It was very focused on the social, economic and logistic aspects of local food. It was a panel discussion mediated by David Beers editor of The TYEE and the panelists were Meeru Dhalwala of Vij's Restaurant, Amy Robertson board chair of the Farmers Market Society, Ian Walker president of Left Coast Naturals and Lori Stahlbrand founder and president of Local Food Plus.
Unfortunately I don't think I made much progress in discovering where there is a need for scientific research and where our project could fall. I do think I made some good contacts for other purposes. The groups, networks and organizations as well as the private businesses I've listed are what I think we could maybe consider secondary stakeholders, they're passionate about local food and so I think it's worth keeping track of some of them for future reference, support and collaboration. I've included the panelists' groups and businesses as well as some for other people I met during the evening. Also I did email some of them but only got around to it by Friday afternoon so hopefully some will respond and we'll see what they have to say.
Finally there were some people at the event interested in covering local-food related happenings so I also started a list of media contacts, should we be inclined in the future to seek media coverage.
When the minutes get posted they can be found here
PHSA website has food for thought fact sheets on it
Kevin Millsip from the Vancouver School Board (VSB) discussed a sustainability framework they recently passed
The framework has 3 key themes food, energy, waste and 6 key result areas (these are basically goals)
Kevin stated that while creating goals with respect to energy and waste is feasible they have found it more challenging to create goals with respect to food
Jan-March --> community engagement/feedback opportunity for the draft to revise the plan, our research can be helpful here
Someone brought up that Local Food Plus could be helpful to the VSB
Chris Thoreau runs My Urban Farm and is proposing to form a network for urban farmers in Vancouver
He probably has a lot of information relevant to what we are doing, especially regarding crop feasibility
Also he might be a person who would be interested in our results
Finally Janine de la Salle (Food Systems Planning, HB Lanarc) made quick mention of a time when people in her office calculated all the area of industrial roofs and she actually mentioned the number, it was in the context that if all roofs were made to be able to bear a load there could be lots of garden area
This is of interest simply for the fact that they did a calculation similar to what we are going to try to do so Janine might be a person to discuss our project with
