Interview: Chris Alward of Local Food Plus

Local Food Plus LogoLocal Food Plus is a non-profit organization in Toronto that certifies sustainable farmers and producers, while working to help institutions of all kinds commit to purchasing food from certified farmers and partnering food purchasers/distributors with certified farmers. In the end, Local Food Plus (LFP) is creating a win-win situation for everyone; farmers make a decent living off their crops, distributors continue to compete for contracts and making it easier for consumers to bite into local, sustainably grown produce.

I recently sat down to have a conversation with Chris Alward, Director of Market Development at Local Food Plus. We talked about LFP’s funding, how things are going and next steps.

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Sustainable Food Initiatives to Take Note Of

It’s been a while since I’ve found some really good initiatives that I thought London, Ontario and Canada at large should be adopting or plain old ripping off. After all, I’ve never seen a government agency claim intellectual property (IP) infringement if someone else began doing the same thing, so why shouldn’t we?! This type of stance has been brought forth by Shawn Adamsson very recently.

Food 2030

The UK government recently unveiled Food 2030 – a food strategy designed to ensure that Britons have access to high quality, sustainably farmed/grown, food that benefits both the farmer/grower and the consumer. At the same time Food 2030 should ensure that people have good jobs, a reduction in greenhouse emissions and food waste.

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Recent Changes to My Website

With the number of changes I’ve made to my website over the last 12 months, I thought it would be a good idea to go over some of the major features.

  1. Integration of RPX. This means you can login using your Google, Yahoo!, Twitter, OpenID, Facebook or LiveJournal account and start participating in comments/discussions.
  2. The current theme/layout. This theme has a lot of hidden features. One major one I’d like to highlight is if you hover your mouse over the top-right corner of the webpage, you’ll be given options to increase/decrease the size of the text and also the ability to change from a fixed-width version of my site to a fluid-width version of my site.

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I Wasn't Taught This in School

Western Tech a high school in Toronto, Ontario...
Image via Wikipedia

Recently I went through my inbox looking at past issues of the newsletter I receive called Project GiftED. While I don’t always find myself in agreement with everything said in the newsletter or on the blog – mostly because the blog entries aren’t always about education – I do find myself intrigued often enough to keep subscribing. I got really interested when I came across an article that was actually written by the folks at zenhabits entitled “27 Skills Your Child Need to Know That She’s Not Getting in School.”

Recognizing full well that I completed high school over 8 years ago and then entered the Computer Systems Technology program at Fanshawe College, I asked a colleague of mine, James Costa, what he thought about the list.  His response below has been edited for brevity and clarity:

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