If you’re going to change the country’s attitude toward food, don’t get buried in programming.
That’s one of the arguments that Nick Saul, president and
CEO of Community Food Centres Canada, will bring to Food Secure Canada’s
national assembly in Halifax this week. The former executive director of
The Stop will appear on a panel called Moving Our Ideas to Action.
Saul hopes the assembly—a gathering of more than 400 farmers, fishers, dietitians, policy makers, activists, entrepreneurs, community organizers, indigenous leaders, students and academics—will rally around a manageable number of key issues. Then participants can move forward on them once the final session is over and they’re back in their home communities. Although many food organizations and agencies offer excellent programs, Saul says activists need to make time to think about the big picture amidst all the time and effort that goes into delivering services.
“You can run programs till you’re blue in the face and we might not have moved the larger structural pieces,” says Saul. “You might have a wonderful community dining program that is dignified, respectful and offers healthy food—and we do that. But that’s just one piece of a broader piece of work, which is also to speak out about how we need to increase social assistance rates, how we need a higher minimum wage, how we need a national housing strategy or how we need an affordable childcare strategy for the country. Those are the big socio-economics determinants of health that need to change.”
Socio-economic factors and community health are just a couple of threads in the discussion around our food system. Climate change is another. “30 percent of our greenhouse gasses are related to the way we move food from field to table,” says Saul. “These are really big juggernaut issues of our time. Food has an important place in how we turn these issues around.”
Saul will be joined in the plenary session by Diana Bronson of Food Secure Canada, Dr. Patty Williams of FoodARC and Dr. Pamela D. Palmater, associate professor and chair in Indigenous Governance at Ryerson University.
Writer: Paul Gallant
Source: Nick Saul