Fight Trump Tariffs with a Patriotic Canadian Diet

Stop buying American goods and services and try a local, seasonal, low carbon and all-Canadian diet.

I’ve just had my last glass of orange juice for a while. For years, I avoided it when Kelly and I followed a “climatarian” diet, where we ate seasonal and local food. I drank Canadian apple cider instead.

Today, we are back on the climatarian diet, but it needs a different name; it is now the Patriotic Canadian Diet, where we avoid buying anything American. If the President of the United States is going to put up tariff (does he know it is an Arabic word?) barriers on Canadian goods, then we are just going to have to stop buying anything American.

I will try to avoid American products and services like Amazon, Facebook, and Instagram (although I know I am writing this on Substack with my Apple computer, I am a bit of a hypocrite), but orange juice is the first to go.

Years ago, when my wife Kelly and I both worked for a shortlived website called Planet Green, Kelly wrote about low-carbon cooking, and we followed the Climatarian diet. I revived it in 2020 while writing my book, Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle and wrote about how it significantly reduced carbon emissions. Here’s an excerpt because, once again, it’s time to eat local, seasonal, and all-Canadian.

Kelly is canning and preparing for winter.

A decade ago, everyone was talking about the 100-mile diet, an experiment carried out by Vancouver writers Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon where they ate food grown within a hundred miles of where they live, promoting the concept of local food. It was a fascinating and successful venture, turning into a book and a TV series.

I was writing about environmental issues for Treehugger and Planet Green, a Discovery TV network that showed the 100-Mile Diet series. Meanwhile, I would go to dinner at my mom’s house, and in the middle of winter, she would be serving fresh asparagus, flown in from Peru. I would explain how bad this was, and she would respond that she had grown up in the Depression, when she would have no vegetables but potatoes. Then, in the fifties, she had canned vegetables, and in the sixties, frozen. She thought that it was just about the most wonderful thing in the entire world that she could go to the neighbourhood supermarket in the middle of winter and get fresh asparagus, and she was proud to serve it.

Meanwhile, I was having my own doubts about the 100-mile diet, and about the importance of local food. I was concerned about carbon emissions, and low mileage didn’t necessarily mean low carbon; research showed that a local hothouse tomato served out of season had a far higher carbon footprint than a tomato trucked up from Mexico.

Kelly was writing about food for Planet Green at the time, and we became convinced that a seasonal diet was as important as a local one and, ran our own experiment: a modified nineteenth-century Ontario diet. Ontario had a short growing season and a long winter (much longer in the nineteenth century), so the diet was wildly variable. In the spring, the asparagus was succulent and wonderful. In July, the strawberries were to die for, bearing no resemblance to the wooden ones from California. In August, tomatoes. So many tomatoes, in so many salads and pastas. Kelly would buy them and everything else by the bushel and spend weeks canning them to get us through the winter.

By December or January, it was a different story. Potatoes. Turnip. Parsnips. More turnip. Root vegetable after root vegetable, and meat, pork or chicken because, back in the nineteenth century, animals could huddle together to stay warm until they were butchered and served. There are many interesting ways to cook a potato or a turnip, but by March, we were counting down the days until asparagus.

We are not so doctrinaire anymore and will buy a head of lettuce in January and a few limes for a margarita. But neither of us ever want to look at a California strawberry or a hothouse tomato again.

The biggest difference between today’s low-carbon diet and our nineteenth-century local and seasonal diet is the protein, the meat, particularly the beef. According to Our World in Data, producing 1000 kilocalories (or dietary calories) of meat emits 36.44 kg of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO₂e).

This is the other advantage of the modern low-carbon diet over the nineteenth-century Ontario diet; those English and Scottish immigrants to Canada wouldn’t have touched these alternative proteins like tofu or beans that can deliver a delicious and varied diet without any meat or dairy. They didn’t have cookbooks about Indian and Asian and Mexican and other cuisines where you can make so many wonderful dishes without meat.

CO₂ emissions drop like a stone if you follow a vegan diet. However, a vegetarian diet that includes eggs and dairy has probably three times the footprint and, realistically, is not much better from that point of view than one that includes pork or chicken. Vegan diets are meaningful regarding CO₂, but vegetarian ones actually don’t appear to make much difference if it includes dairy and tomatoes.

Cut out the beef and lamb, and you will have a great start to a low-carbon diet. That’s the modal shift, the change in what we eat.

While we are not as strict as we used to be, Kelly still never buys much of anything that can be grown locally, so no California strawberries while we wait for the snow to melt, but the occasional grapefruit or my orange juice. Not anymore. It is symbolic and doesn’t amount to much, but it’s a start.

Today, eating local and seasonal means far fewer imported American foods. We used to do it for the carbon; now we do it for the country.