Articles by Wayne Roberts

Discount stores have been in North America for half a century but there’s not a lot to celebrate says Wayne Roberts.

City gardeners and construction developers may be strange bed-fellows – but it’s a promising union, writes Wayne Roberts.

Wayne Roberts looks at how food and water issues mix in an era of drought.

Wayne Roberts visits a backyard forest that combats climate change while offering an abundance of food.

Our governments need to wake up to the new reality of food insecurity, says Wayne Roberts. 

Today’s food movement grew up alongside the anti-globalization movements of the past 20 years, so thinking and acting locally are crucial to it.

Or: how to help Rover reduce his pawprint

The false economies of food production are damaging to the environment, animals and humans.

Government purchases of local or sustainable food is much talked about, but it’s hard to name a handful of places where it’s policy, and harder still, where the policy is implemented.

As new research on low-input farming gains ground, the merging of farm, food, health and environment concerns will become the new normal, writes Wayne Roberts.

Wayne Roberts finds it unsettling that an authoritative and transformative report on cancer released in February 2009 has to hearken back to the horse and buggy days of a century ago by calling for a return to “classic public health.”

A new way not only to cook but to organize the whole food economy – Wayne Roberts stirs the pot.

‘If the transition to Obama is to become the end of an era as well as the end of an error,’ says food and agriculture activist and author Wayne Roberts, then ‘the legacy of Bill Clinton as well as George Bush will need to be overcome.’

Gustava Esteva, one of Mexico’s most distinguished economists and senior civil servants during the 1970s, gave it all up to live the simple life of a traditional peasant on three acres of land in the village of San Pablo Etla in Oaxaca, a province of mostly Indigenous peoples in southern Mexico. From this perch on the world, which he calls "Mexico profundo," Esteva became one of the leading prophets of the developing Zapatista movement, later serving as their advisor in negotiations with the Mexican government, which conceded self-government in Chiapas in 2003 following the Zapatista rebellion in 1994.

The scene was just as I remembered from many decades ago, when my grade 5 teacher asked us to name one of the seven wonders of the world, and I stuck up my hand and blurted out "the Scarboro bluffs." My wife Lori and good friend Harriet joined me for a trip down memory lane on Canada Day when we went for a picnic in my old haunts. The secret trail through the woods was still there, as was the fragrance of clover and wild grape as we tramped over the meadow, until we came to a point where the deep blue eyes of Lake Ontario suddenly stared us in the face from hundreds of feet below.