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  • Gary Nabhan – Climate change and traditional diets

    Tuesday after Tuesday has slipped by in another busy month. A couple of Tuesdays ago, American ethno-botanist Gary Nabhan visited the University of Victoria to give one of the Landsdowne Lectures. A distinguished writer, teacher and conservation biologist from Arizona, Nabhan has published work whose subject matter ranges from tequila, to place-based foods, to diabetes in desert-dwellers, to the marriage of science and poetry, to his special passion for chile peppers. He delivered a fascinating and fast-moving talk to a crowded lecture theatre, covering climate change, indigenous diets and the need for adaptation and knowledge-sharing among First Nations communities struggling to protect sources of their native plants and other food sources.

    He began with an expression of concern about the rapidity of climate change inserting itself into food security: the ravages of drought, he said, are changing what’s going to be on our plate in the near and long term. If you don’t think that climate change alters access to food, wait and see what happens to food selection and price in both developing and developed world this year. Five Canadian provinces, 1,800 rural counties in US and 7 Mexican states have experiences droughts and climactic disasters this year that count as the worst in recorded history. Newly introduced plants, weeds and insects are causing problems for traditional plants even as climate works its changes.

    He spent quite a bit of time on the notion of terroir, and its “relationship to place” that draws lines between flavour and culture. Both physical environment and cultural perceptions contribute to the particular flavour profile in indigenous foods. It doesn’t really make much difference whether landscape, soil or culture is the most important to these flavours, since all these things are now being affected by climate change. It is affecting both wild and managed place-based foods, like heirloom vegetables and fruits, heritage livestock and poultry, and “Salmon nation” foods, some of which were introduced, while others went feral: giant camas, Olympia oysters, Pacific littleneck (butter) clams, wapato, Hooker’s onion, moss cranberry all of which had stewardship traditions.

    Traditional foods in all cultures are undergoing both availability and flavour shifts due to climate change. Where once terroir was perceived as a stable quality, now its definition is being scrambled by the “new normal” of climate change: both flavours and price will change as a result. “Many grape varieties may now be at their ripening limits,” he observed: they won’t taste the same unless we grow them at different latitudes which can offer them the growing season and temperatures they’re accustomed to.

    Other foods just simply won’t be able to be grown where they used to be: for example many wild and cultivated fruits and nuts require adequate winter chill hours and optimum mean temperatures that are no longer available. The wild relatives of cultivated crops have not been well studied, but will also be subject to these changes: lacking the winter chill hours for budding, fruiting and optimum yield. The bog cranberry, cloudberry, trailing blackberry, Pacific crabapple and beaked hazelnut are a few examples.

    This whole situation puts any traditional food products – such as those protected by geographical indications – at particular risk, worldwide, as climate change begins to bite. Seed banks are not the answer, since they lock seeds into climactic conditions that will no longer exist by the time the seeds are needed.

    He turned to his own beloved chile peppers as an example of what’s happening to traditional crops. They are particularly vulnerable to changes in climate, as they flower and set fruit in hurricane season. Drought has brought disruption: low yields, insect predation (the nitrate counts increase due to drought stress, which attracts insects); freak freezing weather in 2011 killed 60-80% of the American chile crop that year.

    Ironically, we have, through urbanization, inadvertently created laboratories to study climate change: urban heat islands can forecast what will happen in adjoining rural areas within a few decades. Now is the time to be observing those changes and learning from them.

    The action required? Assisted migration of heat-stressed plants or food animals is one option, though this won’t help wild foods. Knowledge will have to be shared by southerly neighbours as the growing conditions move northwards. Traditional agro-ecological practices will be needed in order to create climatically buffered micro-habitats for vulnerable foods, in a system he called “ethno-mimicry” – preserving foods that are ceremonially, medicinally or nutritionally necessary in indigenous food systems.

    Traditional food managers are not passively victims of climate change, but are already adapting, through such methods as water harvesting and conservation, or using “nurse plants” to shelter temperature-sensitive edibles and medicinals. We’ll need new alliances of producers and consumers to redesign food systems for resilience, changing our “food prints”.

    Knowing where our food comes from, he concluded, is “the surest way we have to lodge ourselves within this blessed earth.”

  • 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.

     

  • Flavour of September, with a pinch of October

     

     

     

    How busy can one month be? Very very in September’s case. Here it is October and I’m still rushing. A quick review will show why I’ve been too crazed to post, though it’s been delightful and stimulating.

    Friday Sept. 21 was the long-anticipated (by me, certainly) panel discussion featuring visiting baker Andrew Whitley, community-supported fisherman Guy Johnston and urban farmer Angela Moran, with her chicken wrangler Trevor van Hemert. Whitley kicked off with a description of the organic baking career that led him to his current life as a baking instructor and organic activist. He is helping to launch a local community supported baking enterprise, and through the Real Bread Campaign which he co-founded, to raise awareness about different ways to promote bread in communities. Johnston described his two-year old community supported fishery, which helps him keep his boat in the water and his family in the sustainable fishing business. He urged us to join in the October 22 protest against the Northern Gateway Pipeline, which will endanger the livelihood of all those who fish in west coast waters. Moran and van Hemert have arranged with eight neighbours to share both chicken-shaped responsibilities and egg-shaped outcomes so that Moran’s urban farm is able to keep its flock of laying hens. They’ve come up with a model agreement they want to share with others to spread the joy of shared chicken ownership.

    Saturday we put Andrew back in the kitchen to lead a breadmaking workshop for a lucky baker’s dozen who were spared the cost of airfare to Scotland to take the class at Bread Matters. In the beautifully equipped domestic science lab at Royal Oak Middle School, Andrew and the participants faced some challenges with the limitations of domestic ovens and unfamiliar flours while he shared some of his knowledge about bread, flour and the state of grain in the world today.

     

     

     

     

    Sunday Sept. 23 marked the first offering of the Flavour Gourmet Picnic, held at Coastal Winery in Black Creek, just north of the Comox Valley. I’d been to Feast of Fields and the Island Chefs Collaborative festivals, and thought it would be interesting to experience a north Island event. Andrew & Veronica joined us to sample the many, many wares on offer at a gentle, sun-warmed and well-organized afternoon of sipping and tasting. One of those who’d attended Andrew’s talk to the VIU Professional Baking program in Nanaimo the week before was there with her Church Street Bakery breads, and he make an appearance in the rather lovely video made to commemorate the day (accepting one of the most delicious items on offer: a piece of chocolate pave from Kingfisher Lodge).

     

     

     

     

     

    On Monday, after a relaxing morning gathering oysters for supper, we headed back to Victoria where I attended a meeting of the Victoria Horticultural Society‘s Veggie group – one of the members was explaining her planting calendar and use of cover crops, which is something I’d like to do better even in my tiny garden.

    By Wednesday 26th Andrew & Veronica were packed and ready to leave, but not until we’d stopped in to see Cliff Leir’s operation at Fol Epi. He’d described his grain soaking and flour milling operations at the Kneading Conference, but seeing the tiny space in which the magic happens made it the more special. Good things, small packages etc. (and the pumpkin pie and sausage roll we sampled, among other treats, were formidably good).

    Wednesday evening arrived promptly and after a small misspelling on the poster had been swiftly corrected (yes, I pine still for England where there is never a D in my name) the maiden voyage of Digging the City took place in a room in my local library filled with interesting and interested people, many from GTUF.

    Thursday saw me back on the farmstand at Haliburton and then back on the road to Nanaimo where we were discussing vitamins and minerals in the CSNN introductory holistic nutrition course. Fascinating but mind-blowing.

    Friday 28th I went to a permaculture potluck to hear Brandon Bauer, one of the instructors in the permaculture design course I took earlier this year, talk about his work replenishing the soil on his property on Salt Spring Island. He’s currently teaching a permaculture and site planning workshop and as ever had some pithy things to say about his own experiences in those areas. Saturday was a workshop on tenancy management (better late than never) that was fascinating and offered by one of the very knowledgeable souls at ROMS. That evening we went for supper at the Moon Under Water brewpub which I hadn’t had a chance to try out, and enjoyed my Fanny Bay Oyster Burger for auld lang syne.

    Sunday was my weekly family dinner, plus some lying-in, sitting-down and catching-up, which meant I missed the Saanich Sustainable Food Festival and the 5th Annual Chef Survival Challenge and Feast at Madrona Farm… I’ll get to one of those one of these days… AND the Slow Food Terra Madre fundraiser Last Hurrah At Orange Hall.

    Monday it was suddenly October, and I joined some other GTUFers to talk about food security at Gorge-ous Coffee, our newly opened local hangout. While we did not quite set the world to rights, we had an interesting chat about foraging in the neighbourhood, rooftop gardens, preserving skills, grafting tours and nut trees, among others.

     

     

     

     

    After a quasi-restful Tuesday in which I attempted to catch up on a few more things, like a bit of light tomato canning, and a chat with my neighbour who’d attracted a frog to his garden, and a bit of acorn gathering, it was suddenly Wednesday and time for the debut screening of Symphony of the Soil, Deborah Koons Garcia’s (The Future of Food) second feature film  and an excellent one it is. It explains very beautifully what soil is, how it produces food (not just for humans) and how it can be preserved and nourished. Recommended viewing for all living things. We too were nourished with birthday cake as the occasion marked Open Cinema’s tenth anniversary and afterwards there was a panel discussion with Robin Tunnicliffe, Heide Hermary and the filmmaker.

     

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Book cover of Rhona McAdam's book Larder with still life painting of lemons and lemon branches with blossoms in a ceramic bowl. One of the lemons has a beed on it.

In her latest collection, Rhona McAdam navigates the dark places of human movement through the earth and the exquisite intricacies lingering in backyard gardens and farmlands populated by insects and pollinators, all the while returning to the body, to the tune of staccato beats and the newly discovered symmetries within the human heart.

Enjoy

“…A beautiful, filling collection, Larder is a set of poems to read at the change of the seasons, to appreciate alongside a good meal, and to remind yourself of the beauty in everything, even the things you may not appreciate before opening McAdam’s collection….”

Alison Manley

Rhona McAdam is a writer, poet, editor, and Registered Holistic Nutritionist with a Master’s in Food Culture from Italy and a deep-rooted passion for ecology and urban agriculture. Her work spans corporate and technical writing to poetry and creative nonfiction, often exploring the vital links between what we eat and how we live. Based in Victoria, BC, and available via Zoom, Rhona is always open to new writing commissions, readings, or workshops on nutrition and the culinary arts.

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