There’s a new bakery/pizzeria in my neighbourhood, which pleases me greatly as this part of Victoria has been a bit of a quality food desert. B-red Organic Bakery Patisserie & Pizzeria is a tiny place on a busy road, with two slightly dangerous parking spots (you must back out into aforementioned busy road when you leave) and a tiny counter for watching the world go by. Making efficient use of space and time, they bake by day (open for sales 10-3) and pizza by night (5-11 most nights, till 1am Fri & Sat), taking their weekends on Mondays and Tuesdays. Here’s a view of their whole wheat sourdough, called Miche, which was extremely good, with lots of flavour and crunch:

Lots going on right now. I must hurry if I want to catch the Rice is Life show at the art gallery.

GG nominee (announcement tomorrow) and excellent literary chap Fred Stenson is reading in Sidney on November 21st at the Red Brick Cafe, together with local treasure Rachel Wyatt, beloved of many alumni of the Banff Writing Studio.

Next Thursday November 27th there’s a one-day conference in Sidney that aims “to put the farm back in farmland”. The Farmland Conference: Our Foodlands, Our Future runs from 9.00 am till 6.30 pm and features plenary speakers farmer/agrologist Niels Holbek and MLA and agriculture critic Corky Evans.

Saturday 29th I’m tempted by the CRD Parks Magnificent Mushrooms outing. Or I could stay home and study all the ones that are growing in my lawn..?

Weirdness on the water: surprised to see this sight on Sunday morning. A passing dog-walker told me it was only foam from the reversing falls under Tillicum Bridge, but I’ve never seen this on the Gorge in the six years I’ve been looking at it. Something funny going on…

The Vancouver Island Slow Food Film Fest was small but tasty. Last night’s premiere was packed out, with excellent nosh

and such a keen audience of eaters that the Oyster Man

was able to go home oysterless. The screening of Island on the Edge went well and the panel discussion afterwards was lively and showed the keen awareness of the audience about local food issues. As a finale, we got to meet the chef, Michael Minshull, who took a bow with the film’s director Nick Versteeg, writer Don Genova and associate producer Jason Found.

Today’s lineup included Hijacked Future, which covered the issues around seed production and featured a great many Canadian farmers and researchers who spoke well and compellingly about the issues. There was a panel discussion afterwards, hosted by Don Genova, and featuring Sinclair Philip and the film’s producer/director David Springbett.

Gardens of Destiny, featured seed saver, forager and campaigner Dan Jason,

whose Salt Spring Seed Company has been doing a roaring trade in recent years, and who also heads the Seed and Plant Sanctuary for Canada, a network of Canadian gardeners devoted to nurturing plant diversity. The viewing ended with a bitter twist as Jason revealed, after the screening, that he had recently been given the boot from the showcase garden featured in the film by his landlords, and was currently considering his options.

The final feature, The World According to Monsanto, had some technical glitches – scratches on the dvd perhaps, or a tired dvd player (or, as one wag suggested, a Monsanto-engineered dvd player?!) – which cut things a little short. The film can be purchased fairly widely, or for the cheap and patient, it’s available for free viewing on Youtube (in 10 parts), or in 4 parts on LiveVideo.

We saw some previews as well. Here’s Eric Schlosser speaking to CBC, as part of a promo interview about the new documentary Food, Inc.

And Deborah Koons Garcia, director of The Future of Food, spilling the beans about her new film whose subject is, well, dirt:

Here’s a cheerful one for a film – not quite finished yet, I understand (though you can help to make it happen: see their website for more info) – about young farmers, called Greenhorns:

And I end this entry with the useful and appetising suggestion with which Nick Versteeg closed our meeting: invite some people to dinner, serve them some good, local food, and talk about it!

Last week I attended the opening ceremonies of the First Nations Collection at the Cowichan Valley Museum in Duncan, which includes paintings, carvings, masks and artifacts from local artists. The ceremonies consisted mainly of some drumming with dancing by local boys

and a couple of mercifully short speeches by the museum curator and the First Nations cultural coordinator, after which the overcrowded room emptied into the rest of the museum – not a huge place – to enjoy a little buffet which featured smoked salmon candy and smoked salmon & cream cheese wraps with capers and dill, and lots of sweets.

It’s local election time here, so I went to an all-candidates meeting last night, curious to hear the talk and see the one candidate (for mayor) who thought food was worth mentioning. His platform is built on the ideas of self-sufficiency and local autonomy that heated up a room in the downtown library last summer, at a town hall meeting on food security. Aside from Harald Wolf’s comments, there was no discussion of food, and no questions from the floor or the organisers. The closest they came was to talk about the berming of Panama Flats (sounds like a Woody Guthrie song title?) which all candidates who answered the question agreed was suspect activity, said they doubted the agricultural purpose of the berm, expressed concern about environmental consequences of messing with the drainage of these fields, and affirmed they planned to fight to keep the land in the much-abused Agricultural Land Reserve. In terms of what could be inferred about the 13 candidates from their appearance, one point I noticed was that only two candidates (Wolf and Brownoff) brought their own water in re-usable water bottles; 12 of the 13 had bottled water sitting in front of them – it appears only Wolf had had declined it.

Most of the talk was about better public transport, more affordable housing and methods of coping with climate change (answers to the latter were all, except Wolf, pretty much limited to better public transport!). Not a whisper about cultural issues…

One thing I enjoyed about the meeting was the timekeeping. Organisers used a yellow/red card system: a yellow card was a warning the time was nearly up; a red card meant stop talking and sit down. How I wish this had been in use in some of the poetry readings I’ve been to in my day.

This weekend there’s a Slow Food mini-film fest in Victoria, taking place at the Hotel Grand Pacific. For a trifling $25 you can attend the premiere night on Friday, to watch locally-made documentary Island on the Edge and enjoy a splendid reception featuring local treats including but not limited to: Sea Cider, freshly shucked Cortes Island oysters from the Oyster Man, and duck confit made from Cowichan Bay Farm duck legs.

Anyone wanting to stay on top of food issues in Canada can subscribe to mailings from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, or just check the Food Recalls & Allergy Alerts page for the latest. There’s been another BSE case, Canada’s 13th, whose investigation makes interesting reading.

I spent some time catching up on the Food Programme‘s recent reports, which included a thoughtful piece on organics in Britain. There’s been a decline in organic producers there, it seems, because the logistics of producing organic meat and dairy products involve a great deal of imported grain – which became quite a problem with the recent fuel price spike and the world-wide shortage of wheat. In addition, the higher price tag on food in general, but particularly organics – due to fuel and grain prices as well as the overall higher price of producing organic foods -have led to something called the “Lidl Effect” (named after a discount supermarket chain) where consumers are turning away from organics in favour of price-centred shopping. In the program, it’s argued that true organics (which fall within the upcoming EU legislation governing the area) require that producers use a virtuous circle production method, where each farm is more or less self-sufficient, producing its own grain to feed its livestock. They question the inclusion of large, industrial-scale organic producers who are watering down the guiding principles of organic food production.

Last weekend I participated in one of the many launches planned for Rocksalt, a new anthology of BC poets. The event I went to was in Nanaimo at the new public library which is large and beautiful but didn’t have quite enough seats for all the people who crammed in the foyer to see the 17 poets reading. The 108 poets featured in the anthology include, sadly for me, a Rhona (yay!), a Rhoda and a Rhonda. I think the sheer number or poets reflects the retirement and pre-retirement patterns for poets in Canada…

Harold Rhenisch, one of the editors,

Mona Fertig, the other editor and publisher

Nanaimo poet Tim Landon,

Joe Rosenblatt,

and my publisher, Ron Smith:

Meanwhile, working through my list of things to do, I had sent a post-six month query to a Canadian literary magazine I’d sent poems to back in the spring. Because the journal publishes an email address, I thought for purposes of a follow-up I’d email rather than send a letter, but my message bounced in seconds. I was feeling persistent, and rather fed up with technology that works against communication rather than for it, so I printed off the email and the bounce message and stuck it into an envelope with a suggestion the magazine check with its IT department, as things had reached a sorry state when a legitimate enquiry was being dumped as spam. Here’s the reply I got from someone (not an IT guy) at the magazine:

We haven’t received any other complaints about blocked emails (and we receive hundreds of emails a week). I suggest that the problem is on your end. You should run a full system scan on your computer. We have a Spam filter on our computer, but it does not block Spam, it only identifies it as such and lets it through. In other words, your email is being identified as malicious, not simply as Spam.

I guess unhelpfulness is not the exclusive domain of profit-oriented company employees. How could you know for sure you “haven’t received any other complaints about blocked emails” when those complaints can’t actually get through?

For that matter, how many of us even have the energy and persistence to lodge complaints about all the things that don’t work right in this indifferent and alienating world? It’s tiring! Even here in supposedly customer-friendly Canada it’s taken me all week – 3 failed phone calls and 4 email messages – to get my phone bill sent to me.

But out of control spam blocking has been on my mind a lot lately. It happened that in my attempts to arrange a poetry reading with another Canadian college this summer, my messages were sent to the Spam folders of two different organisers. When I hear about these things, I always suggest to the recipients that they contact their IT department, but I don’t know if they do. I think I might have to go back to using paper and stamps.

After a single day back in London it was finally time to return to Canada last week. We went out to find a nice last supper for me, but our timing had us hitting the street at just a few minutes after a freak black-out darkened the doorways of most of the restaurants we would have tried. So we ended up at GBK, where I found myself suddenly unwilling to try the beef burgers, after having tracked down the manager and asked him what he knew about the life and death of the cattle used in them, and he said he knew nothing, but could say with certainty they were not organic, not grass fed, and the chickens were neither free range nor organic. I looked around at the crowded restaurant and was saddened to think that nobody there had thought to ask, let alone think about the quality of the meat they were eating. I ordered an organic lamb burger and hoped it had had a good life as promised on the menu, which named the producer.

I was less impressed by this sign which I thought was a good example of what not to do for customer appreciation. But then again, the place was crowded and nobody really cared. I guess they were there for their industrial meat products and that was that.

Afterwards, we shared some of the bonet I’d brought back from Turin. Which was delicious.

Heathrow Terminal 5 was an experience. I was happy to find Carluccio‘s there, which meant travellers could grab some quality grub before taking to the air…

but they were outside security, so I wondered who exactly would be buying all that lovely wine, vinegar, olive oil, condiments. I wish they had managed to get a spot the other side of the magic wall. How much better a shopping opportunity than the same old duty free players.

I ordered the vegetarian option on my British Airways flight, and was glad I’d done so – I got what I suppose was feta and spinach tortellini. It is beyond me why airlines still offer the ‘beef or chicken’ routine. One thing I’d liked about the late lamented Zoom was their innovation of offering ‘chicken or vegetarian’ on my last flight. Surely even in the name of thrift it would be a brighter idea for airlines to incorporate veggie options into the mainstream? I was less impressed with the vegetarian sandwiches that came – though they were still better than the alternative – because of the awful bread, which came with its full complement of noxious ingredients, emulsifiers E472e, E471, vegetable fat, flour treatment agent and so on.

Vancouver was wet and getting itself ready for Halloween. In fact the ferry I took on Halloween was full of people heading for parties. Or else they just wanted to dress for the crossing.

Before leaving though we had a tasty lunch at La Reglade in West Vancouver. The parmesan sable tart was lovely

and the soup kept us chipping away forever. I wish they could have kept the cheese in the bowl though.

We passed on dessert, though it was very pretty.

Back in Victoria, it was a red sky at morning, and has rained ever since. Not the warmest homecoming, since the furnace had packed in, which I discovered on Saturday together with the fact that all my firewood had apparently gone up in smoke during my absence. Thanks to a couple of space heaters, some firewood donated by my kind neighbours and a whole lot of woolly jumpers, I’m managing to bide my time till it can be repaired. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe Monday. Just glad it hasn’t gone below freezing since I’ve been back.