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Lament for my local

Every once in a while, the American Psychiatric Association pulls a new disorder out of its hat to neatly label and toss on a shrink’s couch. Well, I’ve got one for their books: locarexia.

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Sufferers wander listlessly through major retail stores hoping to binge on sustainable local produce in season, but leave with bags empty, stomachs gurgling, when local, organic peaches or 100-mile kale can’t be found.

Sure, I eat trucked-in bananas and oranges all winter long like a bad environmentalist, but come summer, I’d sooner get scurvy then bite into a nectarine shipped from 3,500 kilometres away.

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This is harvest season 2009, people, two years after all things 100-mile became alluringly hip. Why, then, aren’t we seeing nature’s full bounty of regionally harvested produce at the grocery store?

Especially when the big chains are talking up their oneness with Ontario farmers as though they were the ones holding the pitchforks. Farmers’ markets show us what’s really available. By early August, I was bagging nectarines, peaches, plums, apricots, raspberries, mulberries, wild and harvested blueberries and sacks full of bright veggies.

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Brenda Lammens, chair of the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers’ Association and an asparagus farmer, isn’t surprised by the local deficit in major chains. “As a producer, I’m aware of the fact that we’re not always getting our product into the local grocery stores or major retailers.”

Lammens acknowledges that a chilled, soggy summer has led to delays, mould and blight, and that crops like strawberries have suffered more than usual.

But perfectly good produce is still failing to get to shelves. Why? There’s not enough flexibility in the system to accommodate smaller farms that can’t meet a five-tractor-load order of produce the way California mega-farms can year-round, says Lammens.

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“[Chains] want a continuous supply, and we can’t guarantee it.”

Lammens says healthy fruits and veggies are getting landfilled. “We had to dump asparagus because we didn’t get a purchase order, and I personally know of 35 bins of beautiful watermelons that were dumped on the weekend because of technical problems at the distribution centre.”

The situation is even worse for Ontario’s grape growers. Eight thousand tonnes of Ontario grapes are expected to die on the vine thanks to LCBO rules that allow winemakers to use up to 70 per cent foreign-grown grapes and still get the local cachet of saying it’s “cellared in Ontario.”

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Rick Smith, whose org, Environmental Defence, led a grape-stomping protest in front of an LCBO store last month, says, “How horribly ironic that at a time when local food has never been bigger, Ontario grape growers have never been poorer.”

But just as the LCBO says it’s pumping money into advertising 100 per cent Ontario-grown VQA wines, Brent Ross at the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs says the province has been spending millions on advertising local produce through Foodland Ontario campaigns.

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“In the last two years, the Ontario government has invested more than $24 million and has committed an additional $60 million over the next three years to get people to buy and eat Ontario food.”

Although Ross says the ministry knows anecdotally that interest in buying local is mounting among chefs and food shoppers, he says the global buying system can squeeze out the Ontario farmer. “That’s one reason why we have the Pick Ontario Freshness strategy and the singing farmer.”

Every major grocer is singing that Ontario farmer’s ditty, too, pumping chain-specific campaigns like Loblaws’ Grown Close To Home. Loblaw reps says that in peak season, up to 40 per cent of their produce comes from Canada. But what about Ontario? They can’t say.

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Even those large farms that can deliver the volume that retailers are looking for, like those from Ontario’s $500 million “salad bowl,” aka the Holland Marsh (the ultra-productive 7,000-acre swath of farmland just 50 kilometres north of Toronto), say they’re forced to export 50 per cent of their produce.

Jamie Reaume, head of the Holland Marsh Growers’ Association, says, “We’ve been sending it out of province because we don’t have as much access to the domestic marketplace. Sometimes your availability is there and sometimes you’re not called upon.”

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His advice? “We need to go back 30 years to backdoor distribution” – to a time when farmers dropped their produce off right at the retailer’s door rather than shipping it to centralized distribution depots.

Some chains, like Sobeys, say they do allow produce farmers to drop smaller batches of, say, raspberries off at individual stores (though a few weeks back, several franchisees broke their ties with the chain for forcing its stores to buy federally approved meat over locally sourced).

The funhouse of centralized distribution means a New Brunswick potato is trucked to Metro’s distribution centre in Quebec before it can end up on shelves in St. John. Ditto for Ontario produce.

If we’re truly interested in seeing more regional food on our plates, both Lammens and Reaume say retailers and consumers need to open their minds (and wallets) to genuinely local food. Prices just aren’t keeping up with escalating fertilizer, fuel and wage costs.

In the meantime, local farmers are bracing for the sticker-slashing price war Loblaws announced last week. And consumers? Well, there’s really one main way to make sure you see more local blueberries/broccoli/bok choy in mainstream stores, and that’s to ask your produce manager for them.

Then ask again next week.

adriav@nowtoronto.com

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