Impressions from a visiting student intern from Ukraine and France
Viktoriia Boiko
I’m a Ukrainian who has lived in France for the last three years. Last June, I got my bachelor’s degree in urban planning from Grenoble Alpes University. Over the summer, I was an intern research assistant at the University of Waterloo and I worked closely with Steffanie Scott and Lauren Judge. During these three months, my main focus has been on people’s relationships with plants and animals and what implications they have for our food system.
I was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, in a middle-class family that had strong bonds to its native countryside. Both sides of my family came from a rural background, even though a big portion of my family now lives in Kyiv. I am a granddaughter of peasants who moved away from their native countryside, but who have always kept their affinity for working on the land. Personally, I grew up in a big city and never had the same affective link with the land. As I got older, I was less and less interested in getting my hands dirty and instead preferred to stay in the city and do more “urban” activities. My love for everything urban has also influenced my choice to study urban planning.
In 2022, the full-scale war started and I was forced to relocate to France. That’s where I learned that urban and rural are not mutually exclusive categories. It was my first time seeing community garden plots in the middle of the city and also my first encounter with local food policies. But first, let’s go back to the beginning.
Growing up in Ukraine, my weekends and school vacations were often spent at my grandmother’s house in the countryside. We would often work in the garden together, gathering strawberries, watering tomatoes and tending to many other plants we had. Then we would also preserve, pickle, freeze or dry everything we harvested, and a small portion of it would even be sold at a farmers’ market.
The idea behind it was that it’s best to grow everything you can by yourself instead of relying on supermarkets for food. While for me and my parents, the city dwellers, the idea seemed like an outdated one, my grandmother swore by it. She grew everything on her own, from potatoes and carrots to peaches and grapes, and only really relied on the market to buy animal products like dairy, meat and eggs. Even then, her eggs and dairy often came from other small producers, from the same town she lived in.
While I was never a particular fan of working on the land, taking part in growing my own food had taught me a lot about where food comes from. I also learned essential gardening skills, something that’s going to serve me for the rest of my life.
My grandmother’s garden wasn’t the only place where intergenerational knowledge transfer took place. My grandfather had a summer house with a small plot of land. The Ukrainian mindset is that no land should be wasted, and so it was unimaginable to have a big lawn if one could have a vegetable garden. That’s exactly what my grandfather did. Every year, he planted various vegetables, and even though the harvest wasn’t the biggest, he still continued to do so. He also had fruit trees, and every year the whole family would gather at his summer house to pick cherries, plums and apricots. We would then transform them into jams, purées or simply freeze them to enjoy them throughout the year.
The ability to grow our own fruits and vegetables is closely linked to the question of access to land. While my grandmother inherited her land from her parents, my grandfather bought his plot himself. His summer house is a so-called “dacha”, a small exurban cottage with a plot of land, a practice common in the post-Soviet countries. The land that came with dachas was first cultivated for sustenance purposes, since in the Soviet Union fresh produce wasn’t readily available. The practice prevailed well after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and is still very common now despite the easy access to fruits and vegetables.
I understand that the practices of growing your own food were born out of need and economic precarity; however, they now continue for other reasons as well. One of the reasons is the fear of pesticides and other chemicals used when growing commercial produce. Growing by yourself allows one to control the amount of chemicals that go on every plant, which means that it’s possible to have access to high-quality produce without paying the high price tag for commercial organic produce. Growing one’s own food allows for a lot more agency compared to being a simple consumer, and that’s what I believe is making gardening attractive nowadays.
In Canada, there are no dachas, but a lot more people live in single-family homes compared to Ukraine. However, people from lower socio-economic backgrounds are more likely to live in an apartment and consequently don’t have access to a garden. That’s where community gardens should step in. Nevertheless, it is not enough to give people access to land; we should also teach them how to grow the fruits and vegetables that they want to grow, including culturally significant foods. Ideally, we should foster intergenerational knowledge transfers by engaging young people as well as the elderly who might have more gardening skills.
Moreover, we should provide gardeners with a way to deal with surplus. My grandmother would just sell her produce at an informal market, however it’s better to find a legal way to do so. Creating a marketplace for small producers not only reduces food waste, but also offers other people an opportunity to have access to fresh, locally grown produce. This legal place to sell food would offer better conditions for the vendors and make them more visible compared to scattered informal points of sale.
Not everyone has access to a garden or wants to be a gardener, but it doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t have access to high-quality fresh produce. So, measures should be taken to include organic products in the diets of as many people as possible. One example of such measures is EGAlim law in France, which states that at least 20% of products served in canteens have to be organic.
Our potential lessons from France don’t end there. Another potential growth opportunity is the promotion of local specialties. It allows local producers to get a fair value on their product as well as gain more recognition. It also encourages curious consumers to try something new. On top of that, some consumers will be more inclined to buy a certain product if it’s produced near the point of sale. One way to facilitate access to locally-sourced products would be to create partnerships between supermarkets and local producers, as is already the case in France.
Finally, our cities can produce food not only for humans, but also for animals. That’s why we should consider food for pollinators in urban planning and include it in local by-laws. One example of such measures would be promoting the greening of flat roofs. For instance, in Greater Greboble area, local by-laws dictate that at least 50% of the surface of a newly built flat roof needs to be covered by vegetation or solar panels. Once we have enough pollinator habitats, another potential growth opportunity would be the development of urban beekeeping. It’s starting to become a very common practice in France, and I don’t see why the same model wouldn’t work in Canada. However, there are some limits to this practice, such as the installation of solar panels on the roofs: it’s complicated to combine plants and energy production, even though some solutions already exist.
To sum up, when it comes to food, Waterloo Region has a lot to learn from other places around the world. In this blog, we’ve considered two fairly different countries: Ukraine and France. Ukraine has a lot to teach us when it comes to using the land we already own, the ambition to be as independent as possible when it comes to fruits and vegetables, and intergenerational knowledge transfer when it comes to gardening. These practices encourage food sovereignty, something that is important at a time when Canada is heavily dependent on the US and Mexico for its produce. France, on the other hand, can teach us a lot when it comes to legislation, be it organic produce in school lunches or by-laws that encourage the creation of new pollinator habitats.