the Californian bounty which feeds us….
In the Toronto Star’s Health Zone today, Margaret Webb complains that “Canada has no national food policy, no national strategy to ensure its food system actually delivers nutritious food.”
This is but the latest lefty bash at the huge success of the international food industry. It’s wrong for farmers/companies to grow food for profit! – ” which means producing profitable calories, skewed to meat and dairy as well as crops that go into the most highly processed food, which are least healthy.”
If producing food isn’t profitable, how will the producers be able to grow more and pay workers?
What’s unhealthy about eating meat protein, milk and cheese?
She editorializes further …
“Feeding Canadians seems a distant concern given that agricultural programs support crop and meat production geared for export but let local vegetable and fruit farming all but die, along with that sector’s freezing and canning processors, which could provide local produce through the winter.
Where in Canada could local produce be grown through the winter? Where could be grown lemons, oranges, grapefruit, grown economically if at all?
But luckily we are able to export the despised “profit foods” and thus afford to import 80% of the fruit and veg we eat from California and Spain et al year round. Moreover these “healthy” foods are cheaper than the homegrown ones – when they’re available – which means we can afford to eat more of them. I hate to add they’re sometimes better.
The history of food is global buying and selling. It’s not just a question of importing invaluable spices like cloves, but of keeping food prices down. All countries do it. The fashionable notion that we’d all be better off if food was more expensive comes straight from Maria Antoinette’s playbook “let ‘em eat arugula”. Governments which allow food prices to rise risk riots and worse.
Finally, food is our greatest longlasting pleasure. Why is it being turned by the left into a subject of fear and vilification?
Once again, Ms. Mallet, you’re letting your irrational hatred of the “left” get in the way of your reading comprehension.
In the first quote you take from Ms. Webb’s article, “least healthy” quite obviously refers to the “most highly processed food” portion of the sentence, not the “meat and dairy”. Sure you agree that highly processed foods are less healthy than fresh, whole foods?
In the second quote, she certainly doesn’t suggest that local produce could be GROWN through the winter. Rather, she’s suggesting that the emphasis that the large Canadian growers have placed on exports have led to the closure of many “freezing and canning processors”, which WOULD allow for us to enjoy “local produce through the winter” – albeit in canned form, as well as buying fresh imports as needed.
Which brings me to the ol’ “Where could be grown lemons, oranges, grapefruit”, etc. argument that you always seem to pull out in these situations. Do you really think that every proponent of local food thinks that EVERYTHING should be grown locally? If you actually took the time to do some real research or have an actual rational conversation with someone about it, you would learn that the point of eating local food is NOT to eat EXCLUSIVELY local food, but to simply eat what can be grown locally when it’s being grown locally. Every “locavore” I know is still happy to drink coffee, or eat citrus fruit, or even *gasp* buy imported produce in the dead of winter! But when we’re in the middle of our local harvest season, doesn’t it make sense to eat as much fresh and local produce as possible?
And finally – I’m always amused by your constant insistence that eating locally grown food is exclusively the purview of people on the “left”, given that the personal politics of the many local food fans that I know run the gamut from right to left and back again. But hey, why let the facts get in the way of another poorly researched and spite-filled rant?
I’m glad to hear locavores don’t walk their talk and actually enjoy imported food!
We get plenty of frozen fruit and veg which are lots tastier than canned produce. Why can for canning’s sake, sounds irrational to me.
Food is a precious commodity – it makes sense to grow crops where they grow best and export them, and efficiently grown food is better for the environment….