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GTUF 2013 seed swap

Lost a bit of time to computer troubles, but we seem to be back on our virtual feet again.

This abnormally warm West Coast winter is blending seamlessly into spring with an alarming showing of buds on bushes even as the snowdrops do their seasonal duty. We’re all thinking about seeds just now. The weekend before last the Gorge Tillicum Urban Farmers seed swap attracted around 50 GTUFers and other interested parties. It was a friendly and interesting time, comparing notes on what had grown well in our neighbourhood, and enlivened by the arrival of several cases of last year’s seed stock donated by a good neighbourly commercial seller.

Among my trophies, I collected seeds for:

  • cucumbers (field and pickling)
  • kohlrabi (one can never have too much)
  • scarlet runner beans (some unusual & beautiful brown and cream coloured seeds)
  • mammoth pot leeks (I have regretfully given up on onions – just don’t have enough sun in my garden)
  • a Kashmiri brassica called Haak
  • spinach

And I left small quantities of a large number of different plants including broccoli, celery, amaranth, calendula, oca, bulb fennel, black radish and eight different kinds of tomatoes, sugar snap peas and the remains of some unneeded seed packs, like onion (my plant list is here)

On Monday I was invited to speak to the fruit & veg group of the Victoria Horticultural Society. Rather than try to cross secateurs with more seasoned gardeners I chose community seed banks as my topic, and a lively discussion (several in fact) ensued. The GTUF seed bank, like many in these parts, was started after Dan Jason’s inspirational article on the topic. A good way to build goodwill, seed stocks and, ultimately, food security in your neighbourhood!

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.

Brewing change – Sandor Katz

The Iambic Cafe has been in a process of change in recent weeks, and is now emerging in a slightly altered state, as my interest in food tracks itself inward through the body. I’m studying how food can heal, nourish and sustain us, and so I find myself today in Santa Clara California at the annual Weston A Price Foundation Conference. I’m here with some 1,699 others who think food is the answer to many of the ills that we have brought upon ourselves through industrial agriculture, monocropping, pesticide and biotech damage to soil, crops and consumers; environmental contamination; the consumption of industrial foods; and destructive public health policies that have led to dangerous practices such as low fat diets and overmedication.

I have this weekend achieved a long cherished dream to hear Sandor Katz speak. We met briefly on the floor (literally) of the marketplace at Terra Madre 2008, when he was gathering his blanket with a bemused look on his face, having just sold his last copy of Wild Fermentation. He has published two books since then, and the latest, The Art of Fermentation, is a tome of near biblical proportions which reflects his expanded understanding of all things fermented, and offers extensive footnotes and references. If you’re looking for a cookbook, this is not that. Instead it gives a cultural context plus detailed guidelines for the ingredients and steps involved in fermenting many different foods, in accordance with Katz’s view that fermentation is not a precision activity but a wider cultural movement. Fermentation, he believes, gives us control over our food by allowing us to regain the skills of traditional forms of preservation.. which just happen to offer massive benefits to our gut bacteria as well.

Think you don’t like fermented foods? he asked us. Think again: about a third of what we consume even in a Western Diet involves a degree of fermentation. Coffee, cheese, chocolate, yogurt, bread and vinegar all involve this process of microbial transformation.

Our history of guiding the transformation began with wine, and the edible repertoire expanded as humans took careful note of the natural processes of rot. For really, says Katz, fermentation spans a fine line between rot and delicacy: one culture’s compost is another’s survival food. Rotting fish, whale, seal or walrus until it has the texture of cheese was the far north’s traditional means of making vitamins and minerals bioavailable. (It was also a concept the Franklin expedition failed to embrace, to their cost: cooking their food killed the nutrients and contributed to the crew’s starvation.)

Fermentation was not a human invention, but a discovery: our most observant ancestors noticed that insects and animals were attracted to fermenting fruits; the inventive ones simply took that a step further to cause fermentation to happen on their own terms, and then we had wine and mead.

Agricultural societies adopted fermentation as one form of preservation because we simply couldn’t invest all our energy in crops that are seasonally available without some way to keep them stable and edible beyond harvest. Fresh milk is a 20th century phenomenon: most people in this culture have a “fermentation slowing device” in their homes, otherwise known as a fridge. The obsession with safe storage temperatures is a modern concept, because until refrigeration, we never had a way to store foods below 40f.

Nowadays, fermentation is a way to renew our acquaintance with the healthy gut bacteria we’ve been abusing through years of antibiotic use and poor diets. We need bacteria to digest our food and to sustain a healthy immune system and balanced mental functions. The war on bacteria has proven a very misguided campaign when so many of our internal bodily functions have been enabled or enhanced by the presence of bacteria. While the first triumphs of microbiology had to do with the discovery of pathogenic bacteria, we have ever since been having trouble letting go of idea that all bacteria are pathogenic.

Before opening the floor to questions, Katz held up one pre-emptive hand for a question he knew would otherwise be asked: Safety. From his research, the USDA has never reported a single case of food poisoning from fermented vegetables. Given our recent experience with tainted spinach and cantaloupe, it may be that fermented produces is even safer than raw. The basic reason is that fermented foods are populated with lactic acid bacteria which will overwhelm pathogens. The notorious anaerobic bacterium botulism (clostridium botulinum) can only grow in the complete absence of oxygen (such as in canned foods, sausages), but vegetables are never fermented anaerobically, always with oxygen circulating above and in a liquid which contains some oxygen. In minced meat products (such as sausages) nitrates are what prevent botulism from forming and he doesn’t recommend eating sausages unless they contain nitrates.

After which followed a good hour’s worth of intelligent questioning by people who had attempted fermentation themselves or wondered about the effects and benefits of varieties of these. After that, Katz spent a further couple of hours patiently signing books and answering still more questions. And yes, I got mine, and damn the weight of my poor suitcase!

For those unable to be here but within easy reach of Vancouver, check Katz’s website to learn about his upcoming January visit to UBC.

Stuffed & stirred

Raj Patel made a welcome visit to Victoria last week, supporting the Horticultural Centre of the Pacific’s efforts to raise funds to rebuild the greenhouse, gardener’s office and tool shed that were destroyed by fire last year. For such a high profile name and entertaining speaker there was a puzzling number of empty seats, but those who came were treated to a whirlwind tour through the complexities of feeding an imbalanced world.

Author of Stuffed and Starved and The Value of Nothing, Patel is fond of an hourglass metaphor (you can see this graphic explained on page 3 of Food Security in a Volatile World) to explain the world’s food economies. Consumers are the numerous bulge in the hourglass’s wide top, farmers & producers make up the wide bottom, and a few corporations act as gatekeepers, pinching the middle and squeezing profits from both ends. The aim, he says, is to try to keep those corporations out of the relationship between consumers and producers: in that way, food can be fairly exchanged and there is no need for hunger.

We do have enough food for the world, we just don’t distribute it well, because we’ve commodified it and a small minority is fixated on making  large profits rather than nourishing populations. What we have is wasted and poorly distributed. India leads the world in diabetes – some cities have 20% rate. In his own family every man over 50 must watch his blood sugar.

He spoke about market economies and the disastrous effects they’ve had on food security by removing the obligation found in, for example, feudal economies, where the landlord ensured that food was distributed in times of hardship. In a market economy, there is no such concept. In India, he said, a nation of farmers, the market economy was forced upon a working feudal system by the British, who reaped vast financial rewards and left the country in economic ruin. Where famines had happened once in a hundred years in India, after the British occupation they occurred every four years.

Market economy damages food security by treating food as infinitely produceable and marketable, failing to recognize that it takes time to grow and produce: if there’s a food shortage, it can’t be solved until the crop comes in. Patel reminded us of the concept of grain reserves – a tradition of grain stores whose loss puts the world at tremendous risk. The Mayans, he said, had enough for 15 million people for 6 months; the US public corn store has enough for 9 hours. This is a public grain store: there are private ones, but this will not feed a hungry public in times of need.

Haiti was another example of a food economy crippled by the imposition of a market economy. It had been self-sufficient in rice, but following American intervention and then an American-backed coup, Haiti made a forced entry into market economy. Local rice farmers were swiftly driven out of business by subsidized American rice farmers. There was widespread deforestation and poverty. Farmers were driven into cities to work in sweatshops. Even before Haiti’s earthquake, the country was being hammered into worse poverty by the likes of economist Paul Collier who maintained that Haitians could pull themselves out of debt if the 8 hour sweat shops were made 24 hour (workers were being paid around $3 a day at this time and the American government cooperated with such profitable US clothing companies as Fruit of the Loom, Hanes, Dockers, Nautica and Levi’s in stalling a minimum wage increase to $5 a day, which we now know thanks to WikiLeaks).

Patel expended much of his venom on the World Bank, where he once worked. To illustrate its workings he suggested we watch the Terry Gillian film Time Bandits, in the scene where Robin Hood distributes goods to the poor, while a big thug behind him punches the peasant in the face. And that, he said, is the world Bank. It goes around setting up market economies and lending money that can’t be repaid. Lending more money to cover the debts.

He turned to agriculture, at the root of the food security issue. GMO crops are said to be more productive, he observed. In fact they are, but it has nothing to do with genetic manipulation: it is that seed companies are dedicating their conventional seed breeding efforts to develop the strains that they are pairing with the GMO. So it’s not technology, it’s old fashioned seed breeding that’s improving the yields; but it’s the genetic manipulation of those strains that makes the improved varieties unavailable to organic farmers and those who don’t want/can’t afford to invest in GMO.

He mentioned as well one of the great media blackouts of the past five years: the IAASTD report (Agriculture at a Crossroads) was buried after 4 years work by 400 scientists from 64 countries, working under the request of the United Nations to predict ways to feed the world’s population. The report to its cost said industrial agriculture has had its day and that small scale ecological farming methods are our only hope. Biotech might have a role to play, the report said, but the jury was out.

In brighter news, he spoke about food sovereignty initiatives in Malawi where they’re growing millet, sorghum, cow peas – traditional subsistence crops grown for local consumption. In what sounds like a permaculture move to me, they’re also growing leguminous trees which will also fix nitrogen in the soil while providing shade: 15% more shade means 15% more yield – these are the practicalities of climate change. Despite the success of these crops, children are going hungry, because harvest is woman’s work. Gender roles impair success, so to counter this they’re holding cooking parties, where men, women and children cook together: the women teach the men how to cook.

 

A lesson in not waiting for permission

The Transition Network (and Transition Towns)  exist because governments are too slow to respond to the need for urgent change. Community action can fill the void, and the town of Todmorden in West Yorkshire proves the case in point. All you need is a group of people with passion and vision and the will to plant in every scrap of land and teach one another the how and why of growing food. Check out the Incredible Edible Todmorden website, but first watch this inspiring TED talk.

Wendell Berry: “It All Turns on Affection”

By now all thoughtful people have begun to feel our eligibility to be instructed by ecological disaster and mortal need. But we endangered ourselves first of all by dismissing affection as an honourable and necessary motive.

Our decision in the middle of the last century to reduce the farm population, eliminating the allegedly inefficient small farmers was enabled by the discounting of affection. As a result, we now have barely enough farmers to keep the land in production with the help of increasingly expensive industrial technology and at an increasingly ecological and social cost.

Wendell Berry is known to many of us in many ways, whether as farmer, poet, novelist, essayist or land activist. I recommend taking the time to listen to his no-holds-barred Jefferson Lecture, in which he urges us to restore affection – for our land, neighbours and community – in order to attend to matters crucial for human survival.

The lecture is a powerful and compassionate analysis of our times. Such words as these struck me:

Now the two great aims of the industrialism, the replacement of people with technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy, seem close to fulfillment. At the same time, the failures of industrialism have become too great and too dangerous to deny.

Corporate industrialism itself has exposed the falsehood that it ever was inevitable or that it ever has given precedence to the common good. It has failed to sustain the health and stability of human society. Among its characteristic signs are destroyed communities, neighbourhoods, families, small businesses and small farms. It has failed just as conspicuously and more dangerously to sustain the health and wealth of nature.

And these:

The losses and damages characteristic of our present economy certainly cannot be stopped, let alone restored, by liberal or conservative tweakings of corporate industrialism, against which the ancient imperatives of good care, home-making and frugality can have no standing.

The possibility of authentic correction comes I think from two already evident causes.The first is scarcity, and other serious problems arising from industrial abuses of the land community.

A positive cause still little noticed by high officials and the media is the by now well-established effort to build or rebuild local economies, starting with economies of food. This effort to connect cities with their surrounding rural landscapes rests exactly upon the recognition of human limits and the necessity of human scale. Its purpose to the extent possible is to bring producers and consumers, causes and effects, back within the bounds of neighbourhood, which is to say the effective reach of imagination, sympathy, affection and all else, including enough food, that neighbourhood implies.