Locavorism won’t solve everything
But access to good food brings better meals
Last month, on vacation, I happened across what might be the platonic ideal of a fancy urban farmers’ market. The smell of wood smoke led me to a quiet street in Berlin’s leafy Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood, where a man was smoking various kinds of fish in the middle of the road. As one does. There was a little mobile bicyclepowered coffee shop selling vastly overpriced espresso. There was the requisite improbably expensive produce and charcuterie and cheese. (My God, the cheese. Why do Canadians put up with our benighted dairy industry?) And to shock my Ontarian senses, there was a big booth selling local wines — which one could drink, out of glasses, in whatever quantities one saw fit, right there out in the open. Tipplers weren’t even confined to a secure pen. There wasn’t even a security guard!
Even more than at Toronto’s fancier farmers’ markets, it was clear this was a place for wealthy people with time to spare. And it never occurred to me that was a problem. A new study coauthored by Kelly Hodgins and Evan Fraser of the University of Guelph suggests it is, however — and a recent headline on the matter made my eyes roll so far back in my head I feared they might get stuck: “Access to ‘ethical’ food often available only to the wealthy, study says.”
“While eating local or organic food is often touted as superior from a health, environmental and oftentimes ethical perspective, such foods are often available only in Canada to the wealthy, with limited access for those living on lower or even middle incomes,” The Globe and Mail reported.
Well, duh. A $5 bulb of organic garlic or bunch of kale is purely a luxury good. It is to the family dinner as a Ferrari is to family transport. As heavily “touted as superior” as local and organic and otherwise “ethical” produce might be, the evidence underpinning its health benefits is basically nil. Nutritionally speaking, you might as well eat frozen vegetables. And anyway, in the kinds of places where you’re likely to find fancy organic food shops and farmers’ markets, local in-season produce won’t be very expensive at the supermarket. In fact, it’s usually cheaper at the more down-to-earth farmers’ markets because there’s so little overhead — and more delicious to boot.
The Globe story also wrapped in one of the weirdest and most pernicious myths about the food situation in modern urban areas, which is that it’s cheaper to feed a family processed food or take them to McDonald’s than to cook a meal. “What is often affordable is often not healthy,” one activist argued.
On Wednesday, I priced out a week’s worth of quick, easy, highly rated online dinner recipes for an imaginary family of four at my indomitable local No Frills and came up with about $125 (that’s excluding basic pantry items like oil, flour, sugar and spices.) Mom and Dad will barely get out of McDonald’s for the per-meal price of $18, never mind the kids. These were pretty solid family meals, too: tuna casserole, shepherd’s pie, a roasted chicken dinner, sausage and vegetable stew — and a warm, crispy baguette with each. You could easily cut the budget by a third and stay perfectly healthy.
Not everyone has the time, of course, and there are far too many people who can’t even subsist in the budget grocery market; once you’re taking what you can get from the food bank, all bets are off. But no hoity-toity market is going to help with any of that. So why, I asked Hodgins, co-author of the alternative food network study, does it matter if people have access to healthy food from high-end retailers?
“It doesn’t matter,” she replied, somewhat wrongfooting me. “The reason that I looked at that was just as a way of highlighting the extreme stratification that we see in the Canadian food system today, and to highlight the shortcomings of the alternative food system and to make us more aware of its limitations.”
“What I’m advocating for is a food system where everyone has access to a good diet,” said Hodgins. Some alternative food evangelists see their morally righteous veg as a “silver bullet” when it clearly isn’t, and she thinks they ought to be more aware of that.
Her survey of alternative food retailers in British Columbia found some were perfectly happy with the way things are (“We are a business, not a social-service agency”), while others were trying to expand both their affordability and their appeal; Hodgins suspects some potential customers might avoid such environments because they’re seen as “elitist spaces.” And that really would be unfortunate. The main reason I shop at farmers’ markets is because the produce is reliably delicious, and if the price is right — as it often is — I would recommend it to anyone.
As a public policy matter, there is no salvation to be had in locavorism. As a family dinner matter, however, there might be.