BUY CANADIAN, BUT ARE WE BUYING REAL FOOD?

Around the Coffee Table with Dale Jodoin BUY CANADIAN, BUT ARE WE BUYING REAL FOOD?   By Dale Jodoin Columnist                                               Some familiar grocery products may not be quite what shoppers think they are. Buy Canadian. Support Canadian farmers. Support Canadian workers. Keep our money here at home. I agree. But Canadians should add one more question before putting something in the grocery cart. If we choose to buy Canadian products, do we really know what food we are buying? That question started bothering me after looking at Canadian grocery shelves. Not illegal food. Not poisoned food. Food that can be sold legally but sometimes looks or sounds different from what is actually inside the package. Take pancake syrup. Great Value Original Table Syrup sold by Walmart Canada lists glucose, sugar, water, flavours, preservatives, salt, cellulose gum and caramel colour. Maple syrup is not listed. That is legal because the product is called table syrup, not maple syrup. That small wording matters. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency says the common name on a package must accurately describe the food and must not mislead consumers. And that is where a closer look becomes important today. But how many shoppers study those words? Most people are trying to get groceries and get home. They see a bottle shaped like syrup, sitting where syrup belongs, and put it in the cart. Cheese brings up another example. Processed cheese is not simply fake cheese or a pile of chemicals. It can contain real cheese or milk ingredients, along with added water and other permitted ingredients. Canada has separate standards for cheese, processed cheese and processed cheese food. So a wrapped cheese slice and a block of cheddar are not necessarily the same food. Then there is whipped topping. Great Value Original Whipped Topping lists water first, followed by sugars, palm kernel oil, sodium caseinate, emulsifiers, flavouring and gums. It contains milk, but it is not simply a tub of whipped cream. Coffee whitener tells the same story. Great Value Coffee Whitener lists glucose, coconut oil, sodium caseinate, dipotassium phosphate, mono and diglycerides, silicon dioxide, flavour and colour. It is made to replace milk or cream in hot drinks. Walk to the freezer and the wording changes again. Canada has a legal standard for ice cream, including requirements for milk fat and solids. That is why some frozen products that look like ice cream carry different names. Fruit products deserve an even closer look. A package can show bright berries or tropical fruit while its ingredient list includes concentrates from other fruits, sweeteners, flavours and colours. A fruit flavoured snack may contain some fruit ingredients, but that does not make it the same as eating an apple, orange or handful of berries. Then we have imitation crab. It looks like crab meat, tastes somewhat like crab and is used in seafood dishes. Yet one imitation crab product sold through Walmart Canada is made mainly from Alaska pollock or Pacific whiting, along with starches, sugar, egg whites, flavouring and colouring. It is a real fish. It just is not crab. This is where the investigation becomes bigger than Walmart or any single company. Canada requires a common name on the main display panel of packaged foods. The CFIA says that name should describe the food in simple and direct terms so people can make an informed purchasing decision. The question is whether modern packaging has become better at attracting our eyes than the legal wording is at informing them. Pictures are bigger. Brand names are bigger. Flavours jump off the package. The important words may be legally there, but they are not always the words that catch our eye. Canadians do not need to fear every ingredient they cannot pronounce. Nor should every processed food be called fake. But we deserve to know the difference between the traditional food we think we are buying and a product created to resemble or replace it. Buy Canadian when we can. Support our farmers and workers. But we should also know exactly what we are buying and what we put on the family table. Because before we worry about where our food comes from, maybe we should know what our food actually is.