Remedial food literacy

“I’m glad you guys made me eat a lot of different kinds of weird food when I was little,” said our teenager, during supper the other night.

Of course, any kind of positive feedback received from a 16-year-old should be viewed with suspicion. You’re not supposed to start appreciating your parents until you hit your 20s or 30s. Maybe he is trying to butter us up – currying favour, so to speak – for strategic reasons that will soon become apparent. In any case, the kid claims to be grateful for the fact that he has a reasonably well-educated and pragmatic palate – because some of his friends are fussy eaters, handicapped by their narrow food preferences.

“We never forced you to eat anything,” I told him. “That would be child abuse. We just gave you the choice between eating what was on your plate, or starving – and we tried to keep you good and hungry most of the time.”

This boy is no culinary snob. I’ve seen him put away great quantities of junk food, when the opportunity arises. But on a day-to-day basis, he eats and enjoys whatever is on offer, and he is always curious about trying new things, prepared by others or sometimes by himself. I’m not sure what he means by “weird food.” Our household cuisine has always been veg-forward – never fussy or fancy, but more likely to err on the side of pungency than blandness. (OK, maybe it’s a bit weird sometimes.) Perhaps that has served him well – or maybe we just lucked out.

I was thinking about this recently while tuning in to the Scotia Horticultural Congress, which was presented virtually this year – a pale imitation of the live version that is usually held at the Old Orchard Inn in Greenwich, N.S., but definitely still a worthwhile event. As has become customary, the agenda included remarks from Keith Colwell, the provincial minister of agriculture. Colwell prides himself on being responsive to concerns and suggestions from the farm sector, and he always welcomes questions from delegates. Through the slightly clunky online platform, someone asked about his thoughts on developing a Nova Scotia food policy – which is an idea that has been kicked around for years.

“We’ve basically done that through our programs we do with Buy Local,” he replied. “It’s really an overall policy for the whole province on food security.”

This struck me as rather disingenuous – though to his credit, Colwell acknowledged that the province’s “Get Your Hands on Local” initiative is really just a marketing program. “Hopefully we get a lot more new products on the market that will displace even more things that are being imported into the province, and we can export some of those to other areas,” he said. “We’ve been working on this for over a year. We started even before COVID. We’ve dealt with Sobeys, Loblaws, Walmart, Costco, and all the major suppliers, and they’re really, really stepping up to the plate. So that, over time, will help us ensure that we have a secure local food supply, as we go to 100 percent food supply in our province.”

I’m all for buy-local messaging, but this sounds more aspirational than strategic. I don’t see how it can possibly get us close to 100 percent – or even how that target should be defined and measured. A comprehensive food policy would articulate these things.

When someone posed a question about what the government is doing to get more local food served in schools, Colwell was short on specifics, but offered assurances that the Department of Education is working on it. “As far as I’m concerned, I wouldn’t be happy until we get 100 percent Nova Scotia food in our schools, when it’s available,” he said. “The other issue is, we’ve got to make sure it’s available year-round.”

Again, a food policy could serve to connect the dots. It is already possible to procure a delicious and nutritionally complete diet from local producers. Much of this food is available from farmers’ markets in the province. (Several of them now have online ordering and pickup systems – which are, in my experience, very efficient and convenient.) However, I assume some food categories need to be scaled up considerably.

As for year-round availability, it’s a question of eating seasonally. Broccoli is great stuff, but we don’t need it all through the winter. And when it comes to leafy greens, maybe we should try to keep an open mind. I was recently in a small-town café that makes an effort to source local food, and the server told me about a customer who became quite belligerent when he discovered there was kale in his Caesar salad. (It was an incident of roughage rage.) Apparently this guy’s upbringing was deficient in civility as well as weird food.

For some people, raw kale is a culinary boundary that shall not be crossed – and maybe that’s OK (although it should be noted that the coarseness of mature kale can be much reduced by massaging). Maybe we need to get over this notion that salad is inherently healthful. Lettuce is not actually very nutrient-dense. We like it because it is crunchy and wet. (When we import field-grown Romaine, we are mostly purchasing water – often from arid regions that can ill afford to part with it.) Sometimes, salad is so heavily and richly dressed that it is calorically equivalent to French fries – or topped with so much candied nuts and fruit that it more closely resembles a dessert. There are better ways to get your veggies.

HUMAN NATURE

The conference also featured Angus Ells, of the Oxford Food Group – who chairs the Scotia Horticultural Congress – having a virtual “armchair chat” with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois, director of Dalhousie University’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab. Much of their conversation centred on the pandemic, and how restrictions on restaurant dining changed our shopping and eating habits. Ells said the view from the farm industry, based on anecdotal reports, is that the uptick in home cooking has increased sales of locally produced staples such as carrots. Charlebois agreed that this would seem logical, but he said it is not borne out by Canadian food sales data for 2020.

“Frankly, I’m a bit puzzled,” he admitted. “I’m not entirely convinced that people are buying more vegetables…. What’s driving sales in produce is inflation, clearly. Inflation is impacting that category, and I’m concerned about that – but the volume is not as high as I was expecting.”

Charlebois suggested the explanation has a lot to do with human nature: “Back in March and April, the knee-jerk reaction for most people when COVID hit, it wasn’t the periphery of the store, it was the centre of the store – the non-perishables. The two top products that sold in March and April, in Canada, can you guess? Peanut butter, and Kraft Dinner. Those were the number-one products, because they’re easy to use. Produce is a little bit more work.”

In addition to laziness, another human weakness highlighted by last year’s sales figures is our fondness for novelty. Though people are preparing more food at home, many are gravitating toward specialty meats such as bison, or fake meats, or meal kits and frozen entrées intended to replicate the restaurant experience. None of this bodes well for food self-sufficiency in the Maritimes, because getting into niche products is an especially risky venture in a region with a relatively small population.

Charlebois talked a bit about his lab’s new report on Canadian food literacy – clearly a hard thing to measure. The study put a lot of weight on how many recipes survey respondents claimed to know. In this respect, Nova Scotia came out ahead of every other province – but you’ve got to wonder how many of those recipes were for various kinds of squares. Regardless, I don’t see how knowing recipes has any bearing on one’s understanding of the social, economic, and environmental implications of food production and distribution. The most knowledgeable cooks do not rely very much on recipes; they draw on a set of culinary concepts, and are able to improvise, making use of available ingredients.

A more useful indicator of food literacy is participation in gardening, and these numbers look good, especially in Atlantic Canada. Charlebois noted that not all COVID gardeners will continue over the long term, but just the fact that they have dabbled in the dirt means they will be more inclined to think about where and how food is produced and distributed. He said there is increased public interest in the whole supply chain – including the treatment of supermarket and abattoir workers, and steep supplier fees levied by most of the powerful and highly profitable players in Canada’s “oligopoly” of food retailers.

Charlebois said there’s a lot of room for improving food security, especially in New Brunswick, which produces only three percent of farm produce sold in the province. Every province needs to increase food processing capacity, in order to become less vulnerable to disruptions such as currency fluctuations, border closures, or transport route obstructions.

And the good news? With high housing prices in urban areas, and the widespread adoption of telecommuting, more people are moving to the countryside, and they don’t want to live as tourists – they want to engage with the local economy, which definitely includes the agricultural economy. “Rural is cool again,” said Charlebois. “Smaller farms actually have a shot now.”

So, are we ready for this? DL