At the end of Keele Street, where black asphalt gives way to even blacker earth, the freshest celery you'll never eat climbs a conveyor and plunges into the open box of a transport truck.
"This stuff's getting shipped out of the country," Rick Horlings says, as the autumn sky brews up a cold drizzle over his family business, Hol-Mar Farms.
It's harvest time in the Holland Marsh, one of the most fertile vegetable gardens in North America, where 135 farmers work 10,000 acres planted squarely in Toronto's back yard. Familiar to any summer cottager caught in a Highway 400 traffic jam, the Marsh's unique muck soil pumps out everything from bok choy and beets to cauliflower and carrots, in all more than $50-million worth - or 14 per cent of Ontario's vegetables - each year.
And yet, for all the thanks urban locavores might give for such a vast and valuable resource, less than half of the Holland Marsh's output lands on our plates. The rest, about 55 per cent, is exported, including 450 tonnes of Mr. Horlings' crisp, green celery this year.
To foodie and farmer alike, this statistic symbolizes the growing sense of folly around our globalized food system, which lines supermarket shelves with cheap, tasteless imports and sees farmers a mere 50 kilometres away plying foreign markets in search of a fair wage.
For the same reason, the Holland Marsh holds huge potential for positive change, as a growing number of Toronto consumers open their minds, mouths and wallets to the oft-cited benefits of local food: its better taste and nutrition, smaller environmental footprint and local economic spinoffs and its ability to bolster the sovereignty of Toronto's food supply.
"We could feed everybody in Toronto and there'd be food left over," says Jamie Reaume, executive director of the Holland Marsh Growers' Association, which formed last year in part to seize the momentum of the local food movement. "My farmers would be damn happy about that."
The shoots of this shift have already begun to sprout in the Marsh, a slender, low-lying flatland that curves northeast from upper York Region to the southern tip of Lake Simcoe.
Drained for agriculture since the 1920s using 28 kilometres of canals, the region used to send an even larger share of its produce to the export market, mostly for processing in the United States, Mr. Reaume said. This is because the Marsh's family farmers, who tend relatively small plots by industry standards, haven't been able to feed the voracious demands of ever-larger supermarket chains.
As the chains' distribution systems have become more centralized, buyers favour larger producers abroad over small local farmers, who can't offer the same economies of scale. Foreign suppliers can also provide items that can't be grown, at least not economically, in Canada.
Over time, consumers have grown accustomed to shelves filled with a variety of cheap fruits and vegetables regardless of season, but, in recent years, they've become more conscious of the hidden costs - greenhouse-gas emissions, less-tasty produce bred to withstand distant transport, labour and environmental abuses in source countries - wrought by too many "food miles."
The arrival of farmers' markets throughout Toronto, events such as the Picnic at the Brick Works and buzz around such books as The 100-Mile Diet and The Omnivore's Dilemma offer signs that city dwellers are demanding more local produce from their grocers.
With the Holland Marsh on Toronto's back doorstep, that would seem easy, but as Mr. Reaume points out, the global supply chain took more than 30 years to develop, and undoing it "is like steering a ship; you can only do it in small increments."
For their part, farmers have begun to expand their offerings beyond carrots and onions - traditional favourites that still make up 70 per cent of Holland Marsh output - to suit the diverse demands of a cosmopolitan city. "We're growing 47 crops this year in the Marsh," Mr. Reaume says, including Chinese cabbage, purple carrots and various herbs.
At the end of Dufferin Street, the Riga brothers - Dominic, John and Peter - are showing the way forward.
While the average Marsh farmer is nearly 54 years old, the Rigas are 35 and under, and the fourth generation of farmers in their family. Everything grown on their 200 acres is sold in Southern Ontario; collards, kale, kohlrabi, dandelion, beets, Swiss chard, leaf lettuce and various herbs are among their 31 offerings this year.
"If you're growing 1,000 acres of carrots, Toronto can only eat so much," John Riga says, adding that tradition continues to bind many Marsh farmers.
Breaking those traditions is not easy to do quickly, says Paul Smith, whose family grows carrots and onions on 600 acres and exports half of it to the United States. This season, for the first time in 20 years, they added beets to the mix.
With millions of dollars invested in farm equipment geared to growing carrots and onions, Mr. Smith said, "Nobody's willing to just throw caution to the wind and get rid of everything they've been doing for years. But moving toward something? That can't be a bad thing."
At the Toronto end of the food chain, a three-year-old non-profit agency called Local Food Plus has been working to help Holland Marsh farmers find new markets close to home.
The agency, which certifies food produced to specific environmental and labour standards, has already put its stamp on 1,000 acres of Holland Marsh farmland, with another 1,000 acres in the process of certification. This means farmers will be able to market their produce to a growing list of Ontario retailers, distributors and institutional food services that have aligned themselves with Local Food Plus.
Last year, Markham became the first Canadian municipality to commit its food services to 10-per-cent local procurement, with subsequent yearly increases of 5 per cent. The University of Toronto has taken similar steps, and Queen's Park has committed $24-million over three years to help other institutions go local, says Lori Stahlbrand, president of Local Food Plus.
Over time, these efforts should create markets stable and profitable enough to steer more Holland Marsh into Toronto and away from the U.S. border, Ms. Stahlbrand says. In the process, Toronto will become less dependent on imports, an important consideration if, say, the border was to close due to a health crisis.
"Basically, there's approximately three days' worth of food [in Toronto]rdquo; at any given time, she says. "So, the Marsh is part of that picture and is essential for maintaining our future food security for this region."
Beyond issues of mere geography, people would do well to reconsider what food is, says Alison Blay-Palmer, an author and professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., who studies sustainable food systems.
"Food is not a commodity, like a car, but we try to treat it that way and I think that's problematic," Prof. Blay-Palmer says. "It's what you put inside yourself."
Since it is basic to our health and survival, she argues, we should stop treating it as a factory product, which has been our default for the last few decades. As such, it only makes sense that we pay more for food produced in a way that's fair to local farmers and the environment, she says.
"We understand why it's important to buy fairly traded coffee and fairly traded cocoa, for example, but we don't seem to bring that same mindset to our own farmers."
Thanksgiving, Prof. Blay-Palmer says, is "an excellent time" for people to reflect on the value of good food.
As for the Holland Marsh's potential to become Toronto's exclusive backyard garden, "I think it really could be," she says, "and I think that we just need to think about things differently to make that happen."