Why Not?

SIR ARTHUR CHETWYND:

Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen: It is a real pleasure to welcome our guest speaker today. I am not too surprised, but I must admit that I am very relieved that our guest speaker is here with us today. Not long ago I read of her, that a certain Minister of Agriculture (and I hasten to add here, Mr Handleman, that it was not the Ontario Minister) was threatening to take out his axe and chop down the plumptre!

However, it takes more than such idle threats, postal strikes, and the troublesome exigencies of modern life to deter this remarkable woman whose talent, integrity and courage we hear, see or read about in the media almost daily.

When our speaker, Mrs. Beryl Plumptre, head of the Food Prices Review Board, advised me that the title of her talk was to be "Why Not?" I felt myself becoming a little defensive, as I recognized that this phrase was the attentiongrabbing gambit of the media boys (and I suspect it was boys, not girls!) in their advertisements to promote International Women's Year!

Many women have criticized the spending of taxpayers' money on this kind of recognition for women. The irony is that the words "why not?" could have been extracted from a larger quotation by George Bernard Shaw, who had some very cynical things to say about women. I refer specifically to Shaw's play "Back to Methuselah" which I think was written in 1921. In Act One, the serpent is talking to Eve: "You see things, and say why-always why? I dream things, that never were, and I say-why not?" I suspect that the media boys swiped that from Shaw They're not above that sort of thing!

Indeed many things have been written about women--mostly by men. Here are a few quotes.

"Man has his will, but woman has her way." A man named Holmes said that.

"A woman's guess is much more accurate than a man's certainty." That was one of Kipling's statements.

And a gentleman called Herdeb refers to woman as "the crown of creation".

I prefer to end on this upbeat quote, not only because I believe it, but also for reasons of self preservation, for I know that approximately 51 % of our population is female--and this is International Women's Year.

In my research I came across, quite simply, the whole reason underlying the unequal treatment of women over the centuries. We--that is men--are afraid of their ability, both real and especially, potential. It was all written by Cato the Censor many years ago: "Suffer women once to arrive at an equality with you, and they will from that moment become your superiors!" The woman who chose the sacrifice of taking me as a husband, has been my superior, in many ways, for some thirty-six years!

Our guest today, Mrs. Beryl Plumptre, was born in Australia, graduating from the University of Melbourne, after which she did post-graduate work in Economics at Cambridge University, prior to marrying her Canadian husband and coming to Canada in 1938. She has accompanied her husband in many important postings . . . the Canadian Embassy in Washington . . . NATO in Paris . . . and in recent years in Canada.

Beryl Plumptre has served as an economic consultant to several federal government agencies, including the Wartime Prices and Trade Board, the Tariff Board and the Royal Commission on Coastal Trading.

She is a former member of the National Industrial Design Council, the Advisory Council of Consumers to Health and Welfare Canada, the Economic Council of Canada, the Canadian Consumer Council, and the Ontario Economic Council.

She is perhaps best known to the public at large for her service from 1961 to 1966 as National President of the Consumers Association of Canada.

Some of her other interests have been the Canadian Association of Adult Education, the Canadian Red Cross, the Children's Aid Society of Toronto and of Ottawa. She served as President of the Vanier Institute of the Family from 1969 to 1973.

Our speaker was appointed Chairman of the Food Prices Review Board upon its establishment in May 1973. Just the other day, the Toronto Star ran a headline which said "Beryl Plumptre's taking no more flak." And then went on to say in the article, "Since August she has tweaked Whelan's nose, chicken and turkey marketing, prodded for better beef support schemes, probed into prices and income ideas, monitored chain store prices, called for a more coherent agriculture policy, issued ominous food price reports and chided members of parliament for seeking large pay increases."

The loyal opposition's consumer critic said at that time, "Mrs. Plumptre gets better with time!"

I welcome this charming and able woman to this lectern with what seems to me to be the most appropriate comment on women that I encountered, after reading our guest's life life and record. From William Shakespeare-of course! "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety."

Ladies and gentlemen, I have the honour to present to you the Chairman of the Canadian Food Prices Review Board, Mrs. Beryl Plumptre. "Why not?"

MRS. PLUMPTRE:

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen: It is well known that one should not go grocery shopping before meal times. Feelings of hunger trigger some purchasing decisions that would otherwise not be made. I do not know if there is any corresponding taboo about discussing food after meal time.

I am honoured by your kind invitation to address your members and guests. For more than seventy years, the Empire Club has provided an opportunity for many Canadians, and others, in positions of responsibility to give an account of their stewardships, not only to its members, but also to the Canadian public. I am delighted to have the opportunity to speak to you today. It is always a particular pleasure for me to speak to a group of Torontonians as I still recall, with much gratitude, the warm welcome which I received when I arrived in this city as a bride many years ago.

Like all of you, I have a life-long interest in food. As a homemaker, I have had a long-time interest in food prices. As Chairman of the Food Prices Review Board for nearly two years, I have had a special and urgent concern with food prices in Canada.

Today I have stolen as the title for my speech the Canadian slogan for International Women's Year-"Why Not?" Why not use it to tell you something of the work of the Board, and particularly of our latest report, which we issued yesterday, "What Price Nutrition?"

But first a few words on the Board which was established in mid1973. The Board is an unusual government agency. The Commissioners were appointed by the government, I, and it is financed by government funds. But it does not report to the government-it reports to the public. Government leaders receive the reports of the Board at the same time as they are made available to the media and to the public. This gives the Board an independent status--a status which the Commissioners value very highly. But it also gives us a heavy responsibility--the responsibility of carrying out our mandate with the greatest of care for accuracy, honesty and objectivity. This we strive to do, issuing reports which "tell it like it is."

In our quarterly analyses of food price changes, we aim to give the public an understanding of the pressures and problems affecting all sectors of the food industry-producers, processors, distributors, as well as consumers. Our objective is the same with our reports on prices of commodities, and with related reports such as that on the profits of food companies, and those on the influences of such factors as labour, advertising and packaging on food prices. And "telling it like it is" in our twenty-eight reports to date has, I am sure, brought a clearer understanding of the reasons for high food prices and, I hope, of the policies of restraint in which we must all share and which will be needed to solve the problem of rising food prices.

Food prices have increased markedly over the past two year. Other prices, of course, have increased too, as we are well aware. Over the twenty-four-month period ending last December, housing costs, for the average Canadian, increased 18%, clothing costs increased 17%, and the cost of tobacco and alcohol, in which some of us have a lingering interest, increased by 13%. But food costs, in which all Canadians are vitally interested, rose by 37%--twice as high a jump as the next highest group.

Thus, within the overall inflation problem, food prices have been in a league of their own. Their spectacular rise was triggered, two years ago, by a unique clash of supply and demand. There was an almost unprecedented series of crop failures in major producing countries in many parts of the world. On the demand side, business and incomes expanded simultaneously, to an almost unprecedented degree, amongst the major industrial and food-importing countries of the world. As a result of the high demand for food and the short supply, world food stocks almost disappeared and world food prices soared.

It was against this background that the Food Prices Review Board was set up-set up, not to control prices but to monitor and explain food price increases and to make recommendations designed to ease the resulting problems faced by Canadians in all walks of life.

To complicate the issues and exacerbate the problems, national and international, world prices of oil from the major exporting countries were very sharply increased just over a year ago. Thus, from the energy supply side; a new factor of vast and pervasive influence began to push up the prices of many commodities, including food. And so, supply and demand forces have been pushing food prices upwards all over the world. And, to make matters worse, other upward pressures have been aggravated as governments, rushing from one expedient to another in an effort to put out particular fires, have substantially increased their over-all expenditures and thus added to the general inflationary conflagration.

In these circumstances, Canadians have become highly sensitised to food and food prices. Two main strands of controversy have been sparked.

The first has to do with equity. Who is the villain? What persons, organisations, groups or sectors may be taking advantage of consumers to promote their own self-interest? The Board has dealt with that issue in its reports and continues to do so through monitoring incomes of farmers, profits of food processors and distributors, and the wages of workers in agriculture and the food industry.

As readers of our reports will recognise, we have from time to time identified price increases that seemed to us unwarranted. A year ago, for example, in response to a report and representations by the Board, Canadian bakeries moderated the price increase that they had planned to apply to the standard 24-ounce loaf of bread. And we have called attention to a number of apparent infractions of existing legislation that have been pursued in the courts. On the whole, however, we have not found general support for the heroes-and-villains interpretation of economic events. If there are any villains broadly responsible for our ills, they are the forces of supply and demand and general inflationary pressures to which I have already referred.

The second strand of controversy has to do with the impact of rising food prices on the eating habits and on the health of the nation. All of you undoubtedly are familiar with the reports that circulate from time to time about some poor persons having to eat dog food. These reports are unsubstantiated but, despite the fact that some dog foods provide a nutritional quality and balance that is not always available in other foods on the supermarket shelves, they generate nevertheless a great deal of emotion about the issue of eating and of food prices.

Assessing the impact of sharply rising food prices is no easy matter. We know that people have been changing their shopping habits in response to price change. But there is nothing new in this. Often a change from a high-priced to a low-priced product, even if not desired, is required by one's economic circumstances. It is also possible that the lower-priced, plainer food may be more nutritious than the high-priced. But the opposite also may well be true. Thus, the Board has become deeply concerned, as are many others, lest many Canadians, as economies are forced on them, may have increased their purchases of foods low in nutritional value. Whether or not this has happened to any large degree is not known, but it is a tendency against which we should be on guard.

What is known is something about the way Canadians were spending their food dollar in 1969. It is on that basis that foods are put together in estimating the consumer price index today.

What is also known is that, as of 1971 and 1972, large numbers of Canadians had serious nutrition problems. Many of the facts became known last year when the Government in Ottawa issued its Nutrition Canada National Survey. Amongst the widespread evidence of nutritional imbalance or inadequacy that was brought to light in that Report were the following. Many Canadians (none, I hope in this audience) were overweight-some dangerously so. Some, particularly women and infants, suffered from a deficiency of iron in their diets. Pregnant women and older persons exhibited protein deficiencies and practically all adults, but particularly young and pregnant women, consumed inadequate amounts of calcium. In addition, all groups consumed less Vitamin C than is recommended by the Canadian Dietary Standard. In the report we issued yesterday, we have been able to include bar charts showing the deficiencies being experienced by different groups in the community. These are very telling, showing how some groups are very deficient in very vital nutrients. I hope that these facts will be brought to the attention of all Canadians.

The burden of these conditions is, in terms of human disability and suffering, borne by the individuals themselves. But the dollar costs are shared with the taxpayers. Total health care is now costing Canadians something like seven billion dollars a year. Of this, close to one billion dollars may be associated with nutrition-related health problems.

Big as is our health bill, our national food bill is even bigger. As of 1974, we were spending, on average, more than six hundred dollars per year to feed every man, woman and child at home. In addition, we spent another $125 per capita to eat in restaurants. Adding that up for Canada as a whole, you have $16.5 billion in spending on food and non-alcoholic drink. Food is big business. It touches the lives of all of us as consumers, and many of us as producers, processors and distributors.

We do not know precisely how people currently are allocating all that spending as between milk and soft drinks, between ground chuck and frozen beef dinners, between lettuce and tomatoes or pecan pies. From the point of view of nutrition, there are vast differences among foods and, for this reason, the Food Prices Review Board has taken more interest in some foods than in others. From the time of its appointment the Board has been particularly concerned about prices for basic, staple food items.

For many months, and particularly since the issuance of the Nutrition Canada National Survey in November 1973, the Board has paid special attention to ways in which it can help Canadians to stretch their dollar as far as possible in terms of nutrition. With this objective in mind, the Board prepared, and released only yesterday, a report on how much it costs Canadians to purchase a nutritious diet, one built up from basic, staple foods. This has involved us in a lot of work and brought us into contact with nutrition and home economics experts throughout Canada.

Let me tell you how we tackled this study.

To begin with, we had to decide on the standard group or family to be fed. The average family size in Canada is 3.7. Undoubtedly, that seven-tenths of a person would require a special diet, so we decided not to go with the average but, instead, to a four-person family: a man, a woman, a teenage boy and an elementary school-age girl.

With the assistance of our nutrition and home economics advisers we set out an eating plan which would provide an adequate supply of the nutrients which the reference family required. From the start, we insisted that the foods containing those nutrients be ones that are familiar and commonly available in the major urban centres of Canada. There seemed little point in putting together a food basket that nobody would recognise.

We were already walking the aisles of the nation's supermarkets, in connection with our regular, up-to-date food pricing and monitoring programme. This permitted us, without extra expense, to cost our nutritious basic diet. The cost varied from one part of Canada to another, tending (as is often the case), to be highest in the far-west and the east, and lowest in the central regions.

Two thousand dollars-that sounds like a lot of money; and it is a lot of money for most Canadians. However, we are, in fact, spending much more than that--as much as 50% more than that on the average, on food and nonalcoholic beverages, at home and away from home, each year. And it would appear that although the average family of four spent three thousand dollars on food in 1974, it still did not get the nutrition it needed.

Why not?

The reasons are many. Large numbers of Canadians know little about nutrition. For many of us, food is merely something that we eat, sometimes at leisure but often on a quick-lunch basis. But food is really much more than that. Most of us spend too much on food because we do not plan our meals as well as we might, or do not shop as carefully as possible. But the chief reason why we spend too much is because we eat too much of some foods and not enough of others.

The most serious cause of costly imbalance in our national diet lies in the fact that the diet of the average Canadian has a much higher proportion of meats than is necessary. The meat and alternate groups of foods use up about 40% of our food dollar but, according to the nutritious food basket the Board designed, this share could be only 25%. In contrast, we Canadians are spending too little on fruits and vegetables-less than 20% of our food dollar when we should be spending as much as 30%.

Within food groups, there is considerable diversity of cost per unit of nutrient sought. A gram of protein, for example, costs you a cent a pound when you eat turkey, and almost three times that when you eat sirloin steak. A milligram of iron costs you about three cents when you eat beef liver, but twenty cents when you eat sirloin steak. Knowledge of the nutrient content and cost in different foods allows the careful shopper to get maximum nutrient value per dollar spent. This point was very much in the mind of the Board when preparing our recent report.

Not only do we often fail to buy the food that provides nutrients most economically, we also spend many food dollars on things we do not need at all. One has only to look at the soft drink and confections sections of our supermarkets to see the way in which these add to many grocery shopping baskets. Yet such products provide us with little more than calories, which most of us always absorb to excess. The Nutrient Canada survey pointed out clearly that for large numbers of Canadians, overweight is a problem of major proportions-no pun intended!

Nobody should be telling us what to eat. What we buy, and what we do with the things we buy, is in the last analysis our own business. In a free market economy, consumer demand will always cause some products and services to be widely available in the market, and others not. The market system has proven its effectiveness in allocating resources and maximising productive efficiency even though we may not always agree with the desirability of the things produced and sold.

But our individual freedom to buy and eat as we please has consequences for our health, for which the nation has accepted a collective responsibility. Every one of us wants to minimise the hardship and grief attributable to nutrition-related health problems among our own family and friends. As taxpayers, all of us want to keep health care expenditures as low as possible.

All this points to the need for governments, and for government agencies like the Food Prices Review Board, to provide information to all Canadians on what a nutritious diet is, and what are the consequences of our failure 'to eat properly. That responsibility must be exercised from the earliest days of a child's education and the, message made clear in numerous different ways thereafter. Some food processors and distributors have already taken initiatives in the nutrition education field that are highly commendable. The Montreal Diet Dispensary, the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto, many provincial departments of Health and Welfare and of Agriculture, and university faculties of nutrition and home economics have all done excellent work in this area. Health and Welfare Canada has also been active in nutrition education with such things as including readable and attractive brochures with Family Allowance and Old-Age Security cheques.

But whether all of these efforts are enough can only be judged by the results they produce. The existence and persistence of nutrition problems indicates that governments and government agencies have not yet done enough.

Most Canadian families can afford, many can well afford, the basic nutritious diet such as our Board has provided and priced, but there are those who cannot afford it. Of all the four-person families in Canada, which were the particular target group in the report, the proportion who cannot afford the Board's nutritious diet was almost 10%. We have recommended that the nutrition needs of those with low incomes be given adequate consideration in the Federal-Provincial social security review now underway.

The factual conclusions of the Board's recent report can be summarised in two sentences. We Canadians are spending sixteen billion dollars to feed ourselves and almost seven billion dollars to care for our health, largely for treatment rather than for prevention. And both of those figures are higher than they need be. The majority of Canadians can afford a nutritious diet, can reduce their spending on foods and beverages, and can improve the nutritional quality of what they consume. The final responsibility to do so lies with us. So let's do something about it!

In short, ladies and gentlemen, why not?

The official thanks of The Empire Club of Canada were expressed by Mr. Sydney Hermant, a Past President of the Club.