Food for thought

Nov 14

Santa Clara Topiary

The older I get the more I experience the Whoosh factor: one minute I’m staring at West Coast rain, and the next it’s a sunny morning in Silicon Valley, and I’m part of a 1,700-strong hive of health at the Santa Clara Conference Center. We’re buzzing round stands promoting magnetic beds, fermented cod liver oil, natural cosmetics, books on healthy stomach acid and fermentation and nutritional cures for mood disorders. There’s a seafood stand doing a brisk trade in Alaskan salmon roe, a couple of guys selling crispy nuts – raw almonds which have been soaked and dried according to principles laid down by Sally Fallon Morrell, our queen bee if ever there was – and someone offering tastes of a new product made with ratfish oil.

Soon my hands are warmed by my cup of beef broth and I’m balancing a bowl of full fat sheep’s milk yogurt with frozen blueberries. I have some organic fruit and cheese in my pocket for later and am considering how I can manage to juggle a couple of boiled eggs before grabbing a bottle of raw milk to wash it all down. In my bag I have a small jar of coconut oil, some pecan nut butter and a small package of granola made from pre-soaked grains and coconut.

Such was the sweet beginning to my first Weston A Price Foundation conference. Those breakfast items were purchased for Moolah, tickets sold in support of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, which exists to help those persecuted by the FDA for living the WAPF dream of eating nutrient-dense foods, including raw milk.

And eat we did over those three days. If I saw one person raising a piece of sourdough wholemeal rye topped with half an inch of butter to their lips, I saw a hundred, at every meal. The lunch and supper buffets were groaning with pastured meats, whole fat cheese and sour cream, fresh green salads, liver sausage and fermented foods of all descriptions. We had sauerkraut pretty much every meal, plus kimchi, fermented apple butter, lightly pickled beets and kombucha. (In keeping with the foundation’s food principles, there were no refined carbohydrates or sugar or caffeine.) Several times the meal lines stalled while the kitchen scrambled to keep up with demand. At every table there was a shaker of Celtic sea salt with which we could lavish minerals as well as flavour onto our food. More than one mealtime conversation embellished the theme of “how great is it to be able to trust conference food?” And it was good.

And given all that food, what was really unusual here was the size of the participants. There was another event going on at the same time in the centre, a spirituality conference: the participants there were strikingly like most large gatherings of Americans that I’ve been to: a good proportion were morbidly obese, most were at least chunky. The Weston A Price people were proportioned more like Canadians or Europeans: not many would have been described as heavy, very few obese, and most were either slender or fit. And this wasn’t because they were all in the first flush of youth: middle age was the norm. Living proof that fat doesn’t make you fat.

I’ll follow this entry up with more about the talks I attended that left my brain buzzing even while my body hummed with contentment.

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Brewing change – Sandor Katz

Nov 10

The Iambic Cafe has been in a process of change in recent weeks, and is now emerging in a slightly altered state, as my interest in food tracks itself inward through the body. I’m studying how food can heal, nourish and sustain us, and so I find myself today in Santa Clara California at the annual Weston A Price Foundation Conference. I’m here with some 1,699 others who think food is the answer to many of the ills that we have brought upon ourselves through industrial agriculture, monocropping, pesticide and biotech damage to soil, crops and consumers; environmental contamination; the consumption of industrial foods; and destructive public health policies that have led to dangerous practices such as low fat diets and overmedication.

I have this weekend achieved a long cherished dream to hear Sandor Katz speak. We met briefly on the floor (literally) of the marketplace at Terra Madre 2008, when he was gathering his blanket with a bemused look on his face, having just sold his last copy of Wild Fermentation. He has published two books since then, and the latest, The Art of Fermentation, is a tome of near biblical proportions which reflects his expanded understanding of all things fermented, and offers extensive footnotes and references. If you’re looking for a cookbook, this is not that. Instead it gives a cultural context plus detailed guidelines for the ingredients and steps involved in fermenting many different foods, in accordance with Katz’s view that fermentation is not a precision activity but a wider cultural movement. Fermentation, he believes, gives us control over our food by allowing us to regain the skills of traditional forms of preservation.. which just happen to offer massive benefits to our gut bacteria as well.

Think you don’t like fermented foods? he asked us. Think again: about a third of what we consume even in a Western Diet involves a degree of fermentation. Coffee, cheese, chocolate, yogurt, bread and vinegar all involve this process of microbial transformation.

Our history of guiding the transformation began with wine, and the edible repertoire expanded as humans took careful note of the natural processes of rot. For really, says Katz, fermentation spans a fine line between rot and delicacy: one culture’s compost is another’s survival food. Rotting fish, whale, seal or walrus until it has the texture of cheese was the far north’s traditional means of making vitamins and minerals bioavailable. (It was also a concept the Franklin expedition failed to embrace, to their cost: cooking their food killed the nutrients and contributed to the crew’s starvation.)

Fermentation was not a human invention, but a discovery: our most observant ancestors noticed that insects and animals were attracted to fermenting fruits; the inventive ones simply took that a step further to cause fermentation to happen on their own terms, and then we had wine and mead.

Agricultural societies adopted fermentation as one form of preservation because we simply couldn’t invest all our energy in crops that are seasonally available without some way to keep them stable and edible beyond harvest. Fresh milk is a 20th century phenomenon: most people in this culture have a “fermentation slowing device” in their homes, otherwise known as a fridge. The obsession with safe storage temperatures is a modern concept, because until refrigeration, we never had a way to store foods below 40f.

Nowadays, fermentation is a way to renew our acquaintance with the healthy gut bacteria we’ve been abusing through years of antibiotic use and poor diets. We need bacteria to digest our food and to sustain a healthy immune system and balanced mental functions. The war on bacteria has proven a very misguided campaign when so many of our internal bodily functions have been enabled or enhanced by the presence of bacteria. While the first triumphs of microbiology had to do with the discovery of pathogenic bacteria, we have ever since been having trouble letting go of idea that all bacteria are pathogenic.

Before opening the floor to questions, Katz held up one pre-emptive hand for a question he knew would otherwise be asked: Safety. From his research, the USDA has never reported a single case of food poisoning from fermented vegetables. Given our recent experience with tainted spinach and cantaloupe, it may be that fermented produces is even safer than raw. The basic reason is that fermented foods are populated with lactic acid bacteria which will overwhelm pathogens. The notorious anaerobic bacterium botulism (clostridium botulinum) can only grow in the complete absence of oxygen (such as in canned foods, sausages), but vegetables are never fermented anaerobically, always with oxygen circulating above and in a liquid which contains some oxygen. In minced meat products (such as sausages) nitrates are what prevent botulism from forming and he doesn’t recommend eating sausages unless they contain nitrates.

After which followed a good hour’s worth of intelligent questioning by people who had attempted fermentation themselves or wondered about the effects and benefits of varieties of these. After that, Katz spent a further couple of hours patiently signing books and answering still more questions. And yes, I got mine, and damn the weight of my poor suitcase!

For those unable to be here but within easy reach of Vancouver, check Katz’s website to learn about his upcoming January visit to UBC.

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Genetically-modified October

Oct 27

There has been a fair amount of GMO action, good and bad, this month.

On October 10, the Healthy Saanich Advisory Committee bravely invited public input into their deliberations on the question of whether to allow Genetically-Modified (GM) seed crops into the municipal district. [For those who don’t live here, Saanich is one of the largest of our 13 municipal districts and 3 electoral areas that make up what is commonly known as Victoria (plus the Gulf Islands), but more accurately named the Capital Regional District. It is also a daunting mixture of urban, suburban and rural (peri-urban really, on this increasingly crowded tip of Vancouver Island) areas.] The Healthy Saanich Committee took the public input into their own deliberations, and will be making a recommendation against allowing GM crops to Saanich Council in November. One of the presenters requested that the meeting where the recommendation would be made should be one where the public could be present.

At least fifteen residents made written presentations to the committee, and another fourteen each made five-minute verbal presentations to the committee, who will have left the meeting groaning under the weight of much additional reading. Local farmers, gardeners, citizens, doctors, scientists and church groups were represented, and thirteen of the fourteen presenters spoke emphatically against allowing GMOs into the community.

In my five minutes I spoke as one of the millions of people in North America who have, for the past 18 years, been obliged to consume GM foods without our knowledge or consent, because our federal government has twice blocked the introduction of mandatory GM food labelling, thereby removing our choice over whether or not to eat it. And GM ingredients are present in, so the estimates go, some 70% of the foods in Canadian grocery stores (if you eat a lot of processed foods, your consumption is probably higher than that). Other presenters pointed out the failure of governments to require adequate long-term studies of GM products on animal and human health and on the environment. Still others argued that GM crops would increase the amount of pesticides used on our soil, and therefore the quantity of pesticides introduced into our diets and water supply.

In a timely reminder that the pesticide threat was no idle supposition, we’ve just had news that Canada is on the brink of approving GM corn and soybeans – destined for human and livestock consumption – designed for use with the pesticide 2,4-D (an ingredient in Agent Orange), which is needed because Roundup-Ready GM crops have created glyphosate-resistant weeds, creating what had been predicted from the outset: an increase in pesticide use, not the decrease originally promised by the biotech industry.

In Ontario, farmers gathered to protest the planned introduction of GM alfalfa into Canadian fields. The prospect is more than worrying, because alfalfa is a hugely important crop, which forms the bottom of our own food chain. Organic growers are heavily dependent on it both as a livestock feed, an export crop and a cover crop. Since the only alternative Canadians have if they don’t want to eat unlabelled GM foods is to buy certified organic (no GM ingredients or agricultural inputs are allowed in Canada’s certified organic production), this puts our whole organic food system at risk. Given the rates of contamination of non-GM corn, soy and canola by their GM counterparts in North America, and the sorry tale of the “Triffid” flax that killed Canada’s European flax export trade, it is a certainty that GM alfalfa will cross with non GM.

And finally, Michael Pollan has written a thoughtful analysis of California’s pending vote on mandatory labelling of food containing GMOs, coming up November 6, and the need in today’s damaged food system, for a more vigorous and less one-sided blending of food with politics.

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Gary Nabhan – Climate change and traditional diets

Oct 24

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.”

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Stuffed & stirred

Oct 13

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.

 

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