Michael Haggert
While many of us are making a list and
checking it twice to ensure we have the right
ingredients for our favourite dishes in
upcoming holiday feasts, I want to comment
on an event held in our community last
month.
The Bring Food Home conference was
hosted in downtown Windsor in November.
It lasted three days and brought together
more than four hundred people who are
involved in food systems across Ontario and
several of our neighbouring jurisdictions.
This was a diverse group, from gardeners
and farmers, to marketers and distributors,
to chefs and food service delivery
organizations. The crowd also included a
number of policy makers, both civil
servants and politicians at the municipal
and provincial levels. The conference
opened in the shadow of the recent closure
announcement by Heinz and discussions
were frequently framed around this latest
news and what to do about it.
That unfortunate decision is a natural
consequence of the concentration of 75 per
cent of the food industry coming under the
control of a handful of giant multi-national
corporations. This, combined with our
insistence on cheap foods has led to the
corporations’ drive for increased efficiency
as the only way to achieve ever-increasing
profits. The solution isn’t quick or easy.
We need a societal shift in our
perception of value. Our collective
insistence on large quantities - often in
excess of our actual needs - being at our
disposal at the lowest possible cost has
become an over-emphasized assessment of
value. Thinking mainly about processed
foods we need to ask “Is the company a
good corporate citizen? Do they treat their
suppliers fairly? Are they operating in an
environmentally responsible manner?” and
then judge the results with “How much are
we willing to pay for those behaviours?” It
takes a lot of work to be an informed
consumer.
Now consider our institutions. Nursing
homes, schools and other institutions crank
out hundreds of meals every day within
tight budgets. These volume players rely on
distributors. It’s another part of the system
dominated by a handful of multinational
companies whose profit margins demand
ruthless purchasing practices.
These decisions are influenced by the
consumer. The policy makers at these
institutions will insist on more local content
if we tell them that’s what we want. In turn,
the distributors will find local sources to
include in their catalogue when the policy
makers tell them to. This is where our
society needs to continue the conversation.
I’ve also been hearing the terms “food
security” and “food insecurity.” It usually
comes up at this time of year with the
Goodfellows and others trying to help those
who are food insecure to have enough, or at
least some. Local food banks know that this
is a prime opportunity to fill the shelves for
later months. Often, those shelves have an
appalling lack of fresh and local foods on
them. Many solutions to this problem have
been tried and one that often comes up is
community gardening.
Giving someone a location, and
appropriate support and encouragement, as
well as tools to grow some of their own food
seems reasonable. Some of the community
growing food on scattered neighbourhood
plots and donating the harvest to local food
banks fits the bill at first glance. However
the evidence suggests that these efforts have
little immediate impact on food security.
Community gardens grow too little
food to significantly impact the total diet of
any quantity of people. What they do grow
in significant value and quantity is a sense
of community. The people most often in
food insecure circumstances are often the
marginalized part of our population.
Here is where growing a sense of
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