This field report links food and city policies by tracing the history of the Toronto Food Policy Council and offers our experience-based suggestions regarding the concept of critical food guidance, which we associate with capacity-building and providing opportunities for civic engagement on a continuous and meaningful basis. We bring the insider perspective of Canadian food policy practitioners and staff leads of the Toronto Food Policy Council – the first food policy council in a major city when it was established in 1990, and still considered one of the most influential among the world’s 350 similarly-inspired councils.

Please see 'Notes' below for any suggested/official citation information added by the author(s) of this work. Otherwise, you can cite the HSS Commons instance of this publication as follows:

• Stahlbrand, L., Roberts, W., (2025), "Food policy councils and the food-city nexus: The History of the Toronto Food Policy Council", HSSCommons: (DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i1.505)

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Original publication: Stahlbrand, Lori; Roberts, Wayne. "Food policy councils and the food-city nexus: The History of the Toronto Food Policy Council." Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation, vol. 9, no. 1, 2022. DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i1.505. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation. Copyright © the author(s). Work published in CFS/RCÉA prior to and including Vol. 8, No. 3 (2021) is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY license. Work published in Vol. 8, No. 4 (2021) and after is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA license. For details, see creativecommons.org/licenses/.