Eating and thinking at the same time can be difficult, a constant balancing act between conscience and budget. Cheap food is easier on the wallet, but often hard on the people who make it, or the earth that it's farmed on. Fairly grown and traded groceries can reduce the stress that your daily bread puts on the food chain, but for many people affording them is financially strenuous, if not impossible.
Eating is about existence, life itself. Too many of the lives involved in producing food are undervalued, often severely so.
At the end of March, the Associated Press released the results of a year-long investigation into slavery in the Southeast Asian fishing industry. There were photos of men locked into cages after 22-hour days spent fishing, who told stories of being beaten with stingray whips and being trapped on the same trawler for two years.
The fishers were mostly from Myanmar, their work done in and around Indonesia, and the squid, grouper, shrimp and snapper that they caught sent to Thailand for packaging and redistribution. AP traced slave-caught seafood into the chains of stores such as Wal-mart and distributors such as Sysco, two of the biggest players in the North American food market.
In other words, it's everywhere, including a number of restaurants in Toronto. Conscientious shoppers can turn to boutique fish stores that detail where their catch comes from, as long as they're willing to double or triple their budget. Vegetarians used to be able to slip out of many of these moral quandaries by redistributing the money they saved on expensive animal protein towards a more fair and eco-friendly pantry. But produce and pulses are increasingly tricky to enjoy, too.
The almond groves of California are said to use up to 8 per cent of the state's water supply, and irrigation during the drought is increasingly a political hot potato. Eating local isn't always the solution, either: last year, Canada finally paid some migrant farm workers their Employment Insurance benefits after denying them for years; the government is still often "repatriating" them to their home countries if they injure themselves growing food in the fields that surround our cities.
These dilemmas are increasing in tandem with the cost of eating well, or eating at all. The second half of the 20th century was the golden age for cheap food: In 1969, the average household spend about 18 per cent of its budget on food, an amount that dropped as the decades went on, and sat at about 9.2 per cent in 1997. Things have been creeping up, though – groceries cost Canadians 10 per cent of their housebhold budget in 2009, and in March of this year were up 4.2 per cent from 2014. The cost of food is a real issue for plenty of people, many of whom are stretched to afford anything fresh, let alone stuff that wasn't grown by those who are also impoverished.
More and more, foods that were seen as part of a daily diet – like nuts from across the continent – are moving over to the "luxury" side of the ledger. The solutions are complicated. Despite over a decade of activism, much of the world's chocolate is still grown on farms that use child labour, including lots of the pricey, well-packaged fair-trade stuff – just because consumers pay farm owners more, it doesn't always mean the money makes it to their staff. And in a recent radio interview, Dan Donovan, co-owner of the Toronto fish shop Hooked, pointed out the globalized weirdness of Canadians eating Asian shrimp because it's cheap, while Asians eat Canadian shrimp because they consider it more luxurious.
Reducing the human cost of everyday sustenance won't be easy, and the effort it takes will probably never be complete. Ignoring it, though, in favour of balancing the household budget is difficult on the conscience – either way, there's a price to pay.