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nutrition

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!!

Plants to swap, buy and heal

Wednesday’s fun was the GTUF plant swap, at which we shared around our surplus plant starts. It was our monthly meeting and this time the theme was growing and cooking herbs. A couple of our members – Donna Neve & Gene Monast – presented a wealth of information about the power of such herbs as sage and rosemary and extolled their many benefits – ease of growing, beauty in knot gardens and the like, and offered some delicious ways to use them, in breads, cookies and other baking. Then we pushed our chairs back and set to gathering plants for our gardens. Many of the starts had been grown from seeds shared at our seed swap back in January, so the plants go round and round the neighbourhood.

More plants were on offer at Haliburton Farm on Saturday, when the farmers set out a large display of vegetable and berry starts as well as succulents, ornamentals and native plants. The farm now includes five farming businesses, an organic seedling greenhouse and an organic native plant business, so it’s thriving and developing in interesting ways.

 

 

 

 

 

Last night I went to hear Karin Kilpatrick talk about healing with plants. She is the medically-trained partner of the amazing herbalist and food forester Richard Walker, who’s in town this weekend to give another of his dazzlingly informative and wide-ranging workshops on food forests. Karin is a doctor who’s worked emergency rooms and general practice in South Africa and rural Canada, and she told us about the “trance-breaking” first encounter with Walker, when he transformed one of her patients from “raw meat” stage eczema to perfect skin in two weeks using diet and herbal tea (the magic food was kicheree, and the tea was dandelion).

She has watched the vibrant health of rural Canadians plummet over the past thirty years of her medical practice and she is categorical in her diagnosis: inflammation, depleted immune systems and accelerated aging brought about by malnutrition. “You don’t give the immune system the right food,” she said, “and it loses.”

But our bodies are exhausted too by the stress of working and living in an oppressive system. The strain of working in increasingly demanding jobs with dwindling budgets takes its toll even from doctors: the pay-per-patient system imposed on GPs “keeps us all in serfdom,” explaining that after office and staff costs are taking into consideration she earns $7 per patient. In reducing patients to the sum of their parts, “it’s reductionist and dehumanizing.”

All colonization systems begin to take control of populations by taking away food autonomy, she observed, pointing to the way “we were sold a bill of goods: cheap, centralized food. We ate it and we got sick.” We do not live in a system where growing your food and healing yourself has a dollar value, and we live in a culture in thrall to monetary reward, so nothing will change unless we change ourselves.

She has changed her life, and sworn off the 10-minute rule for patient consultation. She takes fewer patients and spends longer with them, and she brings the chronically ill together in circle groups for extended education on how to nourish themselves back to health. She meets with them for an hour and a half each week, for 28 weeks, to teach them about nutrient-dense foods, stress management and natural cures for their conditions. “And I’m making my rent,” she added proudly.

Showing her roots – as a South African and as an allopathic doctor – she told us she had one day realized that she was guilty of “apartheid towards plants”. But she was not alone in this: all those who do scientific studies on plant remedies are guilty, because they don’t examine the effects of the whole plant as indigenous cultures do. Instead, science in its reductionist way seeks to find the “active ingredient” and extract that for study. And so of course the results are skewed (as Michael Pollan reported in In Defense of Food, in his discussion of nutritionism and the tragic misuse of plant compounds like beta-carotene instead of whole foods).

The most actively entertaining part of the evening came when we passed a bottle of Spilanthes (tincture) around the room and sampled for ourselves a powerful traditional antifungal, anti-inflammatory and analgesic remedy with some unusual properties, including tremendous qualities in stimulating saliva production. It may, we were warned, remind you of childhood experiments in putting a 9 volt battery in your mouth. And it certainly did fizz and sparkle on the tongue, lips and gums – Karin swears by it for dental hygiene and says it cured her abscessed tooth in days, and a patient’s cold sore in front of her eyes.

Anything more we can do to change the world? someone asked. Her answer was simple. Tell your health care system administrators that you want naturopathy, herbalism and other health-promoting practices included in health care coverage, so that we’re not just paying to treat sick people, but to make good health available to everyone.

Traditional west coast plants, and some healing lip balm

Yesterday CR-FAIR hosted a brilliant speaker, native plant specialist and herbalist Elise Krohn, who runs the Diabetes Prevention Through Traditional Plants program at Northwest Indian College in Bellingham, Washington, as well as the Native Plant Nutrition program at the Northwest Indian Drug and Alcohol Treatment Center.

She was speaking at the Victoria Native Friendship Centre, and began by introducing her programs and talking about the various people who’d guided her along the path to a pretty impressive level of knowledge about native foods, herbs and medicines, and how these have been used by various tribes in the Pacific Northwest, and elsewhere. (One of her teachers, Skokomish spiritual leader Bruce Miller, was featured in the film Teachings of the Tree People.)

Her talk included discussion of the foods used in traditional diets and ceremonial meals. For example: horsetail, thimbleberry and salmonberry shoots can be peeled and eaten. Spruce tips are high in Vitamin C and can be eaten straight off the tree or made into tea. Bull kelp can be pickled, or dried and eaten as chips, for its thyroid-controlling properties and its ability to remove toxins from the digestive system.

Skunk cabbage leaves are “Indian wax paper” used to wrap food for storage or cooking: salmon baked in green skunk cabbage leaf stays moist and has a sweet flavour. Leaves should not be eaten without knowledgeable preparation, because they contain calcium oxalate crystals which are an extreme irritant to say the least (this is what kidney stones are made of).

Huckleberries contain flavonoids (to protect and strengthen arterials) and antioxidants; berries and leaves both contain compounds that will lower blood sugar – eat the berries and dry the leaves for tea. Evergreen huckleberries are sweetest after the frost.

Salmonberries have been so important in native diets that families used to cultivate their own patches. Its name might originate in its appearance, since it resembles salmon eggs (and can be used as trout bait for that reason). Salmonberry abundance in its preferred habitat – near fast-running streams – is said to be an indicator of a good salmon year.

Then we got to camas, which is one of the best known native foods in this area; in fact, Victoria is built upon one of the best camas prairies in the area, cultivated for centuries through a system of burns and careful harvest. (We also heard that the Empress Hotel, built on a portion of James Bay that was dredged, drained, and filled, sits on one of the richest clam beds on the Island) Camas bulbs are harvested with a traditional digging stick which allows the root to be lifted and the bulblets that surround it to be replanted, leaving the ground relatively undisturbed. This aerates the soil and gives the remaining bulbs room to grow, so will result in larger crop yields.

The burning that was traditional for maintaining the camas prairies took place in the fall (seed having been collected in the spring); it improves the habitat by reducing competition to the camas bulb by other vegetation. Camas prairies are important habitat for other native vegetation, including chocolate lily and serviceberry (saskatoon). The bulbs are harvested nowadays in the spring, while the flowers are blooming, although they grow sweeter and fatter in the fall; but the flowers are needed for identification, so as to avoid a toxic imitator, the death camas, which has a very similar leaf. I’d tasted some camas bulb at a pit cook several years ago, but found it inedibly bitter; I learned that this was due to undercooking. It needs about 24 hours to cook fully (and should be black, inside and out) before the inulin it contains activates and becomes sweet and delicious. Nowadays it’s often precooked in pressure cookers before being added to pit cooks with other foods.

Elise then turned to discussing the various projects that culminated in a resource and recipe book I’m grateful to have been able to purchase from her, as the book (together with a companion volume I’d also like to get one day, Wild Rose and Western Red Cedar: The Gifts of the Northwest Plants) is normally only available within tribal communities, to protect the cultural property rights of the tribal contributors. Feeding the People, Feeding the Spirit: Revitalizing Northwest Coastal Indian Food Culture was developed using research from the Traditional Foods of Puget Sound project, which included archaeological digs to identify traditional foods from the remains of old cooking pits and middens. There was also a round table discussion with native peoples in the area, about barriers to eating and accessing traditional foods. And then they held a Tribal Cooks Camp, where experienced tribal cooks worked together to develop a series of healthy recipes suited to modern kitchens and contemporary access to traditional foods.

After a break, we prepared to learn how to make lip balm (a clever instructor is this one, who draws young people in by teaching them how to make their own cosmetics!) Here Elise talks about the cottonwood bud, which she’d infused in olive oil and would be using in the lip balm demo. It’s a pungent aromatic, and the oil, or salve made from it, is also known as Balm of Gilead; like most essential oils it’s anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial, and it’s also an analgesic, so a good thing to put into lip balm. Or salve.

She brought with her quite a selection of infused oils, including cedar, wild rose, cayenne (used in Tiger Balm among others), calendula, devil’s club, St John’s Wort, arnica and chamomile. She’d made these with the help of her students; some of the herbs had been heated gently with extra virgin olive oil in a water bath; the more fragile ones (like rose and calendula) had been solar-infused: placed in sunlight. The oils can then be used as massage oils (e.g. devil’s club is used for arthritis relief) or turned into lotion, salve or lip balm.

Mix grated beeswax

with infused oils, essential oils (for our mixture she used black spruce, western cedar and lavender),

and extra virgin olive oil (organic from the US or choose brands from Spain, Italy or Greece where there is less pesticide use). You can also, as she did in this instance, use jojoba, a plant-based oil from the American southwest, which is said to be the closest substance to bear grease (which is said to be the closest to human fats and therefore perfect for lotions and salves to rub into your own skin). Stir gently over heat until it melts.

Test on a spoon – cool to room temperature – to make sure it’s the right consistency.

Then decant into a pouring jug

and pour into tubes. If you’re making lots, this handy holder means you don’t have to spill it all over the counter: you can just scrape the excess off with a credit card.

Slap a label on the tube, and you’re done. Great gift for potlatch or canoe trips, she observed.