FoodShare Serves Up Big Ideas with a Side Salad

Growing sprouts at FoodShare. Photo by Ayngelina Brogan/Torontoist.

In the shadow of the Dufferin Mall and No Frills, FoodShare is planting the seeds of a radical food system. They’ve dug up the lawn of their new location in a public school on Croatia Street to plant rows of vegetables, nourished with compost made from the waste of their busy kitchen. Staff members are cooking meals to be delivered to the homeless and underhoused, and youth in the Focus on Food program (geared to those facing barriers to employment) are cooking to learn life and job skills. On Saturday, the twenty-five-year-old organization hosted an open house, welcoming the public to become a part of their vision for good, healthy food for all.

Amidst the tours, farmers’ market, free lunch, and workshops on gardening, bee-keeping, and community development, there was a driving question: what would it take for everyone to have access to healthy and affordable food? This was the topic of FoodShare’s afternoon panel discussion between five local authors, including Judy Rebick, Debbie Field, Margaret Webb, Wayne Roberts, and Robert Albritton. Their consensus? It will take everyone, including farmers, distributors, and consumers, wresting the food system away from agribusiness and into their own local and autonomous communities.

Judy Rebick, author of Transforming Power, pointed to the success of grassroots movements, like the Slow Food movement and the Landless Workers' Movement in Brazil, that are challenging the corporate food system. She argued that farmers and diverse communities, not just the middle classes, must join in with these growing movements around the world to take control of their food. In order to bridge the gap between farmers and low-income earners, Debbie Field, executive director of FoodShare, advocated for government subsidies, much like those for public transit, for farmers who are sustainably growing food for the local, urban market. Margaret Webb, author of Apples to Oysters: A Food Lovers’ Tour of Canadian Farms, grew up on a family farm that turned into an industrial operation. She has seen the depopulation of farming communities and the collapse of rural economies first hand and advocated for subsidies and support for small and mid-sized farms that use sustainable practices, provide jobs, and stimulate the economy.

FoodShare pushes for such wide-reaching, even national policy changes, but Toronto is the focus of their community programming. This includes community education; nutrition and fresh produce programs for students; and a network of community gardens and farmers' markets in partnership with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, low-income neighbourhoods in North York and Scarborough, and community organizations across the city. Together, these initiatives are building an alternative food system that radically challenges the foundations of our current one. Debbie Field admitted to the audience on Saturday that not all their programs have succeeded, but FoodShare will continue to model a vision for a better, even utopian, food system.