Don't forget National Food Day this year - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

Likely to be forgotten in the rush of life, next Tuesday, Feb. 10, is National Food Day.

 

I tried to look up more information on this, the 10th anniversary of the declaration of the day. As I recall, but couldn’t confirm given how little information was on the internet, it was originally designated to celebrate the day when the average family had earned enough income to buy its food supply for the year. I believe it was the Minister of Agriculture who wanted to demonstrate what a small proportion of our income was devoted to our survival from hunger.

 

It’s hard to understand that lesson today. So much attention is spent talking about the high cost of food. Usually these stories on television also show supermarkets overflowing with every variety of fruit and vegetable. Food is plentiful.

 

And yet the need for food banks continues to grow as people say they can’t afford groceries.

 

While people complain endlessly about the “high” cost of food, many also spend thousands each year on southern vacations or trips to far-off locations in Australia, Southeast Asia or the Mediterranean. In fact they resent the cost of groceries because it gets in the way of their travel.

 

How things have changed. As a boy, I remember when few people travelled, and we grew vegetables in the garden that we planted and ate fruit from our own orchard. Most women stayed home in those days, spending their summer days preserving the production of their own gardens and orchards. Apples, potatoes and carrots would be stored in a fruit cellar or cool basement to preserve them for winter use. Few people had home freezers in those days.

 

The offering in local food stores - there were several in each town and village - might include oranges and bananas that couldn’t be grown in local orchards, but were judged as important to our diet, especially the vitamins in oranges.

 

We’ve come so far with higher wages and most women working, so we buy food instead of growing it in a garden and preserving it. We buy so much more food.  I, myself, choke when I see the total at the bottom of the cash register tape at the supermarket these days.

 

But, in general, we live better than ever, unlike some of our own people who must sleep in the streets or those starving in Africa. I’d guess that when you compare costs, people’s housing has increased more than their food costs.

 

And so it’s disturbing that National Food Day is almost ignored by our modern society. Few things matter more than “our daily bread”, yet we’d ignore it if we didn’t complain so loudly about the “high” cost.

 

And the costs involve more than the incomes of our farmers. At one time we saw the people who worked in local abattoirs that served our butcher stores. Today most of those have closed as supermarkets get their meat from giant plants miles away.
Farmers need to feed their cattle, pigs, sheep and goats, so processing feed has become big business, again, usually miles from home, except for a few examples of local production. We don’t think about it, but even the people who work in our supermarkets are part of the food business.

 

And how farming has changed in my lifetime. When we moved to our rural property 50 years ago, the neighbour who farmed the rest of our farm still grew white beans, not soybeans. He had cattle and grew hay and corn silage to feed them.

 

Today that land is rented out to a cash cropper who farms thousands of acres and he plants and harvests his crops with huge equipment that my dad wouldn’t even recognize, given that he was part of the transition from horses to tractors.

 

Even the food we eat has changed since our population began to diversify with the welcoming of people from all parts of the world. On this past weekend, people originally from Iran demonstrated against the dictatorial government in their home country that has killed thousands. But those people, plus the Indians and the Italians and dozens of other nationalities, have brought different tastes and flavours to our food and in some cases led to different crops being grown on our farms.

 

Yes, National Food Day should never be forgotten because, without food, we couldn’t exist. These days, as cities expand over farmland and we lose thousands of acres of our precious soil every year, we too seldom realize the value of growing food.
We need to celebrate food, and the people who grow it and the importance of the land on which they grow it.

 

National Food Day should be celebrated widely and loudly for we need food to exist.