The Foodie-file: Ontario Sausage Regulations

The hot charcuterie trend in menus and restaurants is a part of a bigger trend throughout the culinary world and trickling down to your kitchens. This movement has been sparked by a renewed interest in quality food, locally sourced and produced with quality ingredients by master craftspeople that know their product and speak to a history of it. Just as the public is catching on to the benefits of these products, small-scale producers are being threatened by restrictive industry wide government regulations. Sausages are the current culprits on the government regulators hit lists. In Ontario new government regulations have come into effect that restrict the ability of small producers to make their cured meats. The same regulations that apply to large-scale producers are being enforced on small purveyors where the safety concerns are not the same.

With growing wariness of contaminated meat, regulators are targeting end producers as the culprits of this very real problem. The thing is the problem does not lie in how the sausage is being produced by small purveyors. These people are steeped in experience, their trade has been handed down to them generation after generation – they know about what works and what does not work in their field from centuries of experience handed down to them. The valuable archive of information these artisans hold is being obliterated – this is the bigger threat to our food supply, not whether or not they have two doors to receive meat.

The lack of respect for this experience and knowledge is a dangerous policy for governments to follow. The market place is looking for the exact thing that these regulations are destroying. Twenty-five years ago provincial regulations did the same thing to rail butchers and systematically put every mom and pop shop out of business, Now the public is clamoring for butcher shops as a trusted source for food but are hard pressed to find them outside of major urban areas, and even there, the prices are so high they supply a niche high-end market and some restaurants but are not main stream.

Food needs to be viewed in a more holistic manner; where it comes from, how it is grown, how it is processed as a whole. This is where our food supply suffers, we have treated our food as if it was a car being made on an assembly to detriment of the, broken down into components instead of treated as a whole. While Europe is working to protect small producers and the integrity of their products with PDO designations, North America continues to go down the path of large scale producers while crushing the quality product turned out by small purveyors.

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