my dear friend Adeleine posted a Globe & Mail opinion article to my Facebook this weekend which lambastes the local food movement as "the most wasteful, inefficient way to feed the human race you can possibly imagine" adding that it's also bad for the environment and a rip-off, all in the most condescending manner possible. she asked for my thoughts, and what else are blogs for?
I've noticed this growing trend towards petty controversy-creation in Canadian media - Jian Gomeshi, I'm looking at you - but it's still surprising to me that the once-mighty Globe would publish a piece so utterly unfounded, dishonest, and downright slanderous towards the new farmers' movement. to my pleasant surprise, the comments on the article were largely on the side of Good, but that didn't keep me from composing a few choice words for Ms Wente while I harvested beet greens this morning.
bitch, please. you think cheap food is really cheap? you come by your Californian tomatoes and Mexican avocados and out of season Chinese such and such by way of slave labor, catastrophic environmental degradation, and the condemnation of millions of local people to starvation in the name of cash-crop production for foreign consumption. consider yourself lucky to be choosing local food, Wente, because with people like you and your ridiculous global food system, it's not going to be a choice for much longer.
you know what? food should be expensive. it should be so fucking expensive that people don't waste it, don't buy it and let it rot in their fridge, don't leave half of it on their plates and then demurely decline a doggy bag. all-you-can-eat endless salad and breadsticks? extra value meals, ninety-nine cent hamburgers? fucking Tim Hortons anything? screw you and the privileged white aging Boomer horse you rode in on.
I do not consider myself an "eager young idealist" but we all damn well "work like dogs" to produce nutritious food for people in our community. we charge a fair price for our produce at our local market, and we sell out every week, and I highly doubt that the people we're feeding are buying and eating to humor us.
what Wente seems to be missing about her quaint experience at the local market, looking down her nose at people like us as she buys carrots for a dollar a piece, is that it's not the local food movement ripping her off, it's herself and her painfully narrow view of what local food means. sure it's nice to shop at a market: you can tour around, compare prices, see all the pretty displays, feel good about yourself. but the truth is, markets make tons of money for farmers because people expect to pay more there; and people pay more at markets because they're buying an experience and an image. it's win-win, but it's not the whole picture.
basically, it all boils down to three little letters: CSA. depending on who you ask, they can stand for "community shared agriculture" or "community supported agriculture" but either way they tidily sum up everything I've just said and totally waste Wente and her bullshit.
the concept is as follows: at the beginning of the year, or in a couple of installments, you buy all your veggies for the whole season directly from the farmer of your choice. then, from June til October, you get a weekly haul of whatever's in season. at most places, it works out to be about twenty bucks a week for more veggies than most people know what to do with. some CSA programs include more than veggies, and a lot of CSA farms offer locally-sourced extras like eggs or meat or flour as add-ons. you eat what's in season, and if you really have to you can go to the market or the grocery store to round things out.
our members have been getting their shares for exactly a month now. over the past four weeks, we've fed seventy something households and two Toronto restaurants: mixed salad greens; several varieties of head lettuce including Romaine, iceberg, and buttercrunch; snow peas, snap peas, and shelling peas; two kinds of radish; three colors of beets and their delicious greens; rainbow chard and black, red, and green curly kale; arugula; beautiful buttery potatoes; five kinds of cabbage; scallions, leeks, fresh garlic, and garlic scapes to cook with; broccoli; a full range of herbs for cooking and drying, from dill and cilantro and parsley to thyme, sage, oregano, sweet marjoram and Russian tarragon; early spring perennials like asparagus and rhubarb; and starting this week, the sweetest zucchini you'll ever taste. over the next week or two we'll start seeing green, yellow, and purple stringbeans, cucumbers, onions - and it's only the first week of July. by the end of the month we'll be into tomatoes, early squash varieties, more potatoes, carrots... and by the final delivery, just after Thanksgiving, our members will need a second person to haul home their bags full of hearty fall vegetables.
it's time to stop looking at food as items on a restaurant menu, ingredients in a recipe. there is a time and season for everything. learn to cook it all, treasure it while it's here, and look forward to it when it's gone. treat yourself to an imported whatever if you want; lord knows I keep myself in tomatoes all year round. but, Wente, do not write down to me from a national newspaper about this shit because when it comes to making food, you and your little back yard of tomatoes know jack shit.
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