Health Canada just released the a draft of the 2019 Canada Food Guide and people have been asking this old farmer what I thought of it ever since. A week after the 2019 draft was released, on our national TV news, a young reporter asked several people on the street, “Did you read the new 2019 Food Guide?” and “Do you follow the recommendations of Canada’s Food Guide?”
A large majority of people asked said no to both questions. Unfortunately I too was in that majority.
Having been a food producer all of my productive life I thought that I should know more. I asked my wife if she had a recent copy of Canada’s Food Guide. She returned an hour later with three cookbooks that dedicated a couple pages in each cookbook to some guidelines from Canada’s Food Guide. The three cookbooks were dated 1932, 1947 and 1966.
Jeannie told me that while in high school she had to memorize the recommendations in Canada’s Food Guide. There was no other old or new guide in our house.
The easiest to understand reference to Canada’s Food Guide was written in the front of the Purity Flour Cookbook printed in 1932. It was recommended to eat food from each of the six food groups every day.
Group 1: Dairy — including milk, buttermilk, evaporated milk, and cheese. (There was no yogurt in Canada in 1932).
Group 2: Citrus fruit — including orange, grapefruit, canned apple juice, tomato (yes tomato is a fruit), salad greens, and raw cabbage.
Group 3: Green and yellow vegetables — Asparagus, green or yellow beans, peas, carrots, squash, sweet potato, beet greens.
Group 4: Other fruits and vegetables — potatoes, celery, turnip, peaches, apples, cherries, grapes and canned vegetables.
Group 5: Bread, cereal —like rolled oats, oatmeal, cracked wheat, whole wheat bread.
Group 6: Meat, fish, eggs, poultry — includes liver, heart, tongue, kidney, fish and shellfish, eggs.
Remember that back in 1932 there was no pasteurized milk, all fruits and vegetables were seasonal or canned, all food was organic, all meat and fish was fresh (except in the sub-zero winter months).
My grandmother always gave us fish once a week to supply some vitamins and minerals. She also served liver at least every second week because it was high in iron. Even back in 1932, it was recommended to not fry food that could be cooked another way.
So what has changed in 83 years? Not as many people do as much physical work and hence require less calories and fats than when my grandpa fed the animals and milked the herd before breakfast.
Dairy products now have added vitamins as well as the calcium, phosphorus, riboflavin and thiamin that were always there. Now many people drink fruit juice instead of eating fruit but many fruit juices contain added sugar that fresh fruit never did.
Fresh fruit is also a source of fibre that our modern diet is often lacking. Now the cook has a choice of hundreds of fruits and vegetables all year round but must wash them thoroughly before cooking or serving them to get residues off that were not even invented 83 years ago. Very few cook or serve liver, heart, tongue, blood pudding or kidney anymore but the abattoir grinds and mixes these 100 per cent meat parts into the hamburger and we buy it at the store or at a fast food restaurant.
Too much of the so-called foods that we buy or eat on a regular basis are further processed and blended with ingredients that we can’t even pronounce to the point that these foods don’t fit into any food group and contain much added sugar and/or salt.
The 2019 Canada Food Guide recommends that we replace some dairy or animal fats with fats made from cereal grains. This may work for some people but people who are sensitive to vegetable fats, oils or margarine either fried in, mixed in, spread on or turned into a milk substitute will not switch from dairy products.
I balanced rations for our herd for many years and worked closely with our veterinarian. We agreed that most health problems with animals could be traced back to their diet.
The biggest challenge was to provide adequate effective fibre in their diet and control the non-structured carbohydrates and sugars in their diet. Salt was important in the diet but it too had to be controlled.
Now that I am less active I find that pushing back from the table is my most important exercise. We are what we eat.
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations. gladcrest@gmail.com
