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A lot of words on waste

I spend a lot of time thinking about waste. (And wonder: is this a waste of my time?)

Waste is inescapable in this culture, and we need to be talking and acting more decisively. Rubbish is engineered into every product we pick off a shelf. How much money have I wasted buying things that didn’t work, that didn’t last? What further damage are we doing to our environment by our willingness to live the throwaway life?

Waste doesn’t stop with the craziness we call consumerism; it’s patterned into our style of eating as well. Truly ethical meat eating demands that we use the entire animal if we kill one for food. My sister-in-law told me a hair-raising tale of an acquaintance who buys whole pre-cooked broiler chickens for her family, cuts the breast meat off and throws the rest into the garbage because nobody in her family will eat anything but white meat. Such people, in my opinion, don’t deserve to eat meat at all.

However. This article about nose to tail cooking concentrates on one body part that those raised on safely anonymous chicken nuggets or pre-formed luncheon meat will have particular problems preparing. Not so the bold souls at The Punter in Cambridge, whose Lamb Fries I had reported on back in November.

Some groups feel strongly enough about commercial food waste to do something about it. On my course in Italy we learned about Last Minute Market, which whisks unwanted food away from Italian supermarkets and processes or redistributes it. Second Harvest does this in Canada.Back in November, some plucky Londoners threw a free lunch for 5,000 to raise awareness about food waste.

It’s never too early to start preparing ourselves for Waste Reduction Week, coming up in October.  There are so many things we could do. How about bringing your own container for takeaways? Takeoutwithout is a great idea in Toronto; you can do your own thing by investing in a tiffin box and taking that. One British journalist experimented with the concept of shopping packaging-free a couple of years ago; and another offered 20 suggestions for reducing food waste. Our own David Suzuki has a few ideas as well. In the commercial kitchen, frugal is finding new panache among San Francisco’s chefs, according to this article.

People can educate themselves about using food they would otherwise have wasted, as this article shows, or learn to understand what the “best before” date means – because it’s not an arbitrary line after which your food will go bad.

Freegans and Freecyclers have understood this for a while. In her book Farm City, Novella Carpenter describes how she foraged in dumpsters and garbage bins to feed her urban animals. But there’s good, edible food in there still fit for humans too. In fact, here’s an excellent letter (originally written to the editors of Monday Magazine) from a resident of the Fernwood neighbourhood in Victoria, who watches waste more closely than most.

From: Edward Butterworth
Date: February 17, 2012
Subject: dumpster demise

Dear Editor,

It is with great sadness that we, the Fernwood Urban Gleaners Group, note the passing of possibly the last major open dumpster in Victoria, outside Thriftys Hillside supermarket this week. It was our ‘golden’ dumpster, reliably supplying us enough good food to feed ten or more hungry mouths. We expect it to be replaced with a second locked compactor, as exist at all the other large supermarkets in town, thus ensuring that surplus food goes to waste.

Far be it from us to moralize about Thriftys’ behaviour. They are locked into a system which make such waste inevitable. I have no doubt that their decision was an ‘economic’ one with moral implications not even discussed. What I question is the narrow view of economic decisions, that don’t see waste in a world of scarcity, that don’t see degradation and pollution of the environment as debts being accumulated. It is not a moral shortfall but lack of consciousness, a sort of blindness to the consequences of our actions, to the fact that humanity is on the brink of paying these debts. Every plastic tub of yoghurt, sour cream, salsa, hummus, etc. we salvaged was recycled, saving them from the landfill.

I joked that dumpster diving was the best paid job I ever had. Organic fruit and veg., half a dozen $35 spiral sliced hams, boxes of organic yoghurt, milk, bulk nuts, artisan bread… One night I opened a garbage bag to find $400-worth of gourmet imported cheese. For a week I was the cheese fairy, dealing out exotic French cheese to all and sundry. It was the dumpster land of milk and honey too good to last, I suppose, in this world of impermanence.

So many people thought we were taking undue risks eating discarded food. But I have spent years wandering the third world and understand the rudiments of hygiene and food safety. Foodsafe is about ensuring zero liability and thus errs heavily on the side of caution. Cheese, for example, goes mouldy at a certain point, but unlike with bread, the mould can be cut off leaving the rest of the cheese good to eat. There was no sign of mould on any in that bag. There is still cheese in my fridge that was gleaned a month ago. I consider myself well-informed enough to take responsibility for my own body and what I put into it.

While I feel gratitude for the gift that was this brief window of abundance I am impatient to see change in this society. For example, while we enthusiastically recycle all plastics that come over our doorstep, supermarkets and all businesses are free to dump them with impunity and do so in huge quantities. I want to see regulations to stop this. Businesses would whine that this would undermine their profitability but with a level playing field they would just pass on the increased costs to consumers. Then we would begin to pay the real costs of what we consume without generating environmental debt. In a world where a billion people go hungry, in a society where homelessness is on the increase and people are expected to live on $650 a month on welfare, I want to see laws prohibiting such waste of food.

It was taboo when I was young.

Edward Butterworth

Had enough? If not, here are a few more links:

Food Waste in Canada (November 2010)
Why Wasting Food Wastes Nature (May, 2011)
Redirecting food waste (March 2011)

Re-entry: Denise Dunn; IdeaWave

I bade farewell to Saskatchewan on Friday afternoon: a blizzard was in the forecast for the following day, but as we lifted off, it was clear enough for an atmospheric sunset, and at the other end of the journey, the rain paused so I was able to enjoy the freshly rinsed walk from the plane and the aromas of salt and cedar that greet arrivals to Victoria’s airport.

 

Saturday was too fraught for me to make it to the first day of IdeaWave, so I missed hearing some great speakers, as was reported to me later. I did manage to go to the memorial service for Denise Dunn, whose sudden death leaves a mighty vacuum in the many spheres of her involvement, not least her generous and welcoming presence in Transition Victoria, where she was active in the Reskilling group, and led the Meet, Mend & Make evenings and the Linen Project. There were around 200 people gathered to remember her, so she got a good send-off.

After that I returned home to continue fretting over my talk on CSAs at IdeaWave this morning. It went reasonably well, although there was a total failure of technology when the lovely pages of my Powerpoint presentation galloped off on their own, so I cut the cord and went imageless and belowtech with my index cards. However. The technology worked well enough to animate quite a number of 10-minute presentations and I learned diverse and interesting stuff from some interesting speakers.

Some of us lunched at Ingredients, where my spicy quinoa chili was good and most welcome, particularly as we’d walked through a Victoria snowstorm – the kind that doesn’t stick – to get there. We stopped at a Chinese bakery on the way back to pick up a bit of sweet fortification (a warm sesame ball with a sweet red bean centre) for the last series of speakers. The afternoon was further fortified by the generous offerings of Lighthouse Brewery, and the final presenters met warmer and warmer applause, so it seemed.

Among the things I heard about over the course of the day were Makerspace (and the Maker Faires – of which there will be one in Victoria in July); the possibilities opened up by iPads to help people with developmental disabilities communicate; the food possibilities of marine plants; the possibilities of diamagnetics in space travel (and the amazing levitating ability of pyrolytic carbon); and a moving presentation by photographer Rob Jirucha about his project to try to photograph 34 elders who are seeking to transfer the language and culture of BC’s 34 distinct first nations languages while they still exist. Here’s a video he made of the project so far:

SENĆOŦEN Language Champion from Language Champions on Vimeo.

 

 

The future of meat?

The last few days at the SWG writers and artists colony are shooting past. The nuthatches returned last week, in fighting form, shooing away chickadees and picking all the largest peanuts to stash in nearby tree trunks.

Meanwhile my inbox has been attracting distractions. Stan has been sending me some meaty articles so I am sharing them with the rest of you as you prepare to tuck into your Sunday roasts.

The Guardian has just posted an article about the £200,000 burger that’s been whipped up in a test tube, in a well-intentioned move to cut greenhouse gas emissions linked to intensive cattle farming. Fair enough, sez I: if people really don’t care to know where their food comes from, and few seem to, why not? Could it taste any worse than TVP, or a frozen supermarket soyburger? It might even be healthier than a school cafeteria burger or frozen hamburger patty, since it wouldn’t be walking around in its own contaminants. Gwynne Dyer had been talking about cultured meat earlier this week, and some months ago we learned about the amazing progress Japanese scientists had made in recycling.. erm.. certain waste products into meat-like substances.

We are eating, I hope, closer to the source of our food at the abbey, although there were some niggling questions in my mind about the historical accuracy of the menu for last week’s Medieval Feast, which featured breaded fried chicken and macaroni and cheese served on locally-made bread trenchers. Try it yourself next time you don’t feel like doing dishes and your meal leaves your guests hungry enough to eat their plates!

Chocolate, gastronomy and Seedy Sunday

The writers and artists at the SWG winter retreat spend a lot of time thinking about food, and chocolate is one of the essential treats we administer to keep us healthy, happy and creative, meditating on all those dark sweet flavonoids as we search the cold white fields for inspiration. With Valentine’s day around the corner, it never hurts to spend time thinking about chocolate: what is it, where is it made and by whom? The industry has a poor record of exploiting producers and depending upon child labour, so if you want  your valentine chocolate to mean what you think it does, you should have a listen to this and ask questions wherever you buy your chocolate. Fair Trade chocolate is always the best choice: if you don’t eat the rest, savour the thought that you are contributing to a better world, one calorie at a time.

Once you have bought the best, most fairly produced chocolate you can, you might like to whip up a little mousse. This one sounds like a good bet, particularly if you are catering for the dairy-intolerant. I was a little surprised to see the recipe credit go to  Hervé This, one of the fathers of molecular gastronomy, as it’s remarkably low tech.

Speaking of gastronomy, I have just come across a 2010 broadcast of The New Gastronomy, from one of my favourite BBC radio shows, The Food Programme. It discusses academic training in gastronomy, starting with the University of Gastronomic Sciences, where I spent 2007 earning a Master’s of Food Culture & Communication (as documented on this blog). It’s an interesting look at the field of gastronomy and how and why it is being taught, though the Italian segment looks only at the three year undergraduate degree rather than the one year master’s that I did. (And I find Sheila Dillon‘s mispronunciation of Alice Waters’ name rather endearing). Other courses in the US and England are also discussed. It gave me a sense of renewed satisfaction that I had done the course.

Seedy Saturday takes place next weekend in Victoria which means winter is on its way out, and locals can start to plan for spring, buying seeds, swapping their home-reared seed and taking in a few talks about gardening. The event, which aims to encourage the sharing of seeds in the interests of protecting our country’s seed diversity, has got bigger every year, and I’ll be sorry to miss it, so am doubly grateful to have made it to the GTUF seed swap last month. GTUF will be at the Victoria event this year, joining other UFs (as we call our community food security groups) in a discussion of urban farming and food security.

READing and retreating

I am back at St Peter’s Abbey for another winter writing retreat with the Saskatchewan Writers Guild and CARFAC artists. Mild and sunny outside, with hungry birds loading up on free peanuts. When I first started coming to the winter artists colonies, about ten years ago, only the chickadees were bold enough to come to our hands; then the nuthatches took over. Today it was only chickadees. Indoors, the colonists, as once we were known (retreatants just doesn’t have the same ring) are unloading ideas and getting into the swing of a quiet time among the monks.

A week ago I attended an anniversary party for the Victoria READ Society, which promotes literacy to all ages. This event was a day of games held at Government House in Victoria, introduced by Steven Point who toured the proceedings and seemed to be enjoying it. Also present was David Bouchard, the society’s newly-appointed literary ambassador, who was sporting his Metis sash and entertaining youngsters on his collection of flutes. Elsewhere there was a hot game of magnetic poetry happening, and much else besides.

Year of the Dragon: seeds, storms and Sipsmith gin

For the past three years, the Gorge Tillicum Urban Farmers have met in January, ahead of the larger “seedy” events in Victoria and elsewhere, in order to swap and share our locally grown seeds. It’s one of my favourite things about this neighbourhood’s delightfully mixed group of gardeners, chicken-lovers and food geeks. There’s no guarantee the seeds will sprout, no fancy packaging and no cost. The seeds mostly come from plants that GTUF members have grown in their own gardens and then saved, so are tested and adapted to our local climate. This gives them a big advantage over seeds purchased from major seed producers, who may be in a completely different growing zone from the consumer. Our seeds also come with an opportunity to tap the knowledge of the producer: could be someone with years of skill, or maybe just a delighted first-timer.

This year 60 of us were joined by affable seed guru Dan Jason, the visionary behind Salt Spring Seeds and the Seed and Plant Sanctuary for Canada. He’s also the star of Gardens of Destiny, a documentary about the importance of seed saving. Jason had put out a call a year or so ago inviting communities to consider establishing community seed banks, in order to preserve locally-adapted plant varieties (all seeds are under threat from seed patents and GMO contamination by seed multinationals) and to provide a hedge against food insecurity. Some of GTUF’s members ran with the idea and we’re in process of starting our first plantings for a seed bank this year.

After the first half hour of picking and choosing for our gardens, we settled in to hear Jason speak and answer questions on seed saving and community seed banks. He began with a primer on why we should do this: in short, because our food seeds are at risk: multinationals have been ramming through GMO legislation despite the lack of testing for food safety, the potential health dangers from unlabelled GMO ingredients (which are in nearly every processed food you can buy in North America) and cross-contamination of our food supply with GMO. This puts our ability to grow safe and nourishing food at risk.

The good news is that Jason believes we can take matters into our own hands and make a positive difference, if we join with our neighbours to safeguard our seeds and learn to grow food:

“Community seed banks are an extension of something people have done throughout recorded history. With a community seed supply, people become the custodian of their own seeds; this empowers a community to grow what is wanted to eat there.”

He stressed the importance and also the ease of saving your own seeds:

“Plants produce a phenomenal amount of seeds. You mostly get so much back from a single plant it doesn’t take a huge number of people to do this. You maybe need just a couple of dozen in each community. You don’t have to be an expert in all seeds. Just go with the people who know tomatoes or beans or parsley, and make them the mentors for those varieties. They can advise and teach others about details of saving seeds in a particular family.

Jason was particularly encouraging about the prospects for urban farmers who are buffered from cross contamination by GMOs because of their distance from large farms, the only economically-feasible places GMOs can be grown. He spoke in praise of the higher yields that any small scale production can get (large scale industrial producers are handicapped by input costs, including fuel and equipment, and by the risks of monoculture; small growers can diversity to protect against crop losses, and can monitor and deal with potential problems more easily) and observed that growing in neighbourhoods we can share the strengths and weaknesses of our situation: the shady side of a street growing greens and the sunny side growing the heat-loving crops like tomatoes and peppers.

More of the same message seems to be contained in this book, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice and Sustainability which I suspect is not the simple attack on vegetarianism that its title suggests, but more of what its subtitle says. A preview in this video:

And finally, I will be nursing myself through the dragonly blasts of wind and water that have started this year with  sips from a precious bottle of Sipsmith Gin, made in Hammersmith, London which I brought back from the UK.  I’d heard a bit about on a Radio 4 program that talked to artisanal gin makers in London and am looking forward to taste-testing it against my favourite local brand, Victoria Gin.