Category Archives: Centre for Sustainable Food Systems

Food for Health Research Forum

Leave a reply
Share on Facebook+1Share on LinkedInShare on Twitter Share

Join us Thursday, April 9 for the 2015 OMAFRA – University of Guelph Food for Health Research Forum at the Conference Centre, 1 Stone Road, Guelph from 8:30 a.m to 3:30 p.m.

Details include:

Health Promotion in Ontario – The Link Between Food and Chronic Disease

Martha Greenberg, Assistant Deputy Minister, Health Promotion Division, Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care — 9 am

Industry and Consumer Perspectives on Food for Health — 9.30
Crossing the Divide – From Academic Research to Industry Output — 10.45
Healthy Eating for Healthy Aging — 11.15
Food Literacy and Healthy Eating — 1 pm
Building Local Food Capacity to Increase Healthy Eating and Create Social and Economic Benefits — 2.30
Grad Student Poster Prize Announcement and Closing Remarks — 3.30

To attend via webinar or see the agenda…

 

New Free Sustainable Farming Tutorials

Leave a reply
Share on Facebook+1Share on LinkedInShare on Twitter Share

ATTRA is now offering two new additions to the series of sustainable agriculture tutorials available on the National Center for Appropriate Technology’s ATTRA website.

The free, self-guided tutorials are more than just online talks. They contain multiple lessons with ATTRA specialists and other well-known experts in sustainable agriculture. They’re designed so you can delve deeply into the subject while working at your own pace and include calculators, worksheets, resource lists, and other downloadable tools. And as further encouragement, the tutorials include “case study” conversations with successful producers who know what it takes to make a go of farming.

The two new tutorials are geared toward current producers:
Scaling Up for Regional Markets and Pest Management

Read more about the tutorials…

Ugly Fruit breakthrough

Leave a reply
Share on Facebook+1Share on LinkedInShare on Twitter Share

… a Rabble.ca post from Wayne Roberts on food waste and accountability, blemishes and all…

‘Ugly fruit’ finally breaks through to supermarket shelves

March 18, 2015

There’s a lot to learn from Loblaws decision to sell less attractively shaped fruit and vegetables for 30 per cent less than their more stylish counterparts on the other side of the produce runway.

Loblaws is not only the leading supermarket in Canada. It’s also a retailing pioneer that draws on the marketing knowhow of a multi-billion dollar global empire of trend-setting products in parent company Weston’s stable of brands, retailers and processors  — one of which is French Intermarché, who successfully launched the whole trend of selling disfigured food a year ago.

Some of what’s revealed by the sale of what Loblaws now packages as “naturally imperfect” produce is a lot uglier than the bumpy potatoes, apples and carrots that have heretofore suffered exclusion from the food supply.

Read more…

From feudal to neoliberal: a historical look at Quebec’s agriculture and food regimes

Leave a reply
Share on Facebook+1Share on LinkedInShare on Twitter Share

Laurier Centre for Sustainable Food Systems

Brown bag lunch and learn

Speaker:   Dr. Manon Boulianne, Dept. of Anthropology, Université Laval

Date:         Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Time:        11:30 am – 12:30 pm

Where: P3027 – Peters Building, Wilfrid Laurier University
(School of Business and Economics, on the corner of University Ave and Albert St. in Waterloo)

From the 17th to the first half of the 20th century, petty commodity production was the modus operandi of an important part of Quebec’s family farms. During phases of industrial expansion, farm-born and raised young people flew to growing city centers. During economic depressions, new regions of colonization were opened in order to prevent French Canadians from leaving for New England, where they moved to find factory work. Commodification and specialization of farming developed after WW1, and by the middle of the 1960’s, modernization and standardization became the norm.

How do these changes relate to the transformation of the agri-food system, in the province and beyond? These questions will be addressed from a food regime perspective. Emphasis will be placed on how regional dynamics were influenced by the nation-states and corporate actors which have occupied a hegemonic position within different food regimes?

Why New York City and San Francisco are focused on local food manufacturing and distribution

Leave a reply
Share on Facebook+1Share on LinkedInShare on Twitter Share

…from the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City:

Record amounts of snow have depleted Boston-area grocery shelves of many food items in recent weeks. Snow-clogged streets and loading docks have resulted in delayed or erratic deliveries, making it difficult for grocery stores to replenish their stocks. In light of these recent events and the fear of future natural disasters, some cities, such as Boston, are giving increased attention to food as part of their resilience planning. Food resilience is concerned with how a community’s food system would recover from a shock such as a natural disaster. A vulnerable or disrupted food processing and distribution industry directly impacts food resilience and inhibits a community’s ability to return to normal functions.

Read more…

Growing Together

Leave a reply
Share on Facebook+1Share on LinkedInShare on Twitter Share

Ensuring healthy food, viable farms, and a prosperous Buffalo Niagara

After nearly three years of research, community engagement, partnership building and planning by over 5,000 citizens and more than 700 local organizations, One Region Forward released its Regional Plan for Sustainable Development entitled “A New Way to Plan for Buffalo Niagara”.

Growing Together report is a technical document that supports a larger regional sustainability planning effort, labeled locally as One Region Forward. For the first time in the history of the Buffalo-Niagara region, a formal planning process has explicitly addressed our region’s food system. Read more…

 Download the Plan Summary

Ontario’s Regional Food Hub Development

Leave a reply
Share on Facebook+1Share on LinkedInShare on Twitter Share

Co-op Food Hub Discussion in Guelph

Changing the Way We Do Local Food

February 24, 2015
7:00pm – 9:00pm
Chapel, Loyola House, Ignatius Jesuit Centre of Guelph

Public Forum, Panel Discussion and World Café

Facilitated by Sally Miller, LOFC Network Food Hub Project Manager

Come participate in a robust discussion about how co-operative food hubs are offering Ontario communities viable, democratically driven business options for local food aggregation and distribution. Guests from the Local Organic Food Co-ops Network’s Regional Food Hub Expansion project will share their experiences before the audience has a chance to participate in small table discussions on Financing, Marketing, Governance, and Logistics for Distribution.

Special guests include Peggy Baillie, Eat Local Sudbury, Devorah Belinsky, Ottawa Valley Food Co-op, Kelly Skinner, True North Community Co-op, Jeff Pastorius, On the Move Organics, Alison Blay-Palmer, Wilfrid Laurier University, Jodi Koberinski, Canadian Council on Food Sovereignty and Health, Glenford Jameson & James Patterson, West End Food Co-op, Glenn Valliere & Randy Whitteker, Ontario Natural Food Co-op.

Tickets are $20 at the door, or included with registration at the Dan Kittredge farmer training (Feb. 23 & 24) or at Building the Soils of a Co-operative Food System, our 6th Annual Assembly (Feb. 24-6).

FAO presents plan for eradicating hunger in Latin America and the Caribbean

Leave a reply
Share on Facebook+1Share on LinkedInShare on Twitter Share

FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva presented a new regional Plan for Food Security, Nutrition and Hunger Eradication by 2025 during a summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC)…

The plan… is based on four broad pillars: strategy coordination at the national and regional levels, with a special focus on gender issues; sustainably ensuring access to safe and nutritious foods; widening school feeding programmes with a priority on addressing all forms of malnutrition, from undernutrition to obesity, and; tackling the challenges posed to food security by climate change. Read more…

The Brazil Food Guide: Look at food differently in 2015

Leave a reply
Share on Facebook+1Share on LinkedInShare on Twitter Share

Analysis from Wayne Roberts in Rabble.ca

… Despite the insipid title, Dietary Guideline for the Brazilian Population, this is unquestionably the most down-to-earth yet visionary rethink of food’s role in health promotion since national food guides were introduced during World War II, one of the rare times in history when the physical stamina of munitions workers and soldiers  captured the attention of national governments.

… The preliminary scientific thinking behind Brazil’s guidelines come from a partnership between Carlos Monteiro and Geoffrey Cannon, who published a lengthy series of articles in the magazine World Nutrition culminating in the 2012 publication of a commentary on “ultra-processing” as “the big issue for nutrition, disease, health, well-being.”

The argument there provides the key thread linking the 150 pages of the Brazilian health ministry guidelines, which is a new classification system based on levels of processing, not food groups.  Read more…

Food: Engaging in Action for Sustainable Transformation

Leave a reply
Share on Facebook+1Share on LinkedInShare on Twitter Share

The Laurier Centre for Sustainable Food Systems will host a workshop January 20-22, 2015 in Waterloo, Ontario. The workshop will bring together over 30 researchers to develop a collaborative research agenda over nine different projects in six countries. Funded by the Transformations to Sustainability program of the International Social Sciences Council, this research collaborative—working together as FEAST (Food: Engaging in Action for Sustainable Transformation) will use this workshop to understand the complementary and synergistic potential of their research programs.