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All kinds of water

Hard not to start the year in a state of environmental angst. Water is always topical here on Vancouver Island: we either have too much or too little at any given time.

In this our water-fronted, rain-sodden wintertime in Victoria, it’s hard to look ahead to our annual drought season, or to grasp the issues around water waste through the year. So I was interested to hear Costing the Earth this week, which was about how each of us can make a small change to our lifestyles – including being more aware of water use – to improve our record on consumer waste, which contributes to all kinds of evil.

One of the things they talked about was the concept of embedded water – how much water does it take to produce, for example, a single pint of beer (170 litres). Meat is, as usual, the worst enemy: a hamburger (150g) takes 2,400 litres to produce, because of the water needed to raise the animal it comes from. That of course is before you factor in the climactic damage caused by clearing Amazonian rainforest to grow soya to feed northern hemisphere cattle.

The commentator spoke to an environmental activist who was so horrified by what he saw when he visited the Amazon some years ago, he came back to London and changed his life. Among the other things he did was to install solar panels – yes, in London – to heat his water, power his fridge and generate electricity in sufficient quantity to make him the first individual to sell power back to the national grid. He gathers rainwater from his roof to use for flushing his toilet and washing the floor, and meets 75% of his water needs that way.

Over and over the commentator asked, what about China? We could all bend backwards, lower the thermostat, keep our heating off when we’re not in the house, buy less of the things that will go to waste — and meanwhile the Chinese are striving for all they’re worth to be big wasteful consumers just like us.

And the answer was, set a new consumer/environmental standard for those who aspire to a good standard of living. And in doing that, remember that “every single small action you take does make a difference.”

Another bit of trivia I was reading about: the British Medical Journal‘s discounting of the 8 glasses of water a day rule that used to cause us all to have a glass, if not a beaker, of water at our desks over the last decade or two.

“There’s a lack of medical evidence showing you need to down this much water daily,” says the Globe & Mail.

This common prescription can be traced to a 1945 medical recommendation that stated: “A suitable allowance of water for adults is 2.5 litres daily in most instances. An ordinary standard for diverse persons is one ml for each calorie of food. Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods.”

If the last, crucial sentence is ignored, the statement could be interpreted as an instruction to drink eight glasses of water a day. Evidence suggests you can meet all your fluid needs through food and other beverages including juices, milk and even caffeinated drinks.

And finally, maybe if we don’t have to drink so many glasses of it, we can cut our use of bottled water – with its embedded packaging, transport and retail costs – and go back to the tap. Gosh, who remembers drinking fountains?

Something for the new year

A lot of you expressed envy at my departure for Italy to study food for a year, and to anyone of that mindset in the Victoria area I offer glad tidings: my classmate Don Genova is offering a course at UVic called Food Culture: Fast Food to Slow Food which covers a lot of the sorts of things we learned in Italy. It gives you the opportunity to meet local food producers and doesn’t incur the cost of travel to Italy (though you might feel a need to go once it’s over!).

Here’s Don’s blog/podcast site if you want to get a sense of who he is. He’s a good speaker and he knows everyone, so I think it will be a great class. (And no, I’m not getting a commission, though I have certainly offered to be his assistant!!)

Anyone not in Victoria will perhaps enjoy looking at the scenery (from a walk along the Gorge on Boxing Day) and wishing you were here…

But it’s not all fun and games in Lotusland. We do have a police presence here, and environmentally-minded transportation for them. We weren’t sure what crimes were being fought at this point but it may have been that one of the fisherfolk needed help with a dodgy lure..?

Sustainable resolution

Looking for a new year’s resolution? How about aiming for sustainable consumption?

A handy guide to sustainable food has been published on Sustain‘s website. It’s a term that gets bandied around a lot, so it’s good to have a working (and workable) definition, which goes something like this:

  1. Buy local, seasonally available ingredients as standard.
  2. Buy food from farming systems that minimise harm to the environment, such as certified organic.
  3. Reduce the amount of foods of animal origin (meat, dairy products and eggs) eaten and eat meals rich in fruit, vegetables, pulses, wholegrains and nuts.
  4. Stop buying fish species identified as most ‘at risk’ and buy fish only from sustainable sources.
  5. Choose Fairtrade-certified products for foods and drinks imported from poorer countries
  6. Avoid bottled water and instead drink plain or filtered tap water.
  7. Protect your and your family’s health and well-being by making sure your meals are made up of generous portions of vegetables, fruit and starchy staples.

Hampers, hampered, hampering

Did my Christmas bit last Wednesday – enjoyed an afternoon hanging out in beautiful big Earle Clarke House

with Joyce and Peter, who every year host a gathering of 70-100 elves who come and go throughout the day bringing food and packing it into giant hampers for needy families in the area. This year the Salvation Army was seeking to provide some 1300 hampers in all, which come from local organisations and community groups as well as more informal groups like this one.

When I left, the turkey (and therefore hamper) count was a record-breaking 65; after I left the tally rose to an amazing 76. Not bad for word of mouth.

It’s a fiendishly simple idea: you just invite everyone you know, ask them to bring what they wish from the list – or raise cash donations to buy what’s needed – and then feed and water them while they work, and somehow it all comes together. It helps that Joyce is supremely well-organised and understands the power of good sign-posting.

She also makes a gorgeous Christmas cake, terrific pea soup and great eggnog,

and cranberry punch


for her grateful workers.

Joyce reports that three of the hampers went to the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Disorder Community Circle’s “Moms Mentoring Moms,” which provides support services to mothers trying to raise families where addiction has been a problem. The other 73 hampers went to the Salvation Army, along with cases of extra carrots, brussels sprouts and potatoes. She says that it took seven burly Salvation Army volunteers and two big trucks to collect it all.

Scotland it ain’t

The company which provides my email has also decided to change my surname. So maybe you can understand why I dislike being in North America in general, and why I have a special hate on for the Beach Boys?

It is maybe not as specific and passionate a hatred as I have for Canada Post, that government agency which has the bare-faced cheek to charge tax when it sells us stamps, and who took my money for holding my mail and then sent a selection of it back to Italy. So now I can choose to enjoy playing a complicated long-distance game of hide and seek in Italian with Poste Italiane during the Christmas rush.

However. I did have an outstanding meal in London before I left, at La Trompette. Here’s the evidence:

A starter of mixed leaves – endive of two colours and rocket – with roquefort, walnuts and poached quince:

Followed by an exquisite piece of sea-bream, crunchy and melting, on a bed of pureed potatoes with a darling lettuce heart and perfectly roasted parsnips for company, in a chicken jus with capers.

We would not dare to call this delicious morsel Pineapple Fluff, but superficially, and passion fruit aside, the resemblance was striking…

And on my first visit to an Italian grocery in Vancouver, which shall remain nameless for the moment, I was able to spot my first instance of cheese fraud. They had vac-packed Grana Padano and were selling it as Parmigiano-Reggiano; you can tell by the markings on the rind, which are diamond-shaped for Grana, whereas Parmigiano-Reggiano simply has its name spelled out together with the production date (which makes it annoying not to get a specific answer when I asked the seller how old their Parmigiano-Reggiano was: basically you are looking for something in the 24-36 month range, but all she could tell me was the piece in my hand would be between 2 and 4 years… since the producers will have charged the wholesaler more for a 36 month wheel than for a 24, it does matter to me the consumer which I am buying).

Grana is a cheaper, industrial version of Parmigiano-Reggiano, so it is more than cheeky to try to pass it off as its higher-priced cousin. I told the clerk at the cheese counter that the cheese had been mislabelled; she looked confused but gamely started filling a basket to get the offending merchandise off the display. But when I looked again, most of it was still there. I will hold judgement and whistle-blowing until I have a chance to check them out again. I greatly fear that my year’s experience has only served to make me potentially unwelcome everywhere I go.

Scotland, a scary place

Even the horses wear tartan.

And you must always, always, watch where you step.

And the plants are so large they get their own right of way.

And the Scots are so hardy they take their baths outside.

Well. Beyond all that, the writing has gone well this week, but what I’ve been constantly enjoying is all the reading.

Here’s a great discovery, thanks to Sian who found it in The Faber book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry: Elma Mitchell, who begins “Thoughts after Ruskin” this way:

Women reminded him of lilies and roses.
Me they remind rather of blood and soap,
Armed with a warm rag, assaulting noses,
Ears, neck, mouth and all the secret places:

Armed with a sharp knife, cutting up liver,
Holding hearts to bleed under a running tap,
Gutting and stuffing, pickling and preserving,
Scalding, blanching, broiling, pulverising,
– All the terrible chemistry of their kitchens…

And from the same anthology, I enjoyed “Chinese Poem” from Iain Crichton Smith, as I too have been wondering

When shall I see the city again,
its high towers and insurance offices,
its glare of unprincipled glass?

Rather too soon I am sure. And once I’m there perhaps I will be eating some of George MacBeth‘s material from “An Ode to English Food”:

…Fresh, tender and unbelievable English
duck. Such

luscious morsels of you! Heap high the
groaning platter with pink fillets, suckling pig and
thick gammon, celestial chef. Be generous with the
crackling. Let your hand slip with the gravy trough,
dispensing plenty. Yes, gravy, I give you your due,
too. O savoury and delightsome gravy, toothsome
over

the soft white backs of my English potatoes,
fragrant with steam. Brave King Edwards, rough-
backed in your dry scrubbed excellence, or with
butter, salty.

And another Scottish treasure I’ll be looking for is W.S. Graham, who died in 1986 but whose Nightfishing (1955) still gets hailed as a model of writing about the fishing life. He writes well about the cold, too, in “Malcom Mooney’s Land” which I read in hopeful anticipation of prairie blizzards (experienced from a warm and safe observation point) in my future…

From wherever it is I urge these words
To find their subtle vents, the northern dazzle
of silence cranes to watch. Footprint on foot
Print, word on word, and each on a fool’s errand.
…
From the rimed bag of sleep, Wednesday,
My words crackle in the early air.
Thistles of ice about my chin.
My dreams, my breath a ruff of crystals.
the new ice falls from canvas walls.

Just taking a last look round Edinburgh before I vanish back down south on Saturday and way back west on Tuesday. The city is, as you might expect, full of Christmas buzz, although the bus system is making me cranky and is a sterling example of the evils of privatisation. Here’s a challenge to all: in what other major city on the planet can you find multiple bus companies running separate services along many of the same routes, where the companies do not accept one another’s day passes, and where the bus drivers can only sell you day passes that work on that service? The maps (like those of Parma) are a confusing if colourful spaghetti-like maze and I suppose that the colourblind bus riders of Scotland have all long since given up and moved away. Or bought cars.

The main attractions for me today were to see the Joan Eardley exhibition I’d been hearing about, and to see what was up at the ethical Christmas fair on Princes Street. The sun is shining, the wind is blowing, and ever so occasionally, there’s a little smack of mist.