The 2003 blackout in the US northeast and central Canada offered dramatic proof that many cities in the developed world carry no more than a three-day reserve of fresh food. As more and more of the 6.5 billion people who inhabit the planet move from the country into the cities, critical concerns are being raised about the fragility of our food systems and the dominance of mechanized cold chains.
Global manufacturing industries and refrigeration companies, in response to the rising pressure of urbanization, have set up just-in-time delivery systems that are able to move enormous quantities of food to urban consumers. These industrial systems are in constant motion, transporting foodstuffs from mega-farms on different continents to city centers thousands of kilometers away.
As public awareness of the globalization in the food supply system has increased, resistance is also on the rise. Activists campaign for greater reliance on local food sources, asking consumers to be mindful of food sustainability and to support regional farm economies. But these strategies are likely to have only marginal impact on our eating habits as long as the supersize discount outlets, with their economies of scale, are able to entice customers with lower prices. Retail giants such as Costco and Walmart dominate most suburban areas and are constantly extending their reach, creating nearly one new store every single day across the Americas.
Referencing Walter P. Hedden’s 1929 milestone book, How Great Cities Are Fed, the following pages tell the story of the operative landscape of the Ontario Food Terminal to describe the magnitude of the urbanization of the food chain as well as the emergence of the foodshed, a term that designates the landscape of food production, distribution, and consumption across a region—towards better understanding a model of the flexible and resilient urban infrastructure that big cities will need if they are to achieve food security and intelligent production for the twenty-first century.
Terminal Congestion Overflowing streets at the St. Lawrence Market in 1948, originally planned a century earlier for horse and wagon traffic.
Photo courtesy of Ontario Food Terminal Archives, 2007
Over the last half century, food delivery systems in large urban centers, although largely overlooked by planners, economists, and politicians, have undergone a critical trans formation towards keeping the retail giants from gaining complete control of the food supply system. The changes began in the years right after World War II, when a sudden, massive influx of immigrants escalated the demands placed on food supply systems A comprehensive reorganization of the food industry in North American cities was needed. During the 1940s and 1950s, Keynesian economic policies and Fordist modes of production were creating an entirely new urban infrastructure. The rapid expansion of North America’s highway system, combined with the advent of refrigeration, made mass-market food delivery systems possible. These systems required centralized transport and delivery hubs for the wholesale distribution of perishable fruits and vegetables, and the modern food terminal emerged to answer that need. These terminals—mostly private-public ventures – had four main objectives: to relieve traffic congestion in city centers, centralize exchanges between growers and buyers, institute food quality standards, and regulate prices—moderating the predatory business practices of the large, vertically integrated retail food chains (as early as the 1920s, chain stores were biting off a solid 30 to 50 percent chunk of the food sales market across the continent).
In the past fifty years, twenty-five of the largest metropolitan areas in North America have built food terminals. Each city operates at least one central facility, imposing quality controls, serving large, ethnically diverse populations, and keeping the playing field level for wholesalers. Since the advent of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, Canada has moved past Japan and Europe to become the United States’ number one trading partner in fruits and vegetables. This expanding cross-border trade, as well as another wave of immigration to the Great Lakes region over the past decade, has exerted new pressures on the continental food system. Ensuring sustainable, perpetual production and a stable, year-round supply of fresh produce—everything that everybody needs, including fruits, fish, and flowers—becomes a more complex operation with each passing year.
Most manufacturing in the US and Canada has been in decline over the past few decades, but the food industry has been growing as fast as other sectors were collapsing: it is now the most important manufacturing sector in North America, second only to transportation. Including spin-offs in food handling, processing, and packaging, agricultural production is now a trillion-dollar-a-year industry that employs more than one-fifth of the North American population.
At the center of this explosive growth, located in one of the fastest-growing metropolises in the Western world, is the Ontario Food Terminal (OFT). The OFT is the biggest wholesale distribution node for fresh food in Canada, and the third largest in North America, after those of Los Angeles and Chicago. Operating at a breakneck pace 365 days a year, the market has not shut down for a single day since its opening in 1954. Over a million tons of produce travel through it every year, making it one of the most important terminals in North America—a food commodities stock exchange that can never stand still.
Terminal Optimism Sketch of the U-shaped terminal proposed in 1954 by architects Phillip Shore and Robert Moffat.
Photo courtesy of Ontario Food Terminal Archives, 2007
The OFT was created in response to a crisis in Toronto’s wholesale market operations in the mid-1940s. The rapidly growing population of immigrants from Europe and China was placing significant new demands on the city’s infrastructure. Market warehouses were bursting at the seams and transport vehicles had a hard time getting through the traffic congestion to the downtown markets. While the St. Lawrence Market had served the city well since its modest beginnings as a distribution center in 1803, the new larger delivery trucks had rendered streets impassable and the market had now clearly outgrown its footprint. The post-war economic boom had created an urgent need for modernization.
Terminal Landscape, 1956 The site of the Ontario Food Terminal in 1954 located in Etobicoke, a suburb just west of the city center bordered by Park Lawn Road, the Canadian National Railway to the east.
Photo: Copyright permission to use this image was received from the Archives of Ontario
On May 17, 1952, the Wholesale Fruit Market in downtown Toronto was destroyed by fire. Faced with a choice between rebuilding on the site or moving the market to a new location, the city opted to take the operation west. Provincial Minister of Agriculture Thomas L. Kennedy argued for paving over a 162,000-square-meter (forty-acre) Etobicoke swampland. Conveniently situated between two major roadways and a trunk line, the site had plenty of space, with room to expand. Building was temporarily set back by postwar steel shortages, but the Ontario Food Terminal was finally opened on July 1, 1954. It was the first wholesale food terminal of its kind on the continent. Farmers in Ontario now had a new home, allowing them to compete with the international distributors who trucked fresh farm produce into Toronto from as far away as California and Mexico. So successful were the operations of the terminal that less than a year later it had reached full capacity.
The terminal works as a leveler. An arm’s-length governmental organization operating on the principle of just-in-time delivery, it ensures fair market competition. The terminal especially benefits small and medium-sized businesses that have strong demand for produce but limited storage and handling capacity. They need fast turnaround times and fresh goods daily. The terminal aggregates 3,100 independent grocery stores, 1,172 franchise stores, and over 600 growers and farmers in Southwestern Ontario. The site houses a farmers’ market with 550 stalls and a warehouse market with 7,500 square meters of cold storage and 1,400 square meters of dry storage. It is equipped with a 575-car parking deck, two cafés, and a restaurant. Like a miniature city, it even has its own centralized garbage collection and police force. All of this production takes place in an environment of totally flexible circulation, where every horizontal surface is dedicated to movement and every enclosed space to storage; nothing can afford to remain static.
Circulation Landscape The terminal in full operation on Thursday, June 30, 2005 at 7:35am. More than 1 million vehicles pass through the Terminal each year as a result of its design as an environment entirely dedicated to the circulation of goods. Diagram: OPSYS
Despite its chaotic appearance, OFT traffic is extremely organized and thoroughly standardized. The scalar breakdown of vehicle types and sizes provides evidence of their origin and their route: large eighteen-wheel transports bring produce from distant farms via transcontinental highways, one-ton cube vans belonging to large wholesalers come in on main expressways, and small mini-vans from mom-and-pop corner stores arrive through city streets. At ground level are the go-betweens, whose diversity reflects the immigrant pool in the Greater Toronto Area. These OFT employees are the critical link between buyer and seller, transporting goods around the terminal in motorized miniforklifts at speeds up to 40 km/hr. The terminal’s organization is like its architecture, essentialized and circular.
Traffic Architecture A nearly perfect representation of the total scalar breakdown of vehicles and box sizes that maximize shipments according to transport routes, where even the color is fully standardized: tractor-trailers for long haul, five-ton trucks for regional distribution, one-ton cube van for inner city transport, half-ton panel van for restaurants, and the quarter-ton mini-van for mom-and-pop convenience stores. Photo: Pierre Bélanger
Globalization of the Apple Seasonal supply cycle and annual chart of apple varieties distributed by the Ontario Food Terminal according to their region of origin throughout the world.
Diagram: OPSYS/Angela larocci and Hoda Matar
The loop of the terminal is entirely closed. Nothing is wasted: any food unsold at the end of the day is donated to the city’s largest food banks, cardboard containers are recycled, wood pallets are reused, and the sludge and sweepings are composted; everything flows back into the system. Entirely self-supporting, the terminal finances its own operations through its base cash flow and leases, without a single government subsidy. The one part of the terminal’s operations that remains remarkably inelastic is its tenancy system: thirty-year leases held by the most powerful grocers in the city are renewable in perpetuity, privileging a small number of family-owned businesses that have kept a tight hold on their terminal rights for over three generations. The business is so robust, and the leases so sought after, that each one is estimated to be worth over a million dollars in annual economic returns. In its role as a regulator, the terminal has helped support the rise of local independent grocers and growers since the 1970s, even as the number of retail chains has decreased from 24 to 13.
Top of the Food Chain The 50-year old perpetual leaseholders on the southern wing of the Terminal, most of which have been operating at the Terminal for three generations. Photo: Ontario Food Terminal Board/Pierre Bélanger
The OFT has indirectly contributed to the growth of greenhouse operations throughout Ontario, which has the fastest-growing concentration of greenhouses in North America. Greenhouse operations in Leamington, Ontario are doubling their production every 5 years. The terminal also functions as a generator. Spin-off effects include more than 600 companies, ranging from food processors and packagers to customs brokers and freight forwarders that employ over 40,000 people. Fueled by diverse demand from Toronto’s 347 documented ethnicities, the OFT serves the largest, most important manufacturing sector in the city and has established a unique and irreversible connection with all levels of the food system: metropolitan, continental, and global.
Hydroponic Effect According to Agriculture Canada, there are more than 600 hectares of commercial greenhouses in Ontario protected under glass or plastic, employing about 3,000 people and generating approximately $375 million in annual sales. The pattern of farms and greenhouses in the Southwestern Ontario endowed with more than 18 million acres of Class I arable land, the most fertile and productive region in the Great Lakes Region, explaining its supremacy in the agricultural food sector in Canada. Photo: Nature Fresh Farms (Leamington, Ontario)
There is virtually no end to the operations and to the reach of the terminal. Highway access flattens out geography, enabling the terminal to reach deep into the Southern United States and Mexico, making California and Monterey—land of blueberries and mangos—Canada’s best friends during the cold dormant winters. As a total ecological inversion, the map of global temperatures speaks more to the cyclical variation of goods than to the bio-climatic boundaries of natural systems.
Geo-Economics The distribution of official growers and wholesale buyers in the Southwestern Ontario Region, according to soil types and regional climates. Diagram: OPSYS/Angela Iarocci
Urbanization of the Food Chain Extents of the Terminal’s outsourcing network based on the North American highway network, reaching deep into the farms of Florida, California, Mexico, as well as Western Canada, and the foreign trade zones of Washington, New York, and New Jersey. Diagram: OPSYS/Angela Iarocci
As the critical infrastructure between buyers and sellers, the OFT supports more than 3,100 in-dependent grocery stores, 1,172 franchise stores, and over 600 growers and farmers in the Southwestern Ontario region. The OFT is at the nexus of a region with more than 7 million hectares (18 million acres) of Class 1 arable land, the most fertile and productive region around the Great Lakes, supreme in the agricultural food sector in Canada, along the longest, most undisputed border in the world. So competitive and so robust is the structure of the terminal that even the retail food chains, which largely dominate other North American cities, supplement their distribution chains with produce from the OFT.
Global Produce & Provenance Map showing locations of origin for produce distributed by the Ontario Food Terminal (OFT) using the respective product lookup codes (PLU) of each commodity. Diagram: OPSYS/Angela Iarocci
Originally published as “Foodshed: the Global Infrastructure of the Ontario Food Terminal,” in Food ed. John Knechtel (MIT Press, 2008).
Fully extended, crossing over into any country at any time, the OFT’s elastic infrastructure upsets the classical Malthusian principle that food scarcity must result when population increases. The terminal’s most essential characteristic is its ability to expand and contract according to global seasons and market prices. Three cycles of distribution are made apparent by the map of global temperatures: during the summer, goods come from local sources in the southwestern Ontario region, during late fall and early spring from continental sources in the southern United States and Mexico, and during the winter from international sources as far away as Argentina, Australia and South Africa. Creating a global foodshed that is codependent on temperate and tropical produce, the Ontario Food Terminal is evidence of a robust, cosmopolitan trading system, strategically designed as one of the most sustainable networks of food distribution in the history of the New World.
Global Foodshed Food sources and proportional flows of distribution according to global temperature variations. Diagram: OPSYS/Angela Iarocci
