A winter wonderland outside our windows yet again!  Let’s hope that this pack of snow helps the maple trees stay dormant and prolongs the upcoming season… This is at least what I will tell myself – I’m getting a bit tired of winter, I don’t know about you.

I think I’ve mentioned it’s been a rather quiet winter for me.  Between the birth of our twins, an unfortunate automobile accident (everyone’s fine!), our logging tractor being in the shop, and seemingly being sick almost constantly (is this… aging?), I have had a plenty of time to stew in my juices, and to think about food and farming and commerce.

In the first few years of the farm, before it was a viable business, I often joked that the whole affair was an elaborate make-work project to keep me out of trouble.   There remains some truth to that, and while I haven’t gotten into too much mischief, I have found myself spending an inordinate amount of time lingering around grocers, bakeries and butcher shops chit chatting, people watching and treating my family to little delicacies I normally wouldn’t fuss with.

Selling food is really half of my job, and it could be argued that it is even more important than the farming itself; because even if we do everything right, from seed to harvest, if the crop has no market, it has been all for nought.  Studying what and how people purchase food is important not only to the success of our family business, but I also find it endlessly fascinating.  Whether we want to dwell on it or not, the grocery store checkout is where the rubber hits the road: it’s where farming, economics and people all meet.   It’s where we trade our value, for pieces of food, which have travelled many miles, and passed through many hands, to be brought home, shared with loved ones, and incorporated into our bodies.

Not only is the checkout great food for thought for big picture meditation on how the world works, it can also be a deep insight into the individual human condition.  I suppose it really isn’t any of my business (I’m doing research, I swear!) but you can tell a lot from a person’s grocery cart.  I look on some belts full of food with admiration, and I will admit, at times scorn.  Occasionally, they are a source of great pathos: few things are more sad than the lone elderly person with a stack of frozen single serve tv dinners.  I recall noting a cart full of Ensure meal replacement behind me in line one day, and I wondered what was going on there, until I looked up to notice this man clearly didn’t have a tooth in his head.  I try to keep him in mind when I enjoy an apple or steak.
Not only is the checkout great food for thought for big picture meditation on how the world works, it can also be a deep insight into the individual human condition.  I suppose it really isn’t any of my business (I’m doing research, I swear!) but you can tell a lot from a person’s grocery cart.  I look on some belts full of food with admiration, and I will admit, at times scorn.  Occasionally, they are a source of great pathos: few things are more sad than the lone elderly person with a stack of frozen single serve tv dinners.  I recall noting a cart full of Ensure meal replacement behind me in line one day, and I wondered what was going on there, until I looked up to notice this man clearly didn’t have a tooth in his head.  I try to keep him in mind when I enjoy an apple or steak.

One of my bigger regrets at the checkout came this past summer, when I saw a young man buying what I can only call rations… seven identical portions of four separate items of highly processed food: obviously his week’s victuals.  He clearly did not get outside much, and appeared very “out of his body” – I assume he spent a lot of time in front of the computer.   This was at the peak of the season, when we have just mountains of the widest variety of the nicest produce, and I felt like Bill Gates walking by a beggar.  I wanted to chase him down and give him a gift certificate and a kitchen knife and challenge him to play around with cooking and just see what happened.  Propriety got the better of me and I let him go on his way.  Perhaps this fellow was actually onto something: a sort of “optimizing” the demands of meatspace to pursue exciting ventures in the virtual realm that I can only dream of – maybe, but this sort of efficiency appears bleak to me. 

The very nature of the grocery till, towards the “self-serve checkout”, has become grim in and of itself: where a computer prompt greets you, and somehow the rampant theft that undoubtedly goes on there is bizarrely worth replacing the hassle and expense of generating a minimum wage job.  That all of the major retailers – even Costco – are herding their customers into this model points to an increasingly impersonal and alienated future for us all.  The idea, long term of course, is that you don’t check out your groceries at all – you gain entry to that store via your phone, and as you leave, the items you carry are digitally registered through the ether somehow, and charged from your account.  I guess that solves this stealing problem! If you think this sounds like a dystopian fantasy, I regret to inform you that it’s called Amazon Go, and there are 44 locations open in America and the UK.

In the face of a digital paradigm, “shopping local” probably has more to do with preserving human dignity than “food security”.  That horse left the barn thirty years ago: as it stands now, Canada imports over 30% of its food, the average meal has over 3,000 kilometres into it and you can’t legally kill a chicken for human consumption within an hour of the city of Kingston – but it would be nice to at least have someone smile at you while you paid for your daily bread.

To be perfectly honest, I’m currently spellbound by the idea of opening a bricks and mortar, year round store: a greengrocer/kitchen/bakery.  It’s David vs. Goliath stuff when I get into the weeds of doing the legwork for it, but it also seems like it could be feasible if people would actually show up…  Loblaws made $529 million in profit last quarter, I think people want an alternative…. *Deep breath*

Apparently I am getting into some mischief: for some reason I made a really weird chart for an email, and I am even doing actual Business Plans.  God help us, Spring comes soon to keep my hands busy and away from such concerns.  Any departure from where we’re heading is largely going to come down to plodding, simple work – and a bit of cooperation: thank you for working with our little farm!!!