At long last, our paper that reviews the state of food asset mapping in Canada is published in Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l’alimentation. Thanks to the hard work of a team of undergraduate students, we did a cross-Canada review of 73 food asset maps. As expected, we found that these maps featured a lot of food assets in the built environment, like grocery stores and food banks. There were very few maps that represented Indigenous-focused food assets, natural, and cultural assets. We hope that through showing the gaps in food asset mapping in Canada, we can add more evidence to support the need for changing how food asset maps are created. We call for more collaborative methods that centre the people who food asset maps would benefit most.
Category: News
We are thrilled to announce that Dr. Tammara Soma is the recipient of two awards at Simon Fraser University. She is the winner of the 2023 Emerging Community-Engaged Researcher Award and the 2023 Excellence in Teaching Award.
These awards recognize her many years of hard work with communities to ensure research is equitable and aligning her course curricula to put decolonization in action in her teaching.
Our photovoice project in partnership with the Kitselas First Nation is now published in the Journal of the American Planning Association. This article features six Indigenous participants from Kitselas First Nation who shared photos and stories of their everyday lived experiences with foods and the importance of traditional foods. Through the findings from this study, we demonstrate the importance of respecting and supporting Indigenous food sovereignty in planning and the need for community food assessments to include cultural food assets. We are grateful for the collaboration and support from the Kitselas First Nation throughout the entire project.
Dr. Tammara Soma’s documentary Food is my Teacher premiered on August 25 on CBC Gem. She travels with filmmaker Brandy Yanchyk across B.C. and Alberta to explore the healing power of food and its role in shaping our culture and identity. The documentary features the backyard garden of Tamara Shulman, Food Systems Lab Director of Community Partnerships. We also made a splash in the media, including:
Dr. Tammara Soma is the expert guest in an episode of the CBC series Planet Wonder. She chats with show host Johanna Wagstaffe about food system sustainability and explores the question “How vegan do we have to be to save the planet?”. Find out her answers to this question in this video.
Our research on how planners can help scale up local procurement for school food programs is published in the latest issue of Plan Canada.
Food Systems Lab had four presentations at the Canadian Association of Food Studies conference this year. Tammara and Belinda shared findings from the Our Home, Our Food, Our Resilience project. Elina, Dina, and Hafsa presented at a panel session on the Digging into the Farm to School Movement project.
Earlier this month, Elina, Dina, and Hafsa also presented at the Farm to School BC Conference and successfully defended their theses.
Tammara Soma is the featured guest on this week’s Eat Well Travel Better Podcast. In this episode, Tammara shares and reflects on her personal and career journey as a global citizen with lived experience from Indonesia, to the United States and Canada.
We published a journal article titled “Reflections From Implementing a Virtual Social Innovation Lab”. This article highlights key lessons learned from adapting a social innovation lab to an online environment. An interesting innovation is the use of interactive tools like Gather.Town to improve participant engagement and Kahoot! for gamification to expand creative thinking. This article is available with open access in the International Journal of Qualitative Methods.