At the Washington, D.C., fine food store P&C Market, shoppers can buy superbly flavoured pastured eggs produced by Joel Salatin, the activist farmer who was profiled in the documentary Food Inc. At my independently owned local supermarket – which sells some of Ontario’s best local produce – all the eggs come out of industrial barns. No wonder. Quota for Mr. Salatin’s hens would cost more than $500,000. If he had the misfortune of being Canadian, as he put it himself, “I would not have entered the egg business.”
Pastured eggs, poultry and milk are the rage of the food world right now, and for a single reason: flavour. A heritage chicken takes three times as long to get to roaster size as its factory equivalent. What it lacks in speed, it makes up for in taste. It’s the same story with pastured eggs and dairy. They are all textbook examples of slow food.
Slow costs money. Heritage chicken varieties cost more than fast-growing factory birds. Frank Reese – a fourth-generation Kansas farmer who raises legendary Silverlace Wynadottes, Jersey Giants and Plymouth Barred Rocks – charges $4.99 a pound at local stores. Mr. Reese and his partners raised 30,000 heritage chickens last year, which in my province, Ontario, would cost about $600,000 in quota. “There’s no way we could afford that,” Mr. Reese told me by phone. “We’d have to charge $25 per bird, and at that price, who would buy them?”
In other words, the quota system works for low-margin, high-volume factory operations. But it puts the price of artisanal products in the domain of the 1 per cent.
There is one bright spot in Canada’s food landscape: cheese. Thanks to a policy loophole, cheese makers can get around paying for quota as long as they can prove their cheese doesn’t taste like any other Canadian cheese (otherwise it would take away market share and upset the price fixing scheme). To qualify, cheese makers send applications and samples to Ottawa, where a team of bureaucrats sits in judgment. If the cheese is deemed “innovative,” permission to produce the cheese granted.
It has nothing to do with quality. Numerous superb cheeses have failed because they tasted similar to cheeses that already have quota. Thanks to supply management, none of those cheeses will ever make it to your cheeseboard.
But there at last may be hope. The rumour in Ottawa is that Stephen Harper – perhaps the world’s most unlikely champion of slow food – is considering scrapping supply management so that Canada can be part of a Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. It’s nothing more than backroom talk, at this point. But if it happens, this country’s reputation for blandness – at least when it comes to poultry, eggs and dairy – may finally start to change.
Special to The Globe and Mail
