It all starts at the dinner table

Eat together.

Could the solution to the vexing challenges of peak oil, food insecurity, food price shocks, diet-related disease, globalization and commodification of food be that simple?

The dinner table is as good a place to start as any and that’s exactly where about 100 of Vancouver’s farmers, policy wonks, food and poverty activists, nonprofit sector apparatchiks, farm market managers, educators and bloggers were this week to knock around some of the city’s goals for enhancing our food security.

Hosted by the city’s food policy advisory council, it was the third in a series of forums convened to hash out the next logical steps toward ensuring people have access to safe, affordable, nutritious food. In amassing the data and strategies contained in the 193page report How Food Secure Is Vancouver in a Changing World? 2010, dozens of indicators and metrics were considered and employed to create a baseline snapshot of a complex system that includes agriculture, food processing, marketing, access, safety assurance and consumer behaviour that penetrates every nook and cranny of our daily existence.

For you it needn’t be that complicated.

“Our strongest connection with food is in eating it with other people,” said Coun. Andrea Reimer, former chairwoman of the food policy council. “Imagine if the family dinner came back into vogue?”

Any opportunity for extended family, neighbours and friends to bring something to the table to share can only make you more conscious of the food you eat, its origins and its nutritional value, she reckons.

There are skills that need to be recovered in the process. Along with not growing much of our own food for the past 40 or 50 years, we have also fallen out of practice with cooking from scratch, said Reimer, who helped drive the early development of the report as far back as 2007.

Reimer is among those reviving the tradition of canning fruits and vegetables in season with a small group of likeminded people as a way to support local growers and save money at the same time.

But she admits that few of her age group, the 35 to 55 cohort, are actively gardening or practising traditional foodways.

Even if the local food revolution hasn’t fully penetrated the consciousness of average consumers, there is a lot going on -from community kitchens and gardens to a fastgrowing local food production and distribution sector as evidenced by the growth of farmers markets -but most of it isn’t well coordinated, said Reimer.

“That’s a role that the city can play, we are pretty good at convening,” she noted. The other tools at city hall’s disposal, bylaws and zoning, are blunt instruments at best.

“There are areas of the city where it’s hard to find good nutritious food so we have to think about that when we are zoning and land-use planning and talking about public facilities,” she said.

“Why wouldn’t we think about a grocer as part of a housing development? But that said, we can’t force businesses to open where we want them.”

The city can, however, make community centres and parks into local food hubs with fruit tree planting, community kitchen programs and community gardens.

Schools across the city are teaching cooking to students even in the primary grades and converting land swaths of playground into vegetable gardens. High schools are developing for-credit courses in food gardening, urban agriculture and sustainability.

The next generation will be more plugged into where their food comes from than the postwar generation of shiny supermarket shoppers and TV dinner kids, though there is some evidence even they are coming around and that people generally understand what it means to be food secure.

Nine in 10 B.C. residents polled by Ipsos Reid agree that it is important that we produce enough food so that we don’t have to rely on imports, an increase of eight percentage points from 2004, the report notes.

A Mustel Group poll earlier this year found that 93 per cent of people in Metro Vancouver agree that it is important to protect local agricultural land.

However, the abundance of supermarkets gives little indication to the average shopper about the vulnerabilities of commercial food systems, in particular its reliance on cheap fossil fuels for fertilizers, pesticides, cultivation and transport, said Brent Mansfield, cochair of the food council, which advises Vancouver city council on food issues.

“In North America we spend less of our income on food than at any time in our history and we spend less than anyplace else in the world,” he said. Rising energy prices are already moving the needle on food prices generally and extreme weather events have precipitated wild swings in wheat, rice and fresh produce prices since 2008.

He suggests that regional rather than global systems are a safer and more stable approach to ensuring a secure food supply, but consumers need to start making choices that support local systems now to ensure the needed infrastructure is in place when we need it.

“We want people to see that there are ways to eat and to buy food that are more respectful of the planet’s resources,” Mansfield said.

“The Food Secure report and the baseline data it contains will become a living document moving forward, adding trend data as things change. We want to use it as a way to recognize vulnerabilities, but also to celebrate successes as things get better.”

FOODTREE APP A GUIDE TO FRESH LOCAL PRODUCE

The Foodtree iPhone app launched this week is designed to help you find your way to fresh local produce.

The platform, developed in partnership with the City of Vancouver, is the brainchild of chef and wine importer Anthony Nicalo.

Users can add to the Foodtree by uploading information about their fresh food finds and pictures of great local products to alert other users in real time to farm fresh organic eggs or the season’s first asparagus.

The database already contains nearly 200 markets, farms, retailers and restaurants.

A mapping function to be added in coming weeks will allow people to find what they want within walking or driving distance of their current location.

“There are apps related to the food system, but this is a more participatory and democratic one,” said Nicalo. “Some apps will try to tell you what’s in season, based on a database that relies on provincial or state boundaries and it’s generally inaccurate.”

Foodtree is designed to be accurate, up to date and local to within metres.

Vancouver Sun