Food For Thought: The Sudbury-Manitoulin Visioning Day

posted March 31, 2004

Around the world, people are working towards making their communities healthier places in which to live. The food security movement brings together issues such as health, economy, environment and equity to create a vision for sustainability. Food security is a goal of healthy communities, one that not only works towards increasing access to families living in poverty, but also, towards increasing community spirit, stimulating local economic development, and ensuring environmental stability.

In December 2003, the Sudbury Manitoulin Food Security Network (a broad-based coalition of social, economic, health and environmental groups) organized a Visioning Day to discuss the creation of a Food Charter. More specifically, community representatives were brought together to discuss what a Food Charter would mean for the City of Greater Sudbury and Manitoulin District, and what should be included in such a Charter.

Participants from across sectors worked together to come up with creative solutions to community food issues - and they empowered each other in the process:

• Guest speaker Brian Bell, a passionate agronomist working with the Ministry of Agriculture and Food, opened up the whole new and incredibly complex world that is modern agriculture - a world that literally surrounds the Sudbury area.
• Participants discussed the statistics that indicate that in a time of emergency such as a blackout or an ice storm, Sudbury hospitals would have enough food to feed their patients for two and a half days.
• Janet Gasparini, Executive Director of the Social Planning Council and Municipal Councillor for Ward 2, spoke of the growing number of people living in homelessness or in insecure housing in the Sudbury area and the fact that approximately 2000 families in our community live in a constant state of emergency.
• Susan Snelling from the Sudbury and District Health Unit presented some startling facts on poverty in the Sudbury Manitoulin area. Approximately 11% of the region's families do not perceive themselves as having enough to food to feed their families and are "food insecure". This trend is alarming and has not improved since the first statistics were gathered six years ago. Approximately one third of single mothers report that they do not have enough to eat or that they cannot afford balanced meals (The Northern Ontario Perinatal and Child Health Survey: A First Look, Dec. 2002).

Ensuring that everyone has access to local, healthy, and culturally acceptable food is a challenge that we must accept, with the realization that being food secure is a huge benefit to our health, to our economy and to our environment. It starts with getting the community involved in recognizing the problems and in developing their own solutions. Congratulations to the Sudbury Manitoulin Food Security Network for spearheading the development of a Food Charter in our community.