Rooftop gardens are an important tool within sustainable urban agriculture (UA) that can contribute towards food security. This paper explores the barriers, benefits and incentives of rooftop gardens which have documented environmental and social benefits, including use as a tool towards combating climate change and for creating community within cities. Significant barriers exist, with opportunities for mitigating such barriers and creating incentives for participation in rooftop UA including grant programs specifically designed to guide businesses through implementation of gardens on commercial buildings, rooftop restaurants for increasing tourism potential, change in policy for support of UA, awards for businesses who are leaders in using roof space for food production, innovations in design, and education and training. Rooftop UA has potential for growth in Vancouver, if impetus comes from various sectors, including government, non-profit organizations and the City of Vancouver, with specific emphasis on making rooftop UA exciting for business and profitable.

This research aimed to explore the nutritional vulnerability of homeless adult men. Using a mixed methods approach, risk factors for chronic illness, food security status, dietary intake adequacy, and how the study participants navigate the food supply system to obtain food were investigated. This study assessed differences in nutrition vulnerability between participants that use solvents and those that do not. The findings reveal that all participants were nutritionally vulnerable. A majority was overweight or obese; nearly all experienced food insecurity; and most did not meet the daily food intake guidelines established by Canada’s Food Guide. Daily efforts by participants to obtain food from charitable meal programs helped to meet physiological needs, as well as social, economic, safety and security needs. Participants using solvents had different nutritional and food experiences than non-solvent users. This was identified by a higher prevalence of severe food insecurity and social exclusion compared to non-solvent using homeless participants. This study provides important information to program planners and policy-makers necessary in order to help meet the food and nutritional needs of adult homeless populations. Findings may be translated into policies and programs aimed at improving accessibility to healthy foods.

Questions have been are raised about the applicability (context specificity) and appropriateness (cultural relevance) of existing frameworks and the indicators used to measure and monitor food security in communities located throughout Canada’s circumpolar region. Developed primarily for use in more urban areas located to the south and with non-Aboriginal populations such frameworks have arguably failed to take into account the unique food perspectives and practices of the Inuit, First Nation and Métis peoples who live in the north. A call for both improved food security concepts and measures that are relevant to and capture the local characteristics of northern communities and its people are required. Taking a post modern ethnographic approach the purpose of the current study was to develop a holistic understanding of food security in Stony Rapids, a remote predominantly Aboriginal community in Saskatchewan’s far north. Immersed in day to day life for a period of three months an ethnographic record of household food security was produced through participant observation (P-O) activities, interviews and photographs. These activities occurred both within the community and within three households that agreed to participate in the study. Analysis occurred in two phases. The first phase was informal, occurred throughout the duration of the field work, and involved reading and rereading field notes and sharing of observations and insights with household participants and key informants. The second phase of analysis began after leaving the field and data collection had ended. In a formal process, thematic analysis grounded in the data was used to reduce, make sense, and derive meaning from the field notes and interviews. Emerging from the analysis, findings suggested that food moves into and within northern households via three dominant pathways that originate from the sources of food that are available to and accessed by households in Stony Rapids. The movement of food vis-à-vis these three dominant pathways was found to be dependent on a constellation of regional and/or community level factors as well as structural factors that were unique to each household. These factors taken together not only influence the capacity of households to access food but also influence how food is utilised within the home. This study produced a novel way of understanding northern food security that has relevance for the measures that may be developed to capture this issue and thereby inform appropriate and effective intervention strategies.

This study is based on ethnographic research that was conducted in the villages of Santa María de Rivas and San Gerardo de Rivas in the coffee farming region of Pérez Zeledón, Costa Rica. While these two villages are in close proximity to each other, the economy of San Gerardo is based more on tourism than the economy of Santa María, although both towns still engage in agricultural activities. Within each village, I conducted 15 preliminary interviews, followed by ten follow-up interviews with the main food preparers of the households. From in depth discussions, I found that food consumption patterns of people in both towns were being affected by seasonal variations in incomes due to the cyclical nature of employment in both tourism and agriculture. A number of households from these villages were experiencing periods of food worries throughout the year that were linked to the seasonality of tourism as well as agriculture, and in particular coffee production. Seasonal availability of particular food items also shaped consumption patterns; however, perceptions of food insecurity in this context appear to be primarily related to problems of access.

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Despite enough food production to feed everyone on the planet, there are 850 million people around the world who are food insecure. This includes people in developing and industrialized countries. Food insecurity may not be just “not having enough amounts of food” but “not having food that is appropriate according to culture and religion”. The global agri-food system has restricted access to food and resulted in environmental damage by displacing family farming, and leading to the establishment of industrial monocultures. Canada, being a multicultural society, has immigrants from around the world with different ethno-cultural backgrounds and religions. This study takes a different perspective on food insecurity by linking food to culture and religion and the food system. The study has devised criteria based on sustainable food security criteria developed by Lima (2008). The criteria include physical and economic access to food, religious and cultural adequacy of food and the food system’s environmental and social effects. The criteria were applied to the case study of Waterloo Region by examining existing policies and initiatives to address food insecurity in the Region. The case study analysis explores barriers and opportunities to foster sustainable food security for immigrants in Waterloo Region. The case study includes an embedded case study of South Asian Muslim community of immigrants in Cambridge, Waterloo Region. The analysis of the case study findings reveals that in most cases the current food system of Waterloo Region is largely industrial and contains major gaps in fulfilling the criteria of access, sustainability, social justice, and cultural and spiritual attitudes. This food system only partially meets or even fails to meet the criteria. As evidenced in the case study, current governance arrangements to address the issue of food insecurity result in exclusion of immigrant populations. The issue goes beyond food and emerges in other planning decisions like the allocation of public spaces. Finally, this study recommends broader multicultural policy at the regional government level to include the issues of immigrants.

Written for the School of Dietetics and Human Nutrition. Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2009/06/29). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Toledo, 2010. / Typescript. "Submitted to the Graduate Faculty as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts Degree in Geography." "A thesis entitled"--at head of title. Title from title page of PDF document. Bibliography: p. 52-57.