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Kameshwari Pothukuchi and Jerome Kaufman’s classic article on food and planning was designed to influence city planners’ thinking about the importance of food (Pothukuchi and Kaufman 1999; Pothukuchi and Kaufman 2000). It probably had as much influence on Good Food advocates’ understanding about cities. Both city planners and Good Food advocates face challenges in thinking about the relevance of the other group’s specialization. Food is not usually identified as an issue under the formal jurisdiction of cities, with few exceptions such as city or county responsibility for restaurant food safety and food waste. Moreover, cities are deemed too parochial and under-resourced to support the policy capacity and implementation resources needed to govern nutrition, health, or food security. Beyond such considerations, the lack of imagination resulting from professional over-specialization is a major barrier to more interactive conversation, learning, and partnership among city planners and Good Food advocates. The Pothukuchi-Kaufman article of 2000 (Pothukuchi and Kaufman 2000) created an opportunity to re-examine the many sides of the city-food relationship and to ask: what can cities, in their broadest sense, do for food, and what can food, in its broadest sense, do for cities? Such questioning opens up entire vistas of food and city understanding that were excluded from the framing used by food and city thinkers before Pothukuchi and Kaufman’s challenge. It takes two to tango, but someone has to first arrange for both to be on the same dance floor at the same time. Pothukuchi and Kaufman issued that invitation.

I came across the article on city planners’ lack of awareness about food’s relevance for cities shortly after it was published in 2000 (Pothukuchi and Kaufman 2000). It came out during a moment of intense turmoil for both me and the city I lived in, loved, and worked for. Municipal and social agencies in the newly-reminted City of Toronto were in the thick of serious rethinking about both food and cities. In 1998, the province of Ontario ordered old Toronto and the six suburban cities surrounding it to join in one centralized “megacity” – a new government that integrated a progressive, densely-populated and feisty downtown known across North America as “Toronto, the city that works” with several car-dominated, suburban and politically bland cities. It was more of a shotgun marriage than an amalgamation. Three weeks into my new job as coordinator of the 9-year-old Toronto Food Policy Council (TFPC), I was asked to serve as staff co-lead of the Food and Hunger Action Committee (FAHAC), which had the job of developing a positive and unifying policy to amalgamate food and hunger policy for the newly amalgamated city. For a brief moment, the brand-new city had no policy on anything, and enjoyed a golden opportunity to apply fresh thinking from Toronto’s politicians, civil servants, civil society organization and social service agencies to emerging food issues. Amalgamation, though unwelcomed by the great majority, was the equivalent of a Greenfield site that could be built up policy-wise, without any need to renovate or fit into old walls or stairways.

Permit me to quickly introduce FAHAC before proceeding to the way the FAHAC experience shaped my appreciation of Pothukuchi and Kaufman’s article. FAHAC was one of those Toronto-type institutional innovations that happened when someone fairly high up cajoled extremely busy and competent people to stretch themselves a little thinner with a project that they could handle off the side of their desk and by the seat of their pants – on the promise that something big and important could be stitched together in a tight situation. Once the cajoled person agreed, the cajoler lost all memory of any understanding as to commitment, authorization or resources. As the person cajoled to be staff lead for Toronto Public Health (TPH), I had to liaise with all public health staff while writing FAHAC policy from my perch as TFPC coordinator. My fellow staff co-lead, Susan Shepherd, represented the community and social development unit, and shepherded FAHAC proposals through her department and the city politicians responsible to City Council. Sean Meagher, assistant to the lead councilor on the file, Pam McConnell, stick-handled relations with community groups and the most engaged city councilors, We met or talked almost daily with bureaucrats, politicians and Kathryn Scharf, who was a community leader of FAHAC as well as the citizen chair of the TFPC and senior staffer with FoodShare, a rambunctious but respected community-based organization campaigning for food security. Implausible as it sounds, with about $10,000 cobbled together from various budgets to cover the costs of a copy editor, FAHAC produced three reports (2000, 2001, 2003) and a food charter, all unanimously adopted by City Council in the winter of 2001. Subsequently, to my chagrin, our Committee, reports and charter slid somewhere close to oblivion, and we were left to our own devices to keep the hope of implementation alive and live to fight another day – which I’ve come to accept as the most anyone could hope to accomplish in this neo-liberal era. (As a final indignity, the TFPC was denied a budget to adapt these reports to meet the needs of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, and the reports were withdrawn from City and Toronto Public Health sites; they are presently housed on the website of Sustain Ontario.)

I saw the Pothukuchi and Kaufman article through my FAHAC window. I used the article as a touchstone to feel my way in these early days. Afterwards, I consulted it often, using it as an intellectual anchor as I participated in various projects over the next 20 years. I’ve had the good fortune to participate in several milestone events of today’s global food and city scene – the shift in awareness as cities arrived as home to the majority of the world’s population and economic leadership in 2007; the crystallizing of food movements around such issues as local and sustainable food, slow food, and food justice; and forceful headwinds indicating a new era of food insecurity, inequality, and #ClimateEmergency. Few of these post-2000 events and developments were anticipated by the wisest articles published in the year 2000, including Kaufman and Pothukuchi’s. But I continue to feel debt and gratitude for what they wrote. The article set the bar for criticism that is informed, cool, calm, collected, and above all connected (to use Michael Walzer’s term for critiques offered affectionately from within the tradition they are challenging to improve) (Roberts 2019). The article invited everyone to participate in a new dialogue about food and city planning, while also providing a platform on which a new generation of both food and city activists could co-evolve together.

My experience as part of the leadership of Toronto’s FAHAC process from 2000 to 2003 convinced me that people engaged by food and hunger issues had at least as much to learn about the role of food in cities as city planners. The issues as well as the professionals associated with food and cities lived inside the silos and specialties of their solitudes. Without much fear of exaggeration, I would say that Good Food activists and advocates in 2000 were oblivious to the “citiness” of city food issues – every bit as much as city planners were oblivious to the “foodiness” of civic issues.

The most forceful civil society voices heard in those early days of the twenty-first century on food security topics came from “anti-hunger” or “anti-poverty” perspectives. In the professional public health world, the most forceful voices came from nutritionists or dietitians. Their ideology is best described as “nutritionism” – treatment of food as a vehicle for nutrients and fuel, and little else in terms of health or life impact. Both civil society and professional groups predated modern food movements, and were almost as indifferent to emerging food issues and organizations as they were to emerging realities and trends in urban life. If we are to appreciate how insightful is the Kaufman-Pothukuchi article, this deficiency in the thinking of Good Food advocates of the time is as important to understand as the deficiencies of planners’ thinking.

Pothukuchi and Kaufman’s article, for example, was premised on and referred explicitly to the existence of a “food system.” From a food system perspective, the specific characteristics of something such as hunger or food insecurity in economically developed societies are akin to specific qualities of an individual planet within the solar system. Hunger and food insecurity need to be seen as a product of an entire food system, much as the season or temperature of a planet depends on the operations of an entire solar system. I feel confident in claiming that few Toronto food activists or professionals outside the TFPC were familiar with food system thinking during the FAHAC years. Food activists of that day could have learned as much about food system thinking as about cities from reading the article on city planning.

As issues, food and hunger had equal billing in the name of Toronto’s Food and Hunger Action Committee, but hunger was by far the more visceral, gripping, and defining issue. This reflected the fact that hunger hit the city of Toronto hard and fast during the 1980s and 1990s – largely the result of the city losing its high-paying industrial base to outsourcing by global corporations. This trend afflicted many once-industrial cities across North America in the same time period, but the impact in Toronto was felt more intensely, thanks in large part to the city’s deserved reputation as “Toronto the Good.” A major street in downtown Toronto is called Church Street because of its many large churches. The most notorious aspect of this righteous reputation was a Sunday that until the 1990s virtually banned all but spiritually enhancing activities – a much-mocked tradition elsewhere in the country. Few appreciated that strict Sunday observance was one manifestation of the power of the social gospel tradition accepted by many Toronto Christians – an obligation in everyday and social life to live up to the social justice message embodied by Jesus. Cosmopolitans who championed open Sundays for shopping and entertainment often overlook that open Sundays mean compulsory work and the denial of family weekends for vulnerable workers. Thanks to the power of the social gospel in Toronto, a broad non-partisan consensus existed that hunger was morally intolerable, as were efforts to address hunger through charity rather than public policies which guaranteed food as a matter of human rights. The legacy of a radical social gospel constitutes one of the major cultural differences between Canada and the US, where a moralistic and individualistic religious tradition has been dominant since the 1950s. Mayor Art Eggleton occupied the center-right in Toronto municipal politics but his sense of religious duty compelled him to oppose hunger and food banks throughout his terms as mayor during the 1980s and throughout his subsequent 30-year career as a prominent Liberal in national politics.

Under Eggleton’s leadership, Toronto funded establishment of FoodShare, led by a United Church clergyman, as a charity charged with finding alternatives to food banks as the way to end hunger. A similar spirit underlay the first food bank, called Daily Bread, an obvious Biblical reference. This societal consensus led to widespread support for the formation of the TFPC in 1991, initiated by leading social democrats on City Council. The TFPC was established and staff were funded as a subcommittee of the public health department – the third FPC in the world, the first in a major city, and one of the few to this day funded by and lodged within a city. Much of the TFPCs first decade was devoted to developing policies and programs designed to “hunger-proof” cities (Koc et al. 1999) and find alternatives to food banks more in keeping with the dignity of individuals and the cohesion of a true community and a health-centered food system. This tradition was largely absent in the suburbs – falsely thought to be immune from hunger and homelessness, when in fact poverty and hunger were largely denied and ignored by municipal government leaders and staff. As a result of this city-suburban difference, the food security capability of politicians, civil servants, and civil society was substantially lower in the suburbs than in the city. People on low income facing hunger in the suburbs coined the popular saying within FAHAC circles – “the suburbs have downtown problems without downtown services.” The FAHAC was tasked with developing a consensus behind a unified understanding and institutional capacity to deal with hunger and food across the amalgamated city.

The FAHAC challenge that I and TFPC faced in this context was to preserve our food system perspective toward hunger and food security while avoiding conflict and division with people coming from an anti-hunger or anti-poverty perspective, and while convincing suburban councilors that food and hunger issues deserved to be ranked as priority municipal responsibilities. If relations within the Good Food advocacy community became sharply polarized, there was risk of a showdown that could derail the entire project of unifying the city behind food and hunger initiatives. Many a night, nightmare scenes of such a polarization woke me from a deep sleep. I feared that one group would insist that hunger was caused solely by poverty and that poverty was therefore THE overriding food issue to be corrected by the city, while another group would hold that malnutrition and other health disorders suffered by all populations across the city would not be lessened unless the city dealt with a much wider range of health-centered food system issues. Such a division with “the left” could create conditions where a more conservative and conventional view of city indifference to hunger and malnutrition would prevail.

1 The Poverty of Anti-poverty

Although I was fairly new to food system analysis myself – I only began to center my political organizing work around food in 1995, at the age of 51 – I knew enough to understand that an anti-poverty analysis of hunger and food insecurity was a truism that was false. Of course, poverty is the effective cause of food insecurity throughout North America. Hunger is certainly not caused by a scarcity of food. The continent is awash in food and food waste, and suffers more from overproduction than scarcity. Nor is hunger caused by the poor budgeting skills or inadequate cooking skills of people on low income. Minimum wages or social assistance programs simply do not provide any individuals with dependent children – no matter what their budgeting or cooking prowess – enough money to pay rent, pay for personal and household necessities, and afford frugal but adequate amounts of nutritious food. In the absence of adequate income, food inevitably becomes the most dispensable item in the tight budget of low-income and single income families. “Pay the rent or feed the kids” – that’s the constant dilemma of families on low income. Hunger is a sacrifice that allows people on low income to carry on with some form of settled life. By contrast, losing a place to live in is not something that can be recovered from. To this extent, an anti-poverty analysis of the immediate cause of food insecurity and hunger in North America and many other places in the world is absolutely correct.

Having said that, a simplistic and one-dimensional anti-poverty analysis lacks the framing of class or political economy perspective. While rhetorically radical in their highlighting of the role of poverty, anti-poverty proponents do not go beyond progressive liberalism and have policy views that are unintentionally consistent with basic tenets of neo-liberalism.

For food system advocates such as myself and most members of the TFPC, “cheap food policy” was on par with poverty as a factor leading to low quality food for all and low quantity and quality food for people on low and fixed incomes. Beginning with the industrial revolution in the United Kingdom during the 1800s, cheap food for underpaid industrial and urban workers has been a cornerstone of an increasingly dominant global food system. Nothing rivals the hegemonic if unstated policy of cheap food in determining food quantity or quality – or of rural poverty and urban poverty, usually concentrated among food workers and small farmers. Food industry wages to workers and food prices set for producers create huge pockets of poverty. Poverty is the first externalized price of a cheap food system – a price that is not captured in the money people pay for food, but which is paid for by degradation of human capital (aka health and well-being of people on low income) and physical capital – aka the environment. The economic and social problem with cheap food is that it makes food unaffordable for food workers, the largest grouping of employees in most cities, if food service and processing employees are counted together. It is not possible to develop a thoughtful food program countering or stemming the impact of food insecurity and chronic disease among people on low income without some recognition that impoverishment and low food quality are two sides of the same coin of a cheap food policy. Cheap food is made possible by industrialization of food production, processing and distribution only in a context that allows environmental and health costs of industrial food to be externalized to degraded food quality and a degraded environment. Cheap food is made possible by cheap tricks permitted by government failures to confront market failures.

The problems of food insecurity, especially severe among low-income populations but also commonplace among all groups, include chronic diseases as well as hunger and food deprivation. For people on low income, chronic disease due to low-quality food is the other side of the coin of poverty incomes set by a cheap food system. Rising rates of obesity since the 1990s, for example, flow from competitive necessities of holding the line on prices in a cheap food system. Low prices account for “razor-thin margins” prevalent in food companies. The most direct way to maintain profitability when margins are low is through volume sales that make up for low margins with high volumes. Indeed, many food businesses are referred to as volume-based businesses. That is a system characteristic, engrained in the food system. Ruthless competition means that few food companies can survive by demanding a premium price that recovers the full expenses and investment of quality goods and proper treatment of producers and the environment. Around the 1970s, companies realized that a strategic advantage in volume sales could be gained by selling more to each customer – not just by competing for more customers. The larger the bottle of pop or cup of coffee, the higher the return on each sale. Therein lies the drive for volume discounts in both Business-to-Business and Business-to-Consumer sales. In Business-to-Business sales, the pressure is to increase volume purchases from one purveyor (why McDonalds sells only Coke and KFC only Pepsi, for example). In Business-to-Consumer sales, this strategy succeeds by encouraging customers to eat more than their bodies need to thrive. That economic compulsion has an inevitable result – high levels of overweight and obesity among all population groups, and especially among low-income or marginalized groups. That trend drives runaway rates of chronic disease, leading to costs externalized to (and thereby subsidized by) public-funded health, social security and welfare programs. The poor suffer most from this obsession with volume sales, partly because low-nutrient/highly adulterated products have a lower sticker price, and partly because people on low incomes are least likely to have full coverage from employee benefit plans covering medical and dental plans and sick leave. The poor suffer twice from a cheap food system – once from adequate and nutritious food being unaffordable to them, and again from the illnesses resulting from deprivation of quality foods. A truly anti-poverty approach to food security, therefore, requires that attention be paid to inadequacies of the food system, not just inadequacies of income security programs. That, in a nutshell, is how a Toronto-style food system analysis is presented.

Aside from political economy limitations of a narrow anti-poverty approach to food insecurity and hunger, a narrowly anti-poverty approach produces unintended consequences leading to unproductive and ineffective social and public health policies. A focus on problems said to be caused solely by poverty commonly leads to government programs that are targeted to people on low incomes or people who are disadvantaged – the norm in the United States, but not in Canada or Europe. I became aware of this difference in public policy strategies during my prior career as a senior union official, when I read William Julius Wilson’s 1987 book, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass and Public Policy. Wilson argued that the US civil rights movements of the 1960s failed to usher in greater equality for African-Americans because of the US tradition of establishing separate, often stigmatizing, programs for people on low income (Wilson 1990). Programs for the poor inevitably became poor and stigmatized programs, Wilson argued, pushing people on low incomes into a permanent underclass. Canada, like Europe but unlike the U.S., followed a markedly more successful tradition of universal programs, Wilson argued. Thanks to universal programs in Canada, for example, there is one standard for healthcare. Healthcare is funded through progressive income taxes – which means that at tax time, the poor pay less than the rich. But at the doctor’s office or hospital, the poor and rich present as equals. And if the quality of healthcare deteriorates, the rich have the resources to lobby for improvements. The same principle applies to Canadian public education, which enjoys support across the population, with both rich and poor students going to public schools and public universities.

The point of universal programs is to affirm the universality of the principle of citizenship, and to decouple rights of citizens from the effects of poverty or wealth. Universal programs are sometimes referred to as part of “the social wage,” an entitlement due to all citizens. Among the many benefits of universal programs is acceptance of taxes as a cost of democracy and civilization. Countries with universal programs do not suffer from tax revolts and tax resistance on a scale common throughout the US, where many people at working class and middle-class income levels feel they are paying for services they do not have access to – a polarization that is corrosive of good public policy. As a result, public health advocates in Canada typically insist on universal programs such as school meals and community gardens, to ensure these programs are not stigmatized and are funded as public goods on an equitable and efficient basis, through the tax system. The existence of poverty-related food insecurity in Canada is seen as a sign of inadequate universal programs, such as free school meals, free meals at childcare facilities, free access to community gardens and so on, which shield all citizens from food insecurity. Likewise, problems related to the low nutritional quality of food are identified as problems common to the entire population, and not just of interest to specific income groups. People on low income, in brief, are first and foremost defined as citizens entitled to human rights and social inclusion, not as an economic interest group – “the poor.”

How does this digression into the intricate issues of anti-poverty and food system approaches to food insecurity affect the appreciation of Kaufman’s impact on the thinking of food advocates? You thought I’d never ask!!

A narrowly anti-poverty approach to food insecurity leads to indifference to the city, as a jurisdictional level of government, as a place, and as a center for citizen cohesion and participation. This may well constitute the most unfortunate of the unintended consequences of narrow anti-poverty thinking on public policy.

A narrowly anti-poverty approach to food insecurity, shorn of a political economy or food system perspective, almost inevitably treats the city as jurisdictionally irrelevant. I know of no local government in North America which commands the financial resources or constitutional powers to counteract economic poverty leading to hunger and food insecurity. The inability of city governments to significantly redress income inequality, low wages and low incomes of people on social assistance is accepted across the political spectrum of left and right. Cities can and should act to assert the right of all citizens to access quality food stores, farmers markets, and garden allotments, to support local food security organizations, and to advocate on behalf of food security measures to higher and better-financed levels of government. But city governments can’t move the needle on forces leading to impoverishment. So, it is difficult to develop a city or local government platform of direct action around food issues flowing from economic inequality.

Consequently, my co-lead Susan Shepherd and I undertook our bid to counter a narrowly-conceived anti-poverty approach by developing a four-point food and hunger program for the city. Fortunately, all the people active in and around FAHAC accepted this, and came up with an approach that maintained the unity of FAHAC.

The first of four food security themes presented to the new city by FAHAC was that city officials advocate for provincial and federal laws and programs to counter poverty leading to food insecurity. City officials would make a point, for example, to lobby federal or provincial governments when they were about to adopt laws or budgets that failed to deal adequately with poverty and food insecurity. On top of advocacy to other levels of government, the City would support food security with the means at a city’s disposal in three ways. It would coordinate programs within the city that could reduce problems related to food and hunger – even by city departments and agencies not directly responsible for food security. Coordination meant that public transit authorities, for example, would ensure reasonable access to quality and affordable food outlets by people at all income levels – even though the public transit authorities have no specific mandate to deal with poverty and hunger. City departments and agencies would also support programs that could improve health outcomes from food activities. The parks and recreation department, for example, had no formal mandate to address hunger and food insecurity, but would ensure staff were available to set aside and prepare land for community gardens. Finally, the city vowed to innovate with new programs that could increase access to healthy food and healthy food environments. The city might innovate in the area of green infrastructure by supporting green roofs, for example, as a way to reduce the likelihood of stormwater flooding sewers. But such innovations would also look to the possibility of green roofs providing increased space for public food gardens.

In summary, three of the four action themes presented to the newly amalgamated city and the new city Food Charter accepted city responsibility for both food and hunger issues. Once it was agreed that there was a city realm of activity bearing on both food and hunger, we were all taking part in a new city conversation that included food as an area of civic action. The Toronto Food Charter, accepted alongside the FAHAC report The Growing Season, made explicit reference to the fact that food and hunger were issues of the entire city, not just specific departments. The city was not just a utilitarian jurisdiction with responsibility for parks, police and pavement. Food and hunger were not just problems in the city; they had become problems and opportunities of the city. This began an important phase in the thinking of food advocates, few of whom had previously paid significant attention to food issues as city issues. It was not just city planners who had lagged in thinking about this file. Food advocates had too.

The proposed Food Charter – adopted unanimously by City Council in February 2001 alongside the FAHAC The Growing Season report – also amalgamated both anti-poverty and food system perspectives within one brief document. The Charter was drafted during a few frenzied hours prior to the City Council meeting by me and Sean Meagher, executive assistant to a leading city Council member of FAHAC, the late Pam McConnell. I ensured the views of food system thinkers were voiced and Meagher did the same for anti-poverty views. Anyone reading the Charter closely can see how it pasted two distinct perspectives into one Charter. A three-page appendix to the one-page Charter spelled out that food and hunger were issues that profoundly affected the quality and fabric of life in the city for better or worse. In turn, the city had its own city rationale to address these issues. This was the seed of a later TFPC slogan: Ask not what the city can do for food, but what food can do for the city. This formulation is designed to shift city thinking from seeing food as an expenditure to seeing food as a city-building investment – whence the title for the memoir of my time at the TFPC, Food for City Building.

Until such thoughts were aired in broad daylight, planners could not be blamed for missing the importance of food as a civic issue – not just a challenge and opportunity in the city, but a challenge and opportunity of the city.

2 Fuel for Thought

Disagreements between anti-poverty and food system advocates on the Food and Hunger Action Committee were mild compared to the tensions within Toronto Public Health between nutritionists and supporters of the TFPC. The outcome of these controversies also cleared the way for food advocates to be positively disposed to the thinking of Kaufman and Pothukuchi.

Nutritionism, the concept or ideology that food was mainly to be valued and understood for the fuel and nutrients it provided to the human engine or body, was part and parcel of the understanding of food that emerged from World War II and national food guides inspired by the wartime effort to build strong bodies that could support wartime mobilization, morale and discipline. With few exceptions, dietitians and doctors accepted this narrow understanding of food – which ignored the importance of food for pleasure, conviviality, identity, celebration, skill building, and other lifeblood functions of food. One of the exceptions was Jennifer Welsh’s nutrition department at Ryerson University, a few hundred yards north of the Toronto Public Health offices. Another was the nutrition staff employed by the old City of Toronto. After amalgamation, suburban nutritionists – often sneered at as “the pumps and pearls set” by resentful Toronto dietitians – brought full-on nutritionism to the amalgamated city, marginalizing traditions expressed in documents such as the 1992 Toronto Declaration on Nutrition (written by Rod MacRae of the brand-new TFPC). The Toronto public health department’s commitment to social determinants of health, alongside the social, cultural and environmental aspects of food, was replaced by a commitment to what is often called “lifestyle” improvements which feature individuals opting for more nutritious (less fatty and sweet) foods.

The department I joined when I started at the amalgamated TPH was called “Healthy Lifestyles/Disease Prevention,” a clear victory for suburbia. Health promotion via social equity and community engagement was no longer de rigeur. Within a few months of my starting, the director of policy who hired me and my immediate manager, both of whom championed the work I was doing, resigned. I stood out like a sore thumb. Unfortunately for my adversaries, I had been trained in factionalism in the labor movement and the left. Rain has more impact on a duck’s back than their efforts had on me. Old Toronto managers still in senior positions managed to defend me until I passed my probation and was protected by a union. The prominence and relative autonomy of FAHAC – responsible to a team of councilors and citizens – made it difficult for junior managers to mount an all-out assault against me. The Medical Officer of Health urged a reconciliation, and my butt was saved. I retired voluntarily a decade later.

Gyorgy Scrinis’s work (Scrinis 2013a, b), later popularized by Michael Pollan, has exposed the severe limits of nutritionism as a way of understanding food’s robust and complex offering. Scrinis and Pollan left out one element of its negative impact on a public health unit operating within a local and city-based government. Nutritionism leaves no room for almost any of the things that a city can do for food, or that food can do for a city. It represents an obstacle to city planners’ understanding of food more formidable than the narrow anti-poverty approach to food insecurity in the modern city.

A city thrives by treating food as a pivotal asset. Food and drink are the anchors of restaurant and theatre districts, the inspiration for Little Italys and Chinatowns and other ethno-cultural enclaves that bring tourists to town, the necessities of neighborhood bars, pubs, coffee shops and other “third places” that fulfill the function in an otherwise anonymous and impersonal city of a place “where everybody knows your name,” as the famous TV series, Cheers, had it. Food is abundant at baptisms when babies are celebrated, at weddings, and at memorials. It is an icebreaker at meetings. It is the feast that makes holy days special. It is a soft and welcoming way to be introduced to another culture. It is a soft and welcoming way to bring farmers into the city to meet and befriend urban people at farmers markets. Food and drink are also the major employer in most cities, as well as a magnet for the creative economy. It is certainly the major employer of post-secondary students who fuel an important part of the modern city and knowledge-based economy. I have barely begun to list what food brings to a city, and have not come close to mentioning nutrition, which helps bring health to a city. None of these accompaniments of food enter the food conversation framed by nutritionism. If nutritionists and public health staff missed the contribution of food, who are we to blame city planners for not seeing the breadth of food either?

It was a long and winding road that led food activists to consider the city we lived and worked in and ate in – to consider the city as a client with its own nourishment needs, to consider the city as a place that had civic as well as personal needs for Good Food policy, to consider the city as a home that needed public squares and watering holes so all its residents could feel at home and people-watch, to consider the city as a fragile and vulnerably entity in need of cohesion that can be provided by food celebrations, to consider the city as a place where people can just be, as Kurt Vonnegut put it so brilliantly – human beings and not always human doings who forget the being part of food and life. But the winding road finally led urban food activists to engage the city – ready to deal with the thoughts of the likes of Kaufman and Pothukuchi.

With FAHAC and nutritionism battles under my belt, I was in a position to read the city planners’ visionary version of FAHAC – an official plan for a newly amalgamated city. When I read an early draft prepared for public discussion, I was dismayed by the way it ignored food’s role in the city economy, environment, culture and health. My harsh critique, called The Way to a City’s Heart is Though Its Stomach (Roberts 2001), was framed by the Kaufman-Pothukuchi article. Like them, I foregrounded the failings of city planners in understanding food. Unlike them, I was not a planner who understood, valued and respected planners, and who could write the kind of connected critique that Kaufman and Pothukuchi were capable of, even when correcting a severe problem their colleagues overlooked.

These many years later, I am in the process of developing what I call “people-centered food policies,” which pay tribute to the city building functions of food. I believe there are three major ways to see food. One may be called the supply chain view, which primarily understands food as a commodity that goes through its logistics – from farm to field or, in a modern circular economy version, from dust to dust. The second view may be called nutritionism, which embodies the science of its nutrient and fuel contributions to the human body. The first and second views are far too narrow, but they correspond to what federal and regional (provincial in Canada, state in the US) governments have jurisdiction over. The third view draws attention to food’s many contributions to personal, psychological, cultural, spiritual, social, environmental and economic development of people, and the mooring of people in their time and place. In my opinion, this third view is the one that deserves to be made the centerpiece of local government and city efforts to enhance food systems. Now that I can see the fuller context in which planners failed to see the contributions food can make to cities, I appreciate all the more the positive and relationship-building aspects of the contribution Kaufman (and Pothukuchi) have made. We who want to see cities and food flourish should work at this together.