Tomatoes, Cucumbers & Peppers, Oh My!
Because of Canada’s long cold winters, it is often suggested that fresh food on patient trays is not possible, but greenhouse vegetables provide a welcome injection of fresh food throughout the year. In Canada, greenhouse vegetable production is a $1.5 billion dollar[1] a year business with approximately 2400 farms reporting greenhouses covering just under 114 million square feet of land[2]. The main crops coming out of Canadian greenhouses are: English cucumbers, beefsteak and on-the-vine tomatoes, sweet peppers and lettuce. Some provinces offer all of these vegetables while others, like Ontario, offer all but lettuce.
Import/export is common throughout much of our current food and agricultural sector, with Canada exporting 382,000 tonnes of greenhouse vegetable crops each year and then imporing 67,000 tonnes of the exact same produce[3]. Some of this reliance on imports may be due to lower prices of greenhouse vegetables coming in from South and Central America, creating a wasteful food distribution system that relies heavily on other countries to provide us with our food rather than building an internal resilience that ensures farmers are paid fairly and hospitals, long term care and other institutional facilities can provide people with fresh food produced within our borders.
Many greenhouse vegetable associations work directly the broadline distributors to allow easy access to the fresh, vine ripened products that are offered from Canadian greenhouses. The freshness of the product is one of the main selling features; vegetables are ripened on the vine and have much shorter distances to travel than imported foods making sure you get a ripe product rather than produce that is ripening on a truck during it’s travels. A study done by Waterloo Public Health out of Ontario found that some of the most commonly purchased foods travel an average of 4500 km further than their locally produced counterparts[4]. This study suggests that there are tangible environmental advantages to sourcing crops from Canadian greenhouses during the winter rather than importing them from farther afield. Additionally, being able to provide patients with ripe red tomatoes in the dead of winter as opposed to some of the mealy textured imports, will liven up the palate of even your choosiest patients.
As with all menu engineering, the slightly higher price of Canadian greenhouse vegetables can be compensated for by looking at waste, quality and impact. This can be achieved by smaller serving sizes of these luscious ripe vegetables, adding them as a garnish or incorporating them into a salad to help mitigate costs. Even facilities without traditional kitchens of cooking facilities can add freshness to menus year round with greenhouse vegetables since they are best utilized fresh to take advantage of their fantastic flavor and texture.
Watch!
The Ontario Greenhouse Vegetable Industry Video
Did you know?
Fun facts about greenhouse vegetable production
- Greenhouse tomatoes and sweet peppers are available from March to November while English cucumbers are available year round[5]
- Greenhouse tomatoes are pollinated by bumblebees whose hives are situated throughout the greenhouse (honeybees tire of searching for nectar so bumblebees are used because they will keep working without much reward)[6]
- Greenhouse vegetables are grown in nutrient rich water rather than soil eliminating the need for herbicides.
- In greenhouses, the good guys win, well, the good bugs eat the bad bugs at least, meaning that there are low levels of chemicals used in pest control.
- A serving of vegetables is equivalent to ½ a cup of chopped cucumber, tomato or peppers.
