sore loser...

I am not a competitive person. Which is what you say when you are, in fact, a sore loser. When I was a kid, my brother was just enough older than me that he was always physically two steps ahead—a condition that has a tendency to level out eventually, but also one that can be a source of much anxiety through the younger years. Our neighborhood friends were also his age (and size), so in the games that boys play...soccer, football, baseball, basketball (I suppose it would have been hockey had I been born somewhere a little less, well, Texas-y)...I guess you could say I had a tendency to lose. I was probably fine with this for a while, I honestly don’t remember, but eventually, it started to tick me off. Loss after loss became a source of manifest frustration. Screaming tantrums, crying jags, the whole bit. Little kid frustration at the fact that the world didn’t seem to work the way it did in the Disney sports movies. I wasn’t upset that I was losing; I was upset that the whole thing seemed so unfair.

Being the runt made me agitated, and I say that I was not competitive, but I was actually the worst of the bunch. But losing time after time made me hate the games, made me throw up my hands and eventually walk away in disgust. Finally I just quit playing, if anyone asked, I just said I wasn’t competitive, I found other outlets, comfort zones where physicality wasn’t critical; books, music, things like swimming or theatre, places where I played alongside rather than against.

Business is not a comfortable or un-competitive space. Even before I was a business owner it had become manifestly obvious that competition, even ruthless competition, was a fact of business life. Just like big kids dominate little kids, big fish swallow small fish, corporations will feast on small businesses. Only the biggest, strongest or sometimes the most creative, quickest or smartest survive in the big game—unfortunately, that doesn’t always mean the best.

Being ‘non-competitive’ in my youth gave me some perspective. It helped me distance myself and observe—it helped me to look for the merit in things that existed beyond the usual benchmarks, the trophies, the material successes.

As a restauranteur, for instance, my obvious goal in a purely competitive mode would be to become McDonald’s, arguably the most successful ‘restaurant’ concept in history. Money, power, market share...it’s all there. They are the Superbowl champs of food. And they are also a blight upon the land. I feel no love for this monstrous beast—It has leveled rainforests in its quest for cheap meat, it has created an entire industry where genetically modified corn fattens grass eaters beyond reason in concentrated toxic spaces that have made me, at times, question whether or not humanity has lost its soul. And then there’s what they’ve done to the cattle (wait for it...). But seriously, McDonald’s is all plastic and disposable in a world where every indication is that plastic and disposable will eventually choke the life from our oceans, our land, and, inevitably, ourselves. This competitive edge has brought them fortune, but we have all lost much for their gains (even as we have gained much from their fries...) All because they are very, very good at winning. It is as if they have successfully mastered the sport of feeding us our own feet, the better to keep us from walking away from this destructive path.

What would be an alternative? Is there one? Or is competing so aligned with our nature that we are trapped into this Sisyphean game forever?

When I lived in Oakland, California—I was down the street from an awesome coffee shop—they used to make an iced mocha with chocolate ice cream that would kill you dead on the spot, and then restart your heart at double speed all in the space of one quick gulp. Let’s just call it delicious. One day Starbucks decided to open a shop on the same stretch of road. Next door. It’s vicious. I mean, my little coffee shop was good, but not so good that it could afford to share a small market. It was pure predatory behaviour—That Starbucks didn’t need to succeed, it just had to outlast...I’ve got a dozen stories like that, and so do you. And the fact is that there is a twisted logic to it all, that is to say, when the object is to win at all costs, anything goes.

Are these corporations evil? No, just good competitors. A positive case could even be made for McDonald’s, Starbucks or WalMart; these guys are huge and generally irresponsible, but when they do make a choice on the side of angels, it can have massive effects...McDonald’s has implemented programs certifying and only using slaughterhouses that kill humanely, has had positive effects on millions through charitable actions such as the creation of the Ronald McDonald houses or their sponsorship of the Special Olympics; StarBucks has made choices like providing the options of Fair Trade or organic coffee, even turning these formerly fringe products into household words (without necessarily always being the best at choosing them...) Even WalMart stands poised to completely inflate the market share for organic foods, albeit at the very real risk of diluting the meaning of that word to the point of meaninglessness. The point is that when a corporation is a good citizen, its impact is on a scale that few small businesses could ever hope to achieve.

So why do I despise these places so much? If we are hardwired, if it is inevitable that we compete, and if, within the competitive world there is always going to be a winner, why can’t I just accept it and move on like everyone else seems to have? Maybe it’s because I am a sore loser. I can’t stand to see that smirking jerk in the winners circle with the babes and the trophy, knowing full well that he cheated his way to the top; it is the unfairness of the game that irks me most. And maybe, just maybe, it’s because I know there really could be a better way. I feel like the corporate big kids all acknowledge it, with these charitable acts, these nods to environmental responsibility or to social justice. They realize that some large part of our success as humans is contingent upon the interconnected nature of our actions.

When it comes to how I spend my dollars, I always prefer the quirk to the quick, the creative to the consistent, the human to the machine. Give me greasy spoons and mismatched forks over McStyrofoam™ any day. I love to see the kinds of restaurants where people sit and talk and feel like they own the place—and I don’t feel any sense of competition with them, even when they are next door. Little restaurants like the ones we’ve got (and have sadly sometimes lost) around our downtown are special, as are the bookshops, bead stores, thrift shops, yoga studios...we are blessed with a host of real and worthy businesses around here. The kind of spots that are worth supporting and the kind that deserve to win—even though you can also choose cheaper, faster and less thoughtful versions of anything they sell at franchise version of the same around the corner or up on the highway. Maybe what I like is that these little places exist in the same way that healthy people and ecosystems work, with diversity, interconnectedness, care and love.

When I was a teenager, I met Bob Atkins at his house long before I entered his homey little health food store—he had two beautiful daughters about my age and I was lucky enough to spend enough time with them to at least meet dad (if too unlucky for much else...), and though they were cute, but it was on my first trip to the health food store that I really fell in love. Rows of bulk bins, bags of flours, seaweed, tofu, sprouts...I had never found such an array of strange and wonderful delights—I felt like a young wizard in an alchemist’s laboratory. Brazos Natural Foods had the particular smell that I have since come to associate with every health food store: that blend of incense, musk, patchouli, yeast and garlic, that rich, savoury scent which I have found again and again in my life, in tiny shops and in giant groceries, scattered throughout a hundred small towns and sprawling cities, in Canada, throughout the U.S., even in Europe. It is a particular and comforting scent for me and every time I smell it, it always feels like coming home.

One of the things that attracted me to Kemptville, in fact to the area in general, was that every small town around here supports at least one if not more of these quirky little health food shops. It was a big factor in helping me have the faith that this community could also support an organic foods restaurant. Kemptville has a particularly nice one, Nature’s Way, which I have shopped at regularly since moving here, and where I am now known well enough that I am always greeted by name by most of the staff, a gaggle of sweethearts who genuinely care about the health of this community (and who definitely care less about me and more about my baby daughter...). I’m not going to say anything rude, but I couldn’t help but notice that recently a local grocery store, which although Independently (oops, sorry!) owned is still part of a much larger entity, which also happens to be practically next door to our little shop is adding a ‘store within a store’ health food area...and, well, I’ll just say that I’m a little peeved. The grocery store doesn’t need that market segment to survive, at least I don’t think it does, and, well, I guess the whole thing just feels fishy to me. It seems like that predatory, anything goes, play to win sort of nonsense that made me such a sore loser in the first place. Part of me says ‘Well, think of the positive, think of all the folks who would never go to a quirky little health food store who will now be exposed to organic foods, maybe even for the first time.’ But part of me, that sore loser side, sees a problem on the horizon for a cool little shop that deserves to win but has a big brother that’s always going to be a little stronger and a little faster.

I mentioned earlier that big brothers don’t stay bigger forever. There came a point for me where I certainly could no longer use that excuse in my losing to mine. Not being competitive is a nice idea, but compete I do, every day, for the hearts and minds (and especially the stomachs) of a small town outside of the city—knowing full well that the big kids can do almost everything I do faster and cheaper—but also knowing that they can never do it better or with more heart. They can smirk and strut in the winners circle, but they also have to try to sleep knowing that they cheated to get there. And they also know that someday, sore loser or not, I’m not going to be quite so little anymore. And neither are you.

Nature’s Way is located at 2676 County Rd. 43 in Kemptville; they are open Monday through Saturday from 9 to 6, stop by if you’re in the area.

--Chef Bruce