... which in other sectors has happened here since Wal-Mart has expanded in Québec, but not for food or drugs. Wal-Mart has had to adapt and offer some local products (which it isn't able to sell with nearly as big a price gap as the rest, resulting in several stores abandonning the idea of selling food at all). The specifics of our food market which they find way too hard and expensive to reconcile with their continent-wide purchasing and distribution systems have also slowed down American grocer chains from expanding here, unlike what they did in the rest of Canada. Only Costco, not really a grocery chain, has managed it so far.

The battle is much harder in the US. It's hard to see how the market alone will be able to even slow down (let alone stop) the multinationals anytime soon. Your food industry also has a long tradition of abusing the American public when necessary. The people's tastes are getting more refined, more eager for fine food? No problem, in America someone will abuse the absence of regulations or inspections and sell you fake stuff (e.g.: most Italian parmesan cheese sold in the US still isn't Italian... and when it is it's most often not from the Parma region. The price tag is most often very close to that of genuine Parmeggiano Regiano, however. You can't import raw milk cheese in some states? No problem, someone will go around that and produce them locally, and selling them under their European protected denominations as those protections aren't recognized in the US (same for grapes for wine, and tons of other food products). The FDA or state regulations forbids the methods used to make this or that, no problem, someone will sell you local products respecting FDA/states regulations under the foreign name, at the price of the imported product you can find in other states. According to the many articles/books I've read on the topic, it's about as widespread as Chinese rip-offs of luxury brands. There's a good discussion - and denunciation - of this in Modernist Cuisine, notably. It's American foodies who are the most outraged and keen to denounce this. Countries fight with the US over the non recognition of their protected denominations, but that battle isn't waged much on the public front in the US, if more and more nowadays). The odds are good that the multinationals will answer to the proximity issue much as they've done with organic food, by finding ways to present their products as "locally grown", simply omitting to tell it's still from factory farms. One of the scandals of the summer in Montréal was that the veggies/fruits distributors's answer to the steadily increasing popularity of farmers markets has been to open stands selling their goods for cheaper than anybody else, as people assume what's sold there is exclusively local products (it worked for years but they stupidly overplayed their hand by introducing more and more exotic products... which lead journos to investigate and expose the fact there's more and more stands at markets offering strictly industrial and imported products, not only for exotic products...) - popular protests have forced the Montréal markets to reconsider allowing those stands to return next year, and the debate for regulated regional labelling has found new fuel (Québec has very long wanted that, for ourselves and also because it would be a big boost for exports to Europe where this added value counts for a lot, but that's a federal jurisdiction and Ottawa isn't favourable to extending the existing protected denominations - for maple syrup notably - this will have to wait for other provinces to follow the trend already in place in Québec and B.C., which is starting to spread in Ontario as well).




That's one thing. We are also beyond that, in a way, ie: beyond the strict economic arguments. It counts with customers here if less so than for Americans, but other values are solidifying, and more people are willing to pay the higher price.

Agriculture is one of the things that's very different here from the rest of north America. We're the last state in North America (I mean Québec, not the Canadian federation as a whole) where "small scale" farming (not sure how to translate the French technical term, literally owner-farmer but the English economic term is probably different) still dominates massively the market and industrial farming barely has a footing for now (and the biggest threat isn't from the outside, we've very long had a protectionist system in place for our agricultural model, but from China... the Chinese have started to buy very good arable farm land here at extremely high price, and to build factory farms. The newly elected government has promised to put a stop to that, how exactly is to be determined by studies and commissions, but Québécois aren't afraid to mix socialist measures with liberal economy if it's demonstrated it's what it takes to do the job. Again, the federal favour Chinese investments, so there's a bit of Canada pushing one way and Québec another involved).

We also favour as customers (that's not regulated, it's the free market talking) importations from smaller scale farms from the other Canadian provinces, then from the larger scale Canadian industry, over those of the US or south American industries, mostly for the proximity issue (we do import, a lot, but mostly out of season). We're possibly - I'm not 100% sure of that - the last market on the continent where nearly all the agricultural products are destined to the local market (what we export are transformed products. We have quotas preventing surplus for the rest, so no exports.. and thus very little factory style farming. The Chinese buyers have bypassed this by building factory farms that aren't selling at all on the local market but to China's, so they don't have to respect the quotas.).

That long predates the proximity/slow food trends - that was rather meant to protect the different, non anglo-saxon farming traditions here - but now it's both. That has put us at an advantage of a sort when the proximity trend appeared, as when the "buy local" movement started there was not a lot of convincing to do - people already knew and preferred local products, nor is there too much of a "David vs. Goliath" battle against a powerful entrenched international industry. Those cultural values are solidifying. 10 years ago, if a grocer put up in season Mexican asparagus at 2.99$/pound and refused to take local products (which he had to sell for 3.99$ to 4.99$), he sold them out. Nowadays they run a real chance of being stuck with their imported goods (unless they're located in poorer markets). The big importators are fighting back hard (with all sort of dubious measures to pressure the big grocer chains to take their products over the local ones), especially those offering products from California, but customers win more and more this fight (if there's a choice offered to customers, they will pick the more expensive local products over the cheaper foreign one, and if there's no choice they more and more don't buy and go buy their veggies at farmers market or speciality fruits and veggies stores instead. The slowness of grocers to catch up on that has resulted in a big boom of farmers markets, expanding the big ones already existing, but in Montréal we have more and more small ones in each neighbourhood, and farmers pooling together to offer weekly or bi-weekly delivered-at-home baskets programs are very trendy with city folk, and more and more those offer more than veggies and fruits to include meat).

So it's less the veggies and fruits which are the a focus here, the new battle is more over meat and transformed products. Over the last 30 years, we've developped a fine cheese industry that's now reached the stage where the best products commonly wins international competitions (and these days, a town has to attract a cheese maker who will develop a local product or it's a middle-of-nowhere town! Same for beers, the regional small scale breweries have passed the 50% market share), and a family-owned/sized sustainable, eco-conscious meat industry (very expensive products compared to industrial ones, mostly sold regionally for now (except in Montréal and Québec City) but more and more people choose to eat less meat to afford the local products when they do. As a city folk, I buy about 60% of local meat, 40% of that at the butcher/grocer, 60% I need to buy at producers' boutiques at farmers market, which are now open year-long. We have more and more street boutiques too - not far from home I can find any duck product, transformed or not, from any of the region producing them. My mom who lives in a region but not in the countryside can buy 90% regionally produced meat. Her remaining 10% is beef, from Western Canada - the local offer exists, but it's too expensive). We also see a European style "terroir" mentality solidifying, with disctinctive regional specialities appearing that didn't exist 25 years ago. People are also keener here to respect seasonality (after many decades, since WWII, when we were no different from the US on this... eg: wanting summer fruits year-long etc.) Food-wise, you might say Québécois in the last 25 years are veering away from the British-American habits we held from the mid-18th to the 20th centuries, and returning to our French roots.

Another factor that helped this spread faster than elsewhere and made the food offering here unique on the continent is language. To sell food in Québec, labelling has to include French. In a small 8 million people market in North America, that had the side-effect of keeping at bay tons of industrial products, though it wasn't the goal (food safety was, of course) as for multinationals adding another language on products sold in the US wasn't an option (whereas for European industrial products it's the norm) and offering a different packaging only in Canada or Québec wasn't cost-effective. For decades there used to be massive bitching about the much smaller offering in Québec, that we couldn't find here this or that brand or product available in the US or other provinces, but as the healthier eating habits movement appeared, we don't hear bitching anymore. Now we realize that if a lot of home cooking skills have vanished since WWII and industrial food, with the change of vision in the last two decades we're no longer "backward" but ahead of the rest of North America in this respect, returning to home cooking being much easier for us. Another advantage is that we can of get some of the best of the US while avoiding some of the worst. General Food and co. don't find it economically advantageous to sell this or that here, but the small(er) scale higher quality US companies eager to expand abroad to counter their difficulties to gain market shares from the multinationals in the US do see their economic interest in labelling in French to penetrate our market.
That's a bit the same with fast food chains. If they're expanding beyond America, we usually have them here. If they plan to stay on the continent only they usually choose not to invest for packaging, advertising (we're real pests, our advertising traditions differ and American concepts translated in French bear poor results. Companies are pretty much forced to have custom advertising campaigns developped by local agencies if they're serious about selling in our market) and general costs of doing business in French and expand only through English Canada.

A telling sign and huge advantage of the Québécois difference in the food industry and eating habits is that we sure have a problem with obesity like all north-Americans, but we're currently 20% below the average rate of obesity in the US (and 3 years ahead in life expectancy) putting us second on the continent, after British Columbia, and slightly ahead of the US most "health freaks" states if quite behind Europe or Japan, and obesity rate is decreasing slightly faster here.

Canada is still slowing this down however. The federation is dysfunctional on matters like this, because of contradicting provincial and pan-canadian Federal regulations. In most regions of Canada the food industry is geared toward exportation (grains mostly, potatoes, fruits etc.), and the federal regulations and subvention system reflect that. There are many exceptions in place to account for the fact Québec's food and agricultural industry is different than most of the other region's, but there's still too many contradictions and some of them are hard to renconcile as they fall under free-trade agreements with the US and Mexico. There's some hope things might change however: the small scale farmers remaining in other regions of Canada and facing much the same issues as their US counterparts have been in the last ten years totally fascinated by the terroir phenomenon that's developped in Québec and farmer unions are sending interested people en masse here to study how it's done and how we managed to make it economically successful. They come to study the techniques, much like two/three decades ago Québécois were going to France and Belgium with the same goals. A counterpart to all this is that agriculture attracts less people, but otoh we attract a lot of European specialized workers (not easy to for young people to establish themselves in food or agriculture trades in France, Belgium, Switzerland anymore, but there's a high demand for them here) and our farmers are quite happy to remedy to the work force problems by using foreign seasonal workers (we find the wages too low, Mexican field workers find them very attractive!).

At the moment,two of the challenges to the model are the economical crisis coupled with Canada's structural problems (the two have combined to make the Canadian dollar reach parity with the US one and hold there after so many years stuck at around .65 US$ or .70$ - which makes food importations from the US sudddenly far more attractive - this hurts especially the products from Ontario sold here - people have less qualms when the choice is between two imported products, no matter those fruits get here in half a day and usually rippened in the field and thus as good as our local ones, unlike American products) and the success of the products that put a lot of pressure on offer, and the producers are struggling to find ways to stick to their small scale methods but increase production. Our products have not gone long under the radar of American chefs, especially those of New England, and there's a boom in higher end restauration in the US as elsewhere. The demand for our meats (pork, lamb, duck) and cheese in particular is massive if almost exclusively from the restaurant industry. The cheese makers are getting more and more demand from consummer boutiques in Vermont and NYC, but they can't meet it, or only very partially. But so far the system it's holding, the producers refusing to "go industrial" to meet demand.

You might think the cost of all this is that we pay significantly more for food here, but if we calculate the median price by removing the remote regions first as they artifically hike the average too much we actually have at comparable quality one of the cheapest average grocery baskets on the continent. We do end up spending a lot more on food in truth (the "normalized" grocery basket stats are quite different from the real average basket spending stats for a Québécois family compared to an American family with comparable income) but it's by and large by choice, because our eating habits differ. What the low income families spend, and what they eat, is however very comparable to the US (but not to the really, really poor, the social programs makes it impossible to be that poor here. Wealth redistribution makes it tricky to compare Canadian and US stats - depending how one interpret the stats, we're shown as much poorer or slightly richer than comparable Americans. If we exclude the 10% of richest (way, way more wealthy than any Canadians) and poorest n(poorer than any Canadian), the 90% remaining Québécois have better living conditions and purchase power than 90% of Americans. If we include the 10% the way most economists of the right do, we're dirt poor.).