Food for City Building: A Field Guide for Planners, Actionists & Entrepreneurs

By Wayne Roberts and Carolyn Steel

You don't have to look hard to find books on food problems and city problems. Wayne Roberts puts them together to create solutions.

Profiling the kind of imaginative and cost-effective solutions he developed over 10 years as manager of the Toronto Food Policy Council, Roberts lays out frameworks that lead to remedies such as:

- How to expand the number of rewarding food careers for youth
- Addressing the need for healthy food and dignity for the hungry and malnourished
- How to develop age-friendly food systems for yesterday's baby boomers;
- How to open up mainstream opportunities for people engaged in urban and regional agriculture;
- How to get buy-in for official plans that foster economic rejuvenation, environmental protection and social inclusion

This book is for everyone who cares about the future of local governments.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9780993769214

Book preview

blessed.

Chapter One:

Food 2.1 Why the Next Ten Years of the Food Movement will be Different from the Last Ten Years

Although I had a reputation for being on the wild and wooly side, not to say totally disorganized and disheveled, almost everything I did during my ten years at the Toronto Food Policy Council was based on a complex set of must-do lists. My most important tool was a pad of post-it notes that had my to-do list for the day, the week, the month, the quarter, the year and the decade. Though my goals often changed, I was always a Type-A, goal-driven person. Who knew?

Anyway, I want to start this manual with a ten-year to-do list for leaders of general purpose food organizations, such as food policy councils. We all need a sense of what will make the next ten years different, and how that governs our activities on a day-to-day basis. So please forgive me while I take a side trip to explain my obsession with how to-do lists fit into my past.

To-do lists provide discipline. They keep an organizer and organization purpose-driven.

The value of to-do lists has little to do with knowing in advance the best things to do at a particular time. The list, which can always be revised, is all about the discipline. Many professions are called disciplines, and the professionals and para-professionals who work on community-oriented public health goals also need to think of their work as a discipline. To-do lists provide discipline. They keep an organizer and organization purpose-driven.

There were several reasons for my obsession with to-do lists. One is that I was trained to think defensively in politics, which is based on the same principles as driving defensively—assuming that the worst can happen, and being ready to do something if someone in front jams on the brakes for no reason at all.

I had no choice but to think defensively, because I started with the TFPC shortly after the former downtown city of Toronto was amalgamated with suburban cities surrounding it. Amalgamation led to a severe cultural conflict between former staff of the old city of Toronto and former staff from the once-separate suburbs.

The TFPC had only existed in the old city of Toronto and fit well with the old city of Toronto’s working habits that went with a smaller, grittier, less formal, less hierarchical, more rambunctious, activist, hip and out-there scene among employees, managers and politicians alike. For example, Connie Clement, my first director, once did a stunt to promote safe sex that featured her wearing a condom on her head. That workplace culture collided with suburban-raised workers, managers and politicians, who were quite a bit more conventional in their bearing.

This was especially so of suburban public health employees, some of whom looked like they just walked out of the casting line for a family comedy on a 1950s TV show. That meant that I had to cope with managers and politicians who didn't like the notion that someone was usurping ownership of the food file from other professions and didn't like the wide-open style of grassroots advocacy. I had to be prepared that they would be the equivalent of drivers who could jam on the brakes or cut me off. A key function of food councils is to advocate, but my advocacy had to begin with my own managers. The to-do list was my first line of defense.

I’d read enough how-to business books to know that every strong sales pitch has to feature a Unique Sales Proposition, something that only this product can offer. Says my friend Jim Harris, a committed Green but also an avid marketer: it’s not about selling or advocating, it’s about identifying the benefit and value-added.

A few weeks into the job, I started making sure that I would always be ready with a USP and unique value-added should any hostile managers or politicians ask what does the TFPC do to justify its existence?

I wanted to be able to recite a nice list of what exactly the city and public health department got for its money as a result of the TFPC, and what the city and public health department got for their money that could only be achieved by a food policy council—for every day, week, month, quarter and year that I had worked there. I liked being able to say that the TFPC was not a cost centre, but a revenue centre, in terms of bringing opportunities to the city. I was pretty brash about saying we more than earned our keep every day.

Consequently, I couldn’t afford to drift along from day to day, going along to get along, or to let civil service norms be my guide. I needed to focus on a to-do list that would provide me with a long list of self-justifying accomplishments that either made the city money, saved the city money, or provided an essential service.

Aside from thinking very defensively, I counted on to-do lists to help me be pro-active in a positive way. I was a fan of Steven Covey’s book on the seven habits of highly effective people. Covey divides the way people spend time into four quadrants—one for items that are important and urgent, one for items that are urgent but not important, one for items that are neither important nor urgent, and one for items that are important but not urgent.

Any person with a survival instinct will get right to the items that are important and urgent. Any person with email, telephone message machine, or gossipy and griping colleagues will go secondly to items that are urgent but not important, and thirdly to issues that are neither important nor urgent, but quickly doable.

Although I’m a big fan of the role email and the social media have played in the food movement, I sometimes suspect they are technologies designed to bring not important and not urgent to the top of everyone’s do-do file. The end of the day will come, and only the highly effective minority will have spent significant time on important but not urgent matters—the very ones most productive for purposefully and pro-actively charting the course of an organization.

I found Covey’s four quadrant metaphor compelling, so I committed to being purposeful and productive by ensuring my time was spent on specifics that led somewhere—for example, a speech to an outside group for a daily achievement, a presentation to a staff workshop for a weekly achievement, hosting a public meeting for a monthly achievement, sponsoring a mini-conference for a quarterly achievement, and writing a significant publication for a yearly achievement.

The to-do list protects an organizer from being dragged along by an undertow of entropy toward disorganization—namely the daily to-do list that others want to impose on you in terms of their requests for your time—the great majority of which are non-urgent distractions from your own tasks for the day.

E-mail and message machines on phones make it qualitatively easier for people to barrage staff with their to-do list without any loss of time in saying hello, exchanging civilities or checking in to see if there is a way the favour can be returned. So in this environment, we need to be pretty resolved about putting our own organization’s needs first.

There’s a famous saying among financial planners that supposedly comes from a wealthy barber who tells people to pay yourself first. The to-do list is the equivalent of that in the workplace—do the important things for your organization’s goals first. If a person on a mission lets up and allows people from departments focused on organizational self-maintenance to run their day, their time will never be their own and their days will be frittered away in a hundred and one ways.

The starting point of personal financial planning is that a person has to very forcefully set aside ten, fifty or a hundred dollars out of every pay check and put it into an account for something they want in the future; otherwise the whole paycheck will go to other people.

The same priority has to go to assignments key to the agenda of an organization with a mission. It’s part of resisting the trend in organizations to settle on routine, self-maintenance and conflict-avoidance rather than supporting under-served groups.

I would argue that it’s our job to give the bureaucratic fussbudgets the hindmost of our time, remembering they serve to keep staff accountable, not to be their managers.

It takes a lot of determination to hold onto a to-do list within a bureaucratic organization. Aside from the bureaucratic protocol that leads to meetings to plan the meeting to organize a meeting, all bureaucratic workplaces are ground down by entropy. The most common expression of this is energy wasted on grumbling and infighting, rather than reaching out and acting.

The only way to overcome workplace entropy is to have a to-do list, which amounts to an excuse for deaking out—love to chat about this, but have to get ready for a meeting—and a second person riding shotgun to defend their workmate from the forces of entropy.

Leslie Toy, my brilliant, giving and socially skilled secretary who I called my office manager, cleaned up after my bureaucratic messes, covered for me and protected me from all the complaints that came from me attending to my own to-do list, but not attending to the to-do list my colleagues and managers tried to dump on me.

It also helped that my persona was that of a madcap policy wonk, which I didn’t think was very complimentary or accurate, but which offered a protective halo that gave me a ready excuse for not responding to bureaucratic demands.

My private joke was that I got in more trouble for doing my job—that is, following the to-do list to advance the food policy council—than I would ever get in for not doing my job, and just going along to get along.

Food policy councils should be very lean organizations, but they should never be fewer than two people because of this need for a protector to protect someone with a to-do list. My private joke was that I got in more trouble for doing my job—that is, following the to-do list to advance the food policy council—than I would ever get in for not doing my job, and just going along to get along. Alas, poor Leslie had to pay the price for me because it was the price of having an agenda, which, if I recall my high school Latin correctly, refers to action which is to be done, not forms to be filled out, phone calls to be returned, or staff meetings to be attended.

The third advantage of a to-do list is that it is intensely practical, immediate and grounded. I knew I had to be saved from thinking on too grandiose a level. Food organizers usually rev themselves up to make big claims about the central role of food because they feel defensive about how food has been ignored and neglected for so long, reduced to mere filler for an empty stomach, or fuel for a motor.

You are what you eat, Jean Brillat-Savarin wrote way back in 1825 in his book, The Physiology of Taste, an early call to arms for the importance of gastronomy. Carolyn Steel carried this message forward in 2008, when she introduced Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives,¹ with this update for an urban age: cities, like people, are what they eat. Toward the end of her marvellous book, she says the battle over food is not just about what we eat: it is about society itself.²

I was as prone to overselling food’s central importance as anyone. My first pamphlet for the Toronto Food Policy Council, called The Way to a City’s Heart is through its Stomach, was a fierce attack on the first draft of Toronto’s Official Plan, which, like other official plans of the day, paid little or no attention to food issues.

Food is really important to cities, is all I was really trying to say, but I used a polemical manifesto style that likely set back relationships with planners for some time. When you think in grandiose terms, you want the last word and you want everything to be about Big Ideas up against Terrible Errors. A to-do list brings us back to earth. When you’re just trying to move the cart forward, as the mayor of a small village explained her daily ambitions to me during a 2013 tour of Honduras farming experiments, you’re easier to get along with and more likely to move the cart.

Round 1 is Done and Won

All this about to-do lists with various timelines is just a long-winded introduction to the introduction of my pitch for this introduction—which is about the need to think Big Picture about what has been accomplished over the last ten years and what might different things might be accomplished over the next ten years.

By year 10 of Round 1, I hoped the TFPC would have been part of transforming the understanding of food in the public mind.

My to-do list for the entire decade of my career centered on what I thought of as Round 1, to use a fighter’s metaphor. By year 10 of Round 1, I hoped the TFPC would have been part of transforming the understanding of food in the public mind. Instead of food being covered in cooking, family and lifestyle section of the newspaper, it would make news in the business and current affairs section and become part of culture and entertainment coverage and thinking.

Instead of food being locked into a nutrition and disease prevention straightjacket, I dreamed food could be positioned at the centre of a city agenda for health-producing job creation, multicultural inclusion, neighborhood revitalization, poverty reduction and dynamic urbanism. Instead of food choices being framed as selections of products to be consumed, food choices would be about the best diet for sustainability, environmental protection and promotion of basic determinants of health for people at all income levels.

Instead of food being seen as a commodity, it would be seen as a connector and gateway to new ways of putting food and public policy together. That had been my hope since the 1990s, when I co-authored Real Food for a Change.

Looking back, my ten-year to-do list on fundamental paradigm change was ludicrously non-doable. Surprisingly, we did move the needle quite a bit. We started to turn the corner on a larger agenda around 2007, the year that locavore was named word of the year, and about the time that local and sustainable food started to be much talked about in the media and even acted on in the marketplace.

Since 2007, there has been a growing consensus that cities need to be at the table where key expectations of a healthy food system are discussed, so that better jobs, better environmental protection, better health, better social integration, more vitality and similar concerns become part of the food discussion.

Sometime between 2007 and 2010 (the year we did a food strategy for the city and also my retirement year, and the end of my to-do lists), imaginative people engaged in civic public policy began to understand three new powerful sets of thoughts about food. One was that food facilitated and leveraged many of the key issues of city functioning—from green space and use of park space, to community development and crime reduction, to job creation and poverty alleviation, to environmental protection and preservation of agricultural land to overall health and well-being.

The second powerful Round 1 notion that got firmly planted was that a new kind of politics—not the politics of the 1930s to 1980s, when relatively homogeneous groups of workers, or Afro-Americans or women or gays rallied for their rights and needs—came to the fore, based on a majority coalition made up of minorities.

Moving food policy forward takes a population where some critical mass of people understands this paradox of today’s food system: a mass production food system throughout the Global North quite successfully meets mainstream demands that food be plentiful, cheap and convenient; but at the same time, this same food system excludes one minority or another at one time or another to the point where most of the people are excluded at least sometime in their lives.

You can fool all of the people some of the time, it’s been said, and that is the trick of the dominant food system. But you can’t fool all the people all the time, and that is the opportunity of the food movement. As long as most people have access to cars and low-cost superstores, a key demand placed on a food system can be satisfied by enough people to keep the problem out of the headlines.

But as soon as all the people with physical disabilities, all the seniors who find superstores overwhelming, all the people who can’t afford cars, all the people who miss having a vibrant main street, all the mom and pops brought to bankruptcy, people with minority ethical or religious beliefs (halal, kosher, vegan, for example) whose preferences are not honored in a megastore, all the farmers too small to be considered by superstore buyers, are brought together, we have an aggrieved and underserved majority.

The food movement is created by giving a voice to the needs of overlooked minorities, and by identifying the common public needs and interests of diverse groups that constitute a new majority.

Food does not create the homogeneous movements that were created during the 1930s and ‘40s, when farmers and workers organized as occupational groups, or during the 1960s and ‘70s, when women or ethno-racial or youth groups came into their own. The food movement is created by giving a voice to the needs of overlooked minorities, and by identifying the common public needs and interests of diverse groups that constitute a new majority.

It’s a bit like the ramps that provide safe passage for people on wheelchairs, for seniors with walkers, for moms with baby carriages, for people on crutches, people on roller skates, and so on—a majority of people at any given time, all of whom were excluded when stairs for the temporarily able-bodied minority were the only option. Seeking out the common interest of many minorities leads to a different kind of food system that benefits the economy, plus the community, plus health, plus the environment, plus human rights, plus the city as a whole.

The telltale sign that someone has got the new style of politics that goes with the new majority of minorities paradigm of new-generation social movements is that they look to a win-win-win approach to public policy rather than a win-lose approach. I believe the food movement of Toronto gravitated in that direction as early as 2001, when the Toronto Food and Hunger Plan and Toronto Food Charter (both, to a considerable extent, influenced by the TFPC) were adopted unanimously by City Council.

By 2007, that understanding of win-win approaches to food policy as good for community/health/economy/ justice/jobs/environment was becoming the norm among progressive people engaged in local politics.

This transformative majority-making exercize is at the heart of the work of food policy councils and other general-purpose food organizations, and it happens best at the local level, if only because some intimacy and direct connection is needed when farmers are introduced to consumers for the first time in a long while, or when members of marginalized minorities find common ground with under-employed young creatives trying out new small grassroots business.

Knitting, weaving, creating collaborative infrastructure, finding common ground, matchmaking, setting up strange bedfellows—creating the links between the two separate DNA strands, one for cities and one for all the distinct groups that make up a city—this is the double helix of a new breed of public policy that happens through the emerging food movement.

That’s why social infrastructure, collaborative infrastructure and partnership creation are so critical to the new political economy of food, and so central to the mandate of food policy councils. Food councils and other general purpose food organizations are in the construction business; they’re bridge builders.

Among most people engaged by food and public policy issues, food is increasingly seen as a solution-provider, not a problem.

The third powerful notion of the emerging Round 1 food scene held that food problems could be solved in imaginative, bold, positive, practical, doable and direct ways that empowered citizens. Among most people engaged by food and public policy issues, food is increasingly seen as a solution-provider, not a problem. In my experience, that is both the appeal of food policy councils and the energy they tap into.

Over the last decade, food organizers around the world rolled out programs which confirm food has what it takes to be at the center of an agenda based on positive and practical solutions. In terms of public agencies, more than 250 food policy councils have been formed, even in cities the size and stature of Los Angeles, Rotterdam, Seattle, Bristol and Vancouver. That’s about 70 times more than a dozen years ago, when I began my career at one of the world’s three food policies, and the only one in a major city.

As well, several cities have food charters and even—London, England, and Toronto leap to mind—food strategies. Urban and regional planners also have come to a consensus that they need to highlight food elements in their designs for cities and regions.

As a result of these three shifts in thinking about food and cities, food initiatives are popping up everywhere. According to a 2011 review of local government food initiatives in the United States, ³ 56 agencies have some form of innovative regulation to encourage citizen food projects, such as community gardens, while 12 places have started using incentives to support healthier or more sustainable foods. As well, at least one North American city and several leading universities have contracts for local and sustainable food.

New and popular food studies courses and activities are now being offered at hundreds of universities, high schools, and elementary schools. There seems to be no end to the inspired range of community-based food projects that have been spawned by the magnetic energy of food activism. The mainstream and alternative media are all over imaginative and inspirational local food stories. The best and brightest of young people are excited about devoting their careers to food.

A major increase in consumer commitment to conscientious food shopping has created significant impact that stands out against the background of the prolonged recession since 2008. Farmers markets are exploding in number, as well as in the quality and range of food offerings and varieties of communities served.

Fair Trade sales exceed $6 billion a year. Organic food and beverage sales in North America continue to climb, upwards of $29 billion a year. Local foods in the United States are racking up at sales of over $7 billion a year. If you can’t beat them, reinvent them, a new generation of entrepreneur activists believe, and a new form of business, the social enterprise—pledged to a triple bottom line of community improvement, environmental benefits, and economic viability—is centered in the food sector. Old-line mega-corporations such as Wal-Mart, Kraft, and Coca-Cola, are bestirring themselves to respond to new consumer desires and preferences.

Obviously, a lot of work remains to be done to consolidate and extend the claims of Round 1. However, I believe it’s time organizers and leaders start shifting to Round 2. A good hockey player (if I could switch metaphors from boxing to hockey) plays where the puck is, says Wayne Gretzky, one of the best players the game has produced. But a great hockey player, he says, plays where the puck is going to be.

What follows in this opening section is my assessment of what can be learned from my experience at the Toronto Food Policy Council to guide people looking for food movement goal posts in the decade ahead.

A decade is a good timeframe to use for food, because sharp turns don’t happen in an industry that is driven by heavy-duty infrastructure and is directed to customers who’ve done certain things by habit for most of their lives. Bill Gates’ statement to the effect that we usually overestimate what can happen in two years, but underestimate what can happen in a decade certainly applies to food. So how does the food movement move to next-generation infrastructure and habits so we can over-achieve over the next decade?

Round 2 is New

I have no knowledge based on sifting through organic fair trade tea leaves, but it’s already clear that Round 2 will be more complex than Round 1. Perhaps it will be more of a grind, because the essence of Round 2 is that victories in expanding both supply and markets will become embedded in structures, systems, and cultures.

Organizations that make the breakthrough to become great, according to business analyst Jim Collins,⁴ build a flywheel that churns out successes with the momentum of a system behind it, without having to create one-offs from scratch every time a need arises.

Organizations become great because they have built structures, systems, habits and cultures that do the plodding work of day-by-day logistical miracles, and therefore offer leaders of organizations time and space to deal with emerging opportunities and challenges. In the food sector, such organizations would provide the capacity to scale up (develop greater volumes) and scale out, (develop a wider customer base) and take on substantial public education, lobbying projects and the crucial work of addressing the food security and health needs of the mainstream public.

There’s nothing out of the ordinary about the shift to Round 2. It’s the norm in the lifecycle of any enterprise, and it’s straight out of Public Health 101. People who study the history of consumer products know there is a cycle that begins with intense interest among new adopters—which corresponds to Round 1 of the new food scene.

Then comes the equivalent of Round 2 when the supporters of the new product expand greatly in number, but demand such qualities as solid and reliable performance, convenient access, good prices, and so on—the kinds of infrastructure-based services early adopters and enthusiasts don’t worry about.

Likewise, in public health thinking, the solid qualities of workability, convenience and infrastructure are more important than people knowing in their mind what’s right. Anyone who is paying attention knows it’s wrong to get drunk often, wrong to smoke cigarettes, wrong to skip vegetables and fruit, and wrong to feed babies formula. But a 2013 report on health habits in the Greater Toronto Area noted several danger signs in everyday lifestyles, including increases in binge drinking and casual smoking and decreases in breastfeeding and fruit and vegetable