Eat Local Article

Eat Local

Whilst sitting in a coffee shop waiting for my car to be fixed one day, I picked up a copy of a local paper, produced right here in Thunder Bay. The paper is called,” The Walleye” A wonderful paper full of ideas, reviews, cultural topics and more. This month, the front page had a chicken on it. The headline read, “Spring Chicken, Thunder Bay’s Black Market Poultry” I had to pick it up and read more.

I love the idea of eating local. Growing up, I learned how to grow vegetables with my grandmother and parents. I’ve read the, ”Hundred Mile Diet” and enjoyed “Animal Vegetable Mineral” and I have brought my children to the farmers market faithfully nearly every week since they were born.

We have been able to purchase local beef and pork in the city for some years and now I try not to purchase any meat from the supermarkets. The meat scares of recent years and reading the above mentioned books have made me realise just how meat is raised on huge commercial farms and I know they deserve better. Being able to purchase local chicken though has been somewhat of impossibility.

The article notes that it is illegal to sell farm raised poultry in the Thunder Bay area as there is no licensed poultry abattoir in the area. Farmers do raise and sell chicken, but it is done strictly on the, ”Black Market”  . Like many things in this area, its not what you know, its who you know and if you want the local chicken badly enough, it isn’t that difficult to find out where you can buy it.

But these farmers do so at a price of being found out. The first infractions can cost them hefty fines of up to $25000. The Food Security Research Network in the city has been trying to work with local partners to try and find a solution to this. They discovered that there is an increasing demand for locally produced birds and the people are willing to pay for local birds if such an abattoir existed.

This is exciting news for both consumer and farmers alike. Hopefully soon someone will seize the opportunity to open a sustainable business like a poultry abattoir and support local farmers and the people alike. Farmers already producing such poultry will finally be able to come out of hiding and no longer have to jeopardize their farms and business anymore.