Fresh "Food"abase

By: Noah

Until the tender age of 18 or there-abouts, my Mom still packed me a lunch every day.  Yup, that’s right...momma’s boy.  She seemed to want to do it, she made some damn good sandwiches, and working Landscaping 12 hours a day leaves you with little energy to do the little things in life.  This culinary luxury however procured a certain hunger for homemade deli sandwiches.  And this tossed me a curveball in my quest to eat Local sustainable organics; how do I reconcile my unwavering desire for these deli meats, when seemingly nobody offers them certifiably the way I’m trying to live?

Fortunately for me I stumbled across a new website launched last month from Greenbelt Ontario entitled www.greenbeltfresh.ca .  It’s a website that seeks to connect buyers, growers, restaurateurs, and markets together in a massive online database.  Regardless of who you are, it’s seemingly easy navigation and attractive layout makes it an effortless solution to one of life’s my daunting questions: What do I want to eat?

I was one of a few dozen lucky individuals to sit in on a small tutorial session at the sites launch and it seemed easy enough.  If you’re a consumer looking to buy produce, simply sign in as such.  You type in your postal code, the Kilometre radius  in which you hope to find food, and the food specifications your looking to purchase (organics, certified sustainable, on-farm markets, farmers market, CSA etc ), and then decide which product you’re looking for.  4 seconds later you’ve got a google map of Toronto, with 15 local on-farm markets that produce certifiably organic and certifiably sustainable Asparagus and Tomatoes within 75Km of your home.

It was actually incredible.  Each farm had its own profile outlining some farming principles or philosophies in a small blurb about themselves, each farm listed what it produced in each season, as well as other possible locations in which these products could be purchased, like farmers markets.  With this type of specificity, you could find that particular farm, within 100Km of your home, which produced the chicken, sweet corn, radishes and lettuce you needed for dinner that evening.  Now, granted, the restrictions of farming practices probably won’t land you at any specific farm that grows/harvests all of your ingredients, but it certainly draws a stronger connection between the farm and you as a consumer.  This follows the Greenbelt slogan, from Farm to Fork.

Now I was really quite excited about this new website, finally I thought I could quench my unreasonable thirst for a turkey, smoked ham and chicken sandwich with a fat slice of cheddar, and some Dijon mustard.  This was of course my staple lunch for a few years, and along with a granola bar and a crisp Macintosh apple, you can’t really go wrong.  However it seems as though, and quite understandably, there doesn’t appear to be too many (none at all to be exact) meat Farmers within a 100km radius of Toronto that specifically cater towards the needs which I was posing. 

Some other minor management flaws seemed to surface once I had been on the site for a few minutes: I didn’t seem to be able to create a new search after my original few, and regardless if I was looking for Brocolli, Spinach, or Beef – I kept finding farms offering Asparagus and Tomatoes (my first non-deli meat search that yielded actual results).

Flaws aside, this website offers a real indication that the city (and surrounding area) is taking a stark interest in what we’re feeding ourselves with.  Potentially, this serves as a first step in what will eventually be a complicated and interconnected web that resembles those things we learned about in grade 3, food webs; as opposed to our current system which draws fairly straight lines from large-scale farms to the supermarket. 

I’ll keep trying to figure out this website (the feedback tab at the top of the homepage will hopefully result in fixed problems super quick), and you should all check it out too.  If not to use as a literal catalogue of farms, at least to bask in the glory that Greenbelt Ontario is shedding upon it’s inhabitants.  Enjoy fresh local ingredients, and know whose growing them too!