There's no taste like home...

Remember those old Foodland Ontario commercials from when we were kids? At any rate, I spent some time with a family I know who are apple farmers and was helping them bring in the harvest from among their 17,000 trees (them's a lot of apples)... it's quite something, fruit harvesting. Much more labour intensive then you'd imagine, as each apple has to be individually hand picked from the tree, being careful not to damage the tree, so it can produce again next year, carefully looking over the whole fruit to see if it's 'supermarket grade' or not (you keep the 'non-perfect looking' apples for personal use, which ends up being quite a few of them), and then accumulating them in your bag so that you don't bang them up too hard, so that they cease being supermarket grade. This is on top of a spring of re-grafting and preparing the ground and a whole summer of pruning and carefully tending the orchard every single day (except Sunday). Throw on top of that those terrible storms we had in August (causing one to lose 600 trees for harvest), and what do you get? A lousy 50 cents a kg of apples. And that's in a good year. I think that's appalling. For a whole year's worth of work.
This highlights the general difficulties farmers in our country have. Being undercut by the Chinese (BTW, most of the apple juice sold in Canada is actually from Chinese apples.. Boo!, not our own, not even the USA's), and other imports makes it hard for our farmers to compete. ("But they're so cheap, buying apples from New Zealand..." I hear people saying, "Why should I pay $1.30/lb of Ontario apples when I can buy them for $0.90/lb from NZ or Chile???") I mean, other people have talked about carbon emissions as part of the equation as well (can you imagine having to fly several tonnes of apples all the way from New Zealand?), as well as the freshness factor (again, can you imagine having to fly several tonnes of apples all the way from New Zealand?).
I brought some of the 'seconds' apples to some friends yesterday, and even they could admit the apples were delicious... but of course: They were picked within 24 hours, and only about 80 km away from where they stood....
I'm encouraging us, as much as possible, to support our farmers and to think about food consumption patterns (what a big surprise that that's the big conclusion I come to :P )...