Behind the Lines - February 2008
Thursday, January 31, 2008
The inspiration for this month's cover story on food labelling came last year when a supermarket meat counter attendant directed Better Farming senior staff editor Don Stoneman's attention towards a "special" just in time for the end of the barbecuing season. It was a steak labelled "Product of Canada" but bearing an inspection logo from the United States Department of Agriculture. Since Canada hasn't quite been declared the 51st state yet, he started on an odyssey to find out what gives.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency insists that the current rules have been in place since the early 1980s to prevent consumers from being misled. The CBC television show Marketplace aired a program on the issue in early fall which appeared to say otherwise. Viewers may recall the scenes from a "fishing" village in Nova Scotia, where a boat hasn't brought a catch to the pier in years, and a factory churns out packages of household brand-name fish which were caught in China and wrapped in a "Product of Canada" label.
Perhaps modern marketing techniques that are strong on image and weak on substance have made the food labelling rules irrelevant. Yet the question remains: do consumers really care where their food comes from?
For some producers like Louis Roesch, a hog farmer and meat retailing entrepreneur in Kent County, the answer is a voluntary labelling system. Horticultural producers see it a different way. Voluntary isn't good enough and they are looking for mandatory labelling rules that will tell consumers where food comes from. This story starts on page 12.
A parallel question is whether consumers care whether food is produced locally. Elbert van Donkersgoed, executive director of the Greater Toronto Area Agricultural Action Committee says "local" isn't just a media-fuelled fad. Surveys of consumers visiting the committee's booth at the Royal Agriculture Winter Fair, while not a scientific sample of consumer opinion, point overwhelmingly to support for locally produced food in supermarkets where the average shopper can buy them. And "local" means grown in Ontario.
Van Donkersgoed says that the central buying centres for eastern Canada's major grocery chains will have to be dismantled to make locally produced food a reality for shoppers. Is that a reasonable expectation? He points out it has already happened in Britain. BF
Robert Irwin & Don Stoneman