Buying Canadian (and not American)

[ac3r]

50 pounds? Wow! Just curious; how much is the shipping on that?
I'm assuming you are having that shipped to somewhere in Canada.

A lot! They don't ship directly to Canada so I have a friend sending it across the final stretch (for free). They're not special peanuts or anything, I just have an adoration for this particular town they are from, as impoverished and destroyed as it is. I'm happy to help a small business out, even if they're across the border.

Well, bully for you.

We, on the other hand, have by now largely managed to eliminate US products from our food purchases.  It takes some work to do that, and some compromises had to be made, but I'm happy to have gone through the exercise.

It's mostly that I don't believe cutting out US products makes any impact, so to me it's a pointless headache to attempt to achieve. Plus, as someone else said how can we really know where the ingredients in said food come from? It's one thing to switch to Canadian produce or whatever, but it's harder when you're using something prepared. Take something like sliced ham. It may say Made in Canada or Product of Canada, but that doesn't tell you everything. Is the sodium diacetate compounded in Canada? Or the potassium lactate? Is the packaging entirely produced in Canada? How can we know the LDPE was made here, using compounds produced by Canadian plastics manufacturers? What about the sticker on the package? There's really no way to know. And unless you go far enough to figure that out, the decision to boycott things just seems like feel good theatrics because everything is globohomo now.

I would do it if, say, the US brought back segregation or something wild but a buffoon for president sticking silly tariffs on us doesn't matter to me. He's an idiot, his administration is idiotic, let them shoot themselves in the foot for all I care.

I think it's important to use as many Canadian products as possible and limit buying things from anywhere outside our borders. It's terrible for our planet and terrible for Canadian workers. Heck, in recent years I don't even buy that many fresh vegetables now because I don't want to buy stuff that gets shipped thousands of kilometres across the planet (think of the environmental impacts that has...) and have been canning things that I use in colder seasons. Shout out to my Mennonite friends for teaching me the nuances in the summer! Same with meats. It's crazy to me we have beef from New Zealand in our stores here... But at times I still have to use fresh stuff. Or, there are just things we cannot grow here such as tea, citrus fruits, coffee and so on.

Either way, boycotting US goods isn't going to make a dent in things because the scale of money is just ridiculously large. I think a more beneficial thing is to instead just use US products from smaller businesses whom have no links to massive US corporations or large money. There are a lot of small companies out there in both our countries that are certainly worth giving our money to. In cases of products where we can't really escape that with tea and coffee being great examples, at least ensuring it is fairly traded is important.