Fear, and thanks

Fear, and thanks

Bioterrorism and war pose little threat for now to the bounty we enjoy in Canada, but environmental factors could leave our grandchildren's cupboards bare.

Published: The Vancouver Sun, October 6, 2001, Op-ed column
By Deborah Jones

Browse through my family's kitchen cupboards and fridge, take a look at the shelves in our basement storage lockers, and you'll see that I have a thing about food. When shelves are jam-packed I am content. When they're empty I do my least-favourite chore -- shop.

We have much cause for giving thanks this weekend, including food in all its abundance, diversity and affordability. We Westerners approach food as an art form or hobby, instead of a basic essential. We ensure that even our poorest citizens can eat. In a world where food symbolizes the line between the haves and the have-nots, we take food for granted.

Canadian groceries are astonishingly cheap, costing as little as five to seven per cent of our gross incomes. "Food in Canada is probably cheaper than anywhere else in the world," says Jenny Hillard of Winnipeg, acting chairwoman of the food committee for the Consumers Association of Canada, who pays 21/2 times more for food on her regular trips to Great Britain.

Canadian food is marvelously bountiful. We export much more than we import, and enjoy unparallelled and unprecedented choice, from everyday grains to exotic spices. "We've got access to the most incredible variety of good, healthy, nutritious food," says Hillard. "There's no reason for anybody to be unhealthy from a bad diet."

For the near-term future we can expect such abundance to continue, barring catastrophes such as bioterrorism, which even after Sept. 11 experts consider improbable in the case of food.

Still, in our souls, our psyches, our cultural records, are vestiges of the famished ones -- ancestors whose offspring survived drought, depression and war, and who left the indelible stain of hunger on our genes. They're why we stock up, against a day when we cannot. We heed them well: stuffing our bodies (often to the detriment of our health), stuffing our pantries.

At farms in Richmond we stock up on carrots and potatoes. We roam the urban markets of Vancouver, Duncan or Penticton in search of a perfect tomato. At the docks at Steveston or Granville Island we buy whole frozen wild salmon. In the aisles of Capers we choose from among four kinds of garlic, 20 kinds of baking for people with or without allergies, and meat representing what is possibly the height of a carnivore civilization: food production that takes into account the happiness and comfort of food animals. We vanish into the maw of a bulk store like Costco, to emerge with giant cases of chocolate milk in 250-gram plastic packages, cheeses as big as building blocks, cereal to feed an army.

My colleague Stephen Hume writes an entire column about his search for the best Nanaimo bar!

Aren't we lucky? Aren't we privileged? Our hungry ancestors were the ordinary ones, their travails the norm. And deep inside, we know how exceptional we are, that we won a geographical and historical lottery to find ourselves in a land of plenty.

In Afghanistan at least a million people are thought to be starving to death. Afghanistan-based terrorist Osama bin Laden would like to impose their plight on us, and through terrorism he's doing his best to destroy an economy that lets Canadian farmers produce, each month, nearly 50 million dozen eggs.

Bin Laden should prompt us to give thanks for what we have, says Mark Winston, professor of biological sciences at Simon Fraser University, "because most of us in Canada don't think about food. Maybe the Sept. 11 events might remind us how privileged we are, to have access to diverse, safe, healthy food."

Winston has a point. Terrorism may well drive up prices for fresh produce because of increased border security, but that will be a short-term glitch in the scheme of things. Full-out war could impede availability of imports, but we have plenty to fall back on. Other food concerns range from economic slowdown to technology to wing- nut animal-rights groups who inject poison into turkeys to try and scare us off meats, but we shouldn't worry unduly about what we put in our mouths.

Instead, our concerns about food should not be directed at lunatics like bin Laden or even pesticide residues on fruit, but at environmental factors, from global warming to pollution, that could affect food supplies for our grandchildren and their descendants.

This past summer, production of some grains on the Canadian Prairies declined by more than 25 per cent because of drought. Global fish stocks are declining and some, like northern cod off Newfoundland and salmon runs in B.C., are on the verge of collapse. Climate change hastens the spread of diseases that affect food production, from parasites that kill the bees that pollinate fruit trees, to species of microbes that cause spoilage of produce or impede growth of food plants like tomatoes.

This weekend, though, I'm going to put those concerns temporarily aside to raise a toast in thankfulness for what we have.
Copyright Deborah Jones 2001
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In our souls and psyches are vestiges of the famished ones

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