Evan Fraser

Guelph

Evan started thinking about agriculture and food systems while spending summers working on his grandfather’s fruit farm in Niagara. There, he watched his stock-broker grandmother support the family farm while their neighbours were going bankrupt. Unsurprisingly, he decided it was easier to write and talk about farming than actually try to make a living on it, so passed on inheriting the farm, opting instead for grad school. He did degrees in forestry, anthropology, and agriculture at the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto. After graduating, he worked in a policy institute with the Hon. Dr. Lloyd Axworthy, and began his academic career in 2003 in the UK, where he worked on farming and climate change at the University of Leeds. He is the author of approximately 80 scientific papers or book chapters on these topics, writes regularly for the Globe and Mail, the Guardian, CNN, Foreign Affairs, the Walrus, and the Ottawa Citizen. He has written three popular non-fiction books about food and food security including Empires of Food: Feast, Famine and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations that was shortlisted for the James Beard Food Literature Award in 2010. His web video series on “feeding nine billion,” which has been watched over 200,000 times, and his self published graphic novel #foodcrisis, are used in classrooms around the world. Currently, he is a professor of Geography at the University of Guelph, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security. He is also is an associate of the Guelph Food Institute, a Fellow of the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation, a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geography Society, and a Member of the Royal Society of Canada’s college of new scholars. Evan regularly works with the food industry and in the past 2 years has provided advice for senior executives at Maple Leaf Food, Loblaw, George Weston Ltd. and BASF Canada.