Life in Cowtown

We are wrapped up in some typical spring weather in Calgary, and by typical I mean gale force winds and alternating rain and snow. So while we wait for some sunshine to peek out from behind the clouds I wanted to share my impressions of the organic grocery delivery service that we’ve been using for a couple of years now – SPUD! The name is an acronym for Small Potatoes Urban Delivery and they arrived here from Vancouver in 2005 with current locations in Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and LA.

Running a well designed website they provide an array of organic choices aiming for mainly local producers – from fruit and veggies to bread, milk, meat and prepared foods, to cleaning supplies and personal hygiene items. While they were very fruit and veggie heavy at first, I’ve seen their lineup expand over time to include more and more convenient products. While I generally much prefer to go to a farmers market to stock up on food, there are many a time, especially in winter where such a trip is simply not happening. Left to choose sad looking veggies at the local grocery store (even if they look good I’d rather support local farmers with more sustainable practices), or schlepping across town on slick roads SPUD! Gives me a great alternative to both.

While their prices are fair to farmers, and there’s the convenience of delivery, they are often not cheap. It is not uncommon to see a single bell pepper or a zucchini hover around 2.50, especially out of season. A half pound of salad greens is typically over four dollars and organic, cage-free eggs are around six. Even when I understand deeply that the real cost of food is often not reflected at the grocery stores, sometimes SPUD!’s prices can be hard to swallow. I suppose the cashier till is where most abstract intentions to eat locally and support sustainable food break down in the face of limited budgets. I also reflect on the fact that I’m cooking for two, and our food budget is easily our largest expense outside of the mortgage. Having said that, I think we’ve developed a system that allows us to maximize our food choices for the way that we eat, and it clearly works for us.  For around a hundred dollars a week we get six litres of milk, a couple of great Hoven farm steaks, a loaf of bread, a couple heads of garlic, zucchini and mushrooms for the week, six to twelve apples, a few lemons, two to five tomatoes, sometimes cukes or green onions, whatever seasonal fruit may be on sale, occasional toothpaste or tea, or crackers or burritos or eggs, as well as hazelnuts and mac’n’cheese.  Some combination of those comprises our weekly baskets.

The best way to eat in a manner that does not cause damage to my ethical sensibilities and wallet is to deal with local farmers directly. When you purchase bulk meat from local suppliers, freeze/can seasonal produce, you mainly need milk and bread as well as some fresh stuff throughout the week. Dealing with a delivery service at the very least eliminates the many middlemen that reduce farmers’ earnings to nothing.

I love the fact that they provide pretty detailed info on some of their suppliers and you can find out who grows your food and where. I love the fact that you can buy bulk items in caselots, which is great when it’s say, peach season and they’re affordable and you want to freeze a few bags. I love the fact that they have great info on most of their products, telling you what’s in it, how to store it and how to use it. Their weekly delivery sheet has the bill on one side and a neat newsletter on the other, where they profile green websites, provide a seasonal recipe and share tidbits of news. You can find out exactly why there is a shortage of onions and potatoes – apparently it’s because farmers underplanted due to vast overproduction in previous years, or how the earthquake affected blueberry farmers in Chile. I love the fact that they interact with the community, they are on Twitter with updates and are supporting the Calgary Horticultural Society Fundraiser.  I love their reward points that you can redeem for discounts, and the fact that THEY DELIVER! Their customer service is also pretty good with prompt refunds on bad produce (only happened twice I think), and relatively quick replies to questions.

Here are some features that they don’t have, and I wish they did. Product reviews. This is elementary, and many is the time I took a chance on something and found it too… granola for me. This is especially common with some soy-based, organic, vegan-whatever foods. They are so healthy that the taste is like cardboard. The product reviews would quickly weed out the stuff that consumers actually like and the stuff that is only for the hardcore health warrior. I guess I’m a gourmand first. I also wish they carried small lot seasonal stuff. Like now all the food boards are aflutter over morels, ramps, fiddleheads, etc. Have I seen any in Calgary? Nope. This is not only applicable to SPUD! but also to all the restaurants claiming seasonality on their menus. Yeah? Where? I also wish they carried more local products that I know are good but aren’t partnered up with SPUD! for whatever reason – Lundt carrots, or Hotchkiss tomatoes for instance. I’m sure there are many reasons why certain farmers would not be a part of SPUD, but since *I* don’t know them I can only sigh. Surely there are local greenhouse farmers that grow tomatoes, they can’t all be from Mexico or wherever.

So like every business they have their good side and some room to improve. But they deliver ethically sourced products and the vast convenience of delivery. And I support them for trying for a vision where farmers get paid a living wage so that stories like the plight of these tomato pickers happens less often. Since the government blatantly disregards our votes, voting with our dollars is often the most impactful way we get heard.

WWW.SPUD.CA

Mustard field in Alberta. Photo by Steve Snyder

The Canada blogger guru Rob asked a great question in the Millarville post below, and my answer grew until it was unmanageable in size, so it moved to a post of its own. He was wondering how much of the stuff is locally grown, pointing out the mangoes specifically. Of course mangoes and several other items are nowhere near local. In fact mangoes, coffee and tea are 100% foreign.  So what’s the deal with eating locally and indulging in stuff grown thousands of miles away and shipped to wee cold Alberta?

Trade of goods has been the staple of mankind since people figured out their area has unique resources that can be harvested in surplus and traded for goods they lack. Since each area of earth is abundant in its unique form of wealth, trade allowed us to have access to foods, goods and minerals that our area may not have. From merchant ships of Phoenicians to the silk caravan and the spice trade people have bartered and traded wealth and redistributed world resources a bit more equitably.

As the modern society of North America evolved, things went a bit sideways what with the subsidization of agriculture, industrialization of food production, excessive use of pesticides, monocultural farming practices and all the other unsustainable problems outlined exceedingly well in books such as The Omnivore’s Dilemma and many others. Throughout all this small organic farmers and eaters kept the ‘healthy food/healthy planet’ fires burning, embracing vegetarianism, tofu, amaranth and composting with vigor, and earning derogatory labels smacking of hippy-ism and Birkenstocks. Some facets of their culture were admittedly not for everyone, but they had a pretty inarguable fundamental point – we ARE what we eat, and earth IS where we live. As more problems arose with childhood diabetes, grownup obesity, vivid campaigns of animal rights activists and pesticide horror stories, the mainstream population woke up and paid attention.

In the last decade that I’ve been paying attention, there’s been a large and growing movement of eating locally, organically and sustainably with lots of shades of meaning for each word. Now people are tossing out things like the ‘100-mile diet’ (a movement that incidentally started in Vancouver), going to see Food, Inc. and listening to podcasts like Deconstructing Dinner. An organic food delivery SPUD has actually succeeded in Calgary, and our farmers markets are busier than ever. Of course as the movement grows so do the problems – everything from horrendous legislation that aims to do direct harm to the small farmer (NAIS), Monsanto’s lawsuits against small farmers, to the expensive organic certification and dubious standards, to the aptly named ‘industrial organic’.

Of course what the whole thing boils down to for consumers is a bit of personal responsibility. Just like so many areas in life we have to be unwilling to abdicate personal authority to decide what’s best for us, and leave things in the hands of legislators. I love food. It’s about as primal of a passion as it gets, right up there with breathing and sleeping. I like food that tastes good, real and fresh and for my inaugural garden I grew primarily things where you can really taste the difference between supermarket varieties and heirloom ones – tomatoes, peas, carrots and strawberries come readily to mind.  I enjoy food grown locally – the less shipping required the more taste remains for you, and I enjoy support the local farmers who spend such time and effort to grow our food. I enjoy eating animals that were raised humanely, have eaten a diet natural to their species and enjoyed a lifestyle reasonably appropriate to their needs.  I adore freshly picked veggies, awesome Okanagan wine, ready made meals and fantastic meats from the farmers market. These comprise about ninety percent of my purchases.

But the other ten percent are simply not available locally no matter how you look at it. We can grow mustard, canola, wheat, corn, meat and veggies, but we will never grow fruit like BC, coffee like South America or tea like India. So we do what people have always done – trade. Now we trade currency rather than goods directly, but we still trade for the things we want and can’t have. Again we can ensure we purchase organic, shade grown, fair trade good and minimize the impact of these transactions, but unless we get militant about eating locally, we will always import some goods.  I am perfectly okay with perpetuating this habit since it makes so much sense to do so. Someone imports our wheat, we import their coffee.  When you take a peek into international trade on a global scale the issue becomes impossibly perplexing with tariffs, quotas, customs and so on, but if someone who lives in town, and wants to select their favorite goods and offer them for his neighbors to enjoy – I’m all for it.

And to answer Rob’s question, yes the mustard is about as local as it gets – Canada is the world’s largest exporter of mustard seeds, and Brassica Mustard is just like their logo says – “Prairie Grown, and Prairie Made.”