Iggy fails taste test: Libs new food policy breaks ground but is low on basics

Canadian Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff released his proposed national food policy on April 26. Policy-wise, the dish makes for slim pickin’s, mostly overcooked, a bit stale, loaded with artificial sweeteners and flavors, low on basic nutrients.

But that’s not the point. Ignatieff is Canada’s first major political leader to stake out ground for the next new thing in public policy, arguably the most important breakthrough in social, environmental and health thinking for at least a generation. Mistakes are worth noting, but they don’t show readily on that big a canvass. Scotland, Wales, Cuba and Brazil are the only countries to have basics of a national food policy, so Ignatieff deserves full marks for being way out front.

“It’s about time a politician stood up and said we have to deal with food head-on. Why hasn’t a politician done this before,” says Jamie Reaume, executive director of the association of growers in the ultra-fertile Holland Marsh area north of Toronto, where Ignatieff made his pitch to the media, “on the bluest of blue farms in the bluest of blue rural ridings,” says Reaume. Under Reaume’s brash leadership, Holland Marsh producers are emerging as a new breed of veggie growers who identify their local and multicultural Toronto neighbors as preferred customers.

“We needed to pee on a hydrant and get things started,” a member of the Ignatieff circle told me, a brilliant metaphor that says exactly what’s gone down in political turf war. The food movement, marginalized in health food stores only a decade ago, has already broken into mainstream supermarkets and box stores, and is now fast wending its way into mainstream national politics.

This milestone shouldn’t be under-estimated. Food, the most recent of the post-1960s “new social movements” to shake up the world – following in the footsteps of civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights and anti-war rebellions – has so far found it almost impossible to leverage political space or champions, and has actually made more progress in the economic than political marketplace.  The likely explanation for that is that the “post-Fordist” marketplace since the 1980s has proved adept at responding to small niches that earn premium prices  — fair trade and organic, for example – a nice supplement to the mass production marketplace where discounted prices and cutthroat competition are the norm.

In contrast to the likes of Wal-Mart, Kraft and Loblaws, all of which have made significant accommodations, mainstream politicians have turned up their noses at potentially divisive food movement issues. No-one has opted to make political hay out of pesticides, genetically-engineered food, rural depopulation, the collapse of farm incomes, hunger in North America and the rest of the world, or government policies that tolerate and even promote the driving forces behind obesity – to name just a handful of issues that have been deemed irrelevant by conventional politicians.

And food movement types lack the discipline or fanaticism of groups such as gun lovers, anti-reproductive choice, anti-homosexuals, anti-Darwinists and most recently Ontario opponents of sexual education in schools. These groups are able to create a political wedge by delivering a small core of single-issue voters to a huge number of candidates who stand to win or lose election by a small percentage of votes. No foodie has ever been able to threaten politicians with the like of “support the right of consumers to know if their food was grown in sewage sludge or from genetically-engineered seeds or with risky pesticides, or we’ll vote for your opponent.” So food has always failed the wedgie test. Food couldn’t break on the scene until a politician decided this could be a vote-turner for a large number of normal people.

Ignatieff may not take this issue to the wall, but he took it to the hydrant.

As well, unlike Michelle Obama, who’s made the obesity problem (rather than the obesity symptom) a national issue in the U.S., Ignatieff takes on food policy itself, the lack of which is behind obesity, as well as a number of other ills that are hotter to handle than obesity. For example, Ignatieff raises the need to pay farmers a fee for environmental stewardship.

Having said that, Ignatieff’s five proposed pillars of a national food policy need a lot of work. Under healthy choices, for instance, he calls for “strong” standards on trans-fats, but says nothing about salt, which is every bit as dangerous. His proposed $40 million dollar program to help 250,000 children from low-income families works out to 15 cents a meal per child, just enough to rub salt in a wound.

Under safety, he says nothing about adapting federal inspection to make it friendlier to local production, despite the fact that uber-centralized and expensive federal meat inspection regs make local small-scale production almost impossible. These regs and practices explain why New Zealand, not local lamb, is available in major restaurants and supermarkets.

Ignatieff’s $80 million buy-local fund ignores any craving for local and sustainable. As well, by my observations, that small an investment would bring less than 200 major cafeterias to the point of 25 per cent local purchases. Federal institutions could easily outdo that ten times, paying for the start-up costs of going more local and local-sustainable by avoiding unemployment insurance payouts through massive job creation and by meeting greenhouse gas reduction goals in a very cost-effective manner.

But I digress. A lot of work is needed, but that’s equally true across the political spectrum. For being first, he’s earned the privilege to be praised with faint damns.