Tracking food

How locavore am I?

Every trip to the supermarket makes me feel as though I am truly not a locavore. Oranges on special for 3,99$ are from Africa, rice noodles are from Thailand. The dried pasta is from Italy, but is it really?

It’s slightly easier to be more conscious about what I eat, when I only have to worry about what I’m eating, but since having to take care of my youngest brother, suddenly I’m faced with the burden of making sure he was eating well.

The easiest meal to make for the both of us is some form of pasta with steamed/boiled vegetables, sometimes some meat, a little olive oil and some salt. Add to that a nice bowl of salad with tomatoes, cucumber and peppers and I feel like I’ve made something good for him. However, when I try to think about where those ingredients came from specifically, I’m stumped.

Those frozen vegetables, where were they grown? The U.S. The salad wasn’t organic and I can’t tell if they were brought in from another country or from a Quebec farmer.

Even while I spent many years being a cashier through all of Cegep and some of University, I was so disconnected with the food I was holding in my hands, they all had a sequence of numbers I had to remember and that was better rewarded by my supervisors then if I knew what a passion fruit tasted like or where it came from. I used to get annoyed when people would ask me specific questions about the products in store, as if I were trained to know about every item in the store.

I once had to wear a sandwich board styled apron that said “You have a question” on the front and “I have an answer” on the back. I was completely embarrassed when I was faced with all sorts of questions I couldn’t answer.

A while ago as I was browsing through a few blogs I came upon either a designer or an artist who had photographed various fruits and vegetables that are known to come from different countries and attached to them where those stickers put on luggage to know where to and from they’re travelling. Except for the produce the information is about the energy needed to bring them to supermarkets and how many miles they travel, etc..

I haven’t been able to find it but hopefully I will eventually, it makes a very strong statement.

It’s important to think about where your food comes from, but we don’t because it’s easier not to. What kind of price do you need to pay for commodity?