Happy Food Day, Canada.
What started this same weekend in 2003 as a national barbecue to support beef producers besieged by blocked borders has turned into an annual celebration of Canada’s food culture and the systems that support it.
This year’s event is focused on sharing — whether through a meal with family or friends or swapping food tales on social media.
There’s something to be said for pausing now and again to appreciate all that comes together to keep food on our table.
That’s not to say there aren’t concerning gaps and flaws in our food chain. There are, as evidenced by the ongoing listeria outbreak that has contaminated plant-based beverages across the country or the cybersecurity attack causing empty shelves in rural grocery co-operatives this summer.
For the most part, Canadians enjoy a high level of food security compared to the rest of the world. Except for rare exceptions, food insecurity in this country is related to poverty rather than a lack of supply.
If you take a moment to consider it, it’s rather remarkable. In other parts of the world, the same supply chain hiccups we find newsworthy are the norm.
While some of us grew up living the 100-foot-diet on farms that produced, processed and stored most of their own food, in addition to commercial grain production, all but a small percentage of our society now relies on an intricate field-to-plate food web that has dozens of moving parts fraught with competing priorities.
Farmers want high prices. Consumers want low ones. In between are marketers, transporters, processors and retailers, all capturing their share of the equation. Overseeing all this are government regulators tasked with making sure the competition is fair (did you hear about the bread price-fixing scandal?), the food and the people working with it are safe, and the environment isn’t sacrificed in the name of efficiency.
There’s a whole research and development phase with all the same layers before the seed, fertilizer and crop protection products ever reach the field.
It leads to some perverse finger-pointing around the issue of food inflation or when the system fails to deliver.
Last week’s column appeared next to a story about how expected record-high yields for wheat in North Dakota could quell rising prices for bagels. The underlying suggestion is that a bumper crop will drive down wheat prices, making bread products more affordable.
It takes a little effort to put together the math (I got help from a long-time grain industry analyst), which is why these myths are so easy to perpetuate.
Based on an online recipe for bagels, it takes about 500 grams of flour to produce eight bagels weighing 62.5 grams apiece. High-protein hard red spring wheat, which produces the type of flour commonly used in bread products, was recently quoted at $272.14 per tonne. The flour extraction rate is about 70 per cent. So, that works out to $389.16 per tonne of flour. One tonne equates to one million grams.
In short, there’s about 2.4 cents worth of wheat in a bagel currently selling for $1.99 at Canada’s iconic coffee chain. A bumper crop won’t change that much. Neither will a below-average crop, which now appears increasingly likely as the midsummer heat wave evaporates earlier talk of a bin-buster.
It also looks as if prices are trending lower. Those for U.S. corn and soybeans, the global commodity price trend-setters, are forecast to drop below the cost of production this fall.
But despite all the things that can go wrong and which sometimes do, our food system delivers quality products on time most of the time and at a price that consumes about one-tenth of the average Canadian household’s income.
Our farmers take pride in their work, and they are supported by an innovation pipeline that continuously raises the bar for productivity and sustainability. We consumers can be frustratingly fickle in our demands, but the result is a food system that delivers choice and accountability.
That’s something truly worth celebrating.
Laura Rance is executive editor, production content lead for Glacier FarmMedia. She can be reached at [email protected]
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