Your morning shower was brought to you by the Greenbelt

By Cynthia McQueen

Every locavore knows farmers feed cities. And, they fly their “I eat local” flags high. But do they know why eating local in Ontario is a very unique experience?

Local food producers supply Toronto’s 30 farmers’ markets by taking advantage of one of the largest and most diverse greenbelts in the world—the Ontario Greenbelt.

The Greater Golden Horseshoe Greenbelt has become a model for the world in keeping the grey green. With 7,100 working farms, including world-class vineyards, the international community has taken notice. Wildlife, habitat, land, water and air are all benefiting from this five-year-old experiment that Wayne Roberts, Toronto’s former Food Policy Project Coordinator, calls an unusual thing.

“It’s a greenbelt that protects both farming and at risk landscape and at risk plants and animals. It’s what we call a working landscape” says Roberts.


And, the landscape works hard. Ontario’s Greenbelt maintains more than 50 per cent agricultural land use while saving 1.8 million hectares of environmentally sensitive land from development and urban sprawl.

And, it does all this while protecting more than half a million acres of lakes, wetlands, river valleys, forests, and habitat for wildlife and endangered species.

At the same time, the Greenbelt purifies our water. Farmland, wetlands, forests, and natural areas allow rainwater to trickle into the ground where it follows the aquifers, results in springs, and feeds the rivers and lakes.

“But if you have asphalt, the water will collect; it will pick up dog sh-t; it will pick up cigarette butts; it will pick up bubblegum; it will pick up oil that was spilled from cars and other stuff, and it funnels it into a sewer system,” explains Burkhard Mausberg, President of the Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation.

Before the city installed tanks to contain rainwater overflow, the constant rain Toronto experienced in early June would have closed the beaches due to E. Coli contamination from the accumulation of animal feces in the storm water. Preventing problems like these from recurring, Mausberg says, is why we need more open spaces.

The Holland Marsh, just 50 kilometres north of Toronto, is one of those open spaces and an essential part of what makes the Greenbelt class 1 farmland—the highest class. Every year, enough carrots and onions are grown in the peat-moss-like soil of the marsh for every man, woman, and child in Canada to eat four pounds each.

“We like to call ourselves both the soup and salad bowl of Ontario,” says Jamie Reaume, Executive Director of the Holland Marsh Growers’ Association. He calls the marsh a gift to Ontario. In order to maintain that gift, 40-50 per cent of those onions and carrots, go to soup and salad bowls in America’s northeastern seaboard. Because local consumers do not pay the true cost of food production, many farmers struggle to make a living.

Food at supermarkets is cheap because farmers are competing in global markets with food produced on the other side of the world by people who are not paid a fair wage, says Lori Stahlbrand, Founder and President, Local Food Plus.

By supporting your local farmers, you pay more of the true cost of food up front, which makes the food seem more expensive. “We don’t pay the true cost of food at the supermarket, we pay for it down the road in terms of long distance transportation, environmental degradation, and our health,” explains Dr. Lauren Baker, Director of Sustain Ontario.

But local doesn’t necessarily mean sustainable. If something is grown locally, but uses pesticides, that’s just as problematic as buying sustainable food shipped in from thousands of miles away.

Reaume says getting food from places we can’t locate on a map is not sustainable.

For whatever reason a locavore chooses to eat food grown nearby, in Ontario, when you eat locally, you help maintain habitat for over 60 endangered species of plants and animals, while curbing urban sprawl, and purifying our water. It may seem, to some, like a costly investment, but to others it’s an investment in the future.

Roberts sees the cost this way: “I would eat locally for the same reason I would buy life insurance—I hope to live and if I don’t live I’d like to have my family well looked after.”

In the same vain, Mausberg relates the Greenbelt to our health as a system and an organic social network. He suggests the Greenbelt is similar to OHIP. “Fifty years ago somebody said, we should have OHIP and people sort of looked at this as odd. But look at how health care has defined us as a culture. In 50 years, we’re going to look at the Greenbelt with the same lens and say, ‘How smart were we to put that land aside.’”

Cynthia McQueen is a freelance journalist and the copy editor of Corporate Knights Magazine in Toronto – cynthia.mcqueen@gmail.com.