by Claudia Kwan
FoodConnect Vancouver
claudia@foodconnect.com

For the rest of this month, more than 150 restaurants across BC are offering a sweet incentive for you to eat BC products--a free dessert if you order a signature 'Eat BC' dish. (You can also win a year's worth of dining , accommodations, and a bunch of other things.) The catch, and of course there's a catch, is that you're only eligible if you're a card-carrying BCAA member.

I'm torn about this approach. Eating locally has a ton of rewards in and of itself for anyone interested in food, and wary of the consequences of what blithely ignorant dining will eventually have on a worldwide scale. When you see entrees that are this delicious and creative on restaurant menus, do you really need more reason to partake in BC grown produce, BC produced meats, and local dairy? And what's with limiting the reward to only BCAA members?

On the other hand, it's clear that many campaigns these days could not succeed without significant corporate sponsorship, and this is no exception. At least BCAA has a fairly sizeable membership, so the potential market is decently large. There's also definite merits in bringing the eat local message to anyone who may not have been exposed to it before. Didn't we learn as kids that dessert was one of the most enticing prospects of all to do something?

As with all awareness campaigns, I hope it lasts beyond simply getting a freebie. I hope people start looking for the little stickers that mark something as a BC or Canadian product, and asking more questions about where their food is coming from when they're at a restaurant or a grocery store. It needs to become an automatic reflex out of genuine concern, not something that we're coerced or cajoled into doing, or one day we'll wake up and realize we've eaten ourselves into disaster.