If you are sitting there scratching your head trying to figure out which New Year’s resolution you are going to make and break this coming year, let me make a suggestion to you that will not be hard to keep and will be good for the environment by reducing your carbon footprint and, more importantly, will also be good for your health, our overall economy and your well-being.
And it is one that you should be challenging your friends and neighbours to keep, as well. And that is simply to buy close to home. Buy American and Canadian.
I really believe in buying North American products whenever possible. It is true that many Canadians and Americans simply cannot afford to be choosy, and we should all understand that.
Just do your best and if you can get along without buying from faraway places such as China, Taiwan and Japan (I list them not to be discriminatory, just as examples) do it, because they, along with many of the other developing countries, have little or no regard as to the chemicals in their fertilizers or the pesticides they use for their crops.
Besides, the carbon footprints of faraway delivery are also of major concern.
If this is of concern to you, it may be helpful to you to know how to read bar codes when you hit the grocery stores. This is our right to know, but the government and related departments never even attempt to educate the public on how to check if the sign on the merchandise offered is correct.
Therefore it is up to the you and the I and the we of the John Q. Public to educate ourselves.
My thanks go out to one of the head chiefs of the big wigwam at the First Nations reserve for the kindness in forwarding the following to me. It will allow you to identify correctly from where the produce comes, based on the bar code.
Take your glasses along with you when shopping – you may need them to read the bar code. This is how!
Remember, if the first three digits are 690 to 692 then it is made in China, 00 to 09 in the USA and Canada, 30 to 37 in France, 40 to 44 in Germany, 47 in Taiwan, 49 in Japan and 50 in the UK.
You are probably thinking this will tax your memory to the max, but you need only to watch for the letter O at the beginning of the number to buy American and Canadian.
Just don’t go searching through the pile of bananas for the letter O expecting to find bananas grown in Canada. That just ain’t a gonna happen until global warming nudges a little further north. I can’t quite imagine a polar bear sitting on an iceberg munching for lunch a bundle of bananas.
Only once in my life have I ever made a New Year’s resolution that I kept, and that was back in my early teens when my mother suggested that I don’t drink tea or coffee for one full year. I didn’t. So now you know why my growth was never stunted.
There was one other time, when I was much younger, when I did not eat meat of any kind for well over a year. But that was for quite yet a reason of a different colour. As a matter of fact, it was white patched with black.
I had a little black and white pet nanny goat, my constant companion for two years.
I had taught her to protect me by butting, with her button horns, whoever whenever they crowded my space. She also found butts rather tempting if someone near at hand squatted down.
The story goes that my father was squatting while counting several baskets of eggs. We had several large pens of semi-free-range chickens, often with ten or more baskets of brown-coloured eggs by the end of the day.
A butt so neatly tucked at the end of this long row of baskets was far more than my little nanny could resist. Need I say more?
I found her hide tacked, inside-out to cure, on the outside of the unused-at-that-season brooder house where, accustom to the times, self-butchered meat was hung inside to age for a couple of weeks before cutting up, after slaughter.
I never ever really got over that. She was good company for a loner. I wonder if I would rankle the local bylaw officer, here in an urban setting, if I had a little goat bouncing stiff-legged off of the coffee table in my living room.
Hummm. They are smaller than most dogs. Hummm. They’re really cute. Hummm. They lead well on a leash. Hummm. Who’d a thunk it? Good idea, ain’t it?
By the way, folks, I’ve just come back from the printers with the third printing of both Book One and Book Two of the Best of Bits & Pieces. If you have not yet treated yourself or a friend to one of these, perhaps the New Year would be the time.
Think birthday, think anniversary, think mom, dad, grandma and grandpa. Think Barrie’s books. They are: “A valuable keepsake of historical memories.”
Take care, ‘cause we care.
barrie@barriehopkins.ca
519-843-4544