have neither.’’’ (Shreck et al. 2006: 446). This said, from a small sample of in-depth interviews their research also found economic benefits to paying a higher wage and providing year round work as training costs decreased. As well, some organic farmers indicated it was what their customers would expect. In Canada, Hall and Mogyorody (2007) examined the links between gender and organic farming. They identified a link between increased gender equality, decreased levels of mechanization and ideological leanings more towards organic as opposed to conventional farming. So organic vegetable farms were more likely to display gender equity and have women involved in production and management than commodity based conventional farms. Below I discuss possible reasons for the scholarly and policy silence on sustainable farm work, but start by exploring whether a shift to a more sustainable food system globally has the potential to create green jobs. Green jobs are defined as non-exploitative and safe positions that alleviate the myriad environmental threats faced, in this case, by agricultural practices. Specifically, but not exclusively, jobs included are ones that help to protect and restore ecosystems and biodiversity, reduce energy, materials, and water consumption through high-efficiency and avoidance strategies, de-carbonize the economy, and minimize or altogether avoid generation of all forms of waste and pollution (Renner et al. 2007: 3).


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Green Job Opportunities in Sustainable Agriculture – An Overview ‘Greening’ of Industrial Agriculture Practices The World Bank’s 2008 World Development Report focuses on agriculture, although the structure and trajectory of the global food system is taken more or less uncritically. Renner et al. (2007) suggest that the Bank’s proposed improvements in natural resource management appear to have some employment-creating potential. For example, activities like terracing or contouring of land, and building of irrigation structures to prevent further land depletion and degradation are labour intensive (World Bank 2007 in Renner et al. 2007: 20). Employment could also be generated as part of the broad effort to raise water productivity (ibid.). In addition, farmers who rotate and diversify their crops reduce the need for pesticides and fertilizers and create positive employment opportunities. This kind of farming is knowledge-intensive and requires research and extension systems ‘that can generate and transfer knowledge and decision-making skills to farmers rather than provide blanket recommendations over large areas’ (World Bank 2007:189 in Renner et al. 2007: 236). Farm workers can also gain knowledge and skills while doing these jobs. Other sustainable practices in industrial systems, however, have the potential of reducing labour inputs. For example, conservation tillage, which uses half as many tractors to cultivate a field as conventional tillage, translates into lower fuel consumption and decreased material inputs but also to reduced labour inputs. Some argue that it may increase manufacturing jobs for the equipment required, but others argue that it eliminates manufacturing jobs for the obsolete equipment associated with conventional tillage (notes 898-9 Renner et al. 2007: 238). Evidence from the Post-industrial/Grow Local Productions Since much of the discourse around sustainable food systems focuses on postindustrial models based on ‘grow local’ policies and practices and small farm production, I explore the possible employment implications of these systems. Small farm-based agriculture shifts farming methods away from dependency on environmentally harmful inputs, such as fossil-fuel based energy, chemicals and fertilizers, towards methods that utilize more human labour, farmer expertise and community experience. The system rests on the better use of locally available natural resources (such as water harvesting, irrigation scheduling and reclamation of formerly unproductive land), the intensification of microenvironments in the farm system (such as gardens, orchards and ponds), diversification through adding new regenerative components as well as making better use of non-renewable inputs and technologies (Renner et al. 2007: 243). Small farmers play an important role in the developing world. For example, in Brazil over 70% of food consumed by the Brazilian population is produced by small farmers, and small properties with less than 200 hectares generate more


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than 14.4 million jobs in the countryside, or 86% of rural employment. The 1996 agricultural census in Brazil showed that, using the average productive strategies of small-scale agriculture, each 8 cultivated hectares produces one rural job whereas large-scale mechanized farms require an average 67 hectares for each unit of rural employment (Wittman 2005 cited in Renner at al. 2007: 244). In the rest of this chapter, the focus shifts to developed countries, where rural communities experience an advanced state of disintegration. The chapter thus examines whether sustainable small farm operations have the potential to create quality jobs in these places. Renner et al. (2007: 246) highlight case studies that provide evidence that organic farming and local food systems generate positive sum employment gains while protecting the environment. For example: •

•

•

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A study of 900 food businesses in Devon, UK, showed that producers involved in the local economy hired more workers on average than those that were not. The study found that 38% of producers have created new jobs at an average of 0.5 per farm, 3.4 full time equivalents (FTE) per farm compared to 2.34 FTE’s for the regional average with a total of 170 on-farm and 113 off-farm jobs created (Devon Country Council 2001 in Renner et al. 2007: 246). The USDA reports on the impact of farmers’ markets as incomeemployment generating opportunities. In 2000, the 2900 registered markets produced over $1 billion in income for their 20,000 farmer vendors. The USDA estimates that the markets are the only marketing venues needed by 6700 of these farmers (Pretty 2001: 4). Local food shops in East Suffolk provide jobs to 548 people and purchase food goods from nearly 300 local producers and processors (Pretty 2001: 5). Similarly, Nya Mon and Holland (2005 in Renner et al. 2007: 246), conducting an input-output analysis of organic apple production in Washington State assert that for every $1 million in sales, organic apples generated 29.4 FTEs whereas conventional farms generated 25.9 FTEs. More effective waste management in the food industry translates into hundreds of jobs in the United States. One composting project in California created over 400 jobs. Landfill to gas energy (LFTGE) initiatives may also offer employment opportunities through the application of bioreactor technology. It is estimated that this process could generate up to 1% of US energy needs. While this is questionable as a sustainable long-term solution as many advocate for the elimination of landfills it could offer bridge employment opportunities as we move in the direction of sustainability.

Similar results about improved job opportunities are reported by other researchers. Morison et al. (2005 in Renner et al. 2007: 246) studied 1,144 organic farms in the U.K. and the Republic of Ireland and showed that organic farms employed one third more FTEs than conventional farms. They calculated that if the amount of


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land dedicated to organics increased by 20%, it would result in 73,200 additional jobs in the UK and 9,200 in the Republic of Ireland. Using an input-output analysis Conner et al. (2008) estimate that if Michigan residents met the USDA fruit and vegetable healthy eating guidelines by consuming more Michigan produce, 1,780 jobs and $200 million in new income would be created. A comparable study in Iowa linked increased consumption of local produce with an additional $430 million in annual incomes and spin-off an estimated 6000 jobs (Cantrell et al. 2006). There are different employment generation capacities based on farm-type. For example, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2003) finds that labour demands in organic agriculture depend on the industry and country. The report finds that horticulture enterprises need considerable more labour than arable and mixed farms or dairy farms. Farm Workers in the Sustainable Food System Discourse Working Conditions on Conventional Farms While the findings above suggest employment gains generated by organic farming, sometimes the differences between the quality of work in organic and conventional farms are harder to detect. There are no comprehensive studies comparing working conditions on the two types of operations. Schwind (2007) provides data on the general farm worker population, and indicates that 75% of farm workers in the United States are Mexican-born; crop workers earn an average annual salary of $10,000-$12,500, ranking them second to private household employees who have the lowest earnings. Consequently, one in three farm worker families in the US falls below the federal poverty line, and very few are covered by health insurance. Mehta et al. (2000 in Shcreck et al. 2006: 441) assert that only 5% of farm workers have health insurance. Lack of health insurance is particularly worrisome in an industry with dismal injury rates and with high exposure to toxic pesticides (see Allen 1994 and Schreck et al. 2006 for more statistics on exposure and injury rates). The ILO (cited in Renner et al. 2007: 231) identifies agriculture as one of the most dangerous industries to work in (alongside mining and construction) with many workplace fatalities and occupational accidents and diseases. Another income-related challenge farm workers face is adequate housing as employee incomes are not enough to pay for expensive housing, especially in some California communities where housing prices are soaring. This parallels challenges faced in other industries. Silicon Valley, for example, is the site of vast social inequity as fully-employed workers live in shelters and are the victims of ‘environmental racism’ (Naguib Pellow and Sun-Hee Park 2002).

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Opportunities and Barriers for Adoption of Positive Labour Practices Allen argues that sustainable agriculture practices reduce worker exposure to toxic chemicals but other problems such as low wages or poor housing have not been adequately addressed (Allen 1994: 54). In the fifteen years since Allen’s assertion, few studies have compared the working conditions of farm employees in organic and conventional farms. A recent study in the UK (Cross et al. 2009) examines the self-reported health and well-being status of field and packinghouse migrant workers on UK vegetable horticulture farms. The study found that farm workers’ health was significantly poorer than published national norms for three different health instruments, and that there were no significant differences in the health status of workers between conventional and organic farms on three physical test instruments. Using a mental well-being test, however, the study found that workers on organic farms were happier than conventional farm workers. Further analysis indicated that this latter finding is related to the diversity of tasks performed each day on organic farms, compared to conventional farms. Strochlic and Hammerschlag (2005), examining positive labour practices on 12 Californian organic farms also found that the majority of the farms in their sample were highly diverse (ten or more crops), with over a third growing at least 50 different crops. This diversity, they argue, leads to worker satisfaction, as employees express appreciation for the ability to switch tasks during the day (2005: 14). Strochlic and Hammerschlag (2005) report that sustainable growers in their study expressed a strong interest to improve labour conditions on their farms, but believed they could not afford to do so. Schreck et al. (2006) similarly found farmers’ reluctant to include labour practices in organic certifications because of economic constraints. Analyzing USDA data, Schwind (2007) provides background information for these findings. Schwind finds that commercial family-owned small- and medium-scale farms (73% of the commercial farms in the US) operate at a loss on average, even when they generate up to $175,000 annually in sales, and many rely on off-farm supplementary income. Large family farms and non-family farms, on the other hand, operate, on average, at a 10-15% profit. These data thus suggest why progressive large farms in Strochlic and Hammerschlag’s research are able to offer a broad range of traditional benefits like health insurance, paid time off, retirement plans and housing assistance. Similarly, in an analysis of California’s organic sector, Guthman (2004 cited in Schreck et al. 2006) found that the ‘farms with higher than average wages and benefits tend to be all-organic larger farms that are highly diversified and oriented toward direct marketing’ (Schreck et al. 2006: 444). Schreck et al. also found that large farms tend to provide their employees with more benefits (e.g., health, dental, life, or vision insurance; paid vacation, pension, and sick leave) than smaller farmers. Specifically, they found that farms with sales of over 1 million dollars are 31% more likely to provide health insurance to workers than those with sales of $150,000–$999,999 and 49% more likely than the smallest farms (sales up to $49,000) (ibid: 444). Smaller farms, whose owners often do not have such benefits


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for themselves, offer non-traditional benefits, including personal loans, food from the farm (which unlike additional income, is not taxable), assistance with social services and educational assistance. Taken together, these finding suggest that large profitable farms have the potential, given the right management attitude, to be agents of change in farm work quality. Other conditions noted in the study as appreciated by workers on both small and large farms include respectful treatment and a humane pace of work, fair wages, profit-sharing and bonuses, regular information sharing and training meetings, opportunities for worker input, year-round employment, minimal use of farm labour contractors, improved health and safety conditions, opportunities for professional development, the ability to advocate for improved conditions without fear of retribution and the provision of opportunities for loyal aging workers (Strochlic and Hammerschlag 2005: iii). Interestingly, the researchers found that farm workers ‘ranked respectful treatment on par with – or higher than – wages in terms of importance’ (ibid: 3) and that ‘profit-sharing and bonuses have a significant positive impact on worker motivation and sense of investment in the farm’ (ibid: 5). In addition, the researchers found that farm workers greatly appreciate the absence of foremen, ‘given the harsh treatment and exploitative behavior that is often associated with that position’ (ibid: 11). Foremen are often hired to communicate with the majority non-English speaking workers; in all the farms participating in the above study farmers spoke some Spanish enabling them to communicate directly with their employees (ibid). The research highlighted that better working conditions resulted in a more satisfied and committed workforce, higher retention rates, a more skilled, knowledgeable and productive labour force, higher quality products, reduced training and supervision costs, and ultimately, higher revenues and profits. Both Strochlic and Hammerschlag (2005) and Schreck et al. (2006) find that such practices can result in training and supervision savings of around $30,000 annually. These findings are consistent with research on Genuine Progress Indicators. This new set of measures has been developed to replace GDP and accounts for environmental and social indicators as measures of overall well-being. In describing the need to move beyond GDP, Costanza and his colleagues explain, Useful measures of progress and well-being must be measures of the degree to which society’s goals (i.e., to sustainably provide basic human needs for food, shelter, freedom, participation, etc.) are met, rather than measures of the mere volume of marketed economic activity, which is only one means to that end. Various alternatives and complements to GDP are discussed in terms of their motives, objectives, and limitations. Some of these are revised measures of economic activity while others measure changes in community capital – natural, social, human, and built – in an attempt to measure the extent to which development is using up the principle of community capital rather than living off its interest. (Italics in original, Costanza et al. 2009: 1)

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Extending the way we conceptualize well-being to include fair labour practices in the food system merits more attention. Certification of Fair Labour Practices Given the benefits to both worker and owner, Strochlic and Hammerschlag suggest that the certification of positive labour practices can provide farmers access to niche markets offering price premiums for such practices. In a series of case studies, Friedberg, 2004 shows how NGOs and organizations like Christian Aid managed to drive an effective grassroots media campaign focusing on labour conditions in Latin American and African supply regions for British supermarkets. These campaigns led to the delisting of suppliers in Peru, for example; although some criticized such campaigns as resulting in the loss of hundreds of Peruvian jobs, they did result in ‘supermarkets joining the Ethical Trade Initiative (ETI), an alliance’ of companies, NGOs, and trade unions formally established in 1998, with support from the British government.’ (Friedberg 2004: 523) (See also Chapters 1, 4, 9 and 12). More formalized attempts to codify and standardize labour conditions have been undertaken recently. Henderson et al. (2003) describe the Social Accountability in Sustainable Agriculture (SASA) project, a collaboration among the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM), Social Accountability International (SAI), Fair Trade Labeling Organizations International (FLO), and the Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN). Raynolds (2000) highlights IFOAM’s addition of social standards (regarding basic human rights and labour conditions) to its certification process (Raynolds 2000: 300-301). Raynolds also describes the Fair Trade certification process, which requires that growers adhere to a set of strict social, as well as more limited environmental, conditions. Fair Trade distinguishes, however, between small-holder and plantation enterprises, but generally upholds basic ILO conventions (ibid: 301). The labour cost associated with of certification, however, is born by the producers, not retailers. In the US, certification opportunities for positive labour practices are limited and as Schreck et al. (2006) have shown, there is much resistance to such proposals (see Guzman et al. 2007 for a proposed Action Plan for US farm workers). As an exception to the lack of standards, the Scientific Certification Systems’ Fair Labour Practices and Community Benefits Certification program is designed for all sizes of farms and food processors, for all foods and all countries. The goal is to certify that fair labour practices are used at every point in the food production chain. This labour certification program operates apart from organic certification. The stated benefits of participation are: transparency for ethical consumers through a commitment to social responsibility, improved worker productivity and satisfaction, as well as better community relations (SCS 2009). As well, Slow Food convivia around the world promote ‘good, clean and fair food’ so that, ‘Fair food is accessible to all,


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and provides a just and healthy living for everyone involved in its production.’ (Slow Food Portland 2009) Problematizing Ethical Labour Standards Ethical labour provisions, then, are complex. Friedberg shows, for example, that the ‘no child labour’ provision in the ETI Base Code, which exclude youth under sixteen from working on farms, means that in Zambia, children cannot help their mothers after school, even though this can help pay their school fees. Moreover, farms cannot offer jobs to teenage AIDS orphans. In addition, in the implementation of the ETI, the costs of improved working conditions, argues Friedberg, are born by suppliers without being shared by retailers, which in Zambia meant abandonment of exports by growers, and a loss of hundreds of farm jobs (Friedberg 2004: 524) (refer to labour and Local Food Plus in Chapters 9 and 10). Lack of consumer interest in labour practices is one reason for the slow adoption of ethical labour standards. Mintel (1999 quoted in Friedberg 2004: 515) reports that although the percentage of consumers who are concerned with ethical labour practices is on the rise, only about 2% of consumers express a willingness to actually pay more for ‘socially just’ products. Friedberg suggests that pressure to change in labour practices does not come from consumers, even educated ones, but rather from the media (for an extensive review, see Friedberg, 2004: 517). Farm workers have been generally ignored in the sustainable agriculture movement, not only by consumers, but also by the media and in research; one explanation for this omission is that farmers, not their employees, are clearly the focus of this movement (Allen 2004). Allen and Kovach (2000: 221) suggest that, ‘the focus on ecological issues and natural materials in organic agriculture obscures social relations’. These relationships are obscured in the same way that distancing occurs in the conventional food system. Using Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism, they explain how the social tensions between owners and their farm workers have been ignored for so long. The fetishism of commodities, they explain, is a condition in which the social relationships through which commodities are produced are concealed from the consumer. Consequently, the invisibility of the social relations leads consumers to ‘see value as something that inheres in the material commodities themselves, rather than something that is created by particular social relations’ (Allen and Kovach 2000: 226). Disguising the social relations, however, leads to their social reproduction, as social action and resistance is muted. Allen (2004) further argues that in studying conflict and inequality in the sustainable food systems, corporate food actors and family farms have been positioned in the center, masking conflict and inequality between smaller, familyfarm owners and their waged employees. She argues, however, that ‘both family farms and corporate farms share an economic position in the sense that they are generally entrepreneurial, property – owning firms that hire workers.’ (Allen 2004: 132). The firm metaphor is useful as it allow us to link some of the industrial innovation

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literature, and explore how this relatively new sector experiences innovation and how learning takes place among farms, not only along the environmental/scientific dimensions but also in the social justice components of the sustainability approach. (See Chapter 7 for other insights regarding firms in SFS.) Sustainable Food Systems: A Paradigm Shift and Future Horizons In this final section, I pose a somewhat unorthodox proposition that suggests that the paradigmatic shift that the sustainable food sector is experiencing is similar in many ways to what the biotech industry has been undergoing in the last quarter of a century. Morgan and Murdoch (2000) suggest that as a response to the crisis of the conventional food system, a new model of food production emerged. This model, according to the authors, constituted a ‘radical break with the productivist paradigm which informs the industrial food chain’ (2000: 166). In this process, they argue, firms undergo a radical shift in which knowledge networks transform from their upstream, hierarchical formats (dealing with chemical fertilizers and pesticides) into tacit, face-to-face information sharing systems among farmers, who must acquire new knowledge and skills. Morgan and Murdoch thus see organics as a ‘radical innovation’ (following Dosi 1988), a radical discontinuity with the past, where ‘some kind of “creative destruction of knowledge” is necessary before radical innovations can diffuse throughout the economy’ (Johnson 1992 in Morgan and Murdoch 2000: 167). In this sense, organic farmers are like biotech firms, where innovations are often considered as ‘competence destroying’ (Powell et al. 1996, Powell & Brantley 1992). Competence destroying discoveries build on a radical shift in the knowledge base producing them, from one scientific paradigm to another (in the case of biotechnology, from organic chemistry to molecular biology). Because of the lucrative nature of biotech discoveries, i.e., they engender specialized knowledge with high potential commercial returns (Zucker et al. 1998), much of the learning and its commercialization is tacit, requiring a great amount of faceto-face interaction among actors in the industrial system, including researchers, investors, regulators and clinical testing facilities. Similarly, Morgan and Murdoch suggest that farmers learn a good deal from other farmers, especially in the organic sector. A farmer interviewed by Hall and Mogyorody (2007) confirmed this interactive process when they say, ‘because organic is a change, a complete change from conventional farming, there is more a tendency for it to be partnership thing’ (2007: 307). Morgan and Murdoch argue that learning can be either formal (e.g. civic interaction) or informal (farm visits, study groups or regional associations 2000: 167) and Hincrichs et al. (2004) suggest that farmers’ markets can serve as mediating social institutions that promote social learning and innovation by vendors/farmers. Data from the 4th National Organic Survey, conducted in 2002 show that organic farmers are highly educated with one in five holding a graduate degree and are involved in a multitude of organizations,


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in addition to farmer’s markets, which can promote their learning. Specifically, 84 % of respondents in the survey indicated that they belong to at least one farm organization or trade group, 40 % belong to an organic-specific association, almost as many belong to the Farm Bureau. This points to a high degree of engagement and presents opportunities for the exchange of tacit knowledge. One could suggest that these associations function in the same way as conferences would for high tech, knowledge based industry and offer the chance to build trust and create innovation (Maskell et al. 2005). Aside from trade associations, and farmers, there is a need to learn more about who are the actors in the organic knowledge networks: To what extent do these networks extend to university researchers, regulators, and other actors in the food chain? How are they governed, and where do farm workers fit into this conceptualization of a learning and innovation network? In most industrial sectors we examine the learning processes of workers. Can growers learn from their workers, or alternatively, how is knowledge transmitted among growers and workers? World Wide Workers on Organic Farms (WWWOOFers) may be one pipeline that spreads knowledge as volunteer farmers move throughout the world. The Collaborative Research Alliance for Farmer Training (CRAFT) system also provides an interesting model for knowledge exchange as farms within regions are networked to provide learning opportunities for farm interns. This helps to train new farmers and also allows existing farmers to gain new experience and knowledge (CRAFT Ontario 2009). A third option could be to compensate farmers for responsible ecological stewardship (consistent with aspects of the EU Common Agricultural Program, the Suzuki Foundation Greenbelt report). These initiatives acknowledged, the lack of attention to these opportunities needs to be addressed, … it is imperative to move beyond the deafening silences within the sustainable agriculture and organic communities in regard to the distinctly different structural positions and power asymmetries in certified organic food chains. The structural positions and interests both between actors at the point of production (of farmers and farm workers) on organic farms and between the point of production and other nodes in the commodity chain (processing, distribution, and consumption) must be clearly delineated and addressed if we hope to envision, much less create, an agriculture that is characterized by a truly comprehensive definition of sustainability – an agriculture that is ecologically sound, economically viable, and socially responsible. (Shreck et al. 2006: 448)

References Allen, P. 1994. The Human Face of Sustainable Agriculture: Adding People to the Environmental Agenda. Sustainability in the Balance Series No. 4. University of California, Santa Cruz: Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food System.

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Allen, P. and Kovach, M. 2000. The capitalist composition of organic: The potential of markets in fulfilling the promise of organic agriculture. Agriculture and Human Values. 17(3): 221-232. Cantrell, P., Conner, D., Erickcek, G. and Hamm, M.W. 2006. Eat Fresh and Grow Jobs, Michigan. Beulah, Michigan, Michigan Land Use Institute, C.S. Mott Group. September 2006. Collaborative Research Alliance for Farmer Training (CRAFT) 2009 Home: The CRAFT season has begun! Accessed online October 16, 2009 at: http://www. craftontario.ca/ Conner, D.S., Knudson, W., Hamm, W. and Peterson, H. 2008. The Food System as an Economic Driver: Strategies and Applications for Michigan. Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition,3:4, 371–383. Costanza, R., Hart, M., Posner, S. and Talberth, J. 2009. Beyond GDP: The Need for New Measures of Progress. The Pardee Papers, No. 4, Boston University. Cross, P., Edwards, R., Nyeke, P. and Edwards-Jones, G. 2009. The Potential Impact on Farmer Health of Enhanced Export Horticultural Trade between the UK and Uganda. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 6(5): 1539-1556. Dosi, G. 1988. Sources procedures and microeconomic effects of innovation. Journal of Economic Literature 36: 1126-1171. Food and Agriculture Organization, (FAO) 2002. Agriculture: Towards 2015/30. Global Perspective Studies Unit, FAO, Rome. Freidberg, S. 2004. French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age. Oxford University Press: New York. Guthman, J. 2004. Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California. Berkley CA: University of California Press. Guthman, J. 2003. Fast food/organic food: Reflexive tastes and the making of ‘yuppie chow’. Social and Cultural Geography 4(1): 45-58. Guzmán, M., Runsten, D., Strochlic, R., Garza, J., Mcintyre, J. and Mason, N. 2007. A workforce action plan for farm labour in California: Toward a more sustainable food system. Report to the Roots of Change Foundation. Accessed online February 13, 2010: http://www.cirsinc.org/Documents/Pub0707.1.pdf. Hall, A. and Mogyorody, V. 2007. Organic Farming, Gender and the Labour Process. Rural Sociology. 72(2). Henderson, E., Mandelbaum, R., Medieta, O., Sligh, M. 2003. Toward Social Justice and Economic Equity in the Food System: A Call for Social Stewardship Standards in Sustainable and Organic Agriculture Pittsboro, NC: Rural Advancement Foundation International. http://www.rafiusa.org/pubs/ SocialJustice_final.pdf. Hendrickson, M., Heffernan, W., Howard, P. and Heffernan, J. 2001. Consolidation in Food Retailing and Dairy: Implications for Farmers and Consumers in a Global Food System. University of Missouri, Department of Rural Sociology, National Farmers Union. January 8, 2001.


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Hinrichs, C., Gillespie, G. and Feenstra, G. 2004. Social learning and innovation at retail framers’ markets. Rural Sociology 69: 31-58. Howard, P. 2009. Consolidation in the North American organic food processing sector, 1997 to 2007. International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food, 16(1), 13-30. Howard, P. and Allen, P. 2008. Consumer willingness to pay for domestic ‘Fair Trade:’ Evidence from the United States. Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems 23(3): 235-242. International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements, The World of Organic Agriculture 2007. Agriculture for Development, Washington, DC, 2007 http://www.ifoam.org. International Labour Organization (ILO) 2000. Sustainable Agriculture in a Globalized Economy Accessed online February 13, 2010 at: http:// docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:i203BPNw7H0J:www.ilo.org/ public/english/dialogue/sector/techmeet/tmad00/tmad-r.pdf+Internatio nal+Labour+Organization+(ILO)+2000.+Sustainable+Agriculture+in +a+Globalized+Economy&hl=en&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShb_7jaJo_ RKQOnkbVo-TjzVJY6gHOQzPSHW9_x7CqDHn6DnIiVQNwq-SMCRLoIbaiGZxUpdUJ3D8nBXnN5yGEWtlTUoTAmGfnUwyrg7n_Lpl2IoG-dAyyZ wiM4kCwV6I1fjg0&sig=AHIEtbQ7Qexn4GnmnlHJrLGKpodVghiXCw Lundqvist, J., de Fraiture, C. and Molden, D. 2008. Saving Water: From Field to Fork – Curbing Losses and Wastage in the Food Chain. SIWI Policy Brief. SIWI, 2008, available online at: http://www.siwi.org/documents/Resources/ Policy_Briefs/PB_From_Field_to_Fork_2008. pdf Maskell, P., Bathelt, H. and Malmberg, A. 2005. Building Global Knowledge Pipelines: The Role of Temporary Clusters. DRUID Working Paper 05-20. Accessed online October 16, 2009 at: http://openarchive.cbs.dk/bitstream/ handle/10398/7883/DRUID_05_20.pdf?sequence=1. Morgan, K. and Murdoch, J. 2000. Organic vs. Conventional agriculture: knowledge, power and innovation in the food chain. Geoforum, 31(2) pp. 159-173. Naguib Pellow, M. and Sun-Hee Park, L. 2002. The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers and the High-Tech Global Economy. New York: New York University Press. Nya Mon, P. and Holland, D. 2005. Organic Apple Production in Washington State: An Input-Output Analysis. Washington State University, School of Economic Sciences, Working Paper Series, WP 2005-3, March 2005. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and development (OECD). 2003. Organic Agriculture: Sustainability, Markets, and Policies. Oxfordshire: CABI Publishing. Powell, W. and Brantley, P. 1992. Competitive cooperation in biotechnology: Learning through networks? In N. Nohria and R.G. Eccles (eds), Networks and organizations: structure, form, and action. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press: 365-394.

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Powell, W., Koput, K. and Smith-Doerr, L. 1996. Interorganizational Collaboration and the Locus of Innovation: Networks of Learning in Biotechnology. Administrative Science Quarterly 41(1): 116-45. Raynolds, L. 2000. Re-embedding global agriculture: The international organic and fair trade movements. Agriculture and Human Values 17(3): 297-309. Renner, M., Sweeney, S. and Kubit, J. 2007. Green jobs: Towards sustainable work in a low carbon world. Preliminary Report. Prepared for: UNEP, ILO, ITUC. Accessed online February 13, 2010: http://www.unep.org/civil_society/ PDF_docs/Green-Jobs-Preliminary-Report-18-01-08.pdf. Schwind, K. 2007. Growing Local Food into Quality Green Jobs in Agriculture. Race, Poverty and the Environment. Accessed online July 24:2010 at: http:// urbanhabit.org/files/RPE14-1_Schwind-s.pdf. Scientific Certification System. 2009. Certified Labour Practices. Accessed online: October 16, 2009 at: http://www.scscertified.com/fff/fair_labour_practices.php. Shreck A., Getz, C. and Feenstra, G. 2006. Social sustainability, farm labour, and organic agriculture: Findings from an exploratory analysis, Agriculture and Human Values 23:439-449. Slow Food Portland OR (2009) Our work. Accessed online October 16, 2009 at: http://slowfoodportland.com/our-work/. Stern, N. 2006. The Economics of Climate Change. The Stern Review UNFCCC website, www.unfccc.int, The World Bank, World Development Report 2008. Strochlic, R. and Hammerschlag, K. 2005. Best Labour Management Practices on Twelve California Farms: Toward a More Sustainable Food System. Report prepared for California Institute for Rural Studies. Accessed online July 25 at: http://www.cirsinc.org/Documents/Pub1205.3.pdf. Winson. A. 1993. The Intimate Commodity: Food and the Development of the Agro-Industrial Complex in Canada. Toronto: Garamond Press. World Bank. 2007. World Development Report 2008 Accessed online February 14, 2010 at:http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTWDR2008/Resources/WDR_ 00_book.pdf.

Chapter 6

The Urban Food Desert: Spatial Inequality or Opportunity for Change? Ellen Desjardins

Introduction A key dimension of a sustainable food system is equitable access to healthy food. Ideally, food is a lively presence in the public life of communities, with multiple retail spaces interspersed throughout towns and cities, and many citizens involved in food-based livelihoods of various sizes and scales. Diverse food-sale venues enable healthy sustenance, social interaction, cultural expression, physical activity and local commerce; they are central to a healthy urban or rural environment. In reality, while such spaces do exist, the past four decades of food retail evolution in developed countries have seen unequal shifts in patterns of regional food provision – an irregularity that leads to questions about the sustainability of food access within the current system. The concept of ‘food desert’ emerged in the early 1990s, when the UK government was alerted to concerns about social and geographical exclusion with respect to services of all kinds, raising the spectre of inequality and poor health (Wrigley 2002). Wrigley and co-authors have cited the earliest uses of the term as ‘areas of poor access to the provision of healthy affordable food where the population is characterized by deprivation and compound social exclusion’ and ‘those areas of cities where cheap, nutritious food is virtually unobtainable’ (Wrigley et al. 2002: 2061). A parallel phenomenon in Los Angeles, California, was referred to as ‘nutritional apartheid’ (Ashman et al. 1993: 14). The search for the origins of and solutions to food deserts, as well as evidence of their existence, has led researchers, citizens and policy-makers down a variety of often contradictory paths. It has directed attention to the fact that food access, a consumer issue, is closely tied to the supply side of the food system, with the related influences of governance and urban planning. One approach to alleviating food deserts accepts the conventional system’s ability to supply lowcost food, advocating more supermarkets and better public transportation to get there. Another approach circumvents the conventional food supply chain and its reliance on car-culture, experimenting with smaller-scale, more communitybased provisioning of food. Two themes are embedded within these divergent approaches to improve food access. One concerns the complex politics that lie behind the main components of

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access: proximity and price. Explicating this theme involves looking at the history of food retail and how the quest for profit and efficiency led to structural changes in the built environment, bringing with it sporadic place-based social injustice. The other theme concerns the agency of consumers and their level of engagement with their food environment. Consumer responses to food deserts have ranged from resignation to activism, from myriad coping methods to the pro-active pursuit of alternatives (Smith and Morton 2009, Williams and Hubbard 2001, Ashman et al. 1993). It would be simplistic, however, to reduce the food deserts conundrum to a ‘structure versus agency’ based opposition. Issues that emerge from examining the two themes reflect an interplay between the interests of food retailers and consumers. For example, food chain competition built upon the sale of cheaper, non-perishable foods also filled the need for affordability on the part of low income consumers. At the same time, it made the idea of low-cost, nutritious food somewhat of an oxymoron. It helped create the belief that highly processed (or ‘value-added’) food, and by extension the productionist food system, is the answer to hunger and fills the gaps where healthier, often more perishable, food is considered financially ‘out of reach’. It is significant how the notion of food deserts has been defined and framed over time. Their first recognition during the early 1990s was based on the absence of any type of food retail in certain parts of cities. In recent years, however, the supermarket has become such a ubiquitous icon of food access that food deserts are now commonly defined by areas of supermarket scarcity (Larsen and Gilliland 2008, Morton and Blanchard 2007, Smoyer-Tomic et al. 2006, Nayga and Weinberg 1999). Rural food deserts are defined by miles of car travel to supermarkets (Smith and Morton 2009). Blinders exist (Hinrichs 2008) within research and policy, to the presence and even the value of other types of food retail that signify growing attention to inclusiveness, local entrepreneurship and sustainability. Arguably, the lasting value of the food desert metaphor may be the fact that it has stirred up a storm of research, debate, activism and experimentation with novel local solutions. This chapter will explore some basic questions and deconstruct some of the discourse related to differences in food access. In lands of plenty, what has happened over time that caused the drift of retail food into spatial unevenness? How have those spaces changed over time, and how have people and policy-makers reacted? Should food access solutions be viewed as ‘one size fits all’, or should a two-tiered or multiple-tiered system be explored for different types of population groups? Most importantly, should the very existence of geographical areas devoid of healthy food retail be viewed as an anomaly that can be easily fixed, or as a symptom of systemic injustice that requires policy-level re-thinking? Origins of Food Deserts, or Unevenness in Food Access Food deserts have been diversely defined, as will be seen later; but for the purpose of this chapter a food desert will be understood to be simply a residential area that

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lacks walkable access to nutritious, affordable food (Clarke et al. 2002). It is worth looking at the historical pathways that underlie the occurrence of food deserts. These roots are most accurately revealed without suggesting the influence of one dominant causal force, as food retail systems are recognized as multiplicitous: they are ‘shaped and reshaped in different places and at different scales and grounded in specific historical geographies’ (Niles and Roff 2008: 3, Guptill and Wilkins 2002). Nevertheless, since food deserts are based on a dearth of food retail, it is the development and growth of this sector that provides important clues to its own patterning over time. The Historical Rise and Spatial Shift of the Supermarket In Canada, the UK and the US, significant transformation of the food retail market began during the 1930s with the development of chain stores (Gottlieb 2001, Wrigley and Lowe 1996, Winson 1993). This strategy of increased efficiency, achieved through integrated buying and wholesaling, allowed the chains to out-compete smaller independent grocery stores. In the post-war period the ‘supermarket’ concept emerged, based on a large selection of products in one big store, combined with in-store self service and lower prices. High volume sales were made possible by the growing consumer ownership of refrigerators and cars. The chain stores adopted the supermarket model soon thereafter, and were hugely successful, expanding in number during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. In the US, for example, the food retail market share of supermarket chain stores rose from 34% in 1948 to 62% in 1982 (Winson 1993). Before the advent of supermarkets, smaller-scale chain stores during the Depression era commonly served community-building functions such as providing culturally-specific foods or spaces for community interaction, and consumer services such as credit and home delivery. Supermarkets, on the other hand encouraged consumer buy-in through marketing strategies such as ‘Every Day Low Price’ (Ashman et al. 1993) and continuous introduction of new products. They positioned themselves as serving consumers’ interests in terms of convenience, efficiency, quality and affordability, while becoming increasingly divorced from their community role (Gottlieb 2001: 200, Wrigley and Lowe 1996). Throughout the rest of the 20th century, several systemic factors combined to create an infrastructure that supported the viability of supermarkets. The building and maintenance of vast highway networks throughout developed countries was an essential component to transport food to warehouses and supermarkets. Suburban retail landscapes typically featured through-roads with malls and parking lots at major intersections. The 1950s and onwards saw the growth of suburban housing developments based on car culture, with retail outlets at driveable, not walkable, distance. ‘Proximity’ gained new meaning in this context: a 10-minute drive to a supermarket parking lot became as convenient as a 10-minute walk. Beyond viability, the extremely lucrative market created by supermarkets led to a drive for further growth and dominance. Successful strategies included

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increasing supermarket size, greater control within the food supply chain and consolidation within the food industry. Supermarket floor space grew in the US from an average of 15,000 square feet in 1950 to 38,000 square feet in 1980, to over 60,000 square feet in the late 1990s, correspondingly increasing space (Millstone and Lang 2003, Gottlieb 2001). Another strategy initiated in the mid1990s was ‘efficient consumer response’ (ECR) in which every component of the food supply chain is coordinated to work in tandem, aided by computerized systems (Millstone and Lang 2003, Guptill and Wilkins 2002). Wrigley (1996: 9) has noted the positioning of retail, especially in the UK during the 1970s and 1980s, as the ‘cutting edge of technological and organization innovation’ with ‘logistically efficient stock control system and quick-response, centrally-controlled warehouse-to-store distribution networks’. To further enhance its own power and control, both vertical and horizontal corporate concentration in the retail sector began in the 1980s. Mergers were negotiated faster in the UK and in Canada than in the US due to anti-trust legislation there (Wrigley and Lowe 1996, Winson 1993). For example, in 1987 Canada’s largest five grocery distributors represented about 70% of total sales (ibid.). In the UK, the top five firms accounted for almost 90% of the food retail market in 1998-99 (Wrigley and Lowe 2002:158). In the US, the top five supermarket chains controlled 20% of sales in 1995 and 29% in 1999 (Guptill and Wilkins 2002); however, by 2002 the top eight American grocery chains accounted for 46% of market share (Schwartz and Lyson 2007). Consolidation helped offset the cost of starting new stores by passing costs such as advertising and inventory holding to partnering manufacturers; nevertheless, it has been shown that greater retail concentration was associated with higher rather than lower food prices to consumers (Schwartz and Lyson 2007, Wrigley and Lowe 1996, Winson, 1993). The result of such strategies was competitive advantage over smaller-scale and independent rivals, and succeeded in putting many of them out of business. Nevertheless, overhead costs for supermarkets remained high. Food price competition remained strong among supermarket chains and mass retailers like WalMart and the newer ‘deep discount’ grocery chains that were introduced in the 1990s in North America and the UK (Guptill and Wilkins 2002, Wrigley and Lowe 1996). Consequently, and significantly, the on-going viability of supermarket chains over time meant further cost cutting measures and discontinuance of stores where profitability was compromised in any way (Lang 2003). Strategies for cutting costs included lower wages for workers, partially through low-skilled labour (Wrigley and Lowe 2002). Cost-cutting was also significantly reflected in the type of food sold. A particular problem was the sale of perishable food, which incurs higher costs and waste at all stages of the retail process and yields a lower profit margin. Therefore, when the manufacturing industry introduced hydrogenated fats and a greater variety of preservatives during the 1980s, the shelf life of processed foods increased immensely and started to take a more prominent place in grocery stores. Secondly, the introduction of high fructose corn syrup enabled a plethora of new products, sweetened cheaply and advertised


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widely. Profit margins for these highly-processed foods were higher than those of fresh produce, meat and dairy; furthermore, supermarkets could charge suppliers for access to optimally-located shelf space. Thirdly, corporate retailers were able to import foods globally by developing long-term relationships with suppliers in developing countries where labour is cheap (Atkins and Bowler 2001). In spite of these cost-cutting strategies which affected the food environment and workers’ wages within supermarkets, cost increases in the form of higher property values, taxes and utility costs were faced by large-size inner city stores (Turgue 1992). The building of new central supermarkets with adjoining parking lots became prohibitively expensive. Especially in the United States during the 1970s, many of these same inner city neighbourhoods experienced a demographic shift by race and class as wealthier people joined the exodus to the suburbs. Faced with a clientele with less spending power, as well as a greater incidence of crime in some places, supermarkets started closing down in many urban cores throughout the 1980s. For example, in Boston, 34 of 50 big-chain markets closed between 1970 and 1990; Los Angeles County went from 1,068 supermarkets to 694 during that period (Turgue, 1992). Between 1978 and 1984, Safeway closed over 600 stores in American inner city neighbourhoods. Business Enterprise Trust (BET) was quoted as saying in 1993 that ‘it makes no sense to serve distressed areas when profits in the serene suburbs come so easily’ (Eisenhauer, 2001: 128). Thus, a major source of unevenness in food retail availability to consumers was the disappearance of many smaller independent and specialty stores where supermarkets had located during their period of expansion; now this was exacerbated when supermarkets started to close in low-income areas. By 1995, the poorest 20% of urban American neighborhoods, where fewer people owned cars, had 44% less retail supermarket space than the richest 20% (Eisenhauer 2001). It must be noted that the term ‘food deserts’ was not used in the US at that time, and it is not known to what extent this phenomenon existed in parts of cities. In the UK, a similar trend was happening to a lesser degree, although some city neighbourhoods like the Seacroft area of Leeds drew attention due to their extreme isolation from food stores (Wrigley 2002). Cummins (2002:437) has pointed out that there was no clear evidence for widespread food deserts in the UK, and claimed that the term had become ‘convenient shorthand for a complex problem’ of social exclusion and poverty in general. External Factors that Contributed to Food Retail Patterning Because of the dominance of food retail by supermarkets in wealthier countries, and the common assumption that this model is the most effective way to provide food for the population, supermarkets are often blamed for leaving some neighbourhoods without food. There were other factors, however, that influenced community food access, including lending practices by banks, municipal zoning laws, public health regulations and development.

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Redlining, for example, is the practice of refusing mortgage credit to businesses in a specific neighborhood by a bank or lending institution, based on assumed creditworthiness of the applicants, value of the property for sale or apparent quality or stability of the area (Kantor and Nystuen 1982). When these criteria are correlated with race or income, the result is the concentration of economic and service development in some neighborhoods while others deteriorate. Redlining originated during the 1930s in the United States with racial connotations; it was widespread in Canada from the 1930s to the late 1950s, marking suburban districts where companies declined to approve loans (Harris 2003). Redlining in Canada represented discrimination by social class rather than the distribution of ethnic minorities, and later disappeared as large city suburbs became more affluent (ibid.). Although there is denial that redlining still exists, some critics have referred to the tendency of large chains to avoid locating in inner cities or low-income residential areas as ‘supermarket redlining’ (Eisenhauer 2001). This situation was considered urgent enough by the US Conference of Mayors that a House committee held hearings on the issue (Turgue 1992). Furthermore, in the marketing world, the rationale for supermarket location appears to be normally based on market forces; this could be interpreted as a positive form of redlining. For example, electronic marketing tools such as ‘geodemographic segmentation’ are available to distinguish average shopping habits by different geographic areas to aid the selection of optimal locations for retail stores (Gonzalez-Benito and Gonzalez-Benito 2005). It is considered financially astute and justified that food stores are attracted to areas of greater wealth, less competition or lower crime (Ver Ploeg et al. 2009). The roles of municipal governments should not be overlooked: they have both helped and hindered the establishment of supermarkets. On one hand, higher taxes in city centres have added to the ‘fixed cost’ burden that led so many supermarkets to close. In many cities the separation of commercial from residential zoning has kept retail out of certain areas altogether (Mair et al. 2005). On the other hand, municipal food safety laws have helped supermarkets in many cities by disallowing or limiting street food vendors and small markets, in the interest of ‘food safety’ (Taylor et al. 2000). In terms of store development costs, property values are usually lower on the periphery of cities, and suburban structure is designed for cars. Mall developers often prefer to include an established grocery chain over an independent grocer, and charge more for a lease to a non-chain store because it does not attract as much business for itself or for neighbouring business tenants (Ashman et al. 1993). The Plight of Small-scale Food Retail With all the emphasis on supermarkets, how has smaller retail contributed to food access over the decades? Outside the world of concentrated ownership, the presence of independent grocers, specialty food shops and convenience stores has persisted. In spite of the diversity and variety of models, in much of the literature


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they are lumped together and typecast as poor substitutes for supermarkets, as, for example, ‘inner cities have been left with smaller and less accessible stores that are generally unable to provide both the quality and variety of foods needed for a healthy population nor the affordable prices to inner city households’ (Nayga and Weinberg 1999). Ignoring or downplaying the role of small-scale food retail, without assessing what they sell, has led to a tendency to overestimate the existence of food deserts and to oversimplify the context in which policy decisions are made (Short et al. 2007, Guy and David 2004, White et al. 2003, Cummins and Macintyre 2002, Wrigley, 2002, Williams and Hubbard 2001). Small convenience stores, sometimes referred to as ‘corner’ or ‘mom and pop’ stores, often remained in spite of the presence of supermarkets, not being seen as major competition as they generally charged somewhat higher prices and were not used for major food purchases. They were able to keep overhead costs down because they were family run and could keep longer opening hours. Often their business relied on the sale of cigarettes, alcohol, candy and non-perishable food; thus giving the small store a reputation for poor quality and selection and higher prices in exchange for the convenient location and opening times (Moore and Diez Roux 2006). This reputation may be borne out in some cases but not in others, as shown by a detailed food scan of a low-income Chicago community where most residents live within a quarter mile of a corner store or independent grocery store (Block and Kouba 2006: 840). Food prices, selection and produce quality varied considerably among these stores, ranging from poor to good. The study concluded that a large, diversified store mix, rather than a few supermarkets, could better serve the needs of a population with low car access (ibid: 844). Small-scale specialized retail and ethnic stores have long been part of the city food environment in Europe, the UK, and older parts of North American cities. There has been considerable variation within and among cities; in some cases, inner city retail landscapes with small retail remained and flourished, while in others they closed down. The Welsh city of Cardiff, for example, which saw a few large supermarkets take over the periphery, still maintained in the inner city ‘a dense network of local shops plus discount shops to provide range of food needed’ as many people preferred them for social or ethnic reasons (Guy and David 2004: 224). In Coventry, UK, many residents of a deprived neighbourhood tended to travel to traditional shops rather than newer supermarkets and shopping centres, as they valued the social context as much or more than the physical setting (Williams and Hubbard 2001). The fragmentation of the consumer market among different sizes and types of grocery stores, in spite of many closures, started in the early 1970s. Qualitative research with smaller-scale grocers shows considerable diversity in the way they source their food and their interactions with consumers. (Guptill and Wilkins 2002). Their success varied by community, but they have shown viability as part of, as well as alternative to, the conventional food system (ibid.). Other research in Toronto has demonstrated that, since the mid-1990s, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which includes retail, have been growing at an unprecedented

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rate, responding to consumer demand for healthier, local and ethnic foods (Donald and Blay-Palmer 2006). These authors argue that this trend is not exclusionary due to higher prices, as is often suggested, but has been embraced by consumers of all income levels due to perceived multiple benefits of both the food and its socioenvironmental context. Short et al. (2007) noted the oft-unrecognized value of small-scale retail; they assessed food affordability, nutritional adequacy, cultural acceptability and accessibility in the San Francisco area. Their mapping exercise demonstrated a different mix of store sizes and types in each of six neighbourhoods, varying from the presence of small grocery stores on almost every block to a food desert in one area. Most small grocers offered a variety of healthy and affordable food, including produce to attract customers and to distinguish themselves from liquorselling convenience stores – even though produce did not bring much profit. Many of the small stores were ethnically (Latino) based and served this sub-community in particular, while other groups may have felt underserved. This study ‘added complexity to the food deserts argument’ (Short et al. 2007: 361) and advocated that food access is a unique community level indicator determined by the sum contributions of all food retail in a neighbourhood (Short et al. 2007). The lack of supermarkets in minority neighborhoods in Erie County, New York, could have pronounced it a food desert, but a closer inspection revealed an extensive network of small grocery stores (Raja et al. 2008). The researchers felt that ‘supporting small, high-quality grocery stores may be a more efficient strategy for ensuring access to healthful foods in minority neighborhoods’ (Raja et al. 2008: 469). The same finding came from four low income census tracts in central New Orleans, where fresh vegetable and fruit availability within 100 m of a residence, often from small neighbourhood food stores, was a positive predictor of vegetable intake (Bodor et al. 2008). A related exploration in New Orleans showed that the food desert rate was 46% if it meant that the distance for residents to the nearest supermarket was greater than 2 km, but the proportion of food deserts dropped to 17% if food retail provision referred to ‘finding significant quantities of fresh foods sold in a neighbourhood’ – regardless of store size (Rose et al. 2009: 10). Urban Regeneration Programs in late 1990s and 2000s – Impact on Small-scale Retail By the mid-1990s in the US, supermarket firms were under pressure to reinvest in inner cities as inequalities in access were revealed (Gottlieb 2001, Turgue 1992). In the UK as well, governments started to prioritize the vitality of city centres (including ‘brownfield’ development), and tightened land-use planning regulations so that it became more difficult to obtain permission for out-of-centre or ‘greenfield’ retail development (Wrigley et al. 2002). Thus some major food retailers were adopting an ‘urban regeneration’ agenda at the same time that issues of social exclusion, including food deserts, came to the fore and influenced retail planning policy (ibid.). Consequently, and ironically,


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the problem for some communities was compounded: first abandonment by the supermarkets in the previous decades; then, reintroduction of supermarkets to the inner city but without attention paid to the needs of communities – nor to existing small retail. The next section will discuss two case studies in more detail. It includes, for example, the story of Pathmark Stores Inc. in the Harlem district of New York during the early 1990s, where the re-establishment of a supermarket in a food desert caused conflict because it threatened the livelihood of existing smaller grocery stores in the adjacent neighborhood (Lavin 2000). A decade later, the Green Cart program was introduced in New York as a neighbourhood regeneration program; again, the smaller grocers objected because of unwanted competition (Rivera 2008). Food deserts, it appears, represent more than manifestations of spatial inequality. They can also become spaces of power struggles when attempts to regenerate neighbourhoods bring disagreement over ‘who owns, who occupies and who controls the city’s public spaces’ (Zukin 1995: 291). The Portrayal of Food Deserts Any attempt to portray food deserts as a fixed, physical phenomenon will be confounded by the variations that happen over time and the perspectives from which they are described. The lens of spatial inequity, applied, for example, to a neighbourhood as time-lapse photography, or focusing its gaze on the resident, the grocer, the activist or the analyst, will reveal the inherent complexity. Discourse of food access and food deserts Given the political nature of food access and food deserts, it is perhaps not surprising that the discourse in both published and unpublished literature varies considerably. This variation stems not only from the vantage points of different disciplines, but also from different time periods. Reports from the early 1990s, when food deserts were first recognized as related to areas of poverty, class and race, presented the issue boldly as one of social injustice and prejudice. It painted a bleak picture of urban wastelands that exacerbated conditions of poverty, calling them ‘deprived’, ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘food insecure’. The lack of planning that led to food deserts has been equated to a disregard for food as a human right (Ashman et al. 1993). Concurrently, research with a political economy of food perspective chronicled the history of retail, noting the almost impossible amassing of profit and power that came with the new food regime, and exposing the global social inequities that came with it (Atkins and Bowler 2001). A health perspective accompanied the British food desert phenomenon from the beginning, making presumed malnutrition and susceptibility to disease one of the main leverage points in obtaining government commitment towards policy change. It is notable that the connection of food deserts with dietary behaviour and health outcomes was often assumed as intuitive. Consequently, many studies

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within the areas of public health, nutrition and epidemiology in high-income countries focused here after the turn of the century, concerned mostly with quantitative measures of population-based diet and health but generally ignoring political aspects of the food economy. The ‘healthy’ vs ‘unhealthy’ binary came into common use to characterize food, diet, food stores, food policy and even communities. The sub-discipline of health geography, since the turn of the century, injected an emphasis on space and place into the overlap of food access and public health; it was also responsible for the flurry of attention to new methodologies made possible by GIS (geographic information systems). Neighbourhoods, distinguished by average economic or demographic characteristics, were assessed for their density of certain types of food stores, conflating physical proximity with food accessibility. The conflicting results that emerged from these empirical studies, as well as increasing uncertainty about how to define food deserts, resulted in either hasty action, usually building supermarkets (Wrigley et al. 2002) or rationale in some government-sponsored documents as a reason for delaying action (Ver Ploeg et al. 2009). The planning literature has almost reluctantly, and in its own fashion, picked up the issue of food access and food deserts, positioning the ‘foodscape’ in recent years as an essential aspect of the urban built environment (Raja et al. 2008, Pothukuchi and Kaufman 1999). ‘Food mapping’ fits with the normal activities of planners, who regularly work with building codes, census tract data and geographical coordinates. The discourse has centred around ‘walkability’, ‘accessibility’, ‘urban sprawl’ and ‘transportation routes’ as well as the essential element of zoning laws. Still, it must be acknowledged that among the first whistle-blowers regarding food access inequities were a group of urban planning students in Los Angeles; this type of work has continued at the Centre for Food and Justice, Occidental College, California for two decades (Ashman et al. 1993) Economic analysis of food deserts and food access has questioned assumptions and brought discourse of its own. For example, it has critiqued nutritional standards of healthy food as over-zealous, suggesting that canned, frozen and dried produce should be considered valid sources, and that food availability should not be measured by single food groups (e.g fruit, vegetables, low-fat dairy, whole grains) but by the store food contents as a whole ( Ver Ploeg et al. 2009, Nayga and Weinberg 1999). Similarly, this literature has created a dichotomy of consumer drivers versus supply drivers or market forces in determining the success of various types of food retail in neighbourhoods. Food deserts then become either ‘under-served areas’ or are seen as ‘market failure’. Other economic researchers have brought attention to the unfortunate occurrence of ‘redlining’. Most often an economic perspective conflates supermarkets with the provision of good quality, affordable food. Tales of Two Cities Most definitions of food deserts have the embedded component of neighbourhood-level poverty, as in ‘areas of social deprivation which have


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poor physical access to food shopping’ (Guy and David 2004: 222) and ‘disadvantaged areas of cities with relatively poor access to healthy and affordable food’ (Larsen and Gilliland 2008: 1). Based on the assumption that most people in those neighbourhoods lack transportation and sufficient income, the fooddeprivation issue becomes positioned as exclusion, segregation and neglect within a larger, wealthier society with abundant food that is accessible by car. Smith and Morton (2009: 176) have summed it up as, ‘although food is abundant in the United States … uneven food distribution and access differ, depending on where you live and who you are’. Descriptions of earlier, dramatic situations of food deserts, such as those in Harlem in New York and South Central Los Angeles, highlighted political and social struggles that demonstrate a significant degree of engagement and action among residents of those communities. Some cases became news items and served to expose the issue from the vantage point of residents themselves. Inevitably, the question is raised: what happened to these neighbourhoods over the succeeding decades? Their stories illustrate the shifting nature of food access over time: the sometimes clashing, sometimes cooperating interests of large food chains, small size retail, residents and city policy (or lack of it). As time went on, the situation was muddied by the influx of fast food restaurants into those very areas of exclusion, bringing in a whole new dimension of consumerism. At the same time, alternative models of food provision were tried, with the goals of overcoming social isolation or improving health. New York City The Harlem district of New York, with a low-income population of about 45,000 households, had become a food desert after the pulling out of food retail chains during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. People bought their food from small bodegas and mid-sized grocery stores in the surrounding areas, many of which were operated by the Hispanic community. In the early 1990s, the city sold vacant inner city property to, and provided monetary subsidy for, the development of a large Pathmark supermarket in the centre of Harlem. To entice back large food chains, the city had eased zoning regulations, lowered corporate taxes and liberalized regulations, expecting to stop the outflow of food dollars to neighbouring areas and to increase job opportunities in Harlem. They hoped it would set precedence as an example of the regeneration of the inner city (Wrigley and Lowe 2002, Lavin, 2000). However, vociferous opposition to the supermarket came from the smaller food retailers who pointed out that they would lose their businesses after having supported the community for so many years. Activists stated their resentment that public subsidy was made to a rich food corporation, and saw it as an outside attempt to gentrify their neighbourhood which they felt they owned. With internal ethnic divisions in Harlem and politicians taking sides, the building of the Pathmark supermarket was delayed for seven years, but finally opened in 1997 (Wrigley and Lowe 2002, Lavin, 2000).

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The lesson learned, from an environmental policy expert’s point of view, was not to underestimate the need for business to be in communication with, and in touch with the needs of, the community in which they were located (Gottlieb 2001). It was argued from a business point of view, however, that the Pathmark store in Harlem provided a large assortment of good quality produce, fish and meat and should recognize ‘the important role that a large chain supermarket can play in a food-deprived area’ (Lavin 2005: 397). Around the turn of the century, Harlem experienced on-going structural improvements that resulted in rising property values above those in the rest of the city. A recent analysis of food access density throughout New York City showed that Harlem is now among the areas with the most food outlets per square mile, counting few supermarkets but numerous farmer’s markets, fruit and vegetable markets and bodegas (Neckerman et al. 2009). This report stressed the important role that small retailers play in healthy food access in densely-settled and lower income neighborhoods throughout the city – considerably outnumbering supermarkets, which operate more successfully in wealthier areas. In 2008 the District Public Health Offices included Harlem in a set of programs designed to improve local food access. The Healthy Bodegas Initiative aims to make fresh produce (e.g. snack packages of locally-grown carrots and apples) and 1% milk more accessible in the many small stores, together with an educational campaign. The Health Bucks program provides two-dollar coupons to food stamp users when they spend five dollars on produce at local farmers markets. The NYC Green Carts program allows vendors to sell raw produce in mobile carts in communities known to have low consumption of fruit and vegetables and high rates of chronic disease, including Harlem (Neckerman et al. 2009). The Green Carts were opposed by supermarket and grocery stores owners, which resulted in the number of licensed carts to be reduced to 1,000 (Rivera 2008). Korean-American grocers protested at City Hall, disputing the idea that increased supply could be expected to increase demand, and pointing to their overhead costs as well as their long history of being the main suppliers of produce in low-income, higher crime areas (ibid.). Nevertheless, the Green Carts proved to be popular among residents due to their lower prices and the potential to create 1,000 new jobs (Collins, June 11, 2009). It remains to be seen how these programs evolve over time, and how they might influence the eating habits and health outcomes of Harlem residents. Los Angeles A different story comes from South Central Los Angeles. The civil unrest that erupted there in 1992 was grounded in years of poverty and racism that included extreme food insecurity. An extensive study of residents, retailers and services revealed the presence of food deserts resulting from the disappearance of supermarkets, the lack of public transportation and higher prices charged by smaller inner city stores (Ashman et al. 1993). It showed that 27% of residents did not have sufficient money to buy food over a month, and that the emergency food system was overwhelmed.


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Some attempt at regeneration came when a major supermarket chain promised to build seven new large supermarkets in South Central LA, believing inner city stores could be profitable and that they would do their duty as a ‘good corporate citizen’ (Ashman et al. 1993). By 1995, however, there were still only 55 fullservice grocery stores for 900,000 residents, as well as a number of small stores that served primarily as outlets for liquor and convenience items (Larson 1998). It was estimated that South Central LA residents spent $1 billion annually on groceries, but about one third of that was spent at grocery stores outside the area (ibid.: 203). The situation did not improve over time. An evaluation of the area in 2002 counted a total of 56 grocery stores, a net gain of only 1 store from 1995; yet the population had increased substantially (Shaffer 2002). By 2008, South Central LA still had only one quarter of the number of retail food outlets than West LA, or 6.8 per 100,000 (Kingston and Kohler 2008). There were almost no chain supermarkets, with four more having recently closed, as the area was considered a ‘ghetto’ with high crime and low income. Residents with transportation options traveled to other communities to shop for food, such as a typical 45-minute bus ride to the discount chain Food 4 Less (ibid.). However, the landscape was by then marked by an extraordinary number of fast food chain restaurants. Both obesity and diabetes rates in South Central LA were significantly above the national average (Kingston and Kohler 2008). An economic analysis of the area found that: It is not clear that bringing in more chain supermarkets to South Central will permit residents the advantage of lower costs, since the large chain markets seem to have successfully developed non-competitive pricing strategies and are not passing on lower costs with lower prices. Since it is difficult to locate or assemble large lots for supermarkets, it may be better to develop a strategy for developing mid-size stores that fit in the neighborhood and that have proven to be lower priced on a variety of grocery items. Indeed, South Central may provide a good environment for independent stores to thrive. This would enable residents to be owners and would lead to greater circulation of income in the community, providing a higher multiplier effect for income (Larson 1998: 2004).

In August 2008, in contrast to the community-based programs to improve food access in New York, Los Angeles City Council unanimously approved legislation that banned new fast-food chains from opening in South L.A. for a year, with the option of two six-month extensions. The purpose was to entice more sit-down restaurants and grocery stores to the district (Kingston and Kohler 2008). Again, it remains to be seen if this policy has the intended effect on the foodscape and on residents. Portraits from within neighbourhoods How do residents living with poor access to food cope, and how do they respond to retail changes in their neighbourhoods? Some insights come from studies in Leeds, Glasgow and Coventry in the UK.

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The Seacroft area of Leeds had gradually become a food desert during the 1980s and 1990s, when many inner-city food shops were boarded up due to competition from new superstores on the outskirts (Wrigley et al. 2002). Focus groups with residents in 2000 showed that as expected, people at different stages of their lives faced different issues and coped in various ways (Whelan et al. 2002). Elderly residents faced physical constraints of having to travel long distances by public transportation and carry groceries, often becoming dependent on help from others. Families with children and without cars found numerous ways to ‘make do’ by using buses and taxis, car-sharing, and walking a great deal. Often they travelled far to reach discount food stores, ending up with processed, higher calorie, foods (ibid.). Fresher food, including produce, was commonly seen as a luxury, as unavailable, as difficult to cook, as perishable and therefore easily wasted, or not part of family preferences. Giving priority to the health value of food seemed to increase with age. In this same deserted part of Leeds, a large Tesco superstore was later built as part of neighbourhood regeneration. A group of 600 people completed surveys before and after the change (Wrigley et al. 2003, Wrigley et al. 2002). Forty-five% switched to the new store for the bulk of their shopping, and 35% used it to buy fruit and vegetables. Those who did not switch said they were averse to the prices, lay-out and size of the superstore. Before the Tesco store, 70% of respondents consumed less fruit and vegetables than the national average, and half of the sample consumed less than one serving of fruit per day. It was this low-consuming group that made the biggest change in their consumption after the store was available, increasing by approximately half a serving of fruit and vegetables per day (ibid.). A similar pre- and post-superstore study was carried out in Glasgow in a deprived area (Springburn) and an equally deprived control area (Cummins et al. 2008). After the new ‘hypermarket ’ was built, the study found high switching rates to the new store, but only marginal changes in fruit and vegetable consumption. Focus groups indicated that most people appreciated the convenience of a closer store and quality and range of products, but some were wary of the prices and unfamiliar ‘luxury ’ products. Significantly, people’s stories did reflect improvement in social inclusion that were related to store-sponsored community events, as well as opportunities for employment (ibid.). A study in Coventry, UK, questioned the assumption that exclusion from larger, more distant sites of retail (such as food deserts) creates consumer disadvantage or social deprivation (Williams and Hubbard 2001). Interviews conducted with 40 households from four materially-deprived neighbourhoods showed differences in preference for large and small-size food retail, influenced in part by the social context such as feeling ‘comfortable ’ or ‘out of place’ in certain stores. People travelled as much as necessary or possible to their preferred locations, rather than always being restricted by proximity; most did not perceive that they experienced disadvantage (ibid.). Such observations are critical to dispel assumptions that new superstores will be automatically accepted and used by residents.


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The Bigger Picture: What Patterns of Food Access Exist Coming to an understanding of food deserts includes their history, political and social context, relationships to health and views from households; but garnering attention from policy-makers requires an estimate of their prevalence and spatial distribution, assuming this to be related to urgency of action. It appears that in spite of the dramatic examples that have received much attention, there is active debate about the very existence of food deserts. Many attempts have been made to identify and quantify them, using national and district-level statistics for neighbourhood disadvantage, and empirical measures of density, diversity and distance regarding access to food retail. Food stores themselves have been subjected to a variety of measures and proxy-measures for price, quality and health value of the foods they sell. In Canada, food deserts were found in London (Larson, 1998) Hamilton (Latham and Moffat 2007) North Kingston (Burns 2007) and to a small degree in Edmonton (Smoyer-Tomic et al. 2006). None were found in Montreal (Apparicio et al. 2007, Bertrand et al. 2008). In the UK, several studies found a higher number of food shops in low income areas of Liverpool, Newcastle upon Tyne and Glasgow, respectively (Hackett et al. 2008, White et al. 2003, Cummins and Macintyre 1999). No food deserts were identified in Yorkshire (Pearson et al. 2005) but six were identified in Cardiff, Leeds and Bradford (Clarke et al. 2002). No clear evidence for food deserts was shown in New Zealand and Australia (Coveney and O’Dwyer 2009, Burns and Inglis 2007, Pearce et al. 2007, Winkler et al. 2006). A systematic review of food desert studies from 1966 to 2007 in high income countries asked whether access to healthy, affordable food systematically varies by areas of disadvantage (Beaulac et al. 2009). The most compelling evidence for the existence of food deserts was in the United States, where healthy food (regardless of price) tends to be less available in low-income and minority areas. In the US, the higher the concentration of poverty within a community, the fewer the supermarkets; this holds true for predominantly Hispanic and AfricanAmerican neighbourhoods as well (Powell et al. 2007, Gallagher 2006, Shaffer 2002). Of all US counties, 418 are considered food deserts and most of these have high poverty rates (Morton and Blanchard 2007). Rural food deserts in the US are defined as counties in which all residents must drive more than 10 miles to the nearest supermarket chain or supercenter; the Great Plains are especially lacking grocery stores (ibid.). Within this literature, likely in response to the diversity found, authors have come up with alternate metaphors that evoke various characterizations of food access in neighbourhoods. Thus, a food ‘oasis ’ describes an area with plentiful food retail in the midst of scarcity (Short et al. 2007); a food ‘prairie’ means an area with a plethora of food shops (Hackett et al. 2008); and a food ‘swamp’ was coined to depict an overabundance of obesogenic food provision (Rose et al. 2009).

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Responses to Food Deserts Short et al. (2007) have pointed out that solutions to food access problems depend on how they are defined. If food deserts are understood to be ‘places where the transportation constraints of carless residents combine with a dearth of supermarkets to force residents to pay inflated prices for inferior and unhealthy foods at small markets and convenience stores’, then the solutions can be twofold. They can involve building more supermarkets and providing better public transportation, but could also mean more widespread provision of quality and healthy foods at small markets for affordable prices (Short et al. 2007, Flournoy and Treuhaft 2005). In any case, it appears that retail gaps are eventually filled – either opportunistically or in a more deliberately planned way. For example, new grocery-store locations can be enabled by policy-makers; convenience stores and fast food restaurants may spring up opportunistically; and alternative food projects or farmers markets often arise from the collective action of residents. Government Policy Responses Wrigley et al. (2003) have suggested that the food desert concept ‘urgently needed unpacking and subjecting to critical evidence-based assessment’ before policy was made; Cummins and Macintyre (2002) came to the same conclusion. These pleas emerged in the midst of controversy in the late 1990s about how food-deprived neighbourhoods and derelict downtowns should be regenerated. Were supermarkets the answer, enabling the provision of food that could be both ‘affordable and nutritious’ due to their economies of scale? Was there not evidence that large retail caused the closing of smaller stores, depriving neighbourhoods of more choice, diversity and walkable food access? Given the minimal profit from the sale of perishable foods, and the distribution infrastructure needed to maintain fresh supplies, how could smaller markets be persuaded to provide these foods? How could the establishment of restaurants with healthier options be encouraged, faced with competition from national fast food chains? Were other options feasible? Throughout North America and the UK in the new millennium, sporadic government legislation was introduced to create ‘Business Improvement Districts’ (BIDs) and ‘Town Improvement Zones’ (TIZs), or partnerships between businesses and local authorities (Wrigley et al. 2002). Their agenda was to pro-actively regenerate urban centres in an attempt to ameliorate both social exclusion and public health problems (Wrigley et al. 2002). These strategies tended to promote big retail chains as the obvious solution, to maintain the high efficiency and competitiveness that is the trademark of the productionist food system (Stringer 2009, Lavin 2005, Nayga and Weinberg 1999). It was supported by research that linked access to supermarkets with low incidence of obesity (Rundle et al. 2009, Ford and Dzewaltowski 2008)


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The UK chain stores responded to regeneration policies by establishing a ‘new breed of pint-sized supermarkets’ in town centres, which provided jobs and did not ‘drown out local shops’ (Walker 2003). Still, the out-of-centre superstores with their car-owning customers continued to be responsible for the bulk of company profit. New York City implemented the Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH) program, which included zoning and financial incentives to facilitate the creation of new full-line supermarkets (Stringer 2009). New York City even defined food deserts or ‘healthy-food deficient neighbourhoods’ as fewer than 15,000 square feet of supermarket space per 10,000 residents, and set the citywide goal of twice that much space (ibid.). The Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative provides grants of up to $250,000 or loans of up to $2.5 million per store when the infrastructure costs or credit needed to develop a new store in an underserved market are not available (Ver Ploeg et al. 2009). The initiative, a public-private partnership, has so far resulted in the addition of 58 new grocery stores in Philadelphia. Others have pointed out that the environment within supermarkets also provides, and actively encourages higher consumption of, energy-dense, nutrientpoor highly-processed foods that are more profitable (Hawkes 2008, White et al. 2003). Winson (2004) stated this more forcefully, calling it ‘spatial colonization’ of the store by devoting 26% to 37% to shelf space with high fat, high sugar ‘pseudo-foods’. In Britain, it was noted in the journal Regeneration and Renewal that the big supermarkets ‘make only a few pence on many essential lines, such as milk and bread … their millions in profit come instead from astounding levels of turnover and add-on sales of luxury items’ (Walker 2003). Consequently, several researchers, planners and policy-makers have questioned the appropriateness of the supermarket model as the automatic antidote to food deserts, noting the success of small retail in many low-income and minority neighbourhoods and the preference for them by many residents, in both the UK and North America (Neckerman et al. 2009, Bertrand et al. 2008, Larsen and Gilliland 2008, Raja et al. 2008, Short et al. 2007, Flournoy and Treuhaft 2005, Guy and David 2004, Clarke et al. 2002, Cummins and Macintyre 2002, Wrigley et al. 2002, Eisenhauer 2001, Larson 1998). There is need, these researchers say, to bring in urban policy measures that build and protect smaller grocers and acknowledge their value in preventing and alleviating food deserts. Incentives to ‘create a supportive environment for new small business innovations’ (Mair et al. 2005: 45-46), such as low-interest loans, matching funds for burying utility lines, discounted electricity rates and tax credits, have recently been introduced in several cities including San Francisco and South Los Angeles (Kingston and Kohler 2008). A policy driver that is increasingly being used to change the face of food retail is zoning. As public health and safety provide the strongest basis for zoning laws, legislation in several US cities has banned fast food and/or drivethrough restaurants as a strategy to curb obesity (Mair et al. 2005). Nevertheless, the authors provide the reminder that ‘while zoning can help establish a local environment that provides access to healthy food ... zoning cannot guarantee that


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people will choose a healthy diet and that businesses offering healthy food will be successful. Thus, simplistic zoning solutions such as mandating grocery stores in every neighbourhood will not solve the problem’ (ibid.: 76). Lang and Caraher (1998: 208) have urged the government and public health to make alliances with interests other than the private sector, ‘such as planners, environmental health bodies, civic societies and non-governmental organizations’ to develop more holistic solutions. Similarly in the US, Mair et al. (2005: 76) stress that progress toward healthier and more equitable food access will require ‘a collaborative effort involving numerous partners, including zoning and planning authorities, city and state governments, corporate and local food producers and retailers, public health agencies, neighbourhood associations and more’. The more partners, the bigger the challenge and the slower the process; but arguably there is a tendency towards more long-lasting solutions. The key ingredient among the lists of potential partners may be the people most affected, namely citizens themselves. Civil Society Responses Many researchers have argued that community food access is enhanced when it is part of a local system that is flexible, inclusive, participatory, democratic and environmentally sustainable (Donald and Blay-Palmer 2006, Lyson 2005, Lang and Caraher 1998). Consider what was observed in South Central Los Angeles at the height of the unrest and food insecurity in the early 1990s, Yet planted within these gaps are seeds of innovation. Visit St. Agnes’ Church on a Wednesday afternoon, and you will find a vibrant farmers’ market where inner city residents come to buy fresh produce direct from farmers. The church that offers its parking lot to the market also provides a food pantry. Members of another community group have organized a buying club which allows them to get foods more easily and cheaply. Stop by the community gardens at Ward Villas, a subsidized housing complex, and (you will see) African American women grow produce in intensive, raised-bed gardens. Not too far away is one of the most productive community gardens in the city, run by Latinos to supplement their limited incomes. Shop at the independent grocery store which provides a van delivery service for customers without cars, which helps shoppers but is also good for business. There is enormous potential to create solutions for improving health. (Ashman et al. 1993: 2-3) The above activities on their own were not enough to bring relief to the LA food desert, but they raise an interesting question about off-the-radar civil society strategies to meet food needs in parallel with competitive market forces. Freathy (2003), who studied 12 voluntary food co-operatives (VFCs) in four Scottish cities, asked, ‘why does this form of retail continue to exist, and how does it operate beside


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other forms of retailing?’ (Freathy 2003: 432) He found that when VFCs sell only a limited amount of low-cost produce to disadvantaged individuals, considered an untargeted sub-segment of the population, other retailers do not regard them as competition. From the point of view of users, VFCs provided healthy produce in neighbourhoods where it was scarce. They helped build neighbourhood cohesion, employed a few part-time staff, rented premises, ran vehicles and stayed afloat through volunteerism and community grants – all together an indication of public sector support. Consequently, VFCs ‘are likely to remain permanent features of the landscape’ (Freathy 2003). Still, similar to the case of food banks, such marginalized strategies to increase food access for low-income people remove pressure from the state to act systemically on issues of inequity. Similar community-based, smaller-scale strategies are still being recommended as a vital complement or even alternative to conventional retail (Bedore 2008, Bertrand et al. 2008, Larsen and Gilliland 2008, Morton and Blanchard 2007). For example, a study with low-income residents living in food deserts in rural Iowa and Minnesota found that food access is improved in those communities where ‘civic engagement’ was strong (Morton et al. 2008, Smith and Morton 2009). Civic engagement took the form of local networks that actively devised solutions such as gardens, farm markets, informal transportation networks and reciprocal non-market food exchanges. Does this mean that healthy food access in low-income communities must depend upon a two-tiered system, if such areas are considered too poor to warrant a supply of good quality, healthy food through conventional retail supply channels? Will people have to work for nothing or for low wages on their own initiatives if they want to obtain an alternative supply of low-cost fresh food in their neighbourhoods? On the positive side, can this type of strategy be positioned as ‘community-building’, a form of empowerment and freedom from dependency upon whatever form of processed food is considered profitable? Arguably, a twotiered system is not congruent with a sustainable, just food system. However, as Guptill and Wilkins (2002: 39) have found, ‘collaborations (are possible) among producers, distributors, retailers, and shoppers, who play an indispensable role in developing viable alternatives to increasing corporate control’. The potential is there to collectively strengthen local flows of food and small independent retail where the chains have moved out. Conclusion The on-going transformation of the food industry from the 1930s to the present has been driven largely by corporate interests rather than by the need for population access to healthy food (MacRae 1999). As efficient modern food supply chains encountered regions with variable economic and social circumstances, preferences were established for locations that maximized profit, excluding areas with less potential that in some cases became food deserts. At the same time, to minimize

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competition, big retail consolidated and repeatedly shouldered out smaller food retail that had previously ensured neighbourhood food access. The on-going battle has centred on low food prices, with supermarkets and large discount stores setting the standard. Considering this history of productionist food retail, the concept of ‘supermarket food deserts’ could be used to describe ‘areas where supermarkets cannot afford to exist’. This perspective helps remove the blinders from a traditional view that sees the problem of food access as in-sufficient consumer income or lack of cars, and the solution as more supermarkets. If a modern, efficient, interconnected and consolidated food retail system which is bolstered by national subsidies and global trade networks cannot operate profitably in all types of neighbourhoods – even when other retail competition has been minimized – then the continued existence of supermarket-free zones is perhaps an indicator that their tipping point of sustainability has been reached. This may not be as problematic as it seems. It means that space exists in many low income areas that can be supplied, as is the reality in many places, by smaller-scale independent grocers, markets, specialty stores and environmentallyfriendly programs that can be accessed without cars. Since supermarket chains are commonly seen as a panacea for feeding the masses with abundant, seasonfree, affordable food, it means that concerted effort, including supportive zoning policies and community organization, will be needed in their place. It means also that the dependency upon cheap processed food, the mainstay of food chains, could be challenged; and that the externalities associated with the dominant food regime could be lessened. As is the case in nature, a desert is not devoid of life: if given the right conditions, it can bloom. References Apparicio, P., Cloutier, M. and Shearmur, R. 2007. The case of Montreal’s missing food deserts: Evaluation of accessibility to food supermarkets. International Journal of Health Geography 6(4): 1-13. Ashman, L., de la Vega, J., Dohan, M., Fisher, A., Hippler, R. and Romain, B. 1993. Seeds of Change: Strategies for Food Security for the Inner City UCLA Urban Planning Dept. Atkins, P. and Bowler, I. 2001. Food in Society: Economy, Culture, Geography. New York: Oxford University Press. Beaulac, J., Kristjansson, E., and Cummins, S. 2009. A systematic review of food deserts, 1966-2007. Preventing Chronic Disease 6(3): 1-14. Bedore, M. 2008. The role of the urban regulatory regime in creating a just retail food geography: The case of Kingston, Ontario’s food desert. Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Boston, MA, April 2008.


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PART 3 The Case for Sustainable Food Systems


Chapter 7

Food Systems Planning and Sustainable Cities and Regions: The Role of the Firm in Sustainable Food Capitalism Betsy Donald

Introduction Over the last few years, there has been an explosion of interest in the field of food system planning (sometimes called community food planning) as scholars, planners, policymakers, activists, dieticians and others point to the possibilities for sustainable development through the lens of new directions in everyday food practices. In particular, these writers refer to innovative developments in sustainable food production, preparation, processing, distribution, consumption, and waste management, in dynamic and evolving cities, towns, and regions across North America. Examples include the growth of community gardens, communityshared-agriculture programs (CSAs), farmers’ markets, and institutional buying programs. For many active in food-system planning, these examples are seen as part of a new food system for sustaining the environment through better waste, air and water management; adding value to local economies; preserving primefarmland; addressing food access and issues of hunger; tackling obesity and other diet-related health issues; and improving rural and urban connections. As a result, the public policy environment is starting to change – especially at the local level – as more and more cities and regions adopt formalized food system planning approaches (Kaufman 2006, Xuereb and Desjardins 2005). These approaches aim to re-localize the food system for overall economic, social and environmental health. Transforming the current food system is seen as one of the most comprehensive and effective ways to reducing a region’s ecological footprint, addressing issues of hunger, and providing more local jobs; thus ultimately moving toward a more sustainable region in keeping with the three classic pillars of sustainability (Gibson 2001, Pretty and Hine 2001).

This chapter first appeared as a journal article in 2008 in Regional Studies, 42(9), 1251-1262. Reprinted with kind permission from Taylor & Francis.

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In this chapter, I take stock of some of these developments. I draw upon examples from across North America, but pay particular attention to the Canadian cases and especially activity in Toronto. Much can be gained from exploring the connections of the food system from a city-region perspective. I am energized by the idea of the ‘city’ as a site for new political agendas for change and to us food is one of the best prisms through which to explore more sustained possibilities to ‘actually existing neo-liberalism’ (Brenner 2004, Donald and Blay-Palmer 2006). Having documented many of these programs, we are also mindful of questions raised by this new kind of city-centered governance model. Of interest is the sometimes naïve ways in which food system planning is constructed and promoted in both theoretical and public policy debates. Drawing upon theoretical insights from the economic geography literature as well as empirical insights from the recent five year study into the organic, ethnic and specialty food industry in the Toronto area, I argue that a firm-centered perspective into food systems planning can help to deconstruct complexities in the system and also shed light into challenges of this form of sustainable regional development. The strength of the firm-centered approach is in its ability to better understand the complex multidimensional and multi-scalar interdependencies between, on the one hand, the internal innovative dynamics of firms and, on the other hand, the broader institutional – as well as social, environmental and cultural – setting within which we all operate. The main aim of this chapter, then, is to make a more explicit link between the food systems planning literature and sustainable regional development by placing specific emphasis on the role of the firm in food system dynamics. This aim translates into the following objectives (1) to develop a conceptual framework for situating much of the descriptive nature of the food systems planning literature which is viewed as promoting more sustainable forms of regional development; (2) to highlight the rise of the specialty, ethnic and organic SMEs that appear to be particularly innovative as they respond to consumer demand for local, fresh, ethnic and/or sustainable food – a segment of the food system which has been hitherto underdeveloped in much of the food system planning literature; and (3) to expose more clearly the conflict between the following three dimensions of change in the food system: the ascendance in localized, mostly ‘non-market’ and new sustainable food system planning programs; the rise of specialty, ethnic, and organic SMEs; and the rapid scaling up of food retailing and distribution more generally. These latter two objectives will be achieved primarily through an examination of empirical results from a recent SSHRC-MCRI sponsored five-year study that examined the competitive dynamics of hundreds of food enterprises across the entire food supply chain in the Toronto area between 2002 and 2006. Innovation Systems and Economic Development: the role of local and regional clusters in Canada (Wolfe and Gertler 2001) was a five-year study that examined the impact and importance of regional innovation in Canada. The study explored how local networks of firms and supporting infrastructure of institutions, businesses and people in regions across Canada interacted to facilitate economic growth. The project examined

Food Systems Planning and Sustainable Cities and Regions

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The framework is constructed through insights from economic geography – and in particular the subset of literature that has studied contemporary food geographies, retail and distribution. Most notable has been the need to not only comprehend, but also come to terms with, the growing concentration of food retail and food distribution firms in the North American market. The recent rapid scaling up and consolidation of food production, processing, distribution and retailing firms means that the current food system is now dominated by a handful of highly vertically integrated companies, relying on mostly industrial forms of production and centralized distribution networks (Christopherson 2006, Wrigley et al. 2005). Thus I argue in this chapter that moving toward a more sustainable form of regional development can only be effective within the context of food systems planning if we first understand and then address food systems dynamics through the lens of food retail and distribution. Once we understand the public subsidies and supports that favour the rapidly growing concentration of power and market share in the hands of a few retailers/distributors, then we can explore optional retail models and supply chain initiatives that lead to a more sustainable future. To me, there is an uncomfortable tension among actors in the food system between, on the one hand, newer forms of competition (Best 1990, Piore and Sabel 1984) that provide opportunities for collaboration, sustaining individual food firms and the local economy and, on the other hand, an older, yet reinvigorated style of competition that can create undesirable power structures and undermine equity in our local economies and communities (Dicken 1998). Sustainable food systems will continue to be niche and fail to mainstream unless we can come to terms with the remarkable consolidation in food retail, examining the structural changes that are occurring along the food chain. The Canadian cases of (1) the 2006 entrance of Walmart SuperCentres with full-service ‘Fresh Your Market’ grocery chains and (2) SunOpta’s dominance in the organic and ethnic-food distribution are particularly noteworthy. Before turning to this discussion, however, first I will explore what more than 20 economic sectors across five regions in both newly emerging areas (such as biomedical, photonics/wireless) as well as in more traditional sectors (such as automotive and steel, and food and beverage). The research project on the food and beverage industry consisted of over 100 interviews with food enterprises across the entire food chain in the Greater Toronto Area. Particular emphasis was placed on firms as opposed to government or business organizations. The interviews explored intra and inter-firm factors that contributed to an enterprises’ ability to compete and contribute to the regional economy. Of the 100 interviews, 49 interviews were with food firms thought to be innovative in the region. Company-reported innovations were either product or process innovations. Product innovations – in addition to being profit motivated – were responding to new health, environmental or social awareness in the region (such as the launch of ethically appropriate foods, organic entrees or environmentally responsible beef production from field to fork). For more complete results on this study see: Blay-Palmer 2008, Blay-Palmer and Donald 2007, Donald and Blay-Palmer 2007, Blay-Palmer and Donald 2006, Donald and BlayPalmer 2006.

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is meant by food systems planning and why it has been argued so vigorously as a panacea for sustainable regional development. This discussion will include an exploration of innovative sustainable development initiatives in various cities and regions across North America, but it will also point to some of the naïve ways in which local food systems are promoted and discussed. The lack of attention paid to the firm in food systems analysis is especially noteworthy. In particular, the firm is often treated as a static, ‘black box’ (Taylor and Asheim 2001), with little regard to either the innovation dynamics of particular food firms focussed on environmentally friendly products and processes or the structural changes occurring more generally along the entire food chain. Food Systems Planning and Sustainable Regions Food systems planning is a relatively new concept in North American regional development circles (Pothukuchi and Kaufman 2000) and is usually defined as the agents and institutions responsible for production, processing, distribution, access and consumption and food disposal (Kaufman 2004). Garrett et al. (2006) have called this approach the ‘commodity chains’ approach, suggesting that while this definition is useful for defining the food system and identifying agents and drivers, it’s less helpful for demonstrating how planners, municipalities or other organizations and individuals can improve their local and regional food systems. They argue that planners must comprehend food systems because of the diverse supply and demand networks that encompass the larger whole: conventional, alternative and anti-hunger. Poppendieck (1998), for example has detailed the supply and demand networks of the anti-hunger food system whereas Pollan (2007) has raised public awareness through his fascinating examination of three differing food chains (industrial, organic and hunter/ gather) in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The narrative running through the burgeoning food systems planning literature, however, is the planner’s role in helping a region move toward a more sustainable food system, whether that is focussed on an anti-hunger narrative or a more localized, ‘alternative’ ecological one. Thus food system planning is often viewed as a subset of a more sustainable form of regional development. Food sustainability has been around at least since the 1970s when it was applied to agriculture ‘as a production system designation that generally ran counter to the technologies of the Green revolution’ (Ecotrust 2005: 10). Sustainable food production aims to better involve nature’s goods and services in the production process, while at the same time minimizing the use of non-renewable inputs. The exception is the use of labour, which places greater value on the knowledge and skills of local farmers in food production. In recent years, the focus has shifted from ‘sustainable food production’ to a ‘sustainable food system’, expanding beyond the farm to include the rest of the food chain, from organic fertilizers, fuel, food processors, food markets, eaters and waste management, as well as all the


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associated regulatory institutions and activities (Pothukuchi and Kaufman: 2000). The organization of these sustainable food systems is somewhat broad, with a loose collection of disparate actors and components. The underlying theory is that all parts of the system must be sustainable, not just agriculture. Some argue that these new forms of organization are in themselves sustainable because they bring together disparate actors who are forming unique partnerships which are beginning to collaborate to address a host of food-related issues (Ecotrust 2005). Indeed, improving organization capacity in the food system is a necessary component of greening the realm (Morgan 2008). The actors involved in this food-systems movement believe that food-related issues – such as pressing obesity rates, food insecurity, and rural farm poverty – are also broader societal issues that are currently unsustainable. However, viewing these issues holistically through the lens of food is one effective mechanism toward sustainable development. There are several reasons for this. First, food is strongly linked to land resources and climate, differentiating the sector from many manufacturing and high-technology industries (Goodman and Redclift 1982, 1991, Goodman 2004). On the input side, the soil, minerals, physical landscape, and the vagaries of the growing season – the terroir – create unique and uncontrollable growing environments for many local producers, inherently embedding the sector in specific places that require sound soil, water and land-use planning to sustain the sector. Second, few commodities so directly, personally and continually affect the well-being of every citizen as does food since it is ultimately ingested into the bodies of consumers (Whatmore 2002, Goodman 1999). Winson (1993) calls food a deeply ‘intimate commodity’ demanding special regulatory and institutional regimes and practices. This leads to our third point: perhaps no other commodity requires such a complex system of multi-scaled institutions and regulations to protect public safety as does food. According to Answell and Vogel (2005: 5) ‘food safety is an important – and often highly salient – regulatory arena, with important implications for producers, trade liberalization, and cultural attitudes and norms’. Recent food-related scares and disputes over mad cow disease, dioxin contamination, beef hormones, and GMOs, have heightened consumer anxiety over food safety policies. Moreover, globalization and increased trade liberalization have created new tensions among countries and accelerated ‘the public’s sense of a loss of control over food as a trusted commodity and cultural patrimony’ (Answell and Vogel 2005: 5, see also Philips and Wolfe 2001). Conceptual Views from Economic Geography Given the unique characteristics of the food sector, the study of food systems through the lens of food geographies, retail and distribution will inform current sustainability debates. In particular, food systems planning could benefit from recent conceptual work in the economic geography literature in four specific

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areas: (1) Hall and Soskice’s (2001) varieties of capitalism framework, arguing for a reinvigorated firm-centered political economy (2) Gereffi’s (1994) theory on the buyer-driven commodity-chain (3) Wrigley et al.’s (2005) research on transnational food retailers and their paradoxical embedded-ness in place and (4) the burgeoning literature on alternative food geographies (Watts et al. 2005, Maye et al. 2007). The literature on the institutional foundations of ‘varieties’ of capitalism has several analytical frameworks (Dosi 1988, Edquist 1997, Hollingsworth et al. 1994, Hall and Soskice 2001, Nelson 1993), but perhaps the best known and most useful to our analysis is Hall and Soskice’s (2001) perspective which takes a firmcentered approach to characterizing the varieties of capitalism. Hall and Soskice (2001) argue for a firm-centered political economy that views companies as key actors in new forms of economic development, echoing classic works in critical regional studies on the importance of the firm in local economic development (Markusen 1994, Schoenberger 1997, Clark and Wrigley 1997, Taylor and Asheim 2001). The broader institutional, social and environmental context is essential to understand yet firm dynamics must be at the heart of understanding. Despite strengths of this literature, empirical research on firm-led change in the 1990s pointed to weaknesses in Hall and Soskice’s framework, especially the tendency to privilege nationally-organized economic systems and the conceptual inconsistencies with the rapid internationalization of firm activity (Deeg and Jackson 2007). This led to the emergence of the convergence thesis that predicted the gradual – or sometimes less gradual – erosion of the institutional differences among different national economies because of deepening global economic competition between firms. Since then, a hotly contested debate has ensued over the extent to which convergence may be happening. Most empirical research in this area has found a change in national political economies (Rutherford and Gertler 2002, Cox 2005), but few authors have actually argued that changes constitute convergence toward a single model (Deeg and Jackson 2007, Cox 2005). At the same time, other theories were being developed to help illuminate firm dimensions of internationalization. The buyer-driven commodity-chain framework is one such theory. In the 1990s, Gereffi and others developed a conceptual model called ‘global commodity chains’ that brought together the concept of the value-added chain with the idea of the global organization of industries (Gereffi and Korzeniewicz 1994). Their research revealed the importance of new global buyers, especially retailers and brand marketers, as key players in ‘the formation of globally dispersed and organizationally fragmented production and distribution networks’ (Gereffi et al. 2005). Their buyer-driven commodity chains framework refers to ‘those industries in which large retailers, marketers and … manufactures play the pivotal roles in setting up production networks’ (Gereffi 1994; 1999). Gereffi (1999) refers to retailers like Walmart in the context of how they design and/or market – but do not make – the branded products they order. His ideas are useful with regard to how large retailers/distributors/marketers may be influencing the supply chain.


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For deeper clarification on the particularities of large food retailers, however, recent concepts introduced by Wrigley et al. (2005) add further insight. Wrigley et al. (2005) highlight several essential differences between transnational food retailers and other international firms that coordinate and control buyer-driven commodity chains. First, food retailers, unlike export-oriented manufacturers, exercise control at the design and point-of-sale end of the production chain. As a result, their competitive advantage is not just based on price, but also quality, reliability, variety and innovation. Second – and this is key to our studies – large (in their case transnational) food retailers are involved in both the distribution and sourcing activities at the same time in host countries. Distribution systems in general (that is, linkages and flows of goods and services) have largely been overlooked in economic geography. The innovation systems literature, for example, has tended to focus on supply chains and the production side of innovation. However, distribution systems are essential to examine because of their profound impact on firms, workers and regions involved. To probe further, Wrigley et al. (2005) examine the concept of embeddedness in the context of how transnational food retailers interact with local firms, workers, institutions, regions and consumers in host countries. I find this idea to be useful to our analysis and demonstrate later in this chapter how Walmart’s entry into Canada is impacting as well as being shaped by, the local milieu. The actual food geographies of this local milieu have recently been explored in a fourth body of literature, loosely defined as ‘alternative food geographies’ (Maye et al. 2007, Watts et al. 2005). Alternative Food Geographies (AFNs) are typically defined as ‘newly emerging networks of producers, consumers, and other actors that embody alternatives to more standardized industrial mode of food supply’ (Renting et al. 2003: 394). The networks that these various actors embody may all have different names– from quality to sustainable to organic to local – but what they do have in common, according to Whatmore et al. (2003: 389) is that they ‘redistribute value through the networks against the logic of bulk commodity production; that reconvene ‘trust’ between food producers and consumers, and that articulate new forms of political association and market governance’. These AFNs include many of the models explored in the food systems planning literature such as community gardens, community-supported-agriculture, farmer markets, and institutional buying programs. Largely understudied, however, are the rise of new environmentally-friendly food processors and their relationship to the changing dynamics of distribution and retailing. Sustainable Food Models in Cities and Regions around North America ‘Alternative’ ‘sustainable’ or localized developments in food production, preparation, distribution, retailing and waste management have been around for many years, but the last decade has seen an explosion of interesting models (Watts et al. 2005, Whatmore et al. 2003). As I describe some of these projects, I also

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evaluate them critically through the conceptual framework developed above. I note the assumed narrative in much of the food systems planning literature that food relocalization is inherently more socially just or ecologically sustainable than non-local foods (Born and Purcell 2006). In addition to making this assumption, the same literature also tends to ignore the contradictory and ambiguous nature of both the ‘local’ alternative and ‘non-local’ conventional agro-food system (Morgan et al. 2006, Sonnino and Marsden 2006). It is ironic that planners are embracing these very localized, non-market programs to feed the most marginalized in the community while at the same time offering public subsidies and supports to facilitate the rapid scaling up and consolidation of the food distribution and retail landscape in general. For example, community gardens and Community-Shared Agriculture (CSA) are not new ideas, but have witnessed a resurgence in recent years, with an estimated 18,000 community gardens now growing in the US and Canada (American Community Gardening Association 2007). The US Department of Agriculture has recently become interested in funding gardens in marginalized neighbourhoods in cities and towns across the US struggling with hunger and poverty. Examples are found in Portland, Oregon, and New York City where relatively small food security grants (under $200,000 in each community) have helped to establish community gardens in low-income neighbourhoods, with the goal to increase food security and local economic development opportunities for low-income people. Planners in New York and Seattle are also making efforts to institutionalize community gardening into their official planning processes after witnessing the highly contested bulldozing of the 14 acre South Central Farm in Los Angeles in the summer of 2006, the nation’s largest and one of the most diverse urban farms, growing indigenous Mexican plants, and feeding over 350 families (worldhungeryear.org). The institutionalization of these gardens into municipal Official Plans and official planning processes and the endorsement of these models by federal governments is promising. Proponents argue that community gardens and other similar programs like Community Shared Agriculture are important steps toward moving toward a more sustainable form of food capitalism, crediting these programs with increasing food security, engaging with ecological practices as well as even having the additional benefit of breaking down racial and cultural tensions. As Bedore notes (2008: 10-11), they are ‘both subversive, in that they allow consumers and producers market-based and community-based avenues to avoid the ‘placeless foodscapes’ (Morgan et al. 2006) of impersonal retailers and a national ‘cheap food’ policy ‘and are also being slowly embraced by governments in developed countries’ (Allen 2004). Moreover, she adds, ‘embracing these practices offers an intuitively attractive approach that focuses on a close ethics of care and community-guided learning that focuses on food quality and origins, and environmental sustainability’ (i.e., Power 1998).


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Critics, however, like Power (1998) and Bedore (2008), have questioned the extent to which these programs are necessarily the best model for feeding the most vulnerable in our society. Citing the work of people like Riches (2002) Bedore asks whether these programs are not also paternalistic because they ask low-income and marginalized people to embrace self-reliant alternatives like community gardening when everyone else in society can simply shop for food at the grocery store at their convenience. In addition, critics have questioned the extent to which these community-based food programs necessarily have any additional benefits of breaking down racial and cultural tensions as some proponents have suggested. Quite the contrary, there is evidence to suggest that programs such as CSAs and small-scale farming are historically grounded in oppressive race, class and gender relations and that these more post-modern versions of pre-modern agriculture are in fact no different (Allen 2004, DeLind and Ferguson 1999, Dowler and Caraher 2003 in Bedore 2008). Moreover, these authors also question the extent to which these programs encourage individualistic and depoliticized behaviour in which all risk is transferred to the participant and farmer, while the state withdraws any responsibility for insurance or protection and also neglects to tackle more fundamental changes to the food system. In recent years, however, the state has become more active in regulating some of the externalities associated with the dominant, mainstream food system. In one case, a small university town in Arcata, California, concerned about the proliferation of fast-food restaurants in their town and the potential impacts on public health (Lewis et al. 2005) used the zoning ordinance tool to prevent more formula restaurants from opening within the entire city. The Arcata City Council approved the enactment of a zoning ordinance, which capped the number of formula restaurants within the jurisdiction at any one time to nine. The ordinance basically barred a formula restaurant from locating within the city unless it replaced an existing formula restaurant at the same location. The measure has been in place since July 2002 (Ordinance no. 1333 City of Arcata). (Similar examples exist in the UK as well, e.g., the Sandwell project (Kyle and Blair 2007). There are dozens of other examples of preventative legislation – everything from New York City’s recent ban on transfats to the City of Los Angeles efforts to reduce carbonated soda in school vending machines. There is little question that these localized actions and plans are admirable and offer great examples of new directions in city-region planning (Donald and Blay-Palmer 2006). Many of these new directions, however, seem removed from any understanding of the innovative dynamics occurring in food firms along the food supply chain more generally. It is as if these firms are somehow outside any sustainability agenda. The next section I am grateful for the stimulating conversations I have with doctoral student Melanie Bedore (2008) who is currently undertaking some very exciting research linking social justice, food access and economic geography themes in her doctoral dissertation research, The Just Urban Food System. I credit her with bringing these ideas to my attention.

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will examine empirical results from a recent research project on Toronto’s food economy. Evidence of New Sustainable Firms in Toronto’s Food Economy? The Toronto food economy is a fascinating case study because the region has one of the largest food industries in North America. Like the economy itself, the food economy straddles both manufacturing and the service economy. From a manufacturing perspective, food is the second largest industry in the city, employing 25,000 people and generating Can $15 billion in sales annually. There are many US food manufacturing branch plants in Toronto, including Pepsi, Kraft, Minute Maid, Kellogg’s, Nestle, etc., but there is also a host of smaller locallybased processors that are responding to niche markets with regard to ethnic, health and ecological consumer demands. On the service side of the spectrum, the Toronto region (Greater Toronto Area) has over 2,000 food producers, 1,000 foodprocessing establishments, and over 8,000 restaurants with over 250,000 people employed in the entire urban food system. The five-year research project into the innovation dimensions of this massive food system revealed many fascinating stories, but perhaps this most interesting and relevant for this chapter is the dramatic change in the makeup of the industry over the last decade. The food industry has always been a major generator of economic activity in the Greater Toronto Area, but the innovative elements of the industry have changed more recently. Since the mid 1990s, the fastest growing segment within the industry has been the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The speciality, ethnic and organic SMEs appear to be particularly innovative as they respond to consumer demand for local, fresh, ethnic and fusion cuisine. Interviews with over 100 firms along the supply chain (from producers to processors to distributors and retailers) reveal that these enterprises have emerged despite existing public policies that tend to bias toward large-scale industrialized agri-food firms in the region. As such, a disconnect exists between, on the one hand, the traditional agrifood paradigm that the government regulatory environment is promoting and, on the other hand, the locally consumer-driven food cluster that is emerging (Donald and Blay-Palmer 2006). This has started to change, however, in the last couple of years. For example, at the beginning of the research, there was evidence of a general reluctance on the part of mainstream government decisionmakers to engage with the publics growing interest in healthy and alternative food alternatives (e.g., comments like ‘organics is a disappearing fad’ were common in 2004). By the end of the project, however, these same decision-makers interviewed a few years earlier had a greater level of acceptance and in some cases even enthusiastic embracement. Paradoxically, what we found over the last three years is that the local food movement seems to have more awareness of itself as a selforganizing ‘local’ system while at the same time there is active consolidation in the system more generally by large, non-local distributors, retailers and marketers.


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Whether or not this particular phase enables these localized food firms and accompanying institutions to mature into what Feldman et al. (2005) refer to as a ‘well-functioning and rich innovative and entrepreneurial system’ remains to be seen. I argue here that it deeply depends on the role that the largest players play in defining and shaping sustainability in the system. I now examine some of the results from the industry interviews and studies. Many of the companies interviewed several years ago have had a change in distributors since last interviewed in 2004. For example, newer quality food companies especially in organic and ethnic production have witnessed consolidation patterns with the recent growth of SunOpta, Inc. – a rapidly growing, publicly-traded and vertically integrated Canadian-headquartered company with extensive expertise in the sourcing, processing, packaging and distribution of natural, organic and more recently ethnic foods (it currently controls 90% of the kosher market). The firm’s no. 1 claimed advantage is that it has control over the certification and quality selling of organic and non-GMO seed (Kendall, 2006). The two areas the company into which does not venture is retailing and farming. Over the last ten years the company has achieved remarkable growth. In 1994 it had annual sales of $150,000 and by 2005 those sales had reached $600 million (Kendall, 2006). SunOpta Inc. recently acquired Debbie Boyle’s Pro-Organics Marketing, Inc., making SunOpta the only national distributor of organic products, with distribution warehouses in Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto. Debbie Boyle (former founder of Pro-Organics) now advises SunOpta on governance issues and organic standards. She is Vice-President of the Organic Trade Association, North America’s organic industry lobbying association. One of the concerns raised by smaller farmers and food processors in our research study is the influential role of large retailers and distributors in the standard-making process of organic foods. In the fall of 2005, the Organic Trade Association, which represents corporations like Kraft, Dole, SunOpta, and Dean Foods, lobbied to attach a proviso to the US 2006 Agricultural Appropriations Bill that critics claim weakens the nation’s organic food standards. This is because it allows certain synthetic food substances in the preparation, processing and packaging of organic foods. The bill passed into law in November, and the new standards were in effect at the end of 2007 (Gogoi 2006). Dean Foods, the world’s largest supplier of organic milk has recently entered into a contract with Walmart to supply it with organic products in concert with Walmart’s new efforts to push into organic and natural foods. Although Walmart’s organic entry has been somewhat unsuccessful in the US market, their strategy in Canada appears to be quite different. This is described in more detail below. There is concern on the standard-making front, but there are also concerns with regards to the role that giant retailers and distributors like Walmart and Loblaws can have in reshaping the supply system. As one distributor remarked, ‘the large stores buy in large volumes direct from producers and then they retail it. They have cut out the distributor. The company is so big that people have a hard time competing (Distributor April 2004). And one small business owner had this to add,

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‘[we] deal directly with the Food Terminal. We can still get access, but it is not as competitive [as it used to be]. It is hard to find the best product all the time. For the future, [we are] not 100% certain we will be able to continue to get what we need. Our distributor was bought by a subsidiary that was bought by Sobeys. We buy half our groceries from that distributor (Specialty retailer February 2004). The consolidation of the distribution network – especially for many entrepreneurs creating innovative and new food products – appears to be posing a serious threat to the entrepreneurs’ viability. A key issue is that these large retailers and distributors are reformulating the rules of the game for small suppliers, transforming traditional supply chains, making it more difficult for smaller players to maintain their presence in the market or for new players to enter it. Moreover, these food retailing distribution-based chains are not only supported by current Fordist-inspired regulatory regimes across North America, but are also reshaping them at all regulatory scales, including the form of land use, labour laws, and food-quality regulation (Wrigley 2002, Christopherson 2006). Perhaps the best place-based example of how this is currently playing out is the recent entry of Walmart into the full-scale grocery business in Canada. Even though it has only been just over 18 months since the first stores opened in Ontario, the Walmart presence is already showing signs of reshaping the food system in this country at all regulatory scales. In late 2006, Walmart made a formidable entry into Canada’s grocery sector by opening seven grocery Supercentres in Ontario. Following along the lines of Wrigley et al.’s (2005) embeddedness thesis, the world’s largest corporation and retailer, is showing signs of embedding in place as it impacts firms, workers and regions involved. Drawing upon Canadians demand for ‘fresh ‘ and ‘quality ‘ foods (Donald and Blay-Palmer 2006), Walmart Canada chose to reject the ubiquitous Supercentre banner from its US grocery stores in favour of a madein-Canada ‘fresh ‘ label. Walmart Canada ‘Fresh Your Market ‘ grocery chains have a wider selection of perishables than its low-cost competitors and are more upscale than their US counterpart, appearing to be expanding natural and organic private label food offerings. President’s Choice was Canada’s first private label and that private label ‘first’ played a key role in making Loblaws one of Canada’s largest and most successful retailers of the last decade (Loblaws currently controls one-third share of national food sales). But the company now sees challenging times ahead with Walmart’s entry (Strauss and Grant 2007). Lowlaws is currently upgrading its distribution lines, cutting grocery prices and fighting on wage gains from its unionized employees as it competes with rivals such as Walmart (Strauss and Grant 2007, Flavelle 2006, Shaw 2006). The full extent to which Walmart’s entry will reshape the food chain in Canada remains to be seen, although early signs are cause for concern.


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Implications and Conclusions Food systems planning still treats the ‘firm’ like a static black box. Generally speaking, this literature has vastly under-estimated the role of food firm dynamics in planning for sustainable cities and regions. Despite efforts to be systematic and integrative, food firms in the food systems planning literature are either seen as part of an unsustainable agro-industrial system that must be regulated through tools like zoning ordinances, or are not vital enough to nurture and grow. Rather than place emphasis on the public policy environment required to facilitate growth in the specialty, ethnic and organic SMEs, food system planning has focussed attention on more self-reliant alternatives like community gardening, farmer’s markets, and CSAs. These self-reliance alternatives have potential to contribute to a more sustainable form of regional development, but as Hall and Soskice’s framework suggests, firm dynamics must be at the heart of understanding the varieties of capitalism, especially as Morgan (2008) notes if we are to move towards a more sustainable ‘green’ realm. Applying Gereffi’s notion of ‘global commodity chains’ to food systems illuminates the importance of new global players, especially food retailers, distributors and brand marketers in influencing the supply chain. My research on Walmart’s entry into the ‘green grocery’ business in Canada and the rapid consolidation of the organic and ethnic distribution market as a result of one company’s actions (SunOpta Inc.) reveal the complex and ambiguous nature of both the ‘local’/‘organic’/niche alternative (SME companies bought up by SunOpta) and the non-local conventional agro-food system (Walmart selling branded ‘local’ fresh foods) (cf Guthman 2004, Hinrichs 2001, Morgan and Morley 2003, Murdoch et al. 2000). As Wrigley et al. (2005) suggest, these larger companies are involved in both the distribution and sourcing activities at the same time in host countries and they do so by embedding in the local, impacting – as well as being shaped by – the local milieu. In the Canadian context, planners may be awakening to the potential newly emerging networks that ‘embody alternatives to more standardized industrial mode of food supply’, but their efforts may be misdirected. As I have argued in this chapter, we need better analytical clarification between oft-presented separated entities of the food system. The conceptual question asked at the beginning of this chapter was: what is the link between these non-market localized food planning models such as local farmers markets, CSAs, etc.; new food firm activity as documented in the Toronto case; and the scaling up and consolidation of food retail and distribution in the food chain more generally? The point to make is that much of the momentum of food systems planning has emerged as a direct result of negative externalities associated with food firm practices (and their accompanying extra-firm institutional environment) within the conventional, agro-industrial food system. Growing food deserts and the obesity epidemic in US cities have led to planners’ new interest in improving the built environment through encouraging an increase access to healthy foods and physical activity through improvements to urban design and public health law and

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legislation. Planners’ involvement in the process is inherently systems-oriented and requires thinking critically about the interdependent parts of the system that provides food to a community. This, of course, includes the growing, harvesting, storing, transporting, processing, packaging, marketing, retailing, consuming and waste management of the project. Some of these steps may be within the local planners’ community – or at least their possibility – others many also be part of a global or regional system. Even though the food systems planning literature claims to be holistic and systems oriented, it still needs to address the missing pieces presented in this chapter. Taking a firm-centered perspective to the challenges facing local food communities around a host of food-related issues can help planners make more explicit links between the current momentum in communities around localized and sustainable food systems, the current subsidies and supports that encourage rapid scaling up and consolidation within the food chain, and new and innovative multiscaled institutional and regulatory approaches for mainstreaming a sustainable food system. A common reaction for planners involved in addressing issues of food access to healthy foods and building strong local economies in low-income communities, for example, is to encourage bringing in a leading supermarket chain on the grounds that the chain offers the lowest cost and convenience to local residents. In some cases, planners will virtually ‘give away the store’ to get them, through offering subsidies in the form of tax relief, brownfield clean-up tax rebates, new infrastructure development in the form of road-widening, new lighting, and parking (Smith and Hurst 2007). Obviously getting food-to-food deserts or food insecure parts of a region is a top priority and any step at thinking about these issues is progressive (see, for example, Wrigley et al. 2002). However, taking a more systematic approach to food planning from the perspective of firm-led economic change, would not only examine established retail outlets, but focus on the overall economic health in these and other regional economies. What opportunities exist for more locally owned and operated small and medium-sized business that source from the surrounding region – whether it be from the surrounding terroir, or even, as in the case of Toronto, the surrounding cosmopolitan base of new immigrant and ethnic communities and cultures? The research in Toronto found that much more could be done to create a positive innovative environment for the post-Fordist hybrid food economy that was emerging (Blay-Palmer and Donald 2006). Examples include creating incentives for local independent retailers; exploring possibilities for publicly accessible food terminal sites; and creating a healthier food-choice environment through positive public procurement, among others. As written elsewhere, creating a more positive policy environment will only come about through multi-scaled governance approaches with sophisticated organizational capacity and commitment to move toward a more sustainable form of food capitalism. The beginnings for such a template are there, but the missing piece of the firm – in all its complex multi-faceted dimensions – must be confronted if we are going to mainstream a sustainable regional future.


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Sonnino, R. and Marsden, T. 2006. Beyond the divide: Rethinking relationships between alternative and conventional food networks in Europe. Journal of Economic Geography 6: 181-199. Strauss, M. and Grant, T. 2007. Loblaws sees challenging times ahead. http:// www.reportonbusiness.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070726.wloblaw0726/ BNStory/robNews/home, Accessed on July 26, 2007. Taylor, M. and Asheim, B. 2001. The concept of the firm in economic geography. Economic Geography 77(4): 315-328. Watts, D., Ilbery, B. and Maye, D. 2005. Making reconnections in agro-food geography: Alternative systems of food provision. Progress in Human Geography 29(1): 22–40. Whatmore, S. 2002. Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures, Spaces. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publication. Whatmore, S., Stassart, P. and Renting, H. 2003. Guest editorial – What’s alternative about alternative food networks? Environment and Planning A 35: 389-91. Winson, A. 1993. The Intimate Commodity: Food and the Development of the Agro-industrial Complex in Canada. Toronto: Garamond Press. Wrigley, N., Guy, C. and Lowe, M. 2002. Urban regeneration, social inclusion and large store development: The Seacroft development in context. Urban Studies 39(11): 2101-2114. Wrigley, N. 2002. Food deserts in British cities : Policy context and research priorities. Urban Studies 39(11): 2029-40. Wrigley, N., Coe, N. and Currah, A. 2005. Globalizing retail: Conceptualizing the distribution-based transnational corporation (TNC). Progress in Human Geography 29(4): 1-21. Wolfe, D. and Gertler, M. Globalization and economic restructuring in Ontario: from industrial heartland to learning region? European Planning Studies 9: 575-592. World Hunger Year Organization. 2007. Food Security Learning Center – description of various food system planning programs around the world. http:// www.worldhungeryear.org, Accessed on July 26, 2007. Xuereb, M. and Desjardins, E. 2005. Towards a Healthy Community Food System for the Waterloo region, Report prepared for Region of Waterloo Public Health, Waterloo.


Chapter 8

The Nexus between Alternative Food Systems and Entrepreneurism: Three Local Stories Hélène St. Jacques

Setting the Stage This chapter illustrates the sustainability of a local food system through three different local enterprises near Toronto in Ontario, Canada: Ontario Natural Food Co-op, Mapleton’s Organic Dairy, and YU Ranch. Each of these stories will be examined through the lens of market development, communication and branding – threads that connect these successful Ontario local enterprises. The Emergence of Local As a starting point, it is helpful to focus on consumerism and alternative food systems. The locavore explosion which is very strong in Ontario, across Canada, the UK and in the United States (Seyfang 2006, Holloway and Kneafsey 2000, Murdoch et al. 2000) should be understood as a dramatic departure or paradigm shift away from the dominant industrial food model. As this chapter makes clear, it is not a fad; once the desire for sourcing and eating locally grown food has been unleashed, it will not be supplanted by ‘the next new thing.’ Reaching for local food is driven by a multitude of big and small factors. It is both a questioning of the monoculture global industrial model with its massive carbon footprint and health perils, and a turn towards embracing local and the many rewards linked with it (Hinrichs and Lyson 2007, Morgan et. al 2006). Qualitatively, local food is thought to be superior in taste, with many other possible functional and emotional attributes. This is not to say that most consumers have suddenly become food literates but enough people have begun to question what seemed to be the monolithic, unquestionable wisdom of ‘shopping the world’ at the local supermarket. A whole new set of values has gradually emerged, aided and abetted by both positive and negative influences. Gurus such as Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, Anita Stewart and influential local food writers, media articles and references provided impetus, as have new farmers’

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markets and celebrity chefs and their menus. The excitement surrounding local food now can be heard from every corner and is heightened by local grassroots organizations, new and existing (Chapter 8). Food recalls dating back to the Alar scare (Negin 1996, Rodgers 1996) and numerous others since then has shaken the foundation of confidence North American and EU food consumers placed in the integrity and safety of the food system. Until this point, polling indicated that Canadians had a high level of confidence in the safety of the food supply. Now food recalls, incidents of food-borne illnesses and e-coli outbreaks have become normative and eaters are jittery (Blay-Palmer 2008, Maye et al. 2007, Whatmore and Thorne 1997). Insights on the move to buy local food are based primarily on qualitative and quantitative research conducted by Informa and others. While many food shoppers do not call themselves ‘locavores’, they are attracted to buying local, reaching out for what has been lost or for a more direct relationship with food and the people who produce it (Maye et al. 2007, Ilbery et al. 2005, Watts et al. 2005). The gloss is off the one-stop, streamlined supermarket experience; comparatively, it is a sterile environment which casts a negative halo over its offering. In choosing the local animated, personal encounters of farmers’ markets, people are feeding a deeply embedded desire to connect with the ‘real thing.’ (Feagan 2007, Kirwan 2004). They want to link with the source even though (or because) there is recognition at some level that they are so divorced from it. Urbanites are on a search for what is called authenticity and in doing so are developing a more holistic view of local world of food choices (Morgan et al. 2006). For many, selection is no longer driven primarily by just low prices, advertising or convenience. Research conducted by the Green Belt Foundation in 2007 found that 91% of respondents say they would buy more locally-grown products if there were more available and it was convenient to do so. Other factors account for why people are turning to local and challenging the beneficence of globalized food systems. Given availability, access and possibly some flexibility in the amount of income spent on food, some shoppers are able to direct more of their income to buying organic options, and ideally locally produced, to support the local rural economy. Local farmers inspire high trust and respect from consumers (Moore 2006). To illustrate, annually the Dairy Farmers of Canada has measured the ‘trust factor’ related to key occupational sectors. Consistently farmers and nurses have been in the top tier, followed by judges, police officers, and others. Canadians reasoned that farmers care about quality because they are consuming this food too. This perception stands in stark contrast to the reality of A CBS ‘60 Minutes’ story focused on the dangers of Alar, a chemical sprayed on apples to regulate their growth and enhance their colour. The February 1989 broadcast, largely based on the NRDC report ‘Intolerable Risk: Pesticides in Our Children’s Food’ told an audience of some 40 million that Alar was a dangerous carcinogen. An Ontario not-for-profit organization charged with managing and protecting the 1.8 million acres set aside in southwestern Ontario.

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shrinking farm incomes and the declining rural economy. Most Canadian eaters have been unaware of the very serious threats to the Canadian agricultural sector posed by international trade agreements and government policies bent on export. These tensions and contradictions are shared with farm communities in the EU and the US. Another key factor in the reach for local movement is the perception that local is fresher and better than food that has been shipped from points around the globe. Integral with the ‘local must be better’ principle is the belief that local farmers are not using as many pesticides and other harmful chemicals as permitted in other countries, and hence local must be healthier (Heasman and Lang 2006, Halweil 2004). This factor has risen to the fore as concerns about pesticide impacts and residues increase and the ban on the application of pesticides for cosmetic purposes is widely seen as a ‘no-brainer.’ Gradually, as eaters develop an understanding of the threats posed by climate change and greenhouse gases, local has become synonymous with environmental sustainability and carbon reduction (Pretty et al. 2005). While it has declined somewhat, there is still the perception that local should translate into cheaper; North America’s cheap food policy orientation is not commonly known. Possibly perceived shipping costs were seen to be a major price factor, while in reality transportation costs in this era of cheap fossil fuel and containerized shipping account for a fraction of the price of imported items. Now many people understand that they are part of the problem and potentially part of the solution. In sum, you build trust through knowing provenance and authenticity (Morgan et al. 2006). Farmers are real and their food is real. My company Informa conducted primary research on behalf of ONFC and Mapleton’s, and fortuitously I learned about YU Ranch (operated by Bryan and Cathy Gilvesy) through the Toronto Food Policy Council. Ontario Natural Food Co-op – Distribution to Alternative Retailers The ONFC story started back in what is nostalgically called the ‘crunchy granola’ period. Karma Co-op, still operating in downtown Toronto, created an alternative to supermarkets and industrial food. They incorporated into the Ontario Natural Food Co-op (ONFC) system in the first year with the express goal of empowering people, challenging the dominant retail model where a few corporations had the lion’s share of the market. Karma Co-op members created their own model embodying their mission: ‘We want to take control.’ It evolved, as, ONFC’s general manager Randy Whittaker explained, from its original ‘red’ roots to ‘green.’

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Figure 8.1 ONFC warehouse The alternative bulk food distribution system adapted over the years to incorporate organic, natural, and healthy affordable food options. The original values expanded and continue to do so, mirroring their grassroots origins. ONFC’s mandate now includes consumer education – an important factor that is missing from the agenda of the dominant food retailers. In contrast, ONFC’s customers – over 400 health and natural food stores employing about 4,000 people across the eastern half of Canada – are advocates for organic or, minimally, GMO-free options, with the emphasis on smaller and local offerings. They tend to act as formal and informal educators and flag bearers for healthier eating practices and are hubs for the development of local communities, linking food growers, processors and activists. ONFC has taken local self-sufficiency on as their mandate supplying ingredients for buying clubs, and those who cook with bulk foods. The aim is to re-skill people because they have become de-skilled. Public education about food, converting passives eaters to active food literates, is only now being seen as an essential factor in reversing widespread obesity and ill-health. ‘Diseases of affluence’ are only now being recognized as an issue that must be addressed by both the public and private sector. This is one of the outcomes of the industrial food model that rejected tradition for the brave new world of convenience, speed and snacking. These factors trumped most everything else, including taste, sharing and nurturing. Back to basics practiced by previous generations has become one


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of the new ways of adapting to the erosion of economies as communities around the world suffer the fallout. With this enormous jolt has come the opportunity to revisit what formerly was cast off as primitive behaviour. Those cast iron frying pans passed from one generation to the next are now being put to good use. People are digging through old cookbooks and trolling the internet for recipes, food canning workshops are running at capacity, seeds for vegetables and fruits are outselling flowers two to one – the making and sharing of food – real homemade food – is igniting palates. ONFC is aligned with this new imperative as it is a not-for-profit that is obliged to fulfill a public good through a community foundation and consumer education. ONFC’s distribution business continues to grow in tandem with the natural and health food retail sector – currently they carry about 4,000 sku’s (stock keeping units) of perishable and non-perishable food items. It now provides employment for over 90 people. ONFC distribution is focused primarily in Southern Ontario, extending as far as the Atlantic provinces. It is an early practitioner of vaunted corporate social responsibility playing an active in the organic sector, both in training and sponsoring trade and consumer events. The ONFC booth can be found at the Canadian Health Food Association’s annual western and eastern events and at the widely popular Guelph Organic Conference, to name a few. ONFC maintains the goal of sustainability in tandem with local and understands the complexities around this. They build local and organic supply chains through a number of links including Local Food Plus, aiming for availability year-round. ONFC also recognizes the benefits inherent in branding and launched the Ontario Natural brand, taking its cue from mass retailers who capitalize on house brands to deliver a double win: increasing margins and building loyalty. Loblaw made retail history with President’s Choice that has grown to include PC Green, PC Organics and PC Blue Menu. Launching New Ontario Natural Brand The development of ONFC’s first house brand Ontario Natural helps us understand the complexity of the product development task. The initial research, conducted by Informa, was funded by a modest provincial government grant (Can Adapt). The starting point was to test the appeal of a local, possibly organic processed item and to probe what food items would make sense. ONFC had initially focused on launching Ontario Natural with a line of local organic beans, grains and seeds. The rationale was to provide convenience with cooking and nutritional information in direct competition to bulk options offered by many of ONFC’s retail accounts. The key difference was benefit driven: convenience and facts for customers, and higher margins and less maintenance for retailers. 1,500 new grocery products are launched every year with a failure rate of 70-80%.

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The measurement research was aimed at both retail buyers/procurement (the gate keepers) and their customers at two retail venues. Structured interviews with both sectors found that there was strong endorsement for new brands of locally sourced and produced organic food and that the field of options was wide open, well beyond beans, grains and seeds. Preliminary discussions with major local and organic bean/legume distributors and growers’ marketing boards indicated that local supply was limited to a few varieties. Most crops are grown for export and, with a few exceptions such as white pea beans (famed British pork and beans), feed animals, not people. However, some Ontario bean suppliers were willing to grow a wider range of items. One offered to grow popular varieties such as local chickpeas or garbanzo beans if ONFC could guarantee demand – the Catch 22 factor – a pre-launch condition that ONFC could not possibly meet. A further barrier emerged: consumer demand. Research conducted by Informa on Canadian legume purchase and consumption indicated that a narrow market segment had the skills and desire to regularly prepare and eat bean-based items. Most bean cooks prefer to source ready-to-serve or ready-to-cook canned beans. Now Canadian consumption patterns of legumes have expanded in step with the influx of new settlers who come from cultures where beans play a central role. Canada’s bygone era of baked beans on toast has mercifully been replaced by a wealth of highly flavourful items such as spicy dhal, peas and rice. The purchase incidence varied per item: 35% bought dried beans every month while almost half of the sample of shoppers bought seeds and grains with the same frequency. ONFC’s search turned to locally produced items that their health food stores would be willing to allocate precious shelf space to and that had a sufficient purchase velocity to make them profitable. Retailers must continually evaluate the customer potential and bottom-line impacts of new product offerings. ONFC and their competitors are constantly assessing the potential appeal and quality of new product offerings. Annually thousands of would-be new brands or line extensions of existing brands are seeking placement wherever food and beverages are sold. (To illustrate this point, just look at the number of different flavours of bottled water.) And annually new hopeful brands emerge and disappear from distribution warehouses and grocery shelves (Nestle 2007). In the maelstrom of ‘new’ and novel offerings, stability and repeat purchase must be established in order to achieve profitability and to continue to satisfy shoppers’ desires. Today’s shoppers have become accustomed to finding innovation amidst familiar, loved food brands. Change is good, but it must coexist with trusted, known products. Retail ‘real estate’ (think shelf space, coolers, and freezers) is valuable. In order to gain entry into the supermarket chains, brand owners have to pay rental or placement fees calculated on a per-year, per-shelf facing basis. All those brands that shoppers can find in the middle sections of supermarkets (the areas that nutrition savvy shoppers avoid) pay fees to be there. And the closer to eye level


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the products are placed, the more money those spots cost; the harder-to-reach, harder-to-see locations are charged lower ‘placement’ fees. Now returning to ONFC’s new brand challenge. It had to be local – as local as possible. Ontario was selected as a suitable example of local for both the main ingredients and the value-added processing and packaging. The surveys with ONFC customer retailers and shoppers at two selected health food stores (Harmony Foods located in Orangeville and Toronto’s Big Carrot) found that both sectors wanted to purchase locally grown, locally processed food because of all of the perceived positive values in buying local and what it would do for the local economy. And the range of options shoppers suggested encompassed a wide range of items. The signals were positive. Now ONFC had to match consumer willingness to buy with the reality of local product and processing availability. After considerable investigation of local and organic supply and processing options, ONFC zeroed in on local organic canned tomatoes. This was a wise choice because it fulfilled the local and organic mandates and it filled a void; available options were sourced from US suppliers. Further, canned tomatoes are a popular ingredient promising fast turnover. Most home cooks use them regularly, ensuring that they would not gather dust on store shelves. The next step was to design a package that communicated the key information – local, organic tomatoes – in an eye-catching presentation. ONFC had done their homework and brought to market the right product, Ontario Natural tomatoes (diced, chopped, pureed and whole options), in a market popular 500gm can at a reasonable price; however, sales were sluggish. Analysis suggested that this new market entrant needed in-store promotion (coupons, price specials, ‘shelf talkers’ and feature placement such as end aisle displays) and possibly higher impact packaging. ONFC also learned that distribution and brand ownership have different demands but can complement each other with the proper support and staffing. ONFC is currently developing new Ontario Natural locally produced, value-added products. Does Packaging Design Count? Packaging composition and design cannot be ignored but tends to be left up to local value-added product creators, for practical and strategic reasons. In the early years the shelves of health food stores were stocked with home-grown, small scale minor brands designed to appeal to supermarket wary shoppers. These upstarts offered products aimed at simplicity, necessarily leaning towards an authentic kind of pre-industrial retailing, a no-frills look. Products would focus on the contents not the external polish and crisp design that define the modern supermarket brands – for example, Heinz, Kraft, Kellogg, and other mega names. This new distribution channel had to fill its shelves with many of the same food categories as the supermarket chains, but with new or alternative brands, opening up opportunities for the smaller companies. It was a double win: health food stores satisfied shoppers’ desire for new names, and smaller producers and processors

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had an opportunity to get a toehold in the market. However, these new brands have been driven by values emphasizing quality and authenticity, downplaying the powerful role that packaging plays in moving products from shelf to shopping basket. Both ONFC and Mapleton’s Organic learned the integral role that package design can play in generating sales.

Figure 8.2 Mapletons’ logo Mapleton’s Organic Dairy Mapleton’s Organic Dairy is a testament to on–farm, value-added enterprise and marketing intuition. Ineke Booy and Martin de Groot, the owners of Mapleton’s Organic, come from the tradition of family farms in Holland and were initially dedicated to working in rural projects in developing countries. Their first two children were born in Yemen but by chance the family ended up in Canada. This fortuitous change of life plans followed a visit to Ineke’s parents who had relocated to a dairy farm outside of Elora. Ineke and Martin purchased the family farm in 1990. A pesticide spill in the barn, which could have turned out fatally, prompted Ineke, a former nurse, to question the wisdom of using harmful chemicals; they subsequently converted to organic in 1990. Now the farm has expanded to 600 acres and is growing. Ineke and Martin then went on to play a major role in forming OntarBio Organic Farmers’ Cooperative bringing together organic grain producers and dairy farmers based in Ontario. Ineke assumed a major role in launching a line of organic dairy products, now known as the Organic Meadow brand. The market orientation of some of the OntarBio board members led them to seek out consumer input prior to launching the new brand. This made good sense given that it was the first organic dairy brand in Ontario. Were organic food shoppers ready to expand their range of choices to include this option?


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Figure 8.3 Mapleton sales sheet Focus group research revealed that while some grocery shoppers were interested in the concept of organic dairy products, they didn’t know exactly what it meant – what made milk organic? What was an organic cow? Did this difference affect the taste or quality of the product? These research findings were then used to guide packaging

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design and content for the launch promotions and advertising. The timing of the brand’s launch coincided with the increasing interest in all things organic. Organic Meadow, Canada’s first organic dairy brand, attracted extensive media curiosity resulting in many newspaper articles, television segments and radio stories. This ‘free advertising’ gave the brand a head start, with the added bonus that editorial references have much more impact than paid messages. Organic Meadow fit neatly into the ‘good news’ type of story: here was a little local enterprise that deserved support. The introduction of Organic Meadow milk was quickly followed by cream, cheese, cottage cheese, sour cream and yogurt. The new brand captured wide distribution in smaller health food stores and then worked its way into the supply chain for major supermarkets across the country.

Figure 8.4 Arwa hillside


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The hands-on experience of launching Organic Meadow inspired Ineke and Martin to create a new on-farm processing plant that initially produced organic ice cream and frozen yogurt. The driving principle was to make the best possible organic products – ‘from our “small is beautiful” little ice cream place – Mapleton’s Organic™ Ice Cream is made right on the farm!’ The 500ml fibre cartons carried an illustration of a farm set amidst rolling hills, typifying an idealized bucolic country vista. It echoed values typical for small-scale, homespun brands and fit naturally into the retail environment of health and natural food stores.

Figure 8.5 Inside the Mapleton’s store Mapleton’s Organic also garnered considerable media attention as their business grew to include their on-farm Ice Cream Café. Here was another one of those little brands that echoed heart-warming values. Print and television footage featured Ineke and Martin and their on-farm operation complete with shots of robust grassmunching Holstein cows. An article about Mapleton’s brand and their on-farm store which ran in the Toronto Star, complete with a colour photo, demonstrated the power of print: a steady stream of visitors arrived, clutching the article, to sample the ice cream and to have a look at what was going on. Mapleton’s tapped into the growing trend of urbanites seeking real countryside experiences and conversations with the people who produced the food they ate.

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Ineke and Martin, working in tandem with family members and a growing team of workers, could see that there was an appetite for more than just their wonderful organic ice cream and frozen yogurt. People wanted to know about the product, the farm, and more about the benefits of organic dairy products. Ineke and Martin also understood that tasting is believing. They bridged the gap, reaching out to urban consumers at shows and local fairs across Southern Ontario and Quebec including the Royal Winter Fair and recently the Green Living Show. This one-on-one, directto-customer contact with ice cream lovers provides the chance to sample the array of flavours and the opportunity to share the Mapleton’s Organic story one cone at a time, which then leads Mapleton’s Organic Ice Cream and frozen yogurt lovers to seek out the brand at their local stores. While this way of growing their market has been slow, it has provided a sure path to reaching their customers and building brand loyalty in the absence of costly media ads. Small brands simply do not have the advertising and promotional budgets that their big competitors enjoy. Initially, ONFC and other companies distributed the Mapleton’s Organic products to local health stores across Canada, a natural fit for the brand and a direct link with shoppers who were committed to organic products. However, gaining access to major supermarket chains and a wider market of potential buyers still presented a major challenge. An estimated 80% of Canadian food dollars flow through these outlets. At this point in the growth of organic food sales, large-scale stores had minimal organic offerings; this sector only represented approximately 3% of total sales volume in Canada. The mass retailers opened their doors to organic as the opportunities in this new niche became evident, with each chain carving out their own organic purchasing policies and possibly launching private label brands. Mapleton’s ultimate goal was to achieve wider distribution through mass retailers; however, as mentioned earlier, listing fees can be crippling. The question was how could Mapleton’s Organic capture the attention of the procurement professionals with their Canadian owned and produced brand of superior quality organic ice cream? Intuitively, Mapleton’s management realized that their launch package design had to be notched up in order to fit into the highly competitive mass retail environment. It had to stand next to the big premium-priced, nonorganic, foreign-owned brands: Ben and Jerry’s and Häagen-Dazs. They planned their strategy carefully in conjunction with advisors, Grow Marketing. It included engaging a packaging design expert to create two new design prototypes (one was an updated variation on the original country theme pack and the other was a dramatic departure featuring a dark coloured, sophisticated background) and then to obtain customer feedback.

A major pack design can be very risky, leading to big gains or big losses, which is why the transnational brands tend to tweak the look of packaging rather than subject it to radical redesign at the risk of losing market share. One rule of thumb is this: While shoppers love innovation, they are also risk adverse and don’t want to waste their money. This is particularly the case during economically lean times.


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Informa conducted an onsite survey of buyers of organic or premium-priced ice cream at three Greater Toronto Area health food stores. The two new test packs were presented alongside the existing Mapleton’s ice cream pack. How would the current pack rate in relation to the two new options? Did either of the new pack designs communicate the desired attributes and project values consistent with premiumpriced ice cream brands? The pack design that was the most appealing was also the biggest design leap from the familiar old Mapleton’s Organic design. It communicated completely different characteristics than the original design, including ‘rich,’ ‘classy,’ ‘sleek’ and ‘expensive’. While the results indicated that Mapleton’s Organic was on the right track to repositioning the brand to stand alongside the higher priced quality brands, some questions remained: What impact would this new packaging have on current buyers? Would they be able to find their beloved brand now that it had changed its appearance? And would they continue to reach for it? Would they hesitate for fear that Mapleton’s ice cream and frozen yogurt formulations had dramatically changed in step with the new pack design? ‘Is it going to taste the same?’; ‘I loved it when it was in this pack, is it going to be as good?’ So there is always that tension. While Mapleton’s consumer research indicated that the new pack would appeal to new buyers would it be at the expense of losing their loyal buyers? Mapleton’s risk paid big premiums by attracting the interest of supermarket giant Sobey’s who offered to provide free shelf space in their ice cream freezers alongside the mega, high-priced market leaders, Ben and Jerry’s and HäagenDazs. And sales flourished through their established markets of health and natural food stores. Mapleton’s have now achieved national distribution through a vast network of small, medium and large format food stores, all without the benefit of paid advertising or costly coupons and promotions. In parallel, Mapleton’s Organic have expanded their on-farm operation, creating a welcoming destination for local residents and visitors. The year-round café offers lunches, snacks and cones, and the store sells organic dairy products, meat and baked goods. A small-scale, people-friendly demonstration barn made from reused timber draws curious people of all ages to see the piglets, donkeys, free-range chickens, turkeys, alpacas, and a miniature pony. During the growing season, visitors can purchase produce from Reroot, a community-shared agriculture operation located at Mapleton’s farm. They can pat the calves and get lost in the maze made from 2,000 cedar hedge trees or go for a meditative walk in the stone path labyrinth. Special tours and on-farm musical and educational events are available. Mapleton’s Organic is constantly evolving and developing new ways of reaching out to people who are not only hungry for their delicious products, but for the authentic farm experience. In addition, the family continues to play an active role in farm organizations active in shaping innovative farm policy and in educating the next generation of organic farmers. Initiatives in aid of expanding knowledge of organic and sustainable farming includes welcoming ‘WWOOFers’ (worldwide opportunities on organic farms) and would-be organic farmers from around the world and lecturing to interested groups around the province. In keeping with sustainability aims, a wind turbine will likely be installed.

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Figure 8.6 Wagon ride YU Ranch I first met Bryan and Cathy Gilvesy, owners of Y U Ranch, when Bryan and Dave Reid from Norfolk Land Stewardship Council presented the ALUS Norfolk County pilot program at a Toronto Food Policy Council meeting. They illustrated ALUS (Alternative Land Use Services) in action at the Gilvesy farm, Y U Ranch, and at other farms in the county. Basically, ALUS is about providing modest incentives to producers for providing ecological goods and services to society, commonly practiced by Canada’s major trading partners (more on ALUS later). Bryan is a former tobacco farmer who began farming in 1979 with his wife Cathy. At that point Norfolk County’s former sheen was fast fading as the tide turned against smoking and tobacco sales declined. Formerly prosperous families that had devoted tens of thousands of acres to growing this high-value, supplymanaged crop for generations were desperately seeking alternatives. Some producers turned to ginseng or peanuts, but world markets, high labour input and adaptation hurdles combined to yield disappointment; the second bonanza has yet to arrive for former tobacco farmers.


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Figure 8.7 Tractor ride Bryan struck out in a different direction, starting on a trial basis with two Texas Longhorn cows: these mighty creatures are impressive, with horns spanning 56 inches from tip to tip. He calls them ‘a genetic marvel of natural selection over 400 years … they are hardy, disease resistant, adaptable, and 30% more feed efficient,

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there is no wasteful back fat.’ Texas Longhorns produce lean, healthy meat dramatically different from conventional beef that is bred for 50% fat content. Given that about half of all beef is destined to become hamburgers, we are eating a lot of fat. Remember the days of steak knives, when every kitchen had a set gratis from their local gasoline station? Now we can cut a steak with a blunt knife or the side of a fork. Marbling, or fat, is one of the reasons why obesity levels have risen to an alarming level among kids and adults. Currently almost 60% of Canadian adults are overweight, and epidemiologists indicate that this generation’s life expectancy is lower than their parents (Statistics Canada 2010). Bryan’s initial trial herd expanded gradually and now it numbers about one hundred head. But the Texas Longhorn cattle are just part of a complex operation. Bryan and his family are working on real, natural heritage in terms of the soil, water, forests, grasses, birds, and pollinators. Y U Ranch’s location in Carolinian-forested Norfolk County helps contribute to its high biodiversity. Because the herd is pastured year round, ‘the grass delivers the nutrients, the cows eat the grass, we eat the cows, etc. It’s the wheel of life – it just goes round and round when there is balance.’ In keeping with the quest for local access and control of distribution, he experimented with ways of reaching Norfolk consumers and establishing a viable position in the 100-mile food shed. This special beef was not destined to be an unbranded commodity and prey to the vicissitudes of the giant packing and meat processing industry. Meat producers, aside from the supply-managed turkey sector, fare no better than those who grow corn for breakfast cereals or wheat for bread and cookies: industrialization of food means that those who add value, process, distribute and retail food earn the rewards. Retail prices rise and fall, and the gains go to these after-farm segments while producers struggle to survive (Blay-Palmer 2008).

Prior to 2000, Informa consulted with organic meat and conventional producers, learning that organic or sustainably raised beef, pork and chicken, had very low appeal among meat procurement sector and even high end butchers. They couldn’t imagine that consumers would be prepared to pay price premiums for quality meat or that there was any concern about how animals were raised or what they were fed. Then the era of grass fed beef arrived and people took note.

With a ground-breaking concept, the Gilvesys headed in another direction, shaping a business based on evolving principles of sustainability and feeding the local market. Y U Ranch beef is the brand with the sought-after value of identity preservation: consumers know what they are buying, where it comes from and why Texas Longhorn grass-fed beef has a unique, full-bodied flavour. This is a far cry from the ‘beef is beef is beef’ approach practiced throughout North America; this business-as-usual approach hit the wall with the outbreak of Mad Cow disease – a teachable moment for consumers who suddenly started questioning meat industry practices. Meanwhile, the Gilvesys were steps ahead of the conventional meat


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production sector which lags behind other food producers who have been offering organic and naturally grown produce, dairy and processed items for niche markets. Now the impressive sales growths are in natural, local and organically produced food, directly challenging the industrial food paradigm. The Gilvesys’ Y U Ranch is very different from the conventional farm. As I learned more about the series of innovative nature-conserving practices and the local market orientation introduced by this former tobacco farmer, I searched for his sources of inspiration. What prompts some business people to hike out in new directions? Was it Bryan’s Honours Degree in Business from University of Western Ontario? As I later learned, his ingenuity and marketing savvy were not a result of this degree. In fact, Bryan counters this notion, claiming that it took him 20 years to unlearn that structured thinking process and become creative again. The Gilvesys differentiate their beef by positioning prairie Tallgrass-pastured Texas Longhorn beef as having a distinct taste and texture. And they’re creating value by delivering on those expectations. Y U Ranch is running counter to the pack by creating a new distribution channel and selling in volume. Contrary to business 101 principles that stress the importance of distribution and market accessibility, Y U Ranch meat is not easy to obtain: while supermarkets account for most beef sales, Y U Ranch beef is not available in supermarkets. Says Bryan, ‘I am controlling distribution, and I am going to build my customer base right from the farm,’ and onfarm education is integral to establishing a relationship of trust with buyers. Until recently, their customers had to order direct from the farm and commit to buying a whole steer or a portion – unless they prefer to enjoy it at a local restaurant. This helped drive tourism to Norfolk County as a destination for farm tours and farmers’ markets selling a wide range of produce, and Toronto shoppers can now order Y U Ranch beef from a new local food emporium. Committed buyers see the wisdom of stocking up their freezers with conveniently sized, neatly labeled portions of Y U Ranch beef, reverting to the meat bulk buying option practiced a generation ago. Those who buy local are learning to adopt new/old practices and skills such as canning, preserving and freezing supplies when they are available. They are seeking food they can trust from farmers and local sources that provide authenticity. While the Gilvesys have expanded access and distribution, the aim remains to bring consumers to Y U Ranch to tour their ecologically-oriented operation. A visit to the farm provides welcome exposure to nature along with an intricate array of information about what it means to farm sustainably while nurturing biodiversity. The tours are led by experts such as Dave Reid, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, and others who deliver a science lesson in biodiversity as it applies to agriculture in Norfolk County. As the song goes, ‘It’s about the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees’ and much more.

Take a tour and see what this means at www.yuranch.com.

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Figure 8.8 Long Point Regional Conservation Authority tour Awareness building of ALUS, Y U Ranch and Norfolk County’s food bounty is done through speaking engagements, tours, media stories and, most compelling of all, word of mouth. Bryan is the most public face of ALUS Norfolk County’s pilot program, weaving together the wisdom of ALUS with illustrations of remediation steps taken on his farm and other local ALUS pilot participants. He tells the story to diverse audiences of farmers, urbanites, environmentalists, local food activists, bureaucrats and story hungry media who congregate in community centres, church basements, government offices and hotel meeting rooms located around the province to hear Bryan tell the story of ALUS. He has a natural speaking style that cuts through cynicism with hard facts and memorable minute examples of what it means to farm in partnership with nature, not against it. Humour and good old common sense make him a natural educator for country and city folk alike. Now seasoned farmers from around the province are recognizing the wisdom and ecological merits of ALUS and, with the support of Ontario Nature among others, are creating plans to establish their own programs. Y U Ranch is now certified by Local Food Plus as a producer practicing sustainable farming; this helps lend credibility and expand awareness. It also means that Y U Ranch is truly from field to table (Chapter 10).


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Figure 8.9 Prairie grass A Brief Description of ALUS In Norfolk County, the lead organizations directing the ALUS pilot project are the Norfolk Federation of Agriculture and the Norfolk Land Stewardship Council. Producers receive annual incentive payments for adopting a diverse array of ecologically beneficial practices. This could mean letting marginally productive land go fallow, sowing soil-building crops of prairie Tallgrass, native vegetative cover and oak savannah, or replanting forests. Once prairie Tallgrass has reached maturity and sequestered carbon, the grass can be fed to cattle which mean that it benefits both the environment and the producer. Also, methane is reduced when natural food replaces corn feed which cows cannot easily digest. This means that producers also reduce high input costs linked with sowing corn, most of which is genetically modified. ALUS means creating a natural corridor essential for the survival of a wide array of bird and animal species. Shores of streams and waterways are protected from grazing cattle and sheep yielding riparian benefits. Bird populations thrive with the installation of bird houses; the birds then help by eating flies that are attracted to the cattle. Planting a diverse array of flowering trees, shrubs and forbes (and herbs other than grass) and creating nesting holes for wild bees by drilling holes in stumps aids the reversal of pollinator decline (Figures 8.9 and 8.10).

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Figure 8.10 Bee in a bore hole ALUS practitioners are progressively adapting new practices and reaching out to the farm community, nature and environmental groups and non-rural populations with their message. Organizers are moving towards positioning ALUS as a player in the rapidly emerging cap and trade marketplace. The carbon sequestration benefits yielded by planting prairie Tallgrass for instance could be factored in alongside current offsets provided by funding the creation of new wind turbines and reforestation in the developing world. The economic benefits that could accrue to participating farmers would then provide essential funds for investing in further remediation and operational costs. ALUS is encouraging farmers to work with nature, relearning beneficial practices that prevailed prior to the Green Revolution following the Second World War. In contrast, industrialized farming puts control of our food in the hands of a few at the expense of the many and the natural world. Fortuitously, the emergence of ALUS is occurring in tandem with the growth of local food markets and import replacement initiatives in Ontario. For more information visit www.norfolkalus.com. So, here we are: three established local enterprises. They are sustainably producing or supplying high-quality food for an expanding market and at the same time providing environmental goods and services either directly or indirectly. They contribute to soil remediation and health, conserve natural resources, provide humane animal care and living wages for employees, and support research and


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consumer education. So, what is their advice to us? Link with consumers first and foremost. Find out what they want. Tell your story, control your brand and your pricing, listen to consumers, continue evolving, but remain loyal to your goals and maintain quality and sustainability throughout. References Blay-Palmer, A. 2008. Food Fears: From Industrial to Sustainable Food Systems. Aldershot: Ashgate. Feagan, R. 2007. The Place of Food: Mapping out the ‘local’ in local food systems. Progress in Human Geography 31(1): 23-42. Goodman, D. and Watts, M. (eds) 1997. Globalising food: Agrarian questions and global restructuring. New York: Routledge. Halweil, B. 2004. Eating Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket. New York: WW. Norton and Co. Heasman, M. and Lang, T. 2006. Plotting the Future of Food: Putting ecologically driven, community-based food policy at the heart of Canada’s food economy. Making Waves 17(2): 2-17. Hinrichs, C. and Lyson, T. (eds) 2007. Remaking the North American Food System: Strategies for Sustainability. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Holloway, L. and Kneafsey, M. 2000. Reading the Space of the Farmers’ Market: A Preliminary Investigation from the UK. Sociologia Ruralis 40: 285-299. Ilbery et al. 2005. Product, Process and Place: An Examination of Food Marketing and Labelling Schemes in Europe and North America. European. Urban and Regional Studies 12(2): 116-132. Kirwan, J. 2004. Alternative Strategies in the UK Agro-Food System: Interrogating the Alterity of Farmers’ Markets. Sociologia Ruralis 44(4): 395-415. Maye, D., Holloway, L. and Kneafsey, M. (eds) 2007. Constructing Alternative Food Geographies: Representation and Practice. London: Elsevier Press. Moore, O. 2006. Understanding postorganic fresh fruit and vegetable consumers at participatory farmers’ markets in Ireland: Reflexivity, trust and social movements. International Journal of Consumer Studies 30(5): 416-426. Morgan, K., Marsden, T. and Murdoch, J. 2006. Worlds of Food: Place, Power and Provenance in the Food Chain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murdoch, J., Marsden, T. and Banks, J. (2000). Quality, nature, and embeddedness: Some theoretical considerations in the context of the food sector. Economic Geography 76(2): 107-125. Negin, E. (1996), The Alar ‘Scare’ was for real. Columbia Journalism Review September/October, , accessed June 18, 2007. Nestle, M. 2007. The Politics of Food. How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. University of California Press: Berkeley.

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Pretty, J., Ball, A., Lang, T. and Morison, J. 2005. Farm costs and food miles: An assessment of the full cost of the UK weekly food basket. Food Policy 30(1): 1-19. Rodgers, K. 1996. Multiple meanings of Alar after the scare: Implications for closure. Science, Technology & Human Values 21: 177-197. Seyfang, G. 2006. Ecological citizenship and sustainable consumption: Examining local organ food networks. Journal of Rural Studies 22: 383-395. Statistics Canada 2010. Canadian Health Measures Survey. Available online at: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/100113/dq100113a-eng.htm. Watts, M., Ilbery, B. and Maye, D. 2005. Making reconnections in agro-food geography: Alternative systems of provision. Progress in Human Geography 29(1): 22-40. Whatmore, S. and Thorne, L. 1997. Nourishing networks: Alternative geographies of food. In Goodman and Watts (eds).

Chapter 9

Scaling Up: Bringing Public Institutions and Food Service Corporations into the Project for a Local, Sustainable Food System in Ontario Harriet Friedmann

Introduction Food politics are moving quickly. Food is increasingly understood as a sector with great potential for regional economic development, if only supply chains linking farmers to customers can include local processors and merchants. Public debates increasingly link sustainability to proximity (Pollan 2006). As long distance trade breaks the link between organic and sustainable agriculture (Guthman 2004) and as ‘food miles’ implicate agriculture more deeply with climate change and fossil fuels (Millstone and Lang 2004: 66-67) localization is becoming explicitly central to understanding sustainable food systems (Pretty and Hine 2001). At the same time, the divide between ‘conventional, long,’ and ‘alternative, short’ supply chains is clearly too stark, and paths towards regional food economies must traverse wider, perhaps global networks (Morgan Marsden and Murdoch 2006, Maye and Ilbery 2006). This chapter describes what could be a breakthrough in longstanding attempts to ‘scale up’ local supply chains in Toronto, Canada. Toronto is notable for both a vibrant network of small businesses in food production and retailing, and a vital community of food activists, municipal and non-governmental organizations (Donald and Blay-Palmer 2006, Hassanein 2003). The two come together in an understanding, based on two decades of practice and reflection, within a large network of individuals and organizations, that food security and sustainability are intrinsically linked through a project to (re)build local food supply chains (Marsden and Murdoch 2006). However, for 15 years attempts by community organizations to get supermarkets to source local farm products, and by municipal food officials to convince This chapter first appeared as a journal article in 2007 in Agriculture and Human Values, 24(3), 389-398. Reprinted with kind permission from Spinger Science+Business Media.

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public institutions to buy local farm products, all met with failure. In contrast to parts of Europe where deeply rooted food cultures offer some scope to shift the retail sector towards local supply chains (Fonte 2006) Canada can be called a ‘placeless foodscape’ (Morgan et.al. 2006: 196). In such a context, ‘creative public procurement could be the most important single factor in fashioning food localization’ (Ibid.). Creative public procurement is suddenly beginning in Toronto, in ways no one, least of all the key players, anticipated. The University of Toronto (UofT) in May 2006 announced that Aramark and Chartwells Corporations had won competitive bids as of August 1 to provide food services to most of the 60,000 students on its three campuses. The contract specifies that a portion of the food provided must be local and sustainable as verified by a new organization called Local Flavour Plus (LFP, now called Local Food Plus). The two officers of this newly incorporated nonprofit organization, Lori Stahlbrand and Mike Schreiner, supported by the consultant writing their standards, Rod MacRae, worked with sympathetic administrators in the University for a year to alter the institution’s purchasing strategy towards social and ecological responsibility. This chapter reports on the model they invented, based on interviews with some of those involved. It concludes with a brief reflection on the vibrant ‘community of food practice’ (Waddell 2005: 136-37) in Toronto, which originated over a quarter of a century ago, and links social responsibility and other issues to sustainability. This community, and its public and nongovernmental institutions, provides the context for these individuals to implement a promising new model. The Toronto Context: A Unique Configuration in North America In Toronto, sustainability is less starkly contrasted to social justice than in the US (Wekerle 2004). It was not always so. Until recently, tension between the food bank community and food security organizations in Toronto echoed the debate between Allen and Guthman (2006) and Kloppenburg and Hassanein (2006) over farm-to-school initiatives in the US. That debate centres on the effects of attempts to promote local supply chains on the universal social justice aims of school lunch programs (Allen et al. 2003, Allen and Guthman 2006, Kloppenburg and Hassanein 2006). It is framed by the specific US history of national, publicly provided school lunches – which in turn draws on its unique history of agricultural surplus disposal (Poppendieck 1986). By contrast, there is no national student nutrition program in Canada, a fact that often surprises Americans. As a result, the US debate never touched student nutrition projects in Toronto. Efforts to achieve a national school food program in Canada came only in the 1990s, and were spearheaded by FoodShare, the largest and oldest community food security organization in the city. FoodShare’s delivery of fresh and (when possible) local produce to schools thus differs crucially from US farm to school programs. Efforts to create a universal school lunch program in the late 20th and early 21st centuries have been intrinsically shaped by issues

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centred on cultural and social diversity, food quality, health, loss of farmers and farmland, and sustainable, local food systems. The larger goals and strategies of Toronto food policy officials and activists are also specific to the Toronto and Canadian context. While planners in the United States have recently recognized food as a distinct focus, most food politics in the US are concerned with availability of retail stores, especially supermarkets, to low income neighbourhoods (Pothukuchi 2005). This is also a problem in Toronto, but to a lesser degree. One reason may be Canada’s somewhat more generous and inclusive social assistance. Two other reasons are more important. First, in contrast to starkly racialized class divisions in the US (which are not absent in Toronto), diverse immigrant communities have sustained a web of small specialty shops, often in low-income neighbourhoods (Donald and Blay-Palmer 2006). Second, successful community organizations actively link accessibility and sustainability, particularly in low-income neighborhoods. In particular, The Stop Community Food Centre, located in an area of closed industries, adopts a unique perspective [that] brings together a number of approaches in the field of food security, melding respectful emergency food delivery with community development, social justice and environmental sustainability…[through] community kitchens and dining, urban agriculture, a food bank, drop-ins, civic engagement and pre- and postnatal nutrition and support. All the The Stop’s efforts are based on the belief that food is a basic human right.’ http://www. thestop.org/

The overriding goal of Toronto food politics in recent years, foodbanks notwithstanding, is to link long-term food security and sustainable agriculture to the (re)building of local supply chains. The TFPC is unusual in lending institutional support and network coordination not only to food security projects, but also to local farmers. Unusually, farmers are represented on a municipal council. Through extending its efforts beyond its institutional home in the Greater Toronto Department of Public Health, the TFPC has for over a decade and a half brought agriculture into municipal politics. At a well attended World Food Day event on October 4, 2006, a proclamation by Mayor David Miller recognized agriculture as a key to the future of the seventh largest city in North America: the city ‘supports urban agriculture within city boundaries, as well as the preservation of farmland in the surrounding regions.’ It quotes Toronto’s Food Charter of 2001 The Good Food Box, which is the flagship program of FoodShare, has since its founding cultivated local suppliers of fresh produce. Its founder, Mary-Lou Morgan, was a pioneer in local food coops in the 1970s. As the Big Carrot, still formally a cooperative, shifted to a larger, more upscale store, Morgan joined FoodShare to express her value-based entrepreneurial skills. She built the Good Food Box on her local farm and food networks and carried into FoodShare the original link implicit in food coops of the 1970s between fresh, healthy, socially just, sustainable foods as the basis for healthy and just communities.

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on ‘the right to healthy, affordable, and culturally appropriate food,’ and names the newly created Greater Toronto Agricultural Area Action Committee (headed by the outspoken former head of an activist farm organization) as key to the city’s commitment to achieve it. It ends with the proclamation ‘to celebrate the contribution of agriculturalists to food security.’ On the community organization side, others have followed FoodShare’s lead not only to foster connections ‘From Field to Table,’ but also to find creative ways to combine service to low-income clients with encouragement for sustainable practices by local farmers. This context has allowed community and government organizations to converge on a focus linking social justice and sustainability via local supply chains. For instance, the Government of the Province of Ontario in 2005 created a Greenbelt to, among other goals, protect 1.8 million acres surrounding Toronto from further encroachment on farmland. (http://ourgreenbelt.ca) One specific feature of the Greenbelt to promote local farming, is the first certification of farmers’ markets to ensure that participants are farmers and products are locally grown. This sort of initiative to protect local farmers sets the stage for a search to find ways to increase their access to the nearly 6 million eaters in Toronto. Why Public Institutions? Local community food organizations believe they have reached the limits of scale in both supply and delivery. The pioneering Toronto nonprofit, FoodShare, after twenty years of success distributing ‘good food boxes,’ expects to peak at 4000 families (see Johnston and Baker 2005). The box schemes expand by assisting other communities across Canada. FoodShare’s community kitchens, gardens, composting, urban agriculture, job training programs, and farmers markets touch the lives of tens of thousands of people. Through innovative approaches, such as the student nutrition program, FoodShare models public funding for local diversity. Yet ‘community economic development’ of this kind, according to FoodShare director Debbie Field, cannot solve social problems. Nor can it support a transition to a local, sustainable food system. Retail has reached limits, unless new conditions force a change in future. On one side, small organic businesses specializing in local products face competition from industrial organic imports. The organics delivery business most committed to building local networks, founded by LFP officer Mike Schreiner, recovered from the crisis of supermarket entry but finds it challenging to compete with the prices charged by corporate retailers who don’t share a similar commitment to local sustainable food. Led by the chain Loblaw’s and its President’s Choice (PC) www.toronto.ca – proclamation_worldfoodday2006.pdf. Interview with Good Food Box Marketing Team Manager Zahra Parvinian, May 4, 2006. Interview with FoodShare Director Debbie Field, May 11, 2006. Indicated as (DF).

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Organics™ Line, Canadian supermarkets are integrating organic imports into their conventional, long-distance supply chains (Guthman 2004, Pollan 2006). While Canadian organic standards are expected to be higher, they are not expected to affect USDA certified imports. While legitimizing organics to a wider range of consumers, supermarkets break the link between sustainable and local implicit in the original organics social movement. ‘Food miles’ (Lang and Heasman 2004: 233-40) show no sign of diminishing through existing market practices. On the other side, supermarkets have not been receptive to attempts by nonprofit organizations to place local, sustainable crops, such as the frustrated efforts of World Wildlife Fund Canada (with Stahlbrand and MacRae part of that team) to place sustainably grown Ontario apples in Toronto supermarkets (despite supplies large enough to export to England). Nor can the Toronto Food Policy Council (TFPC), part of municipal government, do better than nonprofit and commercial efforts to ‘scale up’ sustainable local food systems. The TFPC is widely recognized in North America as a creative organization, which has successfully leveraged public health and other municipal infrastructures (such as publicly owned warehouse for FoodShare) into support for an elaborate web of food-related social and economic projects. Its founding Coordinator, Rod MacRae, recognized the potential of public institutional purchases to scale up the market for local and organic food over ten years ago. Yet access to sympathetic elected Councillors on the Council and to fellow city employees did not encourage the slightest hope at the time. The strategy of institutional buying was ahead of its time in the 1990s. Even as the strategy has made a sudden breakthrough via a nonprofit organization, according to the present coordinator, Wayne Roberts, it is still blocked to the TFPC. Building Ladders: A Collaborative Approach Local Flavour Plus took shape while its founding individuals worked with UofT officials to rewrite the University’s food services contract. LFP created a collaborative and flexible model of standards and verification that gives ladders to farmers and corporations to scale up local supply chains for sustainably grown products. LFP seeks to make it easy to enter into collaborative relationships to scale up local sustainable supply chains. The process began in February 2005, when Stahlbrand, founder of LFP (as it eventually came to be called), was co-teaching a senior seminar in food security with her partner Wayne Roberts (Coordinator of the TFPC) as part of the equity studies program at New College, a residential and

Interview with Mike Schreiner, May 8, 2006. Indicated as (MS). Interview with Lori Stahlbrand, May 3, 2006. Indicated as (LS). Interview with Rod MacRae, May 2, 2006. Indicated as (RM). Wayne Roberts, May 19, 2006, personal communication.

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teaching unit of the UofT. Their practicum included a class survey among New College students, which showed that they were willing to pay somewhat higher costs for local, sustainable food, and research into University procurement in North America, which mainly relied on Food Alliance’s ecolabel. She mentioned the results to the Principal, David Clandfield. Stahlbrand says, ‘… the thing he was most interested in was that this wasn’t an all or nothing proposition. You could start with just one product, and you could slowly expand as the market could bear it and as farmers became certified.’ The continuous improvement approach gives the University of Toronto (UofT) a ladder. Clandfield called meetings and organized presentations where, he says, ‘Lori wowed them.’ It led to extended collaboration between Stahbrand and UofT administrators to write sustainability requirements into the specification for bids for a food services contract to replace the one expiring in July 2006. They designed a contract requiring increasing percentages of LFP products each year, and offering incentives to exceed targets. It provides a ladder for giant food services corporation to climb over the years of the contract. Contractors Aramark which won the larger bid), Chartwells (the smaller) and Sodexho began learning as they prepared bids, asking LFP for guidance. Ladders for Farmers; Proximity, Collaboration, Flexibility Three innovations are key to evolution of the LFP approach: local supply chains – proximity – as a pivot of sustainability; collaborative relations to help individual farmers and the whole sector improve; and flexible verification to help farmers solve problems that arise in meeting standards. Proximity is an LFP ladder for both organic and conventional farmers. Although difficult to specify, especially in sparsely settled regions of Canada, Stahlbrand’s commitment to sustainability led her to insist on local critera. LFP brought in Rod MacRae to write standards. MacRae had worked with Stahlbrand at WWF and on a popular book with her and Roberts (Roberts et al. 1999); had long experience in both organics standards and government (including nine years coordinating the Toronto Food Policy Council (TFPC); a doctorate in sustainable agriculture policy, and a commitment to local food systems. LFP works with and against the arbitrary nature of ‘local.’ It begins with political jurisdictions. LFP certifies within the province of Ontario, allowing exceptions for borders with other provinces but not (for legal reasons) with the US, despite the fact that the national border cuts across natural regions and waterways. Most important, local refers to the whole supply chain. LFP reverses conventional incentives, and encourages regional links (Local Flavour Plus 2006). By making available a greatly expanded market, LFP hopes to balance the scales in favor of local ecological farmers. The Canadian organics movement has succeeded in getting higher government standards than the US National Organic Program. This makes it even more difficult for Ontario farmers to compete with industrial organic imports. Stahlbrand had first looked to US Food Alliance,

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‘rather than reinventing the wheel … and having to write standards ourselves’ (Stahlbrand 2003). But Food Alliance ‘didn’t deal with energy and there wasn’t anything overtly local.’ As a result, frozen blueberries and raspberries, which are grown and frozen in Ontario, are also imported from a Food Alliance certified 4000 acre operation in Oregon.10 When the Food Alliance connection broke down, Stahlbrand realized ‘we can make these standards anything we want to make them because we are starting from scratch!’ (LS). As LFP standards evolved, they aimed to turn proximity from a liability into an advantage. At the same time, ecological farmers stand to benefit from the high standards they have maintained. LFP’s environmental production standard automatically recognizes organic and other environmental production systems. However, farmers will have to meet new requirements for biodiversity, labor, animal welfare, and energy use, as well as proximity. Energy standards are a notable innovation. Even more notable are labor standards, whose absence in the US, according to Guthman (2004), was a fatal flaw that facilitated industrial take-over of organics in California. Organic farmers will have access to the same collaborative relationships and flexible verification practices as conventional farmers to improve with LFP. To meet the proximity standard, organic farmers in the Toronto area can benefit from existing local organic supply chains. LFP Director of Marketing Mike Schreiner brings a loyal network of organic farmers and processors created over a decade through his organic home delivery business, which emphasized local as much as possible. He calls it a ‘values-based’ business. His goal was always political, to build sustainable economies. Beginning with a Community Supported Agriculture project using a local currency, he helped organic farmers overcome what he saw as quality barriers to market entry. Paradoxically, what was grown without chemicals and with attention to ecosystem integrity was not handled properly, so that it would ‘die the next morning in your refrigerator.’ Organic farmers often came from non-farm backgrounds. ‘There was a lot of historical knowledge about how to handle foods that wasn’t there.’ Schreiner had grown up on a farm in Kansas, where his grandmother had milled wheat into flour, which she still does in retirement. He also learned by working in grocery stores. By helping them to market their products, Schreiner got past the attitude he encountered – ‘well, it’s grown without chemicals, so therefore, eat it!’ He taught organic farmers better post-harvest handling techniques. As these local organic supply chains hit limits relative to ‘mainstream corporate organics,’ LFP offers them a food services corporate ladder (MS). LFP’s flexible certification addresses another barrier of the organics movement. Organic certification is an all or nothing proposition. The clear boundary between organic and conventional is intentionally reinforced by rigorous requirements for transition to organic. It encourages division, even hostility, between organics and those committed to the conventional food system. Organic farmers understandably consider themselves burdened by market and government practices favouring 10 www.stahlbush.com/history.php.

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conventional farmers, an attitude noted by both MacRae and Schreiner as a barrier to growth. Conventional farmers and government ministries of agriculture understandably take organics to be a rejection of all they do. LFP standards are instead based on a continuous improvement model, with support for farmers to move in the right direction in place of penalties if they fail to meet specific rules. LFP’s innovative point system is designed to help farmers move in the direction of sustainability in all of its categories. A base of mandatory conditions must be met in each category to be verified, but once verified, bonuses reward improvement in each category. Out of a total of 1200 points, farmers must meet 75%, which LFP understands to ‘represent significant progress in the transition to more sustainable practices’ (Local Flavour Plus 2006: 1). Thus, while it is mandatory for a supply chain to be within Ontario (a very large territory), the LFP local standard awards a 50 point bonus to farmers and processors within 200 km of final consumers. Some small producers are already planning to divert from US to domestic sales (RM). LFP introduces collaborative practices designed to improve the sector as a whole. In order to minimize administration for those already participating in certification programs, LFP ‘piggybacks’ on existing high standards, such as organic and the animal welfare standards of the British Columbia Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RM). All farmers are facing a proliferation of governmental, corporate, commodity sector, and third party norms and ‘performance standards.’ The ‘Introduction’ to LFP farm standards states, ‘In the spirit of continuous improvement, standards are strengthened annually, based on input from growers and other experts’ (LFP 2006: 1). Building on his experience with Integrated Pest Management (IPM) systems with World Wildlife Fund Canada, MacRae devised standards and verification procedures to assist farmers in meeting production protocols. He recalls an IPM instance when a redlisted (banned) chemical for potatoes had to be temporarily reclassified on the yellow list (permitted with specific conditions) because the local pesticide vendor would not carry the listed yellow substitute. LFP standards are thus designed to work consciously with the ‘tension … between differentiating from the [conventional] norm and having … a sufficient pool of people who can meet [the higher standard] so that you guarantee supply … in the short term.’ The aim is the highest possible standard. The means is to ‘shift … provisions to make them more rigorous over time but at a speed that allows producers … to evolve with the protocol.’(RM) Ladders for Transnational Food Services Corporations: Local Auditing Corporate buyers demand protocols, but don’t always know which to use, especially across regions. Much has changed in the decade since MacRae first tried to convince municipal institutions and hospitals to purchase food according to social and sustainable criteria. At that time, he was a government insider, a public servant in the City’s Department of Public Health. Yet in retrospect MacRae thinks the obstacles were mainly to do with undeveloped corporate supply chains,

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at least with respect to local farmers and processors. Ten years ago what we now call traceability – a practice adapted by corporations from the organic movement – was just beginning in many commodities. MacRae was told by municipal and hospital purchasers at the time that local buying was not consistent with specific protocols of vendors concerning food safety and quality. He retrospectively understands these statements to reflect an early stage in restructuring of corporate supply chains (see Marsden et al. 2000). Over the decade, it has become clear that massive investment in electronic tracking systems paradoxically makes it possible for corporations to monitor local supply chains. Still, they need incentives and assistance to do so. Aramark, the larger UofT supplier, follows demand. The corporate website,11 insists on this. Its ‘guidance’ refers only to health: Avian flu (‘… not a food-borne illness.’); Food Allergies (‘Upon request, we share with customers all ingredients that go into our final product.’); and Nutrition: ‘Just4U™ recipes are developed for superior taste and analyzed by dieticians for nutritional content based on several criteria, including Low Fat, Heart Healthy, Carb Counter, Cal Smart, Vegetarian and Vegan;’ and ‘ARAMARK’s ‘Fresh and Healthy’ educational and promotional campaign directs consumers to the healthier items available …’. Its school contracts ‘provid[e] nutritious, healthy food to the children we serve at more than 440 school districts around the country,’ including ‘nutritional meals and educational programs for … the K12 market,’ and ‘[i]n 2004, the ARAMARK Charitable Fund … awarded a grant to the American Diabetes Association Research Foundation to fund research into childhood obesity.’ The corporation introduces new issues in response to its perception of consumer wishes: ‘ARAMARK is dedicated to providing its customers with a broad portfolio of coffee options … including coffees certified as Organic, Shade Grown and Fair Trade…’; however, the word sustainable does not appear, nor as the coffee example suggests, does any reference to distance. There is one reference to local: ‘ARAMARK’s mission is to understand consumer preferences … In spite of the challenges, in circumstances where there is strong demand, ARAMARK works with local providers to ensure they meet our top-rate safety and quality standards in bringing cage-free eggs to consumers.’ Even for this one ingredient, it is not clear whether Aramark’s offer leads or follows the UofT contract. This suggests a highly selective translation of environmental and health demands of social movements into consumer preferences, showing no real attention to the agricultural end of the supply chain, what I have described as an emergent ‘corporate-environmental food regime’ (Friedmann 2005). So big institutional customers can lead in a new way.

11 www.aramark.ca, linked to www.aramark.com. Accessed 6/12/2006.

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Ladders for Public Institutions: Extending the ‘No Sweat’ Experience For its part, UofT during the same period had acquired experience in responsible purchasing. As a publicly funded university, UofT had suffered serious cutbacks during years of deficit politics, and responded to a per-capita government funding formula by increasing enrolments and tuition (though still very low by US standards). Students in recent years, however, despite increased tuition bills, had demanded that the University take social conditions into account in its corporate purchases. The UofT finally complied. It purchases apparel according to social criteria advocated by the ‘no sweat’ campaign of the Maquila Solidarity Network – a policy recently adopted as well by the municipality of Toronto for firefighters, police, transit workers and paramedic uniforms (Annex Gleaner 2006: 2). This shift in purchasing to include criteria other than price set the stage for students interested in local, sustainable food from UofT catering corporations. They didn’t need to demonstrate. With help from teacher Stahlbrand, a small group of students in New College (one of the undergraduate residential colleges) researched models for UofT to consider. Then New College Principal Clandfied took the initiative, and introduced Stahlbrand to his colleagues responsible for purchasing in the wider UofT, where she introduced the students’ findings. They enthusiastically embraced the idea. MacRae says of Stahlbrand, ‘She has tapped into…[a] vein I have never seen before. I have never seen a project that has received so little opposition.’ The UofT is proud to announce its new policy (Munk Centre Monitor 2006), and other educational institutions are expressing interest. Enabling Cooperation: Values-based Facilitation of Market Relationships LFP has invented a promising way to assist a large public institution, two transnational food service corporations, and regional farmers to navigate a foggy climate of proliferating regulations and protocols. A proliferation of norms, protocols, and ‘performance standards’ has made government agencies, which once monopolized regulation, into one among many types of ‘certifiers.’ Government institutions built in the 1970s or earlier, even while requiring extensive records to be kept, have great difficulty adapting to differentiated supply chains. The Ontario Milk Marketing Board, for instance, reluctantly responded to pressure to allow a separate organic stream a few years ago, but other than that, according to Stahlbrand, ‘it’s all or nothing’. LFP, like other ‘third party certifiers’, does some work from which governments have withdrawn. The Canadian government, through its recent Agricultural Policy Framework, disperses some responsibilities it used to perform. For some protocols a government agency may inspect as before. For others, in one example, it gives grants to commodity groups to develop and enforce food safety performance standards in field crops (RM). Government, commodity producer organizations, and

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third party certifiers, including – and perhaps especially – nonprofit organizations, approach regulation from different angles (Bingen and Busch 2006: 247-249). Nonprofit status prohibits political activity and commerce, but allows LFP to provide ‘marketing support’ to farmers who can’t pay for marketing sustainable products that should bring a premium price. It uses the money it raises from foundations ‘to educate people about sustainable agriculture and provide markets, not for individual farmers but for sustainable farming.’ Of course, nonprofit status is necessary to win foundation grants, which provide the income that cannot be generated through charging for services. Finally, the relationship is more comfortable between organizations, such as the UofT and LFP, when both are nonprofits (LS). LFP intends to at least partly shift the highly unequal balance of market power. MacRae says, first, that marketing associations and links to ‘progressive buyers’ are among several shifts by growers wanting to be ‘connected to something’ rather than atomized and dependent on corporations. Second, as an alternative to standard corporate protocols, LFP does not necessarily accept most International Standards Organization (ISO) protocols, which are oriented to large operations and framed universally. Generic standards of the ISO type are applicable without reference to the local conditions, and inappropriate to small operations, e.g., having a company officer responsible for environmental management. LFP protocols are more flexible and conducive to adaptation to diverse sites, an approach more favourable to the small scale and specific cropping systems of sustainable agriculture. According to MacRae, ISO might require ‘a plan for minimizing soil erosion, whereas our [protocol] would be you have to have a four-course rotation.’ While the future will tell how well this works, and what unanticipated challenges will confront the experiment, LFP hopes that Aramark’s purchases to prepare meals for tens of thousands of students will reorient supply chains towards local and sustainable. LFP does not negotiate contracts, including quantities and prices. According to MacRae, ‘we can’t guarantee anything for anybody.’ Nonetheless, some small growers are ‘scaling up’ in anticipation of LFP-certified sales, based on the trust they bear to MacRae, Schreiner, and the consultant who is training inspectors for LFP. Garry Lean was approached because of his 25 years’ experience as an organics inspector, his flexibility (‘we weren’t sure he’d want to since it’s not all organic’), and relations with farmers: ‘When you say to a farmer, Garry is our director of inspection, they say, ok, I’m comfortable with this.’ (RM) MacRae envisions that ‘once suppliers are LFP verified, many of them [will sell] … to multiple customers.’ He hopes that food service companies will encourage existing suppliers to meet LFP standards, and LFP will no longer have to create new relationships. Echoing his colleague Mike Schreiner, the valuesbased entrepreneur who outlived the PC Organics™ crisis, and reflecting on the failure of Lori Stahlbrand’s efforts for WWF to place IPM apples in supermarkets, Rod MacRae hopes that ‘this may be the way to retail in the end.’ Whether or not it reaches the retail sector, one of the lessons collectively learned by LFP is how to

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use the legal framework of nonprofit organizations to enable relationships between small farmers and institutional buyers. The Toronto Context: A Vibrant Community of (Food) Practice What is intriguing about the UofT contract is an experimental configuration centered on a nonprofit organization which works toward enabling a constructive market linkage between local small farmers and large transnational corporations. A public institutional purchaser is specifying local. By rewarding improvements, the contract encourages a large transnational corporation to use its advanced tracking techniques to enable small quantities to enter via local supply chains. These tracking technologies are not sufficient for either the incentive or the practical knowledge of how to implement local sourcing. This is provided by LFP. Its web of relationships allows for a bridge between policy and activist orientations, and between place-based and industrial conventions (Goodman 2003: 1-2). Whatever the degree of success turns out to be, the design is creative. It is worth inquiring into the basis of this social creativity, which both draws upon and facilitates ‘food citizenship’ across not-for-profit (including municipal government) and market spaces (DeLind 2002: 223). Stahlbrand, Schreiner, and MacRae are three of the many creative individuals in a Toronto community of food practice that goes back more than two decades. Like the others quoted in this article – Field, Roberts, Parvinian and even Clandfield (who sponsored a student food bank and offered a course in food security) – and hundreds not mentioned, the three acquired crucial technical skills, organizational insights, negotiating experience, institutional resources, and personal relationships of trust over 20 years within the Toronto context. All three credit their experiences and relationships to what can be understood as a community of practice of Toronto food politics.12 Unlike most uses of the phrase (Waddell 2005: 136-37), I understand the Toronto community of food practice to include more than networks among individuals, and more than their skillful access to institutional resources. It also includes the specific functions of a municipal government body, the Toronto Food Policy Council, and a vibrant network of nongovernmental food security organizations, especially the largest, FoodShare. These organizations have provided strategic resources, as well as opportunities to experiment and learn from others’ experiments, to the diverse individuals who move through them, usually leaving behind new projects and ideas. These institutions are unique in linking a wide range of top-down and bottom-up initiatives that emerge and evolve within and across a range of ‘sectors’ – public, voluntary (NGO), and market. 12 This might be the political complement to the structural understanding of ‘farreaching possibilities for creative forms of production and work … in the great metropolitan regions of the new global order (Scott 2006: 14), which may well emerge by sector, including the food sector (Donald and Blay-Palmer 2006).

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Schreiner and Stahlbrand met at the Toronto Food Policy Council, on the day in early 2005 when Coordinator Roberts invited both to address the Council. Each had turned to the Council for help in scaling up markets in sustainable agriculture in Ontario, but from different sectors – private business and NGO. Schreiner was ready to move on from the organic distribution business, as he turned over management to a new partner. His business had started with a grant from the City of Toronto administered by the TFPC, which allowed him to buy a refrigerated truck, and with low cost warehouse space at FoodShare. Stahlbrand was looking for support for an Ontario ecolabel, at the time envisioned as Food Alliance Canada, which grew out of her work with WWF Canada. She had already begun to work under FoodShare’s welcoming umbrella, which allowed her to apply for grants under their charitable status. These small grants kept her going for a few months at a time. Both Schreiner and Stahlbrand had worked independently for years to arrive at convergent understandings. The embracing community of practice, via TFPC, allowed them to collaborate quickly. That these two food innovators had worked on marketing sustainable food in the Toronto area for many years without meeting testifies to the breadth of the community. Roberts says that ‘Toronto has incredible bridging capital.’ Roberts acted as a bridge between market and social movement organization experiences by connecting Stahlbrand and Schreiner. But this was not a social introduction. They met as a result of requesting help from a public agency and its director, and in the course of addressing the Food Policy Council to solicit advice and support. TFPC is an institutional pivot for the food community of practice. At the same time, community webs are intricate. MacRae was Coordinator of TFPC before Roberts, and the two had co-authored a popular book on sustainable food with Stahlbrand. Although she and Roberts are personal partners, Stahlbrand met MacRae independently. Each was consulting (on different projects) for WWF Canada. Stahlbrand’s fascination with ecolabels and contacts with Food Alliance came from the WWF project, as did her ability to move beyond FA’s limitations. She then took her quest, as do many food innovators, to FoodShare, where Debbie Field gave her support and practical help to explore and experiment. Like the Toronto Food Policy Council, this enduring and shape-shifting NGO is a pivot of the community of practice. As former Co-Chair of TFPC and a food researcher at the University of Toronto, I am part of this community of food practice, and played a small role in the unfolding story. A government research grant at UofT, which included FoodShare as a ‘community partner,’ financed a small seminar at which Stahbrand first introduced the concept of an Ontario ecolabel in December 2004. The event attracted an unusually mixed audience for the University or any venue: policy officials and staff from Toronto and Ontario governments, farmers, food and environmental activists, and NGOs.

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No one guessed at the time that the ecolabel idea was only a step towards a very different approach to ‘value-based labeling’ (Barham 2002),13 which would culminate a year and a half later in the UofT-Aramark contract, and in the creation of LFP, both works in progress. Out of the Toronto community of food practice has come a new way of certifying, of making standards for sustainability, and of sourcing institutional food, which offers a promising way to increase the scale of farm products moving through local supply chains. An aspect unusual in North America (Shreck et al. 2006) is to make labor standards one of the criteria of sustainability. The Toronto Food Policy Council and FoodShare were originally initiatives of municipal government to address hunger and food security. While the mandate was grandiose, the effects were, and are, unpredictably fruitful. These two organizations, one governmental and one not, have helped to sustain the often uneasy link between social justice and sustainability. The elements of ‘real food’ for the Toronto community include justice as well as health, nature, and joy (Roberts et al. 1999) – a creative tension since the early days of the community of food practice. Acknowledgements Thanks to Lori Stahlbrand, Mike Schreiner, and Rod MacRae of LFP and Debbie Field and Zahra Parvinian of FoodShare for sharing time and insights at length, and to Wayne Roberts of TFPC , David Clandfield of New College, Josee Johnston, and Amber McNair for helpful conversations about our ‘community of practice.’ Thanks to Yossi Cadam for the ladder metaphor. References Allen, P., FitzSimmons, M., Goodman, D. and Warner, K. 2003. Shifting plates in the agrifood landscape: the tectonics of alternative agrifood initiatives in California. Journal of Rural Studies 19 (1): 61-75. — and Guthman, J. 2006. From ‘old school’to ‘farm-to-school’: Neoliberalization from the ground up. Agriculture and Human Values 23 (4): 401-415. Annex Gleaner, May 2006, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Barham, E. 2002. Towards a theory of value-based labelling. Agriculture and Human Values 19(4): 349-360. Bingen, J. and Busch, L. 2006. Shaping a policy and research agenda. In J. Bingen and L. Busch (eds): 245-51. J. Bingen and Busch, L. (eds) 2006. Agricultural Standards: The Shape of the Global Food and Fiber System. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. 13 Now the Munk Centre for International Studies (2006) is glad to rediscover its part in what evolved, over two years, in a completely different part of a very large university.

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Buttel, F. and McMichael, P. (eds) 2005. New Directions in the Sociology of International Development. Amsterdam: Elsevier. DeLind, L. 2002. Place, work, and civic agriculture: Common fields for cultivation. Agriculture and Human Values 19 (3): 217-224. Donald, B. and Blay-Palmer. A. 2006. The urban creative economy: Producing food for the urban elite or social inclusion opportunity? Environment and Planning A 38 (10): 1901-1920. Fonte, M. 2006. Slow Food’s Presidia: What do small producers do with big retailers? In T.K. Marsden and J. Murdoch (eds): 1-358. Friedmann, H. 2005. From Colonialism to Green Capitalism: Social Movements and the Emergence of Food Regimes. In F.H. Buttel and P.D. McMichael (eds): 227-64. Goodman, D. 2003. The Quality ‘turn’ and alternative food practices: Reflections and agenda. Journal of Rural Studies 19(1): 1-7. Guthman, J. 2004. Agrarian Dreams: Paradoxes of Organic Farming in California. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hassanein, N. 2003. Practicing food democracy: A pragmatic politics of transformation, Journal of Rural Studies, 19 (1), 77-86. Johnston, J. and Baker, L. 2005. Eating outside the box: FoodShare’s good food box and the challenge of scale, Agriculture and Human Values 22 (3): 313-325. Kloppenburg, J. and Hannanein, N. 2006. From old school to reform school? Agriculture and Human Values 23 (4), pp. 417-421. Lang, T. and Heasman, M. 2004. Food Wars: The Global Battle for Mouths, Minds, and Markets. London: Earthscan. Local Flavour Plus. 2006. Farm Standards, Version #4 (21/04/06). Ms, Toronto. http://www.localflavourplus.ca/standards, accessed on December 11, 2006. MacRae, R. and Toronto Food Policy Council.1999. Not just what, but how: Creating agricultural sustainability and food security by changing Canada’s agricultural policy making process. Agriculture and Human Values 16, 187-201. Marsden, T., A.Flynn, and M.Harrison. 2000. Consuming interests: The Social Provision of Foods. London: UCL Press. Marsden, T.K. and Murdoch, J. (eds). 2006. Between the Local and the Global: Confronting Complexity in the Contemporary Agri-food Sector. Research in Rural Sociology and Development 12. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Maye, D. and Ilbery, B. 2006. Regional Economies of local food production: Tracing food chain links between ‘specialist’ producers and intermediaries in the Scottish-English borders. European Urban and Regional Studies 13(4): 337-354. Millstone, E. and Lang, T. 2004. The Atlas of Food. London: Earthscan. Morgan, K., Marsden, T. and Murdoch, J. 2006. Worlds of Food: Place, Power, and Provenance in the Food Chain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Munk Centre for International Studies. 2006. Academy rewards: from ideas to action. Munk Centre Monitor, Fall. p.5. http://webapp.mcis.utoronto.ca/resources/Munk_ Centre_Monitor/Monitor_Fall_06_high.pdf. Accessed December 11, 2006.

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Pollan, M. 2006. Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. NY: Penguin. Poppendieck, J. 1986. Breadlines Knee-deep in Wheat: Food Assistance in the Great Depression. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press. Pothukuchi, K. 2005. Attracting Supermarkets to Inner-City Neighborhoods: Economic Development Outside the Box, Economic Development Quarterly 19 (3), 232-244. Pretty, J. and R.Hine. 2001. Reducing food poverty with sustainable agriculture: A summary of new evidence. SAFE-World Research Project. Executive Summary. http://www.essex.ac.uk/ces/research/susag/safewexecsummfinalreport.shtm. Accessed December 6, 2006. Roberts, W., MacRae, R., and Stahlbrand, S. 1999. Real Food for a Change. Toronto: Random House of Canada. Scott, A.J. 2006. Creative cities: Conceptual issues and policy questions. Journal of Urban Affairs 28(1): 1-17. Shreck, A., C.Getz, and G.Feenstra. 2006. Social Sustainability, Farm Labor, and Organic Agriculture: Findings from an Exploratory Analysis. Agriculture and Human Values 23 (4): 439-449. Stahlbrand, L. 2003. Ecolabelling as a Marketing Tool to Support Sustainable Agriculture. Consultant report to World Wildlife Fund Canada. MS, Toronto. Waddell, S. 2005. Societal Learning and Change. Sheffield UK: Greenleaf Publishing. Wekerle, G. 2004. Food justice movements: Policy, planning, and networks. Journal of Planning Education and Research 23, pp. 378-386.

Chapter 10

Food Policy Encounters of a Third Kind: How the Toronto Food Policy Council Socializes for Sustain-Ability Wayne Roberts

Whenever a conversation turns to global warming and the environment, someone is bound to bring up the need for sustainability, at which point someone will inevitably talk up the need for innovation. Everyone will invariably nod agreement, not because they always know which innovation will do the trick, but because they assume that innovation refers to technology or know-how that someone else will invent to solve some other person’s environmental abuse problem – not something different or innovative they will change in themselves, the way they live, or the everyday institutions they come in contact with. I want to turn such conversations in a different direction. This chapter examines and promotes a sustainability-driving food system innovation that changes people. It empowers them, helps them work with new problem-solving skills, and thereby transforms the everyday functioning of governments – all to the benefit of sustainability in the food system. As a bonus, it improves the social life of activists and civil servants, two groups that sorely need such improvement. This multi-purpose innovation was invented in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1982, picked up over the next decade by a variety of US cities hit by a loss of traditional industries and the rise of hunger, including Hartford, Connecticut, in 1991. Toronto started its council the same year. I predict it will become the fastest-growing institutional innovation in food governance over the next 25 years and will become as commonplace as city departments of public health or recreation. This innovation is called a food policy council. Food policy councils are a crucial tool for citizens striving to shape food systems that combine food security and sustainability in the most generous sense of both terms – to condense my definition into one mouthful: food policy councils Food policy councils brings together people engaged in a wide variety of food organizations and activities to share ideas about and help initiate projects that advance community food security and food system sustainability and to develop public understanding that a sustainable and secure food system generates a wide mix of community benefits, including job training and creation, beautification, recreation and tourism opportunities, farmland protection, hunger alleviation and increased social cohesion and improved health.

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support the health and well-being of farms and farmers, fisheries and fisherfolk, hunters and gatherers and their ecosystems, as well as all the people, processes and environments engaged in regulating, processing, transporting, preparing, serving, eating, and disposing of food as it wends its way along the product life cycle and through the cycle of life. Because I think food councils can do such a good job of empowering people to connect the dots and build up the indispensable social and problem-solving skills that make sustainable food security happen, I write this chapter on the eve of my retirement to persuade others to cultivate food councils everywhere – in local, regional and national governments, to be sure, but also in a variety of complex organizations (universities and hospitals leap immediately to mind) that work with the many-sidedness of food to address multiple food-related needs of their stakeholders. Becoming an indispensable tool for sustainability is a tall order for an institution that has no formal place in already-existing food systems, and which at this point in time is a factor in about a hundred cities and states, mostly in North America. I have a decade’s experience as an employee of the Toronto public health department (TPH), managing one of the oldest, best-financed and most influential of food councils in the world, the Toronto Food Policy Council (TFPC). I supervise one professional colleague and take direction from one super-competent secretary, 30 enthusiastic and gifted citizen members appointed to the TFPC by the Toronto Board of Health, as well as from Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health. I like to think that I am the most accountable employee in Toronto: accountable to a citizen body, the civil service and elected officials. This standard of accountability is just one of the many unique and high-performance contributions that food councils make to sustainability, and corresponds to the Triple Bottom Line – of economic, environmental and social accountability – of organizations breaking trail in the journey to sustainability. It has been my experience that food councils are well-suited to two sustainability-sustaining functions that are rarely supported elsewhere: councils can break free from narrow specialties to champion and embrace crossdisciplinary and cross-departmental collaboration; and, they can engage people as citizens from diverse backgrounds, rather than as representatives of varying special interest groups, and thereby uphold the goal of serving the public interest. Without such institutions mandated to engage governments in multi-departmental collaboration and engage citizens in deliberative democracy, sustainability efforts won’t get out of the starting gate. Indeed, I believe that the slow progress on the sustainability file is a result first and foremost of ‘failed states’ that don’t know how to manage these two crucial elements of sustainability carriage and governance, and not the inherent economic or technical difficulty of creating workable and sustainable solutions. Sustainability and food security need to become action verbs, not passive nouns, and food councils are the agencies to activate this change. That’s why I think it’s so urgent that the food council as political innovation set the gold standard, not, despite its many benefits, technology.

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Socializing is Beautiful What do food policy councils do? Prepare food policy, most would guess, and, hopefully sustainable food security policy. As many thoughtful and inspired food policy documents illustrate, including ones that I have written, food policy councils which take the policy in the middle of their name literally do burn brightly at first. But then they burn out, for the simple reason that there is no-one in government who has a real job with serious operational responsibility who has the time or mandate to hear, deal with, champion or implement a comprehensive and sustainable food policy. Many governments have an agriculture policy or a rural policy or a nutrition policy or a food safety policy or even a health promotion policy, and sometimes even appoint an official responsible for putting such halfbaked policies into practice. But food policy – with the implementable meat of resources on its bones, as well as directors with overarching responsibilities and resources to animate and orchestrate the whole food sector – exists mostly in our imagination. We haven’t reached to first base in terms of food system awareness, as can be seen in the fact that few governments even report statistics on food as a whole or on food’s impact on global warming, pollution, species diversity, employment or any other indicator of sustainability. What we have is statistics on the number of farmers, amount of fertilizers, and so on, but usually none totaling the number of people who work across all sectors on jobs related to food, none totaling all the money spent on all food functions, and none totaling environmental impacts running the whole gamut from farm pesticides to the garbage dump and sewage plant. ‘What you can’t measure, you can’t manage’ the old saying goes, and government can’t even see it, let alone measure it, which is one reason food sustainability is nowhere – and why it’s impossible for food policy councils to find operational staff to write policy. This – unbelievable as it sometimes seems – is why food, which is as old as humanity and an absolutely essential need, is considered a ‘new’ issue for governments. When discussing sustainable food policy, therefore, both the humility and the high hopes drained of false expectations come from getting a chance to work on a frontier, a blank slate or greenfield construction site. With the possible exceptions of Scotland and Cuba, no national government in the world has a comprehensive food policy that is actually being put into action. With the possible exception of Belo Horizonte in Brazil, no local government has a comprehensive food policy that is actually being implemented. ‘Shambolism’ is how one of my colleagues describes the more common experience of governments, which adopt a report pledging commitment to sustainability, cut a few ribbons in scenes that give a notion of motion, then leave the old ways untouched. Policy and its ingredients (a lot more than ideas, we’ll learn, as soon as we deconstruct what policy is) are the very capacity that food councils must work from below to bring into being; the content of policy directives that come down from above will only come later. So we don’t fool ourselves or get ahead of ourselves, it’s crucial for food policy

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actors to understand that this is how far back the starting line is, despite our fears that when it comes to the planet’s need for sustainability, we are perilously near the finishing line. Why is comprehensive food policy so undeveloped? I’m tempted to say that the government rule is to leave food policy as much as possible to private sector players, and governments only allow exceptions to that rule when there’s a ‘market failure’ and looming political failure that force their hand; as a consequence, governments have specific programs, not general policies (Friedmann 2005). At any rate, Patricia Allen is very astute to notice this consequence in her discussion of the United States Department of Agriculture in her book, Together at the Table: Sustainability and Sustenance in the American Agrifood System (2004). ‘Agricultural planning has been achieved not through regulation and directives so much as by offering various services and opportunities,’ she writes (2004: 54). That’s where the buried treasure is – in services and opportunities, or programs, not policy. It’s the same trial-and-error story with health and public health policy, which also evolved in response to pressing demands that imposed themselves on the government agenda despite the absence of a comprehensive government overview to put specific problems and responses in some proper place. That’s why many governments have health-based services and opportunities relating to pasteurization or food safety inspection, for example; they were the response to imposing problems of some time ago. Likewise, it’s the same story – agriculture and food are not studies in exceptionalism – for social security policies which evolved in response to specific disasters such as widows of soldiers trying to raise families after a war or mass unemployment during the 1930s. The support payments responding to these crises weren’t placed in some accordion file for comprehensive social security programs with one file just for food security; nor was there much thought about food security as a node in the net of social security or human rights. In all these cases, governments put the service and program cart before the policy horse. This erratic legacy creates a special problem for broadly-conceived food policy, a relatively recent arrival on government agendas, because all the parking space for government carts has been claimed and taken – a problem magnified by the untimely coincidence of the rise of food movements during the 1980s and 1990s with the overpowering surge of neo-conservative campaigns to cut back government functions and resources. For good or ill, government is mostly a messy business that is reactive to demands for services banging on the door, not proactive about opportunities to get policy alignment right. This is the tragic irony of sustainable food policy; it has fallen through the chasms left behind by individual services and departments often put in place by well-meaning politicians and civil servants long ago to fix a pressing problem of their day – which problem never included a demand for comprehensive or sustainable food policy. This brings us face-to-face with the banality of evil in sustainable food policy: government silos are a bigger obstacle and require more staying power to


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overcome than corporate power or resistance. That’s why campaigns that take on big business can be safely left to independent citizen groups; what surprisingly mature 1960s radicals used to call ‘the long march through the institutions’ to put obsolete framing of governmental department roles right side up requires food policy councils. How to Win Friends and Influence Food Policy When the penny drops for food policy council members and they realize food policy is nowhere, they can either move to academic policy analysis or get on with rolling up their sleeves for the real policy and practice of animating, supporting, facilitating, connecting, educating, advocating for, championing and celebrating existing and emergent projects, all the while building strategic bridges for cooperative relations with people who work on projects that either link to or border on food systems. This ‘one step backward, two steps forward’ approach to policy is not a matter of discretion being the better part of valor. The valor of advocating comprehensive policy is simply enriched by learning the reality of what comes first in comprehensive policy. According to Carnegie’s 1930’s book How to Win friends and Influence People, winning and influencing come from good relationships, not logical policy, for the simple reason that most people care more about themselves and their friends than they care about policy (1936). So if you want to argue about policy, Carnegie warned, you’ll either lose the argument because your opponent retaliates with unsubstantiated claims that dismiss your evidence, or – worse still – you’ll win the argument and your humiliated opponent will resent you forever. Faced with the prospect of being a curmudgeon who wins policy battles only to lose the policy war, I immediately resolved to learn how to foster sustaining relationships as the foundation of sustainable policy interventions. I couldn’t have asked for a better institutional base than a food policy council to learn how to intervene because food councils have members who can provide introductions to these relationships and facilitate related projects. This scenario planning led me to a meditation on the zen-like paradox of food policy councils: the more council members roll up their sleeves to deal with the meat and potato issues that create food sustain-ability in their communities, the less they deal with policy in the cloistered Capital P way it is commonly understood. The food policy council’s work of supporting community food security and sustain-ability begins with the selection of food council members. In contrast to many citizen advisory boards, which have a competitive selection process to pick one individual at a time, I and the citizen co-chair of the TFPC nominate a slate to ensure diversity in the talents, potential and expertise of the collectivity; the Board of Health is free to accept, amend or replace this proposed slate, though in practice my recommended cross-section of talent has always been adopted unanimously. The Board also sets the terms of reference for the food council, specifying that the

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council’s job is to help the City implement the Toronto Food Charter, a charter that is founded on sustainability objectives and processes. Before discussing work external to the TFPC (i.e. over and above maintenance of the TFPC), it’s important to understand that food policy councils don’t do implementation. It is inappropriate for the same agency to do advocacy and implementation because it is crucial in a democracy that people receive a public service without fear or favor of a civil servant’s views on any issues; especially in public health, there needs to be absolute faith in the objectivity of the service provider. Equally important, organizations built around delivering a program have very different attributes from organizations built around innovation and advocacy; the last thing an overworked service manager wants to hear is a new idea to increase the workload. Third, implementation of any one typical measure that can be adopted at a TFPC meeting in the blink of an eye – increase community gardens, establish communal baking ovens in parks, ensure farmers markets in underserved neighborhoods, provide community kitchens, and so on – has the capacity to become a black hole of lost time. I know from experience that the staff resisting such initiatives could quickly have food council staff tied up in knots that experts at nautical training schools haven’t heard of. The TFPC approach is to initiate and support community groups that will carry out negotiation and implementation of such joint community-city initiatives; we are an enabling and empowerment tool but we are not a substitute for communities taking power. Because we don’t do implementation, external work refers to partnerships that we work on developing. Since we have such few resources, we can’t afford to concentrate them on conflict-laden causes since one cause would absorb all our capacity; so we work with people who want to work with us like people who work on beautification or community development. We operate like the dessert tray server; people can choose to engage or not and very quickly we have more than we know what to do with. In the Toronto model for food council membership, the slate as a whole features balance and diversity, but each individual is chosen strictly on the basis of talent. Luckily, this is not a difficult combination in a city like Toronto; our council members include the former minister of agriculture from Rwanda, the executive chef from Sodexo, a founder of Oxfam, and a research director of the Canadian Urban Institute, the chair of the leading organization training organic farmers, founder of Metro Ag: North American Alliance for Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture, alongside experts from various ‘communities of food practice’ (refer to Friedmann, Chapter Nine for an elaboration of ‘communities of practice’). There are several reasons for putting an equal premium on individual talent and collective diversity, all of which relate to sustain-ability. First, as social work theorist John McKnight has long stressed, it is crucial that members of downtrodden groups see themselves, and are seen by others, as people with exceptional gifts, not just high needs, and therefore primed for empowerment (McKnight 1989). People should feel pumped when they become members of a food council. Second, having visibly-qualified members is the equivalent of the power dress for success; city staff and politicians need to appreciate that a food


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policy council proposal comes from a representative, credible and expert group. Food policy council members need to be, and be seen to be, among the best and brightest and most endowed with gravitas of advocates, because they must win the confidence of authorities who are reluctant to change policies and practices that have many powerful supporters and that have stood some test of time. Since we are the ones who most want change, the onus is on us to convince others they are better off to switch from the status quo. Third, the membership norms of the TFPC help it function as a collectivity and practice the policy equivalent of the golden rule: do policy unto others as you would have policy done unto you. This notion represents a rupture in the ‘fix that problem’ approach of the past, which more often than not fixed one problem while unintentionally and unmindfully creating another. That’s what happened, for example, when simplistic food safety rules favored junk food chains, which can afford all the stainless steel kitchen equipment and ready access to washrooms that are thought to guarantee food safety; such regulations end up backfiring on health determinants because they prohibit sales of fresh and unprocessed fruits, veggies or meats by street vendors who tend to be independent entrepreneurs from disadvantaged groups. As the street vending example illustrates, overarching sustainable policy serves up an amalgam of health benefits, from support of lowincome entrepreneurs to culturally diverse and nutritious food choices to clean air, traffic safety and crime-free streets. This latter set of claims may seem far-fetched, until it is acknowledged that street and pedestrian access to take-out reduces air pollution from stop-and-go traffic at drive-through take-outs, increases traffic safety by reducing the numbers driving under the multitasking influence of eating junkfood, and by adding to a bustling street scene that makes streets busier and therefore safer. I call policies that addressed so wide a range of benefits elegant: the holy grail of efficient and effective sustainability (Roberts et al. 1995). Food councils, which seek input and consensus from people of many distinct interests and perspectives, are pretty much a guarantee that elegant solutions will be favored over the quick fixes chosen by people in monocultural departments with one-track mindsets who are far less likely to catch recommendations suffering from hardening of the categories. The membership norms of the TFPC provide the human group equivalent of a closed loop in natural systems, and thereby help food councils develop a capacity to think holistically and assess unintended and unwanted effects – what are usually and illogically called side-effects as if they are not predictable consequences of the prescription. Thanks to its membership prism that captures the full spectrum of light in terms of health determinants, the TFPC has been able to play a leading role in a number of Toronto Public Health initiatives. In 2008, for example, TFPC promoted a fish advisory that, alongside recommendations of two servings a week of heart-healthy fish, added a recommendation to purchase sustainably-harvested fish: a first, to the best of my It is estimated that one quarter of meals are eaten in the car (http://www.webmd. com/diet/features/the-latin-diet).

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knowledge, in public health advisories. In 2009, the TFPC played a significant role in expanding the fresh, healthy and diverse options available from street vendors at City Hall, putting a foot in the door that could open to a range of sustainabilityenhancing options. Both examples of change mark a shift by a city government toward health-focused but broadly-conceived food security and sustainability. Finally, the TFPC model of personal membership recruitment on the basis of individual talent contributes to sustain-ability by highlighting the centrality of the public interest, not just market interests, as drivers of sustainability measures. In many areas, particularly in the US, food council members are chosen because they represent a specific stakeholder group, such as supermarket retailers or food banks. I believe this undermines the reputation of the food council as a public purpose group, since the stand-out qualification of members becomes the organization they work for and their obvious purpose on the council is to ensure that the turf of the stakeholder paying their salary is protected. Moreover, such stakeholder groups inevitably gravitate toward delay, while people seek voting instructions from their organization, and drift toward the lowest common denominator of projects or policies that all stakeholders can agree on, even if the policy or project does little to advance health, community food security or sustainability objectives. The purpose of membership diversity is not to provide representation, but practical knowledge of all sectors to strengthen the value of the council’s holistic perspective. By contrast with a stakeholder model, TFPC members, chosen because of their personal accomplishments and intensive knowledge of at least one population groups’ needs, are not beholden to organizations. They are free to vote on the spot with their conscience, while pursuing a consensus that addresses their needs as well as needs of other members. As a result of norms established around this foundation, during the ten years I have worked there, the TFPC has settled all internal issues through consensus, negotiated a consensus on working relations and budget with Toronto Public Health, and won unanimous support from key committees of City Council on all but one occasion. We’ve Got to Start Meeting this Way Effective relationship-based sustainability initiatives are also evident at TFPC meetings, which are normally held on alternate months. The meetings are always held in prominent committee rooms at City Hall, an emblem of the fact that we are non-partisan but parti pris – part of the City and ready-to-serve. Meetings are conceived as a social production – the meeting is the message, Toronto media guru Marshall McLuhan might have said – staged to model and optimize relationshipbuilding. In this way, meetings mirror the breaking of bread and companionship (from the Latin roots for ‘with’ and ‘bread’) of meals, over and above the utilitarian nutrients of ingredients. Meetings start with nibblies, usually provided by an entrepreneur chosen as ‘Local Food Hero’ in honor of their ‘going the extra mile to bring local, sustainable and healthy food nearer to us.’ By opening each meeting


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with this ceremony, we not only break the ice with sociability around food; our relationship helps win recognition and profile for struggling entrepreneurs, often from disadvantaged communities, while positioning ourselves to break the ice with the business community, which usually fears that food sustainability hampers business effectiveness. It takes time and skill to make the call to order heard over the buzz and chatter, and to stop the hugging among 50 guests and 25 members excited to see each other. That, together with the time for the ceremony honoring the Local Food Hero, means that the formal agenda starts about 30 minutes late. But the upbeat, positive, cheerful, can-do mood can’t be sacrificed to the formal agenda because we are trying to brand sustainable food security policy emotively as well as logically. In contrast to most meetings of change advocates, where the tedium is the message, the pace is brisk and bristling with humor and progress reports that report progress; if you don’t have such progress reports, the meeting says sub voce, you’re not doing your job because opportunities to make good are abundant. TFPC borrows from Toronto City Council and its committee meeting gimmick known as a ‘consent agenda.’ Detailed reports on all the deathly boring minutes, correspondence and executive routine are sent out by e-mail in advance of the meeting and grouped together under one consent agenda item and voted on in less than a minute. That leaves 10 minutes for council member introductions and updates, 80 minutes for two educational presentations and discussions, a 20-minute networking break and sampling of baked goods bought at a nearby farmers market, and 40 minutes to review upcoming opportunities. Any sensitive, difficult or complex issues are referred to the alternate month’s TFPC meeting, which is identified as a meeting to sort out troublesome details and usually only attracts TFPC members and close followers. Since meetings compete for time of people who have very little time to spare, every effort is made to ensure that public meetings downplay administrivia and play up unique networking opportunities and presentations that have to be experienced in the flesh. This goads TFPC staff and steering committee members to develop relationships that keep meetings fresh and ahead of the curve. In this way, the necessities of successful meetings drive a relationship-based organization. Over and above the two educational presentations, the meetings are part of a learning organization, at least by the standards of learning theorist Senge. A learning organization is one ‘where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire,’ he writes, and ‘where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together.’ (Senge 1990: 3) The mood and style of the meetings also allows us to perform a distinct function; it’s where we shine as what Sue Zeilinsky, internationally respected traffic planner, used to call ‘a linktank.’ Linktanking is a remarkably effective way to make I want to thank Rebecca Schiff for bringing this to my attention by lending me an advance copy of her book manuscript on food policy councils.

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things happen and illustrates the European Green Party concept of ‘subsidiarity’. Organizations, they say, should be ‘as low (close to the grassroots) as possible, as high (i.e. centralized) as necessary’. Meetings such as this are as high as linktanking needs to be and as low as it must be to work well. Both the linktanking and the learning also illustrate the non-technical fix proposition I am arguing here, since the wealth of knowledge that is created comes from a ‘new’ way of bringing a collectivity together – a meeting. The proof of the TFPC relationship-based meeting style is in the pudding. Some of the outstanding successes of TFPC meetings come from what Vancouver Food Policy Council founding coordinator, Herb Barbolet, calls the ‘serendipitous synchronicity’ of food gatherings. Just as golf players get luckier with their shots the more they practice, so savvy food organizers get luckier with the people they meet the more they come to TFPC meetings. The genesis of Local Food Plus (described in detail in Chapter Ten) came from a chance meeting between Lori Stahlbrand and Mike Schreiner which led them to jointly found what became Local Food Plus (LFP), which shortly launched its first contract with University of Toronto, still the largest contract for local and sustainable food in North America. The Plus in Local Food Plus refers to sustainability, and LFP offers the world’s most comprehensive certification and inspection system for sustainable food production methods. LFP and TFPC both work independently to promote ‘local and sustainable’ as words that belong together, just like health and safety, peanut butter and jam, and research and development. Another benefit from the social side of food policy meetings came from recognizing that most guests, unlike TFPC members, were under 25, primarily members of a new generation of university students eager to sow some wild oats on behalf of authentic food. My frequent contact with these youth coincided with other opportunities I was taking advantage of to work with universities in Toronto to educate the next generation of food professionals to work in more holistic ways by combining nutrition, community organizing and sustainable agriculture. At the time, the TFPC had a chance to hire a youthful Yusuf Alam on a short-term contract, and I asked him to organize what became in 2009 the world’s first Youth Food Policy Council. Sustainability doesn’t get much better than having a youth group learning to play leading roles as new food professionals for their entire career. Aside from providing a good time and producing some good results, TFPC meetings create an atmosphere that models processes of dialogue and consensus, establishing a crucial set of social skills as well as an important socialpsychological undertone for sustain-ability messages. Consensus, dialogue and buy-in are critical to good energy – a positive and empowering counterpoint to the otherwise foreboding prospects that necessarily inform sustainability efforts in a grim and threatening era. Though I wouldn’t use the term social engineering, the positive can-do mood that envelops and frames TFPC meetings is deliberate, not spontaneous. The failure of climate protection advocates to do the same – to get out of the scientific doom and gloom club and contest oil industry lobbies by


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reframing a different opportunity discourse on going fossil-free – starkly proves by force of negative example what doesn’t happen when positive dialogue, consensus and cross-societal buy-in don’t happen deliberately. As with most things that don’t happen, they don’t happen in an entropic universe where energy degrades unless someone intervenes to raise the level by concentrating otherwise-diffuse good energy. One big job of food council organizers is to concentrate that good energy by going the extra mile to overcome conflict or find a welcoming place of consensus or collaboration. On a broader level of human psychology, the TFPC’s approach to dialogue, consensus and buy-in means modeling and setting an expectation for win-win and we-we solutions that we can continuously improve, rather than winlose and us-them proposals that end up causing analysis-paralysis. Strong Bedfellows Meetings are the tip of the iceberg in terms of what food policy council members and staff do with their time. Most of the work promoting relationship-based sustainable food policy happens between meetings. Relationship-based outreach can be quite far-reaching, thanks to three methods that have come to define the TFPC’s approach to partnering work. The first of these methods comes from the commitment to elegant design of government programs, design that strives for multiple benefits spread among a wide grouping of beneficiaries. Commitment to elegance gives the TFPC a hand up in establishing win-win/we-we relationships with a seemingly magical ability to do more with less and increase benefits from stabilized expenditures. Innovative food system relationships are all about transforming a problem in one phase of the food cycle (soil degradation, for example) into an opportunity by connecting it to a problem in another phase – for instance, the so-called garbage problem of dealing with food scraps that could be composted to regenerate soil. In this case, city governments and farmers help each other by saving money on both chemical fertilizers and garbage landfill costs. Environmental sustainability wins too because there’s no more rotting food buried in landfill, where it generates methane, a gas that creates 22 times more trouble with global warming than carbon dioxide. Take another example of elegant methodology to get a sense of how it fosters non-threatening relationships that speak well for sustainability. Elegant design can address the problems of low farm incomes, and the resulting problem that many farm-owners cannot get their children to buy or carry on the family farm, by linking farm challenges to the problems of new immigrants who would like a local source for their favorite homeland foods that can grow here, and who might also want a chance to take up their old homeland occupation as farmers. An interesting example emerging are transitional towns that merge positive messaging with opportunities to construct post-peak oil cities (http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=rQF09NG00V8).

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Put these problems side by side on the same page, and soon even government officials start imagining a way that immigrants can work on farms growing ethnocultural foods that fetch a premium price in the stores, and they can do this while creating local jobs, reducing a negative balance of trade in agricultural products and limiting pollution caused by long-distant transportation of foods that can well be grown locally. On the basis of this kind of winning design approach, the TFPC has partnered with a number of groups to champion and promote opportunities for immigrants to farm professionally and for local farmers to hire and grow for new immigrants. Using elegant design as a method suited for social outreach beyond the already-converted, food councils can develop relationships with unlikely partners by piecing together workable, consensus-building and sustainable solutions that people hadn’t previously thought of because they were thinking inside the box of their isolated experience or specialized departmental silo. The members of food councils have eyes peeled for elegant solutions that solve several problems at one time – providing through social innovation the efficient problem-solving method appropriate to sustainability. Aside from the magic of elegance that makes TFPC outreach viable, the TFPC had the advantage of a practical approach to stages of food system reform brought by my predecessor, Rod MacRae, who in turn learned the approach from his brilliant mentor and Ph D supervisor at McGill University, Stuart Hill. Though Hill favored a radically organic overhaul of industrial food systems, he developed a schema that allowed him to present three practical and continuously-improving steps, an alternative to telling people they had to go for all or nothing. The famous Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, who designed a ‘transitional program’ in 1938 that was designed to take workers step-by-step from fights for modest reforms to fights for socialist revolution, would have been amazed that a Montreal agriculture professor upstaged him in such a gentle way. Step one for Hill is reform that increases efficiency. Rather than denounce food banks as violations of basic notions of the right to dignified access to nutritious food, a Hill-based efficiency scheme would suggest that donors give money instead of cans and boxes that have to be carted to a central place and sorted; the money would allow food banks to buy healthy food in bulk at great discounts –literally quadrupling the value of donations. Or, if the topic had to do with toxic pesticides sprayed on crops, Hill might suggest something akin to Integrated Pest Management, spraying only when and where needed, in the most efficient way possible, commonly reducing pesticide applications by half, thereby saving the farmer money and saving the environment at the same time. No fuss, no muss in terms of fights, just the beginning of movement and dialogue. Step two for Hill is reform that offers substitutes. Instead of relying on food banks, help people organize community gardens so they can grow low-cost and healthy foods as a substitute for going to the food bank. Instead of relying on toxic pesticides, farmers can substitute biological sprays that do the job.


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Step three for Hill is redesign. Instead of relying on charitable food banks to provide food, governments should provide people on low income with vouchers for healthy food, and cover the costs for the vouchers through savings in the medical care system. Why quibble over the costs of a healthy school meal when the cost of one child-onset case of diabetes can top a million dollars? Instead of spraying crops with pesticides, farmers can redesign their farms to replace vast fields of one low-value commodity crop that acts as a magnet for lazy pests with new crops that return a higher premium because they’re pesticide free. The new crops can feature diverse plantings, some of which, like carrots and onions, fend off the pests that bother the other. Rod MacRae – who likes to say things like ‘I’d rather see one hundred farmers cut their pesticides in 50 per cent than one farmer cut by 100 per cent’ – instilled this methodology in the TFPC during the 1990s. This approach kept the TFPC from isolating itself on the policy margins where members would issue abstract criticisms of conventional wisdom but with no prospect of ever establishing relationships that could allow both the TFPC and its partners to work together. A few years after I joined TFPC staff, Janice Etter became the TFPC’s unpaid citizen co-chair. I credit her with coining the term ‘issue management’. We applied this concept successfully and unknowingly when we promoted green roofs as sites for urban agriculture. Just like private sector innovators need research and development units, often organized into freewheeling ‘skunkworks,’ government innovators need issue managers – people who can take a seemingly crazy idea and put it through its paces until it becomes official policy. The trick is to be able to deconstruct the tests and stages that have to be passed before getting to a sustainable yes. The first step in issue management is brainstorming and idea-popping to get the outlines of a bright idea. That happened back in the early 1990s when early supporters of urban agriculture, flummoxed by the lack of growing space in a busy and dense city like Toronto, identified rooftops as an abundant space for growing food atop approximately one-sixth of the landmass in an otherwise crowded city. The second step is to create a little buzz around the idea, get people talking about it in avant garde circles. We did this through local alternative media while visionary engineers and architects such as Greg Allen and Monica Kuhn did the same in their professions. Margie Zeidler, the city’s champion of social and green entrepreneurs, also used her restored garment factory office building as a showpiece of a low-tech, food- and garden-oriented green roof right in the epicentre of Toronto’s hip art scene, where black clothing was de rigueur. Green roofs became the building fashion equivalent of the new black. The third step, especially in government circles where evidence-based decisions are prized, is to show that the idea has some scientific legs. TFPC and In the US, estimated direct and indirect costs of diabetes was over $174billion in 2007 (NDIC 2009). The federal health department in Canada estimates diabetes costs over $9 billion annually (Health Canada 2009).

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its friends helped link up with two Canadian federal government agencies, Central Mortgage and Housing and the National Research Council (Peck et al. 1999). These agencies sponsored a report, that determined the benefits of the green roofs to store and clean storm water and keep it out of the full-to-overflowing sewage system, thereby saving millions in public dollars. That scientific report not only made green roofs seem believable it put green roof advocates on the positive side of the financial angles. The fourth step is to ensure an independent host organization that can work to command sufficient respect and support to put the issue on a very crowded policy agenda. This was taken up by Steve Peck, a visionary green entrepreneur who founded Green Roofs for Healthy Cities a non-profit largely funded by farsighted roofing companies. Holding annual building science-based conferences in major cities of North America, Peck turned the Toronto-based non-profit into a worldclass authority on the multiple efficiencies and paybacks of green roofs. The fifth step, commandeered by Peck, is to establish a demonstration project in a prominent place where the project can speak for itself. Demonstration projects often win more support than demonstration protests. This was the case with a set of gardens on the third floor of Toronto’s City Hall, right outside City Council chambers, especially when National Research Council tests vouched for the water and air cleaning. In the course of promoting the showpiece, Peck also found his political champions, two politicians from very different points on the political spectrum. The sixth step is to normalize the issue, which the TFPC did by having green roofs profiled positively in a number of important City reports, including the Toronto Environmental Plan of 2000, the Food and Hunger Action Plan of 2001 and the Official Plan of 2002. The seventh step is to ensure an agency within the city take the lead in bringing the issue home. That job was taken up by Toronto’s Planning Department when they prepared a study recommending a pilot incentive program for green roofs. The water department agreed to pay the incentive for a pilot test as a way of encouraging construction companies and landlords to move early to adopt a building innovation that would save the city money on expanded sewage construction. The eighth step is to have a political champion with clout talk up the benefits of the program and propose to make the innovation permanent. That happened when deputy mayor Joe Pantalone organized a 2009 City Council vote mandating green roofs for new Toronto high rises. The ninth step, still to come, will clean up over-engineered and ham-fisted language in the specs for green roofs. They currently fail to include public benefits of container and other low-tech gardening and food production techniques that can be productively and beautifully done on more conventional roofs. While we wait for more ecumenical language, we can take solace in the fact that green roofs are green or biological or solar machines that provide food for many species other than humans, from endangered butterflies and pollinating bees to the soil and plants themselves, which digest sun rays and rainwater and put them to work, cleaning, conditioning and cooling the summer air.


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It took 15 years before TFPC members who first grabbed hold of the issue could shout from a green rooftop about this pioneering technology of urban sustainability. One of the things that make social capital so productive, what Thorstein Veblen called ‘the Advantage of backwardness’ is that other cities will be able to duplicate and outdo Toronto’s accomplishments in a fraction of the time because someone has already taken the leap of imagination to look for unused capacity way up in the sky (Veblen 1904). So far in this section on strong bedfellows, we’ve discussed three methods, techniques or thinking styles the TFPC has followed, deliberatively or intuitively, to promote relationship-based policy in the area of food system sustainability. The fourth technique, which I’ve followed intuitively, is part and parcel of the whole TFPC effort to present policies that start conversations, not terminate them. In my 2008 book called The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food, I argue that ‘fusion’ prototyped by chefs who mix a little Szechuan with a little Peruvian and French may become the model for emerging sustainable food policies. The old-style religion pitting devils against angels has not gotten us very far in our efforts to build movements for sustainability. Partly that is because life does not divide into two camps of right and wrong. Idealism increases in direct proportion to distance from the problem, my aphorism-rich colleague Brian Cook likes to say. Since sustainability depends on getting very up close and personal with thousands of god-is-in-the-detail techniques and approaches, sustainability advocates need idealism that is less brittle than polarizing versions. In my No-Nonsense guide book I present a future that goes beyond the all-local versus all-global debate and proposes as many local foods as possible, as many fair trade imports as possible, and as much common sense as possible, to give one example of the fusion method (Roberts 2008). That approach to local is also the perspective of Toronto’s FoodShare, the largest citywide food security organization in North America and one of the earliest and strongest champions of the TFPC. Dedicated first and foremost to the nutritional and social needs of people on low income, who in Toronto are disproportionately immigrants, FoodShare sponsors Good Food Markets in underserved neighbourhoods. The Good Food Markets get their food from FoodShare’s warehouse, which in turn gets about half its food from local (often organic) farmers and about half from the Ontario Food Terminal and other importers who provide staple foods such as rice and mango that are the comfort foods of immigrants. Not a local-farmers-only farmers market by any stretch, but certainly socially sustainable and part of the mix we need to encourage as we deepen our understanding of what it means to say that sustainability is a journey, not a destination (Chapter 12 presents a case study of a similar project in Waterloo Ontario). My point is that relationship-based outreach is the way that the TFPC and its co-thinkers have promoted what the UK calls joined-up thinking on community food security and food sustainability (Rideout et al. 2007). Out of respect for the

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crucial role of social relationships and partnerships in bringing this into effect, I coined the term ‘joined-in thinking,’ a unique contribution of the TFPC. Instant and Latent Messages To my great surprise, despite being the most-computer-challenged person in the world, one of the first outreach initiatives I undertook at the TFPC was to launch an e-mail service for people interested in keeping track of progressive food trends. We call the service – one and sometimes two e-mails sent out on most workdays – Eaters’ Digest. The e-mail service is designed to accomplish six goals. First, it identifies the TFPC as a government-funded organization that does what governments should do – solve what political scientists call ‘the collective action problem.’ That is the problem, seemingly inherent in the human condition, which arises from the fact that few people will do all the work on a project that benefits everybody equally but yields no ‘exclusive goods’ for them. That is why we have governments – not just to overcome market failures, but human failings as well. Since both sustainability and community food security are ultimate cases of a collective action problem – there can be no gated community that features food security and environmental sustainability for residents only – I thought the TFPC could develop a real niche here. We are the ones who do information sharing for all groups and individuals and we can do it because the government pays for our salaries and computers. Second, as an under-funded organization trying to service an under-funded movement, I was interested in building what Jim Collins (2001), author of From Good to Great, calls a flywheel – an unstoppable semi-automatic mechanism which grinds it out (the opposite of an organization that goes from one one-off event to another). For example, as the only group in the city (and one of the few on the continent) to have a general purpose e-mail service for a general purpose audience, our flywheel allows us to shoehorn ourselves in as partners in a wide variety of meetings or conferences because we bring to the table an email list of likely supporters and attendees. We can’t afford to kick in $2000 to co-sponsor a conference, but we can offer our e-mail service. We also put a $2000 value on the use of the service when we’re asked to show that a group applying for funds is leveraging those funds for in-kind contributions. Having a flywheel turns a food security and sustainability organization into a partnership machine, which is how it should be. Third, I wanted to use the service as a daily framing device to tell people where we were coming from so they would know where to place us in terms of attitude. The featured story in e-mails, other than postings on alternative food jobs or local events, was always what the TV producers call a ‘bright’ – an upbeat story that says there’s still hope, despite all the gloom and doom. We take the best success story of local citizen initiatives that could be duplicated anywhere. This message, that sustainability is do-able by ordinary people, is perhaps the most


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urgent sustain-ability message of all, and it has helped people see the TFPC as a positive, can-do organization, not to be confused with the doom and gloom, nuts and berries stereotypes many people have. That branding of TFPC encourages what Michael Sacco, the young leader of ChocoSol, a Toronto fair trade organization, calls ‘actionism’ – a food movement twist on activism, which takes full advantage of the fact that food offers an abundance of opportunities for individuals and small groups to start putting into practice what they believe. Indeed, it’s not written in stone that policy only deals with what governments can do; part of promoting an empowerment version of food security and sustainability is to demonstrate that the power glass is half-full, not half-empty, and that there is a huge realm of activity that does not require permission forms from the state. Indeed, I believe that a major opportunity for emerging food policy leaders, in an era when governments are becoming increasingly hidebound and decreasingly responsive to innovative citizen proposals, is to develop a Do It Yourself food policy kit for civil society. The e-mail service had a fourth goal: to help me capitalize on all the time (about an hour a day) I spent reviewing emails from scores of colleagues and listservs. Our service allowed me to make this scanning time serve another purpose beyond my information needs by sharing the best story of the day on our service. This also underlined the fact that the TFPC was an unusual kind of government organization that saw itself as sharing information and providing a service. In this world, organizations need to follow the advice given to journalists – show, don’t tell: show what happened so people can come to their own conclusion without telling them what to think. The e-mail service tries to show that we are a service and helping organization because too many people would laugh out loud if I told them ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.’ Fifth, I wanted to capitalize on the time I spent doing public speaking. Many overly-busy public health staff refuse to do one-off public speaking because it takes about three hours (travel and decompression time included) to give a talk and it’s hard to quantify any benefit. By using these speaking engagements to build an e-mail list, I was able to bring something back to the office that we could build a relationship on in the fullness of time. Sixth and finally, I hoped the flywheel might serve as the key communication tool in any major campaign adopted by all in the food movement. I estimate that people regularly acting on food movement values (buying at farmers markets or buying organic, for example) add up to five % of the population; that is big enough to influence government policy, if those numbers and energies are effectively targeted rather than dispersed over some 25 equally important causes. As the food movement matures, I believe, more supporters will recognize that one issue at some point in time holds out the promise of a breakthrough that can lift the entire movement, and a full-bore unified campaign will follow. When that happens, the e-mail service to be put at the disposal of the campaign will already exist. Thinking and planning ahead like that, I believe, is part of the planning function that government organizations should fulfill.

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I have had modest success tracking how the time we (myself and the TFPC administrative genius, Leslie Toy) spend on this email service helped us advance relationship-based outreach. We presently have some 2000 subscribers, about 1500 of them in Toronto. The TFPC also receives about 100 requests a year from students across North America who want to do an essay about us, and about 50 calls a year from students who would like to intern for the TFPC. When we launched a facebook page for ‘friends of the TFPC’ in 2009, it quickly went to 1000 fans. Our neglected website, which I have not been able to update since 2002 receives the second-highest number of hits of any unit in Toronto Public Health. As well, we have become the go-to place for journalists to call when they’re first looking into a story. Because, they explain they’ve kept one of our e-mails passed on to them as a possible story idea. As a result, I am probably one of the ten most quoted Toronto civil servants in the local and national media. Anyone who cares to make a contribution to all-important but untargeted sustainability or community food security goals needs to figure out a way to ‘punch above their weight’ and this electronic relationship builder is our way. The TFPC participated in launching a second email service in 2002 after I had the good fortune of being selected to represent Canadian non-government organizations at the parallel people’s conference held outside the official 2002 World Food Summit in Rome. Until that time in my life, I had been content to be parochial in my activities and travels, thinking that activists needed to know their own country first. But in Rome, I met peasant activists, especially women who had been jailed and brutalized as a result of their organizing activities and their stories shattered me intellectually and emotionally. I returned home thinking, as I think to this day, that activists in the Global North need to start their organizing day with thanks to the democracy and relatively high standard of living we start from, and that the way we express our gratitude is to do something special in solidarity with people in the Global South. This, I believe, is a touchstone of both sustainability and food security; we cannot build a mature food movement in the Global North unless people have reckoned with the needs of everyone in the world. Upon my return, I convinced a number of people in and around the TFPC that we should do something, and before I knew it, a professor at University of Toronto offered to assign a grad student, Amber McNair, to work with me to co-edit a bi-weekly e-mail service dealing with global food security issues from a policy perspective. Today, that service continues as the e-mail service and website called foodforethought.net/, which is co-edited by TFPC member James Kuhns and me. It provides information to foster dialogue on the need for inter-sectoral cooperation and civic action on global food challenges and strives to spread insights coming from the Global South. A second globally-minded initiative which the TFPC started after the 2002 Rome conference was to hold an annual Toronto event celebrating World Food Day in mid-October. For several years this event was held at City Hall but is now being held at University of Toronto co-sponsored by a New College Equity Studies Program which hopes to launch more courses on sustainable food systems.


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Aside from linking us to the many people in Toronto active in global solidarity networks, the e-mail service and World Food Day event help us relate to half Toronto’s population, people born outside Canada; global is part of being local in Toronto. Inch by Inch, Row by Row The role that a food policy council performs on behalf of food security and sustainability is sometimes identified as ‘catalytic’, as in the chemistry lab when a catalyst is dropped into a solution to make other chemicals fizz and do something together they could not do before. The metaphor is not quite accurate – the TFPC exerts a little more energy than that, and is also as transformed as are others, both of which chemical catalysts miss out on. But as metaphors go, it is close. What is useful about the catalytic analogy is it identifies the transformative ability of someone with an innovative system perspective who brings new energy and new options that allow people to open their minds to new possibilities – or as is more often the case, open their mouths about an idea they have long had but never felt permission to voice. Indeed, when I speak about food councils to some circles, I liken our role to Mary Poppins who came into a totally dysfunctional household and worked her magic by helping people see new relationship opportunities that let them become who they really were. Poppins knew it wasn’t the players, but the system, that was wrong. Even when the TFPC seems to play a catalytic role based on policy understanding, there is more about empowerment and relationships to it than meets the eye. I would like to explore this innovative role as it plays out with two related areas of TFPC external work – promoting local and sustainable food and fostering new relationships between local farmers and local food actionists. When I started working at the TFPC in 2000, I, the TFPC and official City documents were already primed – quite a bit ahead of the curve for the time – to champion a more self-reliant and local food system than the one we had, which was about 95% dependent on imports from outside the region. What sealed the matter for me was going to a meeting of farm leaders from the area just north of Toronto, where I was slated to make a brief presentation about a City food initiative. One look at the crowd and I felt like checking to see if someone had brought a noose and scaffold to hang me; there were a lot of harrumphs as I introduced myself. A number of early speakers made some nasty references to the city people who were always going on about organic as if conventional farmers didn’t grow their food on real soil, and so on. I had a pretty clear feeling I was one of the city people they had in mind, since the TFPC had been interpreted as strongly supportive of organic, then a very tiny niche in the market. I started off my remarks by saying that I had a major hand in the taskforce that drafted the City’s Environmental Plan, which was unanimously adopted by City Council the week I started work.

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the TFPC was keen to work with them, because for us, supporting local farmers trumped everything including organic. I can’t remember what else I said, because everyone relaxed so much the presentation just broke down and we settled into a conversation. I remember leaving with the thought that the TFPC had to become the champion of both local food and local farmers, to become the allies of local farmers in the course of promoting local food. Vic Daniels, one of the farm members of the TFPC (we were authorized by the Board of Health to have two farmers from outside the city) explained to me the next day that the word organic stuck in the craw of farmers and that he found he got a better reception when he said he favored biodynamic – ‘whatever that means’ he added. What it meant, of course, was that the word organic had become a trigger that shut down dialogue and that a working relationship was being upset by a word that had come to mean to farmers that no-one understood how farmers were hurting and how much they needed to be honoured for their hard work putting low-cost food on the tables of city people. One of the books that’s most influenced me, Getting to Yes, explains that problemsolvers should not get hung up or defensive about one position, but instead talk about their needs, which can’t be argued and might be addressed with a variety of positions (Fisher and Ury 1991). Local and sustainable became a means of literally repositioning the discussion between local food counterculture people and local farmers so both sides could talk about needs. For a food policy council, local food is a system and sustainability issue. It isn’t just about how far food travels from farm to table, which is only one result of a long distance food system. I suspect that we think first and foremost about the distance from farm to plate because we are a narcissistic species so we think the food system revolves around us. From a sustainability perspective, local food takes on importance inasmuch as it reduces energy inputs and toxic outputs that are a long way (i.e. distant) from sustainability. Local in any comprehensive sense needs to indicate how far the fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, tractor fuel, irrigation water, irrigation pumps travel to the farm, how far the package travels to the processor, and the processed food in a package travels from the processor to the retailer, how far the food scraps travel from the home to the landfill and the food package from the home to the recycling plant in China – and that’s just a shortlist of distance measures. So local food is about a lot more than making a local decision at the grocery store; it requires a total system rethink and overhaul. Just because an area has local farmers, for instance, doesn’t mean the farmers produce anything remotely related to food that can be sold locally, unless the locals like eating a lot of soy and corn grown for cattle. Just because an area has a local take-out chain or a local cafeteria doesn’t mean it cooks food, let alone local food; more likely, it heats food made from a score of inputs (inputs, not ingredients) assembled wherever the assembling labor is cheap and can be trucked in by an aggregator. These are the system issues that a food council is charged with bringing into the equation. Just to show how far away people from the Toronto area were from understanding local food when we were getting started: our first brief on the local food issue was a


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submission to the Ontario government urging it to save the fertile farmbelt around Toronto from suburban and boxstore expansion. Most farmers opposed farmland protection because it upset their hope to cash out of farming by selling their farms to real estate developers. Surprisingly, one group as far from understanding local food were environmentalists, who saw a protected greenbelt as a way to save atrisk flora and fauna, not endangered farms. It is important to know that local food came up from the outside of all the political lanes of the time; indeed, the TFPC won a major award in 2008 for its work introducing environmentalists to the food issue. Such changes in thinking don’t happen ‘naturally’ without interventions and social relationships, any more than food happens naturally. Where to start? Relationships, of course. Our first annual local food conference, which we co-hosted with Caledon Countryside Alliance just to give ourselves some rural credibility, tried to play matchmaker between chefs who were interested in more local sourcing and farmers who were interested in batch sales of local/ quality food with a bit of a story to tell. We got them talking – no small feat in itself when farmers speak only English and many restaurant staff who came only spoke Chinese, in case anyone thinks distance is just physical. One farmer brought a pickup truck full of carrots and sold the load but I think the only other outcome among about 100 attendees were good feelings. The next conference brought together farmers and farmers’ markets organizers. ‘It is time to take a stand’, we told farmers, ‘at your local farmers’ market’, but not too many were interested in standing behind a stall for a day to take home $500 net, assuming it didn’t rain. As local picked up steam – and equally important, as non-local sales options for local farmers dried up when the US exchange rate dropped and beef and pork couldn’t be sold out of country – we had our successful 2009 conference to develop a common wish list for infrastructure for a local food economy. Just as big a success: by 2009, the TFPC was only one of several major organizations, including Sodexo, culinary tourism organizations, Sustain Ontario, Local Food Plus, Caledon Countryside Alliance, and a farm organization called Greater Toronto Area Agricultural Action Committee (GTAAAC). We had arrived as serious players, thanks to relationships as much as policy. As with Mary Poppins, success comes when you’re no longer essential to what happens. Having the GTAAAC as a formal and official farm sponsor for this conference represented a major breakthrough in relations between the local farm community and the local food community – two very different species. The TFPC was a minor player in the establishment of the GTAAAC. Planners in the Greater Toronto Area who wanted to do something to rejuvenate the local farm economy invited us as well as farmer representatives to set up an organization, which the Province agreed to fund. Two of our members got very active in the organization and another one of our members was the founding staffer, so relationships soon gave us some influence – a reminder that one of the reasons why food policy councils work is that they have staff to handle the tedious work of an organization, leaving members free to work on the outside, with the result that the ones who win are those who come to the most meetings. We began to treat the GTAAAC as a prime arena of

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work, and to prize it as perhaps the leading place on the continent for urban-rural dialogue. We saw it as a chance to bridge perhaps the biggest and most distancing cultural divide in North America, one which plays mainly to the advantage of farm input companies and far-right politicians both sworn enemies of sustainable development. Most of the farmers GTAAAC represents are commodity farmers, producing one crop, such as soybeans for wholesalers, but farm and rural leaders seemed willing to check things out. From a relationship perspective, this kind of infrastructure for local food is the crucible, with the outcome undetermined at the time of this writing. According to the position paper of the British Sustainable Development Commission, food security and sustainability are ‘the perfect fit’ (SDC 2009). That is certainly true in logic, and if logic were the problem instead of relationships or interests, that would be easy enough to fix. But the Commission argues on the first page of its paper that the ‘message that there is an ideal ‘fit’ between sustainable development and food security is in danger of being submerged in appeals to single-issue solutions.’ There is the rub, which the TFPC is in a position to discuss from direct experience. Two quick examples illustrate the complications. For farmers anywhere near Toronto, Toronto is ‘the market’, the fourth biggest metropolitan area in North America. I try to warn farmers that ‘market’ is not a good way to describe Torontonians – we are people, some of us single moms, some of us refugees from Africa, some of us needing kosher or halal meat, and so on – and if they want to define us as an impersonal market, they should not be surprised if Torontonians treat them as part of an impersonal supply chain where the lowest price is the only consideration. The speech always falls on deaf ears. The fact is that culture has been taken out of agriculture – and is why governments, business and farmers refer to the ‘agri-food sector,’ which is about as unappetizing, uncultured, unbrandable, unsustainable and as far from customers eager to buy local as a local farmer can get (Chapter Eight). Some people complain that ‘the kids of today’ do not know food comes from a farm; what they do not recognize is that food does not come from a farm but from a culture, agriculture. That culture question leads to the complicating or enriching realities of multiculturalism, a major theme in Toronto, which is proud to be the most ethnically and culturally diverse city in the world. The TFPC is charged with, among other things, seeing to it that immigrants get as many culturally-appropriate foods as possible from a local food system and benefit from as many local jobs, business and farming opportunities as possible. We’ve also taken it upon ourselves to come up with a word for food that comes from another place in the world. ‘Ethnic food’ is politically incorrect, since it ‘others’ people who have just immigrated a generation or two later than the people who are labeling them ethnic; we’re leaning to a phrase such as ‘world foods’ or ‘inter-cultural foods’ a term used by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Whatever the stereotypes about farmers, TFPC members get a fair hearing on that issue at GTAAAC, despite the fact that most farmers come from northern European families who migrated here before 1960, while half of Torontonians


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came from non-northern European areas after 1970. To honor rights to culturally appropriate food and to contribute to sustainability, it is crucial that local food advocates work the creative tension between being short on distance and long on inclusion. Indeed, many of the favorite comfort foods of many immigrant groups, even people from semi-tropical climes, can be grown in the Toronto area; so it’s possible for local farmers to gain access to a new market niche and to reduce global warming emissions at the same time responding to cultural inclusion. Another single issue, however, proved too much for the TFPC – public sector purchasing by City of Toronto of local food. The TFPC has always favored sustainable food, namely food grown with a minimum of toxic pesticides, Genetically-Engineered seeds, mistreatment of animals, abuse of natural ecosystems, and so on; indeed, the TFPC favored sustainable food in 1992, before it favored local – logical enough, given that most members then came from the same background as organic promoters, who were also slow to get the local angle. From the standpoint of global warming, arguably the planet’s most burning issue of environmental sustainability, sustainable farms with few synthetic inputs do more to reduce global warming than local farms using many synthetic inputs. From the standpoint of creating good jobs, sustainable enhances local since it puts an emphasis on using labour rather than fuels and chemicals (Chapter 5). As well, from the standpoint of people who go out of their way and beyond their budgets to buy local, sustainability issues such as animal treatment, labour treatment and pesticides rank right up there with distance as a purchasing motivator. Therefore, the TFPC supported a motion to have Toronto purchase local and sustainable food, as had been done by nearby Markham township (Town of Markham 2009). That proposal was unanimously defeated by a City Council committee which subsequently adopted a loosely-worded motion favoring more local purchasing. Anyone who followed the ins and outs of that fiasco would have little trouble agreeing with the judgment by the British Sustainable Development Commission. But the TFPC has to take its lumps too; it lacked the resources and ability to lead the way based on the primacy of relationship-based initiatives, and so when the matter stood or fell on policy, it fell. Kicking It Up a Notch Our defeat on the local sustainable food issue was a flashing red light indicating that the TFPC was playing in a bigger league – where well-funded foundations, links to the mayor’s office, and direct lines to the media counted – without the necessary heft, credibility or social relationships. Just like major foundations in the US were discovering, it was getting to be time to scale up from projects – albeit projects woven together from some pattern fitting in with a food system perspective – to whole system interventions. As luck would have it, we didn’t have to nurse our wounds too long. The Medical Officer of Health, Dr. David McKeown, shared an office with my predecessor, Rod MacRae, during the 1990s and was a strong

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advocate of social determinants of health and preventive health measures that a reformed food system would deliver on. His policy advisor, Barbara Emanuel, had a perfect split personality – half bold visionary, half shrewd political tactician. Carol Timmings, was a socially-skilled and I’m-up-for-it director of Policy and Planning. My office neighbor and friend, Brian Cook, one of the best and fastest researchers, had his finger on the statistics showing Toronto, Canada, North America and the world were losing ground on all the key health indicators around food. They and a few colleagues had an idea for developing a food strategy for the entire City, and they asked me and the TFPC, normally the black sheep among the public health flock, to help out. Here is the second curious truth about food policy. The first, which we have illustrated up to here, is that relationship building is what makes policy palatable and creates policy in motion. The second, which is what we are about to illustrate, is that when situations truly ripen for food policy, it is expressed as strategy, not policy, for the simple reason that a policy without a strategy is a wish list without a plan. By then, I had two-years of experience as co-organizer of a city-wide food strategy project that started about a week after I joined TFPC staff. According to provincial dictate, Toronto had just become an amalgamated city of the old downtown merged with its suburbs – like amalgamating Vienna and Phoenix, critics said. The brand-new city had no unified policies of its own, and in the mood of the Millennium year, was keen to start off with some broad statements of vision. A committee of leading counselors, staff and citizen activists were already a team when I joined, and called their team the Food and Hunger Action Plan (FAHAC). The name was a blessing because it was broad enough to address hunger, which was felt as a stain on the honor of ‘Toronto the Good’ by everyone in the city, and to put it in the perspective of food, not just low income. Since I was the food policy person, I worked to give FAHAC a food system as well as income inequality spin. The poor of the world could eat like kings on the 50% of all food that is wasted, and governments could cover the costs of making sure such high-quality food got to people on low incomes just by savings on medical care for chronic diseases, I argued, so we should not blame inequality for things that were just due to stupidity. People liked the sound of that, so we set out to produce a three-volume report over a year that would see all departments of the city working to be advocates, coordinators, supporters and innovators in the field of food. This innovative project in food security and sustainability policy was based on two golden opportunities – the chance to think big without fear of contradicting an existing policy (the newly-amalgamated city was too young to have any existing policies) and the space to look beyond the normal constraints of the ‘tyranny of the urgent’ that absorbs most leaders on most days. We hit the jackpot when someone suggested we work on a ‘backcasting’ basis, asking where we wanted the city to be in 20 years, not what we wanted to do the next day on today’s budget. This kind of freedom and space for open-ended idea sharing allows consensus to develop fairly easily – who wants to say that the city they’re working to create over 20 years


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is one where children will go to school hungry, where hospitals are filled with obese people, and that we look forward to a bitter harvest from unsustainability, for example? We encoded this vision in a brief Toronto Food Charter, one of the first such municipal charters in the world (we borrowed the idea from Kamloops, B.C.), and it was adopted unanimously by City Council in 2001. Though the charter has no legal significance it provides the terms of reference for the TFPC. A charter offers some basis for a claim that it was reasonable to think the city supported sustainability. The charter also stakes a claim for food policy as an area of municipal jurisdiction. As it turned out, our small band of under-resourced staff, overworked citizen supporters and ultra-busy councilors wasn’t able to do much beyond networking in a city where the normalcy of jurisdiction-minded departments on tight budgets quickly asserted itself. We managed to get one item through for $600,000 a year to go into grants for community-building good projects. This pot of money allowed us to fund an exciting group of Animators, who worked in over-stressed and under-served neighborhoods, where people barely knew one another, to use food to literally animate or breathe life into community development. The Animators were such a success that Toronto Community Housing recently retained them to develop community gardens and other community food projects in social housing projects across the city. Despite the success of the charter and the Animators, the project couldn’t carry on without dedicated staff resources or buy-in from the departments that needed to cooperate on a strategy, so FAHAC gradually dissolved. It had become a case study of what the outstanding food analyst Tim Lang called a talk shop without a core focus suffering from the ‘tyranny of structurelessness’ (Freeman 1970). As I look back on the charter from today’s vantage point, I notice two big things we got wrong which showed my failure to understand the level of strategic thinking and promotional savvy to make both food security and sustainability governance principles of food. First, the 2001 charter says that food policy is considered the concern of all departments and staff in the city. As Food Strategy Manager Peter Dorfman, Brian Cook and I thrashed this over countless times during 2009, we landed in a different place, and I now see what was deficient in that formulation from a strategic conceptual, relationship and marketing standpoint. Start with marketing, which is an alternative to selling. Selling is for people who have a product and have to convince someone to buy it. Marketers find out what the person needs and make it. Food security and sustainability deserve to be marketed. The public works, transit, recreation and economic development staff in any city already deal with food. They do not need to be convinced to support healthy food policy. They do need to learn how to identify and leverage what they already do with food so it adds value to them and others (aka food security and The Toronto Food Charter was written by me and Sean Meagher, executive assistant to the lead councilor Pam McConnell, in about an hour in front of a meeting of citizens.

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sustainability); that is what marketing does. That is also how mutually beneficial relations get established, when a proposal is made to help each other, not me. And it is how food gets raised conceptually to the strategic level. Here, in a nutshell, is how the logic goes. About a third of garbage relates to food. Torontonians dump a million paper coffee cups a day into the garbage, mostly picked up by the city. Most recycled containers are for food. The farther a package has come from, the more difficult and expensive it is to collect and recycle. That’s because long-distance hauls need ultra-light, airtight and strong multi-material packages. The packages are bulky to haul away and almost impossible to separate and recycle. In other words, if you stop and think about it, city recycling departments subsidize long distance imports. Passing this cost back to the producer would be a way to save city taxpayers money and level the playing field for local producers and job creation. Food scraps are a different story. But the key is they’re not part of a waste management strategy but a resource management strategy. Two huge costs that are now deadweight could be revenue sources that pro-actively shape the city’s future. What about transit: does a food connection there seem far-fetched? Efficient, cost-effective public transit, which is to say street rail, relies on busy main streets with lots of pedestrian traffic. What creates busy main streets with lots of foot traffic better than mom and pop grocery stores, neighborhood restaurants, street food vendors, and coffee shops? What about transit planning that situates transfer points near grocery stores where people can shop on the way home? What about transit stops beside coffee shops where people can wait inside when it is cold or raining? What about street vendors at key intersections so transit-takers have their version of drive-throughs? What about looking at food as a way to enhance the functioning of public transit? Then think of all the government money that is in the wrong pot – money in the tens of thousands for every hospital stay for diabetes treatment, but almost nothing for diabetes prevention because the money for treatment is at a ‘senior’ level of government and the prevention takes place locally. What about prevention applied to youth in youth detention centres, given the established success record of groups working with at-risk youth in gardening projects? Could we make an example for wayward youth by providing money at the local level to keep them out of institutions paid for at the provincial level? Just as hunger is caused by lack of planning, not lack of food, so many other non-food problems are caused by lack of strategic planning and alliances. The food strategy will (hopefully) be proposing a ‘food facilitator’ operating out of a high level at the city, with a job description to advise heads of departments of where a food connection might be and how to use it to enhance workings of their department. The new food strategy will also pinpoint another resource overlooked by FAHAC – neighborhood centres which, with a little spiffing up, could become all-purpose food centres, which provide a range of services from supporting breastfeeding moms, to teaching gardening to children, to community kitchens for


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people who are lonely or isolated, to free meal programs for people down on their luck, to farmers’ markets for shoppers. Many neighborhoods in many areas of the world have a community health centre, a library, a school, a recreation centre as a fixture of their community. Why not add a community food centre as innovative infrastructure for the 21st century? Jim Harris, one of Canada’s leading green business strategists and consultants, wrote Blind Sided as a cautionary tale about companies that crashed because they didn’t know what hit them and felt like they got whacked out of the blue. The problem, he says, is not lack of problem-solving skills, but lack of problemrecognition skills. In some ways, political and economic leaders of modern societies have been like deer stuck in the headlights of oncoming cars in the way they’ve been blindsided by sustainability for some 20 years. They have the skills to solve the problem. But they lack the strategic skills to recognize it as an organizational – not technological – problem that requires organizational innovation. Food and food policy councils may well be able to be the first movers in this area by showing how to co-manage food security and sustainability. Situated in local and regional governments, they are relatively free of the mega-corporations that run the show in national capitals whenever there is an issue related to trade, transportation, subsidies, advertising, labeling, pollution, packaging, garbage, energy, social assistance levels. In one of the delectable ironies of life, an example of Trotsky’s law of uneven and combined development, these corporations leave real estate and road construction to local businesses that have considerable sway in local governments, but little to say about all the issues that affect food – all of which relate to trade, transportation, subsidies, advertising, labeling, pollution, packaging, garbage, energy and social assistance levels. Carpe diem; with the help of food policy councils, this is where the work of sustainability can come into its own. References Allen, P. 2004. Together at the Table: Sustainability and Sustenance in the American Agrifood System. Penn State Press: University Park, PA. Buttel, F. and McMichael, P. (eds) 2005. New Directions in the Sociology of International Development: Research in Rural Sociology and Developments, Vol.11. Oxford: Elsevier. Carnegie, D. 1936. How to Win Friends and Influence People. Simon and Shuster: New York. Collins, J. 2001. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t. New York: Harper Business. Fisher, R. and Ury, W. 1991. Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement without Giving In. Penguin Press: Toronto. Freeman, J. 1970. Southern Female Rights Union. Beulah, Mississippi. Accessed online January 1, 2010 at: http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm.

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Friedmann, H. 2005. From Colonialism to Green Capitalism: Social Movements and the Emergence of Food Regimes. In F. Buttel and P. McMichael (eds): 227-264. Health Canada. 2009. Diabetes. Accessed online December 30, 2009 at: http:// www.hc-sc.gc.ca/hc-ps/dc-ma/diabete-eng.php. McKnight, J. 1989. Why ‘servanthood’ is bad. The Other Side. Jan-Feb. National Diabetes Information Clearinghouse. 2009. National Diabetes Statistics 2007. Accessed online December 30, 2009 at: http://diabetes.niddk.nih.gov/ DM/PUBS/statistics/#costs. Peck, S., Callaghan, C., Kuhn, M. and Bass, B. 1999. Greenbacks from green roofs: Forging a New Industry in Canada. Report prepared for Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Accessed online December 30, 2009 at: http://www. greenroofs.org/pdf/Greenbacks.pdf. Rideout, K., Riches, G., Ostry, A., Buckingham, D. and MacRae, R. 2007. Bringing home the right to food in Canada: challenges and possibilities for achieving food security. Public Health and Nutrition 10(6): 566-573. Roberts, W. 2008. No-Nonsense Guide to World Food. Oxford: New Internationalist. Roberts, W. and Brandum, S. 1995. Get a Life! Get a Life Publishers: Toronto. Senge, P.M. 1990. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. New York: Doubleday Currency. Sustainable Development Corporation (SDC). 2009. Food security and sustainability: The perfect fit. SDC position paper. Accessed online December 31, 2009 at: http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/publications/downloads/ SDCFoodSecurityPositionPaper.pdf. Town of Markham. 2009. Markham First Municipality in North America to Adopt Local Food Plus Practices. Press release. Accessed online December 31, 2009 at: http://www.markham.ca/Markham/Departments/NewsCentre/ News/080604_lfp.htm. Veblen, T. 1904. The Theory of Business Enterprise. Accessed online December 30, 2009 at: http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/%7Eecon/ugcm/3ll3/veblen/busent/ index.html.

Chapter 11

Food Insecurity in the Land of Plenty: The Windermere Valley Paradox Alison Bell

The shift in thinking about land use, from its importance for both its rural beauty and food production, to its attractiveness for purely recreational purposes, has brought about striking changes in the Windermere Valley in South-eastern British Columbia. Those looking for a place to ‘get away from it all’ are arriving in droves, and the result of the largely unchecked growth in the area has been farreaching. Changes to the Windermere Valley’s social and geographic fabric, what might be viewed as a shift from agri-culture to recre-culture, has meant a marked decline in the area’s ability to feed itself. It is the current level of food security, or, by contrast, food insecurity, in the Windermere Valley that was the motivation for this chapter. Invermere, the central community of the Windermere Valley, is seeing the most growth. While there are no statistics available outlining the exact number of permanent versus seasonal residents in Invermere and its surrounding area, estimates suggest an increase of between 17% and 143% based on information from Statistics Canada 2001 reporting. Since 2001, the area has seen a rapid expansion of second-home and tourism markets resulting in the loss of agricultural land and an increased reliance on the global food supply by both permanent and seasonal residents. As well, residents of the Windermere Valley are so ‘distanced’ from a local food supply, that its loss goes virtually unrecognized (Kneen 2004). While urbanization and the decline of farm-land are being seen around the world, this agricultural ‘missing link’ is actually a relatively new phenomenon in the Windermere Valley. Like most rural areas of Canada, at one time the region had a sustainable local food supply (Norberg Hodge et al. 2004). So, when did the shift that turned a community with a healthy local food supply into one with virtually none occur? And, why should we care? The following two excerpts, taken from developers’ promotional materials, offer a little insight.

The Windermere Valley is located within the Regional District of East Kootenay. The area is also commonly called the Columbia Valley, but for purposes of clarity and to avoid confusion with the Columbia Valley in the U.S.A., I have chosen to use the name Windermere Valley.

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Imagining Sustainable Food Systems But it is not only as a tourist resort and a world’s playground that the Columbia Valley is destined to come into prominence; it is an ideal location for British Settlers. It is a land of mountains, vale, water and sunshine and … it is welladapted for fruit growing. (Columbia Valley Irrigated Fruit Lands c. 1911)

And, Eagle Ranch will evolve into a world-class resort, packed with amenities, recreational possibilities, and real estate possibilities … enjoy the best life has to offer … or just slow down and absorb the beauty of this magical place. (Eagle Ranch Golf Resort 2004)

A cursory glance at these quotations shows them to be almost identical, despite the nearly one hundred year gap that divides their publication. Both herald the beauty of Invermere and the ‘world-class resort’ possibilities to be found there. Both promise the proverbial ‘Shangri-La.’ But it is not the similarity between the two has captured my attention. Instead, it is the difference that I am drawn to, a difference that succinctly illustrates an important aspect of the community of Inveremere and the greater Windermere Valley that has virtually vanished – local food production. Where once the land speculators of Invermere placed importance on local food production with promises of rich agricultural lands as a drawing card, talk of fertile land is now absent from developers’ promotional material. Those currently drawn to the valley are not coming for the fruit-growing potential of the land; they are coming for the ‘amenities’ and ‘recreational possibilities.’ The reciprocity and mutual support between neighbours that is built through the sharing of locally grown food and the relationships that are forged when we purchase food directly from farmers within our community are absent amongst the majority of the valley’s current home-owners who see the area as a place to recreate but not reside. The result of this change in land-use and demographics has brought about a very interesting paradox; a community that is simultaneously experiencing enhanced financial security, lessened community cohesiveness and inferior food security. And while a return to total food security in the Windermere Valley may not be achievable, nor even necessarily desirable, enhanced community food security is certainly a possibility. The emerging movement in North America and elsewhere that is advocating for a return to a more locally-based food supply, or what is referred to as ‘re-localization’, is being led by numerous individuals who are collectively highlighting both the pitfalls of the global food system and the benefits of locally grown foods. Included here is Clare Hinrichs, who both advocates for locally-based food systems, and advises against the creation of a local (good) vs. global (bad) dichotomy (see also Winters 2003). Hinrichs does state, however, that ‘food system localization may remake our troubled world in modest and valuable ways.’ (Hinrichs 2003: 33). But, can food system re-localization revitalize the communities in the Windermere Valley?

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Burgeoning research devoted to the interconnectedness of food security and local food production emphasizes its importance to the social fabric of a community, irrespective of other attributes that are most often used to measure community success or viability, such as a thriving economy (Kloppenberg et al. 1996: 306). As well, in the midst of what the late Thomas Lyson referred to as a ‘rebirth of locally based agriculture and food production’ sits ‘civic agriculture.’(Lyson 2002: 1) Lyson saw ‘civic agriculture’ as the ‘embedding of agriculture into the community.’ (Lyson 2002: 92). In this chapter I will present an account of my hopes for a ‘relocalization’ of the Windermere Valley’s food system and an ‘embedding’ of agriculture into the community by documenting my explorations of early agriculture in the valley, by outlining the subsequent decline in farming and local food production and public perceptions of this current situation and, finally, by providing recommendations on how food security can be enhanced. Food Security in the Context of this Study: The Motivation and the Methods Given the devastating state of food insecurity being experienced in many areas of the world presently, in particular, in Africa, Egypt, Indonesia and most recently, Myanmar, it may seem absurd to suggest that a community with relative affluence, nestled in a beautiful mountain valley and having access to food at most times, could ever be considered ‘food insecure.’ As a way of justifying my brazen use of the term, I turn to Hamm and Bellows who describe food security as being achieved when, all community residents obtain a safe, culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through a sustainable food system that maximizes self-reliance and social justice. (Hamm and Bellows 2003: 37-43)

The Windermere Valley may have ‘access’ to food at most times, but there are other times when the food supply chain is severed by weather conditions, food recalls, and food safety regulations. The following account of my research in the Windermere Valley demonstrated that it also fails miserably in ‘self-reliance’ and a ‘sustainable food system’ does not exist. For these reasons, I see the area as being distinctly food insecure. The research methods I used to determine the level of food security in the Windermere Valley included 212 questionnaires given at four separate locations, 27 interviews with farmers, ranchers, and other key informants and extensive research into the provincial and federal food safety and land-use regulations.

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The Roots of Agriculture in the Windermere Valley The Windermere Valley had a thriving agricultural community less than one hundred years ago with successful market gardens, dairy farms and prosperous cattle ranching. However few of the people who live in the area today, either permanently or seasonally, have any knowledge of the valley’s agricultural roots. Originally known as a place rich with mining opportunities, the valley became valued for its ‘orcharding’ possibilities when the bottom fell out of mining in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Robert Randolph Bruce, who ran a local mining operation at that time, also planted the proverbial seed for what was to become the valley’s next great opportunity. In a matter of a few short years, Bruce, who would eventually go on to become the lieutenant-governor of British Columbia, set the wheels in motion for the migration of colonizers from the motherland that began in earnest in 1911. According to Bruce, ‘there was just as much wealth in the land in the valley as there was in the mines away up on the mountain tops’ (Bruce 1911: 10). What follows is an account of Bruce’s attempts to establish a viable agricultural community and efforts by the Dominion of Canada to bolster agriculture in the area. Bruce’s arrival in the Windermere Valley and his establishment of the Columbia Valley Irrigated Fruitlands Company Limited (CVI) was destined to change the face of the area (Lockhart 1994: 3). Bruce saw the enormous value, both for agriculture and for attracting settlers of a particular class. Orchards were becoming a source of wealth across British Columbia in the early 1900s, most notably in the Okanagan Valley. Okanagan apples won the gold medal at the Royal Horticultural Society in London in the years 1906 to 1909 and the success of these orchards prompted others around the province who were once involved in mining to shift gears towards a life of ‘orcharding.’ (Harris et al. 1984: xii) With the purchase of 40,000 acres of land from the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1908, Bruce set about to create an idyllic settlement for those who were looking to escape the ‘industrial and political unrest in Great Britain.’ (Lockhart 1994: 3) Because the land that Bruce had purchased was comprised mostly of bench-lands, with little water, he recognized the need for an extensive irrigation system that, in his words, ‘would run along the base of the mountains and shed water over thousands of acres.’ (Bruce 1911: 10) But for this pastoral vision to become reality, the CVI, with Bruce as a principal partner, would have to see the construction of irrigation flumes. Completion of the flumes, some of which are still in use today, brought the possibility of agriculture to the bench-lands, and by 1911 15,000 acres of the area were irrigated (Lockhart 1994: 3). It was now time to attract the ideal settler to the area and a campaign was undertaken in Britain. With promises of ‘prosperous orchards and happy homes made possible with life-giving water’, approximately 90 families emmigrated to the valley (Lockhart 1994: 3). Many of these families had little, if any experience with farming and were more accustomed to a genteel life with cooks and butlers, than one of tilling the earth. Bruce realized that some form of farming education would have to be put


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in place in order for the growing community and its newest residents to succeed. The result of this realization was the establishment of an experimental farm. Bruce provided assistance and information to the settlers who had purchased land from the CVI by providing hardy stock from his own gardens and by working to secure a government experimental farm in 1911, one of only three in the province of British Columbia. That the Windermere Valley was seen as having the potential to become a viable agricultural community is made clear in the government’s choice to situate an experimental farm there. Settlers were able to visit the farm and receive guidance from the superintendent. Many of the fruit tree varieties that were introduced to the valley through the Invermere Experimental Farm are still bearing fruit today. A 1915 governmental publication entitled, Experimental Farms of the Dominion of Canada lists seventy three apple varieties, eight pears, fourteen plums, twenty-four different varieties of white, red and black currants, forty varieties of potatoes and numerous other fruits and vegetables that were planted at the farm in Invermere. Mr. Parham, the superintendent during that period, recorded that ‘marrows, cabbages, beans, and peas were most lucrative crops’ in the growing season of 1913. My interviews with community elders uncovered many stories about the importance of the Invermere Experimental Farm that operated until the late 1930s. Many recall the great variety of vegetables and fruits grown at the Invermere Experimental Farm, as well as the various breeds of chickens, turkeys and geese that were kept at the farm’s poultry station. Joe Fuller, whose father was known for his champion certified seed potatoes, remembers the Invermere Experimental Farm and how many in the community relied upon its information. According to Joe, ‘if a tree (grown at the Experimental Farm) was able to withstand the local soil, growing season and weather, then it would be planted around the valley.’ The same could be said for other plants being grown at the farm, including potatoes, which fared well for Joe’s father, Hugh. The senior Fuller received so many ribbons for his potatoes at various agricultural fairs throughout the Pacific Northwest that according to Joe, ‘every drawer in his roll-top desk was brimming with them.’ (JF) A plaque awarded to Hugh Fuller to commemorate his third consecutive win at Vancouver’s Pacific National Exhibition hangs on the wall of the Windermere Valley Pioneer Museum. Clearly, the Invermere Experimental Farm provided invaluable agricultural support to the people of the valley. But, was this support enough to bolster agriculture in the years to come?

At a recent community dinner to promote awareness of local food production, I prepared a soup using heritage apples from one of the trees introduced to the valley by the Invermere Experimental Farm. Canada, Appendix to the Report of the Minister of Agriculture, Division of Horticulture. Experimental Farms, Report prepared by G. E. Parham. (Ottawa 1915), 732. F.R. Coy. Interview with the author. June 29, 2007. Indicated as FC. Joe Fuller. Interview with the author. June 22, 2007. Indicated as JF.

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Agriculture in the Windermere Valley: Success or Failure? The Windermere Valley has strong agricultural roots. Bolstered by the efforts of the earliest settlers, Randolph Bruce and his creation of the C.V.I., and the establishment of the Invermere Experimental Farm, it would seem that the valley was destined to become a thriving agricultural centre. This is not the case today, however, and the question that remains is, what happened? Many factors are cited by community elders to explain why the Windermere Valley never became an agricultural hub similar to the Okanagan Valley. One of the main reasons is believed to be the outbreak of the First World War. Most of the men who purchased land from the C.V.I. were former British soldiers who had strong ties to their regiments and when they learned of the war in Europe, chose to give up their lives in the new world (Harris et al. 1984: 10). Another factor is the economic devastation of the Great Depression. According to Joe Fuller, his father and others weren’t able to keep their farms when the bottom fell out of the stock market. In Joe’s words; ‘… unfortunately the depression hit and in 1929 this finished the potato market locally for many.’ As well, there are many who argue that the rapid expansion of the CVI and the company’s flawed efforts to provide widespread irrigation to all of its holdings left many disgruntled. It is difficult to avoid drawing parallels between the unsustainable growth of the CVI and the rapid development that is occurring in the valley today. One key difference, though, is that the early settlers recognized the importance of a local food supply and while the concept of food security was not yet developed, they knew first-hand that a sustainable food supply was integral to the future and on-going success of a community (Lyson 2002). While agriculture in the Windermere Valley saw a marked decline after the First World War, it did not disappear entirely and there are farms and ranches that have succeeded in the valley. Many local residents recall the numerous mixed farms, large vegetable gardens most families kept and the two dairies and creamery. Mixed farms have mostly been replaced by ranches, however. Lessons learned from the early settlers taught future agriculturalists that much of the area was more suitable for cattle ranching. Still, there are many areas of the valley that have prime agricultural land and three market gardens are producing fruits and vegetables. Why is it, then, that most farmers and ranchers are having difficulty maintaining the farming life in the Windermere Valley? The Loss of Food Production in the Windermere Valley There are a variety of factors that have contributed to the loss of food production since the days of the CVI and the resulting state of food insecurity in the Windermere Valley. When residents are informally polled on this subject, a wide variety of viewpoints emerge about what has prevented agriculture from being


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more important to the community today. According to many, a primary factor is the changing landscape. Increased population brings with it the need for the development of land and as is the case in many other areas of Canada that are seeing an expansion of the second-home market, the prospects of the Windermere Valley to produce its own food have been greatly diminished. When exploring the decline in agriculture, we need to consider the experiences of local farmers and ranchers and turn to the statistics of the Agricultural Land Commission of British Columbia. Between 1882 and 1994 there were over sixty farms/ranches in the Windermere Valley, many in or near the municipality of Invermere. Today, that number has decreased to less than eleven, and no farms are within the boundaries of the municipality itself. For this study, I chose to look at the area of the Windermere Valley which stretches from Canal Flats in the south to Brisco in the north, a distance of 100 kilometers. It is conceivable that the area could become a healthy foodshed upon which the people of the Windermere Valley could rely. In order for this to occur, a revitalization of agriculture would need to happen and throughout my interviews with local farmers, it became increasingly clear that most had little hope for the future of farming in the area and that the continuous decline of agriculture is of grave concern. David Zehnder, who operates a family ranch and is passionate about the conservation of agricultural land in the area, is troubled by the current situation for farmers and ranchers. Zehnder believes that the valley is losing irreplaceable land and with this, the loss of the farming community. According to Zehnder, one of the attendees at a recent meeting of the Farmer’s Institute, more than half were no longer farming and the rest will most likely leave farming within ten years. Other farmers in the area concur with Zehnder’s predictions. Farmer Betty Pendry comments that at a recent meeting about grazing lands and range patrol in the area, several of the ranchers claimed they were planning to ‘get out’, many of them ‘real old-timers.’ Whether farming and ranching operations will continue to exist in the Windermere Valley is a question that concerns others up and down the valley. Some farmers predict that all of the small farms will soon disappear. One such farmer, Alfred Trescher, sees a time when there will be ‘no more cows in the valley’ because all of the small operations will have sold their cattle to large ranches in the Prairies. His justification for this statement is the loss of viable grazing land. New ranchers and many whom are ranching today must rely on leased private land for grazing. Grazing rights on Crown Land have already been assigned in the area and those who began ranching after 1950, like Trescher, were too late to acquire this type of lease. Crown grazing land is overseen by the Ministry of Forests and Range and once a farmer stops farming, their lease falls back to the Crown and Throughout the research for this chapter, I posed the question in informal conversation with numerous residents as to why they believe there is a decline in agriculture in the area. Betty Pendry. Interview with the author. August 21, 2007. Indicated as BP. Alfred Trescher. Interview with the author June 26, 2007. Indicated as AT.

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can be applied for by other farmers. It is feasible that if a person wished to start up an operation, they could apply for one of these leases, but ranchers like Zehnder doubt that ranchers would apply for leased land. Zehnder argues, ‘with beef prices bottoming out and land at a premium, I can’t imagine how anyone could start up a cattle operation in this area.’ Others have the same concerns about the disappearance of ranches. Of the six cattle ranchers and the three farmers interviewed who raised both cattle and other animals, six said they did not see any future for farming in the area, two believed it was possible, but that major changes would need to occur and only one of those interviewed answered yes, they would continue to farm unequivocally. Of the identified barriers, some believed the exorbitant price of land was making it impossible for farmers just starting out. Some felt that landuse decisions by provincial and local governments were the issue and others see the health department regulations which came into effect on September 30, 2007, something which I will discuss in depth below, as the big problem. Still, others see the loss of agricultural land to development as the crux of the issue. To fully understand land-use transformations, we must turn to British Columbia’s farmland protection program which was established in 1973; the Agricultural Land Commission. Land Use and the Agricultural Land Commission Throughout all of the interviews I conducted, the concern about the loss of agricultural land and its connection to food insecurity was a repeated refrain. It is presumed, then, that those who are in the work of agricultural land-use policy would be aware of this connection and would be working to ensure that the food producing lands in this province are protected. Unfortunately, this is not the case. A study of the workings of the Agricultural Land Commission of British Columbia, established in 1973, sheds some light on this disconnect. The Agricultural Land Commission (ALC), a provincially appointed body that oversees protected agricultural lands in the province collectively known as the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) and has as its mandate the protection of ‘B.C.’s dwindling supply of agricultural land.’ (ALC 2007). While the tenets of the ALC may be attractive to those who are concerned about the ‘dwindling’ farmland, the commission’s effectiveness has now come into question. Charles Campbell, the author of Forever Farmland, a publication of the David Suzuki Foundation, makes a clear case for revisiting the mandate of the ALC when he states: Combine sophisticated, wealthy developers, rural communities without well developed plans, and a vague Agricultural Land Commission process, and the result can be lethal for farmers. Not only are they losing the land they need, David Zehnder. Interview with the author. June 6, 2007. Indicated as DZ.


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they’re seeing speculation drive the price of what remains beyond their reach. (Campbell 2006: 11)

In addition to what Campbell refers to as ‘vague’ processes within the ALC, there is what some critics describe as the insidious jockeying of land. When the statistics of land inclusions to, and exclusions from, the ALR are consulted, the impression is that the ALC is surpassing its mandate of land protection. In fact, in the years 1974- 2006 the total area of land included in the ALR actually increased. At its inception, the ALR was 4,721,295.3 hectares. In 2003 the ALR had increased to 4,764,633.8 hectares, a difference of 4338.5 ha. (ALC 2007). On the surface, this is terrific news for agriculture in B.C., a province that has less than 1% of Class 1 Agricultural land in Canada. (Smartgrowth 2007a). Looking more critically at the statistics about inclusions of agricultural land in the province reveals another picture, however. According to Smart Growth B.C., a non-governmental organization ‘devoted to fiscally, socially and environmentally responsible land use and development’, the increase in the size of the ALR should be queried (Smartgrowth 2007b). Statistics provided by the organization shed some light. Of the 176, 184 ha that have been included in the ALR, only 5,446 are designated as prime agricultural land.10 On the other hand, of the 132,845 ha that have been excluded, 15,066 ha are prime land. In short, for every 1 hectare of prime agricultural land that has been added to the ALR in B.C., 2.8 ha have been removed (Smartgrowth 2007c). It is not only the provincial statistics that are troubling. The removal of lands from the ALR in the Regional District of East Kootenay (RDEK), where the Windermere Valley is located, is very concerning and begs the question: is the Commission meeting its mandate to ‘protect the dwindling agricultural lands?’ The East Kootenay region of the Agricultural Land Reserve saw no inclusion of land from 2000–2003, according to statistics from the ALC website (Provincial Agricultural Land Reserve 2007). In this same time period, the amount of land excluded from the ALR in the RDEK went from .5 ha in 2000 to 91.8 ha in 2003 (Provincial Agricultural Land Reserve 2007). Unfortunately, these are the only years for which information is posted by region. Prior to 2000, all information is presented as a provincial total and the statistics after 2003 have not yet been published. Given that development in this area has increased enormously since 2003, it is reasonable to assume that this pattern of 0% inclusions has not changed. I was able to access, after repeated requests to the ALC, the particulars on all applications for removals from, or sub-divisions within, the ALR in the RDEK during the period of January 2006 to July 2007. The approval rate of applications in the East Kootenay Region was 85%. The Windermere Valley, in particular, had an approval rate of 95%. From August through October of 2007 applications for exclusions of land from the ALR provincially have been approved at a rate of 10 Agricultural land in Canada is classified into seven categories where one represents ‘prime land’ and seven is the least productive agricultural land.

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65%, however. That the rate of approval in the Windermere Valley is 30% higher than the provincial statistics is concerning, to say the least. But what is very interesting is that most residents have no knowledge of this provincial disparity. Throughout many conversations with local residents regarding agricultural land, the over-riding belief revealed was that it is next to impossible to have land removed from the ALR. In addition to this misconception, there are removals of land from the ALR which are not made known in the community until after the exclusion has occurred. For example a very valuable area of leased grazing land within the township of Invermere was recently sold to a developer and according to local ranchers, the exclusion of this land went virtually unnoticed by the community. These same ranchers are still shocked that the deal went through at all. The ALC did not consult with the agricultural community, even though the Windermere Valley Farmers’ Institute and the Kootenay Cattleman’s Association were both against the exclusion, nor did it meet with the families who relied upon the use of this grazing land, despite the fact that Commission representatives spent numerous hours consulting with the developer. (Smartgrowth 2004a). Clearly, the mandate of the ALC requires revisiting, but it is not the only issue that concerns local farmers. Obstacles to Food Security in the Windermere Valley: New Meat Regulations Food security in the Windermere Valley is very tenuous for a number of reasons, and one of these is a recent change to local meat production regulations. Locallyproduced meat has not been sold commercially in the valley because federal health regulations require that meat sold at commercial outlets be federally inspected, and there is no facility in the area. Nonetheless, uninspected local meat has provided a source of revenue for area farmers for over a century through farm-gate sales and has helped to bolster food security, until recently, when this practice was forbidden by law. Farmers Petra Downey and Betty Pendry are known throughout the valley for their quality meat products. In addition, farmers who operate primarily cow-calf operations also sell some beef locally. As of September 30, 2007, however, the purchase of locally-raised meat in the Windermere Valley is no longer an option. In an effort to standardize the slaughtering of meat in the province, the Ministry of Health Services implemented new meat inspection regulations that require all meat sold on-farm be slaughtered in a provincially inspected facility (Government of British Columbia, Ministry of Health Services 2007). Previously, some rural areas of the province had been exempt from this ruling as there was no slaughter facility nearby. The slaughtering and butchering of animals was left to the farmer. All this has now changed and the primary justification for the new meat regulations is food safety.


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The provincial standardization of meat processing is seen to be the road to a safer food supply. What appears to be a reasonable move on the part of the provincial government, especially when food safety issues such as BSE are considered, is questionable and many wonder who these regulations will benefit. For instance, the slaughter of animals for the farmer’s own consumption is still going to go unregulated. If the meat regulations are meant to ensure food safety then they should apply at all times when uninspected meat is consumed and not only when a financial transaction has taken place. Food systems activist, Cathleen Kneen, sees the regulations as devastating to small meat-producing farms in British Columbia. As well, the new meat regulations signify a further diminishing of food security and may represent the end of farming to some in the Windermere Valley. Are there other obstacles that stand in the way of enhanced local food production? To dig further, I turned to the residents of the area. The Windermere Valley Food Production Questionnaire There are currently innumerable newspaper and magazine articles, radio programs, pod casts, internet sites and television programs devoted to the topic of locally produced foods, the importance of protecting agricultural lands and of honouring our farmers. But is this message getting to everyone? In particular, are the residents of the Windermere Valley educated about the importance of local food production? A discussion of some of the results of a questionnaire I delivered at four locations in Invermere helps to determine how closely many local residents are connected to the ‘local food zeitgeist.’ Purchasing Produce in the Windermere Valley Respondents were asked to indicate where they obtained the majority of their produce. The overwhelming majority of respondents, 196 of 212, or 92%, clearly indicated that they obtained their produce at one of the two grocery stores in the Windermere Valley. 31% identified the Farmers’ Market, which operates from June to September, and 21%, the health food store. Only 12% of respondents obtained produce from a local farm, 10% purchase their produce in another community, 8% purchase produce from a bulk food store and 6% grew their own fruit and vegetables, at least some of the time. These results indicate that the residents of the Windermere Valley, who were surveyed, rely almost exclusively on the two nationally-owned grocery stores for their fruit and vegetable needs. What does this say about food security and the local food system in the Windermere Valley? If the local grocery stores sell locally-grown fruits and vegetables, then it indicates that the level of food security in the area is quite high, at least in the case of produce. If, on the other hand, the stores do not stock locally produced foods, it illustrates that the population relies on a food supply that originates outside of the study area. Through interviews with the owners of

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the two stores, Sobey’s and A. G. Valley Foods, I discovered that the people of the Windermere Valley were buying fresh produce that had no connection whatsoever with their own foodshed. (Kloppenberg et al. 1996). Not only do these two outlets sell no locally-produced fruits and vegetables, they sell very little produced in British Columbia, or even, in Canada. Some reasons provided by the store owners were cost, lack of an adequate supply, food safety, franchise restrictions, and convenience. The Invermere Farmers’ Market didn’t fare much better on the local food front. According to Eva Hillary, manager of the Invermere Farmers’ Market there is only one farmer selling produce at a market that has over thirty vendors, something that she views as a distinct problem. When the plan for a farmers’ market in the area was first conceived in 2000, Hillary envisioned a busy market with numerous local producers selling their food. Instead the market sells mostly artisan-made crafts and little food. But it is not because people who visit the market don’t want locallygrown foods. In a survey conducted in 2005 by the School of Environmental Planning at the University of Northern British Columbia on the economic and community impact of Farmers’ Markets in the province, ‘25.2% of respondents said that fresh quality products was their primary reason for coming, while 24.4% said it was to support local producers.’ (Connell et al. 2006). Failing to spot the irony in a farmers’ market that is virtually void of farmers is not difficult. It is Hillary’s hope that more people will start producing food in the area so that the market, which attracts over 2,000 customers on an average Saturday, can live up to its name.11 Given that neither grocery store sells locally-grown fruits or vegetables, and that 92% of the respondents identified these places as where they obtained their produce most often, the Windermere Valley is clearly not food secure when we consider fruits and vegetables. As mentioned earlier, locally-raised meat is not sold in commercial food outlets in the Windermere Valley due to federal food regulations. That means that any meat purchased in the area is imported. Very few of the respondents, 8 or 4%, produced meat on their own farm, while 18, or 8%, obtained meat from a local farmer before September 30, 2007. A more extensive surveying of the population is needed to determine the level of food security that exists in relation to meat production for personal consumption, but given the decline in ranches in the area, it is safe to assume that there will not be a substantial number of residents who produce meat for their own consumption. Is the population aware of the problem of a dwindling, if not nonexistent local food supply? Of the respondents surveyed, 109 or 51% answered that local food production did not meet their needs while a remarkable 65 or 31% said that they believed local food production was adequate. A further 38 or 18% did not know. How is it possible that so many people surveyed felt that local food production could meet their needs when, as it turns out, neither of the grocery stores, where most 11 Eva Hillary. Interview with the author. July 5, 2007.


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respondents indicated that they do their shopping, sells local produce? Perhaps it is because many people do not understand what is meant by the term ‘local.’ I cannot substantiate this, but that 18% of respondents could not answer the question gives a little insight. Also, signage in the produce department of the Sobey’s store at the time of this study, misrepresenting local food production, may be responsible for some of the confusion. Under a banner which states ‘fresh, crisp produce from Local Farmers and Local Growers’ sat containers of diced pineapple, papaya, and mangoes, none of which are grown locally, or even in Canada, for that matter. Could it be that people assume that if they are buying food at their local store that it is produced locally? Concluding Remarks and Recommendations The Windermere Valley has changed dramatically since the days of Randolph Bruce and its early settlers. In those days food wasn’t qualified by terms such as ‘local.’ But times have changed and gone are Bruce’s dreams of ‘abundant orchards.’ The area, once attractive for its agricultural potential, is now a mecca for a growing number of people seeking the recreational opportunities the valley has to offer and a benefit of these seasonal settlers is a thriving economy. There is only one dilemma with what could otherwise be construed as a positive turn of events. The very things that attracted tourists and second-home owners to the Windermere Valley in the first place are gradually disappearing (Rural Sociological Society 2006: 66). The bucolic fields have become ‘world-class’ golf resorts and farm shops are on the verge of closing. And paralleling what is happening in other centres, the importance of food production in the Windermere Valley is not being addressed at a municipal level. According to Pothekuchi and Kaufman, this is not an isolated problem. They state that, ‘talk of local food systems is notable by its absence from most planning practice, research, and education.’ (Pothekuchi and Kaufman 2000: 66) Unlike the events that hampered agriculture nearly a century ago, the perceived benefits of development, not wars or economic depression, threaten the current food supply in the Windermere Valley. As I have outlined in this chapter, the loss of farmland is paramount in the minds of many of the valley’s agriculturalists and lesser so in the general population who are seemingly unaware of the lack of local food production. I have also discussed the surprisingly large number of people in the valley today who seem to misunderstand the meaning of ‘local’ food. While it may verge on the histrionic to suggest that the people of the Windermere Valley could perish if we were cut off from the global food supply, a recent event illustrates what can happen if our food supply was ever severed. In January 2007, the highways that provide access to the valley were closed for three days because of a severe blizzard. This event coincided with the Christmas holidays which saw a great percentage of the seasonal homeowners in residence. Within two days, the shelves of the produce and meat sections of both grocery stores were virtually emptied. The weather eventually cleared

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and with the melting snow came the food delivery trucks carrying strawberries from California and salmon from Chile. But what if the situation had persisted? Could the Windermere Valley feed itself? Aside from alleviating the threat of food insecurity during periods such as the one just described, a food secure community also provides enhanced cohesiveness to its residents. The hope for raising the level of food security and for the revitalization of local food production in the Windermere Valley may lie in the following initiatives. Relocalizing the Food System: Where this Study Leads Despite the economic advantages of increasing population growth in many rural areas, a negative repercussion is often the disappearance of agriculture and the resulting food insecurity. There is a trend to protect and enhance local food systems for reasons of food security, community cohesiveness and self-reliance, however. Hinrichs states that ‘food system localization may remake our troubled world in modest and valuable ways.’ (Hinrichs 2003: 33) Kloppenberg, in his writings on the importance of foodsheds, declares that ‘the foodshed can be one vehicle through which we reassemble our fragmented identities, reestablish community and become native not only to a place but to each other.’ (Kloppenberg et al. 1996: 34) And in the effort to localize food systems and to connect ourselves to a place, wherever that may be, we must be aware that localizing isn’t just about the marketplace. According to De Lind, it is also about ‘the collective spirit, the non-voluntary responsibility and grace, the hospitality and sacredness of the exercise.’ (De Lind 2002: 223) In other words, food system revitalization requires community engagement. Initiatives such as community supported agriculture, community gardens, civic agriculture, food citizenship and food education are ways of engaging citizens in local food production (Lyson 2004). Local food systems can encourage a high level of community involvement. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is one important initiative that is becoming widely-spread in both urban and rural communities across North America. Jules Pretty asserts that CSAs ‘encourage social responsibility, increase understanding of farming among consumers, and increase the diversity of crops grown by farmers in response to consumer demand.’ (Pretty 2002: 118). CSA is a way of ensuring the stability of small farming operations by providing a constant source of income to the farmer in the form of customer shares. CSAs are supported directly by members who purchase seasonal shares of vegetables and fruits in advance. On a weekly basis, the members receive a box of seasonal produce, often delivered to their homes, or picked up at the farm itself. CSAs could be an important vehicle for raising the agricultural literacy of the residents of the Windermere Valley and could provide support for the struggling local farmers. Other initiatives located within communities, such as community gardens can also raise awareness. Community gardens come in many forms.


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They can be borne out of abandoned lots in the centre of large metropolitan areas or within an idyllic park such as the Columbia Valley Botanical Gardens and Centre for Sustainable Living’s Heritage Garden in Invermere, British Columbia. Community gardens are operated by a public or private institution and rely on the generous support of volunteers. Their role in community-building is evident in the following from Patricia Allen who states that ‘(i)n addition to providing access to fresh, nutritious fruits and vegetables, community gardening also provides sites for socializing and community organizing.’ (Allen 2004: 69). Community gardens allow those who are unable to maintain their own garden plot because of financial or time constraints to participate in the act of gardening. As well, community gardens provide valuable educational outreach opportunities to schools and the greater community. In the Windermere Valley, community garden projects in addition to the Heritage Garden, which offers community out-reach and educational programs, could serve to highlight the importance of food-production and become places that bring seasonal and permanent residents together. One hope for this may be the community greenhouse project which is underway at David Thompson Secondary School in Invermere. The intention of the project, according to project leader Bill Swan, is to highlight issues of local food production and food security.12 To this end, food grown in the greenhouse will be prepared by the students in the Chef Training program at the high school and served to the students and staff. Community gardens and greenhouses are one way of enhancing local food security and they are both part of a growing alternative agriculture movement described as ‘civic agriculture.’ In the midst of what the late Thomas Lyson referred to as a ‘rebirth of locally based agriculture and food production’ sits ‘civic agriculture.’ (Lyson 2004: 1) Civic agriculture ‘is the embedding of local agricultural and food production in the community.’ (Lyson 2002: 92) As an alternative to the industrial, global food system that is seen as destructive to communities and the environment, civic agriculture provides opportunities for community-building. Civic agriculture is a ‘sustainable alternative’ that fulfills ‘consumer demand for fresh, safe and locally produced foods but creates jobs, encourages entrepreneurship, and strengthens community identity.’ (Lyson 2004: 2). But to become a reality in places such as the Windermere Valley, civic agriculture needs citizens who are knowledgeable, share a belief in alternative agricultural systems and the role that they play in building communities. Jennifer Wilkins describes this type of person as a food citizen. Food citizens play an important part in the building of strong local food systems. According to Wilkins, ‘ (f)ood citizenship … is the practice of engaging in food-related behaviors … that support, rather than threaten, the development of a democratic, socially and economically just, and environmentally sustainable food system.’ (Wilkins 2005: 271). Food citizens are not complacent about their food. They question where food comes from, they are responsible in their food choices 12 Bill Swan. Conversation with the author. October 1, 2006.

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because they are aware of how and where it is grown, and they contribute to the promotion of the overall awareness of alternative agricultural practices in their communities. (Wilkins 2005: 271) Wilkins does outline some obstacles to being a food citizen such as the current food system itself and restrictive agricultural policies. These obstacles are very evident when we look at the communities of the Windermere Valley, but possibilities to overcome them do exist and will provide the opportunity to relocalize the food system in this area. As well, overcoming the misinformation about local food may be rooted in food education. The results of the Windermere Valley Food Production Questionnaire shows clearly that local food system awareness is weak amongst many residents of the area. In my work as Chef Training Instructor at David Thompson Secondary School, I have endeavoured at every opportunity to educate the staff and students about the importance of locally-grown food. The greater populations would also benefit from an increase in food education at the elementary school level and amongst community groups such as church groups, 4 H Clubs, Boy Scouts and Girl Guides. In addition, educating members of the local Chamber of Commerce about food tourism and agro-tourism could benefit local farmers by highlighting the link between local food and tourism. As well, concerned citizens could produce articles for the local newspapers on food security issues in the Windermere Valley. Without educated citizens, the effort to enhance food security in the area will fall flat. In closing, the Windermere Valley has a long history of agriculture and oldfashioned rural appeal, perceived or otherwise, that has made it a desirable place to live, or more recently, to recreate. The very thing that attracted the earliest settlers and the new wave of weekend warriors to this place- agriculture and the idyllic landscape- is in jeopardy and a local food supply is virtually nonexistent. And although I have argued that the absence of a local food supply has led to a state of food insecurity in the Windermere Valley, there is hope, within the tenets of alternative agricultural systems and education, to enhance community food security. By getting to know the attitudes and beliefs of residents of the Windermere Valley, by becoming aware of policies that can both hinder and enhance food security, by ensuring that planners and developers incorporate the enhancement of food security into their future plans, and by actively striving towards a reality that sees imported foods augment the local food supply, there exists the possibility of relocalizing the food system and increasing food security in the Windermere Valley. References Allen, Patricia. 2004. Together at the Table: Sustainability and Sustenance in the American Agrifood System. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press.


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Chapter 12

Imagining Sustainable Food Systems: The Path to Regenerative Food Systems Alison Blay-Palmer and Mustafa Koc There is a time and place in the ceaseless human endeavour to change the world, when alternative visions, no matter how fantastic, provide the grist for shaping powerful political forces for change. I believe we are precisely at such a moment. Utopian dreams in any case never entirely fade away. They are omnipresent as the hidden signifiers of our desires. Extracting them from the dark recesses of our minds and turning them into a political force for change may court the danger of the ultimate frustration of those desires. But better that, surely, than giving in to the degenerate utopianism of neo-liberalism (and all those interests that give possibility such a bad press) and living in craven and supine fear of expressing and pursuing alternative desires at all. (Harvey 2002: 195)

It is clear from both the vast academic literature exploring different dimensions of food (e.g. Hinrichs and Lyson 2008, Marsden 2008, Maye et al. 2007, Morgan et al. 2006, Allen 2004, Friedmann and McMichael 1989) and the chapters in this book that the project of ‘Imagining sustainable food systems’ must be undertaken with caution. The meanings attached to words such as ‘sustainable’, ‘systems’ and even ‘food’ imply different things to different people. And, in some cases the terms are overused to the point of being effectively meaningless. This is especially true for ‘sustainable’ and its association with the neo-liberal agenda of ‘sustainable development’. As well, precise definition renders the project useless if, for example, we confine the ‘system’ within borders and blinkers that are too wide or too narrow (Chapters 2 and 3). It is also important to recall SFS is a process not a destination so that ironclad definitions are ‘neither possible nor desirable’ (Buttel in Chapter 2). And like any utopic project the imagining is doomed to fail (Harvey 2002). However despite these qualifications it does not mean the attempt is useless. As Sarah Wakefield explained at the 2008 ‘Imagining sustainable food systems’ workshop that is the basis for this volume, it [is] all about what you need to do and what you need to give up. It’s about giving up things and letting them go for the good of the world, which … is K.A. Dahlberg, ‘Regenerative Food Systems: Broadening the Scope and Agenda of Sustainability’, in P. Allen (ed.), Food for the Future: Conditions and Contradictions of Sustainability (New York, 1993), pp. 75–102.

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Imagining Sustainable Food Systems important, but what we are not doing is capturing how good that world could be. (Wakefield 2008)

It is one of the challenges for this chapter to capture some of that vision. With these hopes and cautions in mind, the rationale for imagining is to provide ideas and insights to people working towards SFSs and beyond. This project is important as it provides a clearer vision and pathway for practitioners, academics, policy-makers and citizens as they re-think, challenge and change the existing food system. The rest of the chapter expands on the processes and pathways that can be used to understand and transform commodity-based food systems to sustainable food webs so they are more equitable, just, resilient, inclusive and regenerative (Sustainable Development Commission 2009: 3). A framework, derived from the literature and the work presented in this volume, elaborates on the structural realities that define and shape existing food systems (Figure 12.1). The framework is then used to envision the policy, socio-communal, economic and environmental spaces that would follow from applying a SFS lens to existing structures. The chapter concludes by testing the framework using the case study of a community-based market near Toronto, Ontario. As with other frameworks, this one builds on the ideas that come before it and is at the same time itself a work in progress. The framework allows us to to see SFS as a practical response to our everyday concerns and challenges, as a value system/ideology guiding our lives, as set of policies shaping our collective reality for the present and the future. The framework examines guiding principles of sustainability, desired practices of social conduct and institutional arrangement required to establish SFS in socio-communal, economic and environmental spaces, while recognizing the interconnectedness among them. The framework locates these efforts within their historical context (structure) yet as a dynamic model it recognizes sustainability as a stage in addressing some of these structural challenges while aiming for regenerative food systems that remediate the economic, social and environmental damage from the existing, dominant food system. Food Regime (Re)structuring as Imagined Through the SFS Lens The process of creating and supporting SFS in North America and the EU is multilayered and dynamic (Figure 12.1). As discussed in the introduction to this book, one of the most challenging questions is how the current food regime in crisis will be reconstituted (Friedmann and McMichael 1989, Friedmann 2005). Part of being in crisis mode is an iteration between the local and the global as shifts and changes occur on the ground that in turn inform broader systemic change. As elaborated in Figure 12.1, the key structural dimensions include: 1. Corporate consolidation and the narrowing of power and control of seeds, processing, distribution and retail into fewer and fewer hands;


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2. The emergence of green capitalism as a possible lever for bifurcating the food system more deeply along have/have not lines; 3. The development project and associated North-South relationships such as the Via Campesina and new certification programs; 4. The extent of investment in appropriate agri-innovation; 5. Demand side pressure such as the emergence of biofuel; 6. Supply side pressure including decreasing food reserves and climate change; and, 7. International speculative investment that has positioned food as a commodity subject to the economic spikes and declines inherent to futures markets and hedge fund investment.

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These global structures form the backdrop for the elaboration and negotiation of policy, economic, environmental and socio-cultural realities as SFSs emerge within communities. In contrast to the existing global food regime (the first tier in Figure 12.1), the sustainable food lens (the second tier) offers a holistic vision of sustainability that goes beyond economic and ecological concerns and priorities by imagining a food system that nourishes one’s body as well as one’s cultural, spiritual and pleasure needs, to embrace priorities such as accessible, affordable, culturally appropriate, healthful foods. These priorities also encompass food providers including producers, processors, distributors and retailers as this presumes that food is produced and distributed in ways that promote healthy people, environments and communities. As discussed in the introductory chapter to this volume, food is an excellent lens to apply when grappling with sustainability. It is a common denominator for all people as everyone eats. It involves all aspects of everyday lives and allows us to unpack the interconnections between the socio-communal, economic, environmental and policy spaces. So, as Kloppenberg et al. say, ‘We start with food.’ (1996: 40) When envisioning the recalibration of the hegemony through the lens of a sustainable food system, there is the potential to challenge the status quo through democratic, inclusive, social innovation policy (Chapter 3, Lang et al. 2009). Consistent with this vision is Morgan’s proposal for a ‘new geopolitics of care’ (2008: 6) as one way to provoke this shift. A politics of caring could provide a voice for those near and far who cannot speak for themselves. This near-far telescoping perspective is essential for SFSs so that communities in the Global South do not get further marginalized in the move to create local SFS in developed countries. As Morgan has cogently argued to entrench an ethics of care in the public realm, it is essential to integrate ‘Local and Green with Global and Fair’ (Morgan 2008: 2; see also Smith 1998 in Goodman 2004 Chapter 10). Attending to the needs of communities at multiple scales highlights the central role of supportive macro-policy as critical to entrenching ground-breaking change. Communities of space and interest within eco-economies offer a parallel and instructive example. In the case of eco-economies, top-down regulations and policies facilitate both the consideration and inclusion of sustainability within communities on the ground (Marsden 2008). This upper tier of regulatory mechanisms can be at the macro level (e.g. the 2005 EU Bristol Accord) and/or the national scale (e.g. the Canadian Sustainable Development Act, Government of Canada 2008). Subsidiarity as the determination of policy at the most appropriate scale is essential to SFSs. Similar to Morgan’s call for a public ethic of care, these macro-sustainability and eco-economic concepts are underpinned by principles of social justice (Agyeman 2009). Agyeman and Evans’ (2004) concept of ‘just sustainability’ merges environmental justice with sustainable development (Agyeman and Evans 2004: 155). In the context of environmental justice, sustainability is defined as, ‘the need to ensure a better quality of life for all, now


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and into the future, in a just and equitable manner, whilst living within the limits of supporting ecosystems’ (Agyeman et al. 2003: 5). The question ultimately is how do we manifest just sustainability without creating and/or perpetuating existing have-have not binaries (Goodman 2004, Faber 1998). This applies to marginalized communities in the both the North and South. Finding ways to close the equity gap is essential as it also potentially provides a common mechanism to unite farmers, eaters, advocates and others across national boundaries and trading blocs. There is merit in exploring the benefits that could accrue from uniting small-scale family farmers in the North and peasants in the South. This is taking place to some degree through the initiatives of Via Campesina (ETC. 2009, Friedmann 2005, McMichael 2005). Exchanges between these communities bridge divides to establish common issues and facilitate knowledge exchange whereby solidarity is expressed through events such as the International Day of Farmers’ Struggle that recognizes the sacrifice of farmers in Brazil. The process of creating SFS necessarily includes attention to food sovereignty and social justice as spaces where change to the food regime can get a foothold. As Morgan argues so convincingly, one way to work towards these benefits is to capture the ‘layered dividends’ of multifunctionality that are inherent to SFS (Chapter 4, Lang et al. 2009). St. Jacques also points to the importance of providing participants with empowerment opportunities, connections, trust and loyalty as part of recognizing the potential of multifunctionality (Chapter 8). While St. Jacques has applied this to the clients in her case studies, this resonates equally for other participants in SFS. There are also process considerations with respect to interdisciplinarity. Hinrichs calls for an approach that spells out ontological, epistemological and disciplinary assumptions as clearly as possible as we move to open up interdisciplinarity. This is important within the academy as the broadest perspective possible is needed to galvanize food research. Food offers academics that chance to understand perspectives from outside their disciplines and can bring together scientists and social scientists (Chapters 2 and 3). There is also the need to build bridges and networks between academics and practitioners so that our work can be merged synergistically. Imagining Sustainable Food Systems Within the broader policy context, we now consider the characteristics of sociocommunal, economic and environmental spaces created when a SFS lens is used – the bottom tier in Figure 1. For each of these spaces we elaborate guiding principles as well as the practices and institutions that facilitate the realization of increasingly sustainable food systems. The socio-communal space is guided by attention to principles of justice, equity and social responsibility. A SFS aims for social justice and equitable access to food in keeping with ideals of food security and food sovereignty.

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Food security is relevant as ‘all community residents obtain a safe, culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through a sustainable food system that maximizes self-reliance and social justice.’ (Hamm and Bellows 2003 in Chapter 11). Food sovereignty offers a somewhat different perspective and emphasizes the right of people and communities to feed themselves however they see fit (IPC Food Sovereignty 2009). A litmus test for whether these principles are effectively applied could be the extent to which all citizens are food secure. Moving towards a sustainable food community involves forms of civic engagement. This activates the power of food (McMichael in Chapters 6 and 11) and shifts individuals and communities beyond compartmentalization enabling them to envision and create SFSs (Lyson 2008 in Chapter 2). To engage the fullest range of civil society, the process needs to be inclusive and accessible so that it incorporates a ‘more reflexive governance for designing, negotiating and managing sustainability’ (Chapter 3: 23). As well it can allow for individual and collective creativity, participation and deliberation. To ensure that all voices are heard it should also be iterative and reflexive (Chapter 3). According to Wakefield, we do not need … 100% consensus to move forward…[It is important to work] with partners that don’t always share your views. How difficult and challenging that can be, and how rewarding it can be when someone who has been fighting you the whole way finally says ‘Oh, you know, that’s not actually a bad idea.’ Those opportunities for learning are very important. (Wakefield 2008)

Food literate citizens foster SFS as they are informed and activated about the rights and responsibilities associated with food security and sovereignty. As such they can pull the food web in a more sustainable direction. Food education through school curriculum, agri-tourism and community would support this evolution (Chapter 11). The road to this level of engagement is incremental as people work to the highest possible standard at every stage along the journey. To build momentum, participants should be free to merge goals as they build critical mass to scale up (Chapters 9 and 10). This can be facilitated by a ‘[c]ollaborative process of inquiry and adjustment, participation in every day practice. This means incremental and collective tinkering, work that agro-ecologists call adaptive management’ (Wakefield 2008). An excellent example of this gradual ramping up are the ladders that certifier Local Food Plus provides to all of its clients. These ladders create the possibility for constant, continuous improvement (Chapters 4, 9 and 10). On-the-ground processes that smooth the way for these changes rely on networks of trust to facilitate transparent, creative, participatory, negotiated discourse and processes. Networks for communication and knowledge exchange include trade associations, extension services, NGOs, activists, and food policy councils. These institutions can stimulate new practices, structures and policy that facilitate and act as conduits of change (Chapters 2, 6, 9, 10 and 11). Drawing on the work


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of Waddell (2005) Friedmann encapsulates this connectivity and dynamism in describing the Toronto community of ‘food practice’ as comprising, … more than their skillful access to institutional resources. It also includes the specific functions of a municipal government body, the Toronto Food Policy Council, and a vibrant network of nongovernmental food security organizations, especially the largest, FoodShare. These organizations have provided strategic resources, as well as opportunities to experiment and learn from others’ experiments, to the diverse individuals who move through them, usually leaving behind new projects and ideas. These institutions are unique in linking a wide range of topdown and bottom-up initiatives that emerge and evolve within and across a range of ‘‘sectors’’ – public, voluntary (NGO), and market. (Chapter 9: 168)

These scenarios resonate with Marsden who points to the combination of bottom up and top down planning, policy and action. These initiatives enable and extend the quality and richness of interaction within and beyond the community and are key supportive mechanisms for sustainable communities (Marsden 2008: 281). Marsden links these community initiatives to the overarching governance milieu through what he calls ‘governance through projects’. These projects translate, interpret and reflect governance priorities and goals. They are typical of the onthe-ground initiatives that characterize SFS. These projects create new spaces for interaction founded on ‘trust, reliable funding, strong community leadership and comprehensive awareness raising.’ (Marsden 2008: 278) Projects that could signal the presence of SFSs include food-based NGOs, associations, community gardens and CSAs. The creation of healthy food spaces can be supported through regulation such as zoning to create food spaces such as pseudo-food free zones (Winson 2008). A recent example is the limit on the number of fast food restaurants in certain areas of Los Angeles or the restrictions on trans-fats in New York restaurants (Chapter 6). The economic space centers on the founding principle of viability. Practices used to realize this principle include affordable inputs and outputs throughout the food web. Attention to resilient livelihoods is part of the SFS community: A livelihood comprises the capabilities, assets (including both material and social resources) and activities required for a means of living. A livelihood is sustainable when it can cope with and recover from stresses and shocks, maintain or enhance its capabilities and assets, while not undermining the natural resource base. (Scoones 1998: 5 in Chapter 2)

It follows then that in a SFS, farmers would be able to afford to buy land and earn a fair living from their work and eaters could afford to eat healthily. By extension this requires that all costs be internalized so that the price paid for healthy food and processed foods reflect their relative impacts on and benefits to human, environmental and community well-being. This suggests turning the current system

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on its head so that fruits and vegetables could receive support while processed food would be taxed. At the farm level, there would be extension services to foster sustainable agricultural practices (Chapter 11) and break the reliance of farmers on TNCs for information about how to farm. It also requires that processing, distribution and retail firms along the foodway be profitable so that local economic development potential is realized including entrepreneurial opportunities and a supportive risk-taking environment (Chapters 7, 8 and 9). It is also essential to facilitate the creation of the necessary infrastructure. For example, communities must be able to process their own meat (Chapter 11). Distribution networks need to include retailers prepared to work with flexible delivery schedules and the seasonal realities of farming. Long-term, stable, dedicated public procurement can be a centerpiece of this aspect of SFS (Chapter 4). As St. Jacques explains in her chapter on entrepreneurism and local food, improved branding of sustainable products would support knowledge creation and product recognition coupled with loyalty and trust through consistency and quality (Chapter 8). It is also useful to develop comprehensive, transparent standards. Local Food Plus, described in Chapter 9, is exemplary in this regard providing guidelines so that, Local Sustainable farmers and processors reduce or eliminate pesticide use, treat their animals well, conserve soil and water, protect wildlife habitat, provide safe and fair working conditions, reduce energy use, and sell locally wherever possible. (Local Food Plus http://www.localfoodplus.ca/)

As part of any certification process it is crucial that regular verification occurs to make the system as transparent as possible (Chapter 5). There is also a focus on appropriately scaled economic activity that privileges a more dispersed economic system (Chapters 6 and 9). Decreased consolidation throughout the supply chain could bring equity and balance to the food system. Decentralizing the food system into the hands of many would create diverse, niche market opportunities. It would also require and foster networks of small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) along with the appropriate infrastructure to support healthy, quality food. Incentives for scale-appropriate firms can be realized through programs such as tax credits, loans, discounted infrastructure rates and grants (Chapter 6). As Donald insightfully points out, this requires us to develop a more nuanced and detailed understanding of firms and their networks. This improved knowledge would provide insights into power structures and help to identify spaces where change can emerge (Chapter 7). Corporate citizenship would also be a goal for SFS so that companies are engaged in their communities and active as citizens. As Levitte makes clear earlier in the volume, fair working conditions and terms of employment are critical for everyone working in SFSs. This includes farmers as owners as well as farm workers. Boiled down, the goal is to instill fair trade for everyone who makes their living in the food system (Chapters 4 and 5). Fair wages, benefits, compensation and working conditions are foundational. Workers


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need secure, year-round work that honours gender equality, provides comfortable living conditions and respects physical and mental well-being. The prospect for on-the-job learning and advancement is also important. Accordingly training and development opportunities must exist for all workers (Chapter 5). A sign of success in this area would be the existence of firms and organizations that operate without exploiting volunteers (Chapter 9). Environmental dimensions are guided by ideals of resilient ecologies and regeneration and supported through measures such as biological and crop diversity and the conservation of renewable resources (Chapters 1 and 8). SFS environments are those where minimal chemicals are used to ensure the lightest footprint possible. The use of GE seed is avoided, as is monoculture production (Chapter 8, IAASTAD 2008). Crop rotation and the use of organic matter for fertilization are also givens. Compensation for stewardship that values both environmental and landscape protection and regeneration can be part of SFSs so that farmers are encouraged and more able to be stewards of their land (Chapter 8). These goals can be more substantially supported through the commitment to a robust Precautionary Principle that advocates, where a preliminary scientific evaluation shows that potentially dangerous effects for the environment and human, animal or plant health can reasonably be feared. In both cases, the risks are incompatible with the high level of protection sought by the European Union. (Europa 2009, UNEP 2009)

Reducing the distance food travels from field to fork can help to lighten the food footprint (Chapters 4 and 9, Lang et al. 2009). In this context, it is also important to recall earlier discussions for the application of local green and global fair principles (Morgan 2008). Having identified elements that could facilitate the building of SFSs, it is also important to raise some cautions. First the reality of trade-offs needs to be recognized and vigilance is required to attend to how these compromises are negotiated. Gibson (as cited in Chapter 2) offers a set of criteria to help ensure that trade-off decisions maximize benefits. This happens in part by reaching for the most gains possible, minimizing adverse results and having a negotiated process that is as transparent as possible. Second, while a system perspective can allow us to see connections, juxtapositions, places of leverage and potential feedback, in making too broad a sweep we can lose the details. It is important to be cognizant of what is inside/outside and bounded/blinkered by our ‘system’ perimeters so we don’t miss key factors (Sundquivst et al. 2005 in Chapter 2). Third, it is important to be vigilant so that agendas and terms are not appropriated by special interests. We have witnessed the damage this can cause too many times (e.g. Guthman 2004). Fourth, we need to avoid an emphasis on technology as the only solution (ETC. Group 2009, IIASTD 2008). Fifth, we must acknowledge the power imbalances

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and social inequities and work to overcome them as part of the SFS project to create a food system that is as democratic and as civic based as possible (Chapters 3 and 4, Lyson 2008). Finally, while we have just spelled out all of these ‘dos and don’ts’ it is important to avoid being prescriptive. SFSs are unique. They vary over space and time. We must recognize that the process is simultaneously dynamic and place specific (Chapters 2 and 9). There is no one size fits all SFS or no one way to get there. With the framework and these cautions in mind, we can now apply the framework to a case study. This will help us evaluate its relevance for creating more SFSs. The case study explores a community market project that was initiated to address food access and human health issues in low income urban pockets in a city near Toronto, Ontario. While the markets represent only a slice into a SFS, and not an entire SFS, this case study was selected as it offers a glimpse into the application of a set of food system principles as established by a larger body – the Region of Waterloo Public Health – as they are interpreted through their community markets project. Practicing SFSs: The Region of Waterloo Public Health (RWPH) Community Markets The case study describes the creation of community produce markets in the region of Waterloo, an area about one hour west of Toronto Ontario. The RWPH has a reputation for being out front on many food issues in Canada. It has authored several reports including ‘The Cost of Eating Well: The Health Impact of Food Insecurity’ (Bermingham 2008) and ‘A Healthy Community Food System Plan for Waterloo Region’ Maan Miedema and Pigott 2007). They have also written reports on the cost of nutritious food baskets, the potential to reduce food miles and pioneered a local food map that allows eaters to locate farmers and their produce (RWPH 2008). The insights from the community market project provide an example of ‘governance through projects’ and offer a window into a SFS. As Hinrichs wisely reminds us, It is a formidable and perhaps impossible task to describe the food system in its entirety. It is possible, however, and also necessary to describe and analyze facets of the food system from a perspective that considers links and relationships and how the parts combine in particular configurations. (Hinrichs 2008: 2)

RWPH has been a leading innovator in the area of public health and food in Canada. This is remarkable given the rigid, compartmentalized approach to food in Canada. The Canadian health care system operates within stacked tiers both The Toronto Food Policy Council should also be recognized for their internationally ground-breaking work on food security (Blay-Palmer forthcoming, Chapter 10).


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jurisdictionally (for example the federal Health Canada Department, the provincial Health Ministries and regionally/ municipally through regional or municipal Health Units) and professionally (for example, doctors, nurses and nutritionists each have their own professional bodies with little crossover between groups). Similar vertical organizational structures exist for agriculture and the environment. The result is many silos with little cooperation, sparse cross-fertilization of ideas or integrated policy. Within this complex and disjointed system, the RWHP shines as progressive and revolutionary. As part of their vision they have integrated human health with local economic development and the creation and sustenance of a sustainable public health system. The community market initiative is an example of their leadership. The pilot project emerged from an RWHP document ‘A Healthy Community Food System Plan’ that put forward seven recommendations: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

That healthy, affordable food be available to all citizens To preserve and protect the region’s agricultural land To reinforce consumer’s food related knowledge and skills Increase availability of healthy food to facilitate healthy food choices To increase viability of farms selling into local food market in order to preserve rural communities and culture 6. Strengthen the local food economy 7. Forge dynamic partnerships to implement the plan. (Xuereb and Desjardins 2005: 24) As a reflection of interdisciplinarity, a nutritionist and a planner from RWPH co-authored the document and drew on input from colleagues from public health nursing, land use planning, local economic development and social enterprise development. The authors were asked to amalgamate existing work into an overview of what could be done to improve regional understanding about ‘disparate food-related problems affecting public health.’ (Xuereb and Desjardins 2005: 4). A next step from the report was the creation of the community market concept as one way to address all of the recommendations. The mandate for the community markets was, … to increase access to fresh local produce in neighbourhoods that have limited food access, to increase people’s consumption of fresh produce, to increase social connections in neighbourhoods, and to support local farmers. (Maan Miedema 2008: 5)

The markets were launched in the summer of 2007 and ran again in the summer of 2008. The focus of this chapter is the first summer of operation. In 2007, the markets operated in parking lots of the St. Mary’s General Hospital and the Mill Courtland Community Centre in Kitchener, Ontario. By 2008 three

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sites were added. In the first year, the markets were held every Friday from the end of June until the end of September. Recognizing the importance of learning by doing, the first year was limited to two markets and was seen as an opportunity to work through the concept on a small scale. Two years of funding was secured from a local foundation and the project was launched in 2007. The organizers at RWPH undertook two phases. The first phase was described as ‘developmental’ and included, ‘presenting the concept, developing partnerships, selecting sites, and hiring staff.’ (Maan Miedema 2008: 5). The second phase was ‘operational’ and refers to food procurement, pricing produce, coordinating schedules and managing other practical concerns. Before starting the markets, a review of existing models, best practices and challenges was undertaken. In selecting the type of market, three models were considered: the Farmer’s Market Association Model, the Community Collaboration Model, and the Institutional Model. In the first model, farmers sell their own produce at a sponsor promoted location. In the second case a suite of community agencies cooperate to provide the different pieces needed for the market. So, for example, a community centre might provide the space and a local economic development office could do the promotion. In the third model, one institution takes the lead to secure the food, the venue and the sellers. After a literature survey of reports and papers from the US and Canada, three challenges were identified: 1. Markets in low-income communities are unlikely to be self-funding. 2. Fruit and vegetable variety is important to attract eaters. 3. Farmers are oftentimes unwilling/unable to participate in markets due to limited time resources. With the literature survey and community assessment in hand, a plan was implemented to maximize project goals. First, to make the markets more financially viable one site was chosen from an economically challenged area, and the other market was located in an economically heterogeneous community. Ten sites were then proposed following a GIS analysis using bus service, grocery store access, income distribution, population density, location of large employers, presence of farmers’ markets and places of worship. In the end, the Mill Courtland Community Center and the St. Mary’s General Hospital were chosen. To roll out the project, RWPH partnered with ‘Opportunities Waterloo Region’ (OWR), a charitable organization focused on poverty prevention. OWR assumed administrative responsibilities including hiring and managing the market coordinator who was responsible for produce purchasing and market co-ordination. Community Nutrition workers from a multi-site program funded by public health, RWPH and volunteers staffed the two market locations. Food was sourced from a farmer’s co-operative wholesale produce auction and local organic farms with the goal of supporting local farmers. The markets were promoted using flyers and some door-to-door contact. To learn as much as possible from the pilot projects, tracking forms were used to follow the amount and type of produce bought and sold and questionnaires monitored customer satisfaction for each of the first four weeks. A longer final survey was administered to market-goers to determine whether their


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eating habits had changed. Interviews were also conducted with stakeholders to gage the relative achievement of goals. Challenges and Opportunities As the market moved through its first year, several challenges were encountered – most were overcome. The ‘community market void’ in Waterloo Region meant there were no precedents to point to as the RWPH moved forward to connect with local partners. Its inability to specify levels of commitment, time needed and other logistical details meant it was difficult to find willing community partners. Finally though they formed a very fertile linkage with OWR. As expected, there was little farmer enthusiasm for participating in a market. There are several other established markets in the area so there is competition for farmer involvement. This led RWPH to strengthen its ties with the regional produce auction as a reliable and streamlined source for locally grown fruits and vegetables at wholesale prices. This put money directly into farmers’ pockets but left the farmers free to manage and work their farms. Local zoning regulations also proved to be problematic as there was no existing licensing accommodation for produce markets outside designated farmer market areas. As a result, OWR and another community group applied for and received a variance to sell produce at the selected sites. On the promotion front, while there was little money for advertising the markets, local media were very interested. This generated a substantial amount of ‘free’ exposure for the project and got the word out. The amount of time and number of hours needed to run the markets exceeded expectations and more people were required on-site for market days. As a result, more volunteers were needed and the coordinator’s hours were increased from 14 to 21 per week. As well, with more people involved, more educational issues could be addressed. Volunteers and staff had more time for community outreach and education about recipes, local food – many wanted to have more time to ‘tell the story’ about the food – and seasonality. St. Mary’s General Hospital originally reported that nearly 80% of customers came from the hospital. By the middle of the season, this was reversed so that 80% of customers were from the neighbourhood. In the case of the Mill Courtland Community Centre, 69% of customers lived in the neighbourhood. In terms of what motivated people to buy from the markets, Staff and volunteers at the SMGH site expressed surprise at the diversity of people who came to the markets – diversity in terms of their interest in local food issues. Some came because it [the produce] was local and that was important to them; some came because it was close; and some came to compare prices. (Maan Miedema 2008: 14) The City of Kitchener then decided a variance would not be necessary as these markets served a public interest (Pigott Personal Communication, 2010).

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With respect to customer satisfaction: 93% of people indicated they were happy with the location of the markets; 44% of people rated the produce as ‘excellent’ with 54% indicating the quality was ‘good’; 60% of customers found what they were looking for – those looking for other items mostly wanted to buy more fruit; and 91% of customers indicated the importance of buying local produce, Staff at MCCC commented that at least ten customers on each neighbourhood market day would ask where the produce was coming from. It provided the staff and volunteers with an opportunity to talk about EPAC [the farmer wholesale co-operative], Steckle Farm, and Canadian Organic Growers and why choosing to buy from local farmers was critical for this neighbourhood market. Staff also said that some customers were coming specifically because the produce was locally grown (Mann Miedema 2008: 16).

The surveys also sought to address and define issues of sustainability. On the economic front, the markets cost $33,453 to operate and generated $38,450 in revenue. While the markets covered the cost of produce, they did not recover volunteer time, in kind RWPH staff time, start-up or operating costs (e.g., paying the coordinator and promotion). This led to some partners framing the markets as ‘community service’ opportunities, … a lot of the things we run out of this place [MCCC] are services for which we need funding for – or else they would not be viable. If the neighbourhood markets were to run on a business model we would be in trouble. You need to look at the ripple effects of a service … the whole community benefits. (Mann Miedema 2008:18).

Another contribution the markets made were to provide additional vending opportunities for producers. Organic farmers reported planning to plant more produce for the next growing season to meet the demand from the community markets. In 2009, one market that emerged from this pilot project was very close to being financially self-sustaining (Piggot, Personal Communication, 2010). In terms of partner engagement, the broad-based mission of the community markets gave them wide appeal for partners. Community groups came on board as the markets were able to meet affordability and access goals. As a result RWPH was able to facilitate food systems to improve both human and environmental well-being. It also provided collaborating partners with a new perspective on their roles. For example, the hospital was reviewing ways to engage more with local food, As they [SMGH] became more involved they realized the market initiative fit into their mission to teach and promote health, serve those in need (with an emphasis on the poor and marginalized), and be a responsible citizen and neighbour. Further, this project supports the hospital’s directive of being an


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organization focused on strong environmental stewardship. (Maan Miedema 2008: 18).

From the perspective of partnership building, established partners assisted with the community market projects. As well, [o]ver the season, the partnership [with OWR] matured and partners gained trust in each other. Each organization has their particular strengths which [sic] they brought to the table … critical factors that helped the partnership were good communication, constant recognition of each partner’s contribution, and sharing credit and decision making power. (Maan Miedema 2008: 24).

With respect to improved food access, the changes reported by market staff, partners and volunteers included: trying new foods, learning how to preserve food, teaching customers about local food and seasonally appropriate food variety. For regular customers (n = 11 surveyed), seven reported eating more vegetables (64%), and four reported eating more fruit (36%). Anecdotally, market staff and volunteers reported that in one neighbourhood many elderly women frequented the market, while in the other community mothers with young children in strollers were more common. The markets also improved people’s pride in and ties to their communities. As this volunteer commented, By the end I really could see a community had formed around the neighbourhood market at the St. Mary’s entrance. The security guard asked me and another volunteer to dance to the violinist’s music and so we did – or I did – and we caught it on video. The patient next to us was just howling and walked through the picture. You could see that there was a comfort level. It became like a social, like liveliness – people just talking about their experience with certain vegetables or what recipes they used. And sharing amongst customers happened. (Maan Miedema 2008: 21).

Community pride surfaced as people learned about and celebrated the quality food they were able to access in their community. Thinking about the Community Markets through the Lens of the Framework In this section we apply the framework to the case study to test its relevance. Using a sustainable food systems lens (the second tier in Figure 1) to understand the community market project helps identify strengths of the markets as well as pointing to areas where change may improve this particular project. Interestingly for a public health unit, food occupies a place of prominence on the agenda of a core group within the RWPH. Even more interestingly, the focus is more than food and its nutritional value and extends to food and its part in a sustainable system (Pollan 2008). This is made clear through the seven

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recommendations that were the springboard for the community market pilot project. The community market is the realization of a well-developed vision for and commitment to healthy, fresh food that is accessible to as many citizens as possible. The project was founded on well-developed and soundly conceived ideals aligned with concrete and realistic project goals. The location of the market in a community centre parking lot meant that people accessing the social services offered through the community center also had the opportunity to purchase local food. In this way, quality local food was delivered to an economically disadvantaged and underserved community. The majority of consumers at both markets were local residents. As such food nourished peoples’ bodies and their communities. At the policy level, while the community markets emerged with the support of innovative regional institutions, this is the exception rather than the rule in Ontario and results more from a convergence of dedicated, visionary staff at the RWPH than anything related to progressive Canadian food policy. Upper level (i.e. federal and provincial) policy and regulation that encourages multifunctional food systems are either non-existent or countervalent. As a result, there is substantial room for improvement in this aspect of building sustainable food systems. Supportive policy that includes multifunctionality, subsidiarity and a robust Precautionary Principle could make a large difference to this project in particular and overall opportunities for Ontario SFSs in general (Blay-Palmer forthcoming, Chapter 9, Skogstad 2008). Despite the policy void, RWPH was able to recognize and capitalize on the multifunctionality of their project. They deliberately combined and promoted the human health, local economic development and community benefits of their work. This case also provides an excellent example of building bridges between sectors and with the academic community as evidenced in part by the extensive interdisciplinary research and thinking undertaken to determine what approach to adopt. With this background information in hand, the RWPH was able to create a vision and set of goals that allowed them to identify fairly precisely how they wanted to intervene in their community. At the community level RWPH markets adhere to strong principles of social justice and equity. They demonstrate both the practice of and institutional support for these ideals. The socio-communal spaces created through the markets provide ample evidence of the ‘power of food’ to break down compartments and allow the envisioning and creation of a SFS. As one of many food/ health initiatives by the RWPH, the case study demonstrates the commitment of the RWPH to act as an agent of change for a more just, equitable and socially responsible food system. The people involved in the project are dedicated to education and change. Not only are the RWPH employees extremely food literate, they educated volunteers who in turn shared their knowledge about local food systems with market customers. The project was also successful at building community and organizational capacity. As one of the volunteers pointed out, at St Mary’s Hospital the market added a sense of community and even had people dancing. From an organizational perspective, the ties established between the RWPH and the Opportunities Waterloo Region


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(OWR) served both groups’ organizational goals, provided opportunities for information exchange and established connections for future collaboration. They were very successful at building community capacity. The markets provide several examples of civic engagement through public consultation that made the process accessible to locals. For example, citizens were asked to provide feedback throughout the market season. In this way there was the opportunity for collective and individual participation and deliberation about the merits and drawbacks of the initiative. The information gathering that occurred during the summer and after the markets closed for the season allowed for community comment and mutual learning as everyone had a voice about their markets. This helped to empower communities and their agencies as they moved towards creating more sustainable food systems. Clearly, more trust, improved opportunities for community engagement and increased awareness about local, seasonal food were generated as a result of the community markets. There was also a clear expression of food as a public good. The concept of public good extended throughout the food chain from field to fork. It included building better linkages with local farmers by offering fresh, quality, local food to a low-income community. On the producer side, there was also the stated goal to support local and organic farmers by paying them a fair price through the wholesale auction. Less explicit though are goals to respect cultural diversity and preserve ecosystem health. While not ignored, they were more peripheral aspects of this communitybased initiative. This project demonstrates that SFSs can include a high level of information exchange and knowledge creation within a web of connections. They can also foster reciprocal and supportive relationships between individuals and organizations. Communities of ‘food practice’ are also apparent as the RWPH felt able to launch the pilot project using its connections into local institutions including the food auction and the OWR. Adaptive management was in evidence as negotiations unfolded with farmers and the city to realize the goal of the community markets. That the work began with a pilot project and then ramped up the following year to more markets speaks to the incremental nature of the project. While not an example of the creation of certification ‘ladders’ this case provides an example of incremental change and gradual scaling up SFSs. Central to this process were networks of trust that were fortified throughout the creation of the community markets. In considering the economic space, the community market project provided many opportunities to improve the economic resilience and viability of the community through the practice of SFSs and by building supportive institutions. First, in its short 14-week season through the two pilot markets, the project provided modest financial benefits for the produce auction and local farmers as it returned over $9000 to the local economy. The stability offered by the market as a public procurement commitment meant that farmers planned to include the demand from community market sales into their planting plans for the next growing season. In the long term this could provide more options for farmers and foster farming as a more viable living. As well, given the RWPH goal to protect and preserve

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farmland, the market is being used to make farming more financially viable. That the bulk of produce was sold as ‘local’ potentially helps to ‘brand’ the local. That the market relied on outside funding points to an interesting dissonance regarding the definition of ‘profitable’ and how we define ‘value’. With respect to decentralization, the community markets provide an example of food down-sizing. It also speaks to other forms of market exchange that may be possible alongside the existing food system. While the market at the time of writing was a new player on the food scene, it provided the opportunity to support and connect SME processors and distributors and could be a rung on the ladder to scaled-up SFS. In this way it provides a window into new ways of framing food access and delivery. However, in the context of these remarkable accomplishments, the labour characteristics are somewhat less progressive. While the market did create a temporary coordinator position, volunteers and RWPH staff working off the side of their desks ran the market. This is expected in the early days of a community project and does help to frame the market as a community project that reaches beyond the bounds of the marketplace. That said, relying on unpaid labour could be exploitive in the long run. It could also jeopardize the resilience of the market if volunteers move on to other commitments. A creative way to address this dilemma may be ‘paying’ volunteers with produce. Understanding the monetary realities is also important as the project was funded through a community philanthropic grant. While this makes sense for a pilot project, it may threaten the long-term viability of the markets unless a stable source of funding is established. In terms of SFSs and the environmental spaces, the community market project promotes the values of resilient and regenerative ecologies. By buying local the markets reduce community food miles. By educating citizens about where the food was sourced, the project elevated awareness about and helped to value food in a new way. It also fulfills one of the stated goals, to preserve and protect agricultural land. By supporting local, and in some cases organic, farmers, the markets are doing their best to encourage sustainable land stewardship. While a separate research project would be needed to determine the exact extent to which they meet these environmental goals it is reasonable to credit the project with building more resilient ecologies and reducing harmful inputs. Facing challenges from regulatory authorities around issues dealing with zoning, the RWPH staff was able to successfully negotiate through this challenge and at the same time educate authorities about the unique features of community markets. Throughout the development phase, many efforts were made to make the process as transparent as possible. For example, a comprehensive report was authored that assessed the benefits of and challenges to the markets. This report is available to the public on-line. The community markets project itself is an example of additional SFS infrastructure created to serve the local citizens. It also offers an interesting model for providing affordable healthy food to communities in need. While the RWPH community markets project is grounded firmly in an ethics of care, at this point the caring extends only as far as the regional boundary. In this


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regard there is room for improvement with respect to becoming a truly sustainable food system. Finally the community markets demonstrate a clear dedication to democracy, social and economic justice, and environmental well-being as central to sustainable food systems. Concluding Thoughts The final remarks for this chapter take up two trains of thought. First we explore the relevance of the framework for understanding the case study. We also tackle the limitations of the framework as an analytical and conceptual tool. We end the chapter with an assessment of the insights provided through the case study and the framework about the evolution of SFSs. The case study analysis is revealing in several ways. First, it served as a test for the proposed framework and associated guiding principles, practices and institutions that underpin SFSs as outlined in this chapter. It points to the merits of applying a SFS lens to the existing food regime in crisis as it highlights deficiencies in the existing system and points to paths to remedy these challenges. However, as stated at the outset of the analysis, the market project as part of a larger food system has provided a very modest boost to the overall goals of the RWPH in its mission to deliver a more SFS to the region. The framework does help to offer insights on areas of successes being achieved and where efforts could be focused to stretch sustainability even farther. In terms of successes, the markets: 1. Improve access to fresh, healthy food; 2. Raise the level of institutional and individual food literacy; 3. Promote principles of food citizenship; 4. Provide opportunities for community building and engagement; 5. Improve the economic viability of the community; 6. Offer an alternative to food system consolidation; 7. Act in a way that is consistent with food being a public good; 8. Recognize the importance of preserving healthy ecosystems and biodiversity; 9. Promote caring for ‘others’ within the region; and, 10. Support food activism and the NGO community. The framework also highlights gaps in the SFS. There is a clear need for stable funding. Addressing this gap is important as stable funding would entrench the community markets in the food system and give them permanence in the local foodscape. Related to this is the need for more paid staff. Although a shift to this volunteer model puts it somewhat beyond the reach of economic pressures, the project does rely on the overworked staff to survive. On the one hand, volunteer feedback indicated that this was a valuable experience and they were happy to partake. On the other hand, organizations were hard-pressed to accommodate even

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more time. As a result, more full-time staff may be needed to offset the in-kind contribution by RWPH. Another critical challenge is the imperative to extend the concept of caring and community to ‘others’ in the Global South. Waterloo’s ability to care is evident. While the scope of their caring could be extended, the policy dimension needs to be addressed at a provincial or even national policy on the public ethics of care. While a region can set an example, it is constrained by policy and tone set by upper levels of government. As indicated earlier in the chapter, these markets are taking place in the context of woefully inadequate attention to food systems issues. There is a dearth of integrated engagement at the federal level of government on any issues related to sustainability. Broadly supportive policy and institutions, as well as stable funding would make a large difference to this project. A Canadian food policy or amendments to the Sustainability Charter to include principles of multifunctionality, subsidiarity and a strongly worded Precautionary Principle would go a long way to laying the supportive groundwork for this type of food systems project that integrates human health, ecosystem well-being, community participation and economic development. This project opens the door to public procurement in the region as the market was a proxy for public food purchasing. If the market were framed in these terms it could reveal space for more directed purchasing by public institutions of local food (Chapter 4). It is also important to remark on the deficiencies with the framework as an analytical and conceptual tool. First, the case study analysis points to problems in defining terms. This is consistent with cautions raised by Hinrichs (Chapter 2) and Koc (Chapter 3). The clearest example emerged in the analysis of the economic dimension and relates to how one defines ‘economic viability’. The markets were ‘profitable’ in the sense that the food sold covered the cost of the food purchased. It also provided healthier food to local communities – something difficult to ‘value’ in ‘profit’ terms. However, they did not generate, and are unlikely on their own, to generate enough money to cover the cost of salaries. The RWPH was able to support a second year. The Preston Towne Centre Market, a product of the second year’s iteration, will be able to sustain itself. This said, the future of the other markets are not secure. That the market relied on outside funding points to an interesting dissonance regarding the definition of ‘profitable’ as it deliberately internalizes social benefits in the ‘valuing’ of the market. This stands in opposition to the standard externalization of other costs such as environmental degradation or escalating health care costs related to food production. As anticipated earlier in the volume, this raises the question of trade-offs and how different outcomes are reconciled. It also points to the need to recognize the framework as a starting point. Given the intent that this not be a prescriptive ‘checklist’ of characteristics AND that the project is a work in progress, the incomplete nature of the list is not unexpected. The analysis also probed questions related to food regimes. As Hinrichs suggests,


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The process [of changing the food system] is dialectical in that changing the food system generally proceeds from the starting point of openings or vulnerabilities associated with the dominant conventional food system (Hendrickson and Heffernan 2002) and in that it occurs in continual dialogue with that conventional food system. (Hinrichs 2008: 5)

Using a similar tack, Leyshon et al. (2003) talk about ‘alternative economic spaces’ that emerge to fill the ‘cracks [that] have begun to appear in the edifice of global capitalism’ (Leyshon et al. 2003: 3). Wakefield raised an important question at the ISFS workshop in asking, where is the locus of change? Drawing on work by Geronimus (2000), Wakefield explores two types of change whereby, ameliorative change deals ONLY with the outcome (e.g., people are hungry need feeding), while transformative change deals only with the root cause (people are hungry because of structural issues that must be addressed). Dealing with only the consequence and not the cause means you will never solve anything; dealing with only the cause means the people who are facing the consequences NOW will suffer. (Wakefield, Personal Communication 2010)

The examples of LFP and the community markets are more integrative and reach beyond this binary as they confront both the root causes and the consequences. LFP demonstrates change through a ratcheting up of standards and institutional commitment to change. It offers the potential for transformational change as a tipping point is achieved through incremental adjustments. The community market study is an example of small-scale change within the context of a bigger shift in vision that has taken place within the innovative RWPH. Are these local projects examples that could ultimately helped to reconfigure capitalism? Or are they too small and isolated to precipitate lasting change even when taken together? Perhaps if more communities undertook this level of visioning and commitment, these ‘cracks’ would spread to become a restructuring of capitalism through food and this initiative and others like it would serve as templates for other communities. In the US, for example, by 2007, 825 US cities and towns signed on to the Kyoto Climate Accord and committed to fighting climate change. While this was not a wholesale change in the US approach to climate change it opened the door to more public awareness and created traction for new products and approaches. This in turn spawned demand for green energy, smaller cars and new building codes among other initiatives. It is also important to consider that the goal of sustainability needs to be understood as an orientation (both in values and policies) guiding societal action and not a final destination. In this process, sustainability can also be seen as a stage between resilient food systems and the higher objectives of regenerative food systems. In the case of a creating a more scaled-up sustainable food system, the most interesting questions may come as we move closer to our tipping point.

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Index

Page numbers in italic denote illustrations and figures. actionism 189 AFNs (Alternative Food Networks) 121 Agricultural Land Commission. see ALC Agricultural Land Reserve. see ALR agro-food systems 26, 122, 127 agroecology 5, 21, 24 ALC (Agricultural Land Commission) 208-10 Allen, P. 21, 27, 78, 81, 176, 215 ALR (Agricultural Land Reserve) 208, 209-10 Alternative Food Networks. see AFNs ALUS (Alternative Land Use Services) 148, 152, 153-4 Aramark 158, 162, 165, 167, 170 Bell, A. 12 Bell, M. 20, 26 biodiversity 7, 11, 30, 55, 74, 150, 151, 163 Blay-Palmer, A. 7, 18, 41, 94, 104, 123, 128, 232n2, 238 blinders 8, 26, 27, 32, 88, 106, 223 boundaries 8, 26-7, 32, 223 Brazil 6, 75-6, 175, 227 Bruce, Robert Randolph 204-5, 206, 213 Buller, H. 29-30 buy local 27, 60, 136, 151, 157-8, 194, 195 Canada 38, 74, 116n2 food deserts 101 food security 5, 8, 157, 158, 159, 187 redlining 92 school food 158-9 supermarkets 89, 90 Walmart 117, 121, 125, 126, 127 capitalism 50, 120, 122, 127, 128, 243

CARPE (Cities as Responsible Purchasers in Europe) 65-6 certification programs 5, 10, 11, 78, 80, 163-4, 182, 230 civic agriculture 7, 42-3, 203, 214, 215 civic markets 42-3 civil society 6, 25, 42, 104-5, 189, 228 climate change 3, 72, 137, 157, 182-3, 243 commodity-chains 21, 118, 120, 121, 127 community gardens 12, 115, 121, 122, 123, 127, 184, 214-15, 229 community markets 12, 232, 241-2, 243 RWPH 232-41, 242, 243 community of practice 158, 168, 169, 170 Community-Shared Agriculture programs. see CSAs connectedness 26 convenience stores 10, 92-4, 97-8, 99, 100, 102, 103 Coventry 10, 93, 100 CSAs (Community-Shared Agriculture programs) 12, 18, 115, 121, 122, 123, 127, 214, 229 DEFRA (Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) 54, 55, 56 democracy 4, 5, 25, 41, 42, 43, 49-50, 174, 178, 190, 226, 241 Desjardins, E. 10 disconnectedness 26 Donald, B. 10, 230 DuPuis, E. 42 ecological democracy 49-50 ecology 5, 9, 21, 50, 58, 153-4, 231, 240 economic democracy 49 economic development 9, 49, 50, 92, 120, 122, 230

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RWPH 233, 236, 238 economic geography 116-17, 119-20, 121 economic growth 22, 124, 128 economic spaces 7, 12, 224, 225, 226, 227, 229, 239, 243 economic systems 6-7, 19-20, 26, 32, 37, 96, 99-100, 120, 230 economic viability 242 economics 51, 66 elegant solutions 179, 183, 184 embeddedness 121, 126, 127 environment 7, 19, 31, 38, 58, 76, 87, 115, 153-4 environmental dimension 72-3, 231 environmental justice 5, 226-7 ethnic stores 93, 94, 116, 124, 125, 127, 194 everyday 38, 127, 185, 236, 238 exclusion 9, 62, 87, 91, 94, 97, 100, 102 Fair Trade 80 FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) 40, 72, 194 farm enterprises 27 farm production 19, 21, 75-6 farm workers 10, 27, 72, 74 conventional farms 77, 78 labour practices 78-9, 80-81 organic farms 75-7, 78 farmers’ markets 10, 18, 76, 82, 102, 136, 160 Invermere 212 Windermere Valley 211 firms 10, 116-18, 120-21, 124-6, 127, 128 flows 26, 105, 121 food 7, 19-20, 223 food access 9, 10, 12, 87-8, 91-2, 95, 96-7, 98, 101-6, 128, 232, 237 Food and Agriculture Organization. see FAO food banks 8, 105, 158, 184-5 food chains 4, 26, 29n4, 51, 55, 56, 59, 60, 88 school food 56, 60-2, 65 food citizens 11, 215-16, 228 food crisis 37, 38, 40-1 food democracy 8, 9, 37, 42, 43

food deserts 10, 87, 88-9, 91, 93, 94-7, 101-5, 106, 127, 128 Canada 101 Harlem New York 10, 97 Los Angeles 10, 98 UK 10, 87, 99-100, 101 food ecology 5, 9, 21, 50, 58, 153-4, 231, 240 food economies 65-6, 96 Toronto 124-7, 128 food geographies 7, 117, 119-20, 121 food miles 7, 27, 61, 157, 161, 232, 240 food policy 5-6, 12, 57-9, 137, 175-7, 196-8, 227 food policy councils (FPC) 11, 25, 173-4, 175-6, 177-80, 183-4, 191, 192, 193, 199, 228 food prices 19, 40-41, 72, 90, 93, 106 food production 9, 72-3, 82, 118 Windermere Valley 201-3, 206-8, 213 food regimes 3-4, 5, 95, 106, 165, 224-7, 241, 242-3 food security 8, 9, 10, 12, 21, 24, 37, 40, 43, 122, 228 Brazil 6 Canada 5, 8, 157, 158, 159, 187 FPC 173-4, 175, 177, 191 LFP 11 UK 5-6 Windermere Valley 201, 202, 203, 210-11 food sovereignty 37, 43, 227, 228 food systems 3, 7, 8, 37, 41-2, 50-51, 224, 225, 226 planning 10, 27, 66, 115-16, 117, 118-19, 122, 127-8 research 28-32 food systems planning 10, 27, 66, 115-16, 117, 118-19, 122, 127-8 FoodShare 158-9, 160, 168, 169, 170, 187 FPC. see food policy councils France 30, 51-2, 60 Friedmann, H. 3, 4, 5, 11, 31-2, 229 Gereffi, G. 120, 127 Gershon reviews 52-4, 62, 63-4 Gibson, R. 25, 231 Glasgow 10, 100

Index global and fair 66, 226 global food system 5, 9, 18, 72, 75, 202, 215 global warming 72-3, 175, 183, 195 Green Cart program 95, 98 green jobs 72, 74, 75-7 green public procurement 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 62, 66 green realm 49-50, 65, 66, 119, 127 green state 49-50 Hall, P. 120, 127 Hammerschlag 78, 79, 80 Harlem New York 10, 95, 97-8 healthy food 7, 65, 87, 96, 98, 101, 102, 3-4, 105, 127-8, 184-5, 229 Hill, S. 184-5 Hinrichs, C. 8, 82, 202, 214, 227, 232, 242-3 hunger 3, 38, 39, 40-41, 42, 88, 118, 122, 198 Toronto 170, 196, 198 inclusion 9, 100, 195 inequalities, global 39 interdisciplinarity 8, 17-18, 28, 30, 31-2, 227, 233 interdisciplinary 7, 27-8, 29-30, 32, 238 Multi-State projects 31 RELU 29n4, 31 Invermere 201-2, 205, 207, 210, 212, 215 Invermere Experimental Farm 205 issue management 185-7 Italy 60, 61 Kloppenberg, J. 7, 214, 226 knowledge, sustainability 24-5 Koc, M. 9, 242 labour practices 10, 74, 77-9, 80-81 ladders 161-6, 228, 239 Lang, T. 42, 104, 197 Levitte, Y. 9-10, 230 LFP (Local Food Plus) 11, 152, 158, 161, 162-4, 166, 167, 168, 170, 182, 243 liberal democracy 49-50 life cycle assessment 26 linktanking 11-12, 181-82 local and green 66, 226

249

local farmers 7, 9, 59, 118, 136-7 RWPH 234, 239-40 TFPC 159, 184, 191, 192, 193 Windermere Valley 207-8, 214, 216 local food 7, 27, 60-2, 135-7, 151, 192-4, 195, 214-16 RWPH 234, 235 Toronto 157-8 Windermere Valley 201-3, 211-13 Local Food Plus. see LFP local trap 27 Los Angeles 87, 91, 96, 98-9, 122, 123, 229 food deserts 10, 104 Lyson, T. 7, 42, 203, 215 MacRae, R. 158, 161, 162, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 184, 185, 195-6 Mapleton's Organic Dairy 11, 135, 142, 142, 143, 145, 145-7 market failure 9, 39, 96, 176 Marsden, T. 18, 229 McMichael, P. 3, 19 moral economy 51 Morgan, K. 6, 9, 18, 82, 127, 226, 227 multi-disciplinarity 28 Multi-State projects, USDA 31 Murdoch, J. 18, 82 New York 103, 122, 123, 229 Green Cart program 95, 98 Harlem 10, 95, 97-8 ONFC (Ontario Natural Food Co-op) 11, 135, 137-41, 138, 142, 146 Ontario Natural Brand 139-40, 141 Opportunities Waterloo Region. see OWR organic farming 10, 74, 76-7, 78, 82-3, 163-4, 236, 239 organic food 18, 71-2, 73, 125, 160-61. see also Mapleton's Organic Dairy; ONFC Organic Meadow brand 142, 144 organizational capacity 9, 49, 50, 65, 128, 238 OWR (Opportunities Waterloo Region) 234, 235, 238-9

250


packaging 141-2, 146-7 partnerships, interdisciplinary 29-32 Pathmark Stores Inc. 95, 97-8 Plan of Action (World Food Summit) 40 planning 23, 62, 66, 95, 96, 118, 119-20, 2, 127-8 field of 27, 115, 116 policy 5-6, 12, 57-9, 137, 175-7, 196-8, 227 politics 8, 21, 23, 24, 25, 32 poverty 3, 9, 21, 22, 38, 40 food deserts 91, 95, 96-7 OWR 234 USA 77, 101, 122 power 8, 24, 25, 32 practice 8, 21, 29-30, 37, 42, 80, 150-1, 168, 170, 229, 239 programs 4, 21, 176 certification 5, 10, 11, 78, 80, 163-4, 182, 230 CSAs 12, 18, 115, 121, 122, 123, 127, 214, 229 Green Cart 95, 98 provenance 51, 56, 60-1, 137 PSFPI (Public Sector Food Procurement Initiative) 55-6, 62 public health 56, 91, 96, 102, 103, 123 RWPH 232, 233, 237-8 TFPC 161, 178, 179-80 public procurement (public plate) 6, 7, 9, 54-6, 60-2, 64-7, 164-5, 230, 239, 242 PSFPI 55-6, 62 school food 56-62 Toronto 128, 158 UK 50, 51-4, 58-9, 62-4, 63 Public Sector Food Procurement Initiative. see PSFPI regenerative food systems 75, 224, 243 Region of Waterloo Public Health. see RWPH RELU (Rural Economy and Land Use) 29-30, 31 Renner, M. 72-3, 75, 76 Roberts, W. 11-12, 161, 169 Rural Economy and Land Use. see RELU rural sociology 19, 26

RWPH (Region of Waterloo Public Health) community market 232-41, 242, 243 scaling up 116-17, 122, 128, 157, 160-1, 167, 169, 195, 228, 239 school food 9 Canada 158-9 UK 51, 55, 56-62, 63, 64-5 Schreck, A. 78, 79, 80 Schreiner, M. 158, 160, 163, 164, 167, 168, 169, 182 Schwind 77, 78 Seacroft, Leeds 100 Short, A. 94, 102 Simms report 63-4 skills 50, 52, 63, 64, 65 Slow Food 4-5, 80-81 small-scale food retail 10, 92-4, 97-8, 99, 100, 102, 103 social justice 5, 7, 9, 27, 49, 160, 226, 227 socio-communal spaces 12, 224, 225, 226, 227, 238 Soskice, D. 120, 127 St. Jacques, H. 10-11, 227, 230 Stahlbrand, L. 158, 161-3, 166, 167, 168, 169, 182 Strochlic, R. 78, 79, 80 SunOpta Inc. 117, 125, 127 supermarkets 89-91, 92, 93, 94, 102, 103, 106, 128, 136, 160-61 Harlem New York 95, 97, 98 Los Angeles 99 UK 89, 90, 93, 100 sustain-ability 10, 11, 177, 178, 180, 182, 189 sustainability 8, 9, 18-19, 20-21, 24-6, 32, 37-9, 41-2, 43, 226-7, 243 sustainability tensions 24, 25, 117 sustainability transitions 8, 21, 23, 24 sustainable agriculture 8, 10, 20, 21, 24, 74, 75, 78, 81, 157, 229 LFP 167 TFPC 169, 182 sustainable communities 7, 67, 229 sustainable development 8, 9, 21-2, 23, 49-50, 54, 115, 118, 119, 194, 226 UK 54-5, 58, 65

Index sustainable food systems 17, 18-27, 32, 118-19, 227-32 research 28-32 sustainable livelihoods 8, 21, 22-3 systems 8, 26-7, 223 theoretical frameworks 27-8, 31 tipping point 54, 106, 243 Toronto 10, 116, 157-8, 159-60, 168, 170, 195 food economy 124-7, 128 hunger 170, 196, 198 public procurement 128, 158 Toronto Food Policy Council (TFPC) 10, 11, 159-60, 161, 169, 170, 174, 177-83, 184-8, 196-7 e-mail service 188-91 local food 191-5 trade-offs 8, 25, 27, 32, 231 transnational food retailers 120, 121 Turning the Tables 58-9 UK 5-6, 50, 51-4, 66-7, 93 food deserts 10, 87, 99-100, 101 green public procurement 54-6 organic food 71, 76, 77, 78 public procurement 50, 51-4, 58-9, 62-4, 63 RELU 29-30, 31 school food 51, 55, 56-62, 63, 64-5 supermarkets 89, 90, 93, 100 sustainable development 54-5, 58, 65 urban regeneration 94, 100, 102-3

251

UofT (University of Toronto) 158, 161, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170 urban regeneration 94-5, 100, 102-3, 231 USA 66, 73, 77, 158, 159 community gardens 122 food deserts 10, 97, 98, 101 food systems planning 66, 115 Multi-State projects 31 organic food 71, 76 poverty 77, 101, 122 supermarkets 89, 90, 91 urban regeneration 94, 102, 103 utopia 25-6, 223 Via Campesina 4-5, 227 voluntary food co-operatives (VFCs) 104-5 Walmart 90, 120, 125 Walmart Canada 117, 121, 125, 126, 127 whole life costing 60, 63-4, 65 whole school approach 58 Windermere Valley 201-2, 204-5, 206, 213-14, 216 community gardens 215 food production 206-8, 211 food security 203, 210-11, 214 land use 209-10 local food 211-13 World Food Summits 3, 40, 190 Wrigley, N. 87, 90, 102, 120, 121, 126, 127 Y U Ranch 11, 135, 148-52

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