Made in Canada? Probably not. From the farm is the only way to know for sure.
Below is an article I wrote for a local paper a couple of weeks ago. I thought it may be of interest to GPC members. /Lori, GPC Candidate, Nepean-Carleton
I’ve been scrambling like the squirrels lately. The farmers’ markets just closed this weekend, so we’ve been running around getting ingredients for applesauce, pies, and jams to last the winter. I also just finished hosting a “100-mile” dinner fundraiser for the Green Party. All of the food and drink for the delicious four-course meal was grown within 100 miles of our table. That involved a lot of scrambling too. We couldn’t go to one store and buy everything. In the end we visited four different farmer’s markets, plus arranged to have some beef, dairy, and various organic products delivered.
Why is it so hard to “buy local?” It’s cheaper and more efficient for grocery stores to buy, process, and sell in bulk than it is to source from smaller, local producers. It’s also hard to know where grocery store food is from exactly. The label “product of Canada” is meaningless, since manufacturers only need to add 51% of the value of a food product to label it Canadian-made. That’s why you can buy cans of mandarin oranges or pineapples that say “product of Canada.” The “Canadian” boxed fish you eat tonight is likely from Vietnam. The berries in your Canadian jam are from China. And the milk products in your Canadian hot chocolate mix are from Mexico.
Nobody can afford the time every week to shop like I did for the 100-mile dinner. But interest in “eating local” is growing. People want to support local farmers. The city of Ottawa has over 400 farms within its boundaries, and many more on its outskirts, but we are losing about 1% of them every year as farmers leave a business that is too much work for too little money.
People also want to eat food that is safe. But with 40% of the food we eat coming from outside our borders, how can we be sure that far-away fishermen and farms are subject to the same regulations we have in Canada? We can’t and they aren’t.
When I was a kid, “Buy Canadian” had a different meaning. Canadian clothing and electronics manufacturers made a last-ditch attempt to stave off cheaper, imported clothing and electronics made in Asia. Every Canadian-made item sported a large maple leaf, in hopes that pride in locally-made goods would trump cheap prices from sweatshop factories. We all know the ending to that story. The Government of Canada must act now to save farming in Canada from cheap imports of questionable quality.
What can you do to? My best advice for now is buy what you can direct from producers. It may cost a little more, but the taste is worth it. Local Green Party members are exploring ways to make it easier for local residents to buy fresh from the farm. In the meantime, here is a list of nearby producers we relied on for our “100-Mile” dinner:
Apples, Cider: Applehill Fruit Farm, 3699 Jockvale Rd., 613-692-6768
Butter, Milk: Cochrane’s Dairy, Russell (year-round home delivery available) 613-445-2959
Beef: Ottawa Valley Beef, Dan O’Brien, order or buy at Lindsay & McCaffrey, Manotick
Flour: Watson’s Mill, Manotick
Mushrooms: Continental Mushroom, Metcalfe, 613-821-1411
Oats: Mountain Path Organics, Mountain, 613-989-2973
Organic products: Padgeberry farm, Osgoode, 613-826-2286 (year-round home delivery available)
Raspberries: Miller’s Berry Farm, Manotick, 613-692-2380
Salad Greens: Jambican Studio Garden, Osgoode, 613-826-9958
For more information on how to buy direct from farms in your area, visit justfood.ca
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Comments
Made in Canada does not mean grown in Canada.
Lambton Kent Middlesex EDA (SW Ontario)
When a manufactured product is assembled here from international components it is made here. There is no other country that we can describe it as having been made in.
THe term Grown in Canada could relate to an individual component. We really would like to have labelling tell us where each ingredient came from, but regardless, if it was put together here it is made here.
We who have farms close to cities would of course love to have closed markets so that people farming over 100 miles away can not compete with us. We know all too well of course that they will ship goods in to 'our market' They will even go so far as to ship to a farm local to 'our market' to make it appear to be more local if we make that a big issue.
WE WILL NOT WIN THAT ARGUMENT until there are bigger cost penalties for shipping longer distances.
Got to agree with you there---
A lot of these battles that people fight come down to energy costs. Just like the 100 mile diet, so does bottled water, etc. If we can get the true cost of energy put into the equation, all these other secondary problems will melt away.
"There is always an easy solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong." H.L. Mencken
We may always have food coming from over 100 miles
Lambton Kent Middlesex EDA (SW Ontario)
A LARGE CITY like Toronto or Montreal may not be able to feed itself entirely within a 100 mile radius, even if it comes close. There are a couple of good alternatives:
Move part of the city population well away from the present city. That might be simply restricting the growth of the city and developing opportunities elsewhere.
The other option is to transport some food in from far away, hopefully with an economical train,
Having people drive their cars out to farms 10 km and more from home is not a meaningful part of the solution.
When I was a teenager my father was growing a variety of vegetable crops, turnips, cabbage, beets, carrots, parsnips that we sold locally aroung Mount Forest. A farmer from Shelburn came by one day selling potatoes from his pickup... a lot of driving to sell potatoes. My dad suggested that we do a swap, he would carry our vegetables while we would market his potatoes locally. Now neither his customers nor ours knew that neither farmer grew the whole offering. But we did see that our average sale per call almost doubled.
That potato farmer within a short time was carrying a lot of produce from Holland Marsh, as were we, and again saw our sales per call go up. The amount of driving we were doing dropped, and of course we were cutting down on fuel usage. All of our customers continued to think of the person selling the products as the grower.
I mention this to point out that not all the produce at a local farm outlet is necessarily produced on that farm. It would be false economy to insist that it should be. IT MAY BE POOR ECONOMY to have that farm market out on the farm where city folk have to drive out to it. We really need to be able to drop off our farm produce where the consumer is, and have an orderly and unbiased market. We should not be driving house to house to sell bushel baskets of produce. Those marketing methods are barely appropriate to a small town with few local growers, They make no sense at all for a large city and hundreds of suppliers. Supermarkets and supermarket chains really do make sense. What is needed is better access to that market.... even a gardener in a city should be able to sell excess product into that market, but let us not go too far in one step.
Plenty of food can be grown in cities
With a bit of effort, I think we could actually feed even our major cities within 100-mile radius.
That's because, if we try, we can grow about half our food within existing cities. Gardens in the front/back yard, rooftop gardens, window boxes, community gardens, even creative things like edible plants in well-lit atriums - put them all together and a surprising amount of food can be grown right among us.
Produce a lot of vegetables and such in the city and supplement with grains and meat from the countryside and we should be able to re-localize our food even in our large cities.
I have read that Cuba manages to grow half their food (organically, at that) within their cities. Our growing season is much shorter than theirs, of course, but we also have far more 'green' space in our sprawling cities to put to better use, so I think it could balance out.
I have a sloping back yard that isn't much good for anything, so I've terraced it for gardening. The amount of produce it can grow, using only waste organic material as fertilizer & soil amendment, is quite amazing, and I'm no green thumb. Irrigation comes from rain barrels and my water-cooled A/C, so no extra water is required.
Cities have a lot of what is needed to grow food, and right now it just goes to waste.
- 'green' spaces, like little suburban lawns that are too small to kick a ball or throw a frisbee
- 'green' spaces around storm water facilities
- huge amounts of rainwater and grey water that would be fine for irrigation
- huge amounts of solar energy falling on the roofs and walls of our buildings, leading to high A/C costs
- large & constant supply of organic wastes suitable for soil application
If we re-think cycles and combine these resources (many of them currently considered to be waste), cities can go a long way toward feeding themselves, allowing near-city farms to do the rest.
Back in WW2 (appropriate time to remember), these were called 'victory gardens'. If our grandparents did it, why can't we?
Erich Jacoby-Hawkins
Barrie, ON
The views I express on this blog are purely my own and should not be construed to represent the official position of the Green Party of Canada - the same goes for all other people's posts & comments.
Erich Jacoby-Hawkins, Barrie ON - although I'm on Cabinet (Nat'l Rev. and Ecol. Fiscal Reform), views here are my own and may not reflect official GPC positions. Please visit www.ErichtheGreen.ca
Mea Culpa --wrong title to blog
What my blog post should have been called was "Product of Canada--probably not". I really wanted to draw attention to the fact that the ingredients of processed foods Canadians are eating (everyday things like strawberry jam, honey, yoghurt, frozen fish) are actually not from Canada, even though they say "Product of Canada". That face is a surprise to most Canadians. So we definitely need sticter food labeling requirements, something our Ontario Federation of Agriculture has been lobbying for for some time.
Intermixed with this is the "eat local" issue. I am not advocating a 100-mile diet necessarily--I drink coffee and eat a banana everyday :) My goal is to preserve local farms. We will need these farms more as transportation costs grow and concern about tainted imported foods grow. Right now I live in an area where our local farms are being sold to developers to build subdivisions because farmers cannot make a living. Our GPC and GPO organizations locally are looking at ways to help farmers improve their income by improving their access to the people living in subdivisions only a few km away.
Lori Gadzala Candidate, Nepean-Carleton
local produce availability
I attended last week in Gatineau an information meeting to hear a group of citizens who want to organize a coop that provides only regionaly grown produce.
I will try to summarize how it works. Each week, on the coop internet site, the customers look at the list of available products that week from the participating farmers of the region: meat, vegetables,mushrooms, honey, etc organic or not.Then, on line they place their order.
Then, a few days later, the customers go and pick up their order at one collection point. The beauty of the system is that each client makes only one trip per week but has access to the products of many farmers and each farmer has to drive only to one location to serve many clients.
The system works very well right now in Sherbrooke and Québec city.Here are their internet addresses if you want to get a better idea: http://www.atestrie.com and http://www.atmsrq.org/
Diversity and Farm Gas
Lori, good that you acknowledge coffee and bananas as viable foodstuffs. I have little patience for religious 100 mile dieters.
I have a decent backyard garden that keeps me in greens in the summer months. That is about 1/12 of the food my family will eat in the entire year. I do it for quality and that’s about it.
Erich’s heart is in the right place regarding producing our own food, but to most people food comes in a box. Most folks shop the “centre isles” at the grocery store, processed microwavable food that is guaranteed to not be “100 mile” certified. Forget 100 miles, the trick is to get them to shop the outside isles (whether it be Mexican produce or Canadian). This is good regarding personal health, financial well being, and an environmental health. Processed food is generally expensive and less healthy.
As a rule of thumb, the total price you pay is a good indication of the energy input. Sorry, but the fact that organic produce is 2-3 times the price of regular produce suggests that it consumes 2-3 times the energy.
As one of the reasons, consider that a human being is thermodynamically about 11% efficient while a modern diesel tractor is about 40% efficient.
I feel government should favour humans over machines. Farmers are allowed to use “coloured gas” (tax free gas) in their tractors. This and the lack of a tax on the natural gas used to produce inorganic fertilizers distorts the market, I think, in favour of standard produce. As I read it, GP policy makes no mention of farm gas, which is a bit of a shame as it is a strong incentive to consume more energy in an energy intensive industry.
I’m not discounting the advantage of smaller scale farming regarding diversity. Modern produce favours productivity and appearance of the fruit over nutrition and robustness. I’m a fan of seed diversity (http://www.seeds.ca/en.php). However, local is no guarantee of diverse. I’m not sure how to handle this problem. Any solid measure to improve knowledge of the product (like nutrient analysis) would increase cost and favour larger producers who could afford it. A smaller group of larger producers is less likely to be diverse.
Mike Sherrard, P. Eng.