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magazine / jf02
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January/February 2002 issue |
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Mapping a midday meal
By Steven Fick and Mary Vincent
Canadians love to eat out.
We dine in restaurants an average of 4.7 times a week and spend $39 billion annually to
let others cook and do the dishes for us. From the down-home food at Ches’s Fish and Chips
in St. John’s to the swanky Sooke Harbour House near Victoria, we have 63,500 restaurants
and menus from which to choose. But where does all that food come from?
As it turns out, it may come from just down the road, from the other end of the country
or from the other side of the world. We did a little culinary exploring and tracked the source
of every ingredient in this lunch of curried chickpea potato burrito with rice and salad
at the Utopia Café on Toronto’s College Street. Our meal was truly a movable feast:
from farm gate to dinner plate, it came from 5 provinces, 11 other countries and 4 continents.
And while some ingredients, such as the coconut, were imported from tropical climates, many
of the veggies came from farms less than an hour’s drive away.
(Photo by Evan Dion)
Food for thought
- 963,000 Canadians work in the food service industry
- $34.60 of every $100 we spend on food goes to meals outside the home
- Our lunch includes food from four of the top five countries from which Canada imported
agricultural products in 1997-2000: United States, France, Australia, Brazil and Mexico
- Canola accounts for 75 percent of the vegetable oils produced in Canada
- Weight watching aside, the most popular item on the Canadian menu is french fries. A
gut-busting 85 percent of all potatoes grown in North America end up as fries
- Speaking of spuds, we eat our own weight in potatoes each year. And we grow some $600
million worth annually, making potatoes Canada’s most valuable vegetable crop
- Canadians drink 13 billion cups of brewed java a year
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