With a potentially devastating (read: another 4 years of Harper) election looming tomorrow, I can't help think about, well, food. Where is it? Why has nobody mentioned it during this election? In this of all years, I would have thought there was a chance to get food on the agenda. Until the bottom fell out of the economy last week, it's all there was in the news all year. Rising grain prices, reports in the Globe's business section about Saskatchewan farmers getting rich off the backs of people starving for wheat, E. Coli in peppers and tomatoes, melamine contamination (the most sinister of all food stories) in baby milk substitutes, Listeria in hospitals and seniors homes, the local food movement, the decline of BC's Agricultural Land Reserve....what does it take to get politicians to notice something?
If these things weren't enough, surely all the talk of Green Shifts and carbon taxes and environmental issues in general should have led someone to think about food, no? Apparently not. How can they not see that all of these things are connected?
Food imports are part of that economic system that's collapsing around us. We need two things to import food: (1) money to pay for it, and (2) someone to grow it, somewhere, who is willing to sell. If we don't have these, we had better learn to grow it for ourselves, which is going to get a lot harder if we keep building condos on all those farms. Still our agriculture ministries are mandated to export as much as they can of what we do grow.
Food just gets more and more centralized all the time. One little Listeria on one machine in one Maple Leaf plant killed and sickened people all over the country. I don't see how it's possible to add enough inspectors to protect us from a system so fragile that such a tiny thing can spread so far and wide.
Things are going horribly awry, and I fear all our potential leaders are too preoccupied with getting elected to notice.
So in the morning I will head down the street bright and early to vote. Not because I feel there is any great choice, but because that's just what I do. I've tried to not vote before but I just can't do it. Maybe it's an addiction (kind of like being a student....) or maybe it's just my silly commitment to democracy. I always get excited, nervous and giddy and that first date kind of way when I walk into a polling booth....
