Food

by Dawn Paley

Even in the quiet of late afternoon, the market down the street from my apartment in Mexico City is a hive of activity. Dozens of butchers cut up all kinds of meat and make sausages. Women display whole chickens, and offer to prepare them according to what a passing customer desires. There’s homemade ice cream for sale across from a fish stand, and a tortilla stand that always seems to have a line-up. I buy my vegetables from a man who stands at the top of a pyramid of lettuces, tomatoes, avocados, carrots, potatoes, and whatever happens to be in season. While heweighs and bags the veggies I select, he often talks about how good Mexican food is, but how so many people don’t eat the healthy and tasty things he offers for sale. Before I started working on this story, I assumed he was just talking up his business.

by Susan MacVittie

In March 2011, ethnic Maya Q’eqchi communities of smallholder farmers in southern Guatemala were violently evicted by state security forces from land they had farmed for generations. About 3,200 people from 14 communities in the Polochic valley were forced off land they believed they had a right to live and work on. Within months, hundreds of hectares of the lush valley in the province of Alta Verapaz were being planted with sugar cane that would be turned into ethanol for European cars. Today, displaced families live by

by Gavin Fridell

In 2012, the Conservatives ended the 70-year monopoly seller status of the Canadian Wheat Board, one of the world’s largest and most successful “state trading enterprises.” The government decision came without a vote among prairie grain farmers, required by the Canadian Wheat Board Act, and despite a 2011 plebiscite in which a majority of farmers voted to maintain the Board’s status. The matter is now before the courts, but the Board cannot simply be revived after having been dismantled. Instead, a coalition of farmer groups has launched a class action suit against the government seeking billions of dollars in compensation.

by Susan MacVittie

When Leesee Papatsie started the Facebook group, Feeding My Family, to raise awareness of the high price of food in the North and to gather Nunavummiut for a demonstration, she began with two people who said they wanted to help. Since that time in May, the FB group has caught the attention of the world, gathering over 19,000 members – more than half the population of Nunavut, where Papatsie lives.

by Dawn Paley

Co-operatives are falling back into favour as a way to organize for sustainable economic alternatives and social change.
Though Canada has one of the largest co-operative movements in the world, it is – with some exceptions – a rather conservative sector, which has drifted away from grassroots organizing.

by Lucy Sharratt

The proliferation of genetically engineered (also called genetically modified or GM) ingredients is an extremely complex challenge that’s set to frustrate and test any food co-op, but the co-op model itself is uniquely placed to face this challenge head-on and make sense of it for customer-members and the community at large. In fact, food co-ops in Canada are charting a path through an industrialized food system riddled with GM foods.

by Miranda Holmes

For the past eight years, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) has been analysing the pesticide testing done by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
EWG’s annual Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce ranks pesticide contamination for 45 popular fruits and vegetables, measuring the contamination in six

by Anne Sherrod

The pesticides Bt and Roundup loom large amongst the many concerns regarding genetically modified (GM) foods. The bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) was once hailed as a completely natural, safe insecticide, because it produces toxic substances that target certain insects, but do not affect animals or humans. But are the toxins safe for humans to eat? That is the question that arose when agrochemical companies set about modifying and transferring genes from the bacterium into food plants, which then make their own version of the insecticide.