Thomas F. Pawlick

What a kick in the pants this book turned out to be: a war is being waged in the countryside and most of us in the cities not only don't know that it's happening, but we don't understand the stakes.

Pawlick does a great job of using examples from his own part of Ontario to illustrate many of the challenges facing small-scale farmers, but also to show why we need them to win. Put simply, our food supply has been quietly taken over by big agribusiness with no interests in mind but their bottom line. Family farms not only produce better tasting food, but it's healthier as well. We need the small farmers to win, but the entire process is stacked against them: marketing boards are dominated by the big players, government programs are tailored to the interests and government inspectors are openly hostile to them.

He covers a wide variety of topics from marketing boards to government programs to land-use issues (both from the point of view of native Canadians and settlers alike). Thankfully, he includes a good section of resources and groups for interested parties to get involved with or this would have been an incredible depressing volume.… (altro)

The author of this book is looking at life in rural areas with a focus on eastern Ontario. More specifically, he is looking at family farms vs factory farms, as well as mining rights vs indigenous land claims and sub- vs surface rights of landowners.

It seems the government is making things more and more difficult for smaller operations. Large corporations not only get subsidies, but smaller operations are hit with regulations they couldn’t possibly afford to meet, and in a lot of cases, regulations that just make no sense for what they are doing.

Some examples include the vegetarian restaurant told they needed to replace their cedar counter with stainless steel, stainless steel being needed for meat… but they don’t serve meat; but they might one day; well we’ll get stainless steel if that happens; nope, too bad, you need to do it now. Or the small butcher shop that doesn’t serve food to eat inside his shop but is suddenly required to install washrooms. These are just the tip of the iceberg. Both these businesses were asked to do much more than this, as their own expense, of course. Growing organic food is much more difficult than it should be, etc.

The author does end the book with lots of suggestions to fix these issues, but the political will is needed to do it and that’s currently not there, with large corporate lobby groups holding the purse strings of many politicians. Urban folks are asked to become educated to help rural folks stand up for these things.… (altro)

I am finding this book too alarmist. The topic (how the quality of our food is steadily declining) is important enough, but the style does not help at all.
He always starts by naming a problem (vitamin C in our potatoes is declining!), then elaborating on the worst case scenario from that (description of all the symptoms of scurvy), en then saying: "Is it really going to be that bad? Well, we don't really know, actually. But I've got another problem here." And then he moves on to the next one.
It never becomes clear how bad any single problem actually is, and some things are definitely exaggerated: I am sure the point that all food becomes more poisonous than nutritious (the End of Food of the title) is not near at all.
He is also very un-nuanced about the role of corporations - they all did this to us unsuspecting customers because they are so greedy. If only things were that simple.
There is a lot of information hidden in the polemic, but I am not enjoying it.… (altro)