By Mary Ellen Kirby

Local Journalism Initiative

   It seems mid-summer has finally hit its stride, throwing off extreme yo-yoing weather patterns and settling into mellow, sun-warmed, gold-dusted days that glide gently into refreshingly cool evenings. Farm fields and gardens across the Townships are fulsome, burgeoning with abundant crops. Our dusty gravel roads are bustling with the seasonal traffic of busy farm tractors rumbling to and fro towing wagons full of chubby, round hay bales, while the winter wheat fields are already yielding their nodding stalks to prowling combine harvesters.

  Gardens too are maturing, moving from early summer harvests of green onions, lettuce and peas to tomatoes, beans and baby beets. Rather than a date on a calendar, my mid-summer marker is the first cucumber harvest. I canned the first of many batches of pickles this week, so in my books that makes it official. Yesterday, in the cool of early morning, I picked a couple of litres of black currants, courtesy of a generous neighbour. I am transforming my gifted currants into a dessert syrup perfect for topping pancakes or vanilla ice cream. As I navigated the berry patch, I could hear the hens boastfully clucking of freshly laid eggs and the occasional thump of an apple falling to the ground in the orchard behind me. In a nearby pasture, contented cows munched on their breakfast greens, lowing bovine admonitions to wayward, frisky calves. It was a delightfully purposeful start to my day. But here’s the thing about berry picking: while the hands may be busy, the mind is free to wander down sometimes unexpected and twisting paths.

   As the wine dark currants plinked and plunked down into my bucket, it occurred to me that all my five senses were engaged by…food. Everything I was seeing, hearing, smelling, touching and – yes, I admit it – tasting, was food. I was surrounded by food, and I got to wondering how many folks could claim a similar experience. With a rapidly dwindling farm population, I’m willing to bet there aren’t many who would be so fortunate. I also started to wonder how it could be possible – in a land as fertile and bountiful as Canada – that food insecurity has risen so sharply in the last few years. It is a conundrum that I can’t quite grasp. And yet, the numbers don’t lie. According to Food Banks Canada, March of 2024 saw a record high of more than two million visits to food banks all across the country. That number represented a significant 6 per cent increase over the same month in 2023, but a staggering 90 per cent increase over March of 2019. Read that again: an increase of 90 per cent in only five years! That seems unimaginable to me, especially as I live in such a food-rich environment. Hidden in that unfathomable reality, lurks the ugly fact that in excess of 700,000 Canadian children are among those food bank clients. I cannot begin to express my sorrow at those numbers, my heart aches at the thought of even one hungry child. But beyond my sorrow lies a great pool of anger. In this generous and beautiful land of plenty, how has this happened? Who or what is to blame? And how do we fix it?

   As per usual, I have more questions than answers. I suspect there are a number of culprits beyond the most obvious ones. The easy scapegoats are the giant grocery chains; we are quick to accuse them of price gouging and profiteering. And while that certainly may be a huge factor, we consumers need to shoulder some of the responsibility for where we find ourselves. Five major chains account for more than 80 per cent of our grocery purchases in this country. Five big players can easily control pricing nation-wide, throwing us a revolving menu of so-called “specials” to make us think we are getting a bargain. But who made those chains giants in the first place? We did. We abandoned our local Mom & Pop independent grocers for the lure of Bigger! Better! Cheaper! Now we are literally paying the price for that defection. It is a basic precept of economics that competition lowers prices; mergers and buyouts have reduced the playing field to a paltry number of competitors for our food dollars. I suspect they find it ridiculously easy to rig the game. They are not competing against each other…they are playing against us. While young householders today think that a Costco run is the ‘normal’ way to feed themselves, I am old enough to remember a very different food landscape. In 1920s-1930s Lennoxville, for instance, there were two grocers on Queen St. On the corner of Queen and Belvedere, the elegant old structure that now hosts a Subway restaurant was once home to C.C. Chaddock, a purveyor of “Choice Fresh Groceries. Fruits in Season. Fancy Biscuits. Paints and Oils. Shelf Hardware.” Elsewhere along the main street was C.J. Lane & Sons, “Dealers in Groceries, Fruits, Crockery Etc.” Now, while I am not old enough to remember either of those establishments, by the time I was of an age to think about groceries and where to buy them, they had been replaced by a couple of other small grocers. Probably many Record readers will also remember Beaulieu’s store. It occupied the former C.C. Chaddock building, while Nichol’s store was further down Queen St. and was famous for its meat counter. Like their predecessors, Beaulieu’s and Nichol’s are only lines in Lennoxville’s history book now. Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t help feeling the shiny new Maxi with its self-checkout is a poor substitute.  

   I am in no way making excuses for the big grocery chains. They have a long list of transgressions against the average shopper. At the very least, they are guilty of disingenuous marketing practices, perhaps even price fixing or price gouging, although I can’t think of many instances of the federal ‘Competition Act’ being enforced. Perhaps the closest we’ve come lately is the infamous bread price fixing scandal involving Weston and its parent company Loblaws, which resulted in class action lawsuits and fines. That’s just dandy, but has anyone noticed the price of bread going down? That seems a mite odd to me, especially in light of grain prices. Statistics Canada numbers show that farm cash receipts for 2024 went down by 2.1 per cent in the first decline since 2010. That decline was primarily due to the much lower prices farmers received for their grain crops. So, if the price of the chief ingredient in bread dropped significantly for the manufacturers, why are our prices still ridiculously high? My guess is because the big boys are pocketing the difference. Isn’t it cute how they are so quick to pass along their increases but never feel obliged to share their savings?

  But the retailers are not solely to blame for astronomical grocery prices. Perhaps if the federal government hadn’t gone on a pandemic-induced spending spree, the inflation rate wouldn’t have sky-rocketed. And perhaps if average Canadians weren’t losing 45 per cent of their earnings to various levels of government taxation, there would be more left to cover food and shelter costs. Ever since 1993, according to the Fraser Institute, Canadians spend a larger portion of their income on taxes than they do on necessities. That might be justified if we were getting good value for our tax money but lately it feels as though we are paying much more and getting much less…just like the grocery stores. Since governments have contributed mightily to the problem, I think it is unreasonable to expect them to solve it. In fact, I prefer they keep their meddling fingers out of the pie. Government interventions usually cost far more than they are worth.

   So how do we ‘fix’ this? First, I suggest we adjust our lens. We have a national food security predicament, not a problem. Problems can be solved but predicaments can only be managed. So far, I am not inspired by the management of either corporations or governments. That means it is down to us, the consumers. There is no use in wringing our hands and plaintively demanding that ‘Someone do Something’ about the spiralling cost of groceries. Perhaps we could put our hands to better use by growing a garden and cooking from scratch. As a livestock producer, an avid gardener and our household’s food preparation ‘expert’, a goodly proportion of my waking hours are taken up with thoughts and tasks related to food. Through the many millennia of human history, that has been the norm: hunting, growing and preparing food has been our major preoccupation. This recent outsourcing of that responsibility to nameless, faceless corporations is but an infinitesimal blip on our collective human timeline. Will we eventually regain our natural agency over our own nourishment? That remains to be seen. Dealing with this predicament will require creativity, diligence and a willingness to change our habits and that might be too much to ask. Valuable coping strategies would include shopping closer to the source, eating in season, buying ingredients instead of prepared foods, transforming seasonal abundance into food storage for leaner times and creating small neighbourhood networks to share produce or buy staples in bulk. All of these things are possible, but they are not convenient. I think we have forgotten that convenience often carries a high price tag.

   It wasn’t exactly convenient to drive to my neighbour’s farm, spend a few hours picking and sorting black currants, juicing them, adding sugar and spices, reducing it all to a sweet syrup and then canning it in jars for the pantry shelf. My free berries cost me plenty of time and effort. If I paid myself minimum wage, each of those 250 ml. jars of syrup would cost about $20…high-end groceries indeed. Instead, I will be paying my neighbour’s generosity forward and giving some of the syrup away as gifts. I think that when the recipients open the jars this winter, they will be able to smell and taste the essence of mid-summer. The syrup will be infused with my delight in the picking, my neighbour’s kindness and the care that went into its making, and those ingredients can’t be bought at any price in any store. These are the intangible goods we have sacrificed on the altar of Cheap & Convenient. I hope we can reclaim them before it’s too late. And I hope that through small acts of defiance, we can collectively reshape our food landscape to one where we are not at the mercy of giant corporations, where not a single child ever again goes to bed hungry.