ASLE 2013 – plenaries, poetry & medicinal plants

Jun 4

 

 

 

I managed to get a long overdue poetry reading into my ASLE week, attending the plenary reading by Maine poet Jeffrey Thomson and Colombian writer Juan Carlos Galeano, who teaches in Florida. I had first encountered Galeano at my first ASLE at UVic in 2009, where he read some of his translated poems from Amazonia, a charming collection that draws its inspiration from Amazonian folk tales. This time he read from that, accompanied by projected translations, as well as from a new work just published (in Spanish) in Peru, Special Report on the Wind. Thomson read from several works, notably his 2009 collection Birdwatching in Wartime; his anecdote about hanging back while the sounds of a group of students he was with faded and observing the way the forest animated after the humans had left stayed with me as a good metaphor for what a lot of presentations touched on.

The Friday afternoon field trip I chose was a trip to the Native Medicinal Plant Research garden, which also houses the university’s community gardens. We were led down the garden path by the excellent Kelly Kindscher, a highly knowledgeable prairie ethnobotanist and wetlands advocate, who explained a bit about the program and let us pick, crush, sniff and ponder over many of the garden’s plants. The program’s main aim is to examine native plants for cancer-healing and antioxidant properties, and Kindscher made some interesting observations about the narrowness of that kind of research: what else might we be missing by focusing on molecules? As if to prove the point I caught myself asking which part of the immune-boosting Topeka Purple Coneflower (echinacea atrorubens) was used for tea. How locked we all are in our modes of thinking: had I not just heard Karin Kilpatrick say that one Western medicine’s many mistakes is failing to use the entire plant as native cultures do? Below, we look at Rattlesnake Master (Eryngium yuccifolium), Kelly demonstrates the invasive power of Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca. a good food – if cooked) ironically invading a patch of mint; and the star plant of the moment, the Long-Leafed Ground Cherry (Physalis longifolia) which is showing some powerful antioxidant properties, offering 14 new compounds that reduce tumour size in breast and pancreatic cancer.

 

 

 

 

Finally, my day came first thing on Saturday morning when I read my personal essay in the company of two quite different academic papers. I had not expected more than a couple of people to attend, since it was 8:30 in the morning and the room was murderously difficult to find, but we had a healthy gathering of 15 or so which was gratifying, and the discussion was interesting and friendly. The sessions I went to in the Species & Food subject stream were all pretty well attended; I understand it was the first time ASLE had had a food theme, so I expect it will continue. Since I have the floor, here is the panel in its entirety: Shamim Us-Saher Ansari, St. Louis Community College-Meramec: ‘You are What You Eat and How You Eat’: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Eating in French Canadian Culture as Dramatized in Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rock; Bethany Ober, Penn State University: Expanding the Limits of Gender and Domesticity in Contemporary Ecofeminist Memoir; and Rhona McAdam, In your own backyard: Food sovereignty & the urban garden.

After that there was only time for one more session before I had to leave for the airport, and fortunately for me it was Daniel Wildcat. The title of his topic, After progress: Enacting systems of life-enhancement frankly put me off but I went anyway and was very glad I did, as he was an entertaining and persuasive speaker. Describing himself as a recovering academic, he spoke about how to respond to a damaged world, using “indigenous realism.” This is not, he stressed, naive romanticism: that label is better represented by the idea that humans are in charge of the balance of life on the planet. What we need, he said, is a cultural climate change, one that bridges the gap from knowing to doing and does not include a division between nature and culture. Storytelling is lost: the stories our children hear now are not the wisdom transmitted by their elders, but 30 second soundbites developed by corporations in order to teach kids to be consumers. We need to get from a sense of inalienable rights to one of inalienable responsibility, in a world of relationships not resources. The least each of us can do, if we can’t fix the planet, is to become a better relative and make the world a better place for nonhuman relatives.

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ASLE 2013 – been & gone

Jun 4

 

 

 

 

Water could have been the theme at ASLE 2013. At the opening reception, the Provost of KU promised us that Kansas is a great place when it’s not raining or snowing… but life does end up being a lot about water management when you get, as Lawrence did, five inches of rain in three days.  Lots of impermeable surfaces on the hilltop campus mean lots of extra drainage. I guess it all ends up in the Kansas River, which ends up in the Missouri River, which ends up in the Mississippi and on into the Gulf of Mexico, instead of back in the groundwater. Although as we heard from Kelly Kindscher, the impassioned ethnobotanist who led our Friday afternoon tour of the university’s Native Medicinal Herb Garden, some of the topsoil is very deep and there are clay deposits of such depth that may be separating groundwater from deeper water deposits.

My first conference appearance was on Wednesday when I chaired a panel called Race, Gender, Garden, Region which rambled across Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Gardens in the Dunes, gendered landscapes in early 20th century New England Ballads and an analysis of “A French Garden in England: A record of the successes & failures of a first year of intensive culture” by Helen Nussey and Olive J. Cockerell, a garden memoir from 1909, which sounded fascinating. It is charmingly illustrated by Cockerell – who had made a name illustrating fairytales – and faithfully records instructions, successes and failures. I’ll have to have a look next time I’m at the British Library.

The first plenary I attended featured Stacy Alaimo and Cary Wolfe. Alaimo kicked off her discussion of deep sea environmentalism with an apt New Yorker cartoon, and then took us through some of the decade’s worth of work from the Census of Marine Life. Wolfe, referring to his recent book Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame, riffed on such thoughts as what kinds of creatures is it ok to do what to; and whose lives count as lives and whose life counts as a “grievable life”.

Picking a couple of favourite presentations from favourite sessions – hundreds? thousands? to choose from – I was particularly moved by a paper by Hillary J Fogerty, from  Missouri Southern State University,  the irresistably-titled Why she can`t stop talking about the farmers market: Considering the role of activism and Advocacy in Food Studies Pedagogy and Curriculum. She described a research course for English students which she rewrote to allow students – largely from disadvantaged socio-economic groups – to study their own food security, developing research and writing skills while keeping food diaries, analyzing food advertising and ultimately in many cases changing the way they ate. She described students three years later shouting across parking lots at her to share weight loss, dietary changes and other improvements which were all the more remarkable for taking place in a town that is the headquarters for Tyson Foods, with Walmart down the road and in the looming shadow of Monsanto. Those students were likely directly dependent on those companies by direct or indirect family ties.

My other favourite, a no-brainer, was the personal essay by Dan Philippon describing a visit to Italy where he guest-lectured at the University of Gastronomic Sciences and spent time with his family visiting food producers in the Piemonte region. His talk, Slow Food or Small Food? Learning from Italian Producers, hinged on his visit to a small flour and polenta mill, Mulino Marino, and what he learned there about perceptions of quality, marketing, tradition and technology. He summed up his findings – what the producers he spoke to believed – as:

1. quality matters
2. organic and natural do not equal quality
3. history and tradition matter, but so do technology and innovation
4. local cannot be untangled from global
5. small food good; big food bad

I will finish in my next posting to mention my own paper, two different but inspiring plenaries and a field trip.

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ASLE 2013 – and I’d never been to Kansas

May 30

Bricks, Lawrence KSI arrived on the heels of a big thunderstorm that flooded basements and washed the place clean before disappearing off to neighbouring states. The air is still heavy with heat and humidity, and more storms are forecast but so far we’ve been lucky.

I flew into Kansas City, MO, which is across the Kansas River from Kansas City, KS, more or less. The Missouri River is also involved in ways I have yet to become clear on. Anyway I left that puzzle behind me and was whisked off to Lawrence, about 40 miles west, where Kansas University is hosting the tenth biennial ASLE conference, whose theme is Changing Nature: Migrations, Energies, Limits.

I spent Tuesday walking around the neighbourhood I’m staying in, which borders the university, and where there is, happily, no shortage of gardens to gawp at.

 

 

 

 

 

A bit of wildlife too. Funny to see the rabbits, not as pretty or numerous as the ones that entertained ASLE 2009. I throw in a gratuitous cat picture because I don’t have cats in my suitcases as often as I used to. And a Jaybird for the sports fans.

 

 

 

 

 

Pretty campus, on top of a steep hill which gets steeper during the hottest time of the day. And it has been warm. Not inside where the air conditioning is: there, it’s been very chilly. Never occurred to me to bring winter clothing for the meetings…

 

 

 

 

 

And finally, a couple more gardens. I suspect that exams and graduations got the better of the campus garden which does have some lettuce struggling for life against the weeds. But most gardens here suffer the effects of short growing seasons, which are short and powerful: hot sunny weather and lots of rain mean it’s hard to exert much control over what grows where once it starts. The school garden at right seems to be well in someone’s hands though, with the broccoli nearly ready. And that’s where I’ll leave it – more about the conference itself another time.

 

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Plants to swap, buy and heal

May 19

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.

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Octopus Day on the Gorge

May 14

I have some deadlines looming, so of course I am overcome with a need to cook and clean and hang laundry on the line while the sun shines.

And so it was that while diligently sorting through the hidden treasures in my freezer, I came upon an octopus, bounty from last year’s Michelle Rose seafood share.

This particular species, the red octopus (O. rubescens), is considered bycatch in prawn fishing, so the Michelle Rose fishermen decided to make a meal of it and add it to their offerings. Spot prawn season started last Thursday and  I’m looking forward to another share of both this year. All the more reason to drop everything and cook up some octopus surprise.

Octopus is not something I’ve found too often on Canadian menus; when I mention it my friends gag and make squeamish noises about tentacles. They are surprised when I tell them how tender and delicious it can be, as they assume it will be rubbery like cuttlefish and as flavourless as the depressing platters of calimari that (dis)grace so many bar menus.

One of my enduring memories of Crete is a particularly delicious dinner featuring octopus in red wine. This must have been nearly ten years ago, yet the taste and texture live on. When in Italy I always have insalata di polpo, and occasionally carpaccio di polpo. So I was game to try cooking some myself.

Many recipes consulted, and Italian cooking videos watched for good measure. In all of them they dunk the octopus three times in boiling water, to curl the ends of the tentacles and gradually introduce the change in temperature to assure tender cooking. They all stewed or simmered the octopus in water, but I had taken the words of saint Harold McGee to heart–“If you cook octopus in water, you dilute those juices and their flavor.” The flesh, he advises, is 80% water, so it does release a lot of juice while cooking.

This was a hefty one, in excellent condition, having been frozen in salt water. I forgot to weigh it before I started but I’d guess at least 2kg, with very long tentacles making it a bit of a trial to handle. I decided to blanch it as directed – eschewing the salt at Harold’s suggestion – and divide it in two so I could try a couple of different recipes.

One batch I cooked in the oven, with no added water, at 200f. I can cool this and eat it as is, or use it in salads or make a carpaccio. Harold said it could take up to five hours for a large octopus but this one was seeming very tender after blanching, so I only needed an hour; put it in a smaller casserole and turned it at the halfway point and then cooled it in its juices. When I reduced them they were salty indeed so I was glad I hadn’t added any seasonings.

The other half I cooked in red wine the Cretan way. The initial instructions were a little difficult to believe: cook in olive oil on low heat until all the juices are absorbed. Of course the opposite happened, but I figured I could reduce the juices later. I decided to pause after half an hour as the flesh was starting to tenderize beautifully. I added the red wine and gave it another half hour and let it cool in the juices before tucking it away in the fridge for my supper.

Looking forward to a nice healthy meal  of it which will contain iron, calcium, potassium, phosphorus, selenium and zinc; vitamins C, A, B12, folate and Niacin; as well as some omega-3 fatty acids, choline and taurine.

Here are the recipes:

Slow-cooked octopus (based on Harold McGee’s To Cook an Octopus)

    1kg octopus
    1 large kettle boiling water
  • Clean the octopus, if needed: remove any extraneous matter from the hood, cut out the eyes and remove the beak (found on the bottom of the octopus where the arms meet). Rinse well.
  • Using a large fork, hold the octopus just under the hood so that the tentacles fall downwards. Dip the tentacles almost up to the fork in the boiling water and hold for about 15 seconds. Lift and note the way the ends have curled in. Repeat, plunging a bit further to cover the hood. Once again lift and let the water drain; then repeat a third time, ensuring the octopus is covered in water. Hold there for about 10 seconds and then lift, drain and place in an ovenproof covered casserole.
  • Place the casserole in a 200f/95c oven and cook for 2-5 hours, checking for tenderness with a knife.
  • Drain the juices and boil them down to reduce them to the desired consistency and amount.
  • When cool, you will probably want to remove the skin and perhaps the suckers for a more aesthetic look.
  • Serve the octopus as is, with the juices, or cut into pieces and make into an octopus salad dressed with good quality olive oil and fresh lemon juice (cold boiled and sliced potatoes make a nice addition) with freshly chopped parsley; a mixed seafood salad; or make octopus carpaccio (scroll down to see photos in this recipe for easy instructions) drizzled in olive oil and lemon dressing. Or perhaps you could add potatoes and beans and make a version of this nice sounding octopus stew.

 

Octopus in Red Wine (based on Cretan Cooking, by Maria & Nikos Psilakis)

  • Clean the octopus, if needed: remove any extraneous matter from the hood, cut out the eyes and remove the beak (found on the bottom of the octopus where the arms meet). Rinse well.
  • Using a large fork, hold the octopus just under the hood so that the tentacles fall downwards. Dip the tentacles almost up to the fork in the boiling water and hold for about 15 seconds. Lift and note the way the ends have curled in. Repeat, plunging a bit further to cover the hood. Once again lift and let the water drain; then repeat a third time, ensuring the octopus is covered in water. Hold there for about 10 seconds and then lift, drain and place on a chopping board.
  • Cut the octopus up into pieces about an inch long, or to your preference.
  • Heat half a cup of good olive oil in a pot large enough to hold the octopus pieces comfortably. Add the octopus and cook at low heat for around half an hour, until starting to become tender.
  • Add half a cup of red wine and cook another half an hour or so, until very soft and tender.
  • Serve with rice and a Greek salad, and lots of your best crusty bread.
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