Jon Steinman developed Deconstructing Dinner in 2006 as a weekly one-hour radio show and podcast based at Kootenay Co-op Radio CJLY in Nelson, British Columbia. Before it went off the air in late 2010, the show was being broadcast on 50 radio stations in Canada and the US and was ranked as the top Canadian food podcast by iTunes. In 2011, Jon was a finalist for a Jack Webster Award in Community Reporting following his work on an investigative story about local food fraud which appeared on Deconstructing Dinner.
In early 2011, Jon met James Beard Award winning filmmaker Declan O’Driscoll and the two transformed Deconstructing Dinner into a documentary television and multimedia series released in late 2013 through 2014. Deconstructing Dinner: Reconstructing Our Food System broadcast between 2013-2015 across Canada on ichannel and was available on the U.S.-based streaming-on-demand service Gaia. The 6 episodes, 44 webisodes and 5 audio productions remain available on the Deconstructing Dinner web site. The series received the Best of Canada award at the 2015 Taste Awards.
Complementing his work as a journalist, Jon was a Board Director of the Kootenay Co-op between 2006-2016 and served as the Board President in his final two years. The community-owned grocery store in Nelson is the largest of its kind in Canada.
Between 2012-2017, Jon curated and coordinated the annual Deconstructing Dinner Film Festival of food documentaries.
For his contributions to the Nelson community, Jon was presented with a Sustainability Leadership Award by the City of Nelson in 2014.
Jon is most recently the author of Grocery Story: The Promise of Food Co-ops in the Age of Grocery Giants (New Society Publishers, 2019). In 2019, Jon toured the book across the US and Canada – speaking at 130 events and visiting 125 retail food co-ops.
Jon lives in Nelson, British Columbia at Heddlestone Village – a cohousing community that he co-developed.