Life in the salad bowl continued last Monday when I was privileged to spend a day volunteering in the kitchen for the Meet Your Maker Vancouver Island event. Organized by Farm Folk City Folk, it was the first time it had been offered on the Island, and it was a staggeringly good affair, at least from where I was standing (and peeling and chopping and arranging and carrying and washing and slicing).
Around 80 food producers (farmers, fisherfolk, processors) and food buyers (from restaurants, delis, grocery stores) converged on the Saanich Fairgrounds for a day of networking and information exchange. Participating producers were invited to donate their wares which local chefs turned into the most extraordinary potluck lunch I’ve ever had the good fortune to sample. We kitchen volunteers were kept busy for four or five hours arranging, heating, cooking and/or simply laying out the wares that arrived in a steady stream starting at 8am.
Below, Haliburton Farmer Nate from New Mountain Farm; luscious lemon bars; baker Byron Fry and chef Dwane MacIsaac find their zen at the start of the long buffet.
As I overheard someone say, gaping at the bounty heaping their plate, it’s hard to believe in food insecurity when you see this small sampling of what can be produced on Vancouver Island. Which, need we remind ourselves, is small scale agriculture by necessity.
It has been quite the delicious craziness over the past couple of weeks which has kept me away from this blog and out in the edible world enjoying lots of food and food talk. Here’s one of the events I was party to.
Farmer 2 Farmer was a modest little conference held back on March 7. Robin Tunnicliffe, from Saanich Organics, was behind much of it, and Dwane MacIsaac of the Island Chefs Collaborative led the kitchen. The registration was around 100 in the week leading up, and the organizers prepared for around 120. But on the day there were more like 200 farm and food folk in attendance, chewing the fat over issues like options for farm labour, organic certification and creative fundraising solutions for farming, as well as more hands-on info on poultry nutrition, choosing berry varieties and techniques for direct marketing farm products. Most interesting to me (tethered much of the morning to the registration desk, and later to the book signing table after a short stint explaining Haliburton Farm‘s development in the context of a workshop on farm succession) was the generous lunch rolled out by members of the Island Chefs’ Collaborative. Bread from Byron Fry, Salumi from Cory Pelan and assorted wizardry from David Mincey and Dwane MacIsaac, with seasonal produce from local farms (squash, lentils, roasted beets, rutabagas, garlic), meant some pretty nifty loaves into fishes work and a good feed for all those extra bodies.
It was an intense ag-food weekend starting with Seedy Saturday at the Victoria Conference Centre. Many were the crowds, nigh on as numerous as the seeds on sale, and much was the diversity on offer. I was helping out at the CRFAIR stand, conveniently situated next to Jacob of Salt Spring Sprouts & Organic Mushrooms, who is always generous with his samples. I also sampled some excellent banana pancakes made by chef Joseph from his bean flour pancake mix. Managed to escape with only one package of seeds, this one from GTUFerKendell Nielsen, PAg, who had dropped off some mini-spaghetti squash seeds that caught my eye. I did not need her giant Jerusalem artichokes though they were beautiful. There was a very busy table of volunteers repackaging the donated seeds, and a large variety on offer (free for trade or $1 a package).
My book was on sale at the CRFAIR table (near the giant rutabaga); Verna & Bob Duncan talked fruit and fruit trees at their very popular stand, and it was spring all over the place with tender snowdrops and other spring shoots waiting to be taken home. There were many workshops as well, including a preview of the Changing the Way We Eat food talks which are upcoming at the Belfry Theatre in late April. Watch this space for news..
Sunday was a double whammy. First, the GTUF meeting, in which Gabe Epstein and Belle Leon shared some photos of community gardens in Victoria, Seattle and South Africa, and invited discussion about the nature and purpose of community gardens in our area. Then we broke for snacks – including two glorious pizzas hand-crafted by local caterer Eugene Monast who has often blessed us with food at our meetings. GTUFer Robert Baker had brought a basket along to show what he’d harvested from his garden that morning, encouraging us to make the most of winter growing.
And finally it was on to the VIVA-RAW monthly potluck, to see what delectables were on the table and to hear Aika Tuomi talk about mushrooms. He focused on shiitake, reishi and chaga mushrooms and did a good plug for mushroom powders and extracts on sale where he works, Ingredients Health Foods.
And the raw food we ate: below, a delicious and beautiful salad featuring pomegranate, kiwi and avocado; seedy flax crackers; mock salmon (walnut) pate (my contribution); zucchini noodles; ingredients list from some cocoa-date cookies; and finally the groaning plate which features everything but the late-breaking and improbable-sounding but gorgeous salad of mango, citrus and sauerkraut.
I love the random and unusual places my food interests take me. But then, as we learned at food school, gastronomy touches every aspect of life; and food being life-giving, its universal reach should not surprise us.
So last week I returned from beautiful Bellingham and stopped briefly in vivacious Vancouver, where I was whistled off for a delectable Palestinian lunch at Tamam on East Hastings. All the food is made from scratch, and tastes fresh and Tamam's hummusauthentic. We had a selection of treats, opting for the vegetarian menu – hummus, mutabbal (the Palestinian version of baba ganoush), mujadarah Tamam's Kunafah (rice & lentils with caramelized onion) with a lemony red cabbage salad, some house-made flatbread with za’atar and another with yogurt, followed by the very pretty kunafah dessert – spun pastry enfolding a couple of different kinds of cheese. I took away an order of Palestinian cabbage rolls (the cabbage is fermented, and stuffed with rice and vegetables) with a side of green salad, fuel for the ferry ride home. And it was a welcome respite from the indignities of BC Ferries’ franchised fast food offerings.
We stopped in at the Woodland Smokehouse & Commissary after that, and emerged with assorted house-smoked sausages, a salad of potato, bacon and mushrooms, and a long and wistful memory of the freezer cabinet and its load of Earnest Ice Cream, which is sold in reusable glass jars.
Once home I unpacked and readied myself for a trip to Salt Spring Island, where the CRFAIR roundtable meeting was treated to a tour of the newly/nearly finished community abattoir. Our guide and president of the abattoir society, Jean Brouard, made clear he was not the only vegetarian on the committee, and added that there were several vegans aboard as well.
After all, he told us, the foremost aim of this facility was to improve animal welfare. The draconian changes to farmgate meat processing several years ago had made it illegal for farmers to slaughter their own animals. Aimed at making large scale meat processing safer, the changes were devastating to small farm operations, particularly ones in remote locations. The financial and logistical repercussions of taking a small flock of chickens or a couple of lambs on the ferry for slaughter meant that meat production on Salt Spring dropped by nearly 50%. Local farmers and food activists were worried by the island’s corresponding drop in food security: having to import so much of the island’s protein put them at the mercy of steadily increasing ferry fares and put the few animals under production under considerable stress. Fundraising ensued and the island put plans together to build Canada’s first dual (red and white meat) abattoir.
Poultry cones
The community decided it wanted the facility to be a mobile abattoir, to share services with nearby Pender Island, and raised enough money in cash and grants to start building in January last year. Unfortunately, in the process of meeting the multiple and often contradictory requirements of the regulating agencies (municipal and provincial health authorities, CCDC and CFIA as well as building standards) the mobility dropped out of the picture. So did the first building inspector they’d worked with and his successor deemed it necessary that the building meet stringent seismic standards, adding nearly a third again to the not inconsiderable building costs. A new round of fundraising will soon begin to clear the debts incurred. The abattoir opened for bird business in late September, just in time for Canadian thanksgiving, and recently processed its first lambs. Adjustments and adaptations were in progress with carpenters and electricians fine-tuning reinforced boards and the new chiller equipment.
The abattoir is, like all those large and small, subject to rigorous inspection, with every animal checked by a federal meat inspector. It’s anyone’s guess what will happen if the federal government makes good on its promise to hand inspection over to the provinces – a move slowed by the recent Excel Meats disaster in Alberta, which showed that even the current system is fatally flawed.
Last weekend I happened upon this rather lovely book display in the window of the Laughing Oyster book store in Courtenay. I’m keeping good company!
This afternoon I go head-to-head with the Superbowl, whatever that might be, giving a book talk at 4pm at the beautiful Village Books in Fairhaven, Bellingham. I took the marvelously efficient and comfortable Amtrak train from Vancouver, which gave me a little time to wrap my head around a new laptop, purchased reluctantly after my previous faithful companion died a lingering death of old age (obsolete after 5 whole years: why is this legal??).
The trip also gave me time to reflect on last night’s thoughtful and inspiring talk by Seattle’s food forest designer, Jenny Pell. She spoke about community-driven food security initiatives in Washington and Oregon, including the Beacon Hill Food Forest in Seattle, a 7-acre parcel that is being developed as the largest public food forest in all of North America. It’s had lots of media coverage.
Pell, like many permaculturalists I’ve met, was a broad thinker who has passed the stage of thinking about change: the time for change is already here, and she wants to see movement into a more sustainable and positive way of life. Why, she asked, do we behave like zoo visitors, simply marveling over model achievements (like the Bullock Brothers’ permaculture homestead, or the solitary Sea Street in Seattle) and never creating multiples of them? We know what’s coming and that change is needed, but somehow we keep our heads down and live on as if we had nothing to do with making a sustainable world possible.
She admitted she was unusual, having never had a credit card nor made a mortgage payment, so was free of the economic traps that have wrapped so many in knots. Do what you need to do, was her message, and you too can live in a world where a salad costs less than a heavily subsidized hamburger, or you don’t have to call in the media in order to be allowed to keep your front yard food garden; where municipal planners can encourage home owners and builders to incorporate features like greywater harvesting and composting toilets; and where it’s not illegal to sell produce grown in your own garden.
Lost a bit of time to computer troubles, but we seem to be back on our virtual feet again.
This abnormally warm West Coast winter is blending seamlessly into spring with an alarming showing of buds on bushes even as the snowdrops do their seasonal duty. We’re all thinking about seeds just now. The weekend before last the Gorge Tillicum Urban Farmers seed swap attracted around 50 GTUFers and other interested parties. It was a friendly and interesting time, comparing notes on what had grown well in our neighbourhood, and enlivened by the arrival of several cases of last year’s seed stock donated by a good neighbourly commercial seller.
Among my trophies, I collected seeds for:
cucumbers (field and pickling)
kohlrabi (one can never have too much)
scarlet runner beans (some unusual & beautiful brown and cream coloured seeds)
mammoth pot leeks (I have regretfully given up on onions – just don’t have enough sun in my garden)
And I left small quantities of a large number of different plants including broccoli, celery, amaranth, calendula, oca, bulb fennel, black radish and eight different kinds of tomatoes, sugar snap peas and the remains of some unneeded seed packs, like onion (my plant list is here)
On Monday I was invited to speak to the fruit & veg group of the Victoria Horticultural Society. Rather than try to cross secateurs with more seasoned gardeners I chose community seed banks as my topic, and a lively discussion (several in fact) ensued. The GTUF seed bank, like many in these parts, was started after Dan Jason’s inspirational article on the topic. A good way to build goodwill, seed stocks and, ultimately, food security in your neighbourhood!
