Day 90 – Where Does Your Food Come From?

“Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.”

~Voltaire

185.8 lbs

I’ve already written about the dubious environmental benefits of buying local, but there’s no doubt that when it comes to pounds and pence it’s better to give your money to local producers than have it shipped off to who knows where.

In theory, the quality control can be higher if you’re buying food produced under the watch of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), or their equivalents in your area, since you can hold them accountable.Of course, if your local or federal bureaucrats are corrupt, incompetent, or otherwise useless, your mileage may vary.

But what if local food is less available? We’re becoming more urban, making it harder to get fresh food locally. Rooftop gardens are nice warm & fuzzy initiatives, but aren’t really compatible with another trend: less crap sprayed on our food. Let’s not forget urban rooftop gardens sit in the same smog as everything else in the city.

Outside the city most areas still have some farmland left, but as cities get bigger those farms don’t ‘move’ farther out. They get paved over. After all, there are already other farms farther out, taking up the arable land. The urban expansion just puts these surviving farms that much closer to the cities.

This works as a double-edged sword. On the one hand the surviving farms are closer to markets – which is good for fruits and veggies. Not so good for livestock, grains, and so on that have to be sent to existing processing locations before going to market anyhow.But on the other hand these now-closer farms only exist at the expense – and destruction – of the farms that were already close, but are now condo developments or cul de sacs lined with identical stucco clad houses tucked behind two car garages.

In the Soviet Union they had patches of the collective farms set aside so urban dwellers could have their own little plot to grow fresh fruits and veggies. Busses took people to and from, making it practical albeit time consuming. But the produce belonged to the person who grew it on that patch. This is part of the reason no one starved when the Soviet Union collapsed – they could get by on the food in their own garden.

That probably wouldn’t work here. Even if we were each given a little garden of our own, and free transit to go tend to it, how many of us would make the effort? We’re a society of people that would rather microwave a sodium and hydrogenated oil filled burrito than take 15 minutes to fry up some hamburger, open a can of beans, grate some cheese, and wrap the lot in a tortilla.

Some notes on where I live to put things in perspective:

Canada is huge. The longest coastline in the world (243,000 km, or 151,000 miles) surrounds the 2nd largest country by land mass at 9,200,000 square kms (5,716,615 square miles), yet the population is just 34,000,000. That’s the 4th lowest population density in the world. Canada is in the top 5 countries producing gold, copper, zinc, nickel, aluminum, and natural gas, not to mention vast resources of potash, oil, diamonds, fresh water… the list goes on and on.

The province I live in, Saskatchewan, has 48% of Canada’s farmland – probably because Saskatchewan has barely a million people in it. Farmland in other provinces is being turned into urban areas at an alarming rate, making it necessary to import more and more food.

Why is a shrinking domestic food supply important? For one, it means a trade shift. An individual item of food isn’t worth much, but we go through the stuff so fast that it all adds up to billions of dollars. More of that money flowing out of your country means less left in the pockets of people in your country – which, if they had it, they could buy other things in your country, keeping the economy healthy even as the fresher food does the same to your body.

For the global security crowd, consider this: If your country relies on a bunch of food shipped in all the time, and one of the countries who supplies a lot of that food decides they don’t like you anymore, they can choke off the supply. It’s kind of like oil that way, except far more necessary. An oil shortage is a pain in the ass and, usually, the wallet. A food shortage can cripple a country in days.

So what can we do? obviously if you want strawberries in February and live in North America, odds are you’ll have to buy the imported stuff. But in the many months we’re not buried under snow most cities have vibrant farmer’s markets.

While the economies of scale don’t match up with industrial agriculture, and the local stuff may in fact have a higher carbon footprint than the imported versions, you’re still keeping the money in the local economy and the fruits, veggies, and meats will more likely be fresh and flavourful.

We could also stop being so lazy and plant a few more of our own gardens. A government collective farm/free transit initiative is as likely as a fish becoming a concert cellist, but that’s not stopping you from popping down to the hardware store, buying some seeds and basic gardening tools, and spending some time in the summer sun planting things you can later eat.

If you prefer the air conditioned supermarket to the sweat of your brow, or live in an apartment with no roof that you and other tenants can turn into a rooftop garden, then talk to your grocer and encourage them to carry clearly labeled “Made in [insert your country/region here]” foods. Unfortunately in many areas manufacturers can call something “Made in…” if it was just packaged or finished there, but for stuff like produce it’s pretty straight forward.

This video nicely sums up the changing agricultural landscape in Canada and the true cost of what goes on the dinner table. I’m sure much of it holds true in your area as well; if increased urbanization can have this effect on a large, sparsely populated country, imagine what’s going on in more densely populated areas.