Hamilton Food Strategy

Putting the Food Strategy into Play through Goals, Recommendations, and Actions

Food Strategy Goals

The four goals remind us where we want to go and what we want our local food system to look like in the future:

1. Support food friendly neighbourhoods to improve access to healthy food for all residents.

2. Increase food literacy to promote healthy eating and empower all residents.

3. Support local food and help grow the agri-food sector.

4. Advocate for a healthy, sustainable, and just food system with partners and at all levels of government.

Food System Recommendations

There are 14 recommendations for action that contribute to one or more of the four goals to ensure a healthy, sustainable, and just food system in Hamilton:

1. Strengthen advocacy to eliminate poverty to improve individual and household food security.
2. Strengthen funding criteria for community food initiatives.
3. Ensure that food system enabling policies, tools, and other approaches are in place.
4. Build stronger City-Farm relationships to enhance the growth and development of local food.
5. Improve children and youth’s eating habits, food skills, and knowledge of food systems through food literacy.
6. Support and create diverse ways for people to grow food in the urban landscape and support participation in urban agriculture activities.
7. Foster Hamilton’s food innovation and entrepreneurial spirit.
8. Enhance the promotion and marketing of Hamilton’s local food industries.
9. Increase the amount of healthy, local food in publicly owned facilities to make the healthy choice the easy choice.
10. Promote physical access to healthy, local foods in all neighbourhoods.
11. Integrate food literacy and food systems education and training where residents live, learn, work, and play.
12. Support the physical and social infrastructure needed to empower citizens to take action.
13. Foster innovation to reduce food-related waste through diversion and composting.
14. Promote a culture that values healthy, local food to reduce food waste through food literacy.

Actions

The Food Strategy is brought to life with 46 actions that were identified by the City of Hamilton and local stakeholders. They were broken into 6 categories:

• System-Wide Actions
• Food Production Actions
• Food Processing and Distribution Actions
• Food Access and Consumption Actions
• Food Waste Management Actions

The complete list of actions can be viewed in the Food Strategy Report(PDF, 9.28 MB).