food system

A parking lot sprouts a vibrant community

Big Yellow Taxi

Big yellow taxi was one of the first Canadian songs I learned.  A friend of mine had a copy of Ladies of the Canyon where the song was first released.  Its environmental theme appealed to me and its catchy chorus became forever etched into my memory.  From that point on, any cursory glance at parking lots would bring back Joni Mitchell’s playful alliteration:

They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot.

Love Without Justice

For the past 11 years, ReFrame Film Festival has served us an amazing platter of engaging, insightful, moving and tasty stories.  Every year the Festival helps us gain a deeper understanding of critical issues related to human rights, the arts, environment and social justice, all framed through the lens of the best film-makers in Canada and beyond.  This time, festival organizers sprinkled an extra dosage of delicious offerings: nine food films!  Truly a bumper crop!

Green Your Plate While Growing a Healthy Food System... One Recipe At A Time

Want to prepare some delicious recipes, follow 7 Days of Green.  Today's recipe is served by Kawartha Choice FarmFresh.

While Greening Your Plate you may be interested in discovering how you can Green Your Week.  As you will see from the calendar, there are many activities for everyone.  I had the opportunity, yesterday, to join community gardeners at the Stewart Street garden.

Peterborough is sprouting a new library

Seed Saver

As I sat with Jill last week I learned how she fell in love while interning.  This love affair forever transformed her life.  Truth be told, it was not quite love at first sight, but almost.  The farm she had selected for her internship was well-known for its heirloom tomatoes and one of Jill's roles there was to save thousands of seeds from all these tomatoes.  "That's a bit of a gross job," Jill tells me, "there's lots of fermentation, there's mold but then when it clears out, you see all the seeds."

Vital Signs

Under the leadership of the Community Foundation of Greater Peterborough, Vital Signs brought together community leaders and stakeholders, professional consultants and statisticians, as well as everyday citizens in assessing our regional vitality. The purpose is to understand and evaluate how we, as a community, are doing across a number of “issue areas,” while helping us identify significant trends, and highlight our community’s needs and strengths.

The Local Food Act

On Tuesday, the Ontario government re-tabled a bill that had been lost to the proroguing of the legislation in 2012.  The Local Food Act, also known as Bill 130, is now being reintroduced in the Ontario Legislature.  

The Act starts with the following preamble:

ReFrame's food offerings

In the past nine years, I've come to greatly anticipate the last weekend in January. It's the weekend of the ReFrame Film Festival and I know I'm going to be challenged, moved, questioned, propelled to act about something that had escaped my awareness previously. I feel very grateful to the amazing team of staff and volunteers who pull this event together. Without their commitment and hard work, I would never be able to enjoy the incredible diversity of socially engaged documentaries that the festival brings to our community.

Kitchen Literacy - Part III

Kitchen Literacy illustrates that our relationship with food has undergone radical changes in the past 150 years.  Nothing is static... which means that everything can always change.  Indeed, we are seeing lots of new changes taking place in the food system.  By joining community gardens, shopping at farmers' markets, enrolling in CSAs or food box programs, people are starting to alter how they consume food or connect to it.

Pages

Subscribe to food system