The Deconstruction of Our Dinner
Kootenay food system expert Jon Steinman on grandma’s cooking, price versus perception, and grocery carts as vehicles for change.
It’s in the Bag — Kootenay-based writer, host, and producer Jon Steinman is all about food transparency, security, and sustainability.
Frightened and uncertain after grocery buyers worldwide witnessed dwindling store shelves due to the pandemic, increasing numbers of consumers began to take startled notice of the bigger picture. Beyond the wise old adage, you are what you eat, more alarming observations from the aisles and supper tables gave way to inquiry: how do we get what we eat, from where, and from whom?
These are questions Jon Steinman started asking a few decades ago. Back in 2006, after four years spent studying restaurants and food management at the University of Guelph, the Kootenay journalist and food system researcher developed Deconstructing Dinner, a one-hour radio show. Before it went off the air in 2010, many of the series’ 196 episodes had been broadcast on over 50 radio stations in Canada and the U.S., and the program ranked as iTunes’ top Canadian food podcast. Steinman also hosted 44 webisodes of the TV show Deconstructing Dinner: Reconstructing Our Food System, and authored Grocery Store: The Promise of Food Co-ops in the Age of Grocery Giants.
Growing up, what was it that led to this deep interest in the topic of food? I don’t know if there was any one moment, but certainly my grandmothers, serving up food in a way that expressed care and love. I don’t doubt they helped influence my relationship to food before I got involved in the economics and politics of it all. Food connects us.
You say you learned a lot during your university studies from restaurateurs who’d lecture or invite you to their kitchens. What exactly? They paid next-level attention not just to what they were putting in their dishes, but where the food was coming from. That was twenty-five years ago. Now I don’t just pay attention to the ingredients either, but the stories behind them.
What are the biggest challenges facing the grassroots local food production sector in the East Kootenay? Inflation alone is creating some steep hurdles. Some of the issues that existed fifteen years ago still exist today. We’ve inherited a food system that’s developed over 100 years. The biggest challenge is price perception, from the consumer’s standpoint. Local food producers are up against very strong momentum to put downward pressure on prices. And while that’s understandable — at the end of the day many of us have only so much that we can spend on food — the reality of what it takes to produce food is disproportionate to what we’re expecting to pay for it. So as we put pressure on grocers to keep prices down, we’re also changing the perception of what it cost to produce it in the first place. That’s the biggest challenge, regardless of what ranchers or farmers are producing.
So grocery buyers want good, clean food — but for prices that reflect the fact they don’t realize the cost to growing, processing, packaging, and transporting that food to the shelves. What’s another challenge? Climate. Like for instance, losing capacity to produce a crop because the spring doesn’t bring out buds on the fruit tree. That was a big problem in the Eastern U.S. this year. The challenge to adapt is ongoing. What can we do about it? We can support local producers any way we can. Put all your eggs in the local food basket, or, at least go once a week to a farmers’ market. Or when you walk through the grocery store, buy a few local things to complement whatever else you’re buying. This, more than ever before, has to be a priority. The climate emergency is something we can respond to.
Like a lot of aspects of the global economy, the pandemic has made consumers and the food industry aware of the fragility of our supply chains, hasn’t it? That seems like an enormous problem to fix. Yes, the vulnerabilities of the long-distance supply chains have shown themselves as of the last couple of years — but on the upside, the relationships being built here in the Kootenays are beautiful. The relationships between food producers and eaters. And what’s different now from fifteen years ago is the amount of support for local food production — like when the Columbia Basin Trust has their once-a-year Basin Food gathering, or the municipal support we’re seeing for markets. But we’ve got a lot of work to do to incubate and support the sector.
There’s a quote from your book The Promise of Food Co-ops in the Age of Grocery Giants that says “a grocery cart can be a vehicle for change.” What are some of the misconceptions we have about who owns our grocery stores and packaging plants? Four years ago, in 2019, when the book came out, I wanted to introduce this part of the food system to readers as a place where we as consumers could exert a considerable amount of power and change. I had no idea it would only take a year for people around the world to start looking more closely at grocery stores. And that started with the emptying of shelves and the recognition of how little grocery store workers in some places were being paid. The headlines at the start of the pandemic were much like what I’d written about in the book. Most of us have taken access to grocery stores for granted, and we don’t realize just how powerful they are.
Hungry for Change — Jon Steinman’s captivating book that encourages us to change our perception of and relationship with the food that we place on our table.
Many Canadian stores are owned by just a few big corporations, correct? Yes, today we need to be aware of who owns the grocery stores. That’s what I put on the back of the van I drove across the U.S. on my book tour: “Who owns your grocery store?” More to the point, I wanted people to know who their grocery stores were accountable to. Ultimately, they’re accountable to their shareholders and owners. Here in Canada, we have two companies that command half of all the grocery sales in the country, Loblaws and Sobeys. The next three largest are Metro, Walmart, and Costco. Five grocers control over eighty percent of all the grocery sales in this country. That’s considerable power not only over the food system, but more specifically over suppliers, their access to shelves, and where we’re able to access food.
What were you aiming to achieve when you first started Deconstructing Dinner? I wanted to study the origins of food, the politics around food, and the economics of food. In 2006, there was almost a complete absence of that information in Canadian media. I wanted to challenge one of the deepest assumptions we have — that food just shows up at the grocery store and ends up in our kitchen, without any understanding of the impact that has for that to happen. I’ve tried to unpack the assumption that food will just keep showing up and coming through the door and the assumption that that relationship is secure.
Is it safe to say you were among the first Canadian media professionals to bring the state of our food supply, and the importance of locally grown food, to light? Well, I started in 2006. In 2007, B.C.’s James and Aleisha McKinnon wrote a book called The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating. That really took off. But about ten years before there’d been a very small and vocal group of...let’s call them food systems activists, in their ‘50s and ‘60s. They’d really started to develop the conversation in the ‘90s. I benefitted from the groundwork they’d done. They were in fact my first interview on Deconstructing Dinner, on January 5, 2006.
Fast forward to today and this is a conversation that’s happening everywhere.
~ Darren Davidson
Find this full-length story and more in The Trench’s (Go Cranberley) Fall 2023 edition: