Somewhere between the border and your grocery cart, dinner became a bargaining chip.
You can feel it in the headlines this week. Tariffs on, tariffs off, deals almost made and almost broken. Whatever your politics, one fact sits underneath all of it: Canada imports roughly 70 percent of the vegetables and nearly 90 percent of the fruit we eat, and most of it comes from or through the country we are negotiating with. When trade gets tense, our food is on the table in every sense.
We cannot control trade policy. Neither can you. But there is one kind of food that no tariff, no trade dispute, and no supply chain can ever touch.
The kind you grow yourself.
No trade deal in the world can negotiate away a harvest that never crosses a border.
We have been here before
The last time Canada's food supply was squeezed by forces beyond its borders, the answer did not come from bigger farms or bigger imports. It came from 209,200 Canadian families who planted victory gardens and grew 57,000 tonnes of vegetables in a single year. We told that whole story in our last Field Note, and the parallel is hard to miss. Then, it was a war disrupting the supply lines. Today, it is a trade war. The vulnerability is different in scale but identical in kind: too much of what we eat depends on decisions made somewhere else.
And the answer is identical too. More growers. More food that starts and ends its journey within a few kilometres of the table it lands on.
Homegrown is the only tariff-proof food
A tomato grown in a community greenhouse in the Fraser Valley has no border to cross, no broker, no duty schedule, and no eighteen-wheeler idling at a crossing. Its price does not move when negotiations stall. That is not a slogan; it is just the supply chain, shortened until nothing is left but a family and their plot.
Ottawa sees the same picture. The National Food Security Strategy commits $750 million to expanding year-round Canadian growing through greenhouses and controlled-environment agriculture, precisely so that less of our dinner depends on trucks from the south. We think the fastest way to honour that ambition is the same way it worked in 1944: put ordinary families back in the growing business, and give them the infrastructure our grandparents never had.
That is what we are building. Climate-controlled community greenhouses where any family can rent a plot and grow year round, with sensors and heat and water handled, an experienced grower on site, and our app guiding every step. All the certainty of homegrown food, none of the guesswork.
This is not about politics, and it is certainly not about any one headline. Trade deals will come and go, as they always have. It is about the oldest kind of security there is: knowing where your next meal comes from, because you grew it.
They can put a tariff on almost anything. Not on this.