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War on local food
There’s an amazing exhibition of wartime posters about food and agriculture which you can enjoy virtually, if you are unable to visit the National Library of Agriculture in Beltsville, Maryland.
Back here in nambypambyland, you’d think you were in some kind of wartime, and maybe you are. Just across the Salish Sea, farmers and food producers are revolted by the behaviour of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency which has come down on a local food store in Vancouver, The Home Grow-In Grocer (which was celebrating its first birthday on my last trip to the big city) for stocking local products which (gasp) don’t have bilingual (French) labelling. And various other labelling infractions, rendering many foods officially unsaleable.
Seizing perfectly good stock on such lame grounds would be bad enough, but the repercussions for the food producers are in some cases crippling, as it makes their products unsaleable until they are able to find the time and money to invest in conforming to standards which are (here we go again) in place mostly because we can’t trust multinationals to tell the truth about our food supply.
And why is the CFIA picking on a neighbourhood grocery anyway, when Vancouver boasts a world of non-compliant ethnic groceries, and one of the biggest selection of Chinese and other Asian foods in the continent – many of those items not even labelled in English? I bought a jar of jam in Quebec last month that had no English on it at all; since I was in a French-speaking part of Canada I was neither surprised nor moved to call the inspection agency over it.
This is not, it seems to me, an issue of food safety: rendering a product label into French in an English-speaking part of the country is not going to make a food any safer for anyone. So why are the inspectors wasting time and money on all this? When you look at their list of recalls, you wonder how they have time to do anything but keep up with the industrial scale producers that cause most of the trouble.
Certainly I think it’s important to include ingredient labelling on a product: I wouldn’t normally buy anything that lacks such information, and I would agree producers should be required to produce such labels if they don’t have them. Nutrition labels… I don’t know; maybe. But for heaven’s sake: locally-produced food in a local shop doesn’t need to carry translated labels.
Canada is not the only one struggling with this misdirection of its food inspectors. The Americans do it as well. I’m sure Europe has a catalogue of incidents too, since its labelling regulations are as complex as its membership’s food traditions, in cultures where those traditional foods are fighting for survival against easier-to-regulate mass-produced industrial products. And where there is a long history of attempting to balance food safety against traditional methods of food preparation and preservation. Understandable in a region where food safety concerns like BSE have created catastrophic problems for consumers. But these illnesses are overwhelmingly the product of overproduction and profiteering, not artisanal production.
One happy note in the food world is the enlightened thinking of Canada’s Governor-General, who has seen fit to recognize food and drink for national honours. Sinclair and Frédérique Philip who founded Sooke Harbour House and nurtured a generation of excellent chefs, were among the recipients for the first Governor General’s Award in Celebration of the Nation’s Table this year. They have been tireless advocates for local and sustainable eating and have managed to deliver world-class dining in an unlikely location, a long drive from Victoria, which they’ve made a stunningly beautiful restaurant and b&b.;
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Summer on the farm stand
I’ve been spending a little time on the Haliburton farm stand, which has been a great opportunity to ogle seasonal produce.
Braising greens have never looked so beautiful.
Tayberries are about done now, but there are lots of raspberries, strawberries and a few red currants.
Marty, who is part of Sunbird Farms (one of the three farming operations at Hali), produces staggeringly beautiful organic flower arrangements. Here they are getting ready to go to Moss Street Market last Saturday.
And some sweet peas on the farm stand:
It’s garlic harvest time. Hang ’em where you may…
Edible flowers are as beautiful an addition to the farm stand as to salads:
Our CSA veg baskets are looking lovely. Actually I think it looks like a CSA seminar.
And finally, I am a Poem of the Week poet on the Acumen website this week (see Guest Poem button). Catch me while you can…
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Folk festival
Last weekend’s Vancouver Island MusicFest was the usual mix of heat and song and generally friendly and happy crowds.
Not the greatest music ever but as always, there were some highlights. Unfortunately the headliner – Roberta Flack – was at the other end of the scale, offering a late-starting, faltering Friday night performance punctuated with odd ramblings. I will go on enjoying her early moments and be grateful for those at least.
I always enjoy a bit of David Lindley, who had to cancel last year so gave us some multidimensional quirkiness this.
Nanci Griffith was a good ‘un, a reliable performer who understands the importance of her backlist and gave us a good mix of old and new. I could have done without the breast-beating over the BP oilspill, though; Amerocentrism is a tiresome thing at the best of times. It gets me to musing that she and others anguishing over the inevitable could get some useful perspective with a visit to Nigeria… and if folk songs don’t solve the problem, they could always sell their cars.
Some old favourites returned: Winnipeg’s charming group Nathan were sweet and entertaining. The heat was blasting by the time they came on at 5pm and I was happy to view them from a few inches of shade I managed to cosy into in front of the stage.
Meanwhile, the food swung from the awful to the pretty good. My prize for the worst value meal goes to Bali, the Indonesian stand. Posing as “Vegetable Curry”, this $10 Chinet platterful of rice was nothing more than tinned Chinese vegetables – palm shoots and baby corn – in a coconut curry sauce. Priced the same as their meat dishes, which is just wrong. Good profit margin for them I guess. May they burn their tongues in hell’s kitchen.
Moving up the scale, I give the Gourmet Burger wagon’s yamburgers a thumbs-up for presentation (I liked the paper bag wrapping) and use of ingredients from local farms and food producers. Thumbs down for pricing it ($8) the same as the beef burger.
Old reliable: Woodstock’s Smokies continue to be the best I’ve ever had. Bavarian smokies are my choice, but the Gardener’s Revenge (venison) was once again a hot seller. I don’t know if the venison was local, but from what I saw wandering around the roadsides, I would guess there are more than enough deer to stock a few folk festivals.
Plastic water bottles were banned from the site, so you could refill your own from the water wagons that circulated constantly over a hot and thirsty weekend.
I’ve never been a fan of Kettle Corn’s sugary salty combination, preferring my popcorn salted, buttered and served with movies, but was entertained to see what kit you need in order to make festival-sized batches.
The best food on the weekend was, of course, breakfast at Fanny Bay
served al fresco in the balmy morning air, in the company of an affable group of the like-minded.
Before breakfast I foraged a few berries – thimbleberries are ripe and difficult to pick, and salal berries are starting to ripen.
I was captured by a roving photographer who liked my hat (the work of Ulrieke Benner on Salt Spring Island)
Favourite performance, hands down, was Joan Osborne, singing with The Holmes Brothers. The album the music tent did not have on sale – at least not when I was there – was Breakfast In Bed, which features this cut:
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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.
“…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….”
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.
