Just as the clothes do not make the monk, the fleur-de-lis label does not always make the product blue. No more besides than the local product mention which flourished on our stalls, as evidenced by the ambitious quest of our reporter Sarah Champagne, who dissected by the menu a year of data supply. Report of the shopping of his household? It appears that our blue plate may be paler than we are led to believe.
Interest in local foods is on the rise. Under the effect of the pandemic, their sale jumped 18%, calculates NielsenIQ. But you still have to find them. Even with the best of wills, our reporter’s household was unable to identify the source of nearly 42% of what happened to them. Not to mention that it was necessary to devote a hundred hours to cross-checking the origin of the foodstuffs bearing the famous blue label, a tiring exercise, time-consuming, incompatible with the daily frenzy of a normal household.
We are far from child’s play promoted by Quebec with its “$12 Challenge”. No, it’s not true that your little one will manage, like in the commercial, to replace some of your food from elsewhere with food from here, shouting “Rabbit”. Despite the introduction of an “Aliments du Québec” label now applied to nearly 25,000 local products, it is still easy for producers, distributors or sellers to hijack the principles governing our labeling to take advantage of our growing taste. for products from here. The reason is simple: their designation is less rigorous and less framed than a biological designation or a reserved designation, for example.
That’s how our reporter got his hands on a basmati rice claiming to be “proudly Canadian” or a bag of peppers with the name of an Ontario farm on the front and the words “Product of Mexico” on the back. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has the power to better regulate this type of marketing, but concentrates its energies elsewhere. The provincial does not do much better. Last June, in his performance audit, the Commissioner for Sustainable Development severely rebuffed the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAPAQ), judging that it still had crusts to eat so that consumers have easy access to “reliable information on food claims and sources”.
He also felt that the MAPAQ did not adequately monitor the reliability of the information on the labels, noting a similar laxity at Aliments du Québec, which is responsible for the famous logos “Aliments du Québec” and “Aliments prepared in Quebec”. Between 2017 and 2021, the organization’s annual checks were rickety (less than 1.5% of products checked). In comparison, all reserved designation products are subject to a mandatory annual audit.
MAPAQ and Aliments du Québec are committed to doing better. But to continue to multiply converts to local products among Quebecers of good will, it will be necessary to work twice as hard. Designed to energize Quebec purchases, the Blue Basket is far from having reached cruising speed, and its failures still haunt people’s memories. The situation is reminiscent of our conflicting relationships with other individual actions such as recycling or composting, two collective programs occasionally shaken by crises of confidence. If trust is not there, membership will suffer.
Not to mention that the individual burden of blue plates adds to an emergency fueled by food deserts and food insecurity, which is the lot of nearly 18% of Quebec households, according to the INSPQ. For these, buying local is the least of their worries. However, these individual gestures have a collective significance that we tend to lose sight of. Nearly a third of Quebec SMEs said that the craze for buying local allowed them to survive during the pandemic, according to a survey by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. Better still, 37% said that the changes in consumer behavior in favor of buying local were beneficial to them.
Obviously, the fruit is ripe in Quebec for greater food autonomy as defended, moreover, by the Legault government. But with a grocery basket whose cost has increased by 3.8% in 2021, and whose total will increase by another 5 to 7% this year, according to the annual report on food prices, it will take more than wishful thinking to make such an ambitious shift. Without strict labeling, tighter checks and measures encouraging the big banners to continue to open up to products from here, Quebec will have a hard time winning over new flocks. He even risks losing some along the way.