Elbows Up
We are making an attempt to make some simple substitutions in what we buy in an effort to buy more Canadian goods and services. It can be difficult to unAmericanize a household though; there are a lot of American services that are deeply entrenched in our culture. Here's an overview of what we're trying to change.
Food & Drink - Produce and Packaged
One of the things that has been easiest to deal with for us has been produce. We already heavily favoured produce that was made in Canada, so for the most part our produce buying has not particularly changed. The only item where I am really struggling to find a good replacement is green leafy vegetables, like lettuce and spinach. We have mostly opted to skip these in favour of things like snow peas, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, but I do find myself looking forward to a salad.
Packaged food is a bit more of a challenge in many cases. Some of them we were already doing - I haven't bought Heinz ketchup in years for example. For the most part, we are not finding it that hard to adjust. Here are a few of the product swaps we have been making:
| Category | Silly American Loser Brand | Cool Canadian Winning Brand |
|---|---|---|
| Cream Cheese | Philadelphia | Tre Stelle |
| Yogurt | Yoplait | Liberte |
| Chips | Lays | Miss Vickies |
| Tortilla Chips | Tostitos | Que Pasa |
There are many that we are already doing, like Balzac's or Zavida instead of the garbage coffee that tends to come from the USA, or the aforementioned French's for Heinz. Cheese and other things we already were almost entirely local (or Quebecois) purchases. We are continuing to go to the Farmer's markets.
There are also some things that we are struggling with. I swapped out Coke for Canada Dry, but despite the name, that isn't really Canadian owned. I've been trying to move more towards PepsiCo products instead of Coke, because many of them are made (not just bottled) in Canada, but they're still American owned.
Beer and Liquor - we already purchase almost entirely local or Quebecois.
Entertainment 🏴☠️?
We are looking at cutting out the American entertainment apps, but this is a hard one! CTV, CBC, and Global don't quite cut it, and they show a lot of American shows. I'm not going to just straight up advocate for piracy.
Travel
We have stopped all travel to the US for the forseeable future, which is unfortunate because there are friends and family members that I would love to visit.
Amazon
This is the pervasive one. I use Amazon for a lot of things; even this blog is hosted on AWS! We are trying to ensure that we do even the minor purchases in brick-and-mortar local stores instead of impulse buying things that are convenient.