A frosted
gingerbread cookie changed the way Sarah Elton thinks about food.

The Toronto-based
author of Locavore, which encourages eating food that’s grown locally and
sustainably, discovered the cookie in a loot bag her daughter brought home from
a birthday party. Though it looked like something you’d find at a bakery down
the road, the cellophane-wrapped sweet was actually manufactured in China. The
realization of how far the cookie had travelled to end up in the loot bag
shocked her.

“It
really highlighted the environmental cost of our food for me,” Elton nods
during an interview with CityLine.ca
at the Rooster Coffee House in Toronto’s
Riverdale neighbourhood. “I immediately wanted to know how many other foods we
have that are from China.”

At about
the same time the writer and journalist learned just how much of what we eat is
being produced on the other side of the planet, the local food movement was
gaining momentum. Writers Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver were writing
about the industrial food system and the importance of changing the way we
produce food on a massive scale. Elton made this her focus, covering stories on
organic vegetable farmers, city-dwellers and chefs seeking out local meat and
produce, and the concept of eating in season. That collection of Canadian stories
and anecdotes grew into the book, which was published in March.

“Every
year I think we see more and more people understanding the importance of food
in their lives,” she observes.

In many
ways the key to a local, sustainable food system rests with the consumer. That
starts with eating in season – so, for instance, if it’s fall, don’t buy
asparagus or strawberries.

“Wait
until May and June when asparagus is in season here. If we all shop in season,
there won’t be the same pressure to import food from far away,” Elton suggests.

She
proceeds to tell me an anecdote about visiting Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market and seeing
asparagus in one of the food stalls in December. When she asked the farmer why he
was carrying the vegetable, clearly out of season, he told her that if he didn’t,
he’d lose business.

“He said,
‘If you come in here one day and you’ve decided that for your dinner party you
want to serve asparagus, and I don’t have it, you’re not going to come back the
next time you’re going to head straight to the supermarket, so I have to have
it because that’s what you, the consumer, wants.’ That really proved to me that
if we all decide not to eat asparagus in January or December, it just won’t be
available any more,” she remarks.

Elton
says she, her husband, and their two children eat infinitely better now that
their diet is made up of locally produced food. Yes, eating locally means
adapting your menu depending on what’s available, but it’s not difficult, she
maintains. A Thai curry made with zucchini and eggplant in the summer, can be
switched up to include sweet potato and Brussels sprouts in the late fall or
winter.

That’s
all well and good, but what about pint-sized eaters? They don’t care where their
food comes from, they just know what they like. Elton says her kids can be
picky too, but including them in the process has made a difference.

“I find
if they’re involved in cooking, choosing foods and also in growing foods,
they’re just more open-minded to food in general,” she says. “For example my
older daughter hates tomato – if I touch tomato she doesn’t want me to touch
her. And yet, when we grow tomatoes in our backyard she picks them and feeds
them to her younger sister. There’s this wonderful familiarity they have with
food, and they understand where it comes from, and they get excited about
eating food when they know its story.”

Elton’s
own interest in food stems from childhood, where her parents educated her on the
food system. Her grandmother would ask her where this pepper, or that potato,
came from. And she didn’t mean what store, she meant what country.

“I was
raised with that awareness but I don’t think you have to be raised with that
awareness, I think it’s something we can learn and have to learn,” she says. “We
have to build up our knowledge and our food culture if we’re going to have a
local and sustainable food system.”

For more information about Locavore, visit Sarah’s site here.