Food and Transportation: Part One

You don't have to be driving for long on the Trans-Canada Highway to realize that there are a lot of trucks, big rigs, that is, rolling down the highway. We were in Longlac, Ontario a week or so back. We spent two nights in a fine motel on the Highway.

All day and night long you could open the curtains a bit and watch the transports roll. They carry everything from toys to tomatoes. Cities, like Thunder Bay, and the smaller towns and villages in the region and elsewhere in Canada, are dependent upon the trucking industry to keep us supplied in most, if not all, of Life's essential items.

In order to give the reader an idea of how integral the trucking industry is to this city, our major chain grocery stores carry a five day supply of food, so if trucks are unable to reach town, along the only access route, for more than five days, due to weather or other major event, then the food supply comes down to what you have on hand.

This is an particular concern in the winter where snow and ice storms can close the highway and make it impossible for the trucks carrying our food to get by. Now, the storms don't usually last five days, a few hours or maybe a day's delay is most likely but it doesn't take much more than that for fresh items such as fruits and vegetable to disappear from the stores' displays.

I use the word fresh with some hesitation. I am almost tempted to put quote marks around the word but manage to resist. How fresh is food that has been transported a thousand miles or more, even if the truck is refridgerated. How long has the food sat on a loading dock, in a warehouse or food terminal, before being shipped to its end destination. Are transport trucks really the best means of transporting food across the country? Is transporting food across country the best approach to food delivery? The use of fossil fuels contribute to climate change, for example, global warming, not to mention smog within urban centres. We may want to ask ourselves why we have become so dependent upon a system that leaves us vulnerable. Would using the train make a difference?

Ideally, I'd like to see more of a balance between train and truck. In particular, I'd like to see the return of the passenger train to Thunder Bay. That is the subject for a future story.

Resources:

Terrace Bay

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