Inaugural Issue: Winter 2011

foodshedlooking at T.O. through a food lens

DUMPSTER FEASTA local group shows how one person’s trash is another’s dinner

URBAN APIARIESBeekeeping is on the rise — what’s behind the trend?

BRAIN FooDSchools introduce policy on healthy snacks

Winter 2011foodshedmagazine.ca

Read these stories and more at:

foodshedmagazine.ca

Top Left: Nathan Isberg looks onto his jar of crickets. They are not his pets. Instead, he raises them to use in a dish he serves at his restaurant. Eating insects, although generally viewed as taboo in the West, has both nutri-tional and enviornmental benifits.

Bottom Left: A movement to rekindle our relationship with food and its source has been gaining momentum. Sarah Elton, Toronto food journalist and author of Locavore, says the increased interest is a reaction to the cheap and bad food that is readily available.

Right: The Bendale Market Garden inScarborough is believed to the first school-based market garden in the country. Ian Hepburn-Aley (front) from a local food organization, FoodShare, helps students learn agricultural skills.

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From the Editorial DeskFoodshed proudly presents its inagural issue

Edible LandscapesGleaning from the city’s edible network of trees

City BeesBeekeeping is on the rise in Toronto

Small Businesses, Big CityBeing a food enterpeurner in T.O.’s diverse market

The Human RaccoonsOne person’s trash is another person’s dinner

United Through FoodFarmers markets as social spaces

Gastronomical MapCharting Toronto’s food facts

Bursting at the SeamsThe green bin program is a little too successful

Feeding the HungryWhat started as a band-aid solution is now a main-stay. Are food banks doing more harm than good?

Urban GardeningA quick guide to growing food in the city

Fugitive FowlA growing movement is trying to bring hens back to the city

Sowing DiversityHow one seed can grow hundeds of varieties of vegetables

Eating ABCsA school food policy to improve student nutrition

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Food is rooted in a sense oF place. We’re connected to what we eat — where it comes from and how we access it. The path food takes to get to our tables, and eventually our stomachs, can be understood as a foodshed. Living in large city like Toronto can leave us disconnected from this process, but when you follow food’s journey from field to table, you begin to see how intercon-nected our eating habits are with the way our city is built. Toronto’s foodshed is a complex one, spanning the entire globe. Yet our city has the potential to source a lot of the food it consumes locally, considering that Toronto is built on some of the most fertile land in the country.

There’s a movement growing to rekindle our connection to food — people are raising chickens in their backyards, bringing farmers markets to their communities, and starting apiaries. At the same time, policy makers are recognizing this desire for the local by creating policies that reflect it.

Toronto has traditionally been at the forefront in developing solutions to food inequality, creat-ing a food policy council in 1991. The city released a report in June 2010 on their first food strat-egy that aims to address issues of food access and urban malnutrition by integrating food security into all city departments. With a new city council, there is potential to reinvigorate the debate on how to design the city through the lens of food.

foodshedlooking at T.O. through a food lens

Tomatoesat the Bendale Market Garden,Scarborough.

From the editorial desk...

Foodshed Magazine looks at the relationship between food and our city — how growing,accessing and consuming food shapes the design of Toronto, as well as how the existing urban landscape influences what we eat.

Masthead

Amanda Kwan

Alina Smirnova

Alice Hoang

Emily Hunter

Saeda Raghe

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GROWINGgleaning

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pollinationcompost

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WEEDShealth

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ging

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PROCESSING PLANTS

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FOODTOURISM

Faculty supervisor

Ellin Bessner

Visit our website at foodshedmagazine.ca to read stories and view our multimedia content. You can also follow us on the following social media sites:

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edible landscapes Urban foraging can change the way we see our city and our relationship with food

The tree rustles as three metal claws tug at its edible bounty. One apple drops to the ground. A man stand-ing under the tree picks up the fruit

and places it in a bag. “That’s the fallen fruit. We don’t give those away to organizations,” says Chris Sharp, the Riverdale hub coordina-tor for Not Far From the Tree, a residential fruit-harvesting program in Toronto.

The tree they are gleaning from is in the backyard of a house two blocks south of Greenwood subway station. The canopy of apples towers above the volunteers. With only one ladder for five gleaners, one volun-teer climbs on top of a patio table. Raising the fruit-grabbing contraption toward a branch, she snags the fruit and watches it drop into the small bag attached to the end of the pole. Once they’re finished harvesting, they will divide the apples three ways between the vol-unteers, the tree-owner and a local food bank or social service.

Toronto’s network of edible trees is of-ten invisible to most residents. But as cities question their ability to provide food for its citizens in a sustainable manner, urban fruit foraging can offer a way for people to increase their food security and reconnect with their food. “A lot of people are becoming more aware of issues around food and where their food comes from, and want to find local food,” Sharp says. “And you can’t get much more lo-cal than a tree in your own neighbourhood.”

Story & photos byAmanda Kwan

WINTER 2011 | 5

Yet the idea of eating fruit grown in our cit-ies often elicits concerns about whether the food is safe to eat. It’s a contradiction in the way we think about our food: we fear local pro-duce, yet accept imported ones, says Laurel At-kinson, program coordinator for Not Far From the Tree, which began in 2008. “I trust fruit growing pesticide-free in my own backyard rather than picking an apple from the store and wondering what it’s been sprayed with, how long it’s been travelling in a truck surrounded by fumes.”

GleaninG can chanGe the way people view food accessibility in Toronto because they start seeing the possibilities of growing their own food in the city, Atkinson says. “There’s still a big divide. People say backyard gardens are just small, it doesn’t really count. But when people see a tree and come on a pick and see that we’ve picked 300 pounds of fruit from one tree, you start to understand how one lit-tle piece of land can actually do all of this and more.”

Projects like The Edible Tree Tour led by LEAF highlight the existing potential of Toron-

to’s edible canopies. LEAF (The Local Enhance-ment and Appreciation of Forests), a local or-ganization dedicated to protecting Toronto’s urban forests, began the tours in 2007, which have been gaining in popularity, said Sahar Ghafouri-Bakhsh, Community Outreach intern at LEAF. “People weren’t aware of how ed-ible the trees in their neighourhood were,” she said. “A lot of people have these trees in their yard but they never looked at them as a food source.” Some of the trees they feature on the tour include: Gingko tree, Sugar Maple, Ameri-can Elm, Russian Olive, and Japanese Maple.

There is no bylaw in Toronto banning people from gleaning fruit growing on public lands but the legal ambiguity makes it harder for public harvesters to justify their actions when ques-tioned by the city. In November, then-mayor David Miller signed an official decree that would allow people to harvest fruit from public parks.

Ben noBleman community Orchard is the first one of its kind in the city. Located across from Eglinton West Station, the project brought a flurry of protest when it was first

proposed almost two years ago. Detractors said the fruit would attract wasps, provide weapons for children, and even stain their clothing. The opposition illustrates how alienated people are from their local food system, says Susan Poizner, a Growing For Green volunteer who spearheaded the project. “A lot of the people who were protesting were from a generation that took food for granted. My parents’ gen-eration remembers what it’s like to be hungry.” But for the generation that followed, food was plentiful. And it’s a privilege we may not be able to keep forever as the economy and environ-ment changes, she says.

Growing for Green planted the first set of trees in June 2009. Today, there are nine trees growing in the orchard (three sets of pears, plums and sweet cherries) and the feedback has been positive, Poizner says. Even some residents who were initially concerned now support the project. “We are developing a rela-tionship with the trees,” she said. “The way we are nurturing these trees, they’re our babies. When they do give us fruit, I think we’ll re-ally cherish them. We won’t look and say, ‘Oh, there’s a spot on it.’”

not Far From the tree is in the process of creating a public fruit-tree map of Toronto, with information about the type of fruit the tree bears, when it’s ready to be picked, and whether or not you need to bring a ladder. Atkinson says that until now, they haven’t fo-cused on fruit trees on public property because they figured anyone could get access to it. “But we still often get calls and emails saying there’s a pear tree in this parkette or there’s an apple tree here just going to waste,” she says.

The group plans to overlay this data with other information, like the location of the clos-est food bank where people can drop off the ex-tra fruit they’ve gleaned. Another component they want to add is the ability for gleaners to post stories about their harvesting trips. This feature is important, Atkinson says, because it helps connect people, and it inspires them to take part in the local food system. “Seeing a map is one thing but I think it’s just a vehicle to get you on the ground.”

After an hour and a half of gleaning, the vol-unteers — necks and arms aching — decide to stop. Sharp weighs each bag. The total comes to just over 50 kg. The volunteers discuss the fate of the gleaned fruit: chutneys, preserves, or maybe fruit leather. As they help Sharp load the fruits onto the cart, they look up at the tree. The top of the canopy is still dotted with apples.


1) Chris Sharp weighs the bounty. 2) Volunteer Lynn Kamazaki retrieves an apple from the pouch. 3) For fruit too far to reach by hand, gleaners use a pole with a metal claw and bag attached at one end. 4) Volunteer Eva Bencze loads apples onto the cart, which is used to transport the fruit.

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SkyScraperS dwarf ruShing people, idling taxis, lounging pigeons and a couple of hot dog stands — a familiar scene at Union Station. But 14 floors above, the atmosphere is entirely different. Across the street from the station, the rooftop terrace of the Fairmont Royal York hotel is dotted with containers of growing vegetables and herbs. And in the corner, a hub of buzzing activity: six beehives that house up to 300,000 bees. They may not seem to belong to this urban space, but they do.

“Bees thrive in cities,” says David Garcelon, the executive chef at the hotel, which opened their fist hives two years ago. “There are a lot of parks, people have a lot of flowers, and there’s not a lot of competition.”

Toronto is seeing an increase in homes for these unlikely residents. Just in 2010, the Four Sea-sons Centre for Performing Arts, the University of Toronto’s Trinity College and Downsview Park all added hives to their properties. Together with the existing hives at the Evergreen Brick Works, the Fairmount hotel, Casa Loma, on Toronto Island, and other locations at U of T — there are over 30 hives. But professional bee farmer André Flys says if unregistered ones are taken into account, the number is probably in the hundreds.

City BeesUrban apiaries on the rise

WINTER 2011 | 7

Story & photos by Alina Smirnova

What compels someone to take up beekeep-ing in the city? Even to go as far as breaking the Ontario Bees Act that requires beekeepers to register their hives and keep them at least 30 metres of a property line?

One obvious allure is honey. The Royal York hotel has harvested almost 200 kilograms of honey in 2010, which it uses in its restaurants. Honey is not a highly regulated product and someone selling it would be subject to the same vending regulations as a regular kitchen, Flys says. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has barred imported honey before because of high level of pesticides found in it, but here, most people just produce it and sell it, he says.

Honey’s taste is influenced by the kinds of flowers bees harvested pollen from, so Toronto’s honey bees will reflect the city’s floral diversity in their product. This year’s yield at the Royal York hotel has hints of tropical fruits, whereas last year’s tasted more herbal, Garcelon says.

But Bees are also simply fascinating and offer much to learn, says Jacob Kearey-More-land, a U of T student involved with the hives on the roof of Trinity College. For example, bees build symmetrical combs, communicate through dance moves and play an important role in food production. “We have a symbiotic connection with bees in a sense that we genu-inely depend on them,” Kearey-Moreland says.

Bees are essential for pollinating crops. This enables them to reproduce, making them an im-portant part of agriculture. Because crops pol-linated by bees can produce up to eight times

more fruit, bees contribute up to $1.7 billion per year of value to growers, according to the Ca-nadian Honey Coun-cil. Since their tasks are so valuable to agriculture, growers pay beekeepers well to ship their bees to them during polli-nation periods, Flys says. They can go as far as California.

But Bees and oth-er pollinators are dwindling in num-bers. Several factors are suspected: disease, pollution, climate change, environmental deg-radation and pesticides. Flys says he believes the latter play a major role; some pesticides are just too effective and do not differentiate be-tween pests and useful insects.

The awareness of these facts and the im-pact of bee decline are reasons Garcelon, Flys and Kearey-Moreland all cite for the increased interest in urban beekeeping in Toronto. “The fact that [bees] are disappearing at an alarm-ing rate should be cause for worry for all of us, considering that we all depend on food and by extension bees,” Kearey-Moreland says. Their role can be seen as linked with environmental movements, which are also on the rise. “There’s

this holistic process and bees are just another part of that puzzle,” he says.

Currently, pollination isn’t a huge issue in Toronto, Flys says. Toronto’s urban agriculture does include community gardens, and balcony and backyard gardens, as well as some farms at the boundaries of the city. But if the city does want to scale up its food production beyond this, bees would be of great help, he says.

Expanding urban agriculture and looking after a small bee city can also bring people to-gether in the big urban area like Toronto. “It gets a lot of communities together — they work together to produce food and it binds the people to get to know one another and their neighbours,” Flys says.


There’s this holisticprocess and bees are just another part of that puzzle-- Jacob Kearey-Moreland

Six beehives on the 14th floor roof of Fairmont Royal York house up to 300,000 bees and produced 200 kilograms of honey in 2010.

Bees & Agriculture Industry(With info from the Canadian Honey Council)>> Bees are pollinators — as are butterflies and bats — making them important to growing food crops>> Crops that have been pollinated are up to 8 times more productive>> Because of this, the value bees’ pollination to food production in Canada is about at $2 billion per year>> There are about 7,000 beekeepers in the country and 300,000 colonies of bees>> Canada produces 75 million pounds of honey a year, exporting half of it, with most to the United States

Susan Ho always wanted to be part of the food industry, even though she isn’t exactly where she envisioned when she began. Ho is the owner of

Tea Aura Inc., which currently manufactures five tea infused flavours of shortbread biscuits: matcha green tea, chocolate mint, rooibos chai, early grey and lavender currant.

Ho, a food and nutritional management graduate from Centennial College, initially wanted to open a teashop and develop products for her store. “I did a business plan and realized that doing a teashop would encompass too high of an overhead to start up,” she said.She scaled back the business to something that wouldn’t cost her as much money, devel-oping tea-related food prod-ucts. After graduating from the federal gov-ernment’s Self Employ-ment Benefits Program, she joined the Toronto Food Business Incubator (TFBI) to produce her prod-ucts in their test kitchen.

TFBI, LocaTed In the west end of the city, started three years ago as a non-profit group. Connected with the eco-nomic development department of the City of Toronto, it helps com-panies get started in the food-manu-facturing sector. It provides business advice and shared equipment for food manufacturing with flexible leases.

It currently focuses on clients who are de-veloping products to be sold to retailers and wholesalers — not restaurants or special kitch-

ens, said TFBI manager Albert Peres. The focus on manufacturing is important because of To-ronto’s large food manufacturing cluster, Peres said. “It’s unknown to everyone [because] you don’t hear about it,” he said. “But in fact, To-ronto is the centre of many food producers. ”

ToronTo’s Food IndusTry employs 40,000 people and generates $20 billion in sales revenue, according to a city study. Food exports to the United States have tripled in the last 10 years and Toronto has the second largest food manufactur-ing cluster in

N o r t h A m e r i c a .

There are 400 food manufacturing companies in Toronto

and 1,600 in the GTA. “Toronto is an absolutely brilliant [food]

market to enter,” Peres said. “Torontonians eat everything and they like to experiment. You know that if you start a business here there will be a market for it.”

The TFBI was Phase one of three to create

International Food Processing and Innovation Centre (IFPIC) in Toronto and it has been suc-cessful, said Michael Wolfson, food and bever-age cluster specialist for the City of Toronto. The TFBI is currently working with 12 clients, graduated three clients and has a waiting list of 10 to 12 companies. “The need, demand and value of the incubator has more then been proven,” Wolfson said.

The city was planning a second phase to ex-pand the TFBI to include five

accelerator units but it fell through due to lack of fund-

ing. “Governments are there to help seed projects, but

they are not there to be bottomless pits of dollars. Unless you

can figure out how to make something self- sus-

tainable it isn’t going to suc-ceed in the long run,” he said.

Wolfson said manufacturing food in Toronto has economical, environmental

and safety benefits; couple that with our abil-ity to produce and an intelligent workforce, and a lot of new clients are looking at the Toronto food manufacturing industry.

From an environmental viewpoint, “as fuel becomes more expensive people will look to-wards local food production and processing to meet their needs,” Wolfson said.

aLL Tea aura Inc. production is currently run out of the TFBI shared kitchen three days a week, but Ho said they are getting too big for the TFBI’s facilities. She hopes to expand her business with other tea-infused products in up-coming years.

small businesses,big city

Toronto’s large food market is perfect for launching a product

WINTER 2011 | 9

Story & graphic by Saeda Raghe

The Human RaccoonsIn the underground world of dumpster diving, activists salvage food to feed the city’s hungry. But is it worth the risks? Story & photos by Emily Hunter

Out of plain sight, a small group of Toronto activists trailed back alley routes in the Annex until they hit their target — a dumpster. At 10 p.m., the small group of men and women in their 20s sifted through garbage bags, empty wooden crates

and cut-up cardboard boxes, like human raccoons. Flashlights beamed through the smelly pits, as pairs of legs dangled out. It was the urban version of finding some buried treasure. The haul included peppers of every colour in perfect form, a slightly browned bunch of bananas, an overly ripened squash, scrumptious look-ing eggplant and even a chocolate bar in its original wrapping. By the end, it was a bountiful harvest of mostly fruits and veggies — all from the inside of a grocery store garbage bin. This was a typical Friday night dumpster dive for the activists of Food Not Bombs (FNB) Toronto. The group is only a year old and has a core team of eight who “dive” every two weeks. Searching through the trash of a downtown grocery store, the group claims that perfectly edible and

safe food is being wasted — food that could help feed the hungry in the city. “What we found here tonight was just a small, little haul from some small, little market grocers; throughout the city there are truckloads of food we could use every day,” says Jay Wydra, 38, one of the divers. Food Not Bombs Toronto is part of a global underground movement that feeds the food insecure, such as homeless and low-income people. The FNB movement started nearly 30 years ago as an anti-war group in the United States, but has expanded to feeding the hungry using food waste in over 1,000 cities around the world. In Canada, there are over 30 FNB chapters and plenty of food waste to be reclaimed. As of 2007, nearly 40 per cent of food produced is never eaten, but thrown into the trash, according to Statistics Canada. In Toronto, two-thirds of the city’s food waste comes from manufacturers, grocery store chains and restaurants, city officials say. “We find exorbitant amounts of wasted food, enough to feed 60 people every time” said Sammy Knight (pseudonym), a FNB member.


A local group cooks and serves food they found in a dumpster the night before.

While FNB targets small-scale grocery store dumpsters, larger grocery stores and food busi-nesses waste even more. “Grocery stores throw out over $10,000 worth of food every month,” says a former employee at Highland Farms, Charles Hitchings (pseudonym).

The reasons grocery stores trash the food are multiple: overstocking, items nearing the end of their shelf life, damaged packaging and even just incorrect labeling. But for the FNB activ-ists, those aren’t good enough reasons to not use the food to feed the hungry. “Food isn’t necessarily thrown out because its gone bad —it has more to do with how wasteful our society is,” said FNB member Alex Charlton (pseud-onym). “Instead of just wasting all this food, that waste can be given to someone else.”

With over 50 per cent of the working poor in Toronto unable to purchase food and over 30,000 homeless, according to the city, these young activists have taken it upon themselves to feed some of the hungry from trash.

That Friday night, as the group scanned over their recovered items, another activist arrived with a shopping cart welded to his bike. He is one of the eight core divers and the group cheered as he arrived. They quickly filled his shopping cart to the brim with apples, cucum-bers, even guava and the collection of edibles they’d procured that night. Then, the cyclist took off into the night to begin preparing the food for the next day.

Perhaps it was a quick retreat for fear of get-ting caught. The group’s activities are illegal after all, as they trespass on private property, steal from private dumpsters and serve food without a permit. But the group says none of this matters since morals trump law.

Not everyone agrees, however. Diving for food has legal ramifications that implicate the small business grocer, said Taslim Jamal, own-er of Wholesome Market, a small grocery store. Her store’s dumpster was never targeted by divers but she said there are a lot of regulations surrounding food. “If people were to take food from a dumpster, the grocery store itself could still be liable if people got sick from that food, even if someone stole it,” Jamal said.

Toronto Public Health says the health risks associated with dumpster diving outweigh the benefits. “There’s no guarantees with what’s put in a dumpster, of what’s healthy and what’s not, it all gets mixed in,” said Wolf Saxler, man-ager of food safety, remarking that rodents, in-sects and worms fester in dumpsters.

Charlton says the city is demonizing the group. He argues that FNB takes special pre-cautions for the safety of the food they pro-cure. For example, the group targets fruit and vegetable markets and only collects raw foods, he said.

But food out of a dumpster is still food out of a dumpster, says Aileen Shannon, program director for Saint Stephens Community House, a homeless shelter. Beyond health issues, it is also degrading, she says. “I think this is absurd and frankly it’s demeaning to feed homeless people from a dumpster,” Shannon said.

Charlton disagrees. He says food out of dumpster is good enough for anyone to eat. “I myself eat out of a dumpster and I’m not home-less,” he said. “We ourselves eat the food and feed it to anyone who might want it.”

However, critics point out that there are alternatives to dump-ster diving. The organization Second Harvest makes legal arrangements with

large grocery chains, manufacturers

and res-

t a u -rants to collect food for the hungry before it hits the dumpster. “The food we collect turns into 16,000 meals a day in the city,” says Ste-

phen Faul, executive director of Second Har-vest. “A lot of this food would otherwise be put to landfills.”

Second Harvest feeds nearly 250 social ser-vice agencies, including shelters for the home-less, refugees, women who face abuse, and children’s aid programs. Last year, the group collected 6.4 million pounds of food, twice as much as eight years ago. “This is only the tip of the iceberg of what’s out there,” laments Blayne Walker, an employee of Second Harvest.

Which is why for the FNB activists, as long as food waste still exists, they will continue to dumpster dive — despite the criticism they face.

The following Sunday, the dumpster food — after being cleaned, chopped and cooked — was served to homeless people in Christie Pits Park [location name changed]. A small but steady line of people surrounded the food, as the activists doled out their culinary creations from pots and pans — either wrapping the food in tinfoil for later or serving it on a plate to eat right then and there.

There was a rice and veggie stir-fry, some warm and toasty bread, pumpkin lasagna, fruit salad and banana bread just to name a few of the dishes offered. Feeding over 40 people that day, the dumpster dive was considered a vic-tory by the FNB activists.

Maybe the victory was only realized when one man being served said, “This will feed me all night.” For that’s what it was all about from the first pick of the trash.

Food isn’t necessarily thrown out because its gone bad. It has more to do with how wasteful our society is-- Alex Charlton

WINTER 2011 | 11

United through foodFarmers markets are growing in numbers and

popularity, serving as social venues that offer local, high-quality produce

Story & photos by Alice Hoang

The market grounds were bustling with people. Families sat at picnic tables or on hay stacks eating French fries in carton cones, while children

had their faces painted and planted vegetables in the outdoor garden. Aromas of apple cider, roasted corn, and sausages filled the air while acoustic guitar players entertained the crowd with Spanish melodies.

In September, nearly 2,000 people came out to the grand opening of Evergreen Brick Works — an environmental centre — for its re-pur-posed buildings and new programs.

Its farmers market is just one of many that have recently opened in the city. According to Farmers’ Markets Ontario, there are 154 farmers markets in the province, with over 15 million visits in 2008. Fourteen new farmers markets were organized in 2009 and another dozen were slated to open by the end of 2010. And just in Toronto, the number of markets doubled in the past few years, says Evergreen Brick Works spokesman Nate Habermeyer.

One appeal of farmers markets is the quality of the food, says Arlene Larosa, Distillery His-toric District Farmers’ Market organizer. “The produce is grown by the farmer and picked usu-ally the morning of the market, ensuring that they are getting the freshest possible produce from farm to table,” Larosa says. “The grocery stores get it in and it sits [until] it sells or has to be sent back to the supplier.”

But shopping at a market is not convenient for everyone. Marg Bass, a customer at No Frills on Lawrence Avenue, says she would go to farmers markets more often if they were more accessible; most are held once a week and close by 2 p.m. “They’re only for stay-at-home moms,” Bass says. “But I have organic produce delivered to my home. And I just buy corn from this guy around the corner of my house on Kingston [Road].”


Volunteers lay out McIntosh apples at Evergreen Brick Works’ grand opening in September, 2010.

farmers markets don’t provide the convenience and immediacy that grocery stores do, but customers say they offer a country-like feel to urban consumers. Unlike grocery stores, farmers markets go beyond the sole purpose of buying and selling, as public spaces are turned into hubs with intimate environments, pro-moting civic engagement.

For example, Evergreen Brick Works was a destination for friends and family to spend quality time together around high-quality food. Steve McCarrey, who was with his wife and children at Evergreen Brick Works, says his day at the grand opening was a fun outing.

He says he enjoyed spending time with his family and had the chance to bring his kids to the farmers market, as they’re in school when he goes on weekdays. “There’s one that’s close by where I work near Metro Hall downtown, so it’s convenient — I can go there during my lunch hour,” McCarrey says. “I think that it’s better quality, it’s locally grown in the province, and you can talk with the farmers.”

As the celebration held activities, he says his kids’ favourite part of the day was rock climb-ing and going up the hills by the hiking trail.

PeoPle also go to the markets to support local farmers and to have intimate one-on-one time with them.

Carmen Clauser, a vendor who sells during the summer at Guildwood Village Farmers’ Market on Livingston Road, says she develops relationships with her customers as she tells them how to grow certain vegetables and they would share recipes. She says she gives them basic tips, as the most common questions peo-ple ask her are: “What is it?” and “How do you eat it?”

“For example, beans — there are different ways of making beans,” Clauser says. “But first I tell them the simplest way to eat it, so they can appreciate the flavour. And then I tell them how you can add it to a soup or a casserole.”

She says the customers who buy from her are committed and trust her. “There is a faith-ful following of people who are aware that they can get fresh stuff, local stuff, in the winter and in the summer,” Clauser says. “They trust me. They trust that what I say I bring is what it is.”

At the Guildwood Village market — which extended its hours to 6:30 p.m. to accom-modate people’s work schedules — farmers packed away their produce and loaded boxes onto trucks as sellers offered good deals to cus-tomers. After taking off her black apron, Claus-

er picked up a basket full of mini pumpkins and handed them out to children.

Clauser also takes part in The Stop’s year-round farmers market and says winter markets have a lovely atmosphere as there’s a mixture of artisans, farmers, crafters and bakers.

the farmers market at the Everegreen Brick Works was coloured with an array of green, red, orange and yellow as fresh produce was the centre of attention in the pavilions. But while there were melons, tomatoes and pump-kins, people also indulged in sweet treats like sheep milk, ice cream and hand-made Belgian waffles made from natural local ingredients.

The organization reaches out to all commu-nities across the GTA, Habermeyer says. “We’re open and inclusive, so you see a lot of families around the Evergreen Brick Works,” he says. “But you also see some folks from the east end of the city and the west side, so it’s a real mix.”

Vendors have increased since the Brick Works Farmers’ Market opened in 2006, tri-pling in the second year from 10 to 30, Haber-meyer says. The market has also become more sustainable as more farmers are coming to the city and making enough money to participate on a weekly basis, he says. “I think the advan-tage that we have is we’re in a really unique location,” Habermeyer says. “Since May 2009, there’s a free shuttle bus [at Broadview subway station] that takes visitors straight to Ever-green Brick Works.”

there’s controversy over what consti-tutes a farmers market, as some have re-sellers and vendors with produce imported from oth-er countries. But Habermeyer says a caveat of Brick Works Farmers’ Market is “vendors must be local farmers or food producers.”

Although farmers markets range in size and vendors, they have the common thread of fos-tering social gathering and community activity. “I can shop, but I can also attend cooking class-es or bring my dog to play in the dog park and smell all the food cooking,” Habermeyer says.

Evergreen Brick Works Farmers’ Market has gone indoors in December, 2010 to join year-round markets, including St. Lawrence and Kensington. There will also be activities, as the roof of its gardens will be turned into an ice rink, leaving the entire building exposed for people to skate around the boundaries, Haber-meyer says.

He says he hopes the market’s organic com-munal atmosphere and excitement will be kept alive during the winter. “I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know some of the farmers and producers personally and shake their hands,” Habermeyer says. “I feel a bond with them and consider them friends. For me, knowing the people who have harvested the food, or made it, makes the meals I prepare even tastier.”

WINTER 2011 | 13

At Evergreen Brick Works: 1) Families and friends enjoy roasted corn. 2) Edward Dirse of Nature’s Way Organics sorts a few of the 40 different kinds of vegetables his farm produces. 3) Omar Price of P&H Farms sells heirloom tomatoes. 4) Michael Sacco of ChocoSol Traders makes xocolatl — a drink made of cacao beans, boiling water, and spices — as he ex-plains its health benefits.

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T.O.’s Food Facts: Past & Present1. North York farmers marketOne of the many that have recently been springing up across the city.

2. Food Cycles @ Downsivew ParkAn urban farm with vegetables, beehives and a com-posting program.

3. Food TruckA man used to sell produce out of his truck at Dorset Park before the city stopped him. But now the city is considering legalizing the practice.

4. Ben Nobleman OrchardThe first community orchard in the city. It currently has nine fruit trees.

5. School Market GardenBenadale Business and Technical Institute has the first school market garden in the country. Students are in-volved with the entire process from field to table.

6. PACT’s Farm-in-the-VillageA 14,000 square foot urban farm that engages youth through agriculture.

7. FoodShareA food security organization offering programs from growing to cooking.

8. Willowvale Park (now Christie Pits)In 1914, locals were banned from picking mushrooms in the park to protect the land.

9. Evergreen Brick WorksThe former brick works factory was converted into an environmental centre that also offers food programs.

10. Carrot Green RoofOnce complete in April, the roof will host vegetables, herbs, and fruit trees.

11. CabbagetownIn the late 1800s, Irish immigrants in the area could only afford to eat cabbage they grew in their front yard — thus giving the neighbourhood its name.

12. Hogtown pigsWilliams Davies started his pork business in the early 1860s, giving Toronto its pig moniker.

13. St.Andrew’s MarketOne of the main markets until the late 1800s. Re-cently, residents have tried to revive it with a farmers market.

14. Fishing in Lake OntarioIn the 1800s, Torontians could buy fish caught in the harbour.

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T.O.’s Food Facts: Past & Present1. North York farmers marketOne of the many that have recently been springing up across the city.

2. Food Cycles @ Downsivew ParkAn urban farm with vegetables, beehives and a com-posting program.

3. Food TruckA man used to sell produce out of his truck at Dorset Park before the city stopped him. But now the city is considering legalizing the practice.

4. Ben Nobleman OrchardThe first community orchard in the city. It currently has nine fruit trees.

5. School Market GardenBenadale Business and Technical Institute has the first school market garden in the country. Students are in-volved with the entire process from field to table.

6. PACT’s Farm-in-the-VillageA 14,000 square foot urban farm that engages youth through agriculture.

7. FoodShareA food security organization offering programs from growing to cooking.

8. Willowvale Park (now Christie Pits)In 1914, locals were banned from picking mushrooms in the park to protect the land.

9. Evergreen Brick WorksThe former brick works factory was converted into an environmental centre that also offers food programs.

10. Carrot Green RoofOnce complete in April, the roof will host vegetables, herbs, and fruit trees.

11. CabbagetownIn the late 1800s, Irish immigrants in the area could only afford to eat cabbage they grew in their front yard — thus giving the neighbourhood its name.

12. Hogtown pigsWilliams Davies started his pork business in the early 1860s, giving Toronto its pig moniker.

13. St.Andrew’s MarketOne of the main markets until the late 1800s. Re-cently, residents have tried to revive it with a farmers market.

14. Fishing in Lake OntarioIn the 1800s, Torontians could buy fish caught in the harbour.

The city’s green bin program has a festering problem — it’s too successful

Story & photo by Emily Hunter


Community composting has the ability to alleviate some of the city’s waste-- Marlee Kohn

WinTeR 2011 | 17

In September, mountains of organic scraps were piled high at the Dufferin Waste Management Facility in North York, filled with kitty litter, soiled baby diapers and

fungi-growing fruits by the tonne. Filling the nostrils, the smell was like a sewer line.

This is one of the last stops for Toronto’s green bin waste. Toronto produces 130,000 tonnes of organic waste a year. But until recently, two of the four city-contracted processors were shut down because they were having difficulty coping with the excess volumes of organic waste. “There’s a real challenge of processing capacity,” said Steve Whitter, solid waste manager for the city.

Whitter said the processor closures left the city’s seven transfer plants with 4,200 tonnes of organics, “a couple thousand tonnes more than I’d like to have.”

However, he insists the fall stockpiles were held for a short period and caused no major problems that would force the city to send the organics to landfill sites. One of the closed contractors, OrgaWorld, also re-opened its facility in the fall, allowing the city to resume some of its organics processing.

But the city is frequently affected by an unstable market for the organic waste, Whitter laments. Since the green bin’s launch in 2002, Toronto has gone through 13 processor companies. Facilities typically shut down because of odour complaints or layoffs.

John Harwood, a former city solid waste supervisor who spent over 30 years in this field, retiring in 2008, says he’s seen first-hand how organics were shipped to landfills because of processing delays. If the stockpiles grow mould or begin to stink, which frequently happens,

it’s considered a health hazard and must be thrown into landfills, Harwood said.

Whitter however denies this, saying they have not landfilled even a pound of organics.

ToronTo has embraced the green bin with over 90 per cent of single-family households and small businesses participating in the program. The city says that with the success of the program, 70 per cent of Toronto’s garbage has been diverted from landfills, half of that being organic waste.

But processing it all has become a challenge and the city knows this problem is not disappearing any time soon. A new processing plant is being built by 2013 to ensure sufficient capacity, while the city is expanding the Dufferin plant.

Yet despite the city’s efforts, some experts say the stockpiling is only going to get worse when apartment buildings are included in the green bin program by 2012. “It’s ironic but the green bin’s problem is coping with its own success,” writes Peter Gorrie, in the August edition of BioCycle. “[It’s so successful] that one of their main difficulties is coping with the increasing quantities that residents are sorting and putting out.”

“There are Tonnes and tonnes of other food waste that we haven’t begun to deal with,” said Sunday Harrison, co-founder of FoodCycles, an urban farm in North York.

Apartment buildings that waste thousands of tonnes of food annually are exempt from the composting program, Harrison says. But instead of pushing for an increase in the city’s organics capacity, she says there are better ways to deal with food waste. “Community composting has the ability to alleviate some of the city’s waste,” said Marlee Kohn, researcher with The Stop Community Food Centre, a food security organization. “It’s not meant to replace the green bin but instead to assist the green bin program in some of its gaps.”

Kohn and Harrison are a part of a small but growing movement advocating for mid-scale composting in the city. Both The Stop

and FoodCycles have their own composting facilities, which handle over 20 tonnes of food scraps annually from their various food programs. But they are limited to composting their own food waste because provincial regulations prohibit off-site waste being used for public health and safety reasons. “Community composting is in a weird grey zone when it comes to regulations,” Kohn said. “It’s treated like a major processing facility instead of a mid-scale operation.”

Kohn and others in the composting business suggest that community composting could have its own set of regulations, adhering to health and safety standards, but be allowed to accept off-site waste from the surrounding neighborhoods.

Montreal and Pennsylvania have been running successful community composting projects for years. In Montreal, a community park accepts 20 tonnes of vegetable and fruit waste annually from surrounding apartment buildings, while in Pennsylvania, farms collect grocery store food scraps, earning farmers extra income from manufacturing compost. “Montreal and Pennsylvania provide good examples of where Toronto could benefit from community composting, if we were to focus our attention on areas that are typically left out of the city’s organic waste program,” Kohn said.

But there are those that are still skeptical. “I can’t imagine that any organization that wanted to do this could handle the magnitude of organics this city produces,” Whitter said.

Advocates of community composting say that they wouldn’t attempt to process large amounts of organics, but only alleviate some of the city’s capacity challenges. “The conversation of composting shouldn’t stop at the green bin,” Kohn said. “It has done great strides for Toronto, but we need to continue this dialogue and keep improving the way we divert city waste.”

Watch a behind-the-scenes video of the the green bin program, visit:

foodshedmagazine.ca

Bursting at the seams

The city’s green bin program has a festering problem — it’s too successful

Story & photo by Emily Hunter


Community composting has the ability to alleviate some of the city’s waste-- Marlee Kohn

WinTeR 2011 | 17

In September, mountains of organic scraps were piled high at the Dufferin Waste Management Facility in North York, filled with kitty litter, soiled baby diapers and

fungi-growing fruits by the tonne. Filling the nostrils, the smell was like a sewer line.

This is one of the last stops for Toronto’s green bin waste. Toronto produces 130,000 tonnes of organic waste a year. But until recently, two of the four city-contracted processors were shut down because they were having difficulty coping with the excess volumes of organic waste. “There’s a real challenge of processing capacity,” said Steve Whitter, solid waste manager for the city.

Whitter said the processor closures left the city’s seven transfer plants with 4,200 tonnes of organics, “a couple thousand tonnes more than I’d like to have.”

However, he insists the fall stockpiles were held for a short period and caused no major problems that would force the city to send the organics to landfill sites. One of the closed contractors, OrgaWorld, also re-opened its facility in the fall, allowing the city to resume some of its organics processing.

But the city is frequently affected by an unstable market for the organic waste, Whitter laments. Since the green bin’s launch in 2002, Toronto has gone through 13 processor companies. Facilities typically shut down because of odour complaints or layoffs.

John Harwood, a former city solid waste supervisor who spent over 30 years in this field, retiring in 2008, says he’s seen first-hand how organics were shipped to landfills because of processing delays. If the stockpiles grow mould or begin to stink, which frequently happens,

it’s considered a health hazard and must be thrown into landfills, Harwood said.

Whitter however denies this, saying they have not landfilled even a pound of organics.

ToronTo has embraced the green bin with over 90 per cent of single-family households and small businesses participating in the program. The city says that with the success of the program, 70 per cent of Toronto’s garbage has been diverted from landfills, half of that being organic waste.

But processing it all has become a challenge and the city knows this problem is not disappearing any time soon. A new processing plant is being built by 2013 to ensure sufficient capacity, while the city is expanding the Dufferin plant.

Yet despite the city’s efforts, some experts say the stockpiling is only going to get worse when apartment buildings are included in the green bin program by 2012. “It’s ironic but the green bin’s problem is coping with its own success,” writes Peter Gorrie, in the August edition of BioCycle. “[It’s so successful] that one of their main difficulties is coping with the increasing quantities that residents are sorting and putting out.”

“There are Tonnes and tonnes of other food waste that we haven’t begun to deal with,” said Sunday Harrison, co-founder of FoodCycles, an urban farm in North York.

Apartment buildings that waste thousands of tonnes of food annually are exempt from the composting program, Harrison says. But instead of pushing for an increase in the city’s organics capacity, she says there are better ways to deal with food waste. “Community composting has the ability to alleviate some of the city’s waste,” said Marlee Kohn, researcher with The Stop Community Food Centre, a food security organization. “It’s not meant to replace the green bin but instead to assist the green bin program in some of its gaps.”

Kohn and Harrison are a part of a small but growing movement advocating for mid-scale composting in the city. Both The Stop

and FoodCycles have their own composting facilities, which handle over 20 tonnes of food scraps annually from their various food programs. But they are limited to composting their own food waste because provincial regulations prohibit off-site waste being used for public health and safety reasons. “Community composting is in a weird grey zone when it comes to regulations,” Kohn said. “It’s treated like a major processing facility instead of a mid-scale operation.”

Kohn and others in the composting business suggest that community composting could have its own set of regulations, adhering to health and safety standards, but be allowed to accept off-site waste from the surrounding neighborhoods.

Montreal and Pennsylvania have been running successful community composting projects for years. In Montreal, a community park accepts 20 tonnes of vegetable and fruit waste annually from surrounding apartment buildings, while in Pennsylvania, farms collect grocery store food scraps, earning farmers extra income from manufacturing compost. “Montreal and Pennsylvania provide good examples of where Toronto could benefit from community composting, if we were to focus our attention on areas that are typically left out of the city’s organic waste program,” Kohn said.

But there are those that are still skeptical. “I can’t imagine that any organization that wanted to do this could handle the magnitude of organics this city produces,” Whitter said.

Advocates of community composting say that they wouldn’t attempt to process large amounts of organics, but only alleviate some of the city’s capacity challenges. “The conversation of composting shouldn’t stop at the green bin,” Kohn said. “It has done great strides for Toronto, but we need to continue this dialogue and keep improving the way we divert city waste.”

Watch a behind-the-scenes video of the the green bin program, visit:

foodshedmagazine.ca

Bursting at the seams

feeding thehungry

Food banks were concieved as band-aid solutions. Should we

phase them out today?

Story & photo by Saeda Raghe

Volunteers restock The Stop’s food bank. The centre located in west end Toronto strives to give out fresh food instead of prepackaged items to promote healthy living.

If you live in Toronto, you’ve probably come in contact with a food bank at some point in your life — whether you and your fam-ily used it in a time of need, volunteered

for one of the over 70 food banks affiliated with the Daily Bread Food Bank (DBFB), or donated money or groceries to food drives.

In this city of about 2.5 million people, al-most 1 million visited a food bank in 2010, ac-cording to the DBFB. That number might stay the same, as last year’s recession resulted in the loss of thousands of jobs and the economy is not bouncing back as quickly this year, food bank officials say.

Food banks sprang up in Ontario in the 1980s to temporarily deal with emergency situations, but have since become a necessity in many communities. Some people argue that food banks mask hunger in the city, are inef-fective in combating poverty and should be abolished, while others believe food banks are an essential service and have grown to provide more than food.

Jawed Anwar, the founder and coordinator of the Thorncliffe Food Bank says he believes the issue of hunger would be more apparent if

food banks didn’t exist. His food bank serves over 500 people a month, mostly Muslim im-migrants, and is one of the only ones in Toron-to to offer Halal meat. He started it in Febru-ary 2009 after noticing a need for a food bank while he was chair of the Thorncliffe Park Pub-lic School council. “I’ve lived in this community for four years,” he says. “I’ve come in contact with many parents and children and see their needs.”

Anwar said the current state of welfare sys-tem doesn’t provide enough money for food after families pay off rent and utilities.

The Thorncliffe Food Bank is not affiliated with the DBFB, even though Anwar has been trying to connect with them for over a year. He says someone from the organization respond-ed to his emails and calls and visited in July 2009, but he hasn’t received any updates as to when and if he can get donation from it, as many food banks in the city do. “It’s really hard to manage without help,” Anwar says. “The cli-ents are increasing.”

Valerie Tarasuk, a University of Toronto nu-tritional sciences professor, says she doesn’t think food banks can be abolished. “If you

think about the things that propel people to go to the food banks, those things are a long way from changing,” she says.

Like Anwar, Tarasuk says welfare in Ontario doesn’t provide enough to make ends meet and the provincial government is not addressing poverty. “Until that happens we can’t expect the need for these services to diminish,” Tara-suk says.

She says she doesn’t think poverty would be any more apparent if there weren’t food banks, but has a problem with the message they send when asking for donations. “Their appeal for


Volunteers restock The Stop’s food bank. The centre located in west end Toronto strives to give out fresh food instead of prepackaged items to promote healthy living.

WINTER 2011 | 19

food drives gives the illusion that by donating food you are addressing the problem, and that I think is problematic,” she says.

Tarasuk wants Canadians to take their sup-port of food banks further to advocate for more support for low income earners and food as a basic human right by taking their views to the ballots.

Rekha Cherian, food bank coordinator for The Stop Community Food Centre, says her west end Toronto organization believes food banks shouldn’t exist.

The Stop is a flutter of activity on any given

weekday. The centre’s small receiving area is packed with people waiting to enter the cafete-ria for the meal drop-in program, sitting in the waiting area to talk to a counsellor for many of The Stop’s programs and in line to pick up a food hamper from the centre’s food bank.

Their mission is to increase access to healthy food while combating inequality and building communities. As one of the first food banks in Toronto, their organization provides more than just food as a way to combat poverty. They also offer advocacy programs, legal clinics, cooking classes, a prenatal program, sustainable food

systems education, bake ovens, markets, gar-dens and greenhouses.

Like Tarasuk, The Stop believes healthy food is a basic human right and that access to healthy food is not only hindered by low in-come but many other issues.

Cherian says food banks have the same pur-pose as when they started 30 years ago, which is to provide food for people in need. “They’re existing because people don’t have enough money for food, and that’s because there’s a lack of full time jobs with benefits, and there’s a lack of affordable housing.”

Urban gardening


You don’t need a big plot of land to grow food in the city. Follow the flow chart below for some tips to creatively use the space you have access to.

To learn more about balcony gardening & rooftop agriculture,visit our website: foodshedmagazine.ca

A plant is grown inside a pencil case on the Carrot Green Roof in East York.

NO

Plant some vegtables, consider starting with a seed.

Join a backyard sharing program — either lend your space or usesomeone else’s.

DO yOu have access tO a cOmmuNity garDeN?

DO yOu have a backyarD?

Ask your councillor to help you set one up.

yes

Sign up! But space may be tight.

DO yOu have a

balcONy Or access

tO a rOOftOp?

Start a container garden — they’re light-weight and productive.

DO yOu have a

wiNDOw sill?

Plant some herbs along your window.

Consider guerilla gardening. But watch out: it’s illegal, people may trample on your hard work, and the soil may not have been tested for contaminants.

NO

NO

NO

yes

yes

yes

Fugitive FowlBackyard chickens are illegal in Toronto. But there’s a growing movement that is trying to bring the practice back to the cityStory & photos by Amanda Kwan

Samantha, Hepzebah and Baylik are huddled in the corner of the backyard. With their heads low to the ground, they eat their morning snack in rela-

tive silence. A plane flies overhead, the sound of the engine drowning their soft clucking.

Paul Stewart watches them with a bemused smile on his face. “They don’t always peck alongside so cutely like this,” he says. Stewart has been harbouring fugitives in his backyard for the past seven months. But they earn their keep, providing him and his roommates with a daily supply of fresh eggs.

The hens — or “the ladies” as Stewart refers to them — are part of Trinity Reach Farm, an urban agriculture project he started with his roommates in the backyard of their rented house in Little Italy. The only problem: chickens are illegal in Toronto, except in certain areas of the city that are zoned for agriculture.

But recently, with the rise in the local food movement, there has been growing interest in bringing hens back to the city. City officials are currently studying the feasibility of keep-ing backyard chickens as part of their report on Toronto’s urban food strategy. Staff from public health, animal services, and the Environment Office are looking at what rules are in place in cities that have legalized the practice, and will make their recommendations in their reports, which could be released as early as spring.

She initially did it for the eggS. “From the time I had chil-dren, I was on a path of how to improve the quality of our food, and to stay away from things I didn’t want my kids to have,” says a woman who calls herself Toronto Chicken to protect her identity. “Backyard chickens are a perfect fit because you can control the feed the chicken has, and thereby control the eggs the family is eating.” Toronto Chicken keeps four hens in the backyard of her mid-town Toronto home: Bianca, Ayr,

Cinnamon and a fourth unnamed hen. She’s one of the main players pushing for change at city hall. In 2008, she created an online petition to legalize backyard hens in Toronto. Since then, her website — torontoch-ickens.com — has become a reservoir of information for urbanites who are thinking of raising their own hens in their backyards. So far, 1,600 people have signed her petition, which she eventually wants to bring to city hall.

Backyard chickens used to be legal in Toronto before they were banned in 1983 due to health concerns. At that time, mainly immigrant communities, like Italians and Portuguese, were raising urban chickens, a practice they brought over from their home countries.

WINTER 2011 | 21

Why did urban chicken-keeping fade from Toronto? The issue is that city dwellers aren’t exposed to agricultural practices, Toronto Chicken says. “For people from other coun-tries, it’s totally natural,” she says. “I have a neighbour on one side from Romania, and he saw my chickens and said, ‘Oh, that’s great. I grew up with those.’”

There is an increasing number of people in Toronto who are interested in urban chicken keeping, Toronto Chicken says. She describes the people who have contacted her through her site as “the responsible type” — people who want to raise hens for eggs. “And they want to do it right,” she says. “I’ve held a couple of workshops, and each time about 30 people come out, and they all ask very good questions.”

In April, Stewart bought Hepzebah and Bay-lik from a farm in Campbellford, Ontario. A month later, he bought Samantha, a black and white speckled heritage hen. “When we first introduced Samantha, we had to build another coop because they were picking on her to the point where they would defeather her or re-strict her from getting food,” he says. “Chick-ens are kind of jerks.”

Stewart says none of his neighbours have complained about his hens. “You just bribe

people with eggs,” he says jokingly. Most of his neighbours — Italian and Portuguese families — used to raise animals in their backyards, like his backdoor neighbour who kept chickens, rabbits, a rooster and even a pig at one point. Toronto Chicken had one neighbour who was concerned her family might eventually eat the hens. So she invited the family to her home to see how she cared for her chickens. “The kids were really fascinated. I think the father thought it was still a little weird,” she says.

Misconceptions about chickens — that they’re dirty, noisy, smelly and attract rats — is one of the main barriers to legalizing the prac-tice in the city. Opponents argue that backyard chickens can pass viruses, like the avian flu, to humans. But Toronto Chicken says the real cause behind these epidemics is factory farm-ing where the birds are bred in cramped quar-ters — the perfect environment for viruses to spread and multiply.

Battery-cage birds also have weak immune systems because they never see the sun, which helps with vitamin D and also kills aquatic vi-ruses like the avian flu by dehydrating them. Compare these birds to her free-range hens, which have ample room to roam, spread their wings and socialize. “If you look at my chick-ens, they are the picture of health,” she says.

Backyard chickens are allowed in cities like Brampton and Niagara Falls. In April 2010, Vancouver passed a bylaw allowing up to four chickens in backyards, but the fowl have to be kept no more than three metres from a door or window. Stewart says Vancouver’s bylaw is a re-stricted version that prevents people who can’t afford to buy houses with large backyards from keeping chickens. “And a lot of times, [people with large backyards] aren’t the people who’d be interested in it,” he says.

Stewart is pragmatic about the possibility of legalizing backyard chickens in Toronto. While he thinks it’s the right thing to do, it’s not a top priority for city council, nor should it be, Stewart says. “But I think just going ahead and doing it, and working it out with your smaller community — like your neighbours — making sure they’re into it first, is just as beneficial to getting it legalized,” he says.

Chickens are kind of jerks-- Paul Stewart

Paul Stewart got his first two hens, Hepzebah and Baylik, in April from a friend’s farm in Campbellford, Ontario. About a month later, he got a third hen — Samantha.


Ward 21 councillor Joe Mihevc says he’d like to start a two-year pilot project to test the pos-sibility of keeping urban chickens — one in a suburban ward and one downtown. “No one is saying [Toronto] should become one big farm but I think increasing the amount of food that is produced locally, that people have some con-trol over, would be a good idea,” he says. Some of the ground rules for the pilot project would include a cap of five hens, or making the num-ber based on the size of the backyard; no roost-ers; and keeping hens for eggs only.

Stewart, who did an internship at Mihevc’s office, wants his backyard chickens to be part of the pilot project. He’s also done some work with the councillor’s office to push the agenda, like when they brought hens into city hall and presented them to the head of the Toronto Food Policy Council as a retirement gift. But they didn’t know he lived in a condo. “So we sent the chickens back to the farm. But there were probably 100 people in the meeting, jour-nalists there,” Stewart says.

If Toronto eventually legalizes backyard chickens, Mihevc says he would consider keep-ing his own. “I have a backyard and I would love to. I will be one of the guinea pigs.”

If Stewart getS caught, he’ll have to pay a $260 fine for each hen. The money is the part that scares him the most. But he doesn’t think any of his neighbours will report him. “If I did get caught, I’ll think, ‘Oh, it was nice.’ I’ll probably bring them to my friend’s farm in Cambellford.”

But he does have one motive for getting backyard chickens legalized.

“You see how nice and short the grass is here?” he asks, pointing to the grass in his backyard. “The grass is really long up front. So I’d like to take them up front and let them mow the lawn. That’d be something nice, if they were legal, is to have front-yard chickens, not just backyard chickens.”

WINTER 2011 |23

Ward 21 councillor Joe Mihevc wants to start a two-year pilot project to test the possibility of keeping chickens in the city — one in a downtown ward and another in the suburbs.

What to do with your chicken poo

Paul Stewart used to place a straw bed in the coop and rake it out every week. “It was a big pain in the ass,” he says. Then he learned about a deep litter method: mix a carbon material (i.e.: wood shavings or straw) with nitrogen (i.e.: the poop). As the poop decomposes, it creates compost, which Stewart uses in their garden. The deep litter method also eliminates most of the fecal stench. “Maybe I’m just used to it, but I don’t smell it,” he says. “And I think it’s cool they’re supply-ing us with compost we can use to grow food. It’s a nice addition to the eggs.”

English Telegraph, Lebanese Sultan, Spacemaster and Yellow Submarine. These four names may sound like they have nothing in common, but they

do. They are four of the hundreds of species of cucumber seeds Torontonians can access — if they know where to look.

“There are over 70 Canadian seed companies that offer over 10,000 types of seeds and any-body, anywhere in Canada can get these seeds by mail-order,” said Judy Newman of Seeds of Diver-sity, which conserves biodiversity of food crops.

But a recent report by Metcalf Food Solu-tions found that accessing a variety of edible-plant seeds may be a challenge for those not involved in the urban agriculture movement. “It’s not obvious,” said Joe Nasr, a co-author of the report. “It’s not the kind of thing where on a Saturday morning you can walk over to your neighbourhood nursery and buy what you need.” If people can’t easily access desired seeds or plants, they might not want to take up gardening, he said. For example, immigrants might be discouraged if they can’t find vegeta-bles they are used to growing back home.

Having access to a large variety of seeds is also linked with biodiversity and food security. Colette Murpy, who runs an organic seed and seedling supplier Urban Harvest, said she has seen a steady increase in customers every year. She attributed the trend to rising concerns over genetically modified food and food secu-rity, which is closely linked with seed diversity because if a disease strikes a crop, having 20 va-rieties of it rather than one would make it less susceptible to the disease. “The more varieties we have, the more secure our food is,” Murphy said, citing the 18th century Irish Potato Fam-ine as an example of where dependence on one

crop variety had devastating effects. Monocrop farms are also more susceptible to insect infes-tations, she said.

“There is strength in diversity,” agreed New-man, adding that people also enjoy seed va-riety for personal reasons. “Taste in variety is a wonderful thing to have. If we all ate the same tomato it would be a pretty boring life.” There is also a sense of history around certain varieties of plants. For example, an intern at Everdale Farm — an educational centre — was working on the farm when she came across a tomato with the same last name as her, New-man said. “She started shouting because she had come across the Climenhaga tomato,” she said. “It turned out that someone in her family had bred that tomato, had given it to someone who’d given it to us. We were growing it here and she didn’t know about it.”

The abiliTy To access all this variety is one advantage of growing something from a seed rather than buying a seedling, Newman said. “You can’t get that when you just go to your lo-cal Home Depot, or Canadian Tire, or local nurs-ery to buy a seedling,” she said. “You’re lucky if they have two or three types of tomatoes.” And the seeds are out there, as a quick search on the Internet will show. B u t people may not know about local places that offer varieties or seed savers may not have money to advertise, Murphy said.

There are ways to tap into the diverse seeds without ordering off the Internet. Toronto holds an annual seed exchange event, Seedy

Saturday, run by the Toronto Community Gar-den Network. Urban Harvest, which grows all its seeds and seedlings within Toronto and the GTA, has not only a store, but also sells seeds at farmers markets and other shops.

a lack of knowledge on how to start growing from a seed can discourage gardeners from doing so, Newman said. “People have the idea that it’s too difficult,” she said. “It’s easy to go to Canadian Tire and grab some seedlings rather than start them yourself.” But you don’t have to be a farmer to grow plants from seeds, she said. You don’t even need a large plot of land — gardening can be done on balconies and windowsills. Before she started her seed business and store, Murphy said she used to do everything in her bedroom. “It got a little bit crowded because I used to grow a lot of plants,” she said. “There were times I was crawling un-der them to get to my bed.”

She said she always encourages people to ex-periment with seeds because the knowledge of saving seeds and planting them can easily be lost. And it provides more than just food. “It also provides a real sense of satisfaction and accomplishment when you plant a little seed and you watch this miracle of it growing.”

We can grow hundreds of varieties of vegetables ifwe start with a seed Story & photo by Alina Smirnova

24| Foodshed Magazine

SowingDiversity

Eating ABCs

The lunch bell rings and it’s time for students to refuel. Some pull out sandwiches from lunch bags, some stand in the cafete-ria line, ordering burgers and fries, and some walk to the plaza across the street, coming back with a couple slices of pizza.

But schools in Toronto will be encouraging all kids to add healthy food to their timetables next fall. The provincial government introduced On-tario’s Food and Beverage Policy in January 2010. It will come into ef-fect Sept. 1, 2011 and replace the current nutrition policy, released in October 2004.

While schools across the province will have to serve foods that meet the new nutrition standards, giving students healthier food options, some students are already making healthy choices.

It’s been four months into the school year, and one student has bought food from the cafeteria and gone out for lunch a total of three

times. Gelila Solomon, a Grade 12 student at Pope John Paul II Catholic Secondary School (PJP II C.S.S.), says she would call herself a healthy eater as she only eats junk food once in a while.

Sitting in the cafeteria with her container of rice, fish, and salad, Solo-mon says she makes her lunch in the morning before she goes to school. “I buy a chocolate milk often, but not really lunch. I haven’t had a single cookie this year from the [cafeteria], but they are quite the treat,” she says with a laugh.

She says students may complain about the new regulations, but the healthier menus will benefit them in the long run. “If these numbers of obesity increase at the rate they already are, it could be a lot more detri-mental than a kid sacrificing his Twinkie,” Solomon says.

The healthy eating strategy was initiated because good nutrition is vi-tal to a young person’s growth, development, and well being, says Gary Wheeler, Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care spokesman.

Story & photo by Alice Hoang

Schools set to replace junk food with healthier meals and snacks

Wendy Tan, a Grade 12 student at Agincourt Collegiate Institute, volunteers to sell healthy food at her school.

WINTER 2011 | 25

“Research shows that a healthy school en-vironment enhances learning and success and provides academic, social, emotional and physical benefits,” Wheeler says. “Schools play an important role in teaching students healthy eating habits and reinforcing those lessons through school practices.”

The new sTandards will reinforce the ini-tiatives that schools have already started, says Shaun Chen, Ward 21 TDSB trustee.

Agincourt Collegiate Institute’s “The Snack Shack,” a program started in fall 2007, sells nutritious food and beverages at lunch time and after school. The program is funded by the Toronto Foundation for Student Success and is run by staff and student volunteers. “It’s a really great thing because the students are in-volved, and it teaches them skills in that sense,” Chen says.

Yogurt, granola bars, milk and whole wheat bagels line the counter. Wendy Tan, a Grade 12 student at Agincourt C.I., says she has been eating healthier since she began volunteering at the Snack Shack two years ago. “I just eat lunch when I’m at work, so it’s convenient, too,” says Tan as she counts the inventory.

Rita Manghirmalani, The Snack Shack’s pro-gram co-ordinator, says the items are afford-able for students, as most are sold at 25 and 50 cents. “A lot of students buy from here because we sell food at a lower price than the cafeteria. And they get a free fruit or vegetable with a purchase,” says Manghirmalani, pointing to boxes of apples and cherry tomatoes.

On average, The Snack Shack makes $80-$100 at lunch time and $60-$80 after school, Manghirmalani says.

Chen says the new policy allows leeway for student fundraising activities, like selling choc-olate bars on school property, but he would rather see students be allowed to fundraise by selling more nutritious foods.

PJP II C.s.s. began the “Health Action Team”

in 2010, an initiative funded by the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care. “Our students went apple picking last week and gave it to all the Grade 9s,” says Helen Mieta, a food and nutrition teacher at PJP II C.S.S. “My nu-trition class hopefully will be trying to prepare pumpkin chips and roasted seeds. So we’re trying to teach that there are really cheap and healthy things that you can eat that are simple.”

The policy doesn’t control what food stu-dents bring from home, but if children are given proper information and the chance to be involved in decision-making, they will choose healthy foods, says Mieta. “I think in general children know what’s healthy, what’s not healthy, and they will choose healthy alter-natives if they taste good, and they can taste good,” she says. “And I think it’s a falsity to say that kids will only choose French fries, any-way. I don’t think that’s true. We want it to be healthy and we want it to taste good, so let’s find a common ground.”

PublIC eduCaTIon and social marketing campaigns are critical to helping Ontarians be-come more informed about what they need to do to lead healthy and productive lives, Wheel-er says. Since 2009, the Ministry of Health Promotion and Sport invested $1.4 million for Healthy Eating and Active Living campaigns and $1 million to raise awareness of the severity of diabetes and associated risk factors, he says.

Schools have already put in new vending machines in September 2010, says Shannon Suitor, HealthyVendCananda representative. The company was developed in response to the guidelines developed by the health and educa-tion ministries.

PJP II C.S.S. doesn’t have new vending ma-chines, but the current ones are free of choco-late bars and potato chips. The school has al-ready taken steps toward promoting healthier diets for students by removing their deep fry-ers and stacking vending machines with water and juices, says Paul McAlpine, principal of PJP

II C.S.S. “When the guidelines come through in September there [will be] no wiggle room in terms of what we consider healthy or not — it’s what’s dictated,“ McAlpine says.” So things will be directed to us as to how we put our menus together. [The caterer] will have the ability to decide the menu based on parent and student involvement, but it will have to fall into the cat-egory that is scripted for them by the ministry.”

There’s a shared responsibility, as the min-istry leaves it up to school boards to imple-ment the policies and monitor the progress, Chen says. “If a school were not to comply, we have staff that would essentially find out, in-vestigate, speak to the ministries and find out what’s going on,” he says. “We will continue to look at ways to ensure that all schools are fol-lowing the right policies and procedures.”

a ConCern for schools is how they can still offer quick service, as caterers are working on how they can best serve students while stay-ing within the nutritional guidelines, McAlpine says. “One thing about the deep fryers was it al-lowed for fast food,” McAlpine says. “It allowed them to get a large amount of food produced very quickly, which was a benefit when you’re dealing with 1,400 kids coming in at one time for lunch. Taking the deep fryers out has made the caterers more creative as to how they can get a large amount of food produced in the same amount of time.”

Recently, more students have been leaving school grounds and getting food that they’re more used to buying, McAlpine says. But he says he hopes the new rules will deter this habit as schools are bringing in more healthy living initiatives to promote good eating patterns. He adds that making health-conscious decisions is a learning process. “Students will need to be educated into healthy food choices and not say-ing, ‘I can’t get it at our cafeteria anymore, but I can still get it down the corner.’ Maybe slowly, maybe once or twice a week they’ll eat here and they’ll get their healthy choice.”

Stats of children’s health in Ontario(With info from the Ontario Ministry of Education website)

>> 28% of kids aged 2–17 are overweight or obese>> Less than half of kids aged 2–19 eat the minimun recommended number of daily servings of fruits and vegetables>> Obesity costs the health care system about $1.6 billion annually>> Five other provinces that have mandatory nutrition standards in schools: British Columbia, Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Newfoundland


WINTER 2011 | 27

fun & games

Eating these creatures is viewed as normal in many countries but seen as a taboo in the WestA large food bank that is affiliated with over 70 organizations The first community orchard in TorontoA skill that can be lost in today’s societyThe act of salvaging edible foodTravelling with the purpose of discovering new foodMore young urbanites are taking up this activityPeople’s Food Policy Project network is trying to reclaim _____Bee hives in Ontario need to be ____ metres from someone else’s property lineFood prepared for long-term storageMethod for growing crops in a small space

Chickens are illegal but this bird can be raised as a petA prominent Toronto food writerBureaucratic rules are blamed for hindering _____ from diversifyingA space someone can use to garden if they don’t have a backyardSome say Toronto’s _____ can be used to fightclimate changePreserving the season’s best in jars for the winterA program that supports new entrepreneursA province in Canada that already has a school food policyLinked with food security and saving food crop seeds An edible weedThe city started this program in 2002 to reduce waste

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ACROSS DOWN

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Inaugural Issue: Winter 2011