Celebrating food, farms & gardens

Nutrition Month may be officially over but I forgot (!) to publish this post last week, so here it is now, a little late but still timely.

That all people in the community, at all times, have access to nutritious, safe, personally acceptable and culturally appropriate foods, produced in ways that are environmentally sound and socially just.

Richmond Food Security Society's Mandate

To help my knowledge keep pace with my passion for food security & environmental sustainability, on March 12th I attended the Richmond Food Security Society's Conference where I listened to stories that inspired and informed me.

After the sessions, I did some research to learn more about the speakers & their projects. If you're interested in food security and sustainability issues or setting up a healthy school lunch program or school garden project, I encourage you to check out the following resources:

Food For All – Making Food Security more Inclusive (Jelica Shaw, Claudia Li, Cease Wysse)

Oskayak Garden Project

Shark Truth

Farm 2 School & Food Gardens: How to advocate for healthy food in our schools (Joanne Bays & Michael Wolfe)

Farm to School

Food Gardens in Richmond - School Year Garden Toolkit

Civic Dietetics

Two of the Cool Globes on display at Vancouver's Science World this past spring

Last month while doing a search on "environmental nutrition", I stumbled across the new-to-me concept of "civic dietetics":

Making food system issues integral to dietetic practice represents a transition for the professional, calling for new applications of skills and expertise. Drawing from the work of Thomas Lyson on civic agriculture, we propose civic dietetics to mean the application of dietetics to enhance public health by addressing food system structures, impacts, and policies and their relationship to food choices....

It can be argued that the economic, ecological, and social sustainability—the “triple bottom line”—of the food system, matters as much as the nutritional value of its products. Civic dietetics provides such a framework. [bolding added]

Source: Beyond Eating Right: The Emergence of Civic Dietetics to Foster Health and Sustainability Through Food System Change  by JL Wilkins, J Lapp,  A Tagtow & S Roberts in the Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2010.

Here are some other results from my recent Google search on "civic dietetics":

Civic dietetics: opportunities for integrating civic agriculture concepts into dietetic practice

Local and Healthy, 2 messages or 1?

Civic Dietetics, Community Gardening and Food Recovery

National Dietitian Day -- It's all about change!

Civic Markets and Alternative Agrofood Networks

This "cool globe", one of my favourites at the Science World display is called "cool careers". Made me think: perhaps "Civic Dietitian" is a new, evolving and essential role, if not career, for our times.