Erin Wilson
Romney sheep are dual-purpose, hardy animals that originated in England’s Romney Marsh.
In my province, the local food movement is gradually going vegetarian. By my calculations, locally raised meat will be a rarity within ten years if something isn’t done fairly soon.
I’ve raised pigs in the barnyard every summer for 30 years. For a long time my little family would munch through a pig and a half every winter and there was always a home for another two among relatives and neighbours. But every year the price of feed went up and the cost of butchering doubled and then tripled. Last year, my brother flinched when he saw that his pig was now going to cost him four hundred dollars. That still didn’t leave me a nickel for my time.
“I can get a pork loin roast two feet long at Cosco for twelve bucks,” he complained. I shrugged and said maybe he should do that. But he thought for a minute. “No, your pigs are terrific. They eat like an Angus steer. I’ll pay.”
It was my turn to flinch when the meat inspector at the local plant looked at my cutting instructions and scolded me that I really shouldn’t be selling my own pork.
“That’s not the purpose of provincial inspection,” he said. “It’s just for your own personal use.”
He was a young man and could be forgiven for not knowing the history of the program. It was introduced in the 1950s in Ontario to encourage farmers to bring livestock to a place that was clean, sanitary and humane.
Up until that time most of our grandparents killed beef, pigs and chickens in the fall in the drive-shed and stored it in communal freezers in the village. The new provincial program was very successful and by the 1960s there were a thousand small abattoirs across the province. But inspection was a public expense with no revenue stream and a dwindling constituency. Cash-strapped governments in the 1970s started clawing back some of their costs, making the abattoirs pay for the inspectors and build them separate washrooms. On top of that, the big processors realized that they could tap into a larger market share by forcing the little processors out.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency helped them by downloading the same rules that applied to massive plants like Maple Leaf and XL and making the tiniest mom and pop meat packers in the hinterland do the same paperwork. The 30 page standards manual for the local shop ballooned to a stack of manuals of several hundred pages each. Every year expensive and mandatory upgrades left the small packers scratching their heads wondering if it was worth carrying on. At last count, the number of small abattoirs had dropped below a hundred.
There are two left in our neighbourhood that could be called local but you have to book dates for cattle and pigs a year in advance. My chickens now face a 110 mile drive down into the southwest to a plant that has a waitlist slightly longer than for hip replacement surgery. All my chicken buddies have returned to the drive-shed, some of them tying chickens up on the very same nails their grandparents used fifty years ago.
Twenty two people died in the fall of 2008 from listeriosis contracted from Maple Leaf Foods products processed in their Toronto factory. In 2012 the XL Lakeside plant in Brooks Alberta needed just one shift to send a still undisclosed number of people to hospital and trigger the largest meat recall in Canadian history. XL had a long history of labour unrest and union busting and annual staff turnover had risen to 100 per cent. My little plant down the road in Dunedin kept the same cheery employees on staff for 25 years and never poisoned anyone. But they finally gave up and closed five years ago.
Ontario’s premier Doug Ford just won the Canadian Federation of Independent Business Golden Scissors award for chopping a whole department from the bureaucracy. The College of Trades presided over a myriad of duplicate and unnecessary inspections and certifications that has plagued the trades for decades. No one will mourn its passing. Ford himself used to work on the line for Maple Leaf Foods and has since become a vegetarian, like two of my kids.
He’ll win another prize from the local food movement if he gives small abattoirs back their 30 page manual and lets the neighbourhood hold them to account.
—Dan Needles