Thoughts, Reflections and a Global Food Crisis

Apologies for the long wait between posts. We have been busy with work, weddings, birthdays and traveling. This is not to say that there hasn't been a host of local eating involved. One great treat was the trip to Windsor for the wedding of our dear friends Luke and Alyssa, where we scored some exceptional canned Tomatoes from the Tomato capital of Canada. We highly recommend Thomas Utopia organic canned tomatoes if you can get them. Bold flavour, great texture and dripping of summer freshness.
On another note, though, this post is meant to speak to an issue we have been been talking and thinking about over the past month and a half of eating and thinking local. Inspired largely by two couples who are very close friends of ours who are traveling to Malawi, we have been learning to stop, look around us and be grateful for where we live. Southern Ontario has been blessed as the greenbelt of the country. Come summer, the farms and orchards are bursting with fresh fruits and vegetables, the vineyards are hanging low with grapes and the fields of corn, soy and wheat (yes, wheat) blow along the highways in Wellington, Grey-Bruce and Prince Edward counties. Even when the dark and blowing winter winds wind their way through the province, the fields still bring forth potatoes, carrots, cabbage and chard, bringing a welcome freshness into the depths of the cold. Yet throughout all this bounty, it is still easy for people looking for alternatives. A trip to any of the many Korean produce markets in the city of Toronto attests to this. The big attraction for many to these markets is the big, cheap boxes of berries flown in from California. Granted these berries look attractive. They are picture perfect, uniform in size and bright in colour, why wouldn't you want to eat them, right? If you were to shift your glance a little though, you would find a smaller selection of Ontario produced berries nearby. This berries appear in waves over the summer beginning with strawberries in June, shifting to raspberries and blackberries in July and then sweeping to blueberries in August. Now these berries do look different then their California cousins. They are smaller, often misshapen and perish very quickly. The difference, however, is in the bright, sweet, juicy taste hidden behind their deep colour. There is nothing, nothing that compares to the flavour of a local strawberry in season. It bursts in your mouth and fills you with a flavour that is so distinctly strawberry, you will be longing for them for the rest of the year. But that's just the point, they aren't around for the whole year, you are only able to savour them for 3 short weeks. But people are not satisfied within that 3 week limit. Instead, they buy forced, tasteless California berries all winter just to meet a craving and then continue to buy them in the summer because they are 'picture perfect' and can survive a few weeks in the fridge. The silly things we do for convenience.
But it's this culture of convenience, in all parts of our lives, that truly is the heart of the problems with our eating habits. Frequently, as we introduce our local diet to people, we receive accolades for our efforts, but are met with comments that the individuals could never do the diet themselves. Whether it's a comment of not knowing how to cook, a perceived lack of vegetarian options or not want to live without imported product 'x', people remain reluctant to step away from what they are used to in order make a change in the way they eat, how they live or what they want. Now, regardless of the efforts we have made in own own eating adventures, we absolutely identify this reluctance to change. We've struggled with our own haunts (coffee, chocolate, pepper etc.) as you've heard and have had to learn a whole new way of cooking and we are still working on resisting our temptations. But lately, what has been helping us through is an appreciation for the food we have available to us. The fact that we are even so 'lucky' to have a choice between local berries and imported ones is astounding. In comparison, we recall a story our friend Luke told after his first trip to Malawi. After working on a small local farm for a day, plowing a field, he was offered a handful of groundnuts and a cup of tea as his meal for the day. Hungry as he was, he was still grateful for whatever he was blessed to eat. This is what it means to truly not 'have options' when it comes to food. We, in Ontario, in Canada, in North America have been given a great gift of nutritious, fruitful land that produces beautiful food and we have the tools to work the land with greater ease. So many places in the world do not have this luxury. Many people perform back-breaking work by hand in dry, rotten, swamped or scorched conditions and marvel when they are able to grow the smallest piece of food. For them, local eating is not a choice, it is survival. In thinking globally, eating strawberries for only 3 weeks a year isn't restrictive, it is a treat and needs to be valued as such. We don't need imported fruit to eat well, we just need to switch our thinking, look around and maybe begin to feed our needs a little more than we feed our wants. And that is applicable to all parts of life!

P.S. Looking for a drink to substitute for the lack of 100% local beer! Try cider! Why didn't we think of this before? Two great Ontario options from Prince Edward County are Peeler and Wappoos. You might not even miss the beer...