Category: politics

Happ McAnniversary to Me

It’s my 20 year McAnniversary this month. April of 1989 was the last time I ate anything from McDonald’s. I don’t remember the exact date because it wasn’t really a marker at the time. My boyfriend and I had been to the Toronto Zoo where we visited the Americans pavilion. There were huge info walls explaining that the Amazon rain forest was disappearing as more and more land was cleared to make space for cattle farms – to raise beef for US and Canadian burger chains. At the time, McDonald’s was the only food available to purchase at the Toronto Zoo (how’s that for irony?) and I made the decision then and there to never eat at McD’s again.

The task has been a surprisingly easy one. Living in downtown Toronto, I have plenty of other options and am still boggled at how people can choose McD’s over a block full of great ethnic restaurants. There has been some pressure over the years, with many people not understanding or respecting my decision, but I’ve managed to stick to my promise to myself.

In those 20 years, I’ve been inside a McDonald’s exactly four times. Twice on road trips in the early 90s along highway 401 when I needed to use the washroom, back when the rest stops consisted of a service station and a fast food restaurant. I won’t eat their food, but I will pee in their toilets, thank you very much. Rest stops are now more like tiny malls with a donut shop and a magazine/variety store as well as the restaurant and gas station, so I no longer have to go inside the McDonald’s to pee, and can usually find a candy bar or something to eat if I’ve not bothered to pack a snack. The other times were to drop off toys for a holiday toy drive and once when I was meeting someone at Dundas subway station, which has its own McD’s outlet.

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The Compassionate Carnivore

The Compassionate Carnivore: Or, How to Keep Animals Happy, Save Old MacDonald’s Farm, Reduce Your Hoofprint, and Still Eat Meat
by Catherine Friend
Da Capo Press, 2008, 291 pages

I read this book over the holidays and it’s been sitting on my desk waiting for a review ever since. It’s not that I didn’t want to talk about it or discuss it, but rather that the message seems somewhat mixed and I haven’t been sure how to approach it.

Maybe I’m too much of a “seeing the world in black and white” kind of gal, because while I know that there are plenty of farmers out there who treat their animals well, who advocate for better lives and more humane slaughter methods for livestock, there’s still a part of me that can’t help thinking, “Yanno, if you really loved animals, you just wouldn’t kill them for food at all.”

This is even more difficult to parse when Compassionate Carnivore author Catherine Friend admits that she’s addicted to ready-meals and county fair pork on a stick. Yes, she and her partner raise sheep in an ethical and humane way, keeping to organic and sustainable principles as much as possible, but her own eating habits are less than stellar and certainly don’t put her in a position to preach to anyone else.

Therefore, I tried to concentrate on reading the book as an account of life on a farm, similar in context to the book Sylvia’s Farm or the blog Farmgirl Fare. And from that point of view, The Compassionate Carnivore scores well with plenty of stories of how Friend and her partner deal with all the issues of sheep-rearing from birth to slaughter.

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Duck, Duck, Goose

I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a big fan of foie gras. Part of my job requires that I generally eat what is put in front of me, and I’ll eat the stuff if I have to, but it’s never something that I’ll make an effort to search out.

Despite having an opinion on just about everything else, I actually have no opinion on the issues surrounding foie gras production. On the one hand, it seems weird and cruel, but on the other, those duckies sure do come running at dinnertime. I figure it can’t be any worse than the conditions that most of the western world’s meat is produced in, so any issue I have with fois gras would be more to do with farms that are more of a factory setting instead of a happy organic free-range kind of place.

Peta has recently issued a challenge to chefs to come up with a “faux gras” product, offering a $10,000 prize to the recipe that most closely resembles the real thing. Now sure, it’s Peta, and they can’t let it go without getting in a few jabs, calling foie gras the “delicacy of despair”, but the reaction to the contest has been just as childish.

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Gardens and Jealousy – Both Green

Most readers may not be familiar with the rapier pen of one A A Gill, a restaurant and television critic for the UK Times. Gill has recently had it in for the various UK chefs working to promote healthy, local, seasonal eating in Britain, and appears to take special exception to food journalist-turned-farmer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Hugh F-W runs a farm, shop and restaurant operation called River Cottage in the Dorset area, and currently has a series on the air in the UK called River Cottage Autumn, in which he delves into the seasonal delights of local UK food, from the garden harvest, to fish in season to the fine art of foraging.

Gill reviews an episode of River Cottage Autumn in a recent television column, ostensibly killing two birds with one stone. But he’s not especially nice – to Hugh F-W, or to the millions of people who happen to revel in the joy of a home-grown tomato.

Why should poor, fearful folk have to put up with a bucketful of organic new-age anxiety to go with the anxiety their imperfect lives manufacture all on their own, especially when it’s created by a home-made television presenter in a Beatrix Potter set? The idea that ideal people should strive to live like 18th-century crofters is intellectual silage. The enthusiasm may be charming, but this fetishising of food is part of the problem, not the solution. Shirley Conran once said that life was too short to stuff a mushroom. She was wrong. But you’d have to live an awfully long time to make making your own baked beans on toast worthwhile. Self-sufficiency is not an admirable goal, it’s small-minded, selfish, mean, mistrustful and ultimately fascist. It ends up with people waving shotguns at strangers over their garden gates. We live in a complex, mutually reliant society, and the answer to our problems is not each to his own cabbage patch.

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The Deadwood of Canadian Food Safety

Saturday’s National Post had an article about how the Canadian Food Inspection Agency plans to allow companies to police themselves when it comes to health and safety inspections.

The document, addressed to the president of the agency, details how the inspection of meat and meat products will downgrade agency inspectors to an “oversight role, allowing industry to implement food safety control programs and to manage key risks.”

Obviously this is a bad, bad thing. With diseases like bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) still present in our food systems, government inspection is imperative. But it seems that the government doesn’t care, as funding for BSE testing is also slated to be cut.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is also ending funding to producers to test cattle for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease) as part of a surveillance program, the document indicates, a move expected to save the agency about $24-million over the next three years.

Given the number of food borne illnesses that have shown up in the US factory-style food system in recent years, is that really something we want to be emulating here in Canada?

If you weren’t already concerned about where your food comes from, if you haven’t already made friends with a farmer, a baker and especially a butcher, now might be a good time to get that ball rolling. Because once this deregulation comes into effect and food companies don’t have to answer to a government inspector, it’s pretty safe to assume that an already screwed-up system is going to look like the wild wild west.

Apparently bitching and Complaining WILL Get you Somewhere

It’s okay to eat chicken again. Or at least chicken from KFC. In Canada.

After years of protests and campaigns by animal rights groups PETA, KFC has bowed to pressure and has agreed to work only with suppliers that can ensure less crowding for the chickens it uses, as well as phasing out non-essential growth hormones and drugs. KFC will also source chicken only from suppliers who slaughter birds with gas, considered the most humane method of processing.

An added caveat will be that KFC will add vegan and vegetarian “unchicken” options to its menu, making the chain a consideration for a demographic of customers who might never have eaten there, and allowing those of us who love the magical 11 herbs and spices coating to get our fix without guilt.

Full story at the CBC website.

Product of Canada

Did you know that Canada grows some fine pineapples? Or that we have many thriving chocolate plantations? If you’re a grocery label reader, it might be easy to assume that all of those prepared products labelled “product of Canada” were grown here. But the current law is a little bit slippery.

A recent Reuters piece about changes to labelling laws indicates:

Current rules state that a label can say “Made in Canada” or “Product of Canada” if 51 percent of the production costs are Canadian and the last substantial transformation of the product took place in Canada.

So cocoa beans shipped to Canada to be made into chocolate bars here go to the stores with a “product of Canada” label, even though they came from somewhere else.

The Calgary Herald explains the changes:

The new standards require that any label claiming a food product is a “Product of Canada” necessarily needs to have all or virtually all of its contents be Canadian. That includes ingredients, the processing and the labour used to make the product; an exception has been made for some foreign content to be included in a Canadian product and labelled as such if minor additives or spices are not available in Canada.

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Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.

I was ready to dislike Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto before I even picked it up.

While I mostly enjoyed his previous book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, I felt that he did an awfully complicated song and dance in the steakhouse chapter to try and justify eating meat. Then I read a quote from In Defense of Food by another blogger which said “Don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food”, which riled me up excessively.

My own grandmother was all about baking fresh bread, canning tomatoes and picking blueberries, but she was also of a generation that fully embraced the new convenience foods. Not to mention that until 1973, she had never lived in a house with indoor plumbing – with four sons to feed, and then a handful of grandkids, can you blame her for throwing store-bought cupcakes and frozen pizza at us? The woman had to boil her dishwater on a kerosene stove!

Turns out Pollan’s quote is actually about GREAT-Grandmothers, which makes a heck of a lot more sense. Well, unless you factor in the lack of indoor plumbing (those great grannies would likely have been all over the Twinkies too!).

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Playing Chicken – The Chicken Out Campaign

As a huge fan of British TV, and an openly honest stealer of television shows on the Internets, I was likely one of a small number of North Americans to view the series on Britain’s Channel 4 called Hugh’s Chicken Run in which food journalist and farmer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall tries to get his entire town of Axminster to switch from intensively-farmed (and cheap) chicken to slightly more spendy free-range chicken.

In a three-part series, HFW sets up a chicken farm in which he raises half a barn of chickens as they would be in an intensive farming operation (no poultry operation would give him permission to film on their premises, so he was forced to create his own), and the other half as free-range, with more space, access to the outdoors, toys and activities, etc. He also trolls the aisles of his local supermarket to try and convince customers to purchase the free-range birds.

This is the point where Greg and I looked at each other and went “Waitaminute!!! Whaaaa???”

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There’s No More Room on the Bandwagon

Okay, so I’m flipping through one of the happy housewife magazines that I subscribe to, eating lunch and not really paying attention to what I’m reading ($160 is too much to pay for a hot trend item that looks good on exactly nobody and will be out of style in 6 months) when I come across an ad that makes me choke on my soup.

The eeeeevilest of evil corporations has gone organic.

Sweet motherfucking hell.

Currently Kraft is only offering crackers, salad dressing and coffee in organic form, but you can bet your sweet patootie that there’s more to come.

Although organic products have recently gained an increase in recognition, organic practices are deeply rooted in traditional agricultural methods. Organic farming practices employ a variety of ecologically stable methods to help sustain a healthy environment. Composting, recycling and crop rotations are just some of the holistic practices farmers utilize to ensure a sustainable land, where crops are grown with natural fertilizers such as manure and without the use of synthetic pesticides. Animals raised on organic farms have access to pasture and open air runs to foster their health and natural behaviour, and are raised without the use of growth hormones.

Kraft organic products are created with carefully selected organically grown ingredients, and their organic qualities are maintained at all stages of production. Organic foods are minimally processed and contain no artificial preservatives or genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

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