Rethinking Lifestyle

Living in southeastern Manitoba, we feel secure in our ability to obtain food. Unemployment in our province is low and food prices are at a historic low as a proportion of incomes. However our freedom to choose healthy foods from sustainable sources, produced by farmers who receive a fair wage may not be as secure as we think. And if we look further afield, we find many people whose choices are extremely restricted.

This concept, known as food sovereignty was the main theme of Raj Patel, writer, activist and academic as he spoke at the recent Community Economic Development conference in Winnipeg.

In North America, and increasingly the rest of the world, the market has become the arbiter of whether we have access to nutritious and sustainable food. Instead of moving towards increased freedom, we have evolved a system that has, for many, taken away the choice to adopt a more sustainable lifestyle. The system has moved even the power to chose lifestyle away from the individual toward the corporations that now dominate commerce.

The choice to buy local, fresh, pesticide free and ethically sourced is often seen as a lifestyle choice of the middle class but, for many, basic choices for a healthy diet is dictated by income. Even those who have work are challenged in their ability to chose nutritious food. Rents are rising, time pressures due to long hours at work are increasing and access to stores, for some, is decreasing. Our ability to democratically choose is further impaired by corporate PR machines that take advantage of inadequate product labelling laws to hide the true facts about their product: how it is produced and what it contains.

In an age of unfettered markets the multi-national corporations have been able to dictate the contents of our food, choosing to add ingredients purely because these ingredients reduce production costs and maintain high profits for shareholders. As food has become a product of industrial scale manufacturing, it has become a commodity. The nutritional value of much of what we eat has fallen as the fat and sugar content has risen.

Ethical sourcing is an integral part of food sovereignty. Most of us believe in the idea that a fair day’s work deserves a fair day’s pay. Nevertheless, for many family farmers and migrant workers who struggle to produce our food, this is far from reality.  Globalization has made it easier for corporations to move production to distant lands, forcing farmers to take a cut in incomes to compete. Workers are kept in virtual slavery on some industrial farms across the southern USA so that we may eat fresh tomatoes in the middle of a Manitoba winter. To satisfy the demand for food, states and corporations are buying land across the world, depriving local people of access to land and ensuring that in times of shortage the highest bidder will get the food.

To address these negative impacts of market forces on food sovereignty, many cities across the USA and Canada have formed Food Policy councils. Although these councils are often embedded within municipal government these are grassroots organisations strive to raise awareness of food issues and reduce the social injustice associated with limited access to healthy food. Manitoba is one of the few provinces currently without a FPC, although pressure is growing for a council in Winnipeg.

Is it time we considered a Food Policy Council for Steinbach?