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On the hidden cost of cheap food, and what it means to invest in the people who grow it.
At our farm stand, we price our vegetables honestly. That means sometimes our kale costs more than the bag at the grocery store three kilometres away. I know this. Our members know this. And every so often, someone new stops at the stand, looks at the price, and looks at me.
I don't argue the point. I explain it. Because the grocery store price is not the whole story. It never has been.
The Sticker Price Is a Partial Truth
When you buy a head of imported lettuce, you're paying for the lettuce. What you're not paying for — at least not directly — is the fuel burned to truck it across a continent, the greenhouse gases released in transit, the wages lost to the community where the money ends up instead of yours. Those costs exist. They're just distributed differently: across the environment, across future generations, across the communities that don't get the economic benefit of your food dollar.
I think about this often at Zawadi Farm. We're a regenerative urban farm at Downsview Park in North York. We grow food. We run a CSA program, which means our members pay us at the start of the season and receive a weekly share of whatever we harvest. It's an act of trust on both sides. They trust us to grow well. We trust them to believe the model is worth supporting.
The local dollar doesn't just buy food. It buys the next season, the next job, the next farmer's confidence that this work is worth doing.
What Money Does When It Stays Local
Research from the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute shows that every dollar spent on locally grown food recirculates within a community at a higher rate than one spent on imports. The farmers buy supplies from local vendors. The vendors employ local people. The money moves through the neighbourhood before it leaves. That's the multiplier effect, and it's real.
What's also real is job creation. Small-scale agriculture is labour-intensive in a way that industrial farming isn't. We hire people. We train people. We create entry points into agricultural work for people who didn't grow up thinking farming was for them — including a lot of people in our community who look like me.
At Zawadi Farm, our team has learned to grow, to teach, to host, to preserve. That skill set belongs to this community. It doesn't disappear when the season ends.
The Supply Chain We Never See
In 2022, when the Ambassador Bridge blockade disrupted cross-border trucking, Canadian grocery stores began feeling the impact within days. This was a preview. The infrastructure that moves food across this continent is efficient, but it's also brittle. A border dispute, an extreme weather event, a pandemic — any of these can interrupt a supply chain that Toronto depends on for the majority of its fresh produce.
Local farms are part of the answer to that vulnerability. When you buy from us, you're buying from a farm that doesn't depend on a border crossing. You're buying from people who know this specific soil, this specific climate, this specific community. That's resilience that no spreadsheet fully captures.
What the Investment Actually Is
I want to be honest about what I'm asking when I invite you to buy local. I'm asking you to spend more, sometimes. I'm asking you to think about your food as an investment rather than just a transaction. That's a real ask, and I don't take it lightly, especially in a city where food costs are already a daily stress for too many families.
At the same time, I believe that how we spend collectively shapes what exists. The farms that survive are the ones that find enough people willing to support them. The ones that don't find that support quietly disappear, and then everyone wonders why there's no local food system to fall back on in a crisis.
Zawadi means gift in Swahili. That name is not accidental. Every season we grow is a gift we offer to this community — food, education, a gathering place, a living demonstration that urban agriculture is possible and meaningful here. Your local dollar is the gift you offer back.
The sticker price is not the whole story. The whole story is what you're building when you choose to look beyond it.
Much love and light — Jessey Njau, Founder of Zawadi Farm
