Local eating is beyond trendy. More than ever, farmers’ markets abound with the hip middle class, arriving en masse in hybrid cars or on swanky road bikes, sporting reusable bags and handsome infants in organic fair trade cotton onesies.
Yay for mainstreaming food issues by having them turn hipper than hip! But in the rush to environmentally conscious consumption, let’s not forget that food security is primarily about ensuring that nutritious, sustainable food is available to our most vulnerable citizens.
Unfortunately, socially just and sustainable food policies are slow to manifest. Internationally, government policy often subsidizes our farmers to grow foods (like ubiquitous corn and soy) for use in the vast array of unhealthy processed foods that bombard us in the supermarket. Or, in the case of biofuels, policy makes it profitable for our farmers to not grow food at all, but rather to grow fuel.
A human cost of our dysfunctional industrial food system is that it’s cheaper for people to feed their kids pop and chips than it is to feed them vegetables (let alone organic veg grown by their local farmers). It follows that the poorer we are, the more likely our health will be negatively impacted by what we eat.
With organic local vegetables prohibitively expensive for many city dwellers, it’s no surprise that healthy foods are even less affordable for people living in Canada’s remote and northern communities—in some cases up to $15 for a jug of milk, or $2 for a single apple. A report by the Public Health Nutritionists of Saskatchewan found that healthy food in our northern communities is up to 80 per cent more expensive than in our cities, and that for households living on social assistance or minimum wage, there is little money left over for other necessities after paying for food and shelter. “In order to make ends meet,” the report found, “shoppers may choose items perceived as expensive (fruit, vegetables, and meat) less often.”
It’s understandable that food in the north is more expensive. After all, it does have to travel much greater distances to reach much smaller communities. Why is it, then, that a person can go anywhere in Saskatchewan, from Moose Jaw to La Loche, and buy the same bottle of whiskey for exactly the same price? Because the provincial government regulates the price, that’s why.
Subsidized booze sends a clear message from our provincial government that affordable alcohol is a higher priority than affordable vegetables.
Priorities like these are a cruel irony for our First Nations people, who are disproportionately affected by both alcohol and nutrition-related illnesses like diabetes. The Victoria Times Colonist recently reported that aboriginal people in B.C. are five times more likely to suffer alcohol-related deaths than non-aboriginal citizens. And aboriginal people, in particular those living in isolated communities, are at a much higher risk for type 2 diabetes than non-aboriginal people. The disease, previously known as “adult onset” because it was almost never seen in children, is now being diagnosed in First Nations children as young as eight years old.*
It should come as no surprise that aboriginal people are also at a higher risk for poverty, and that socioeconomic status and health are inextricably linked. First Nations children are nearly 50 per cent more likely to live in poverty than Canadian children overall, and aboriginal people live approximately five to seven years less than the general population.
An analysis of whether our province’s northern allowance and social assistance programs make it possible for the poorest of our citizens to access sufficient healthy food is well outside the scope of this article. But maybe it’s time for our food policy makers to sit down for some lessons from our Liquor Authority.
In the meantime, let’s raise a mug of festive homemade chokecherry mead in celebration of a commitment to just social and economic policies, and an end to poverty and racism in our province!
*In case you’re tempted to resort to easy assumptions without historical context, don’t forget that until colonial policy resulted in the overhunting of buffalo, the introduction of alcohol into aboriginal communities, and the implementation of the reserve system and residential schools, aboriginal peoples on the Canadian prairies had neither too much alcohol nor not enough healthy food.