Urban Gardens

Our speaker on Aug 20th, Peter Ladner is a former Vancouver city councilor, Metro Vancouver vice-chair and business owner who is currently a weekly columnist at Business in Vancouver newspaper and a regular contributor to crosscut.com, a Seattle-based online news service.

 

He is the author of The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way we Feed Cities, published by New Society in November, 2011.

 

From 2009-2011 he was a Fellow at the Simon Fraser University Centre for Dialogue, researching, teaching and organizing public events around the theme Planning Cities as if Food Matters. He has a lifelong interest in growing food. As a city councilor, he worked with the Vancouver Food Policy Council in initiating the city’s program to add 2010 food-producing community garden plots by 2010.

 

He has more than 40 years of journalistic experience in print, radio and television and is a frequent speaker on business, food, community and sustainability issues.

 

His paternal grandfather was the founding partner of what has now merged into Borden Ladner Gervais, a prominent Canadian law firm. His great-great grandfather and great-grandfathers brother originally settled in Ladner and gave  name to "Ladner".

 

 

Our reliance on industrial agriculture has resulted in a food supply riddled with hidden environmental, economic and health care costs and beset by rising food prices. With only a handful of corporations responsible for the lion’s share of the food on our supermarket shelves, we are incredibly vulnerable to supply chain disruption.

 

The Urban Food Revolution provides a recipe for community food security based on leading innovations across North America. The author draws on his political and business experience to show that we have all the necessary ingredients to ensure that local, fresh sustainable food is affordable and widely available. He describes how cities are bringing food production home by:

 

•Growing community through neighborhood gardening, cooking and composting programs

•Rebuilding local food processing, storage and distribution systems

•Investing in farmers markets and community supported agriculture

•Reducing obesity through local fresh food initiatives in schools, colleges and universities.

•Ending inner-city food deserts

 

Producing food locally makes people healthier, alleviates poverty, creates jobs, and makes cities safer and more beautiful. The Urban Food Revolution is an essential resource for anyone who has lost confidence in the global industrial food system and wants practical advice on how to join the local food revolution.