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Digging the City

Back online to see out 2013

Things have been on hold here at the cafe for a couple of months. There has been activity I could have reported on, but I’ve been tied up with other matters, and took an unscheduled break while paddling the river of life and pondering the future of this forum. It’s been nearly nine years since I started, and many things have changed.

Back in 2006, I started the blog to muse on food and poetry which were my main interests du jour. There has been, sadly, much less poetry in my life over the past year or so, although writing of various kinds has been happening. But I can happily announce that a new poetry collection – Ex-ville – will be published by Oolichan, hopefully in late 2014.

I’ve been paying more attention to nonfiction over the past couple of years, while Digging the City came into being – and continues to gratify me with positive reviews both published and anecdotal (anyone out there want to review it on Amazon by the way?). The rest of my writing has been sparse posts here and more numerous but sparser posts in my Facebook pages (and please feel free to Like those pages – one for Digging and one for me the writer).

More of my time over the past year has continued to be spent on food, as eater, cook, writer and student. The food security concerns I documented in Digging the City have unfortunately not changed much. My experience at the University of Gastronomic Sciences continue to inform my interests, and my writing, but nutritional studies at the Canadian School of Natural Nutrition have led me into a different way of looking at food. I’m fascinated by the possibilities for healing by simply eating the right foods; but there seems to be little agreement on what those are. (Lots of consensus on what many of the wrong foods are, though!) My chief concerns are for foods that are healing, nutritious and able to be locally produced.

So.. watch for posts from the blog in the new year; maybe not so frequent, but trying to bridge food security, urban agriculture and nutrition with the usual odd sprinklings of poetry and travel.

Meanwhile: happy new year! Be sure to eat something nice and read something good. Here are my books of the year = enjoy!!

Full steam ahead: a week of talks!

Lots going on this week. If you’re in town I hope you can make it to one or more of these different events!

On Tuesday evening, March 19, look for me in Fernwood, where I’m talking urban agriculture at Fernwood U. Cornerstone Cafe, 1301 Gladstone Avenue, Victoria, at 7pm. (Free!)

Friday night, March 22, I’ll be reading at Planet Earth Poetry alongside Rosemary Griebel. Moka House Cafe, #103-1633 Hillside Avenue, Victoria, at 7:30pm. (Nearly free – just $3)

Saturday afternoon, March 23, I’m on the Food Writing panel at the WordsThaw Spring Writing Symposium, hosted by the Malahat Review, an all day affair that runs 10am until 10pm at the University of Victoria, Human & Social Development Building, Room A240. ($40-50, but you get a whole day of literary fun for your money)

Laughing oysters, food forests and a trip to Bellingham

Last weekend I happened upon this rather lovely book display in the window of the Laughing Oyster book store in Courtenay. I’m keeping good company!

This afternoon I go head-to-head with the Superbowl, whatever that might be, giving a book talk at 4pm at the beautiful Village Books in Fairhaven, Bellingham. I took the marvelously efficient and comfortable Amtrak train from Vancouver, which gave me a little time to wrap my head around a new laptop, purchased reluctantly after my previous faithful companion died a lingering death of old age (obsolete after 5 whole years: why is this legal??).

The trip also gave me time to reflect on last night’s thoughtful and inspiring talk by Seattle’s food forest designer, Jenny Pell. She spoke about community-driven food security initiatives in Washington and Oregon, including the Beacon Hill Food Forest in Seattle, a 7-acre parcel that is being developed as the largest public food forest in all of North America. It’s had lots of media coverage.

Pell, like many permaculturalists I’ve met, was a broad thinker who has passed the stage of thinking about change: the time for change is already here, and she wants to see movement into a more sustainable and positive way of life. Why, she asked, do we behave like zoo visitors, simply marveling over model achievements (like the Bullock Brothers’ permaculture homestead, or the solitary Sea Street in Seattle) and never creating multiples of them? We know what’s coming and that change is needed, but somehow we keep our heads down and live on as if we had nothing to do with making a sustainable world possible.

She admitted she was unusual, having never had a credit card nor made a mortgage payment, so was free of the economic traps that have wrapped so many in knots. Do what you need to do, was her message, and you too can live in a world where a salad costs less than a heavily subsidized hamburger, or you don’t have to call in the media in order to be allowed to keep your front yard food garden; where municipal planners can encourage home owners and builders to incorporate features like greywater harvesting and composting toilets; and where it’s not illegal to sell produce grown in your own garden.

Edible Gardens, Terra Madre Day & Digging the City on TV

I was over on the Mainland earlier this week and spent three days enjoying many things, including a tour of some urban agriculture in practice, Terra Madre Day celebrations Vancouver style, and a few minutes in the public eye to promote Digging the City.

On Monday afternoon I was delighted to be able to meet up with Emily Jubenvill, community liaison with the Edible Garden Project in North Vancouver. They use a mixture of community gardens and corporate partnerships to grow food, teach gardening skills and increase the amount of food growing going on in the community.

They’d planted an urban plot behind a skateboard shop which demonstrated a couple of the problems that can arise with urban growing. The shop’s ownership was about to change, and so the garden’s future is as uncertain as on any borrowed land. This is something that affects SPIN farmers and other farmers working under leases rather than secure tenure: it determines the kind of crops they can grow and the amount of long term planning they can do. And then there’s urban vandalism: a ripped polytunnel and a few torn plants here; earlier at the community garden we’d passed a sign asking people not to steal the vegetables.

 

 

 

 

 

One of EGP’s high profile projects, Loutet Farm, was built on the underused edge of a city park with considerable help from private and public funds. It’s a place for workshops and demonstrations, but mostly it’s land for growing food, which can be sold to raise money to fund green jobs in the community. Its success, Emily thinks, is due in large part to the fact they can pay a farmer to manage it: anyone who’s struggled with the ebb and flow of energy and funds around community garden management – or any other social enterprise run by volunteers – will understand what a big deal it is to be able to have someone in charge! On our visit the drainage was being revamped with the help of some grant money and a lot of free muscle. An apiary was under construction as well: this being North Vancouver, it has to be bear-proof: the sturdy mesh cages for the hives will be sunk into concrete before they’re stocked next spring.

 

 

 

 

Monday evening was of course Terra Madre Day everywhere, a global celebration of local eating. As I was missing the carnivore culinary book exchange that Slow Food Vancouver Island was hosting, I was grateful to catch wind of Slow Food Vancouver’s  celebration, which took place at Chill Winston in Gastown. Chef Derek Bothwell is a hand-crafter if ever there was, and brought many of his wares for us to sample. Ingredients included house smoked steelhead, bison (he’s an Alberta boy, originally), a pretty amazing lentil caviar, and local pork belly, with some salt caramel chocolates to finish. We ordered some nice limey crab cakes, smashed potatoes and wild mushrooms to tide us over in between.

Tuesday I made my television debut on CTV with a short spot on a noon show where I was grilled on food security in Canada. You can still catch my moments here.

Stones in your Soup

I was thrilled to be among those invited to present at Victoria’s Stone Soup event back on December 2: much like the story it grew in a few short weeks from nothing to a sold out celebration of food and community. There were storytellers, artists, musicians, writers and farmers in the lineup, two cauldrons of soup to warm us on another rainy evening, and even a vegetable auction! Funds raised were destined for agricultural micro-lending projects. Below, one of the organizers, Neil Johnson, explains the event; local farmers Robin Tunnicliffe, Sol Kinnis and Goldie Paquette were part of the farmers panel; Mason Street farmers Jesse and Angela explain their crowd-funding efforts towards hiring interns and creating Victoria’s first urban greenhouse aquaponics operation; Chef Dwane MacIsaac of the Island Chefs Collaborative discusses the soups he and his volunteers made from entirely donated ingredients; and my book, which someone purchased using only No Tanker loonies.

Food so clean & local

It’s been a couple of weeks of book promotion and food events… I keep waiting for things to slow down but they keep speeding up instead, so I will try to catch up a little.

Last week began well, with a unanimous vote by Saanich District Council in favour of a no-GMO motion that had been in the works for a couple of years:

“That the Healthy Saanich Advisory Committee recommends that Saanich Council does not support the use of genetically modified seed crops within the District of Saanich, and that Council write to the federal Minister of Agriculture, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, and local MPs in support of the mandatory labeling of genetically modified foods.”

For those who don’t hail from these parts, Saanich is one of the largest of the 13 municipalities that make up the Capital Regional District (what outsiders would call “Victoria”) and one that has an interesting mixture of urban and rural properties. It joins other BC communities, including Powell River, New Denver, Kaslo, Rossland, Nelson and Richmond in banning GMOs.

Biotech Crop Countries+Mega-Countries 2010I was among those who spoke in favour of this motion at a public meeting in October, on the grounds that GMOs have not been proven safe for human consumption. While some might argue the horse has long since exited the barn, I am with those who believe we can only carry on letting people know they have a choice and a voice and trying to educate the wider public on under-discussed aspects of what should still be a lively GMO debate. I pointed out that since our parliament has failed to allow our population to safeguard itself against eating GMO products by introducing mandatory GMO labeling, all Canadians have been fed GMO foods without their knowledge or consent since 1996. So I was particularly pleased to see that the municipality would be writing to the federal representatives about labeling. And would urge all sensible people to do likewise while they have ink in their pens or pixels on their screens. Sanity may yet prevail in this country when poor brainwashed Canadians manage to grasp the same realities as the citizens of more advanced nations including South Africa, Kenya and Peru.

Tuesday there was a round-table meeting of Victoria’s CR-FAIR which brought a couple of dozen food and agriculture activists together to discuss local initiatives. The range of activities was heartening and included work or plans for community gardens, agricultural land protection, community seed banks, access to food by low income residents, community kitchens and kitchen gardens, gardening workshops, food redistribution tools and access to farmland.

Friday I was at a promotional do for my beautiful book, held at the even more beautiful Maritime Museum. Appropriately for a daughter of the bench, I took my turn speaking from the place where Judge Begbie had thumped the gavel in days of yore (and he was *not* a hanging judge, according to Marlyn Horsdal, who also presented as author of a novel in which he is a character). Thirteen books from the Heritage Group of publishers were celebrated by 14 authors, each of whom had five minutes to say something about their books. One book, in fact the only one I bought (in a spirit of strictest frugality) – Saanich Ethnobotany – was co-authored by the excellent Nancy Turner and Richard Hebda whose collaborative tale-spinning made a fitting finale for an evening well spiced with food, drink and tantalizing introductions to a good mix of fiction, nonfiction and anthologies.

And finally, tonight I launched Digging the City at the Cornerstone Cafe in fabulous Fernwood, with the kind assistance of Don Genova as my celebrity host. About which event I will say not much except a good time and tasty treats were had by all.. and my generous readers took away some purdy books and free seeds!