Visit any food store in Canada (or at least southern Canada) and it’s almost impossible not to take food for granted. 
    Stores get bigger and bigger to meet shopper’s expectations. Shelves are overflowing. They throw out food that’s still perfectly good because it looks imperfect or it’s past is “best-before” date – or they give it to food banks for the small part of our population that can’t afford to buy their groceries.
    Given all this – that it’s always there when we want it – it’s perhaps hard to really value food. And so it shouldn’t have really surprised me when I read Ralph C. Martin’s column in last month’s The Rural Voice. He quoted Globe and Mail writer, John Ibbitson, whose column I usually read, though often disagree with, but I’d somehow missed this.
    Ibbitson argued that the answer to Ontario’s housing crisis was to let cities sprawl across southern Ontario’s farmland. The land wasn’t that valuable for food production because “increased agricultural productivity compensates for land taken out of use for housing.”
    Certainly, the increase in the production of our farmland since I was a lad is astounding. Fertilizers, weed sprays and – often overlooked – the superb education young farmers get today, has all led to tremendous increases in how much each acre of land produces. Still, Martin points out, our changing climate may reverse all that.
    Canada needs 400,000 more immigrants this year and for each of the next few years, in part because we keep growing and in part because people are having fewer children and our population would actually be decreasing if not for immigration. Since we have fewer people living in larger homes (other than in those downtown apartment towers), we need more housing.
    But we also need more food, and more land to grow food on. According to Martin, we’ve converted 2.2 million acres of farmland to housing in the past 40 years. The provincial government is proposing more farmland be paved over to build new superhighways north of Toronto and the resulting housing developments they will encourage.
    Though rural organizations such at the Ontario Federation of Agriculture and the National Farmers Union – Ontario have made their voices plain about the importance of protecting farmland, they simply don’t have the clout they had back in the 1970s and 1980s when these became items worth fighting over for farm leaders.
    Back then, there were more people living on more farms than we have today in a province with a smaller population, so the farm vote mattered more. Still, the evidence shows that many acres of farmland were lost to food production forever as cities expanded.
    An increasingly urbanized society, moreover, has lost touch with the nitty-gritty of food production because the food is always there, in abundance, on the store shelves. Large newspapers, television and radio stations/networks take farming and food for granted. Even local newspapers are usually part of urban-based chains these days and seldom report on farming and food.
    There are lessons to be learned by looking at the troubles in Ukraine. Consumers have found empty store shelves in the supermarkets of one of the food-baskets of the world as the invasion of that country by Russia interrupted the food supply.
    Southern Ontario has traditionally been a food basket too. But food production is too often taken for granted. We need more places for the Ralph C. Martins to illustrate the reality of our position. We need louder, more-angry voices from our farm organizations so they will actually be heard. We need to stop taking food and food-growing land for granted and to fight for its protection before it’s all gone.◊