The Food Citizen
I recently had the pleasure of traveling between Vancouver and Victoria aboard a seaplane for work- my god those planes are tiny! With each pocket of air pressure and gust of wind we hit, the tail of the plane swished around like a bald tire’d Mazda on a sheet of black ice. To keep my mind off the erratically shifting horizon and white-capped ocean below, I leafed through my complimentary copy of Douglas, a business magazine based out of Victoria, B.C.
A feature article titled “Relationships: Victoria’s changing perspective on food and community” was just enough to hold my attention. After starting off with the usual discussion about local food production and the 100 mile diet, I stumbled upon a new concept: food citizenry.
Despite the fact that I’m a gardener and a grow-your-own evangelist, the article didn’t dive into the concept much and I had to ask myself:
What exactly does it mean to be a food citizen? Technically speaking, aren’t we all food consumers?
Of course, this question goes back to the consumer vs citizen argument from media and culture studies, which states that we are “continually shifting away from involving people in society as political citizens of nation states towards involving them as consumption units in a corporate world.” (Thanks, Habermas!).
It certainly doesn’t seem like a stretch to think of our food culture in this way. Since the beginning of the 20th century, we have increasingly shifted away from producing our own food to buying absolutely everything we eat, effectively reducing our relationship with food to simple consumer interactions. (I mean, have you seen those commercials for Uncle Ben’s rice with chicken and vegetables that you microwave in the plastic bag and eat in 2 minutes? Wow.) Food is just another part of our consumer culture, so what does it mean to become a food citizen?
To be a citizen is to be engaged in a nation or state, often politically and socially. So do we follow Obama’s edict and “Buy American,” or “Buy Local,” as the case may be, to engage ourselves in the politics of food? Do we participate in farmer’s markets to build a social community around local food production? While I’m a huge proponent of both, I would argue that these are just different consumer interaction taking place - albeit, healthier and better ones. And consumer interactions just ain’t political actions.
To be a food citizen is to have a relationship with our food that goes beyond a consumer interaction.
It means creating and growing your own food, or at the very least knowing where it comes from and interacting with that source (the farm, the ocean, the orchard). It means having a relationship with the growing matrix we rely on (the sun, the earth, the water). So whether that means balcony container gardening, DIY food production (growing vegetables, maintaining fruit trees, canning, freezing, drying) or a bit of good ol’ hunting-gathering (fishing, berry picking, clam digging), I think food citizenship must begin with production.
Now that doesn’t mean we all need to quit our jobs and start living on farms again. For starters, there’s no way we can produce enough food in B.C. to support our own population, even if all the urban gardening potential were tapped and farmland in production. We only have 189,000 hectares of arable land in B.C. (less than 5% of the Province) and it takes 1.5 hectares of land to feed each person in Canada. Do the math. We are food consumers by necessity. But more importantly, I would argue that achieving full self-reliance is not necessarily equal to food citizenship either.
Becoming food citizens must take a balanced approach. It needs to move beyond simply changing our consumer habits and buying locally, but it can’t just be equated with trying to grow all our own food either. Our engagement as food citizens needs to start by building a better relationship with production at a local level through DIY action and outreach, and then extending that relationship into global food politics and policies.
What do you think?
- B.C. has the most diverse agriculture industry in Canada with over 250 products, but we’re still not food reliant.
- Less than 10% of our food is locally-produced.
- We currently have 189,000 hectares of irrigated land in B.C.
- There are over 4,000 farms on Vancouver Island alone, but most farms produce $10,000 a year or less.
- It takes approximately 1.5 hectares of land to support one person’s food habits in North America (omnivore).
- B.C. imports $3.4 Billion in processed foods and exports $2.5 billion to other countries, $2.2 to other provinces and sells $17.2 Billion to B.C. consumers.
- 98% of all B.C. farms are family owned and operated.
- There is the potential to operate close to 30% of B.C.’s land space as arable land.
No comments yet.
Leave a comment
Cracked Pot Pix
