Welcome to our Reports section, where you can find our repository of project findings captured in articles and other documents. 

Sustenance Beyond the Surface: A Deep Dive into Food Insecurity and its Root Causes (2023)

This report unfolds a compelling narrative, shedding light on how inadequate housing, infrastructure needs around population growth, and income disparities intertwine to perpetuate food insecurity. The report was published by Feed Scarborough, a community partner of the Feeding City Lab. Click here for the full report.

 

Nourishing the Nexus: A Feminist Analysis of Gender, Nutrition and Agri‑food Development Policies and Practices (March 2023)

In this article, Vercillo et al. apply feminist critiques to investigate how agri-food and nutritional development policy and interventions address gender inequality. Based on the analysis presented of global policies and examples of project experiences from Haiti, Benin, Ghana, and Tanzania, we find that the widespread emphasis on gender equality in policy and practice generally ascribes to a gender narrative that includes static, homogenized conceptualizations of food provisioning and marketing. Click here for the full article.

 

Small Food Outreach Program (Summer 2022)

Small Food Enterprises (SFEs) have faced enormous challenges, especially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Small-scale, independent, and family-run restaurants, in particular, continue to endure hardships with the impact of decreased customer purchasing power, and rising prices due to inflation, in addition to structural constraints that affect this sector.

 

Is a vegetable garden essential? Toronto gardens as culinary infrastructure

(June, 29 2022)

Sarah Elton and Donald Cole argue that gardens are essential and seeing them as part of culinary infrastructure makes space for nonmarket food production in food systems analyses. Viewing gardens as essential should prompt policy decisions, particularly during crises, which support social-ecological, nonmarket food sources as important parts of culinary infrastructure.

 

Visions of the Food System to Come: Agriculture, Eating, and Ecological Justice in 2050

(April 20, 2021)

In this report, members of the Feeding the City team blend fiction and academic research to offer a vision of a possible future food system. Access version 1.0 here.

As the document is intended to provoke a discussion and iterative process, we welcome feedback on its content, form, and structure. To provide feedback, please visit this link or email us.

 

Feeding the City, Pandemic and Beyond: A Research Brief – Gastronomica, Volume 21, Issue 1

(February 1, 2021)

In this early overview of the Feeding the City project, Bryan Dale and Jayeeta Sharma relate our research questions, methodologies, and initial findings. We focus here on two of the key questions we are asking: (1) How are food supply chains and food insecurity rates being affected within this pandemic context?, and (2) How are different actors—from newcomer urban gardeners and those involved with farmers’ markets to BIPOC groups—responding to food system-related constraints and opportunities during this time?

Access the full article here.