Feeding the City, Pandemic and Beyond

Abstract

It is a simple truth that the COVID-19 pandemic has been hugely disruptive to food systems. It is essential to recognize, however, that certain social groups are disproportionately experiencing heightened levels of food insecurity, and societal and livelihood challenges.1 Other groups have faced relatively minor inconveniences, primarily from disrupted food supply chains. In Toronto, Canada, with a population of approximately 3 million, disparities in food system changes are playing out along overlapping racial and class-based lines, despite the fact that the city is often celebrated for being multicultural and diverse. Due to its size and international connections, Toronto has been one of the most negatively affected areas of Canada, in terms of numbers of COVID-19 infections as well as socioeconomic consequences. It is important to analyze, however, why and how the pandemic serves to exacerbate and make visible long-standing problems and inequalities in the food system to a far greater extent than it generates entirely new issues. It is also imperative to explore how this shock might create opportunities for ethical-, ecological-, and justice-oriented aspects of our food systems (i.e., those often termed as "alternative") to come to the forefront. In this research brief, we discuss these themes in relation to a COVID-19-related project under way in Toronto. The project is entitled "Feeding the City, Pandemic and Beyond: Documenting Food System Experiences, Community Challenges and Local Resilience, and Actions toward Sustainable Food Solutions." We relate the research questions motivating the project, the methodologies employed by our research team, and reflect on initial findings from its first months.Guiding this project are four key cross-cutting research questions that presently focus on the Greater Toronto Area2 and explore its place within the global food system:We are beginning to answer all four of these research questions. When we discuss our preliminary findings below, however, we focus on responses to the first two of these questions, due to the analysis we have undertaken to date.Drawing on COVID-19-related research support from the University of Toronto and other Ontario educational institutions, ours is an extensive, collaborative, and public-facing undertaking. In addition to the authors (Jo Sharma, the principal investigator and project lead, and Bryan Dale, a postdoctoral fellow and project manager), the project brings together scholars and student researchers from different universities, with representatives of community organizations and policy bodies. Together, we broadly examine five main areas: (1) school food programs, and their closures' impact on nutritional and community food insecurity; (2) the importance of urban growing for food security and community resilience; (3) agricultural issues, farmer-consumer connections, and farm labor concerns; (4) food supply chains and local distribution networks, including public markets; and (5) food security and provisioning networks, particularly for traditionally underserved neighborhoods, newcomer/immigrant, and other vulnerable groups.Broadly, our theoretical approach involves adopting an intersectional and transdisciplinary lens, in our attempt to capture the relational nature of the various themes and topics in our view. As food studies scholars who engage in a variety of disciplines (including anthropology, diasporic studies, environmental studies, gender studies, geography, history, public health, and sociology), we are informed by diverse bodies of literature. However, we are broadly inspired by a model of socio-technical transitions. Such a model documents near-term reforms and policy outcomes that help to improve an existing food system, and distinguishes them from the medium- to longer-term innovations and structural changes that help to build sustainable and equitable food systems, as well as resilient food infrastructure for the future. Socio-technical transitions are complex social, technical, economic, and political processes that lead to the replacement of old technological systems, and the social systems connected to them, with new ones (Geels 2010). Urban political ecology frameworks are also particularly relevant, given the fact that Toronto's food system is enabled by a far-reaching urban metabolism that affects laboring bodies, institutional processes, and economic relations around the world (Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw 2006). This literature also speaks to the essential question of who is (and is not) able to access resources—including food itself—as a result of the power dynamics inherent in a food system dominated by racial-capitalist political-economic tendencies and extractive industrial processes (Holt-Giménez and Wang 2011).To answer these research questions, our team relies on a multifaceted methodological approach that includes media analysis, ethnographic engagements, semi-structured interviews, and topical surveys. Given the broad scope of the project and the many researchers involved, we communicate regularly through software that supports encrypted file sharing, messaging, and video conferencing. We periodically meet as a group to share research updates, discuss developing methodological strategies, and facilitate analysis that cuts across the topic areas and questions we explore.The media analysis involves conducting keyword searches within databases and using media tools that are targeted toward mainstream local and nationally focused media outlets, as well as social media. Results are captured and organized by theme, date, media outlet, and article title, and organized for later analysis. Separate searches capture relevant food-system developments at international and national levels with the primary objectives being (1) to compare and contrast experiences in the context of Toronto and its neighborhoods, with those taking place in cities around the world, and (2) to document geographically diverse policy-related and community interventions that can inform socio-technical transitions from the near to long term.To complement this analytical approach, we deem it crucial to capture developments that the mainstream media tends to overlook. This includes a documentation of food-related pandemic responses within different cultural and racialized4 communities that are underrepresented in traditional, especially English-language, media reporting. Thus far, we have focused on grassroots interpretations of food system issues, "vernacular" responses to such issues, online food provisioning practices, and community food assistance initiatives. Much of this occurs through secondary research captured through ethnically specific media outlets and social media channels, but also through primary research, by way of ethnographic engagements with targeted communities and neighborhoods. The latter is in fact part of a broader process of observation, wherein researchers seek to document auto-ethnographic accounts of food provisioning practices throughout the pandemic. Drawing on the cultural diversity of our team members, this is intended to capture food-system experiences as they have changed as a result of COVID-19, particularly from a consumer perspective, but also as a means to take note of observations as articulated by shopkeepers, farmers, food retail workers, urban growers, restaurant workers, and other actors with whom we are, varyingly, in contact.Data collection and ethnographic engagements lay the foundation for some of the initial semi-structured interviews that team members are conducting. We are developing specific interview questions geared toward each respondent's role in the food system, within the context of our key research questions. Recent and upcoming interviewees include produce dealers, wholesale importers, and farmer sellers connected to the Ontario Food Terminal, "ethnic" grocery store owners, urban agriculture specialists, small-scale ecological farmers, farmers' market managers, staff at a sustainable-food retail operation, and a sampling of community members, including BIPOC groups in targeted neighborhoods. Interviews are being recorded and transcribed for future coding. Together with collaborators, we also seek to capture qualitative and quantitative data through the implementation of surveys geared toward specific groups, including managers of farmers' and other public markets, and stakeholders in the running of school food programs and associated community programs. Team members are gathering data to map Toronto's food-related infrastructure. They are doing so figuratively, by relying on existing databases, media, and surveys, and literally, through the use of GIS mapping software. Through these different strategies, we will obtain a nuanced "socio-technical transitions" view of how grocery stores, restaurants, food banks, urban gardens and farms, markets, and other less formal elements of the city's culinary infrastructure (Pilcher 2016) have supported food provisioning in light of COVID-19, as well as the pandemic's overall impact on them. Finally, we deem it imperative to reach out to stakeholders in different Global South locations (starting with India and Sri Lanka) to compare such findings, especially in light of the globalized social location of several people in our research team, whose personal and professional ties are inextricably linked to places beyond North America.We are committed to public scholarship including community-focused outcomes, in addition to our scholarly research. In the short term, our team is preparing weekly blogs available through our project website (www.feedingcity.org/blog), largely conceived and run by our student researchers, who are active on the project's behalf across related social media platforms. We are also organizing public-facing webinars.5 Through these efforts, we have been highlighting, and will continue to highlight, important food-related adv