Holy okra! A recent study told us that immigrants to North America often experience a decline in health over time due to poor nutrition. I could defer to Captain Obvious who would say the immigrant is embracing the cheap American industrial diet, but could it not also be true that you just can’t find a bag of reasonably fresh okra anywhere?
Ethnocultural crops — okra, bitter melon, cassava, etc. — attract a frenzy now and then from well-intentioned promoters of local crop production. Glen C. Filson, a retired professor in the School of Environmental Design and Rural Development at the University of Guelph, is one of them. He has, for instance, followed closely the farmers around Holland Marsh outside Newmarket, many of them Chinese farmers growing ethnocultural crops. Given that fresh produce is nutrition with a fuse on it, maybe it’s a win-win for local farmers to embrace the ethnocultural crops. Eat Local, Taste Global is intended to inform us how that can be possible.
Unfortunately, the message gets a little garbled. “Can imported vegetables really be that much cheaper than locally produced food?” the authors implore. The answer is, yes. Ontario grown edamame can be as high as $3.99 while Chinese edamame will be $2.80. I was in Florida. I bought tomatoes at Dollar General; they were from Canada and they were cheaper than the local. While immigrants would prefer to pay the cheapest price for their ethnocultural food, sometimes they are ready to pay a premium. The authors talk about okra sold at the Ontario Food Terminal; the more expensive Guatemalan okra outsells the local okra because it is cleaner and better packaged. Speaking of the OFT, Asian buyers have taken over from the Italians. Surely that’s a sign of something that is changing.
What isn’t about to change is the way our immigrant population will find its ethnocultural food — at the supermarket. With near oligopolistic control of the food regime (Sobeys and Metro share 70 per cent of the market in the GTA), all one can hope is that the retailers have done their demographic homework because things have changed. The Greater Toronto Area is North America’s fourth largest city, larger than Chicago, is one-third ethnic, and half the population wasn’t born there. And they want their okra.
Don’t expect the farmers markets and community shared agriculture to be of much help. They have what the authors called a “white” crop. This was perhaps the best part of the book as the authors painfully gleaned the overwhelming class and economic indicators of the farmers market.
No, I do not expect this book to become the ethnocultural manifesto for the small farmer. But it does make clear that there are changes taking place in small pockets that might make fertile ground for alternative food crops. And maybe the best place to start would be to meet up with those Asian buyers at the OFT who took over from the Italians!
- Stuart Logie