Covid Journal, April 16, 2020
More about food. I know … annoying, right?
I mean, nothing like a pandemic to make us all fear for the future of what’s on our table.
For the first time, so many of us are thinking about where our food comes from and why the various chains are so damn long.
Seriously: forests and ecoculture are wiped clean (eg. Amazon), stuff is grown in South Africa or Peru (likely using unacceptable levels of toxins and pesticides), harvested by people who are probably being paid next to nothing (with various companies promising ‘a roof over your head’ or something inane like that), loaded onto ships or planes (pumping unnecessary carbon into the air just so we can have fresh raspberries in February), brought to supermarkets that only enrich a few dozen people in this country and others and then brought to your home, sadly sometimes to just rot on the counter or in the fridge.
This has to change. The longer the chain, the weaker it gets.
Community Shared Agriculture (CSA) organizations are the easiest way to eliminate the dozens of actors in this play and make it as intimate as a two-person show.
The University of Guelph released a survey in 2016 that shows what a CSA looks like. Here’s a quick summary:
- 90% – one farm involved
- 86% – one or two farmer partners involved
- Average acreage = 26 acres under management
- 72% owned by the partners
- 34% certified organic, with most of the others using some level of organic practices
- 1 CSA feeds 100 households
- Average share price $476 per year, usually resulting in 10-20 weekly baskets
In short: I pay money up-front to a local farmer, they grow stuff over the season and deliver it to a central spot or possibly even to my door.
F-U Loblaws, Metro, Sobeys and so on. No more Costco.
This is an old list of CSAs in Canada. I’m hoping to update it, so if you have a more current list of CSAs near you, I’d like to add them to the ExcitedDelirium.ca web site as a separate page.
Post-script
It shouldn’t be this way.
So many grocers are owned by so few people in Canada and I’d love to see them take a stronger leadership role in helping Canadians understand that our ‘food future’ isn’t at risk. Unfortunately, they’ve created systems of shopping based on impulse and haven’t adequately addressed online ordering and fulfillment. Their response to Covid has been lame, to say the least.
We need to stop enabling this dependency. Small entrepreneurs should get incentives to start nimble food delivery services instead. Let’s cut out the middle-people and stop creating billionaires that aren’t paying taxes.
Joining a Community Shared Agriculture (CSA) program will break these chains.