Maybe it’s just something I never paid attention to, but as a kid I don’t remember the shelves being empty of dairy and egg products.
Not once.
And yet here we are, the third time in as many years, shelves with no eggs or milk.
Each time, the reason seems to get increasingly mundane. First it was the initial COVID lock-down, a historic event that impacted all of Canada. Then we had washed out roads last November, another momentous event.
This time, however, a snowstorm in the Lower Mainland?
It was never like that before.
And that’s because we once knew how to take care of ourselves.
We had two egg and poultry farms, multiple dairy farms, and not one, but two milk bottling plants here in town. We once even had Rose’s Ice Cream supplying the entire north with premium local ice cream.
How old fashioned!
Of course we tossed all that away, like a sturdy set of old workclothes we figured were no longer needed, and replaced it with the flimsy garments of neoliberal progress; cheap and flashy yet hiding a hideous reality. The moment the fabric of our transportation system unravels, the shelves grow bare.
You see, our local food security is subsequent to the “efficiency” of dairy-giant Saputo. And Saputo is more “efficient” when the competition is gobbled up and where labour is minimized by one or two giant dairy production facilities in the Lower Mainland.
It is so “efficient” that it somehow makes sense to truck raw milk from the remaining northern dairies to the Lower Mainland, put it in jugs, and ship it all the way back up north, the climate and northern jobs be damned.
You may live next to a dairy, but your milk probably has many more miles under its belt than it does cents in its ever-inflating price-tag.
If our northern interior dairies- we only have a couple left- can’t get their milk to a Lower Mainland mega-facility- that milk is dumped down the drain.
During the road wash-outs last year, while our local shelves sat bare, notices were sent out that fresh local milk would have to be dumped before it could even be loaded on a truck.
Now you may be saying, that’s insane. Why don’t we just open up a little milk bottling plant in Prince George to compete?
For the same reason we can’t just open up a commercial egg farm; you need government-mediated access to production and markets through the marketing boards, which protects existing producers from competition.
Our malfunctioning food supply system is a fragile human construct of failed government policy that has prioritized megacorp market-share and profit over resilience.
Just as the BC Milk Marketing Board and antitrust authorities allowed a global dairy giant to gobble up independent producers, shut down our local bottling plant (it is now a thrift store), and move the production hundreds of kilometres away, foolishly exposing the entirety of Northern BC to shortages and supply chain breakdowns, it can reverse this.
But only if enough of us demand it.
James Steidle is a Prince George writer.
