Wal-Mart Supercentres to threaten Canadian retailers

An article in today’s Province talks about the new giant Wal-Mart stores to open in Canada, up to 17 of them. I am positive that Vancouver City would strongly oppose opening one here.

I found this part interesting.

”Our goal is to become the one-stop shop for customers,” said Mario Pilozzi, chief executive of Wal-Mart Canada, gesturing at palettes of impeccable, unbruised produce.

”You see how fresh that is today? We are going to maintain that freshness in these stores.”

I’m skeptical. There’s a huge chance the reason why it looks “impeccable” is because it ISN’T fresh. Impeccable and unbruised doesn’t have to have anything to do with freshness. If the produce is bred to be solid (tomatoes aren’t supposed to be hard like rocks — that’s an entirely different thing from ripely firm), then it’s not going to bruise when they truck it off to stores. Fresh is just-picked-from-the-tree, and we forget that. “Subway — eat fresh.” How fresh are the ingredients? “Always fresh at Tim Horton’s!” Again, how fresh are the ingredients? Freshness seems to be a very important aspect these days, and yet we’ve forgotten what fresh truly is. Funny how the Oxford American Dictionary definition of “fresh” with regard to food says “recently made or obtained.” If Wal-Mart just got it, it’s fresh, even if it was picked 2 weeks ago. As for made? well, I’m thinking that may just be the new name for my project. Food isn’t grown or raised anymore, it’s made.

Explanation?

Conventional farming is typically on a mass-scale, monoculture, created and controlled artificially, and done with profit in mind. Huge profit. Instead of using cow manure to fertilize soils (to renew nitrogen, for one thing), they use a chemical process to artificially create nitrogen by using hydrogen (not easy to obtain) and nitrogen from the air (easy to obtain), from which they make ammonia, which is 82% nitrogen. They then spread that on the crops, which, because they’re monoculture, are very likely to have little or no nitrogen left in the soil. Corn uses it up very easily, but instead of planting legumes like beans to renew it, they want to keep the profit coming by doing the (supposedly, to them) most profitable thing, which is to keep the corn growing the following year, and the year after that. So they spend tons of money on expensive fertilizer, and on pesticides to keep the bugs away, which feast year after year on their favourite food instead of being discouraged every time the crop changes. What we end up with is chemically-treated crops, and cattle-specific farms that have huge waste management problems because the cow doo-doo doesn’t have anywhere to go. Farms also burn hay instead of feeding it to animals. They also feed cattle to cattle, instead of grass, which really quite puzzles me, not only because cows naturally eat and should only eat grass, but because… shouldn’t eating grass be cheap? [Information from The End of Food, Thomas Pawlick]