Teachers know this simple truth: field trips fight summertime malaise.
Though none of the field trips from my school days were as uplifting as a recent visit to Vineland Research and Innovation Centre (more blog post after video)
I caught a ride with Barbara Emanuel and Seodhna Keown from Toronto Food Strategy–much better than a yellow school bus.
At the same time, folks from awesome non-profits across Toronto were descending on Niagara, eager to plant and learn about world crops with Vineland’s lead researcher Ahmed Bilal.
It’s not often that people from food security, environmental and immigration organizations work shoulder to shoulder. They’re more likely to see each other at conferences. But on this glorious warm day there were people from the following organizations working together planting calalloo, long beans, bitter mellon, and okra:
- Green Thumbs for Growing Kids
- Toronto Food Policy Council
- Greenest City
- Ryerson University
- Big Carrot Green Roof
- Bendale Business and Technical Institute
- Access Alliance
And their work was serving an important purpose. Right now, people in the GTA spend $61 million a month on Chinese, South Asian and African-Caribbean fruits and vegetables. These crops are not currently being grown locally. Rather, they’re being shipped from far away places–often worse for wear. So why not grow them here–giving farmers new commercial crops, and providing people across Ontario a chance to taste fresher flavours from home, or the flavours they’ve learned to love.
After a morning of planting and a brief orientation on the world crops, each organization grabbed flats of world crop seedlings to plant in their community gardens and greenhouses.
The non-profits’ observations about these crops perform will feed into the documentation Vineland will need to make the world crops viable for farmers to grow.
It sounds complicated. But as you can see, on that particular field the seeds of conviviality were being planted alongside the world crops.
