A few weeks ago, I was standing outside one of these seafood restaurants peering into large lobster tanks, displayed in the window to lure in tourists like me.

“Are these lobsters from the Mediterranean?” I asked a waiter.

“No,” he replied, the lobsters weren’t from local waters. He was certain that the lobsters were visitors, just like me.

When we planned our first overseas family holiday in Barcelona, food ranked high on the list of what we wanted to explore. I travelled to Spain with my parents when I was 12 years -old, and I hadd vivid memories of some of our meals. I ate green beans with olive oil for the first time on that trip, and I still remember the flavour of the warm oil with the just-picked beans. These days when I travel, I am interested in getting to know the places I visit through what I eat, which means choosing foods that capture the terroir and offer a taste of place.

But on this holiday, when I searched for local food, I found long-distance industrial instead. From the hole-in-the-wall joints to swish tapas bars near the Passeig de Gracia, imports ruled. At one café that was highly recommended by a resident food blogger, my heart sank when the spinach salad with local ham turned out to be made from pre-washed greens, identical to the ones at my neighbourhood supermarket; I ate the salad despite the tell-tale rotten bits of old leaves clinging to the fresher ones. Then in a restaurant overlooking the famous Boqueríia Market— where vegetable stands overflow with fresh produce, where you can choose between
dozens of different cured hams, and where there is a woman who sells only eggs collected from a variety of fowl—, I asked the waitress what they had in season. She shrugged.

“We can get anything we want at the market so we don’t pay attention to the seasons,” she explained.

By the time the waiter at what was referred to as the city’s best tapas bar, told me the shrimp were from Indonesia, I was ready to cry. While Although I was unhappy at being served grilled South American asparagus instead of fresh Spanish green beans (asparagus are a winter food in Spain), it was the amount of imported fish and seafood that surprised me most. Because of the city’s position beside the Mediterranean, there exists an illusion that when you order your fish in a restaurant, you are eating the catch of the day.

While Barcelona might once have been a place to find ample, fresh seafood, today that is no longer the case because there aren’t as many fish in the sea–we ate them all.

Francisco Muñnoz, whose family has worked in the city’s fishing industry for four generations, has witnessed the disappearance of local varieties over the last fifteen years. “The fish we ate when I was young are more expensive. What was two eEuros is now 20 eEuros a kilo because there are fewer,” he said. “Globalization is bringing in fish from other parts.”

Our industrial-scale appetite for fish has consumed, literally, local fish stocks. The potentially catastrophic environmental repercusssions of this have been well documented by scientists. And our global, industrial farming system that grows enough asparagus in the Southern Hemisphere to supply the Nnorth is not only unsustainable, but also offers us a bland homogeneity at the table.

There used to be Mediterranean lobster–few remain–and they tasted differently than the imports.

“They are the most delicious,” one of the city’s fishmongers told me. While she did have some Mediterranean fish for sale at her stand in the Mercat de la Concepcióon, most of what she was serving her clientele was brought in from elsewhere. It was the same fish you can buy in New York, Toronto, and London, too.

For the traveller who likes to eat, this means a globalized palate that disappoints. A world where you can always find South American asparagus spindles and where spinach tastes like spinach wherever you go.

This piece was also published at The Atlantic Food Channel here: http://bit.ly/cGMeYJ

While I’m not an urban farmer like my neighbour Elaine, who is one of the people behind Toronto’s Young Urban Farmers CSA and who grows veggies in borrowed backyards for her members, I do grow a little bit of  food. Currently, I have peas, lettuce and chard suffering in the heat on my back deck, zucchini, beautiful basil, beans and cherry tomatoes that have yet to ripen and four fingerling eggplants dangling from one plant. I’ll seed some broccoli this weekend for a fall harvest and I hope my nasturtiums flower more so I can dress up my salads.

However, my absolutely favourite domestic food source is my front yard native black raspberry patch. Oh what a joy it is to wander outside in the early morning to pick fresh black raspberries for breakfast. I slip on my rubber boots and long sleeves (or maybe just a bathrobe) to protect against the prickles and wade into the patch. Many a morning I’ve startled some passerby as they’ve turned to see why the bush they are walking past is rustling. I just smile.

We used to have a lawn in front of the house, with a small kidney shape flower garden. The black raspberry showed up after I transplanted something from my parents’ farm. At first, I tried to move the bush to the backyard, thinking berries were better suited to the back, but it wasn’t happy there. Instead, it thrived in the front and soon took over the lawn.

Now I love my berry bush. Beside it are 15 feet high stems of native cup flowers that capture rainwater in the cups of their leaves and milkweed too. It’s an oasis for pollinators and there is a constant buzzing sound. I’ve seen a humming bird drink from the cups and very often you’ll see monarch butterflies, attracted by the milkweed. And of course there’s me and my kids. Drawn to the delicious berries we love to eat.

What I enjoy most at the events are the question and answer sessions and these highlighted for me the big issues for local food in Canada today. At Toronto’s Culinarium, where we had a book club-style meeting with fabulous food to eat, the big question was how to take local food to the mainstream. The Culinarium has been open just under two years and the owner is hoping to make a profit this year. So how do you get more people to shop there? One major hurdle, she said, is that people have forgotten just how much variety  we produce in Ontario. Local food here is not only about fresh vegetables in the summer. We have dairy, meat, eggs, staples like the corn meal I purchased or organic turtle beans. So they offer a pantry box to subscribers, packed with all sorts of different local foods. Of course, the issue is bigger than this. We need to find a way for all of us–from big box supermarket shoppers to farmers’ market go-ers–to eat locally. Discovering the diversity of our local products is a first step.

At London’s public library, discussion focussed on small abattoirs. There were more than 100 people in the room but discussion was so passionate it felt like we were at a meeting of friends. There used to be hundreds of small abattoirs in Ontario, but thanks to tougher government food and safety regulations (designed for industrial processing plants) the small abattoirs that serve the local and sustainable meat market are going out of business. They can’t keep up with the paper work nor afford the renovations the government requires of their facilities. But if they go out of business, there won’t be anywhere for local farmers to have their meats slaughtered. This would mean the consumer would have no choice but to buy from the big league farmers. The National Farmers’ Union is organizing a campaign to save the abattoirs. Check them out here. They have printed up post cards with a letter of protest.

Now off to Creemore this morning for another event. Brunch made by six chefs and a visit to the legendary New Farm.

The walk was inspiring. While I was listening to one woman describe her fabulous front yard food-based garden, I realized that I actually do have room to plant food. I dug out the second third of the front lawn last fall and have been thinking about what to plant there. Now I know! Zucchinis, broccoli and green beans will be alternated with flowers. I can’t wait for the last frost day to pass!

Gilles took his place behind the cheese counter and started to introduce the group of us to different cheeses. It’s one thing to go the cheese counter and point to blocks of curd that look good and it is quite another to have an expert share with you his favourite cheeses. What an experience! I discovered Bleu D’Elizabeth, creamy but with an edge, that equals my favourite Quebec blue,  Bleu Benedictin, made by monks in the Eastern Townships.  Creamy Grey Owl with its thick black exterior. The pink-hued soft cheese 14 Arpents that recalled for me the women who used to make a quick farm cheese, a “faisselle,” hundreds of years ago in the province (for more, see chapter seven of Locavore).  The scrumptious Louis D’Or–I could eat this cheese every single day, at every single meal. And the most heavenly of all, 1608, made from the milk of the breed of cattle that Samuel de Champlain raised when he first arrived–the Canadienne. I could taste the flowers in that cheese that the cows themselves had munched in the first step in cheesemaking.

He almost pulled over the car when I told him that I’d just written a book, in part, about farming in Canada. He then told me about his 400 acre farm in Lebanon where they grew all sorts of vegetables and where he had a staff of more than 100 people. He tried to farm when he immigrated to Canada 14 years ago, but they lost their crop in an early frost and gave up. He needed to find another job to support his family. Though he still dreams of owning a greenhouse.
Imagine the talent we are losing out on when our farmers become taxi drivers–or any other job that takes them away from the growing of food! The knowledge of at least four generations of farmers is lost in this one man’s case.
I scribbled down the names of two organizations that might be able to help him start farming in Canada–Just Food in Ottawa that advocates for more farming in the area, among other things, and the Guelph-based FarmStart where they help to train immigrants with agricultural backgrounds. His face was beaming as I left the cab. I think he was thinking that maybe, just maybe, he might be able to own a greenhouse one day.

What stands out for me the most though was the conversation. So many people came up to me after the talk to chat about local food with such insight and passion. Thanks to David and Alexandra for inviting me!

For a late breakfast, we ordered plain congee but it had a nice chickeny flavour which we ate with what they translate to be “salt donuts.” I felt geographically displaced over breakfast in my own city. Flavours I’d never tasted, customs I’d never witnessed. I love it when this happens. When the city turns out to be exactly the kind of place I want to live in.