The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Is Canada's Food System Broken?

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

Visits to the food bank have risen in Ontario, indicating that the cost of living has affected food security. At the same time, there's a lot of food waste along the food value chain. Food waste is not only an environmental challenge, but one that falls on the shoulders of our provincial municipalities. Find out what community organizations, local businesses, and municipalities are doing to combat food waste and, at the same time, potentially improve food insecurity. Kate Parizeau, from the University of Guelph; Tom Armitage and Logan Pollock from The SEED; Bradley Crepeau from Food Cycle Science; and Cameron Walsh from the City of Guelph, offer their insights into the issue that affects Ontarians.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Matt Nethersole. And I'm Tiff Lam. From TVO Podcasts, this is Queries. This season, we're asking, when it comes to defending your beliefs, how far is too far? We follow one story from the boardroom to the courtroom. And seek to understand what happens when beliefs collide. Where does freedom of religion end and freedom from discrimination begin? That's this season on Queries, In Good Faith, a TVO original podcast.

Follow and listen wherever you get your podcasts. High levels of food waste are a symptom of a food system that isn't working. We know landfill capacity is limited in the province. We need to find solutions that the actual producers of food waste are going to use and continue to use. It's not a lack of food, it's just getting it to people is the issue right now.

Oftentimes we try to make connections between food insecurity and hunger and wasted food. I think that's a pretty common trope in our society. It's something we need to be really careful about. There's some amazing innovators out there who are doing great work to temporarily give food to people who are hungry, food that otherwise might be wasted. So the SEED is a program of the Guelph Community Health Centre and our vision is a community where everyone has the food they need to be well.

And we go about achieving this vision by creating programs in social enterprises that are meant to increase financial and physical access to nutritious food, particularly among people who are facing food insecurity. We know that food insecurity is an income based challenge. People's incomes are on a spectrum, therefore food insecurity is on a spectrum. Because if you have a high wage, you pretty much you can buy food wherever you like. If you have a much lower wage, then the number of options available to you is fewer. So we keep the freezer at minus 18 which is a recommended temperature for preserving things like meat donations and we have frozen meals and things of that nature

in here as well. So I'm just going to open the door briefly because we want to keep the temperature cold obviously. If we didn't have the freezer in particular, we wouldn't be able to accept large-scale meat donations, which is a critical thing for our community, because oftentimes when you're sacrificing quality, quantity, you're also sacrificing a bit on the types of food that you're able to purchase. And protein is one of those things

that ends up being sacrificed, because it's often higher cost than some other things. With our Groceries from the Seed program, it's an online grocery store and people can go onto the store and they can select as much or as little as they like from around 250 products we have on the store. And depending on what their income level is, they can choose to pay retail rates for that food. And then also because we know that there are some people who can't afford to pay anything for food,

we have a free food section of the store as well. We have a bin alongside our repacking stations. And this bin, we refer to it as Farmer Doug's Bin. And Farmer Doug is a local farmer, he's got livestock. And when we're going through and looking at the quality of the food that's coming through, anything that we're going through and looking at the quality of the food that's coming through, anything that is slightly blemished, that can be processed in a kitchen,

so we'll keep that and it'll be in a blemished bin. But then there will also be items that are beyond processing, in which case, we're just throwing it directly into Farmer Don's bin. Food waste is a really big deal for multiple reasons. It's definitely an environmental issue. It's been estimated that food waste accounts for somewhere between 6 to 9 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions.

And when we think about aviation being responsible for about 2 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, it's huge. It's been estimated in Canada that we waste about $50 billion worth of food and so that's a huge economic loss across the food value chain. That's everywhere from farmers to businesses, agri-food businesses, to consumers. Sometimes we see waste on the farm because people further in the food value chain are not able or willing to receive the foods. So perhaps a farmer grows some food that's off

standard. So you might have a retailer or somebody along the distribution chain who says no we're not going to take that. So these tomatoes have been pretty routine we've been getting them. It's like 8,000 pounds a week kind of thing but it's hard to move sometimes though. They want like a routine but I'm like I can't do that at the moment just because of capacity because they take up fridge space. We also see some food waste at retail and then another really big bump in places like households. At the household level about a thousand dollars a year we estimate is wasted there's a range there but roughly a thousand

dollars a year per household. We see then the handling of that, so as that wasted food enters the organic stream, it becomes something we need to handle. Our organics facility processes 30,000 tonnes a year, so that equates to about 19,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions that are reduced by processing it through our facility. Our data suggests that there's about 30% avoidable food waste within that stream. Our process is aerobic, that means we add air to the process and that means

there's benefits and drawbacks to that process. As the food decomposes, it's creating carbon dioxide rather than methane, so there's less impact there. What this kind of composting also allows for is for the return of the nutrients at the end of that compost cycle. So very high quality compost that the farmers use to as part of that it's part of the nutrient cycle and part of the circular economy. A big part of what's wrong with food loss and waste is what happens after the food has been wasted. So, for example, if you have food or food scraps that end up in a landfill, they're

decomposing in an anaerobic environment. So that means there is an oxygen there and the way that that food decomposes creates methane, in particular. It's the most concerning greenhouse gas that is produced in that sense. We know landfill capacity is limited in the province. For well specifically we don't have an operating landfill so we have a contracted landfill and it's estimated there's about 10 years of capacity left and furthermore we know through our studies that we have about 20 percent

organics in the waste so that's about another 3,000 tons we could get out of landfill and processed as well. So those are some of the challenges we see in terms of managing food waste awareness of those types of costs implications and then integrating with folks busy lives in terms of understanding that there's an important issue and what to do about it. It's a multi-scalar governance problem. So there are federal responsibilities and we do see some action at the federal level, some commitments to addressing food loss and waste,

but it's mostly within provincial and territorial mandates to manage waste. What we see in many different parts of Canada is that those responsibilities are then devolved to municipalities. So municipalities, which have generally the least funding in Canada bear the biggest responsibility for providing waste management infrastructure and services. We need to do things differently, we need to do them better. So let's start thinking about and planning for food waste reduction now in order to help us deal with those difficult challenges in the future. There are a lot of municipalities that don't have access for a number of reasons to curbside

collection programs. Whether that's because of the infrastructure cost or the economies of scale that simply don't exist in rural municipalities, a food cycler program is a scalable solution that is able to divert food waste from the landfill. The FoodCycler is a convenient countertop appliance that offers a solution to food waste. What we do is we take all of your leftover food scraps and through a matter of hours we recycle that down by approximately 90% into a nutrient-rich soil amendment that you can then take and mix into your garden.

The problem with food waste in Ontario is that one of the largest contributors to municipal solid waste landfills is food waste. And the largest contributor to that food waste is households. So we've got a real challenge on our hand. And unfortunately, a lot of these municipal solid waste landfills are not capturing that methane gas that is so harmful to the environment. We won't be able to catch up to the food waste problem if we don't change our behaviors. The problem of food waste has often been an afterthought because we put it in the bin, it goes to the curb, and we forget about it.

Somebody else is taking care of it. And when you're starting to use a system like the food cycler, it's a lot more in your face. You're more intimate with your food waste, and you become, quite honestly, shocked at how much you waste over the course of a day or a week. And I think that either consciously or subconsciously changes your purchase habits. And I think that is what inspires us as a society wasting less food.

It's important for us to recognize though that food insecurity at its base is an income inequality and income insufficiency issue in the same way that food waste is a problem is due to over consumption and not enough management across the food value chain. So I think it's important for us to look at solutions that deal with both of these issues at their base. It's part of why I think the SEED is such a great example. They do work that addresses food security as a dignity issue and as an income inequality issue. I want to make it clear that by us bringing surplus food into the warehouse and breaking it down, sending it out to partners, making it available in the grocery store, we don't see this as a solution to food insecurity.

This is hopefully a temporary thing before those income-based solutions come into play. you