Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (23 page)

As for the Big Crunch and Eat-In Ontario, it's no coincidence that it is being staged on the doorstep of the provincial legislature building. FoodShare is lobbying for provincial and national child and student nutritional programs. FoodShare has launched its Recipe for Change initiative to bring food literacy to schools so that all students can learn how to make healthy food choices, access at least one healthy meal a day at school, and increase their physical fitness through food activities such as gardening, cooking, and composting at school. Canada is one of the few Western nations that does not have a national school nutritional program or national school nutritional policy. Lunches and snacks have always been the responsibility of the student and family. And so, rather ambitiously, the work at FoodShare, said Field, is about “creating capacity” at all three levels and addressing all three crises at the human, individual level, the community level, and “eventually the social level.”

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FoodShare is not the only pioneering community-supported food-security organization in Toronto. In the mid-1970s, The Stop Community Food Centre opened in Toronto's West End as one of Canada's first food banks. Since then, it has evolved into a global pioneer of innovative antipoverty and food-justice programs, drawing visits from the likes of UK chef turned food-education crusader Jamie Oliver.

Like FoodShare, The Stop takes a holistic community-development approach from the point of view that food should be a basic human right and that empowering people to grow food and help one another helps communities build resilience. What would otherwise be termed a soup kitchen in a food bank facility is a bright, welcoming dining room at The Stop, where fresh, local, pesticide-free produce and organic beef is served to clients at the table rather than at the usual cafeteria-style lineup. The drop-in dining area transforms into a classroom for
nutrition education and perinatal programs, as well as other community outreach programs.
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In 2009, The Stop expanded to a second location, called the Green Barn, which became the operational headquarters for its urban-agriculture programs in low-income and other socially disadvantaged communities. It operates three community garden sites in inner-city Toronto that together yield up to 4,000 pounds (1,800 kilograms) of fresh, organic produce a year. Educational workshops encourage peer-to-peer exchanges on how to grow fresh, local, culturally appropriate organic produce. And The Stop facilitates a Yes-In-My-Backyard (YIMBY) garden-sharing program that connects people who want to grow food with those who have the space.

In the summer of 2010, The Stop established its Global Roots demonstration garden at its Green Barn location. The Global Roots
Garden features seven twenty-foot-by-thirteen-foot (six-by-four-meter) plots planted with foods from some of Toronto's most populous ethnic communities: Chinese, South Asian, Somalian, Italian, Latin American, Polish, and Filipino. Elders with often decades of food-growing experience from the various ethnic backgrounds do the teaching and directing, while the youth gardeners do the heavy lifting and digging. Together, these intergenerational teams tend these garden plots, socialize, and even cook together. The food grown is not just a demonstration of what can be grown in Toronto's climate and the diversity of food cultures that make up the city; produce from the gardens go into The Stop's community kitchens and wood-fired community baking ovens, and back into feeding the community.

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While in Toronto, I also met up with Wayne Roberts, another deep-in-the-trenches food-security activist and author.
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Roberts had been agitating in social-justice circles around environmentalism and labor issues for a couple of decades before becoming the manager of the Toronto Food Policy Council from 2000 to 2010. Recently retired, he seemed busier than ever, writing widely on food-policy issues and serving on several boards, such as FoodShare, Community Food Security Coalition, and Food Secure Canada. His consulting and speaking work was increasingly taking him beyond Toronto and even Canada to consult on community food-security issues. Life after work seemed to be a busy next step for Roberts.

Roberts wanted to show me what he thought the future of Toronto might look like, and how that future was already taking shape in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. Just a few blocks off the major routes of Bathurst and Dundas Streets, we were in a multiethnic neighborhood with one of the lowest average household incomes in the city but that was also dotted with food gardens. We stopped briefly at the
Alexandra Park Diversity Garden, tucked away along the flank of an open stretch of a municipal park. It was just minutes from Scadding Court Community Centre, which, on the surface, looked like a typical community center building built in the late 1970s. A community garden overflowing with bush beans, broccoli, Swiss chard, sunflowers, kale, squash, marigolds, and the like was where the lawn next to the main entrance would otherwise have been.

Roberts was overflowing with enthusiasm for the various urban-agriculture initiatives facilitated through Scadding Court Community Centre. He walked me through the various community gardens, the community compost education center, a community café that serves low-cost, healthy meals and provides job training for youths, and gushed about the food-literacy programs for kids. For a week every June, the community pool in Scadding Court Community Centre is converted to a trout pond, stocked with live fish for the Gone Fishin’ program. Children learn to fish and even take home their catch of rainbow trout, for a minimal fee.

Scadding Court Community Centre most recently established a street market along Dundas Street. A line of modified shipping containers have been refurbished into street market stalls, similar to what many of the residents of the neighborhood are familiar with from their countries of origin. This market, which includes food stalls, provides a lively street scene, especially in the evenings, and a small-business incubator for residents of the community.

Within a very short time and on foot, Roberts had taken me to see several community gardens as well as the Scadding Court Community Centre, with all its various community-based agriculture programs. This is what Roberts wanted me to see, what he hoped the future could hold for more neighborhoods in Toronto, especially those struggling with crime and social problems.

“Busy places, where there are lots of eyes,” said Roberts, “is a safe place for a community.” Urban agriculture isn't really about food, in Roberts's opinion; it's about building vibrant, safe communities with positive options, as opposed to the negative ones usually associated with inner-city life in North America. Roberts sees Scadding Court as a particularly positive place for inner-city youth in Toronto.

“I always say, ‘Don't ask me if at fifty dollars a square foot, can you justify an urban-agriculture program in the city of Toronto. Ask me if at $100,000 a year per juvenile at a detention center, can we not pay for one urban-agriculture program instead?’”

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My friend John H. offered to show me around a community garden in Toronto that he had belonged to, as long as I was discreet about how I photographed it and wrote about it, so as not to give away its location.
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The funny thing was, it was plainly visible behind a see-through metal mesh fence on a residential street surrounded by both low-rise and high-rise apartments. The only thing different about this community garden was that there was no usual sign with the garden's name, no poster of garden rules, and no contact information. And as far as the city was concerned, this garden didn't exist.

The space on a former industrial site leased from the city had been
proposed as a community garden for men who lived in a nearby shelter, but the garden never really took off. With the infrastructure already there, gardeners from the neighborhood began to use the space anyway to grow food. They self-organized and now maintain the dozens of raised beds and plots on a piece of inner-city land that they technically don't have permission to garden on. As long as the city continued to be unaware of the garden or turned a blind eye to it, no one but the gardeners would know that it was not technically supposed to exist. Besides, it looked and felt like any other community garden to a passerby or casual observer.

The humidity off Lake Ontario was thick, even in the late fall. There were striped snails hanging from plants, prickly-pear cactus to watch out for, and a confusion of plants, pea fencing, rain barrels, and haphazard footpaths between overgrown plots. We had to scramble over places where weeds had overtaken a pathway or where rusty wheelbarrows were abandoned. On closer inspection, though, the gardens were still producing giant fountains of Swiss chard, broccoli, long green beans, herbs, eggplant, and exotics that were strange and unidentifiable to both John and me. I relished my moment in this garden that was hiding in plain sight of newly built condo towers encroaching on the decaying old red-brick factory buildings and warehouses of the area's previous lifetime.

One area of urban agriculture where Canada is strangely lagging behind the curve is in its bylaws for keeping urban chickens. The anonymous blogger behind the website Backyard Chickens in Toronto (
http://www.torontochickens.com
), known as “TC,” lists eighty-six municipalities in the United States that allow city residents to keep chickens for eggs (with varying restrictions), compared to Canada's six.
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But scratch around in just about any city in the United States or Canada, and, regardless of whether it's legal to keep chickens,
it's pretty easy to find backyards with small coops and a small brood pecking around. In 2009,
Raising Chickens for Dummies
was added to the wildly popular “For Dummies” book series, and urban chicken-keeping supply shops have been popping up in Portland, Oregon, and London in the United Kingdom. Hardware stores are starting to carry chicken supplies, and there are even underground mobile urban slaughterhouses that operate—very discreetly—in a handful of cities for clients who wish to put their aging hens in the stewpot when a hen's prime egg-laying days are done.