What? Why? How?
Canopia is a project aimed at working with, and engaging participation with, parents and kids. Perhaps Canopia’s number one most important task is to facilitate an understanding of food prices as a reflection of how they are produced, and how foods interact with the land on which they are grown. More specifically this means: are food systems preserving water, protecting forests and ecosystems, building soil, and sequestering carbon. This means that our food choices are not arbitrary, they manifest as investments and subsidies in the healthy ecological futures of our children. Ecologically-minded and regenerative land practices translate into a healthy planet for generations moving forward.
How? How do we do this? How do we get started?
Get informed.
A great resource that I highly recommend is a book by farmer Joel Salatin and Nutritionist Sina MuCullough called Beyond Labels: A Doctor and a Farmer Conquer Food Confusion One Bite At a Time. It is a manual, a practical how-to guide on how to eat healthy by sourcing from local, regenerative farms, and it explains how to do it in an affordable way. It is not easy, it does require a bit of strategy and shifting of priorities, but it is not unaffordable, and it is certainly not impossible.
Another thing you can do is to find out where and when your local farmers markets are, and get to know your farmers if you can. If there are no farmers markets in your area, do a bit of research and find out where your local farmers are located, and go see them if you can.
Buy into a CSA. A CSA is Community Supported Agriculture. It is a seasonal program where farmers will sell CSA “shares” in advance—there is normally a summer CSA and a winter CSA—and this guarantees you a box of fresh farm vegetables once a week for the season. CSAs are important contributions because they are a cultural and socio-economic buy-in. By buying into a CSA you are buying into and committing to a local-sustainable food system, you are investing in and empowering the alternative that you believe in. CSAs are also very helpful and appreciated from the farmers’ point of view because they are guaranteed income, and it allows them the investment they need up front for the upcoming season.
Grow your own food or start your own local food business:
Parents and kids can engage their schools to start schoolyard vegetable gardens. Families can do their own gardens at home.
If you are motivated enough to start your own local food business, start producing, for example, hot sauce, preserves, or ready-made meals in the city sourcing from small local farms.
If you are already living in the countryside, start your own seasonal vegetable garden if you haven’t already. Take on a few chicken, ducks, or geese for eggs and meat; it requires a little bit of time and money investment, but a family can set it up together in a weekend, and it is a super fun little project.
Lastly, but possibly most importantly, start to build your own little food system at home. Buy vegetables in bulk from farmers during the season in large enough quantities to freeze or process into preserves; this way you can bring healthy local fruits and vegetables with you into the winter. Preserves are a bit more work, but they’re useful because they don’t take up any freezer space. Having said that, freezer space is helpful, and in addition to fruits and veg, you can also buy meat in bulk from local farmers and have frozen meat ready to draw from all winter. Planning and buying meat and produce in bulk makes feeding your family healthy local food much more affordable. It also provides food security knowing that you have the food ready and with you at home.
Why?
Another aspect of Canopia’s mission is exploring ways of thinking about food systems differently. A very simple and effective way to approach this is the slogan, It’s not the what, it’s the how. This means that an environmentally accountable participation with food choices is not about isolating and boycotting one particular food, i.e: meat is bad, or soy is bad. Rather it is about how our food is produced. Let us simplify the memes that culturally guide us. When striving for ecologically healthy food systems, the only characteristics that should matter are bioregional, and regenerative.
What does this mean?
Bioregional: Bioregional means local, or hyper-local foods. Making bioregional food choices is to be informed about what foods grow in your region, and how those foods can begin to be local alternatives to the foods of globalization. Lastly, bioregional eating means being in relationship with the seasons, knowing what local foods are available at what time of the year, and having the way we eat be a reflection of that.
Regenerative: Simply, regenerative means replacing what we take. In terms of food, this means mainly to rebuild the soil that is used in the growing of our food. For all the food that we take out of the soil, we should be putting organic matter back into the soil. Our use of water in food production must also be regenerative. Lastly, rather than simply taking from the land and using it to grow the foods that we want, regenerative means letting our local ecosystems be the guide, and building food systems that steward the land, that give the land what it needs.
Often, the confusion with the food systems conversation stems from focusing on the wrong things, and asking the wrong questions. What has come to dominate such a large part of this discussion is the narrow and misleading binary of vegan/plant-based vs. omnivore. This is not a helpful guide. When thinking about healthy ecological food systems, the only questions that should matter are, again: are our ways of growing food preserving water, protecting forests and ecosystems, building soil, and sequestering carbon? If the answer is yes, then we are on the right track; if the answer is no, then we need to be thinking about how to do things differently. This is the metric by which we should be judging and evaluating food systems.
Another helpful guide is understanding the tremendously important differences between monocrops and polycultures, and between annual and perennial food systems. What are these?
Annual: In conventional agriculture, specific crops planted for harvesting that grow in one season. Plants that grow and die usually in only a few months. Annual plants are finicky and require soil that is cleared of other plant competitors, “weeds”, and are often very water-intensive.
Perennials: Contrary to temporary annuals, Perennials are permanent plants such as grasses and trees that can grow for dozens and sometimes hundreds of years. The benefit of perennials is that they keep the soil protected with ground cover, their roots help in the absorption of water, and they even build soil and sequester carbon.
Monocrop: The planting of only one type of crop in giant quantities. The removal of natural diversity for the homogenous planting of conventional agriculture.
Polyculture: The opposite of monocrop. Ecosystems with naturally occurring biodiversity that is habitat for hundreds of thousands of different bacteria, soil organisms, mycelium, insects, plants and animals that serve many different functions to keep ecosystems healthy.
So, to make a simple statement after having explained these, we should be looking to source from food systems based in perennial polycultures, and to avoid foods from annual monocrop agriculture as much as we can. Again, investing in local, sustainable food systems is investing in ourselves, and investing in a healthy ecological future for our children.
What is the Opposite?
Lastly, it is also important to illustrate the flip side of the equation, the global-industrial food system, and to understand its method of annual monocrop agriculture, what globalization is, and why and how they are harmful.
An easy, educational and illuminating way to understand globalization is something called externalization of costs. This is essentially the chain of human and ecological relationships that food travels before it gets to us, and how industrial processes outsource the true costs of harmful production onto human and ecological communities along the way. Externalization of costs applies to all production, but it is also true of food, and it is how food remains so inexpensive. We will not do a deep dive into this topic here, but I encourage you to explore this link for a very illuminating twenty-minute video called the Story of Stuff that very neatly explains externalization of costs.
Culturally, we can define globalization as the belief that we can have any food that we want, from anywhere in the world, at any time of the year. Currently this is a luxury that we have at our disposal, but there are consequences. So, in three sentences, why is globalization harmful?
Globalization or, the global-industrial food system, is harmful first because of its carbon miles; because foods are travelling thousands of kilometres from all over the world, the carbon footprint of these foods is extremely high.
Second, because it is a big, centralized and global system, the production process of these foods is distant and inaccessible, and it conceals harmful relationships along the way. Culturally, this is a system that lacks accountability and transparency, and this affects our ability to make informed decisions.
Third, globalization is harmful because it dominates the landscape of food culture by posing as the only game in town, and co-opts the messaging of sustainability to make it irrelevant, and to prevent it from gaining in importance. Global-industrial food culture is so widespread that it is difficult to see alternatives.
This is only one part, and the aim of this work is certainly not only to point out what is wrong with our food systems, but it is important to understand the reasons behind our choices and habits first, in order to begin undoing them if they are harmful.
With that said, I encourage you to go back to the top of this page and begin your own food journey for you and your family. If you have any questions, any questions at all, or if you need any type of help or support to get this started, please do not hesitate to reach out. I am absolutely happy to help out in any way that I can.