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food movies

Vegan is as vegan does

How things change. A few years ago – 2006? – celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain visited Victoria to promote his latest book, which I believe was A Cook’s Tour. A strong showing of kitchen folk swelled the audience and there was a lively question and answer during which Bourdain talked about local food (nah, he said, I’m a chef: I seek the best ingredients no matter where they come from), most amazing food experience (attending a pig slaughter, coincidentally an episode recounted in his latest book) and worst food experience (a vegan feast in California). Not surprising from a meat-evangelist; he was very much in the thick of the nose-to-tail eating trend of those years, and vegans are an easy target. In his bestselling Kitchen Confidential he’d already opined that

“Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn.

To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living.

Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It’s healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I’ve worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold.

Oh, I’ll accommodate them, I’ll rummage around for something to feed them, for a ‘vegetarian plate’, if called on to do so. Fourteen dollars for a few slices of grilled eggplant and zucchini suits my food cost fine.”

Last night I attended a screening of Forks Over Knives which leans heavily on a very different sort of book, The China Study, and maintains that plant-based diets will prevent and possibly even reverse the diet-related illnesses of our time: cancer, diabetes, heart and arterial disease. It was entertaining and informative enough, although there was a puzzling lack of comment about its assertions that added oils (including vegetable oils) are toxic, and a complete absence of discussion about the role that exercise plays in disease prevention and control, even though all the patients featured in the film were exercising like mad.

But this kind of advice has been around, and largely ignored, for years. In 2007 the buzz in Britain was that cured meats (and sedentary lifestyles) were the demons. Stay away from bacon, they said, even there in the land of the bacon butty. Not to mention the Full English Breakfast (and all its Scottish, Welsh and Irish counterparts).

It’s something that Marion Nestle, Michael Pollen and Mark Bittman have also been writing about for a while. Nestle has, like the film, pointed out the excessive influence of the meat and dairy industries on American food policies – and in particular the dietary recommendations represented most recently by the USDA’s MyPlate, which doggedly continues to include meat and dairy. So does Canada’s Food Guide, although it is careful to give alternatives equal weight.

It’s worth reminding ourselves how little protein we actually need vs how much we consume if we’re eating meat and dairy. To calculate what you need, multiply body weight in kilograms by .8, or weight in pounds by .37  to get the number of grams. For a 150 lb person, that amounts to 55g (a bit less than 2 ounces) per day: the entire daily protein needs could be met by 2 hamburger patties. But almost everything we eat has some protein in it, so if we’re eating a balanced diet with enough calories, we can clock up a healthy amount of protein without trying too hard.

So there’s no question we can get all the protein we need from plant-based diets, a point the American Dietetics Association made in its 2009 recommendation that vegetarian – and vegan – diets are safe for babies, children and adults, and recommended as a way to prevent chronic illnesses of the sort the film discusses.

Though I’ve reduced my meat consumption hugely in recent years, the sticking points for me would be cheese, yogurt, eggs and butter. And milk in my tea. And the fact that eating away from home becomes such a headache: so many restaurants, caterers and the like simply don’t make nice food without meat in it. In less cosmopolitan towns and cities, the vegetarian options on menus are too often ineptly executed stir-fries. Ah well. Not to worry about just now: lots of nice vegetables and fruits in my fridge this fine summer day. And soon, they promise, Green Cuisine will re-open.

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)

Organic Islands, featuring Percy Schmeiser

The Organic Islands festival took place last weekend, and we went for a sunny Saturday afternoon of tastings and talks and music. Found some Emmer (aka Farro, in Italy) an ancient wheat now being grown for the first time on Vancouver Island.

There were interesting causes to support, like this one where you can register your fruit tree and have others pick and use your fruit if you don’t want all of it.

A lost tree being tormented by small children.

One of the events we wanted to catch was the GE Free BC panel, featuring Yukon farmer Tom Rudge,

Powell River politician Colin Palmer,

activist Josh Brandon from Greenpeace,

and special guest Percy Schmeiser,

whose story I knew from CBC coverage and films like The Future of Food and Life Running Out of Control.

Schmeiser impressed me with his speaking skills. I hadn’t known he was a former MLA as well as a farmer. I did know he was a life-long seed developer who had spent $400,000 and 7 years of his life fighting Monsanto on the grounds of patent infringement when Monsanto found GM (Roundup-Ready) canola growing on Schmeiser’s field in 1998.

The rather alarming issue of GM canola crossing itself with non-GM canola is something Schmeiser talks a lot about: “You can’t contain nature” is his mantra, and the message he dearly wants to deliver to regions tempted to introduce GM crops alongside non-GM.

Canola, a Canadian cross-bred (not genetically-modified) brassica plant that was developed in the 1970s, is an important crop because it is used for vegetable oils (lower in saturated fats than any other oil) and animal feed as well as a rotation crop.

Canola has proven it doesn’t obey corporate laws of ownership and whether through wind, rain, pollen drift, flood or spillage, GM and non-GM canola have interbred right across Canada and pretty much killed the country’s organic production of canola (no GM crops or products are allowed in Canadian organic production).

Not only does being GM make the contaminated crops unexportable to the many countries which do not allow GM imports, it also – from Schmeiser’s experience – makes those crops, and their seeds, the property of Monsanto, since you have, willingly or not, and no matter to what degree, ended up growing a Monsanto-engineered plant. This is anathema to farmers who have traditionally saved seed from their own crops to plant the next year. But if you grow GM plants, Canadian patent law prevents you from saving and sowing or trading or selling that seed, since it includes Monsanto technology and is therefore not yours to do with as you please. To reinforce this message, farmers who buy the seed are required to sign Technology Use Agreements which forbid farmers from re-using seed, and require that they purchase new seed each year

Schmeiser also talked about the promises Monsanto had made: higher crop yields, better nutritional content, decreased use of pesticides (insecticides and herbicides), an end to world hunger. Instead, the crop yields from GM crops are lower, nutritional values from industrial crops are demonstrably down, and the potency of today’s Roundup is 4x what it was ten years ago because glyphosate-resistant strains of weeds (superweeds) have evolved; the content of new herbicides currently used in Saskatchewan includes Dioxins, which have toxic effects on human health and are largely passed to humans through the food supply.

Standing ovation…

Also discussed by the panel was the point about there being no research about GM crops aside from what Monsanto itself funds, selects and publishes, and how that just might be a problem in terms of credibility and human safety.

The GE Free BC campaign aims to make BC a GE free region. They’re also linked with campaigns to promote that seemingly elusive goal of requiring food containing genetically engineered substances to be labelled in this country, and another worth-while movement to ban Terminator technology, which would allow corporations to genetically sterilise their crops, ensuring farmers would have no choice but to purchase seed from them each year.

After that we needed a hot dog, from the eternally popular organic hot dog stand where we managed to get the last three hot dog buns on offer for the day.

Then we wandered beneath the attractive drystone arches of the Green Drinkery

for a glass of local wine

and a prime location to hear former Victoria resident Jeremy Fisher play us out.

Monsanto movietime

Came across this documentary (The World According to Monsanto) which appeared on Arte in France on March 11 of this year. Worth a look if you had any curiosity about what Roundup is, who runs Monsanto, how the company influences decision making in its favour, what effect genetically-modified organisms are having and will have on food and other crops, and on the ability of farmers – particularly in the developing world – to survive the company’s economic might.

**April 27 update: mysteriously, the video has disappeared from Google Video, but for now at least catch it while you can, serialised on Youtube; part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9, part 10, part 11. What a funny old world. Monsanto exerting influence on public comment? I cannot help but wonder.**

Downloadable iPod version also available. (And you can buy a copy of the dvd (English soundtrack available) from Arte.) I found when I watched it on my laptop, the video kept sticking, but I could prod it along by clicking the play indicator arrow along the bottom of the viewing screen.

GM canola and alfalfa, and a little poetry news

I’ve been discovering some shocking things about genetically modified foods in Canada this week, and so will all of you with televisions that can be tuned to Global for a documentary on Saturday night, March 23 at 7pm (dunno if it’s the same outside BC). Hijacked Future is about GM foods, but also about the stranglehold that large, profit-driven corporations are securing on the world’s food supply, while we consumers blithely carry on as it it were the most natural thing in the world for farmers to be forced to buy new seeds every year instead of saving and planting their own stocks, developed for local ecosystems and disease resistance.

Stephen Hume‘s article in the Vancouver Sun this week previews it nicely:

“…it’s fascinating to observe how we appear to be collectively sleepwalking toward … a potential catastrophe with that most strategic of all things, a sustainable, secure, equitably distributed global food supply… [Hijacked Future] takes dead aim at the question of whether it’s in our best national interests as informed, intelligent citizens of a global civilization to snooze while a few giant trans-national corporations succeed in their attempt to monopolize food production.”

I learned a bit about organic farming, too, and the loss of Canada’s organic canola crops, both as a commercial crop and as an invaluable rotation crop. It appears that because of the (non-organic) genetically-modified canola in our fields, over 90% of all canola – including organic – has been contaminated now. This has caused a significant loss of livelihood to organic farmers, so two Saskatchewan canola farmers tried to bring a class action suit against Monsanto, on behalf of all certified organic farmers, but our very own supreme court told them in December they couldn’t. The farmers are currently considering their options. Percy Schmeiser is our best documented case of unwanted GM crops intruding on private land against the wishes and intent of a farmer, and our higher courts did a less than heroic job there too. Although he’s just won – wait for it – $660 from Monsanto in a small claims settlement for costs involved in cleaning the GM canola off his fields.

Thank heavens for the farmers, consumers, environmentalists and courts of California, who were able to call the USDA on its ill-judged approval of genetically modified alfalfa. Alfalfa is hardly a glamour crop, being mostly known as animal feed, but it is also a crucial rotation crop for organic farmers. In both these roles, it sits at the bottom of our food chain, and we should – must – pay attention to what happens to it, or risk losing organic farming forever.

And on the poetry side of things, if you want a little extra CanLit reading you can sign up for The New Quarterly‘s new e-newsletter.

Plastic world

I got a monster killer migraine yesterday afternoon, which went some way to explaining why fate didn’t want me travelling this weekend.

Before it hit, I did a bit of reading on the subject of plastic, which I wandered into through a story on the banning of plastic shopping bags. It made a nice change from the latest grim news for English farmers who are already struggling with the latest round of foot and mouth.

But it’s not a much more uplifting story, although the banning of plastic bags – something not unknown in Canada – is a good thing. Spending, as I have been lately, quite a bit of time Thameside in London, I’ve often noticed them floating in the water. The Thames is a tidal river, draining into the English Channel, so as my recent reading has been telling me, those plastic bags will ultimately end up as plastic fragments perhaps even flowing past my house on the Gorge in Victoria.

The interesting – if tiny – preview of a longer film called Synthetic Sea, produced by the Long Beach CA Algalita Marine Research Foundation, explains that plastic, as we should all know by now, is non biodegradable: which means that although it breaks down in time, it doesn’t disappear, it simply disassembles under sunlight – a process called photodegradation – into tiny plastic fragments which then wash around in the ocean, for centuries. Algalita believes that every piece of plastic ever created still exists.

In the the centre of the Pacific, Algalita took a random sample of sea water which showed there were six times as many plastic particles as there was plankton in the water. This means, of course, that plastic is competing with plankton as a food source for filter-feeding sea life (at the bottom of the food chain). The plastic becomes embedded in cell tissue of lower life forms like salps and is then ingested by larger sea life – on and on up to the fish on our dinner plate: I wonder if there is any way to find out how much plastic ends up in a salmon steak?

Not only does it threaten our food sources, plastic is also killing wildlife. Sea birds like albatross will eat larger plastic items like bottle caps and disposable lighters that fill and block their digestive system and kill them through starvation; others confuse tan coloured plastic fragments with krill or may eat nurdles – the pellets used by manufacturers to ship plastic for manufacture – thinking they are fish eggs. The problem here is that birds regurgitate their food for their young, many of whom die through malnutrition and the poisoning from the toxins that plastics carry. Whales and other sea animals are often found to have massive quantities of plastic – including balloons – in their digestive systems, and may also sustain injury or die when becoming trapped or tangled in discarded plastic.

So banning plastic bags is a good first step, but it’s not the end of the story. Plastic is lurking in all parts of our lives. I found a 2004 article in Science magazine that adds a caution about where else it’s hiding:

Many “biodegradable” plastics are composites with materials such as starch that biodegrade, leaving behind numerous, nondegradable, plastic fragments. Some cleaning agents also contain abrasive plastic fragments.

Like Algalita, the researchers found lots and lots of plastic fragments of all sizes; they found theirs in estuarine and subtidal sediments around Plymouth, and to check whether it was really something that all kinds of animal life would ingest, they kept “amphipods (detritivores), lugworms (deposit feeders), and barnacles (filter feeders) in aquaria with small quantities of microscopic plastics. All three species ingested plastics within a few days.” They couldn’t say what the long term effects of eating plastics might be on these or larger animals, but they do warn that “There is the potential for plastics to adsorb, release, and transport chemicals.”

A few statistics that are circulating on the web:

  • The world uses over 1.2 trillion plastic bags a year. That averages about 300 bags for each adult on the planet. That comes out to over one million bags being used per minute.
  • On average we use each plastic bag for approximately 12 minutes before disposing. It then lasts in the environment for decades.
  • Not all litter is deliberate. 47% of wind borne litter escaping from landfills is plastic. Much of this is plastic bags. In the marine environment plastic bag litter is lethal, killing at least 100,000 birds, whales, seals and turtles every year. After an animal is killed by plastic bags, its body decomposes and the plastic is released back into the environment where it can kill again.
  • In June 2006 United Nations Environmental Program report estimated that there are an average of 46,000 pieces of plastic debris floating on or near the surface of every square mile of ocean.