Skip to content

organic farming

Saskatoons to sorrel

The native blackberries are nearly – but not quite done now, and a few premature Himalayans are peeking out on the roadsides, but not enough to pick yet. I found a precious few saskatoons when I was picking the other day: my dear Saskatchewan friends will be interested to know that they are native to this part of the world as well as theirs. I didn’t find enough to do anything more than mix them with other stuff, but still. Exciting to the berry-fingered.

Last week at Haliburton Farm we were pulling and cleaning garlic,

getting it ready to hang.

Their veggie stand always looks enticing; love those little round zucchini.

I made an exceptionally good zucchini parmigiana the other night, which was just like melanzane parmigiana only different in one fairly obvious way. I got my version from Jane Grigson’s excellent Vegetable Book which is funny and encyclopaedic and fun to read cover to cover.

This week we were pulling weeds, and I encountered a lot of red sorrel,

which made me think of sorrel soup, which is an excellent thing as you can eat it hot or cold. I brought a couple of hefty bags of these lemony weeds home with me, cleaned as much as I had patience for, and used this recipe, without the spinach. I didn’t cook the sorrel, just dumped it all into the blender with the broth, onions (had no leeks) and potatoes, and the heat cooked it as it landed. It is a good idea to sieve it though as some of it is kind of stringy.

And I ate it with a dollop of Greek yogurt; I have found a passable if not authentic version of this in Victoria which does ok for purposes like this and for making tzadziki to eat with another excellent zucchini dish, Delia’s version of kolokithokeftedes (Κολοκυθοκεφτέδες).

Bread and dirt

It’s been a pleasant summer here at the Iambic Cafe. I’ve recently been on a bread binge, using the nearly no-knead bread recipe

that was featured recently in Cook’s Illustrated – which I always pick up to read on the plane. The bread is refreshingly easy to make, as long as you plan a day ahead (it takes 18 hours resting time plus another couple of hours rising). And this one from the New York Times sounds very easy and convenient. I might start experimenting with levain breads; this blog entry gave me some inspiration.

I also visited a couple of organic farms this week. Local Yokels is a group which provides an acre of cultivation, a cluck of chickens and a well-cleared blackberry trail to groups of children and adults with disabilities for use in therapeutic gardening. It’s a great example of how much can be achieved with very little: there’s a lot of innovation and re-use of building materials, augmented with organic growing practices like micro-drip watering and companion planting. The scarecrow, built by visiting children, is rather splendid.

Haliburton Farm is, thanks to citizen action, city-owned and volunteer operated. I took up tools for the cause

and weeded a patch of golden beets one sunny day. Nasturtiums dressed up one of the fields…

some laying ducks another.

The university has been tending the wetlands area and installed a bat house

and a mason bee house.

Only one of the tubes appeared to be filled when I peered in. The bees lay their eggs in the tubes, separated by their own mini-concrete walls, and when they fill a row they wall up the end, so you can easily see which ones are occupied.

Some reading and looking

The Soil Association‘s recent report that showed crop yields for GM crops are actually no better and often worse than non-GM has coincided with a similar study published in the US, but so far neither report appears to have been found worthy of comment in GM-friendly Canada.

Were you questioning whether organic is really worth it? Here’s one writer who finds that organic foods are more nutritious than those raised by industrial methods (and an article of divided opinion, that still thinks they’re worth it). (And if you wonder why organic food costs so much, check out these regulations, covering permitted substances and the standards and principles which Canadian organic producers will have to follow from December of this year in order to qualify to use the Canada Organic logo.)

Can’t help wondering why this is news: recent headline from the Globe & Mail:
Schools that cut fat and sugar saw dramatic results

I liked Wendell Barry‘s summation of what to do, what to do in this confusing and frightening world, in the panel discussion I mentioned yesterday (Fast Food World: Perils and Promises of the Global Food Chain):

I think the way to begin is to ask yourself what you know about your own economy, your own food economy. Ask yourself where your food came from and what the cost of production was, what’s the ecological cost and the human cost. And I think the result of that exercise is that you don’t know very much at all… And I think when you come to that point, when you understand your ignorance of your own economy, you’ll understand that the only way to become knowledgeable about it is to exert your economic force in support of local production.

This selfsame Wendell Barry has a sobering article entitled Faustian economics: Hell hath no limits in the most recent issue (May 2008) of Harper‘s, which you can read excerpts from here.

And (thanks Bonnie) I just saw some amazing work by Seattle-based former corporate lawyer turned artist Chris Jordan. Called Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait, he describes the project this way:

This series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on.

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.

Some food reading, viewing, listening

An interesting interview with Whole Foods co-president Walter Robb. The CEO of Whole Foods, John MacKay, posts a blog on the company’s website. Of interest to me and my recent reading is the exchange of public letters between MacKay and Michael Pollan, discussing Pollan’s somewhat skeptical take on the Whole Foods phenomenon in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. and the expansion of organic food production and retailing into something that rather too closely resembles the system that organics grew up to counteract.

David Szanto, who completed our course at UniSG in November, joined us for some merrymaking at the Quebec cheese tasting evening last week, and he pointed me to a recent article in The Guardian, The Organic Church Splits, about the Soil Association which I suppose you could say turns some of the same ground from a British perspective; and there was an earlier article and podcast on US organics in Business Week last October. An op-ed piece in the New York Times called The Amber Fields of Bland explains the US farm bill, and the terrifying span of its coverage, and just what it has done to food production in that country.

I’ve been watching a dvd called The Future of Food which MJ brought back from Canada. About farmers, farming, gmo crops and seed/pesticide monopolies, it’s an excellent introduction to the realities of farming today and the issues we should all be attending to in our food. I liked the dvd extras, which included a clip from Michael Pollen responding to the question about ‘will food cost more in future’ – yes, he said, but it’s artificially cheap right now because of heavy crop and farming subsidies in the US and Europe, and people need to perhaps look at their relative priorities: which do you want to spend your money on more each month: safe/nutritious food or $40+ on cable tv? He also made the excellent point that prepared food is always more expensive than food you cook: so people need to learn to cook. But they also need sources for raw ingredients: in some poor neighbourhoods it’s simply impossible even to buy fresh fruit or vegetables.

Doris pointed us to a well respected Austrian documentary on themes of food and hunger, We feed the world – global food which I’d like to have a look at someday.

There’s a Belgian-made short documentary you can view online at EUX-TV called Chicken Madness, about dumping of chicken surpluses in Africa by western countries such as Belgium, Germany, Holland and Brazil. It seems we’ve got very picky in the western world and we just don’t want to eat all of the chicken, so we sell the icky bits to someone hungrier than us. But the lack of effective licensing (=political corruption) and the dearth of functioning cold storage facilities at the receiving end results in an economic double-whammy: food spoilage and the trashing of African poultry farming which can’t compete with the prices — or the convenience of a ready-to-cook product, however tainted. But the industrialised world is committed to free trade at (literally) all costs. As one African farmer bitterly noted, would the US and Europe be ok with the destruction of their local economies in the name of globalisation? Something to think about next time you pick up a packet of chicken breasts…

And I recently listened to a podcast about nutritional food labelling. An education in how little consumers understand of what they read on the label: consumer food education has a long way to go. One telling example from the American representative who said that the majority of American consumers surveyed could not say what a typical daily calorie intake ought to be, despite the calorie information printed on the food labels since 1994 which stated that it was based on a 2000 calorie per day allowance; and that they often disregarded serving size recommendations and simply ate the whole packet. Which says something about labelling, obesity and education.