Towards a Sustainable Culture

Farm & Countryside Commentary by Elbert van Donkersgoed

February 21, 2006

“Working Towards a New Direction for the Agri-Food Sector” was the theme for last week’s national conference sponsored by CAPI, the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute. CAPI was created two years ago to be an independent think tank with a mandate to step back from the issues of the day and maintain a long-term view of the agri-food sector.

Much of what I heard was stimulating and enlightening. And then there were the ideas that make you shake your head. Take for example the notion that the agri-food system should become a solution provider for health — make Canadians the healthiest citizens in the world. Now, I’m not about to take issue with the reality that health costs are rocketing upwards unsustainably for our federal and provincial governments. And I’m on side with the voices that argue for more emphasis on prevention rather than fix-it medicine. I take issue with the voices that look for a road to health in bio-engineering our natural resources into an intensive bio-food economy.

First, the real front line workers who deal with food as health every day were not at the CAPI conference. I’m thinking of the folks I met last fall at the 3rd National Food Security Assembly in Waterloo. That conference resulted in the establishment of Food Secure Canada. Many of its founding members are the front line workers in our health agencies — municipal, provincial or federal, from across Canada. Much of that conference’s talk linked zero hunger, healthy food and sustainable farming. Many of the participants were women between the ages of 25 and 50, a very different crowd from those the CAPI event attracted.

Second, when food — the vegetables, the lean beef or the raw milk — leaves the farm gate it is “food for health.” On the way to the consumer table there is a lot of change: mixing and mashing, pasteurization and sterilization, packaging and presentation. Consider just one change, the addition of salt — where the average daily intake of sodium far exceeds the daily recommended amount. The main health effect of too much sodium is high blood pressure. Food for health is not more bio-science, more bio-technology and a more intensive bio-economy. It is about a food chain, from the farm to the consumer table, which is short — it is about eating close to the source.

Third, we eat our environment. Food is the result of a complex system that involves feedback loops, where unintended consequences and unpredictable developments are commonplace. Think drought or grasshoppers or mealybugs or mad cow disease. We eat embedded in our environment. The future is knowing the environment we eat and keeping that environment healthy, not bio-engineering it.