I read about chef Jamie Kennedy possibly going broke in the front-page news (not a bad profile for someone who’s not a banker or carmaker getting bailed out) at the same time that I got an invite to see the preview of Food, Inc., a doc by Robert Kenner.

This food serendipity made me pause: Food, Inc. and Food red ink – there’s more cause and effect here than we might realize.

I see so few movies that I’m easy to please at the worst of times. Food, Inc., now playing at the Cumberland, has great camera work, interviews and writing and a powerful storyline describing a commercial food system without an ethical bone in its body. 

But I’m disappointed that movie producers in today’s highly conscious globalized world can treat the “industrialized food system” as if that system had no country of origin and as if the food systems of some countries weren’t just industrialized, but also colonized.

About the only country in the world that would identify industrialized food as merely industrial rather than U.S.-multinational-controlled is the U.S.

Big Food, as I’ve argued before, is a by-product of U.S. efforts to maintain military, political and economic control of the world, from the time of the post-World War II new world order to the post-Cold War new world order since the 1990s.

One problem with local, I guess, is that sometimes movies can get too close to see the whole picture.

Once the film triggered my old Canadian nationalist buttons, my mind flashed back a few decades to when Susan Crean’s book Who’s Afraid Of Canadian Culture? was all the rage. Back then, Canuck singers, writers, comics, actors, artists and academics – but alas, no foodies – were demanding attention as prophets in their own land. 

The best of them were going broke trying to produce in, for, about and from the local Canadian scene – just like Jamie Kennedy, the Margaret Atwood of Canadian bacon, is going broke now. And like Kennedy, our authors, actors, comics, singers and academics got stern lectures about being too exclusive, too highbrow, too lacking in talent and smarts.

You could call them too anything as long as you didn’t come out and make the most obvious point: they were too unsupported by their own governments’ agencies and policies.

The bald truth is that Kennedy, the most celebrated of our local celeb chefs, is in trouble for the same reason that Canadian cultural figures were in trouble 40 years ago: he’s being done in by his own government. 

Kennedy has publicly blamed his economic problems on the high cost of local food. That upset a lot of localistas, who feel that problem shouldn’t be named. But the reason local food is only available at upscale restaurants and high-end farmers’ markets is that public policy makes it unaffordable anywhere else. 

Kennedy was one of the founders of the Knives and Forks farmers’ market that first brought farmers to neighbourhoods way back in the 90s, when today’s revival was just a gleam in a few foodies’ eyes. Today, he spends countless hours bringing local and artisanal foods to the Brick Works and other food oases. 

While he takes time from his day job to find and support local farmers, his competition – conventional chefs, cooks and fast food managers – rely on imported food delivered right to their door thanks to just-in-time multinational supply chains featuring anonymous edibles selected on price point alone. 

Public officials evidently believe it’s a level playing field when the two kinds of restaurants or retail outlets compete head to head on price and quality, even after governments have funded a virtually free highway system for long-haul food truckers.

It should not be assumed that governments have no ability to promote local products. At the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, the biggest booze retailer in the world, local wine is the first thing an incoming customer sees. Same for beer at the government-sanctioned monopoly called The Beer Store. Same for Lottario tickets at corner stores – no long-distance betting in this province, where the government takes the lion’s share of money wasted on gambling. 

Only when it comes to nutritious diets and sustainable economies do governments throw up their hands at providing infrastructure for local products. For example, Ontario’s government-owned Food Terminal for wholesale buyers does nothing to highlight Ontario food. And there’s no requirement that supermarkets highlight local in product placement, let alone order it in prime season.

Since ag department officials at both federal and provincial levels have their heads stuck in the sands of grain-and meat-centred export economies, there are virtually no programs to support local post-harvest handling, customized processing or even sought-after federal inspection. 

The last explains why New Zealand lamb gets into local restos with clearance from the feds while sheep farmers in Ontario struggle to find nearby federally inspected slaughterhouses.

Unlike in the U.S., where many universities were given land grants to fund the mandate of improving local agriculture and value-added opportunities, our university research is much more modest and funded by U.S.-based agribusiness. 

To make up for that, activist chefs like Kennedy work overtime in the grassroots. 

That’s my version of why our primo cook is facing tough times.

Slim pickings 

• Percentage who say they read origin labels on the foods they buy: 88

• Percentage of the retail market controlled by Loblaws, Sobeys and A&P/Dominion (now Metro): 78

• Percentage of Canadian schools with food gardens: .5, UK: 5, California: 30

• Decrease in Ontario apple orchard acreage from 1996 to 2005: 10,000

• Number of growers affected by the 2008 closure of CanGrow, the last fruit processing plant in Ontario: 150 

• Number of farmers’ markets in Ontario: 154

• Number of farmers’ markets in Toronto: 19

• Number of T.O. retailers selling food with the sustainable Local Food Plus designation: 12

Farmers’ Markets Ontario, Metcalf Foundation, Local Food Plus

Wayne Roberts’s latest book is The No-Nonsense Guide To World Food (Between the Lines).

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