Sometimes it seems as though our “world class” city can provide just about everything except the fundamentals of life.

During the blackout of 2003, some spoke half-jokingly of having to “forage” for food when stores shut down along with electric can openers. 

So inured are we to concrete and commerce that we forget how absurd we’ve become. Toronto, it seems, has a subtle fear of food production, as if our farm-phobic roots went deeper than those of our levelled orchards, making the city a refuge from the baseness of dirt.

Fortunately, we’ve got a growing number of food activists, some of whom showed up at a Parks and Environment Committee February 5 to push for greenhouses, changes in zoning and composting regulations to allow city farming, and more stretches of plantable land.

“There’s more arable land in downtown Toronto than there is in Newfoundland,” FoodShare exec director Debbie Field, one of the deputants, tells me. “We’ve paved some of the best farmland in Canada.”

Field’s special angle on food production is neighbourhood-building, literally from the ground up. Speaking fondly of a former strip of grass near Lansdowne and Queen, now a garden plot, she tells me: “You never saw anyone on the grass. Now, every day in the summer you bike by there are always people out there gardening, talking, meeting one another.” 

Currently, Toronto has an estimated 125 community gardens, most within the old city. But an obvious first step to amassing more growing room would seem to be a tally of just how much more city-owned land is available. No one actually knows right now.

Almost as interesting is the consideration of how much land has been lost. Parkdale used to be an orchard between what’s now Roncey and Lansdowne. We all likely know someone who was alive when Scarborough was still mostly farmland – and it could be again. Some Scarborough schools, for instance, sit on acres of land being used for little more than grass, a deceptively resource-intensive carpet. The same is true to some degree of many parks.

“The city’s spending quite a bit of money on planting, growing, cutting grass,” says Field. “We’d like them to turn some of that money over to us.”

Staff are currently absorbing the info received at the meeting and are in the early stages of formulating an urban food production policy, with input from parks, public health and the environment office. 

The new report, says Solomon Boyé, the city’s community gardens program coordinator, will likely address neighbourhood planting in less affluent areas of the city. “Successful community gardens are mostly in well-to-do areas,’’ he says. “People [there] are organized, they know the process and can do it quickly. Areas with high populations of immigrants need land but can’t take advantage of the program.”

Boyé wants to combine community and allotment gardens in high-priority areas (see chart on page 26) and prompt a discussion on redefining the plots as food programs to circumvent fees. 

Another important area in the new policy will likely be changes in regulations and guidelines that are harvest-hostile, like the rule for property owners that apple trees mustn’t grow over the sidewalk in case people are injured by falling fruit.

Deputants at the February meeting argued that some urban land should be zoned as agricultural so social enterprises and commercial gardeners can bring their produce to market. A paper by Lauren Baker of the Ontario Alliance for Healthy Food and Farming points out that reduced taxes are used in rural areas to encourage agricultural production, but such a carrot here would require changes, since property assessments are not the city’s responsibility.

Then there’s the fact that rezoning could mean lower property tax revenue for the city, a prospect that already has some councillors spooked.

Baker, a researcher with Ryerson University’s Food Security program, thinks these fears are unfounded. “It’s not like we’re suddenly going to have this massive conversion – and if we do down the road we can deal with it then,” she says. “It is absolutely impossible now for small farmers to access urban land.”

The utility of planting amidst our pavement goes far beyond ecology, says Field. “It’s about figuring out how we’re going to survive in what’s likely to be a very weird time."

With files by Paul Terefenko

news@nowtoronto.com