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Political choices in the produce isle
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency recently made changes to its qualifications for organic foods. As of Tuesday, in order to get CFIA’s approval (and the important organic stamp that justifies price hikes), produce will now have to be completely organic, while foods with multiple ingredients must have at least 95% organic content.
This got me thinking about how we make our decisions when grocery shopping.
We don’t really know much about what we eat, and this is making the supermarket increasingly politicized – an endless debate between several parties, all of whom feel they know more than the others but have no way of proving it. The problem is, our industrialized, mass-produced food manufacturing system is so far removed from our everyday lives that it is becoming more and more difficult not only to know about the food production process but also to actually understand it all.
We know there is something wrong with what we eat, right? But what else do we know? Unfortunately, very little. Decisions about food are usually made within a horizon of previously held political and ethical values, consciously or unconsciously. And very few people are willing to commit the necessary time to research enough about the foods they eat to make an informed decision.
It is also difficult to know which sources are reliable. There is so much conflicting ‘evidence’ regarding healthy food options, only making it easier for us to rely on our politics to make the choice for us.
And our lack of accurate or trustworthy information on this matter makes it easier for marketing campaigns to play on our confusion. Think about environmentally friendly products: this marketing strategy has actually been reduced to simply having the product in green-coloured packaging, whether or not it the product was produced in an environmentally friendly way. Playing on our perception that green=environmentally friendly=good, we pick up the green package, questioning no further.
And what are the answers to such a debate: vegetarian or vegan diets? Raw food diets? 100-mile diet? Free range? Are these choices made for health reasons? Or are they made for political reasons? Or, are health and politics the same?
