There’s been some flap about how Facebook makes rather too free with the photos and personal information posted by its subscribers – using people’s personal photos for advertising without asking and so on.

No sooner do we sort out that – to some extent (by adjusting privacy settings) – than we’re presented with Google’s new terms of service which you must agree to in order to post photos on Blogger, or Picasa albums (emphasis mine):

Google claims no ownership or control over any Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Picasa Web Albums. You or a third party licensor, as appropriate, retain all patent, trademark and copyright to any Content you submit, post or display on or through Picasa Web Albums and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Picasa Web Albums, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, distribute and publish such Content through Picasa Web Albums, including RSS or other content feeds offered through Picasa Web Albums, and other Google services. In addition, by submitting, posting or displaying Content which is intended to be available to the general public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, distribute and publish such Content for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services. Google will discontinue this licensed use within a commercially reasonable period after such Content is removed from Picasa Web Albums.

I fear my love affair with Blogger – and all things pertaining to the Google empire – may be drawing to a close…

As the canning season progresses, it might be useful to refer to the Table of Condiments for guidance. I’m not sure how accurate it is, but it’s entertaining!

The Slow Food Vancouver Island & Gulf Islands convivium has been eventless for some months, so it was with joy and sunshine we celebrated the love-apple yesterday at Haliburton farm, hosted by the delightful Dayle of Terralicious gardening & cooking school.

We brought tomatoes for tasting

enjoyed a seed-saving demo

and then chowed down

on some extraordinary grub. I must say that Slow Food events have the best tasting food, and the most enthusiastic diners.

Dayle even dropped a perfect loaf of hot bread

on the table which we fell upon with as much enthusiasm as we could muster, given the wonders that had preceded it. She had made this pretty Andy Warhol Cake

which turns out to be a reincarnation of ye olde tomato soup cake, but she made it with heirloom tomatoes, of course. And Joan’s green tomato and apple crisp was an inspiration!

Then we had a tour of the farm which was, like us, baking gently in some late season sunshine.

And then gave out the raffle prize – seasonal condiments plus a bit of Slow Food swag –

but are holding off awarding the grand prizes (a place on a Terralicious course, a night for two at Sooke Harbour House) to award with signed copies of Michael Pollan‘s books, at a Slow Food sponsored screening of Food, Inc. at Cinecenta on September 22.

There has been a lot of buzz around the UK’s Food Standards Agency-sponsored study – actually not a field study but a literature review – released in July, which claimed that organic food was no better, nutritionally, than conventionally-grown. As this article points out, the flaw in the FSA‘s treatment of the topic was to sidestep the main fact so many people buy organic: to avoid pesticides and agricultural chemicals in our food. COG has a few things to say about the study as well.

People choosing organic are choosing it for a variety of reasons, including faith in organic farming methods, which attend more closely to the longterm health of the soil, water and animals involved. Choose “nutritionally equal” conventionally grown foods and you choose to support farming methods that have been shown to exhaust soil fertility, contaminate water and deplete nonrenewable natural resources that prop up chemical fertilization and pesticide productions.

For the yay-sayers, a new French study contradicts those pesky Englishmen and upholds organics as all-round better, because

organic plant products contain more dry matter and minerals – such as iron and magnesium – and more antioxidant polyphenols like phenols and salicylic acid.

and

Organic animal products were seen to have more polyunsaturated fats.

Carbohydrate, protein and vitamin levels were not studied because the authors feel they are insufficiently documented. They did look at pesticides though, and found

between 94 and 100 per cent of organic food does not contain any pesticide residues, and organic vegetables have about 50 per cent less nitrates.

It’s totally tomato season. I managed to can my first jars of diced tomatoes, which will liberate me from the tyranny of grocery store cans for a while. I have a bowl of ready-to-sauce beauties on my counter, some suffering a bit of seasonal splitting due to the amount of rain we’ve had over the past few days

and lots more on the vine, so I’m keeping fingers crossed against blight. And considering what to bring to the tomato brunch Slow Food is holding with Terralicious, at Haliburton Farm, this weekend.

Though I’ve been out there on work parties most every week, I haven’t posted much from Haliburton lately, but for starters here’s a selection of tomatoes they’ve had on the farmstand lately:

A frantic round of this and that last week. The event I was very much looking forward to, the Compost Education Centre‘s autumn worm party, was delightful. Half a dozen or so of us stood in some bonus sunshine for a couple of hours, getting our hands dirty sorting through the bins that had housed the centre’s summer campers – worms that are part of the school worm bin project.

These worms had been spending the summer lying around and eating and breeding and generally enjoying themselves, but now it was time they were rounded up and sent back to school. Local teachers will soon be stopping in to collect their charges, who will work all year demonstrating their skills at composting to a new year of Victoria’s schoolchildren.

We picked through the worm castings

to find and capture these light-shy worms and their eggs

and drop them in a big bucket which would be turned over in a few days to allow a finer sorting.
These are red wigglers, which is a fairly wide term for a number of different subspecies that include some natty tiger stripe fellows

and they love, as we discovered, corn – were found hanging onto cobs for dear life.

We heard that they were fed the contributions of discarded produce from a local grocery store – the only one in town that would supply the centre; the others have all gone funny and cite ‘health and safety’ as their reasons for tipping tons of produce into the dumpster every day. Such is our world.

So that was Friday’s excitement. On Saturday I hoisted the sign of the snail

to sit at the North Saanich Farmers’ Market and explain the world of Slow Food to passers-by (a good moment to do so with a few tasty events coming up in the Vancouver Island & Gulf Islands convivium). The market is small and neighbourly and featured the wares of Kildara Organic Farm,

some green eggs from Ameraucana hens (I’d seen some last October at Terra Madre, as Araucana Chickens are one of Chile’s Presidia products)

some local watermelons

some really local fruit and veg

but hands-down the busiest stall at any farmers’ market seems to be that of the bakers,

which featured some spectacular cupcakes

and gorgeous tarts

The weather was very up and down and at times it sheeted down, which did not stop our excellent local performer Paul Stephens.

Rain and chill being something of the story of the weekend, I was grateful for a taste of Peg’s fabulous Rebar-inspired spicy squash soup on Saturday night, made from – and served in – her amazing golden hubbard squash.

I keep remembering Ruth Reichl’s closing words when she spoke at the Food & Morality-themed Oxford Symposium a couple of years ago: how where food is concerned, most of us want to do the right thing, if only we could figure out what that was. Vegetable oil labelling certainly makes it harder to do right by your salads.

From a health standpoint, extra virgin olive oil should be one of those right things, as long as it’s fresh when you get it and that you use it fairly quickly (regrettably most olive oil producers do not provide a harvest date on their labels).

Here’s a comforting article about why it’s worth paying more for good olive oil. Which usefully explains a bit about pomace oil, something I have seen on proudly labelled on sale in a few places here, and which I suspect few consumers know much about. And all that got me back to thinking about olive processing, which is a complex and many-layered subject.

Pomace oil is the cheapest possible kind of olive oil, on a par with industrial refined olive oil used for blending by the food industry. It was historically the lowest grade of oil: used for lamp oil, soap making or lubricating machinery.

Pomace is the residue of olive oil pressings: the pits and pulp of the olives, and is variously used as fuel, herbicide, animal feed, road building material, or mulch. But it may also be treated with solvents – because there’s not much extractable oil left – to extract the last of the oil, and then refined to make it edible.

Which from a nutritional and flavour standpoint makes this no better than other refined vegetable oils, (“refined” here is a manufacturing process and not a value judgement!) which are not “extracted only by mechanical means” as extra virgin olive oil is.

It’s the chemicals and heat which cause refined oils to have less character and nutritional value than cold-pressed oils. There have as well been health risks reported from consuming pomace oil.

But industrial olive processing has created some new problems: pollution and water consumption. For speed and convenience, the new olive oil extraction processes involve injecting water into the first of two, or sometimes three, phases of pressing, using centrifugal drums. The oil emulsifies with the water into a paste that emerges from the first phase and needs to be treated again, with more water, to separate them.

The so-called “vegetable waters” that result from this separation are contaminated with the inedible compound oleuropein in olives (try eating one off a tree sometime to understand the term “inedible”), and are considered toxic. This water is a major polluting by-product of olive production, whether for oil or for eating (eating olives must be repeatedly soaked and rinsed or brined to make them edible), and nobody has managed to work out a way of re-using this substance; worse, it can contaminate water supplies by seeping into groundwater.

“Vegetable waters” are not toxic in the way that chemical treatments are toxic, since they’ve been produced only by combining olives and water: but if dumped in water systems, they can cause eutrophication – meaning water pollution caused by excessive plant nutrients. The same kind of human-caused water pollution that results from runoff from agricultural fields, feed lots, lawns and golf courses, and sewage; which leads to algal blooms, oxygen depletion and a lot of dead fish.

This kind of pollution is a product of industrial olive oil processing. The traditional – laborious, low-yielding – method didn’t add water, so didn’t create contaminated vegetable waters, just our friend pomace, for which uses had always been found.

For eating olives, there has always been waste water from the curing process, further contaminated by the lye or salt used for brining; but the quantity has never before been as great as it is in today’s more populous world, and there were uses to which small quantities of this could be put: smoothing out plaster floors, oiling leather, keeping the weeds down in olive groves. But the volume is such, and our lives have changed so much, that there are no longer modern uses to which this can be put.

The special thing about the traditional method (now ponderously named “discontinuous extraction”) of extracting extra virgin olive oil is that it was done by crushing (mechanical means) alone, and chemicals and heat are not allowed to be used. So what you get is as pure an oil as you can get.

Other refined vegetable oils, for example sunflower, canola (rapeseed), soy, or “pure” (meaning refined) olive oil, typically undergo a process called hexane extraction. Hexane is a petroleum derivative, a toxic and potentially explosive substance with a poor environmental record; processors like it because it is an efficient way to extract the oil from seed crops. Other steps that may be needed to remove impurities that affect the flavour, odour, appearance, and shelf life of the oil include degumming (typically treating oil with steam followed by acid); neutralizing (with caustic soda); bleaching; and deodorizing. Which are terms that sound a lot less pure than a label that says simply “refined”.