Eating local can help make farming viable

Author: Kyle L. McGregor

Posted: March 22, 2010

Categories: News from Sustain Members

Trying to save the family farm (featuring Karen Hutchinson, Co-Chair of Sustain Ontario)

Karen Hutchinson loves food.

She hands over a Caledon-grown head of garlic and describes its virtues, notably its flavourful taste. She loves the countryside and the riches of the land.

But she worries about family farms disappearing when it’s hard to make a living and the land is more valuable for development.

For the 49-year-old Hutchinson, it’s been a roundabout route.

“When I was younger, all I wanted to do was go to the city and work in the city,” she said.

She followed her dreams, studying urban planning at the University of Waterloo before heading off to Toronto. She lived in many neighbourhoods from Riverdale to the Annex before settling in Etobicoke, where she and her husband, Rich Miller, bought their first house.

Though she liked life in the city, she was eventually drawn back to the land where her family has farmed for three generations. Now she is trying to become the fourth.

“I think maybe you have to go away to appreciate things,” she said sitting at a picnic table on a sunny spring afternoon behind the Inglewood General Store. “I have more of an urban perspective. Urban and rural have so much to share, and food is the logical place.”

She and her husband, an IT specialist, and their children Katie, 10, and Alex, 14, live at Sheffield Farms, which sits on 100 acres.

An avid viewer of the cooking shows on the Food Network when her kids were babies, Hutchinson became increasingly interested in how food got from the farm to the kitchen.

And that’s become her focus, because what we eat affects everything from the environment to development and even the viability of the family farm.

To continue reading the full article from the Toronto Star click here.