While many people may talk about putting local food on the table, fourth-year Carleton student Jasen Brousseau is showing people local organic food before it ends up on their plates.
Last March, the 21-year-old environmental studies student started a business called Lorgavore Tours. It involves taking people out of the city to visit farms that are both local and organic.
Brousseau says he started the tours because he feels people need to see what they’re eating and where it comes from.
“For me, the food issue really involves all aspects of social and environmental issues,” he says. “My motivation for starting [this tour] is to reconnect people to their food source.”
Originally called Locavore Tours, Brousseau’s business was named after people who stick to eating local produce. But then he spent some time stewing over a term that would include not just local food, but also organic food — two things he says are completely separate.
“One of the big things about the local movement is that there’s no organic part of that, it just means eating whatever’s closest to you,” he says. “People are just buying local for the sake of being local . . . but just because it’s down the road doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.”
So Brousseau coined the term “lorgavore” to include local and organic foods. On his tours, he aims to find farms that can provide both.
So far, he has taken four groups of about 25 people to Alpenblick Farm, which specializes in organic livestock like cows, sheep and goats.
A typical day-long tour starts when Brousseau and the other tour-goers take a 20-minute schoolbus ride from Kanata out to the farm. When they arrive, they hear from Robert Oechsli, the farm’s owner, about the benefits of eating local, organic produce.
The visitors then gather around an open cookfire for a hamburger lunch, with meat supplied from the farm and cooked by an organic chef. Afterwards, they get the chance to buy some of the farm’s produce. Brousseau also provides coolers so tour-goers can keep the food fresh before they return home.
The tour costs about $20 a person and runs in the summer.
“It’s important for [visitors] to learn about healthy nutrition and a healthy lifestyle . . . So that’s why with [Brousseau’s] help, we have those farm tours,” says Oechsli. “All the food on our farm is much different from the food in a supermarket because it doesn’t come from factory farms.”
Oechsli says he knows of four people who were vegetarians when they visited his farm. But after seeing how he treats his livestock, they were more open to eating meat again, he says.
Brousseau says his own experience of living close to farmland opened his eyes to sustainable, “healthy food systems.” He also credits his mother as the first person to encourage him to eat sustainably. Their family avoids pre-made food, and all of their staples like butter, eggs, meat, grains and vegetables come from local farms in Ottawa’s west end.
“To get first-hand experience affects people a lot more,” he says.
This summer, Brousseau says he plans on adding two other farms to the tour’s roster. He’ll continue running the business as a side project while writing his thesis during his final year at Carleton.
And while he expects to take on other projects after he graduates, he’s confident eating locally and organically will always be a priority.
“Whatever I do will certainly be furthering what I’ve started, I guess,” he says. “[It’s] sort of the reconnecting process and reconnecting people to the land.”
