What does Local Food mean? Here’s what Roots to Harvest has to say!
Posted: June 8, 2017
Categories: GoodFoodBites
Roots to Harvest is one of Sustain Ontario’s members. Here is a bit of information on their organization and what they have to say about Local Food!
Tell us a bit about your organization and one or two highlighted projects or activities you would like to discuss.
Roots to Harvest is a non-for profit and charitable organization providing transformative educational and employment opportunities for youth to engage with local agriculture and cultivate healthy communities. We use food – growing, cooking and eating- to engage the populations we serve, and strive to provide work which is meaningful, programming which is purposeful, and staff who are qualified and compassionate.
We work in schools from September until June, providing food literacy education. We work in classrooms offering workshops on topics such as bee keeping, vermi-composting, sprouting, and food preservation. Roots to harvest assists high schools across Thunder bay to help plant and maintain school gardens and greenhouses. We feel that this provides hands on experience, and tangible skills that students can take with them beyond the school setting.
A new pilot project this year was the Get Fresh café at Westgate CVI. The café reinvents the traditional high school cafeteria model, featuring local and Ontario foods. Each day fresh food is prepared from scratch in collaboration with students, developing relationships with local producers, cafeteria staff, and teaching staff. This helps to build food literacy both in the cafeteria and the classroom. School kitchens provide opportunities to reconnect students and the broader school community with good food that is grown close to home.
What does local food mean to you? Why do you think it is important to buy local? What do you see as some of the barriers for people to buy local? Could you offer some advice?
Roots to harvest uses local food as a community building tool to provide educational opportunities. We believe that there is more to learning about local food than just where the food comes from – it is about connecting with local producers, and all that goes into our local food system. Likewise buying local is not just about the environment, and the health of the planet – it is about connecting the community to the whole food system. At Roots to harvest we choose to create garden spaces in urban settings in hopes to just that. Access to local food is not always easy, sometimes people need to go out of their way. Our garden sites increase production in our local areas through our markets and through teaching in our garden spaces and in schools.