Eating your veggies for sake of immunity
According to the United Nations, 2021 is the International Year of Fruits and Vegetables.
Many could not care less about a proclamation from a global agency that has been criticized over the years as being out of touch. Some of this criticism is warranted but, depending on the topic, these campaigns can bring a healthy load of success and change.
The year 2016 was the International Year of Pulses. At the time, consumers were starting to mentally correlate food choices with environmental stewardship. Context helped shine some light on Canada’s most overlooked crop.
Slowly, not only is Canada becoming a super vegetable protein powerhouse, but consumers are buying into it. In 2020, plant-based sales grew 31 per cent in Canada, even amid the pandemic.
The context for fruits and vegetables this year can assist the UN’s ambitions to advocate for the importance of healthy diets and lifestyles through sustainable food systems. With COVID-19, our collective fight went from keeping safe to achieving immunity. That shift happened just within the last month or so. Collective immunity has been top-of-mind for many, given our acute focus on how vaccines are being rolled out.
The best medicine, virus or not, is sound nutrition. One of the major pieces to building a strong immunity system is by eating more fruits and vegetables. If one country needs to be reminded of that it is certainly Canada.
In 2021, despite volatile prices, 41 per cent of Canadians intend to increase their consumption of fruits and vegetables. Last year, it was 46 per cent. Canadians did buy more fruits and vegetables at retail, but they have bought more of other food categories, as well.
According to NielsenIQ, vegetable sales in Canada went up seven per cent in volume and 13 per cent in dollars since vegetables became more expensive.
The same happened with fruit. Fruit unit sales were up five per cent, and seven per cent in dollars.
Restaurants are not a significant market for fruits, so lower percentages are not surprising. In volume, Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia all saw sales going up in volume by eight per cent for vegetables, and six per cent for fruits. The lowest increase for both categories was in the Maritimes: two per cent for vegetables and only one per cent for fruits. Those figures are disappointingly low.
Most products experienced tremendous growth in retail sales in 2020. Tomatoes were the most popular type of produce in 2020, as sales grew almost 28 per cent in dollars. Since some were still looking for convenience, bagged vegetables grew 25.8 per cent.
In fruits, oranges saw the biggest increase in sales with 21.9 per cent, followed by cherries and lemons. Dollar sales of both celery and peaches dropped in 2020 but this is likely because these products’ price points were much lower than in 2019. Highly publicized recalls also affected some categories, mainly peaches and lettuce. Numbers suggest onions dodged a bullet in 2020 as they, too, were subject to a recall.
But given what happened to the food-service industry in the last 10 months, these numbers may be a mirage. People cooked more often at home and required more produce bought at the grocery store. Unit sales for tomatoes, for example, only grew six per cent. Almost one Canadian in five started a garden at home in 2020, and many grew tomatoes, but still.
Numbers are not impressively high with many restaurants closing. Figures from NielsenIQ suggest that we may not be buying and eating more produce, at least not yet. Since March, it has all been about baking, snacking and indulging to simply overlook the awfulness of the pandemic, if only for a while.
As suggested by Canada’s Food Guide, fruits and vegetables are vital components for achieving quality of life and a stronger immune system. Also, recalls and highly volatile retail prices spook consumers all the time.
Declaring 2021 the International Year of Fruits and Vegetables is timely and important. As more governments investigate food autonomy as a priority for our post-COVID era, creating awareness of the consumption of produce will be parallel.
Building capacity through controlled-environment agriculture products in Canada can only make our produce supply chains less vulnerable to factors like currency and scaled bacterial outbreaks.
We also desperately need to take care of our immune systems as soon as possible. Reminding us of the importance of eating enough produce benefits everyone.