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Olympic-sized arts cuts and global land grabs
As artists of many Olympic cities have discovered to their cost, when the lure of international trade beckons, arts funding goes out the door and into sports infrastructure, or roads, or trains, or any number of expensive and often worthy developments.
The Vancouver Olympics has caused both federal and provincial government purse-holders to grab and redirect funds intended for arts groups, tossing them into the Olympic abyss. The past year’s downturn has perhaps helped to accelerate the process in recent months.
Now BC Bookworld has had its funding pulled. If it goes down, so too perhaps its comprehensive reference offshoot, the BC Author Bank database. Rather than letting the loss of a $31,000 annual grant drown it, the magazine is asking interested readers to subscribe, for a pretty meagre $25 per year. Email them if you’re willing.
The individual amounts we’re talking are tiny, particularly if measured against Olympic expenditures, but they make the difference between life and death to non-profit arts organizations. BC already has one of the lowest levels of support for the arts in Canada, and the province wants to shrink it by 88%. Artists are hugely vulnerable to such cuts; it may appear to a population earning a steady wage that grants and subsidies are needless fripperies, but the point and benefit to the wider society of supporting the arts has been long and better explained and supported by independent studies and statistics.
What is disturbing here is to see money creating rifts between artists – who’s in and who’s out of the official arts presence at the games – and the introduction of high-flown arts planning; even though it must be obvious that the money has to come from somewhere. Obvious too that funding any grand Olympics arts program from the existing pot would necessarily cripple existing arts programs and that grand schemes often provide direct benefit to only the already well-rewarded big names.
We probably all know (having witnessed Montreal’s experience) that the costs to the local population of any Olympic event are astronomical, and are learning how the long-term “Olympic Effect” benefits international trade, not local industry. About which we should surely have questions – ethical as well as financial – after the hardships that people around the world have suffered this past year. And the very serious questions we should all have been asking for years about the effect of global trade and consumerism upon our world.
I am thinking dinosaurs today, but man-made dinosaurs with engines fuelled by collossal-sized greed. The Olympics has become a huge corporate machine in a world crawling with them. How do we small squashable individuals manage to keep from being crushed beneath it?
Speaking of which, this article about corporate ownership of arable land around the world came through my inbox today. Corporate greed seems hell-bent on removing human ability to feed ourselves in any sane and sustainable manner. Check out the article’s table that explains who’s behind the rush to control our food in the future.
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Food in cities and snow on mountains
This TED talk by architect and author Carolyn Steel has been circulating recently and, while it does simply discuss a lot that’s pretty well known now – urbanization, the planetary cost of meat and dairy consumption – gives some historical context to urban food production, asking us to think about food as an essential aspect of city planning, and how we’ve severed that connection in recent decades.
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
Speaking of cities, I was sad to see this message appearing on Victoria’s public library website. Municipal budget cuts are, ironically, impairing a service that is enjoying peak demand right now as people turn from bookstores to libraries to help them save money:
Here in Banff we’ve had our first snowfall and it’s warmed and cooled enough to make paths slippery. But not too cold or slippery for some of the walks we’ve had between the literary doings. Yesterday to the Hoodoos
and Saturday’s treat was a visit to Johnson Canyon
followed by a soak in the hotsprings. We’ve also been visiting the Wild Flour Bakery in town, which has fantastic cookies and beautiful bread.
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Watch those salads
This article about the top foods linked to food-borne illnesses is worth reading if you’re going on holiday, particularly if you’re going anywhere with large scale industrial food growing and processing (like, oh, Canada or the US?). The items on the FDA’s top-10 list are not always what you’d think (potatoes?? ice cream???):
Leafy greens: 363 outbreaks involving 13,568 reported cases of illness.
Eggs: 352 outbreaks with 11,163 reported cases of illness.
Tuna: 268 outbreaks with 2,341 reported cases of illness.
Oysters: 132 outbreaks with 3,409 reported cases of illness.
Potatoes: 108 outbreaks with 3,659 reported cases of illness.
Cheese: 83 outbreaks with 2,761 reported cases of illness.
Ice Cream: 74 outbreaks with 2,594 reported cases of illness.
Tomatoes: 31 outbreaks with 3,292 reported cases of illness.
Sprouts: 31 outbreaks with 2,022 reported cases of illness.
Berries: 25 outbreaks with 3,397 reported cases of illness.As the article makes clear, the problem is with the scale of manufacture and processing, not inherent in the foods. Illnesses are usually carried by cross-contamination through equipment and handling, or unsafe storage that typically results from using poorly trained (and badly paid) factory workers. These same foods might be perfectly safe if obtained from small organic growers or artisans working with local, fresh produce.
Here at the Banff Centre we are enjoying many salads, but following them with perhaps too many desserts.
It is all fuel for the writing of course, and last night we had some introductory readings, with more to follow on Friday. Three of the faculty read: Caroline Adderson, Sid Marty and Stan Dragland. A measure of the quality, I think, that fourteen readers did their five minutes each and the time flew by. Of course not having a watch might have helped with that…
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In her latest collection, Rhona McAdam navigates the dark places of human movement through the earth and the exquisite intricacies lingering in backyard gardens and farmlands populated by insects and pollinators, all the while returning to the body, to the tune of staccato beats and the newly discovered symmetries within the human heart.
“…A beautiful, filling collection, Larder is a set of poems to read at the change of the seasons, to appreciate alongside a good meal, and to remind yourself of the beauty in everything, even the things you may not appreciate before opening McAdam’s collection….”
Rhona McAdam is a writer, poet, editor, and Registered Holistic Nutritionist with a Master’s in Food Culture from Italy and a deep-rooted passion for ecology and urban agriculture. Her work spans corporate and technical writing to poetry and creative nonfiction, often exploring the vital links between what we eat and how we live. Based in Victoria, BC, and available via Zoom, Rhona is always open to new writing commissions, readings, or workshops on nutrition and the culinary arts.
