The national food policy dished up by Michael Ignatieff last month makes slim pickin’s. It’s mostly overcooked, a bit stale, loaded with artificial sweeteners and flavours, low on basic nutrients.
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But that’s not the point. The Liberal chief is Canada’s first major political leader to stake out ground for the next new thing in public policy.
“Why hasn’t a politician done this before?” says Jamie Reaume, executive director of the Growers’ Association in the ultra-fertile Holland Marsh area north of Toronto, where Ignatieff made his pitch to the media “on the bluest of blue farms in the bluest of blue rural ridings,” as she points out.
“We needed to pee on the hydrant and get things started,” a member of the Ignatieff circle tells me, a brilliant metaphor that says exactly what’s gone down in political turf warfare.
This milestone shouldn’t be under-estimated. The food movement has so far found it almost impossible to find champions, and has actually made more progress in the economic than the political marketplace.
The likely explanation is that the marketplace since the 1980s has proved responsive to small niches that earn premium prices – fair trade and organic, for example – a nice supplement to the mass-production marketplace where discounted prices and cutthroat competition are the norm.
In contrast to the likes of Walmart, Kraft and Loblaws, all of which have made significant accommodations, mainstream politicians have turned up their noses at potentially divisive food movement issues.
No one has opted to make political hay from pesticides, genetically engineered food, rural depopulation, the collapse of farm incomes, hunger in North America and the rest of the world or government policies that tolerate and even promote the driving forces behind obesity – to name just a handful of issues that have been deemed irrelevant by conventional politicians.
And food movement types lack the discipline or fanaticism of groups such as gun lovers, anti-reproductive choicers, gay rights opponents, anti-Darwinists and, most recently, Ontario opponents of sexual education in schools.
These groups are able to form a political wedge by delivering a small core of single-issue voters to a huge number of candidates who stand to win or lose elections by a small percentage. No foodie has ever been able to threaten politicians with the likes of “Support the right of consumers to know if their food was grown in sewage sludge or from genetically engineered seeds or with risky pesticides, or we’ll vote for your opponent.”
So food has always failed the wedgie test. It couldn’t break onto the scene until a politician decided it could be a vote turner. Ignatieff may not take this issue to the wall, but he took it to the hydrant.
Unlike Michelle Obama, who’s made obesity a major issue, Ignatieff takes on food policy itself. He raises, for example, the need to pay farmers a fee for environmental stewardship.
Having said that, his five proposed pillars of a national food policy need a lot of work. Under healthy choices, for instance, he calls for “strong” standards on trans fats but says nothing about salt, which is every bit as dangerous. His proposed $40 million program to help 250,000 children from low-income families works out to 15 cents a meal per child, just enough to rub salt in the wound.
Under safety, he says nothing about adapting federal inspection to make it friendlier to local production, despite the fact that über-centralized and expensive federal meat inspection regs make local small-scale production almost impossible. These practices explain why New Zealand lamb, not local lamb, is available in major restaurants and supermarkets.
Ignatieff’s $80 million buy-local fund ignores the craving for local and sustainable. As well, by my calculations, that small an investment would bring fewer than 200 major cafeterias to the point of 25 per cent local purchases. Federal institutions could easily outdo that 10-fold. Local food is a massive job creator, freeing the government from substantial EI payouts, not to mention providing a cost-effective way of addressing other national objectives like reducing carbon emissions from long-distance food.
But I digress. A lot of work is needed, but that’s equally true across the political spectrum. For being first, Ignatieff has earned the right to be praised with faint damns.
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