ReallyGoodWriter | Food • Writing • Poetry Iambic Cafe

food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

Last Monday a group of us went to Larry and Marilyn’s for an extracting party. So absorbed was I in my task of finding cool comfortable clothes to last me a day in a warm garage I forgot to remember who else might be there…

but luckily was able to adapt my wardrobe to suit the conditions and escaped without a sting, although not everyone was so lucky. The bees were a bit dopey and curious and kept a close eye on us and the honey supers, and did a bit of the fine cleaning.

First task was to cut the cappings on the honey. There were several tools at our disposal. Top of the line was the capping knife,

which melts the tops off in one fell swoop, with relative speed (depending on who was operating it)…

and then there’s this more modest version…

and finally the capping comb, which is useful and necessary for finishing work as well. They must all be used carefully as you don’t want to damage the comb and make more work for the bees when you return the frames to the hive.

Then the frames, dripping honey, are positioned in the extractor, either a larger-capacity mechanical one

or a hand-cranked model that can do two frames at a time.

After a while it starts to flow…

and flow.

And then, when you have uncapped as many frames as you can,

you can down tools (the cappings are melted down for the beeswax)

and go for lunch. If you are not too full from sampling fingerfuls of honey.

In Our Food, our Future last week, the topic was the impact of high food prices on those with less disposable income, where the proportion of monthly income spent on food is escalating with possibly dangerous results. Some interesting issues raised. The rise in obesity among poor people, because fatty, sugary foods are cheaper than better quality ones. The lack of practical food skills (selection, preparation) among those who need them most: young, pregnant or breastfeeding women, single parents, students. The difficulty of feeding ever-hungry teens on a small budget. And the economic risk of experimenting with cooking or dietary change: if you are on a very tight food budget, with children to feed, monotony is a big problem, because you must stick to foods with a long shelf life (fatty, sugary, highly-processed) that you know how to portion and prepare, and that your family will eat.

It’s been party time in Victoria. Last weekend was BC Day, and the crowds were out in the inner harbour,

the Snowbirds did an impressive flyby.

I didn’t stay for the evening’s open-air entertainment which included Burton Cummings, Feist and Sarah McLachlan, because I had food to think about.

The Himalayan blackberries are in season now, though I suspect people are not picking them because there’s a rumour about (repeated to me with my berry pail at every turning) that they aren’t ripe until the end of August. Ok, so believe that if you wish. I believe with mine eyes and mine palate and mine berry bucket.

During an irresponsible visit to some farm markets, I bought loganberries and giant boysenberries, which for scientific purposes I compared in my berry line-up, in order of size, with a Himalayan and a native blackberry.

Then, because my apples are ripe and my berry pail full, I made pie. Rather good with Udder Guy’s strawberry ice cream.

And for those who say to me “but don’t you get tired of zucchini?” I can only laugh sadly and smugly. There’s soup to be made, chocolate-zucchini cake of course, but also zucchini parmigiana as earlier mentioned, and this wonderful thing which I sampled last April (paired with smoked provolone) at the wonderful La Croce di Malta in Parma. I thought the proprietor was calling it zucchini escabeche, but in fact she was saying Zucchini alla Scapece,

which is a superb Italian cousin; by her account from Sicily. It’s a wonderful substance, featuring fresh mint, garlic and vinegar and – best of all for dinner party purposes – a good long sit on the kitchen counter. I read that its combination of sour and sweet flavour signals its origins in Spanish cuisine, and its roots in Spanish-ruled parts of the country.

I spent some time reflecting on the back-breaking nature of organic farming last week.

Wednesday’s tasks at Haliburton were to liberate the squash patch from smartweed, which was something more than abundant.

Four of us made a good dent

and were rewarded with lemonade and some rejected potatoes, which I took home and roasted with thyme, lemon and mushrooms, as instructed by Nigel Slater.

Saturday I paid a visit to Local Yokels, where with my growing weed-naming skills I can with some certainty say that we pulled smartweed, sorrel, morning glory, plantain, mustard and lots of other stuff from the squash,

the broccoli

the cabbage

and the corn (boo!)

Couldn’t say hello to the chickens as they had been taken away for a holiday to get over the trauma of witnessing whatever was killing their kin – a weasel, it was thought, rather than raccoons, as the corpses were left in the chicken tractor. Whatever it was, security’s going to be ramped up considerably before they return to the field.

But the berry trail was looking good, with lots of berries ready for the picking.

And the bees are very happy in the borage

though it’s nearing the end of honey season, and I’m looking forward to a visit to Larry & Marilyn’s to help out with some extraction on Monday.

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).

I feel like I’m closer to understanding why the cost of food has shot up this year, thanks to the first of a new four part radio series from BBC. Our Food Our Future looks at the reasons behind current price rises and what may lie ahead in the future.

In the program, Tom Heap investigates the truth behind what we’ve been told: that higher costs are due to the rises in costs of raw materials (and yet EU figures say that, for example, raw material costs of bread and cereals were 19% of the supermarket costs, and in 2008 they are 4%); increased consumption of wheat by India (actually 2% per year) and China (static); increased production of biofuels (increased in USA from 43 million tons to 63 million tons in the past year, but has also increased exports); and climate change, in its most popular recent example the Australian drought (but Australia only produces 3% of world wheat: the drought meant loss of 10 million tons out of worldwide production of 600 million tons).

His conclusion was that there is in fact some truth in all these things, but not only that: because the production and consumption figures worldwide are now so close, any small change in any aspect of production or consumption will shake the whole system.

The whole thing began with postwar agricultural subsidies that aimed to boost production at any cost; other factors like political liberalisation of countries such as Russia (with the collapse of farming collectives) and global shifts in production and agricultural land availability have all affected global food production.

When the postwar subsidies were withdrawn in Europe, farmers began finding ways to cut costs rather than boost yields, so yields stabilised, production went into decline (with supermarket pressures for low prices and no government guarantees to shore up farming incomes) and the global food surplus was shrinking.

So we have less surplus right now to pad out shortfalls caused by climactic or economic crises, and any little thing can tip the world into shortages. As well, wealthy western shoppers, instead of adapting to high prices (caused by shortages) by traditional behaviours such as substituting cheaper goods, are pushing prices up still further by simply paying whatever it costs to buy whatever they’re used to having. Because they can.

And finally, food commodity markets are being used by derivatives traders to offset other debts, adding another factor that makes food prices more volatile.

The technology that we depend on now to boost agricultural yields is artificial nitrogen, created through heavy use of oil; an estimated 50% of agricultural costs now are tied to producing fertiliser. The commentator drew one scary comment from an interview subject: since its introduction after WW2 artificial nitrogen has allowed the world’s population to increase unchecked, by boosting yields (with less and less nutritious crops). The global population is such that now we have outstripped the yield that could be generated by natural nitrogen cycles, so we are facing the real possibility of not being able to feed the world even now. Which I guess is why the recent Unesco report on world farming was so firm on the use of organic farming practices, which include natural means of soil enrichment.

Part 2 airs on Monday.