Years ago, I caught myself saying
something about “voting with my dollars” for some product I believed in. The
context was some kind of argument, and I was going to buy it, dammit, whatever
it was, to support the concept and whoever or whatever produced it, no matter
what it cost.
I can’t even remember what it was
that I was so riled up about and why I thought it was so deserving of support,
but at the time I was struck by the cleverness and originality of the idea of
voting with my dollar. I’d never heard of it before.
Later, I heard the same expression
used by a TV commentator and I just about fell on the coffee table. He’d
appropriated
my
expression! Well, who
cares, right? Maybe it was one of those serendipitous things, like cultural
artifacts that pop up in a hundred different places at once. Whoever invents it
and however it enters your lifestyle is irrelevant. It works.
Right now we’re up to our sweaty brows
in pre-election fevers of all sorts. If you’re feeling cynical that your vote
or a US Democratic vote won’t count anyway, it’s a good time to consider how we
all vote, every day, whenever we make choices about what we eat and drink, or
anything else we buy, for that matter.
So who and what are you voting for
with your food dollars these days? What companies, what chemicals, what
trucking outfits, what research or farmers or package designers did you just
prop up with your hard-earned bucks when you bought that can of soup, that head
of lettuce, that egg salad sandwich? What systems and values? What regions?
China? Columbia? British Columbia? Your neighbour’s farm? A family-run coffee
bar?
And what did you neglect, pull the
plug on, say ix-nay to? What did you weaken by not buying into it, by not
giving it any money — capital it can expand with, grow bigger, stronger, more
dynamic with?
See? Simple grocery shopping never
looks the same after you think of it as voting. It’s like taking your power
back.
So in the sprit of this mighty fecund
election season, I bring you the following facts, with apologies to Harper’s
Index. They might help you decide how to vote in your next daily food election.
Glenda’s Handy Consumer Voters’
Index
• Proportion of gross domestic
product the World Bank designates as the food and agriculture sector: 10 per
cent
• Approximate value of that
sector: US$4.8 trillion
• Amount the world’s five largest
global supermarket chains (all of them US or European) expanded between 1980
and 2001: 240 per cent
• Number of corporations that control
60-80 per cent of global food supply along with integrated systems, such as
transport and warehousing: 4-5
• Value of packaged food sector,
according to Euromonitor International: $1.6 trillion
• Revenues of Kraft Foods Inc., one
of the world’s largest food and beverage companies: US$37 billion
• Proportion of US houses that
contain Kraft products: 99 per cent
• Number of countries that sell Kraft
products: 150
• Number of brands Kraft sells: 59
• Proportion of people in the world
employed in agriculture in 2007 vs. 1996: 35 per cent vs. 42 per cent
• Decrease in number of farms in
Canada, from 1996 to 2001: -10.7 per cent
• Amount greenhouses have increased
in area in Canada between the 1996 and 2001 census: Doubled
• Number of organic farms in Canada
as of 2001: 2,230, or about 1 per cent of all farms
• Percent cancer could be reduced
worldwide by a diet of plant-based food: 30-40 per cent
• Percent increase in the risk of
people developing pancreatic cancer who eat large amounts of processed meats,
including hot dogs and sausages: 67 per cent
• Year that the European Union
adopted compulsory labelling for GMO foods: 2003
• Amount of genetically modified
materials that food products contain in the EU that triggers labelling and
traceability: 0.5 per cent
• Proportion of Canadians who feel
that genetically modified foods will make their lives worse in the next 20
years: 50 per cent
• Amount of money that Monsanto feels
its “seeds and genomics” section will generate in profits in 2008: US$3.8
billion+
• Percent increase that is over
Monsanto’s 2007 profit for that sector: +25 per cent
• Amount of money Percy Schmeiser and
his wife spent on legal feels battling Monsanto when the company’s GMO canola
seeds blew into their field and grew “illegally”: $250,000
• Number of people worldwide, besides
the Schmeisers, who have received the Right Livelihood Award from Sweden: 123
• Value of global seafood market
according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO): $400 billion
• Estimate of proportion of large
fish stocks such as tuna and shark that have been fished out of the oceans: 98
per cent
• Number of wild Atlantic salmon
Canada has compared to farm-raised ones: 150,000 to 15 million
• Percent of rivers that wild Pacific
salmon stocks have disappeared from: 40 per cent
• Number of local wild salmon
populations that have disappeared from the western coast of North America: 100
• Amount of bycatch of “trash fish”
(rays, eels, flounder — this doesn’t include things like starfish, sea urchins,
turtle grass) mangled and discarded for every 10 pounds of Gulf of Mexico
shrimp scraped from the sea floor: 80-90 pounds
• Number of plastic water bottles
added to landfills worldwide every year: 38 billion
• Number of tons of plastic that adds
up to: 2.5 million
• Number of barrels of oil it takes
to make all the plastic water bottles used in the US alone in one year: 17
million.
• Number of Canadian cites that have
banned the use of plastic water bottles in their facilities: 2: Nelson, B.C.,
and London, Ont.
Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning
freelance writer who reminds you it’s just as important to vote in the regular
elections.
