The Changing (Socio) Nature of the Agri-Food System: Examining the Historical Rearrangements and Socio-Ecological Entanglements of the Ontario Food Terminal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Ontario Food Terminal (OFT) is Canada’s largest wholesale fruit and vegetable distribution infrastructure, and it has only recently received scholarly attention within the context of urban food production and distribution-side dynamics. To address this gap, this article examines the history and origins of the OFT, paying particular attention to the political, economic, and socio-ecological conditions, to which its conception and development first responded or looked to respond. This project relies on documents from both Toronto and Ontario’s archival collections, as well as historical news media. It employs an urban political ecology framework, taking note of how environmental changes are closely tied to historical, political-economic, and social conditions, as well as the systems of power that follow them. By looking at the original development of the OFT, this article connects its history and its socio-natural implications to broader narratives about nature, production, distribution, consumption, and our society. Here, the Ontario Food Terminal acts as a socio-natural hybrid, and its opening is positioned as a key moment in the production of urban nature and the consolidation of a particular conception of nature itself.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".