Just in Time

I used to chuckle at my mother-in-law whenever I looked into her cupboard that contained row upon row of canned goods. Her explanation for carrying a stock that would shame some convenience stores was that the creek might rise. Mother-in-law lived on a side road in Nipissing Township that passed over Wolf Creek, a creek that tended to flood its bank in spring, leaving people stranded on the far side of the bridge.

Stocking supplies in case the creek should rise became an in-joke in our family, because no matter how high the Wolf Creek got in the spring, two days later the road would be open. Now when my wife buys a few extra cans of Habitant Pea Soup when it is on sale, I raise an eyebrow and she admits the creek beside our house in North Bay will never cause us to dig into our cache of pea soup. However, you never know.

Then last week some expert on international trade and tomato soup said that if the highways leading into to Toronto were closed, the city would run out of food in two days. I tried to picture the rivers around The Big Smog that could flood and close the roads but the analyst was talking about free trade and how much we rely on importing our food. More and more of North America’s food comes from abroad. Just as our large conglomerates looked for cheaper goods, the food giants have also turned their eyes to the East.

The largest factor in food costs is labour and our labour has become so costly that we look elsewhere to trim the costs. At first it was sneakers, then jeans and we all adjusted very nicely to labels that said anything but Made in Canada or Made in the USA. Quality control is only occasionally a problem in our clothing and appliances but some are beginning to worry about the quality control on food products.

Buying Salsa from Mexico seemed like a good fit for anyone who had ever spent a week or two in the warm winter sun on a Mexican beach. We had long ago accepted that olive oil from Italy was the only olive oil to buy and Swiss cheese was very gouda. We now sip wines from Chile and Australia with only a passing thought that maybe we should be buying locally grown grape wine. Alas, some of our Ontario wines are now blended with foreign grape juice, and some of what we think as Made in Canada, is only packaged here.

For instance, take the tomato soup that mother-in-law used to keep on hand for emergencies. Did you know that we are now importing tomatoes from China, mixing them with fresh Ontario water and marketing it as made in Canada? This is a good fit for the Chinese who are fast becoming the world’s supplier of all things. The Chinese do not traditionally eat tomatoes, but they have the climate to grow the red fruit, the cheap labour to pick and process it and lines of containers waiting to ship the product around the world.

Some folk who were previously concerned about genetically modified food are now wondering how safe are the food products coming onto our store shelves. The labels made read made in Canada or the USA, but have all the ingredients passed muster? What quality controls are the Chinese placing on those tomatoes? Pesticides? Obviously, they want to continue to sell goods here, so they will ensure that safe and healthy standards meet our criteria. When we have recalls of California spinach, we could expect similar problems in another country. Or can we?

The thing about food is that much of it grows and ripens in a short time, so food distributors must search the world for ripening crops, set up the delivery system and have the product on the shelves before it spoils. Shelf life and storage issues are solved by the just-in-time inventory system that we hear of in the automotive industry. Yet we use the same systems for delivery of our food and gasoline. Delivery of fresh bread and eggs across Wolf Creek in the spring flood was a temporary problem, but with just-in-time worldwide systems, any hiccup in the system can have far-reaching results.

It may not be a creek rising, but terrorist attacks on our infrastructure that we have to face, not flood water. Blockades of rails, bridges and roads could cause the same problem. If Toronto, the distribution centre for much of our northern goods, can deplete their just-in-time grocery goods in two days, how long will it take before our stores run out pea soup or loaves of bread?

Mother-in-law may have been right. If you live beside a creek or you think the just-in-time system has some weaknesses, and you can afford it, keep a couple of day’s supply of food in your cupboard. That creek might rise.