Canadians Are Going Loonie on Social Media About Skyrocketing Grocery Bills

This is why I now make sure to always have a shopping list when I hit the grocery stores and why my favorite reading material these days are the Safeway, Save On and IGA flyers.....

I spend a lot of time in the 'import' isles. Indian cuisine uses a lot of pulses for protein, and they are pretty cheap.

Frozen veggies are also a good way to make a dollar go further.

Turns out globalizing agriculture wasn't the best idea. That's hard for a devout free-trader to concede.

What about all the other globalization commodities and industries? Prices for everything are going to go up.

So as not to derail the thread topic, I'll just say that I'm a lot less concerned about people's ability to pay for cellphones, toothbrushes and Nikes than their ability to access healthy nutrition.

I doubt we learned our lesson tho. If (big if) the world economy does recover, we'll go back to wanting to be an "energy superpower" and the usual bullshit arguments will be made about letting countries do what they do best and import the rest. But it seems quite possible we've hit a real bump in the road here where the world goes into depression for a while. Consume consume consume can only be sustained for so long before you start hitting limits.

For those of you in coastal areas or in areas with abundant game it's time to start thinking about supplementing the household larder the old fashioned way.

I made a garden last summer, it went well enough I will expand it this year.

I remember when I was a kid, my parents used to give me an orange for St. Nicolas Day,
Dec. 5

Only much later did I figure out why it was an important thing for them.
Even in Holland, fresh fruit in winter was not normal in the 60's and even 70's,
an orange was a big deal.

Why Canadians think they are entitled to fresh strawberries and fresh fruit & veg
year round is beyond me.

And it's only the beginning, folks.

I made a garden last summer, it went well enough I will expand it this year.


^^

As a kid, we always had a garden and relied on it through the winter. I am using a lot of what I grew and preserved this year. Wish I had my Grandfathers' recipe for chow-chow thought. Preserved green tomatoes and onions. Mmmmm!

All of us, everywhere, not just those with local foraging possibilities, need to work harder to find locally-sourced foods, of all types.


We've become far too accustomed to the abundance of cheap, fresh produce that globalization has given us. We've forgotten how to preserve our summer harvest for the Canadian winter. This is one of many skills we need to relearn.

My boss went deer hunting last month. Next week myself and one other guard will get sausage, links, and Deer Jerky. Maybe a couple deer steaks. No meat shopping for the next month or so for me. Can't do gardens at my Apt. complex but we used to have a strawberry patch when I was growing up in Ohio. Loved going out there with my mom to pick them. We would freeze them and have strawberry's almost year round.

My Grandparents had a small farm area and wow the bounty when we visited was great. Corn, peas, string beans, strawberry's, carrots and a couple other things that I just don't recall.

We eat whatever is cheap for the week, and lots of moose burger.
If I knew what moosez say I would be saying it.

We traded the mega malls in the Fraser Valley and turning Kelowna into cement city for the 'convenience' of buying fresh watermelon in January.
And I laughed my head off at a Border Security episode where a BC couple got fined for having an apple in their luggage landing in New Zealand. Looking at my local grocery store, the apple probably came from New Zealand....

Already do anyway. Lots of fish and shellfish not far from home. We have dungeness crab and rockfish quite regularly, year-round, as frequently as the opportunity arises to go get some. Annual fishing licences are cheap and only salmon and halibut have more sensitive restrictions and have to be documented.

There has been more discussion lately as well about expanding the little community garden here into something bigger to that would have to involve using greenhouses as the natural ground is far too hard and rocky.