Butcher and retailer Calvin Vaags doesn’t need to stretch his imagination much to paint a mental picture of where the hams, bacon and other meats at the Carver’s Knife come from.
His festive meats are a celebration of local livestock talent.
“We’ve gotten a lot of congratulations from consumers for going local,” said Vaags, who tries to fill his east Winnipeg shop’s long meat counter with Manitoba-produced meats.
Not only is the meat Manitoban, but he personally knows many of the producers who supply his shop.
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He also knows the supplier of the beef pretty well: it’s him.
Vaags runs a 2,800 acre grain farm and a 1,300 head cattle feedlot just east of the city at Dugald, Man.
He doesn’t know specifically from which farms his hams and other pork products originate because the Portage la Prairie packer doesn’t specify the farm each cut comes from. But he does know hog production well.
His cousin, Rick Vaags, who farms just down the road, produces feeder hogs for the U.S. and market hogs for a small Manitoba packer.
Calvin Vaags set up this meat shop in 2004, after thinking for years about moving down the meat value chain.
He had watched the way that live animal, wholesale meat and retail prices interacted and decided it made sense to leap beyond the farm gate to reach the consumer.
“For risk management, if we could move all our cattle through retail, we’d be much better off,” said Vaags, noting that his small shop can only now move a tiny portion of his feedlot’s production.
Vaags, who displays a sign saying “100% Beef, Pork and Chicken” on the top of his glass counter, said he’s found it’s not only hopeful farmers like him who care about eating locally produced meat. Consumers are even more committed.
“Customers appreciate that you can buy local and they make a point of it. It’s the wave of the future. A lot of consumers are going to want to see less distance on their food products.”
Indeed, a small cult of eat-local-only has begun in North America, with small but influential numbers of people trying to eat only food produced within 100 miles of where they live. It is a project that many attempt for just a few weeks to see how difficult it is.
But many organizations are promoting the concept of eating locally produced food, including the United Church of Canada, which thinks Canadians and most people in the industrialized West have lost connection with the origin of their food.
The church also believes that importing food from vast distances, whether that is New Zealand lamb and kiwis or fruits and vegetables from California and Florida, is environmentally wasteful and forces farm production into unacceptably large production units.
Some high-end Winnipeg restaurants,
such as Fusion Grill and the Blaze Bistro, specialize in locally produced foods,
including Manitoba-raised pork, Manitoba grass-fed beef, Manitoba bison and Alberta triple A beef.
(The “regional food” culinary movement often includes prairie-produced food as local.)
At the Winnipeg specialty food shop and delicatessen called Stephen and Andrews, many consumers have made a point in recent years of buying “humane raised” pork approved by the Winnipeg Humane Society.
Vaags said he doesn’t think shops like his, which focus on locally produced pork, beef and chicken, are a short-term blip. He thinks consumers want to get closer to the farmer, and want to get up close and personal with the origin of their meat.
“A lot of consumers are taking notes on where the food is coming from,” said Vaags.
“If they can meet the farmers that it’s coming from, that’s even better.”
