In April, the Literary Review of Canada and Diaspora Dialogues hosted the inaugural edition of the Spur festival in Toronto and Winnipeg. At one extremely lively Winnipeg session, locavore Sarah Elton met her rhetorical arch-nemesis, Pierre Desrochers, a dedicated globavore.
They waged a verbal battle over what each has called, respectively, our “destructive” large-scale farming practices and the “elitist” local food movement. The moderator, local reporter Bartley Kives, challenged Elton to imagine the drudgery of surviving Canadian winters on nothing but locally sourced rutabagas. Then he forced Desrochers to face his aversion to life on the farm, cultivated during a childhood spent surrounded by corn fields.
The result was a witty, informed discussion about how to feed a growing number of mouths with the economy and the environment at stake. The following is an edited and condensed transcript of the event.
Bartley...
Pierre Desrochers is a professor of geography at the University of Toronto. His main research interests are economic development, technical innovation, business-environment interactions, energy policy and food policy. He and his wife, Hiroko Shimizu, are authors of The Locavore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-Mile Diet (PublicAffairs, 2012).
Sarah Elton is the author of Consumed: Sustainable Food for a Finite Planet (HarperCollins, 2013) and Locavore: From Farmers’ Fields to Rooftop Gardens—How Canadians Are Changing the Way We Eat (HarperCollins, 2010). She is the food columnist for CBC Radio’s Here and Now in Toronto and writes regularly about food for TheAtlantic.com, The Globe and Mail and Maclean’s.
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