In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada, home food gardening articles have saturated popular media outlets. Home food gardening is more popular than ever, and community gardens and community greenhouses are at capacity with long waiting lists for plots. Several local governments across the country are also participating in the food gardening craze. This study compares 19 municipal urban home food gardening programs that ran in 2020. These municipalities provided program participants with free gardening supplies and instructions on how to grow food at home. This study reveals a complicated relationship among municipalities, food gardening programs and household and community food security. The study also determines that the social and emotional challenges brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic are somewhat alleviated through gardening. Ultimately, municipalities are limited in their policy capacities to adequately move the needle on food insecurity in Canada.
It is well known that many consumers believe local foods are more expensive than comparative products coming from other markets. The aim of this study was to measure the price competitiveness of products certified by the Aliments du Québec program, a well-known program in the Canadian province of Quebec. Using machine-learning, artificial intelligence and targeted data mining, the report identifies local products and comparator products, to consider whether locally certified products are more expensive than comparative products coming from outside Quebec. Uncertified products used as comparative products come from anywhere around the world, outside of the province of Quebec. For this study, a total of more than 350,000 discrete price data points were analyzed in the Winter 2022. Local product prices were examined relative to the prices of comparator products. In total, there were 48 subcategories considered. In 70.83% of the subcategories, the local product was either as expensive (similar price) or less expensive than the comparator product. Results challenge the popular belief that local food products are often more expensive. This study also provides limitation and future research paths.
Historical research involves the construction of competing narratives around complex historical events. Getting the whole story requires having access to these narratives, which can be a challenge when the coverage of historical research in widely used databases is incomplete or biased. This paper investigates to what extent journals indexed in two historical research databases, namely Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life, are covered by the Web of Science and Scopus, as well as the national and linguistic biases in that coverage. Results show a much higher coverage of historical research in Web of Science than Scopus. However, both databases disproportionately favour indexing English language journals and journals published in the United States and the United Kingdom. That raises questions about how these imbalances in journal coverage may lead to biases in the narratives to which readers are exposed when they limit their sources to those included in large, multidisciplinary databases.
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