Putting the Meaning Back in "Green"

I’m on the verge of heartbreak when it’s clear that companies like WalMart have discovered a way to make themselves look virtuous and green for Earth Day. Driving home from the GO Station this morning (Ontario’s own version of Lip Service on the issue of the Stewardship of Nature), I managed to catch almost the entire radio spot (they’re running one on TV, too), featuring WalMart’s “healthy” snack options. There aren’t many of them, just your usual Sun Chip corn/wheat chips, flavoured with an MSG chemical manufacturers can legally call “cheese” because of the political and economic clout companies like WalMart command, selling for “the famous WalMart low price”. The big selling point of the commercial is its message: for every package of such “healthy” foods you buy, WalMart will donate a portion of the proceeds to purchase “green points”, which then go to support and promote the use of “alternative” (and yet unspecified) forms of energy. No word yet on exactly what “green points” we’re talking about–Kyoto Accord green points? The kind of Green “credits” discussed in Brazil’s last biodiversity conference, way back in the last century? What? It’s mystifying in that familiar sloganeering way: you know the phrase would have a little disclaimer star right above it if it appeared in a print ad. In a TV or radio spot, however, it sounds right only until you ask, “what do they mean by that?”

And that’s all WalMart has to do to be absolved of its myriad transgressions against life, people, food, labour, and the planet: feature a pretty, smiling hippie girl on television holding a bag of junk food, telling the world what a good corporate citizen it’s become. That, and perhaps hire Renzo Piano to design them an Optic Green head office somewhere in the South, full of light, and air, with a token nod to solar energy in a glistening panel installation on site. Something more like a sculpture than an actual working fuel source. Just to, you know, say that they did it. So they have a place where they can consult with other “green” experts, who’ve found a way to cross that line between activism and corporate resistance.

In a way the rash of suddenly green corporate citizens is part of a timely lapse in “holidays” — and I have heard an advertising executive interview that Easter and St. Patrick’s day came so close together this year, which left a kind of gap that Earth Day filled perfectly–just in time for “green” marketing, exceedingly lucrative and new. It’s not really that new, however, and definitely not new where food is concerned. What’s interesting is its coincidental presence in a world where so much is happening around food and its distribution right now, so much is affecting its price and accessibility. So much is happening around the kind of food that’s being produced, what’s being wasted, what’s being hijacked for use in non-food product, and what’s being misrepresented to us as “real” and “healthy”.

WalMart’s just another big box store in Canada, most recently a big box food store to rival the 5 other massive big box food corporations currently running the show here–Loblaws, Sobey’s, A&P/Dominion, to name a few. Ever since Loblaws came into the “green” food business, however, nothing in the typical supermarket has actually lived up to the European standard of “organic” food; and the resulting legal definition of “organic” in Canada has become as believable as the legal definition of a “trans fat”. Plenty of the food being sold in these major chains are billed as organic, despite the fact that the only difference between these foods and the store’s regular brand items seem to be packaging. In these grocery stores, “organic” foods contain as much genetically modified grain and soy, as many refined and “enriched” foods, as many soy-derived glutamates and hydrolyzed proteins, and as many artificial colorants, hydrogenated rancid fats, and perfumes as their non-organic counterparts. It’s all about labelling now, as opposed to content–labelling and definition: WalMart is perfectly suited to walk in to a market that’s already been hoodwinked to buy less-than-what’s-stated foods made by other large corporations, usually from food sources far, far away from home. China, mostly; or in countries recently forced to allow grain materials formulated by companies such as Monsanto and Cargil to be grown in large quantities, despite their farmers’ and consumers’ resistance (places like Brazil).

That sounds like the antithesis of “green”, doesn’t it? No matter: sell the consumer a plastic weave bag for a dollar extra, and you can make him or her believe even more strongly in their virtue as protectors of this planet for the coming seven generations. It all looks good and real, just like Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth–but everyone remembers the end of that brilliantly produced film, with its well articulated but terrifying argument: the one suggestion made to “make the effort” to stop Global Warming came in the form of asking people to buy fluorescent light bulbs, instead of incandescent ones.

So the problem of sustainability, which is perfectly attainable, just gets worse. WalMart is moving in very quickly, even where the company faces a great deal of resistance from citizens who are targeted as its market (WalMart inevitably just overrides public concern, decision making power, and law to open up anyway, putting competitors out of business easily). It’s well known for its questionable business practices, its legal transgressions in terms of pay and working conditions and labour practices. It’s known, in Canada, for union busting (since so many WalMart stores have been unionized by their workers–WalMart simply appeals to the local or provincial governments and the unions are dismissed outright and dissolved in those stores, or WalMart just closes up shop until such time as it can reopen as a non-union store). There’s no doubt WalMart needs to account for a great deal of what it does to generate profit, and people need to rethink shopping at WalMart all together: it’s unfortunate a bunch of Earth Day ads demonstrating a commitment that’s as small as possible is the best the corporation is willing to do.

It’s dispiriting, I know. So is the fact that the last canning factory east of the Rocky Mountains, CanGro, is closing, here in St. Davids Ontario. The countless farmers who continue to grow fruit like peaches, plums, apricots, cherries, apples, pears, and berries of all kinds will no longer be able to sell their produce to companies who would put the stuff on the market. We’re talking about arable land in Ontario that’s been used to grow fruit for the last 400 years: no longer marketable because the large food distribution corporations like Loblaws and WalMart prefer to buy food products and produce from China or South America or Chile or California instead. It’s a lot of good Niagara land producing a harvest that is simply ignored here, no longer valued; and, it’s another massive aspect of the Ontario economy (it’s largest sector, actually) that is just shutting down. A lot of people will be forced to pull out fruit trees for a subsidy, and replace them with…what? Corn for ethanol? Or, worse, corn for…the refined processed food industry? More grapes for more agribusiness wineries, fruit which costs tens of thousands of dollars per acre to plant and won’t yield for at least 5 years? And if there is no subsidy, or the subsidy for these changes aren’t enough? What then? More newly constructed Niagara bedroom communities?

The more I learn about this, the more I realize something really sinister seems to be at work here in Niagara. In the CanGro case in particular, the 100 plus staff members were ready and willing to negotiate purchasing the plant themselves, and creating a fruit farmers’ cooperative: but the local Member of Provincial Parliament, Tim Hudak, was once again ineffective at bringing the parties involved together (he also let Cadbury Schweppes close last year–another very important canning/fruit processing plant Niagara farmers depended on, another large employer in the Niagara region). The first and only grape farmers’ cooperative in Canada, 20Bees, was also allowed to fall into receivership despite the fact that so many farmers and wineries in the area need a co-op and the ensured supply of the best quality fruit in order to sustain the Niagara wine industry–but again, no “bail out” could be arranged. Seems very clear that ever since Hudak’s been around, Niagara’s industries have been shutting down quickly and without obstacle, no matter what attempts people have made to save them, and themselves, in the process. Like dominoes, we’ve lost a huge chunk of Ontario’s (and Canada’s, let’s not be simple about this) agricultural industry–this was the biggest industry in the province not 20 years ago. Following that, we’re watching the auto industry close, massive layoff after massive layoff, while Hudak and his party’s federal counterpart, Harper, throw billions of dollars to GM, Chrysler, and Ford just to watch them keep the money and fire everyone anyway, because it’s always given with no strings attached. The Auto industry was the province’s second largest industry–in particular, the second largest industry in Niagara after food–so Niagara is really in trouble. With so much money and effort invested already in an industry as vital as food, I can’t help but wonder why it is we let such astounding opportunities for real “green” business to flourish go, while people we elect continue to prop up businesses which simply aren’t “green” in any way, and simply aren’t interested in giving anything back to the communities which provide them with tax free business operation, a market, and lots of underpaid labour so their profits can soar.

We aren’t manufacturing anything much in Canada anymore as the largest employers started to leave Canada in droves way back when Free Trade was forced on us. That was Niagara’s first blow: produce grown here would no longer make it into Canadian food stores as Loblaws et al contracted to do business with American agribusinesses first. The wine industry grew as a response to that death: people were paid about $4000 per acre to pull out their trees and replace them with vineyards. Now that that industry’s been taken over by multinationals trying to look like small boutique wineries (while putting all the small wineries out of business as quickly as possible), those vineyards are also being pulled up (the 20Bees Co-op represented at least 20 individual vineyard owners, independent farmers–now all out of business as well as out of their vineyards, as some lost everything when that co-op failed). What we have now is more Escarpment land that can serve no purpose for the production of food. We could turn this into a real opportunity to put food from this area on the map, so to speak, as one of the world’s best high quality food sources, particularly to consumers who want to buy from local producers, and want to buy food raised sustainably: but the sad reality is that developers end up buying the land from exhausted farmers. When the Niagara on the Lake farmers who’ve been farming peaches and pears bulldoze their trees this week (that’s Niagara farmer Bill Duffin’s doomed peach orchard being pushed over in the photo above, one healthy tree at a time), they won’t be given enough subsidy to plant anything new–and even if they were, what could they plant that they could actually sell? Agriculturally, the land is worth nothing–unless alternative means of farming can be explored, and implemented–and lets face it, these could just as easily be subsidized as any “replanting” project, and they’d continue to keep producers here, and people working. As a site for a new subdivision development, because of that other bastion of Lip Service in Niagara known as “The Greenbelt Law”, a lot of farmers will be selling their land to builders in exchange for anything they can get to move somewhere where they can actually make a living doing something. Or, the other option: sell the land to developers who put in “Power Centres”: strip malls featuring big box stores in predictable combinations. Invariably, WalMart and Loblaws’ defense strategy to WalMart, the Loblaw’s SuperCentre, come in with these Power Centres to take over where the farmers used to be.

So, finally, even small business owners like farmers are being lost by the thousands in Niagara, all so that big box stores can stomp on in. The foundation of the Canadian economy is still individually owned, small businesses–entrepreneurs, even on a small scale, have always been the most resilient, the biggest form of financial stability and employment possible to the country’s economy. What does it say about us if that’s dying here, so rapidly? It says we have a strange idea about exactly what “Green” entails, for one thing. My secret wish is to see some backbone and fury here: I’d love it if every farmer could take every penny of those subsidies to plant whatever nonsense they’ll be told to plant–genetically modified soy, or Round-Up Ready corn (whatever version of that seed they’re in now), or even the deadly genetically modified rapeseed they use to make Canola oil–and leave their peach trees exactly where they stand. They could use the money to buy the CanGro operation outright and run it themselves anyway, just like the co-op they wanted to create. Grow the fruit sustainably, without deadly chemicals and crazy biotech seeds or caustic fertilizers and market it directly to Canadian consumers who want to buy local, fresh, native, “organic” produce, as that market is growing. Happy Earth Day, yeah.

I have to look for any kind of hope I can find, any sign that people have the means to figure out a way of taking back some of this lost access, the loss of control over something as basic and as fundamentally required as real, nourishing food. And it does exist.

There are still farmers out there who are actually growing produce organically–careful about using heirloom seeds, careful about saving and storing those seeds particularly for foods that have become so heavily modified by the biotech industries. Some people are doing this on a small scale, others are stepping out of that small model and setting up community supported agricultural schemes where local people subscribe to the harvest in advance. All of these farmers have carved out their own markets–educated consumers who will buy from farmers’ market stalls in city centres, or restaurateurs and chefs who insist on sourcing the best and freshest foods available in what is becoming quite a culinary hot spot. Many of these farmers are proudly “uncertified” organic, since “certified organic” has come to be an empty marketing strategy in these parts–and all encourage you to get to know what they do with integrity. The vegetables pictured here come from
Linda Crago’s Tree and Twig Gardens Heirloom Vegetable Farm, a local organic producer whose work in the area has made her something of a leader among foodies and people in the know. This is a CSA she started in my area about 5 years ago that’s grown so large she’s supplying restaurants all over Ontario, as well as customers who can now order as needed every week instead of “buying in” every season. The produce is not about shipping possibilities or storage ease or even marketability: it’s all about taste, fragrance, variety, the sensuous reality of food we all miss when we consume processed foods or junk foods we’re told are “healthy-er” than plain old Doritos or potato chips. We’re always jumping off from that point of comparison because we’re led to do so: we assume nothing like the assortment of texture and hue and flavour exists for us to choose from, and that our frame of reference begins and ends at what we can buy in a big crinkly package, in a supermarket. But that diversity does exist. The minute I look at those purple and green tomatoes I think of panzanella salads, or simple tomato sandwiches, or even rich homemade sauces or soups that burst with their sweet, intense flavour, and how each variety I choose to work with will create something far less predictable in its quality than the hothouse varieties we can get anywhere. Heirloom plant varieties always surprise with their appearance, texture, and flavour, and they can’t be had in local supermarkets doomed by contractual obligations to buy from large agribusiness producers thousands of miles away. They mature in the garden, their flavours develop from sunlight and not from food additives which coax our bodies to respond so that the lack of real flavour in our food doesn’t seem so apparent.

In my area alone there is a massive potential for a grass-roots-up food regeneration movement: many farm owners are growing older and large farms are too pricey to operate; fruit farmers can opt to find a new market for their produce by targeting consumers directly, or creating “value added” small scale industry to go along with selling the produce directly. If fruit farms are now becoming useless, and so many once-active acres become fallow land, there’s a perfect opportunity for new farmers who wish to court and nurture a more informed consumer base for real organic produce. Since so many fruit farmers will no doubt be asked to rip out their orchards for a subsidy to plant grapes or corn, why couldn’t they be subsidized to farm organically anyway–or even to designate their land for organic farming use, so that agricultural schools could set them up to create community initiatives? The fact is there are thousands of the really “green” agricultural scientists who are emerging from graduate schools already well trained and well versed in the many ways we could produce foods more sustainably in this country–we could actually employ them here, instead of watch them move away to places like Norway or Italy or Sweden, where people see real value in what they know and corporations have far less power over the way food is produced. If we want to think about killing a few birds with one stone, we can even think in terms of economic problem solving–supplying a learning environment/food source/nutritious lunch program for kids in schools, as Alice Waters does in the US with the Edible Schoolyard (or as Jamie Oliver and his friends tried to do in the UK–but we can plan against the outcome he got there); or, we can supplement already overrun food bank programs all over North America with community garden schemes, community canning efforts (especially for those forgotten fruit farmers whose orchard’s produce won’t be canned any other way), and opportunities to help those “in need” produce their own food, even if they haven’t got the land to do so. The possibilities for community and cooperation with each other seem to explode whenever gardening comes up, don’t they?

There’s a real need for foods that are rich in nutrient content, whether those foods be grains or fruit or meats and dairy–and there’s a growing awareness that real foods, in particular the traditional foods, are vital to creating and maintaining human health. What we think of as cultural food traditions are actually stores of nutritional knowledge gleaned over long periods of time by trial and error, and long term observation. Many of the foods we’ve now been led to believe are “deadly” or “unhealthy” simply are not so, nor have they ever been–and ironically, many of the foods we’re now told to believe are healthy (particularly the ones sold to diabetics or those who suffer from cardiac diseases of all kinds) are simply marketing opportunities for various processed food producers. Even mainstream media have begun to expose some of these marketing scams–a recent CBC Marketplace feature focused on the Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation’s mandate to sell “Health Check” labels to producers of foods like Becel margarine (100% pure, rancid, hexane-laced hydrogenated soy oil, which we know exacerbates heart disease as well as diabetes). Many Canadians have become outraged to learn that these “labels” are still allowed by the Canada Food guide nutritionists, despite scientific research which warns against ingesting these foods. On the plus side, however, many of the newly outraged Canadians who used to believe the marketing (and in the Canada Food Guide, which has been exposed as yet another big corporate marketing tool) have become even more determined to learn how to make better food choices. And that’s a start, if not a focal point, in creating a demand for real food.

Real food will certainly continue to be a focal point for alternative medical practitioners who specialize in treating and reversing chronic disease, and in averting the long term effects of chronic disease on populations in general. After all, we know that chronic diseases don’t just affect us individually, they have an impact on a generational level, and on a community level as well. Human health in the developed world has actually become significantly compromised over the last 2 generations, despite what modern medicine would like us to believe. People now become chronically ill sooner in their lives, chronic disease is much more commonplace among the population, and overall quality of life declines much sooner for people in our generation and the one preceding ours. What I’m seeing in the latest generation doesn’t bode well for the future, either: we’re at a stage now where prosperous societies produce children with chronic illness that begins very early: from autism and other neurological disorders, to severe allergies to food which start in infancy (or before that), to severe allergies to the environment in general (”environmental” allergies are so prevalent now that various foods and all perfumes are now banned in places like schools as a policy, throughout North America). How did we get so sickly we can’t even live in the world, which is no more polluted now than it’s ever been?

I’m also seeing a universal weakness in an extremely important area, and that is skeletal development. Children with poor dentition are so commonplace now, where once (I’d say even thirty years ago, just over a generation ago) this was very rare. What we’re also seeing quite frequently now is the shocking occurrence of heart disease in even the more physically “fit” athletes, at very early ages. Heart attacks that kill at 13, for example; heart attacks that take place right on the basketball court, or at the track meet. In children who are supposedly supremely physically fit, at ages closer to childhood than adulthood. At some point, we have to begin to acknowledge how much of these deteriorations have taken place not as a result of genetics but of the supposed “better living through chemistry” diet we’ve all subsisted on for decades now--with all the spiritual and cultural repercussions of that "choice". And we have to begin to seek out the real “green” alternatives our ancestors depended on for full, sustained health. In our own era, right now, that means the work that small scale local producers are trying to get done in the communities around them, with community support and cooperation.

So, yes, it does look bleak when it looks like all the Big Food Boys are muscling their way in to take over what it is we’d really like to see happen with our food, what it is we’d really like to (need to) buy and use: but the fact is that things can definitely be made to change in our favour. Organizations conducting privately funded, independent research on nutrition aren’t the standard yet, not by a long shot– but they do exist. The largest one and the most comprehensive in its scope is the Weston A. Price Foundation, which creates a wealth of information on nutritional science based not only on traditional cultural food knowledge but also on pure scientific inquiry, funded by nothing except individual participant donations (in other words, they aren’t working for Big Pharma, or government food marketing boards, or biotech firms and chemical farming companies in any way). This foundation also does advocacy work–with its foremost scientists often speaking out to demand access to real foods such as raw milk and dairy. As a resource for people who need access to these foods to treat health concerns such as autism and environmental sensitivities, WAP has brought many people together. From there, people seem to be naturally creative when they work cooperatively. They can work together to lower the cost of access to various foods or supplements or even medical care, just because they create solutions to their existing common problems. It’s quite a revolutionary thing, community. Right now, in the Niagara region, it’s our only hope if agriculture as its been done in this area of the country is to continue.

Even if all we have the strength or energy or inclination to do is plant our own garden, no matter what size it is, that’s a significant contribution to ourselves as well as to the world’s ecological health–quite an impressive point for “green” living against the efforts of big box retailers intent on making themselves look good despite their long and ongoing records for exploitation and abuse. As small as that seems, it would have a great deal more impact than switching out your incandescents for some twisty neon bulbs you’d probably only be able to find at WalMart.