Meat is Murder, and so is eating out in Victoria

If it turns out that the BSE infected cow that was recently diagnosed in Washington State originally came from Canada, I won’t be surprised (just look at Brian Evans’s face in this article and tell me he’s straight). This country has the most corrupt and lax system for overseeing environmental and health issues that I’ve ever come across in my (today) 47 years of living on two continents and 3 countries. Canada is a cesspool of pollution. The city of Victoria pumps raw sewage into the Juan de Fuca Strait. There are no air quality controls on cars for this city, nor are any in place federally. The restaurants in this fair tourist town are abominable, despite the abundance of fresh ingredients, and likely to give you food poisoning. There are no publically accessible health inspection reports of restaurants here or in Vancouver. The officials have been talking about it, but so far the consumer is left in the dark.

It’s all cronyism and corruption, left right and centre. When Werner and I lived here in the early 80s, we used to joke that Canada was “the Italy of the North.” I now feel that’s an insult to the Italians.

Driving home from my birthday lunch at McMorran’s in Cordova Bay (after which we all felt sick, even though we enjoyed the lovely view), we listened to The Smith’s “Meat is Murder.” I’m not a vegetarian (although I had the vegetarian dish at McMorran’s), but I am against industrial farming. I would kill an animal to eat it, I would buy meat from a local farmer who killed his/her own animals. But I’m getting sick of buying meat from the supermarket where I know it comes from industrial farms that rely on corrupt inspections and graft to increase profit — in addition to the inexcusably inhumane conditions the animals are kept in, along with the insane overproduction that results in “meat is murder.” When my parents and I still lived in Germany, before we emigrated to Canada in 1964/65 (in the wake of yet another massive financial failure and bankruptcy on my father’s part), we rented a farm near the Dutch border where my mother grew everything we ate, including the livestock. For dinner we had chickens we knew by name; we had lambs — they were all named “Floppy” — on special occasions.

What are we having for dinner today? Floppy? Oh, that’s nice. Floppy is bound to be good, he had such a great life and really loved feeding on that pasture with all the dandelions / nettles / grasses.

Before my parents died, they rented a farm for a few years on Vancouver’s outskirts, in the Fraser Valley in the Lower Mainland, and when I visited, we again had Floppy for dinner. I liked Floppy, and I didn’t consider Floppy a pet on the one hand or any less of a sentient being on the other just because I knew it before I ate it. but I sure don’t know the name of the stuff I buy in the supermarket, and my relationship to it is abominable and unspeakable and barbaric. The Smiths sing about these beautiful animals having to die — well, that’s sentimental rubbish. Of course they’re beautiful animals, but sentimentalising them into some stupid level of abstract beauty isn’t going to stop the barbarism of industrial farming. I have looked into Floppy’s eyes, and into the eyes of the chickens we ate at home. Almost every chicken we had we seemed to have named “Ille,” which is short for Ilse, which was my mother’s name. Don’t ask; I don’t know why we did that, except to laugh at my mother’s distractedness and to express — perversely — our affection at the fact that she fed us while my father managed to run consecutive financial ventures into the ground. All the chickens were generic — Ille das Huhn — a running family joke — but we knew the damned chickens, from the exciting moment they hatched, to how they grew and got their new feathers, and what colour eggs they laid, up to the occasional one ending in the Sunday fricassee. What sort of creatures am I buying in the supermarket to feed to my children? Animals “inspected” by corrupt bureaucrats, people more distracted than my mother ever was in her life? Or rather: people so single-mindedly bent on profit that they are distracted from every value worth having?

Canada acts so bloody civilised, and it uses its mantle of snow — “the Great White North, eh?” — to cover a multitude of sins. It’s all garbage and festering slime underneath.

My next task is to start a campaign to expose the rotten restaurants in this tourist town. We hardly ever go out to eat. Partly for financial reasons (too expensive), partly for dietary reasons, and partly because it’s becoming injurious to our health to do so. Take Ottavio’s in Oak Bay — please take Ottavio’s, as the shtick says. They specialise in Italian coffees and delicatessens, including handmade organic la-de-dah icecream that costs nearly $5 a scoop. When they moved this past summer to their new fancier location up the Avenue, we thought, Ok, nice place for a latte, at least it’s not Starbucks, even though it IS more expensive. But when I saw the moon-faced counterboy repeatedly doubledipping his little wooden paddle into the fancy icecream to have tastes of this and that flavour, licking the paddle in delight before dipping into the next flavour, I thought: FUCK OTTAVIO’s, I’m never going there again. I did go one more time, and my kids felt sick afterwards. That was that.

Or take the Marina Restaurant, another Oak Bay eatery with upscale pretensions. The last two times we went (last was in September, for wedding anniversary), we all felt sick. My husband says it’s because they use “bad fats” — he read an article by Margaret Atwood years ago about the recycled cooking oils industry in the restaurant business. But it can’t just be “bad fats” if you have a meal that’s simply grilled; it has to be bad hygiene. The Marina now takes on bus loads of tourists, which I don’t recall seeing in the summer of 2002. Well, there goes the neighbourhood. When you base your clientele on transients, there’s no one around at the end of the day to hold you to account. And the locals are so godawful British, they don’t complain: it’s like Fawlty Towers. Frankly, the food at the Marina stinks, and at the inflated prices, it should be vomited back onto the plates. It used to be good, but somehow in 2003 they went straight downhill. The busloads of tourists on whom they now base their bulk business go home with indigestion, but they don’t rock the boat and local diners can just piss off.

Hey, anyone reading this in Victoria: there are no health inspections worth the name of restaurant kitchens here. Hepatitis, bacterial infections, bad fats, greasy pans that don’t get cleaned properly, you name it: it’s all possible. But remember: we’re on an island, and so we get to pay extra, and we can’t get off that easily.

Ok, so is there anyplace worth going to for dinner? Yes, Zambri’s. No “bad fats” and you can see what they’re doing in the kitchen, and it’s so small that they can’t be lured into attracting the tourist busloads. If you see the masses — tourists, cattle, whatever — run away fast, ’cause there’s bound to be someone messing with the food supply and a greasy-palmed slimy mealy-mouthed Canadian bureaucrat standing in the Great White shadows waiting for the pay off.