For example, a recent post locally lamented the jump in the price of bread at a local store, and meat prices have trended higher as well – making a decision to barbecue steaks this summer a bit more difficult for families on a budget.
In recent months people will have also seen posts about certain foods simply not on the shelves. My better half has noted they’ve not seen Kellogg’s Rice Krispies – one of my favourites – on the shelves for some time.
To read posts, the climbing prices are the result of whichever politician the poster happens to not support, or it’s just big business taking a bigger chunk of the consumer’s paycheque. Of course, nothing is quite as simple as social media posting would suggest. For example, a lot of the issues regarding food prices and shortages can trace back to what our parents and grandparents did in terms of food buying decisions.
If you lived in Yorkton and were to decide that the answer to high beef prices was to go out to a local producer and buy a beef animal, you would find there is not an abattoir in the city to kill and process the animal. A decade, or so ago, it would have been impossible to even imagine a Prairie city of 18,000 would exist without a local abattoir, but because consumers long ago put their food security in the hands of food stores, the local custom meat processor is increasingly rare. Over the years, it is the same thinking that has made gardens increasingly rare in city backyards.
As we have walked away from tending and harvesting a garden, we have also walked away from owning a deep freeze to store our own food.
When I was a youth, a home with a deep freeze was common, and dishwashers were a rarity. Today the reverse is much more the norm.
Today we rely on food shipped from afar. The milk once produced on a Yorkton area farm was processed in a facility on York Road. Today a truck hauls raw milk from the farm west to Saskatoon or beyond, where it is processed, loaded on a truck and hauled back to stores, and when diesel is more than $2 a litre, the price in the store is bound to rise.
Perhaps if we still had greater control of our food, grown or sourced and processed locally, the cost of our food would not be quite the topic on social media it is these days.
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Disclaimer: opinions expressed are those of the writer.
