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Slow Fishing at The Superior

Slow Food Fish Dinner menuLast Wednesday Slow Food Vancouver Island hosted a celebration of “merroir” as we supped on seafood at The Superior.

Events got off to a briny start with a good hour of oyster shucking by Slow Foodies Kyle Hunker and Cory Pelan. No oyster lingered on the plate for more thSlow Food Fish Dinner oyster-shuckingan a sea-second before being quaffed with or without the accompanying Gravenstein apple mignonette.

After this, we settled in for a preview of the pleasures to come by chef Oliver Kienast, who had organized a meal ample in local, seasonal, sustainable and Ark of Taste foods. First up were darling little fish-balls made from salt cured lingcod and served with a salad that included miner’s lettuce and other seasonal greens. Then there was halibut, garnished with crab and rhubarb and accompanied by an emmer and wild rice risotto-ish dish and oleracea (brassica) shoots. After a pause, a platter of Fry’s Red Fife wheat bread arrived with a dish of butter, swiftly followed by clams with Whole Beast chorizo and cranberry beans, fermented fennel, sea lettuce and a seafood broth. The sweet cicely biscuits were a suitable finish, after which the silent auction items – including such desirable items as Vancouver Island Salt, a signed copy of Seasonings: Flavours of the Southern Gulf Islands by Andrea & David Spalding, and a stay at Sooke Harbour House – were distributed and we dispersed, slowly and foodily.

Slow Food Fish Dinner: salt cured lingcodSlow Food Fish Dinner: halibutSlow Food Fish Dinner: Fry's BreadSlow Food Fish Dinner: clams & chorizoSlow Food Fish Dinner: sweet cicely biscuits

Flavour of September, with a pinch of October

 

 

 

How busy can one month be? Very very in September’s case. Here it is October and I’m still rushing. A quick review will show why I’ve been too crazed to post, though it’s been delightful and stimulating.

Friday Sept. 21 was the long-anticipated (by me, certainly) panel discussion featuring visiting baker Andrew Whitley, community-supported fisherman Guy Johnston and urban farmer Angela Moran, with her chicken wrangler Trevor van Hemert. Whitley kicked off with a description of the organic baking career that led him to his current life as a baking instructor and organic activist. He is helping to launch a local community supported baking enterprise, and through the Real Bread Campaign which he co-founded, to raise awareness about different ways to promote bread in communities. Johnston described his two-year old community supported fishery, which helps him keep his boat in the water and his family in the sustainable fishing business. He urged us to join in the October 22 protest against the Northern Gateway Pipeline, which will endanger the livelihood of all those who fish in west coast waters. Moran and van Hemert have arranged with eight neighbours to share both chicken-shaped responsibilities and egg-shaped outcomes so that Moran’s urban farm is able to keep its flock of laying hens. They’ve come up with a model agreement they want to share with others to spread the joy of shared chicken ownership.

Saturday we put Andrew back in the kitchen to lead a breadmaking workshop for a lucky baker’s dozen who were spared the cost of airfare to Scotland to take the class at Bread Matters. In the beautifully equipped domestic science lab at Royal Oak Middle School, Andrew and the participants faced some challenges with the limitations of domestic ovens and unfamiliar flours while he shared some of his knowledge about bread, flour and the state of grain in the world today.

 

 

 

 

Sunday Sept. 23 marked the first offering of the Flavour Gourmet Picnic, held at Coastal Winery in Black Creek, just north of the Comox Valley. I’d been to Feast of Fields and the Island Chefs Collaborative festivals, and thought it would be interesting to experience a north Island event. Andrew & Veronica joined us to sample the many, many wares on offer at a gentle, sun-warmed and well-organized afternoon of sipping and tasting. One of those who’d attended Andrew’s talk to the VIU Professional Baking program in Nanaimo the week before was there with her Church Street Bakery breads, and he make an appearance in the rather lovely video made to commemorate the day (accepting one of the most delicious items on offer: a piece of chocolate pave from Kingfisher Lodge).

 

 

 

 

 

On Monday, after a relaxing morning gathering oysters for supper, we headed back to Victoria where I attended a meeting of the Victoria Horticultural Society‘s Veggie group – one of the members was explaining her planting calendar and use of cover crops, which is something I’d like to do better even in my tiny garden.

By Wednesday 26th Andrew & Veronica were packed and ready to leave, but not until we’d stopped in to see Cliff Leir’s operation at Fol Epi. He’d described his grain soaking and flour milling operations at the Kneading Conference, but seeing the tiny space in which the magic happens made it the more special. Good things, small packages etc. (and the pumpkin pie and sausage roll we sampled, among other treats, were formidably good).

Wednesday evening arrived promptly and after a small misspelling on the poster had been swiftly corrected (yes, I pine still for England where there is never a D in my name) the maiden voyage of Digging the City took place in a room in my local library filled with interesting and interested people, many from GTUF.

Thursday saw me back on the farmstand at Haliburton and then back on the road to Nanaimo where we were discussing vitamins and minerals in the CSNN introductory holistic nutrition course. Fascinating but mind-blowing.

Friday 28th I went to a permaculture potluck to hear Brandon Bauer, one of the instructors in the permaculture design course I took earlier this year, talk about his work replenishing the soil on his property on Salt Spring Island. He’s currently teaching a permaculture and site planning workshop and as ever had some pithy things to say about his own experiences in those areas. Saturday was a workshop on tenancy management (better late than never) that was fascinating and offered by one of the very knowledgeable souls at ROMS. That evening we went for supper at the Moon Under Water brewpub which I hadn’t had a chance to try out, and enjoyed my Fanny Bay Oyster Burger for auld lang syne.

Sunday was my weekly family dinner, plus some lying-in, sitting-down and catching-up, which meant I missed the Saanich Sustainable Food Festival and the 5th Annual Chef Survival Challenge and Feast at Madrona Farm… I’ll get to one of those one of these days… AND the Slow Food Terra Madre fundraiser Last Hurrah At Orange Hall.

Monday it was suddenly October, and I joined some other GTUFers to talk about food security at Gorge-ous Coffee, our newly opened local hangout. While we did not quite set the world to rights, we had an interesting chat about foraging in the neighbourhood, rooftop gardens, preserving skills, grafting tours and nut trees, among others.

 

 

 

 

After a quasi-restful Tuesday in which I attempted to catch up on a few more things, like a bit of light tomato canning, and a chat with my neighbour who’d attracted a frog to his garden, and a bit of acorn gathering, it was suddenly Wednesday and time for the debut screening of Symphony of the Soil, Deborah Koons Garcia’s (The Future of Food) second feature film  and an excellent one it is. It explains very beautifully what soil is, how it produces food (not just for humans) and how it can be preserved and nourished. Recommended viewing for all living things. We too were nourished with birthday cake as the occasion marked Open Cinema’s tenth anniversary and afterwards there was a panel discussion with Robin Tunnicliffe, Heide Hermary and the filmmaker.

 

Prawns & other fishy business

I often share tables and menus with people who have not spent the past half dozen years or so obsessing about food to the same degree as I, and who therefore do not have as much trouble finding something edible in restaurants and other food outlets. Most of them do not register my shudder at the sight of prawns on the menu; nor do I act on first instincts to seize the menu and tear it into tiny pieces and then arms flailing eyes wild to scream at them “don’t touch them they’re poison!!!!” It’s become one of those things I simply won’t comment on unless invited.

One of the reasons I eat very little fish anymore, and particularly avoid prawns, as well as farmed catfish, basa, tilapia etc from China, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and elsewhere – and of course farmed salmon from  Canada – is because of the use of antibiotics, which are used to combat potential infection in overcrowded tanks and cages. This is prophylactic use, not treatment of illness, and is as worrying as the use of low dosages of antibiotics as a growth enhancer in land-based meat farming. The most troubling of these antibiotics is a series called fluoroquinolones.

So I’m inviting myself to comment here, because I have just read an article about these very chemicals (showing up in fish illegally imported to the US from China, Thailand, Canada, Indonesia, Vietnam and Ecuador) and simultaneously noticed that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has relaxed by .04 ng/g the fluoroquinolone residues in aquaculture products action level from 0.6 ng/g (ppb) to >1.0 ng/g. This is because

The revised action level continues to provide adequate human health safety to consumers and is considered stringent enough to detect deliberate use of fluoroquinolone therapeutants in aquaculture.

Well all right then. It’s tiny, and the CFIA continues to assure us that  there is no change in Health Canada’s policy of

zero tolerance for deliberate use of fluoroquinolone therapeutants (ciprofloxacin, danofloxacin, enrofloxacin and sarafloxacin) during fish production life cycle.

But if you also read

Resistance to quinolones has been reported in a variety of important bacterial pathogens, including Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, and other enteric organisms; Pseudomonas aeruginosa; Chlamydia trachomatis and Mycoplasma pneumoniae; Campylobacter jejuni; Burkholderia cepacia; Stenotrophomonas maltophilia; Neisseria gonorrhoeae; Staphylococcus aureus (especially oxacillin-resistant strains); Enterococcus faecium; and Streptococcus pneumoniae.

Don’t you just not want to go there at all? Particularly on a week when there’s news of a new antibiotic-resistant strain of gonorrhea and a spike in the incidence of syphilus — as well as general increases in STD’s in the elderly as well as youth. Not to forget the ever-increasing rates of food-borne illnesses like campylobacter jejuni, salmonella, and E. coli O157:H7 (and the new one that surfaced in Germany this year, E. coli O104:H4). And of course the hospital superbugs. It’s all enough to put you off your dinner.

A couple of months ago Barry Estabrook laid out the issues, and praised the one prawn I will still eat and am thankfully positioned to find – the Spot Prawn.

I have no doubt that things have improved since 2003 when Felicity Lawrence documented problems with the industry; but I am still suspicious of foods like prawns whose cost has so cheapened on the menu. And I know that most restauranteurs are watching their price points too carefully to ask too many questions about the full story on everything they buy. And will mislead you whether by accident or not, as I learned in Newfoundland a few years ago where a waitress informed me that the tiger prawns on the menu were local, which I doubted enough to double check; and yes, they were local – to Thailand I think it was.

Food – sight and sound

B is for Bananas (if you didn’t know why it was important to buy these organic and Fairtrade, here’s your briefing)

 

BANANAS!* trailer.
 

B is also for Bees

 

Queen of the Sun trailer from Youtube.

 

And R is for radio, specifically NPR (I’m close enough to the border to be able to listen in) where you can hear

Yotam Ottolenghi talking vegetables – promo for his excellent cookbook Plenty (recipes born in YO’s wonderful Guardian column, The New Vegetarian); Barry Estabrook speaking in depth to NPR’s Fresh Air about his new book Tomatoland, which blows the lid off many aspects of the Florida tomato industry – labour standards, soil depletion, pesticide use – and explains why big ag’s focus on high yield tomatoes does not put good tasting food on your plate (which is exactly why Slow Food exists); and then a brief look at sustainable fish (tilapia) production: urban fish agriculture (but not the kind that involves feeding them corn and, like other farmed protein sources, causes more of the same old problems to those who eat them)

The difficulty of eating local

One of the difficulties of trying to eat local food is that you can’t trust food labels, at least not in Canada. Last October, CBC’s Marketplace broadcast an enlightening program about the meaning of the ‘Product of Canada’ label, which you can watch again online, in which they revealed that this branding means that 51% of the production costs (not even the content) were spent in Canada. This is allowed thanks to legislation created in 1985, when 20% of Canadian food was imported; now we’re at the 40% stage, it is starting to sound downright silly, let alone outdated.

So in the example given, of Highliner frozen fish products branded ‘Product of Canada’, the fish may have been farmed in Vietnam, Indonesia or China and then shipped frozen to Canada for processing, becoming Canadian somewhere en route. When the program-makers went to Lunenburg, the published address for Highliner, they were told that no fishing boats had come in there for six or seven years.

All of which is problematic to consumers: they can’t make informed choices, because the information they’re using is flawed and misleading. They can’t vote with their wallets against poor labour practices, potentially unsafe food production practices, unsustainable fishing practices, or unsound ecological practices, and they can’t even support local producers because they cannot tell (from packaged goods anyway) which products are truly local.

Spain 5: olive oil, peaches and lots of fish

With one down (massive cava hangover) and a few more beginning to falter (3 head colds, 1 sore back), we set off for Reus (birthplace of Antoni Gaudi!) where we had a tasting of DOP Siurana olive oil (made from small arbequina olives) at the beautiful art nouveau (modernisme) building housing the Consell Regulador de la Do Suriana:

and heard about various other geographically designated products, including rice, hazelnuts, potatoes and tangerines.

Next stop Cambrils, at the Cooperativa de Cambrils y Borges, where we observed the packaging of peaches, destined entirely (or maybe 90%, depending on who you asked) for external markets. Not an organic or artisanal coop, but a very busy one. We visited the agricultural museum which is part of its headquarters, and had a lunch of salad, spaghetti (Spanish local specialty?) and fried fish.

Off we sped to the docks, where we watched a fish market in action. Instead of an auction, like the one we’d seen in Puglia, here the prices are pre-determined, and buyers gather round a conveyor belt where they drop identifying tags on boxes of fish, and then pay the going rate at the end. Anything not sold off the boats in this way goes to the bigger markets at Valencia and Barcelona. We heard about the EU’s method of conserving fish stocks (they buy back the boats and licenses of small fishermen, removing them permanently from the sea — unfortunately as we’d learned elsewhere the slack is being taken up by large scale trawlers). We stepped onto a fishing boat to see the cleaning and sorting involved. The men were hand-sorting the takings from their dragger nets, which scour across the sand and bring up all manner of crabs, crustaceans and smaller sea life. Larger enterprises would chuck these back in the water, dead, but here they were hand-sorted and sold.