Editor's Note: The four market tours and workshops featured in this article are just a snapshot of what’s on offer at the 11th International Public Markets Conference. Explore the program and register at the regular rate before it goes up on May 4th, 2023!

With more than half of Toronto’s residents born outside of Canada, the city is recognized by the United Nations as the most diverse in the world. The territory of Tkarón:to, which has been cared for by the Anishinabeg Nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Huron-Wendat, and its current treaty holders, the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, is also subject to the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement to share and care for the land and resources in the Great Lakes region peacefully—a sentiment at the heart of conference programming.

At our 11th International Public Markets Conference, participants will get the opportunity to explore this benchmark of multiculturalism by joining our public market mobile workshops and tours. During these sessions, we hand over the stage to local market managers and advocates—the people out in the field developing innovative solutions to challenges that public space professionals in other parts of the world might be facing. 

Together with our Toronto-based co-hosts, we’ve carefully curated 18 workshops and tours that will provide participants with the opportunity to be on site, meet the people who work there, learn the history of these special places, and brainstorm with others about ways of scaling these successes. The market-related projects and initiatives will all build upon the conference theme “Setting a New Table” and will provide inspiring examples of how to put promises of a fair food system, inclusive economies, and social cohesion into action. Equally important, the conference is designed to be a tool to catalyze engagement, collaboration, and action on shared issues in order to foster a more robust public market ecosystem and demonstrate a “market city” in the making. 

Saturday’s tours will end with a closing party at Stackt Market, a unique cultural marketplace created out of repurposed shipping containers, which features shops, a microbrewery, music, social enterprises, and fun public spaces. So come along with us on this journey to learn more about how the conference’s key theme of equity is shaping the work of market leaders in Toronto.

Waste-Free Role Models

As people become increasingly aware of the need to support environmentally conscious businesses, it's essential to explore ways to alleviate the burden on customers. Simply urging customers to bring their own bags and containers is no longer sufficient. The real challenge lies in reducing waste associated with prepared foods at farmers’ markets and special events.

One mobile workshop, "Setting a New Table with Reusables: Grassroots Action to Reduce Waste at Farmers' Markets," offers some innovative approaches to meeting this challenge. The workshop focuses on the two host farmers' markets, Withrow Park Farmers' Market and Evergreen Farmers’ Market, which have successfully implemented waste reduction programs in collaboration with vendors with an emphasis on replacing disposables with reusable options, including dishware and packaging. Participants will learn how to implement similar programs at small-and large-scale markets, conduct waste audits, develop sustainability goals and policies, and design pilot projects.

At the workshop, Evergreen, will share the results of a recently conducted waste audit which identified the most common sources of waste. Armed with this information, they were able to develop strategies to reduce those items and Evergreen representatives will share their process and next steps with workshop attendees. As Evergreen’s Farmers’ Market Manager puts it, "Small actions add up to big impacts." By providing concrete examples of successful waste reduction efforts, this workshop will undoubtedly inspire attendees to take action and make a positive difference in their communities. In addition, two of our bus tours, tour 1, which covers Central and North, and tour 4, which covers Central and East, will include stops at both markets where conference participants can experience the re-use program in action. 

Food infrastructure in Scarborough

Scarborough, a large and diverse district in Toronto, Canada, has long been plagued by negative perceptions of safety and lack of excitement from outsiders. Howard Tam, a resident and food enthusiast, is trying to change that by showcasing the unique and delicious food offerings of the area through his Eat More Scarborough Food Tours. Howard's goal is to challenge the negative narrative and shed light on the heart of the community.

One of the most interesting things about this community that will be highlighted on the “Scarborough Foodways” tour is the way new immigrants have adapted the area's infrastructure to create their own unique businesses. Tam points to Filipino restaurant Jesse Jr., which is located in a former burger chain location, as well as the Scarborough branch of the Adonis supermarket, which features a very popular in-house pita production line. Scarborough's local frozen dim sum factories are another example of immigrant business owners adapting to local culinary demand.

Despite the ingenuity of these private spaces, Tam recognizes that more investment is needed in the public realm to truly help these communities thrive. He believes that city planners would benefit from working with local communities to better design public infrastructure that meets the needs of the diverse populations in the area and attract more people to visit the area. This is best exemplified by one of Tam’s tour participants who said, “I’ve driven by this place 100 times and never went inside because it didn’t look interesting from the outside, but the food is amazing and I’m coming back!” Marina Queirolo, the founder of MarketCityTO, believes that tours like this can make visible Scarborough's social infrastructure and help us imagine the future role of public markets in the area. 

Ojibiikaan Indigenous Garden

Ojibiikaan, an Indigenous-led organization in Toronto, aims to promote Indigenous food sovereignty and connect young people with the land through activities like medicine walks, gardening, and traditional cooking. Their unique programming is rooted in ceremony, storytelling, and the seven generations teachings.

Our mobile workshop leader for “Pathways to Indigenous Food Sovereignty and the Role of Advancing Reconciliation,” Anishanawbe and Algonquin chef Johl Whiteduck Ringuette has dedicated his life’s work to identifying sources, relearning, and reclaiming the traditional Anishanawbe diet. He is the owner of NishDish Marketeria and Catering as well as an artist, storyteller, and co-founder of Red Urban Nation artist collective. Whiteduck Ringuette will walk participants through a series of murals designed and painted by the collective.

Participants will learn stories of Indigenous foodways as well as Whiteduck Ringuette’s insights on his work indigenizing and reclaiming urban spaces by the original peoples of this land including lessons from implementing the first Indigenous Harvesters and Artisans Market on site, which is an annual event celebrating Indigenous traditions and ecological practices to reduce waste and promote sustainability. The workshop will also share reflections on some of the ways Indigenous peoples want to participate in Toronto’s public markets and how markets can advance reconciliation. 

‍Toronto’s Unofficial Public Market History Tour

‍"Toronto’s Unofficial Public Market History” walking tour is a collaboration between Culinaria, Feeding City Lab and Tasting the Global City. The tour will be led by academic historians and community knowledge-keepers who use food to animate the vast social and cultural changes that Toronto has undergone over its relatively young life.

The tour guides see themselves as partly following in the footsteps of local social historians in the 1970s whose focus on immigration to Toronto contributed to the popular acceptance of multiculturalism as a core tenet of the city’s identity. Today, this group is committed to foregrounding the long Indigenous presence in and around Toronto, and exploring how newcomers to Toronto have shaped its wider food system—its culture and infrastructure—often through informal private retail space rather than as vendors in the city’s official public markets. 

This tour will provide attendees with a unique historical perspective on Toronto’s market culture. Guides will highlight the Indigenous food infrastructure that first demonstrated the richness of this territory—to the point of nourishing the settler colonial project that displaced many of its original inhabitants. And, attendees will learn why Toronto, unlike similar cities in North America, struggled to develop a strong public market system, due in part to the role of corruption in the failure of two public markets, and in spite of strong public demand which by the 1850s had outstripped the capacities of the St. Lawrence Market. This tour will highlight how in light of this history Toronto’s most vibrant market districts developed on the margins of “respectable” society, carved out of available space to satisfy the tastes of non-Anglo immigrants. 

“This is the first time we’ll be running this tour,” says Joel Dickau at the University of Toronto. “But in my own experience as a participant and a leader of tours through Kensington Market, one of our walking tour destinations, I have seen firsthand how food inspires pride in people for their forebears who persevered in making and circulating foodstuffs to their community in the face of cultural alienation, racism, and harassment from the dominant Anglo society.” Our guides on this tour hope to inspire participants to investigate the histories of their own markets and the interplay between public infrastructure and migrant communities. ‍

Ready to Explore?‍

Head to the conference website for the full program. You’ll find more market tours and mobile workshops as well as participant-led breakout sessions and social events all aimed at connecting public market practitioners and sharing best practices from around the world. In addition to these opportunities, we’ll have breakout sessions on topics ranging from tips for streamlining operations to how to get creative about funding, unconferences including one on expanding food access through incentives, and a bevy of networking opportunities in the evenings. Register now to join us in Toronto on June 8-10, 2023!