Again it's Lin Roberts.

I introduced you previously, to the seven elements of the Food Policy Council and

seven functions.

And I don't have a seven this time, I gotta a nine and

I'm breaking that seven rule.

I want to give nine explanations as to why I think the Food Movement generally and

the Food Policy Council in particular, are spreading and

some of the kinds of work they do.

And what you might hope to do yourself as a health professional, in this field.

Now, you may remember from the last slide.

I showed the African food basket and

that's of course a pun with a Can with a capital C, like we Can.

And then I wrote a book sometime ago called the no nonsense guide to world

food, and the introduction is called "I eat, therefore I Can",

which is [LAUGH] I think, therefore, I am.

But, I didn't know that Obama was actually going to steal that slogan and say,

"Yes, We Can".

But I'm happy he did, it's a great concept and

that's the first spirit behind the food movement, is that people are looking for

an issue where they can make a difference, where they can do something.

And that is the, I believe, it's an animating drive in the food movement.

It's why, it's so rich with young people in the sort of 16 to 28 category.

They're looking for a place to make their mark on the world and do something,

where everything else seems hopeless or.

And so food is such an issue, it lends itself to that for reasons I'll explain.

And so, it taps into that.

I'm a Canadian I'm not partial, non-partisan,

I could say about US politics.

And so I don't mean to disproportionately weigh it this way.

But you want to take a "Yes We Can" example, it is Yes We Can,

the government may or may not do certain things with Agricultural and

health policy but we can all garden.

And that's the story that came out there, and

I believe it's a really powerful vehicle of communication and public education,

and from the food policy council point of view I would say,

this is the issue is the glass half full of half empty?

Or my daughter would say,

"no, the container is twice a big as it needs to be".

[LAUGH] But if you're not overly philosophical,

most people are asking, is the glass half-full or half-empty?

For food policy councils and food activists, the glass is half-full.

We are dealing with the power we have, not the power we don't have.

I could talk to you for years about the power that we don't have.

But I want to talk to you about the power we do have.

And what we can expand on, through food policy councils.

And, that's what she is doing, she may not have or

her husband may not have the power to change our healthcare system, or USDA or

whatever but, everybody's got some power that they can work with.

And there's a great social worker who came up with a similar concept,

around working with populations that are disadvantaged.

The way that we use the word disadvantaged to describe them, and

he said you don't go into those communities and say what are your needs.

You go into those communities and you ask what are your gifts?

And then we'll build the strategy around your gifts, not around your problems.

And that's, I believe, the food policy council "Yes We Can" attitude.

And I think that that is catching on.

The second reason why people I think are attracted to food issues in general and

food policy councils is that, there is a need for a lens that allows you to make

sure that food does not fall between the cracks of systems, which are not working.

So in farms they have silos, and in the food policy we have silos.

There are hundreds of specialties, all of which go up and down and

none of which go sideways.

And as a consequence, some of the more important issues fall between the cracks.

And so we need a group like a food policy council,

which reflects the breadth of the food movement but also provides a lens and

goes to somebody in the traffic department or somebody in the water department,

who thinks that their stuff has nothing to do with food.

Yes it does.

Have you ever thought of trying to grow food without water, for a while?

But somehow, food and water departments are never together, and so

we need these lands.

That's the second reason I believe, especially among,

I would say city functionalities who are trying to

seriously think through how to solve the problems they realized you know what,

the departments we have no longer mirror reality.

And we need a new body that does mirror, and that's what a food policy council is.

The third one will take a while before this sinks in.

It's an inflatable dart board [LAUGH], and that in my opinion is the problem

solving strategy of our society which is that, you get the target.

But when you do, [LAUGH] the balloon fizzles out.

And I think in the movie "Food Inc.", there's a lovely line that said,

we have mastered getting the target by the time we hit it, it's the wrong place.

And so public health and food, we are crowded with examples of that.

So one of the issues that we deal with a lot for example,

is the question of street food.

Well, we don't have the healthy street foods they have in many societies

particularly in Asia and Africa, because in the city of Toronto until very

recently, the only foods you could sell on the street were hotdogs and ice cream.

You're like well guys either heart disease or cancer, whats your preference?

But, t's safe from the point of view of microbes.

If that's the only issue of food health and safety.

Then that's how you manage it, but we're looking at that rubrics cube again.

And so, we've been counter productive and, in fact,

you could say the rise of the fast food industry is due to the health regulations

that have prevented other means of getting healthy fast food, in the hands of people.

So, in medicine they use the term side effect.

Yes, this is supposed to help you with your wart.

On the other hand, your hair fell out.

And so, that's not a side effect,

that's just an effect that you didn't want to happen.

And so, public health and health are loaded with side effects,

because they don't have a broad enough lens, and

because they don't have a sense of the system.

And that's why people who are interested in being problem solvers are starting to

say, you gotta think a little bit bigger than the problem and look at the system.

If I go to a doctor and say it hurts here, the doctor does not say,

well that's the only place I'm going to look.

The doctor says well you know what,

that part that hurts is part of a larger system.

And like icebergs, most of that stuff is beneath the surface, so

I'm going to look a little beyond where it hurts.

And that's what people who are thinking seriously about diagnosing city problems,

thinking the same system way.

And that's why I think again among five-fold bureaucrats and functionaries

are looking wow, we need some new ways and let's try out this food counsel thing.

Now, I think that there's more openness to thinking about things in systems,

and then young people- [SOUND].

Well, there we go.

Perfectly timed to make my point.

[LAUGH] And,

we've all seen the rise of the BlackBerry and the iPod.

When the iPod came on and everyone thought the BlackBerry was, as you know is made

in Canada was going to go bankrupt, but instead their sales tripled.

Because now the BlackBerry came out of being just for business, and now it's for

consumer use.

And what we see with this is an incredible system change, and that is it.

Once we had phones in our home,

and then you had piles of notepaper to take all sorts of other things down.

And then you had electronic things that took down all your addresses and

meetings, but you had a separate mobile phone.

And now we have mobile computers that do everything and I think at last count,

iPhone has 60,000 applications.

And, but it's going so fast that you can keep track of it.

And so what we all seen in front of our eyes,

within 15 years is the development of the entirely new system of telecommunication

that merges information, entertainment, communication the whole works.

And so we see what system changes is about.

And I think that food is a system, it's the original web,

www connecting the whole world together .com,

and we have tens of thousands of applications for food as well.

And I think people are getting that system.

View.

So that's the third reason why I think these ideas are spreading,

is there's a sense of a need for system change, system understanding.

The fourth reason is that one of the things that makes food distinctive is

that it has what I call bureaucratically multiple entry points,

you can come at this from any way you want.

And I don't care what your issue is, I'll find a food connection to it.

[LAUGH] And so what food has is a multiplicity of entry points,

and there's an incredible richness and breadth of resources.

And what that means for people who are involved in the policy business is that we

need to have a partnership concept of how we work together,

it's not the old hierarchy that goes down,

it's partnerships that go abroad, just like nature works.

And I wanted to just give you a quick sampling of some of the resources,

and some of the magic, I call it, of the food.

This is a fantastic group called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida,

mostly Mayan or Mexican farm laborers living in desperate poverty.

And they, to solve their problem, developed a partnership, which is with

some of the biggest consumers of tomatoes which is the product they sell.

Whole Foods, Burger King, all the big chains, and they made the case to them

that if you paid a cent and a half more for a pound of tomatoes,

we can have healthcare and pensions, and increase our standard of living by 50%.

For one and a half cents a pound, who can not do that?

And if they didn't want to do it voluntarily as in this case,

they had called for a boycott of them.

But one after another now, the big chains are doing it.

So what an unusual way to organize poor people, is to form a partnership

with the major consumers who will help you enforce that principle.

So this is sort of an example of the kind of unusual resources you can bring

to an issue, I call food is a blended family.

Sometimes we use the word, and Laurie will use this more,

is a community of practice that we're trying to establish, which is very porous,

and the porosity explains why the popularity is spreading.

I'll give you another example of the breadth.

This is an old, dear friend, Kate, who developed breast cancer,

knew about food, was interested in food.

And when she had to go in for her chemotherapy, all her

friends mobilized to raise money to help her family through that situation and

to provide them with as many casseroles [LAUGH] as was possible.

And when she got through with her treatment, she organized

a Good Food Box specially designed for women undergoing cancer treatment.

And just by sheer act of serendipitous synchronicity, we got the idea

to do this one night when I was up trying to figure out this issue with my wife.

I came to work the next day and

the woman next to me does the Breast Cancer Coalition and

she said you know what, I just got $1 million from a bank on breast cancer.

And I said can I have $60,000 to use that as a pilot from Food Share to do this and

she said bingo, one phone call later this program was started and

there's Kate delivering the food.

So this is the kind of breadth of resources that you can

bring if you've got an organization which is open to move with the possibilities.

This is the result of the, in my opinion, of having taught breastfeeding to

the young mothers on our street which is then the street got organized.

So they may say, I think Mrs. Clinton used to say, that it takes a village to raise

a child, but it also takes children to raise a village.

[LAUGH] And so out of that, the street came together and

now we have a thing with no worry about drinking and driving,

every Christmas season we have a progressive dinner.

If you Google it you'll be amazed,

it's like 1.5 million sites of progressive dinners, and food in other words

is bringing this resource that at the neighborhood level you form a community.

And that's a resource we want to tap into for

its maximum benefits, one is of course it reduces drinking and

driving, eliminates the problem, it's just drinking and walking.

So the fourth part of that four thing again of the resources,

is of course at every age you eat, at every income level you eat,

at every ethnocultural level, at every religious level.

And so it's a way that you can bring people together again,

it's this multiplicity of entry points.

And here we have on a farmer's market day some kids are down and

we have some fairies that are teaching them about all the different foods.

And you can see wow, is it ever hard to get their attention, hey?

[LAUGH] You just see how they're just drawn right into it, and

how powerful this would be within a school curriculum.

So there's a fifth reason why this is spreading,

and I find this pretty remarkable.

I just found these graphics from Ancient Egypt, and

the thing about food is that it links to all the key aspects of the urban agenda,

and maybe I could just say a word here about the difference.

The big business change that took place in the middle of the century is

until the 1950s people used to make something and

then they would try to sell it, and then in the 1950s they started to market.

And the difference between marketing and selling is that

with marketing you find out what people want and then you make it [LAUGH].

And what food people do, is they are like the people who have a product and

they're trying to sell it, and what we need to become is marketers.

And so my view about food, and what a food policy council does,

is that it goes to a city and

says what are your needs, and what can we do in food to solve your problem?

I'm not asking you to solve my problem, I know you're already overbooked.

So I wanted to talk here, and it's the fifth point about why it's spreading,

is we can solve the city's problem, I'm not asking the city to solve our problem.

And so the food does a lot of things for

a city, I'll give you a trivial example of this.

When cities first started to form they would have three streets crossing,

three roads would cross and that's where they would form a farmer's market.

And then the farmers would set up,

and people would come along and they would gossip, and talk, and whatever.

And what do you think trivia is, tri meaning three, and via meaning road.

So you would be amazed at the number of words in our language that reflect

the sociability of food.

Companion for example, is com meaning with, and pane meaning bread.

When you have a board for an organization, of course it comes from the old raping and

pillaging Vikings, who that was their word for table,

that's where people met to make decisions around the table.

So our culture is inundated with the legacy of

the archaeology of when we remembered that food and coming together were one and

the same thing, and then we have segregated that out of the food equation.

But you cannot have a society, you can have a city of buildings but you can't

have a city without food, because food is where people come together.

And just to give an example of an issue that food can deal with and

that people never think about, approximately 20% of car trips

are made to buy food, just think about your own life and it'll ring true for you.

And we need a scientific study in every city to establish it's not our due.

Well, if you were trying to think as a transportation planner,

one would be to say how do I get more roads or widen the roads so

that people can continue to drive to get food?

Or you might say how do I eliminate all those unnecessary trips by making food

more accessible?

because the issue is not that people want to drive to the store it's that they

want to get to a store, and if they can get there by foot they will.

And so if you look at it from the City of Toronto point of view,

here's the math to do in every city.

We're committed to spending $1 billion over ten years to repair roads.

That's $100 million a year, even I can figure that out,

one-fifth of that is $20 million a year.

So, I am saying,

why don't we earmark $20 million a year to making that food trips unnecessary.

So therefore, the road repairs are unnecessary.

That's what I call a green-jobs strategy.

How it begins to take shape is we're going to take some money that we're now,

really blowing up in smoke to be literal about it, and put it into a good use.

Well, we can have lots of corner stores,

which are much more labor intensive than the big stores substituting for a fuel.

So here's a picture of a typical traffic jam and

there's probably no city in North America or

the world that doesn't have a traffic jam and part of the cause of that of course is

road repair and the fuel is wasted while you go zero miles per hour.

But the other huge waste of it is time.

And calculations for

most cities over a million are that it's somewhere in the area of a billion dollars

a year is lost while you're paying a truck driver, and all these people,

the school bus driver, and whatever are being paid to sit on their rear end.

Like normally you don't say, I'm happy [LAUGH] to pay you for an hour while you

sit on your rear end but you do if you're sending them out in traffic.

And so what if we calculate that and say, well,

okay, one-fifth of those trips are for cars.

Now we've got it at about $200 million a year which we can add on

to the $20 million.

That's a lot of money to play with to create alternatives

to a long distance food system.

Not only long distance from California to Baltimore, but

long distance from your area of town to the area where there's a food store.

So this is how you start to think as we may say

out of the box when we start to look at food as a source of new, green employment.

Toronto's one of the few cities in North America to have street cars.

That's relic from the pre World War II days.

And the interesting thing about streetcars,

which are making a bit of a revival, is that streetcars are on the street.

That's where streetcars come from.

[LAUGH] And subways, by contrast, are under the street.

Subway's are the through ways of public transit, that is they go through the city.

Street cars go in the city and so to build a street car is way cheaper

then to build a subway because to build a subway you have to go underground and

it's costs billions of dollars for very modest distances.

Street cars by contrast are many times more efficient because it's all

above ground.

And moreover you're given the nicer view to the people who are doing

the right thing taking public transit.

But you can't have street cars without streetscapes.

You've got to have living streets otherwise you can't have streetcars

if people just want to go through, you gotta do a subway.

And so how do you build a living street?

How do you build a streetscape for streetcars?

Food is the anchor of all malls, and

it has to be the anchor of a main street in the mom and pop groceries and

the healthy bodega movement, which got some real potential.

So you need a not from the point of view of food,

you need it to create a street, so you can have public transit.

You need coffee shops and that's part of a street in which people are engaged.

And so, the concept I'm trying to work with right now is that

we used to talk in the 1950s about what were called the commanding heights,

that you had to control the banks, the steel companies and the auto industry.

And the central bank and you could control how things work.

And I say our view is now what is the commanding hubs.

The little places where people congregate in which

little nodules of power can be formed.

And so this is part of a living street scene and

every city should try to have one.

It's what in web language we call, making a sticky site.

Okay, some place where you hang around, and say, I better hope on a streetcar.

Right, I don't want to be paying $1.25 to park here while I have a coffee,

when I got my pass that'll get me off and on whenever I want to go.

And likewise, street vendors are part of a living street.

Drive throughs are not.

They are part of a thing that you are driving through the city, it's for your

convenience so you don't mind polluting the air of the people who live near.

But street food is part of a pedestrianized environment.

And so the whole concept of the new public health I believe,

hinges on the issue of what's called the environmental support.

We're trying to make the right thing to do the easy thing to do,

the affordable thing to do, the fun thing to do.

And so food is part of getting a city,

preparing the ground one might say for public transit.

Just to switch issues totally, another urban function is beautification.

and food production is a form of beautification which I call or

many people call edible landscaping, okay.

You can eat it but it looks good too and towards serving more than one function.

Here I'm taking a tour of people from Botswana which has the highest AIDS rate

in Africa who partnered with the [city of Toronto on how to do more AIDS prevention.

And I took the money toward to show them how engage youth through gardening and

to provide education about life, protecting yourself and

the like in the course of that.

So it's not a I'm going to scare the daylights out of you about getting AIDS,

just come on and gardened and in the course of that,

we're going to talk about some things that are going to help you look after yourself.

And also to be honest it was because when the parents get AIDS then of course

the next thing you gotta thinking about is how the kids going to live.

And so the gardening thing become the important part

of being able to feed the orphans that were produced out of that crisis.

So it was a two-way thing.

Not a beautiful idea necessarily but

it's part of a beautification motive of urban agriculture.

And we are very fortunate to see we have a beautification planner.

Original planner was to be in charge of the Clean and Green Program.

Toronto is obsessed with being clean.

That's why they said New York run by the Swiss.

But she came to believe that beauty was not skin deep and that you become

beautiful as a part of a city because people have a sense that they own you and

care about you and if they do then they will make it beautiful and

if they don't they will let it be ugly.

And so she came to believe that community gardening was a vehicle for

beautification.

Not just that it's edible landscape but that it changed the psychology of an area.

And let me show you this.

This is what is called a vacant space which we like to say there is no such

thing as a vacant space only a vacant mind.

Okay so somebody who does not see that that's an unused capacity so

green city very involved in urban agriculture worked with teens who were

having problems and that's how that area was transformed into a garden.

And that's how they did it.

And this is how they were transformed.

So they're now helping younger kids learn about food.

In a book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and

then the eighth habit which follows that was to help other people find their voice.

This is the great gift and so that this is what this young woman is able to do

through this program of beautification.

Is that what we would call it or beautification of people or of scenery?

What is it?

This one of the older community gardens.

A lot off times this movement is put down as a yuppie movement, so

here's a bunch of yuppies [LAUGH] from Regent Park,

which is the largest social housing project in North America.

So it started in a pretty low income area, but they wanted to get a sense of

What they had in common and remember their heritage and adapt it to Canada.

They did it in this very beautiful garden.

So, in other words,

this is not just a tool for health in the conventional sense of nutrition.

It's about the health of a city in terms of beautification.

Now, the biggest use of water in the world is food.

And we may we think that we use a lot of water washing our hands,

washing our dishes, going to the washroom, etc.

But the biggest water we use of all is in the food that we eat.

And I think it's no secret to say that the world we are entering into is a world in

which many key resources that we now take for granted which are priced very low.

Are going to become very scarce, and one of them is oil and one of them is water.

And one of the new books that's out is

by the author of a book on oil scarcity, it's called Peak Everything.

[LAUGH] probably by 2050, we're not going to just face peak oil,

we're going to face peak fish, peak water.

There's going to be a lot of peaks.

And the test of whether a city can survive and

survive well is does it have resilience?

And resilience is, I believe, the next big thing in public policy and

in food security and public health planning.

And it has to do with the fact that not are you prepared for this problem or

that problem.

But do you, as an individual, have the core strength, the inner strength,

to withstand whatever challenge is thrown your way, and come out the better for it?

And applied to society, does society have the resilience to bounce back, to get

off the mat, and rise to the challenges without degrading into barbarism.

And that may be a challenge of this century, and I believe that food

is the key training ground in which cities will build resilience.

And that will prove to be their greatest contribution to public health.

And I believe it will be so because of this concept of the commanding hubs.

That food allows us to build Cheers type meeting places,

community food centers, streetscapes that work,

community gardens that are beautifying as well as feeding people.

And that's where people will develop the skills,

the core strength we would say in yoga for resilience.

So that's another reason why I think it's spreading among people who are thinking

about resilience, which is the new buzzword.

Now I want to just move on to the environment.

And there's several ways in which food connects to the environment.

And one is that,

as people who are studying urban problems seriously know sprawl is a big problem.

The answer to sprawl is not one that makes too many people happy,

it is that the city must become more dense, or more intensified.

Most people think that downtown is already too dense and intensified.

Well, roofs are part of the answer to that, and

we got a new place to create green space in the city virtually for free.

And it can have lots of nice things to it,

even without being flat it can have room for goats and whatever.

And I believe strongly in what is called the biophilia

hypothesis which is that people need to be close to nature.

You see little kids, they're always grabbing onto animals.

They love rolling around in the grass.

This is part of what we are as a species.

And so I believe that food provides us with the economics that make

the availability of green space viable to solve our biophilia need.

It's not that my opinion that it solves a food production problem,

because we got more food than we know what to do with it.

It solves our biophilia problem and

has the square foot economics that can say, yeah we can give that space up.

So, that's one side of the issue.

The other is what is called waste incorrectly.

About one-third of what is incorrectly called the waste or

garbage problem is related to food.

And I believe a food council brings three things which are increasingly

getting resonance.

One is waste not, want not.

About somewhere between 20-40% of the food that most people in North America and

Europe buy goes to the garbage with nothing wrong with

it other than that you treated your fridge as a composter.

[LAUGH] And just never got round to eating it, because you bought way too much.

So that's a big chunk of waste, and I estimate in my book, The No-Nonsense Guide

to World Food, that about 50% of the food that is produced in the world is wasted.

We can solve a lot of problems with 50% of the money that's spent on food and

with 50% of the food eliminate hunger overnight.

So waste not, want not.

The second is, which I learned from Abby Rockefeller,

the founder of Clivus Multrum composting toilets.

Waste is a verb, not a noun.

[LAUGH] We waste, there is no waste in nature, we waste.

And it's our decision to make it into waste.

Related, but I'll call it the third point is pollution is a right

resource in the wrong place, namely a garbage can.

If you put it all into one place it has no value because it costs too much to

segregate it and make use of it.

But food is one-third of what we call waste.

Even though it has all sorts of incredible things.

The packages can be recycled or reused.

And the food itself can be composted.

So I don't accept that it is waste, and

I don't accept that some of the waste should have happened.

One of the areas where people are starting to move is packaging waste.

In Ontario, just so you know how the numbers multiply in this.

We used four billion plastic bags a year, and

now we charge five cents per plastic bag.

And five cents, is that a lot of money in this country, in this continent,

I don't think so.

But man, it dropped like a stone, because people don't want to pay five cents for

a plastic bag.

Damn you, I'm going to bring my cotton bag and reuse it.

Okay if you have to.

So we use in [INAUDIBLE] one million paper coffee cups a day.

I mean the numbers are just so staggering.

And we can eliminate all this stuff.

So that's the first point, we can move towards systems that reduce this waste.

Now one of the interesting things isif you look at, this is where you need a lens.

If you look at garbage or materials as a recycling problem or a getting rid of

garbage problem, it's different from looking at it as a resource challenge.

So the problem with our garbage department is they look at the garbage problem and

they need to look at it as a resource opportunity.

And when you do that, then you say well how can we use this as a tool?

So just think of this weird irony and think about the Rubix cube.

We take a light plastic package which is ideally suited for

long distance travel and we pick it up for nothing and recycle it at great expense.

In fact, all cities lose money on recycling.

What we are doing, in effect, is subsidizing long distance shipping of

pop and other goods which are doing us no good for our health.

We are subsidizing them by dealing with their garbage problem that they produce,

and we are paying for it out of taxpayer's money.

because we have defined this as a garbage problem.

if we instead said well, wait a minute, you want it in plastic bottles,

you put it in plastic bottles, you pay for figuring out what to do with it.

And we'll use our money to do green jobs.

And that's a flip that we need to make in the way we think about policy.

We have the assets at our hands.

We are blowing this money.

Toronto actually sends about 20% of its recycled products to Asia to be recycled.

I mean the mileage that this stuff goes through is staggering because

the poundage of plastic is low but the volume is high.

And so we got the money but

we're using it to subsidize pop companies which are killing us.

That's the challenge for public policy.

On the waste thing, so just so

you know the magic of food is it can turn a problem into multiple solutions.

And so you can have a lot of food scraps in your garbage, goes to landfill.

As it rots without access to oxygen,

creates methane which is 22 times more powerful

than carbon dioxide as global warming, or you got the next generation of soil.

Or if you're really smart, you give your food scraps to pigs and chickens.

And they convert it into protein and into their own quote unquote waste which

is even richer than compost in terms of fertilizing the soil.

So you create a solution instead of creating a problem.

So, we got this power, it's at the end of a fork.

And the last element I'll give as an example,

is that food policy counts as work to promote local and sustainable food.

And Laurie later will explain why local and

sustainable need to go together like love and marriage.

[LAUGH] Horse and carriage.

And just in terms of my issue that I try to introduce this

on about the power you have, and the power you don't.

North American universities are the 27th largest economic power in the world.

In the Spring of 2009, we had a meeting of the top 20 economic powers in the world.

If they had made it the top 30 they could have included the Universities

of North America.

That is one big powerhouse of economic demand.

And it's coming to the fore on the food issue and their students are asking for

a local and sustainable food.

So we're in favor of meeting that demand.

That's where there's a big job production.

So I want to talk a bit about jobs now if I can.

There's Jamie Oliver.

You know who he is, and I like him and what he does.

And I believe we are role models for a new food economy and

one of the things we need to do in our society is to restore

the dignity of honest work and the pride of honest work.

You don't have to be a currency trader to be cool.

[LAUGH] And so I think that's what Jaime Oliver and

a lot of the so-called celebrity chefs are doing, and

they're giving the young people something to look up to.

So main streets I've talked about before as an important part of life.

There's the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker.

And so that's who you need on a main street to have a goods streetscape and

a good street transit system.

And so this is where these things belong, not in plastic bags but in paper bags,

because the bread that has been made that morning is going to be eaten that night.

And artisans are the key to restoring the food system, I believe,

that people who built all the beautiful 19th century buildings were artisans, and

the people who made many 19th century foods, their methods are being restored,

are the artisans, the indies or independents.

And the important thing to know about food in a food economy is that,

if it's a non-chain, more money stays in the local economy.

And that's been established, it's about a 20% increase.

Namely, the non-chain,

this person's going to have to hire a local printing company, a local graphics

design company, a local lawyer and a local accountant, and the big chain is not.

They're going to hire one in their main headquarters in town which is probably

2000 miles away.

So, when you have local producers, they are always hiring a wider range of talent,

and secondly they're keeping the money circulating within that local economy.

A study's been done in Seattle,

which establishes that if Seattle people bought 20% of their food as local food,

now Seattle is one of the fruit baskets and seed baskets of the world so

this is not exactly a huge challenge and it's a moderate climate,

they would add $1 billion of economic power to the community.

Roughly translated, that's 20,000 jobs.

So, you can make a lot of stuff happen in this local food scenario.

And we often think of jobs or work as competitive, but

I believe in the food economy the more the merrier and viva la difference.

So this a halal butcher.

So every area has a variety of communities,

all of which have their favorite foods, and there are niche markets for everyone.

And the more that developed, the more that come on.

And so we have, as part of our Toronoto food charter,

is the right of people to have culturally appropriate food.

And I think that's an important right in the global world that we live in.

And from a job point of view,

we're going to have what I would call glocal foods.

They're glocally inspired.

Cook globally, eat locally, [LAUGH] might be one way of putting it.

And I might say that, in terms of how we frame that,

what we're trying to do in the city of Toronto is not call it ethnic food.

Ethnic food is what people who came from immigrants 60 years ago

called people who come from immigrants today.

The word we're trying to use is intra-cultural,

because it's not really about this group or that.

We're all trying to learn from each other by learning from each other's food system.

Food is great for job preparation for kids who may not know where they're going with

their life, and it can teach a whole variety of skills.

So it's key in that way.

It's key to what's called the creative economy.

One example would be culinary tourism.

So people are not going to come to my city, or your city,

in order to see the same box stores and chains that they have in their own town.

You gotta have something different, and

it's part of moving the food system from quantity to quality.

And creatives are going to play an important in that.

And, just so you know, it goes way beyond food.

And Baltimore is a city that's known for its incredible world renowned

higher education, but about 20% of youth work in food.

So you can have a city with higher education, which Toronto is as well,

Boston is, San Francisco is, Los Angeles is.

These are all good jobs, but you can't have them unless the students who

are going to them have jobs in the food industry.

So it's in the interest of the community to have a very well functioning, not what

is called a McJob economy, but a creative economy that pays students well and

gives them a skill that they can use for the rest of their days as well.

And finally, there are jobs in food production.

And there's many ways that you can slice, and one is that people can make a living

as food produced by growing very high quality, high value added, rare,

unusual things that people will pay enormous prices for per pound.

Another is that you consume a lot of waste in food production, you can take a lot of

compost, a lot of grey water and the like, and so they can get paid at both ends for

taking the waste off somebody's hands and for producing food.

And the third, my preferred way which I've just started to explore,

is that people who work, let's say, in a higher education center and

are finding their life going a little bit harried working five days a week,

can volunteer to work four days a week.

The government will pay them unemployment insurance for

the one day a week that they're unemployed.

because they don't care whether their paying four people to be unemployed for

one day or one person to be unemployed for five, it's the same math.

And then you'll use your fifth day to be a community gardener and

cover your minor loss in salary with your own food that you're producing.

You've got a nicer and calmer life.

So that's my way, is that urban agriculture is the way to move to the four

day week long overdue in North America.

Why the Food Movement is Spreading

An Introduction to the U.S. Food System: Perspectives from Public Health

Meet the Instructors