At a time when local food movements are springing up, organic agriculture is booming, and nutritionists are joining with hunger activists, educators and foodies to rethink the food system, this is remarkably shoddy coverage. Oh, and did I mention peak oil and devastation of farm soils, or the cruelty to animals in Big Industrial Ag? Indeed, the cover picture is of a turkey farm – not turkeys out in the field, but packed in beak to breast inside a large covered barn where they get fattened up for slaughter without ever seeing the light of day. You can almost smell the feces, and taste the antibiotics that prevent them from mass illness. True, it is the Globe, and its ever-lowering standards of journalism. And just one story in a series, though it sure looks like the rest of the series plays into the same narrative.

Our recent Climate Justice paper, Every Bite Counts, tried to break out of the industrial growth paradigm by thinking about food through a climate lens, which tells us to more greatly value self-reliance and agricultural systems and practices that are not fossil fuel intensive. I also suggest a great series on food and agriculture in the Tyee by Colleen Kimmett, and a new publication from CCPA’s Saskatchewan office by Trevor Harriot if you are looking for an alternative to nonsense on the cover of the Globe.

I’m really proud of the result. I think the paper builds nicely on the work of countless activists at the grassroots level (who have brought us farmers’ markets and community shared agriculture projects), and on more recent efforts at the local government level (such as Metro Vancouver’s draft Regional Food System Strategy). Our report is aimed at the provincial level, and talks about actions that would greatly strengthen these efforts to create a just, sustainable and resilient food system.

The report covers a lot of ground, and we don’t pretend to have answers to all of the big questions surrounding a food system. Instead, we use climate change as a lens to engage a discussion about where our food system needs to go in the years to come. That sounds like a hard conversation to launch at this moment in time, given the casual over-abundance of the modern supermarket, and a plethora of restaurants to choose from. But start to peel back the layers and the whole edifice of globalized, industrial food is less solid than one might think.

The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard

I watched the video along time ago, and even saw a live performance of it at the Oregon Country Fair a couple years ago. Now the book, which puts some much needed meat on the bones of those stick people. Which makes it a compelling popular primer on ecological economics, except while the latter tends to the abstract, Leonard tells the story of everyday Stuff, walking you through the processes of Extraction, Production, Distribution, Consumption and Disposal. She also makes a compelling case that our ecological woes – of which climate change is just one – are systemically rooted in a little thang we call capitalism. But she does not stick to environmental problems, either; she reveals the injustices for workers at all stages in wages, hours and unsafe working conditions so that we can buy a toxic bauble for a dollar.

The Geography of Hope by Chris Turner

I saw Chris Turner speak at a conference last year at Harrison Hot Springs, and even got to chat with him in the hot tub. He was a pretty funny speaker and I committed to picking up his book. But then I assumed I would see it on the shelves in my occasional bookstore browsing, but never saw it anywhere. Which is a shame because this type of book is what we need to shake ourselves out of our fossil fuel addiction. Turner is a fantastic writer, and as a journalist he is able to tell compelling stories from a round-the-world journey in search of real examples of a zero-carbon economy that represents a plausible future – if we can just break the addiction. Working on climate change takes you to some pretty dark places, and this type of book shines some of the light I need to keep going.

The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett

When I first heard the name The Spirit Level, it met with a roll of my eyes, kind of like when someone says Mother Earth during an environmental debate. But the book kept coming up from some sources I highly trust, and after picking it up I found it has little to do with the last known residence of Carlos Casteneda. In fact, it is the type of synthesis that is so rare these days, covering a wide range of empirical evidence, and weaving it together so nicely that at the end it just seems obvious. The sub-title gives it away: using cross-sectional international comparisons and states within the US (plus the occasional time series), the book makes its way through an undeniable link between higher inequality and adverse social and health outcomes. As someone who has spent a bit of time researching inequality, and advocating for policies to reduce it, I’ve noticed a tendency for researchers to sometimes fall into “statistical pornography”, or displaying data for its shock value (“just look at that growing gap”). What the Spirit Level does is provide the deep context for why that growing gap matters, linking it to real outcomes rather than ethical ideals, filling in the canvas with research on social determinants of health and life satisfaction. I’m pleased to say I got this one out of the library.

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan

Pollan’s follow up to The Omnivore’s Dilemma revisits some of the critique of the industrialized food system covered in that book, but focuses on our evolving understanding of nutrition. Pollan is a wry writer, and he deftly and humourously argues that the science of “nutritionism” has led us astray because of its reductionist tendencies that miss the big picture of healthy eating in practice, thus leading societies down one food fad after another, plus a lexicon of food-speak that few can relate to. The major lessons seem to be about avoiding the products of the industrial food system, fast foods but also most of the processed foods, especially ones that have health claims emblazoned on the package. Simply put, eat your fruits and veggies, ideally as locally produced as possible, and not too much meat. And slow down, dammit, and enjoy that meal with friends and family.

This conclusion is based on a very simple, yet effective measure of housing affordability: the ratio of median housing prices to the median household income in each municipality (housing market). This price-to-income ratio measures how many years the median family (the one in the middle of the income distribution, where half of all families earn more and half earn less) would need to work to earn as much as the median house costs. Typically, a housing market is considered affordable if 3 (or fewer) years of household income is sufficient to purchase a home in the area.

In Vancouver, however, the median housing price – $540,900 – is equivalent to 9 years and 4 months of the median household income of $58,200 (both are measured in the third quarter of 2009). Wow, just wow.

The rest of BC’s urban areas aren’t doing much better: 4 of the 5 least affordable housing markets in Canada were in BC. In order of lowest affordability, these are Vancouver, Victoria, Abbotsford and Kelowna. The next least affordable housing in Canada is in Toronto.

If you’re curious, the 5 affordable urban housing markets in Canada are Thunder Bay, Windsor, Moncton, Saguenay and Saint John, NB.

What can we do about the rising unaffordability of housing in BC?

First off, we need our policy-makers to recognize that housing affordability is a serious problem and begin to monitor it regularly so they can measure their progress in addressing it (targets and timelines, anyone?). Here’s where I agree with the assessment of the folks at the FIPP that in Canada

housing affordability has received little or no political attention, even in the bubble markets where booms escalated housing prices to unprecedented heights.

It’s time for this to change.

What kind of policy reforms should we be looking at? The folks at the Frontier Institute for Public Policy recommend a market approach of relaxing zoning regulations and getting rid of agricultural land reserves, which they argue will reduce the price of land and thus the price of housing. Increase supply to lower prices – a standard textbook economics solution, but in this case it’s not going to work.

No matter how far you take it, eventually there are hard limits to low-density sprawl. We’ve got only so much land to fill with single family homes before we run out. Paving over agricultural land may postpone the problem for a few more years, but it’s not a long term solution. Moreover, as we prepare to face climate change and peak oil, encouraging urban sprawl may well do more harm than good. And if our world is about to get a lot smaller, paving over agricultural land would soon prove to be short-sighted.

It seems to me that we’ve left the invisible hand work its magic in the housing market long enough by now to know what it is good and bad at. It does an excellent job of providing luxurious condos with ocean views to the highest bidder (and we don’t lack millionaires in BC), but it fails miserably at providing affordable housing to the hundreds of working families. And I’m not just talking about the poor or near poor here – whose situation is dire – but about families with two earners with decent middle class jobs who are finding it more and more difficult to afford a home in the city. It’s time for governments at all levels to intervene in the market and ensure that a share of the new homes build are priced so that they are affordable for middle income families.

And since affordability is not just about housing prices, but about household incomes as well, I’d like to see some action on the income front. A couple of decades of making our labour market more “flexible” have resulted in stagnating earnings at the middle, and falling real (inflation-adjusted) earnings for families in the lower end of the income ladder. We need to address the rising income inequality and increase the economic security of the poor and modest income households. This can be done both through strengthening labour law and through re-distribution via the tax system.