Iambic Cafe | food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

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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Flavour of September, with a pinch of October

Oct 5

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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Kneading with a k

Sep 19

I’d been looking forward to the second offering of the Kneading Conference West, held in the idyllic gardens and fruit orchard of the Mount Vernon Research Station, where grains are being grown, tested and much discussed. Over this past September weekend they were also being ground, mixed, cooked and tasted to delicious ends.

There was enough variety to keep the 200 or so various types of grain geeks amused, from tasting sessions – grains baked into crackers or breads, or liquified into beer – to talks on the science of baking (complete with easy-to-grasp 3D models) to demos on how pizza can turn into pita.

There were baking workshops too. Last year I’d missed most of George de Pasquale‘s session on sourdough/artisan bread for home bakers so made sure to attend it this year, though it was packed to the rafters. He walked us through equipment, explained ingredients, and guided those able to reach the counter on mixing, kneading, shaping and fermenting bread dough.

He demonstrated with a few swift cuts how to make Epi

And he critiqued a baked loaf, explaining some of the features to test for done-ness and the physical clues of underproofed and properly baked loaves. There were other demos too: one of the keynote speakers, food writer Naomi Duguid, demonstrated some of her favourite flatbreads (Finnish barley bread, Naan, Pugliese and Burmese breads) with help from Toronto baker Dawn Woodward. Oregon barley scientist Pat Hayes was there showing off his wares and giving out samples of his team’s Streaker (naked) Barley, so named for its hullessness.

Then there were the mud people, led by Kiko Denzer, who slapped together a wood-fired oven in less than a day. One minute he was demonstrating an oversized hand blender in a bucket of mud and water, the next he was tamping down the base, and a few hours later it was done and decorated. Miraculous.

Andrew Whitley – who’d enlivened a panel on Thursday, discussing grain quality with Tom Dunston (an Oregon miller with Camas Country Mill) and Cliff Leir (of Victoria’s own Fol Epi Bakery) among others was the keynote speaker on Friday morning, introduced by last year’s barley baker, Andrew Ross from Oregon State University, and he gave us a rousing talk about his own history as a baker and small-scale grain grower, having started off in a spirit of self-sufficiency growing wheat for his own bread. He started and ran the Village Bakery in Cumbria for more than 30 years, during which time he produced rye bread that I had, to my delight, discovered at my local Waitrose in London when I lived there back in the nineties.

After reviewing his past life as a rural wholegrain baker using only local wheat in 1970s England, with a business plan someone had once summarized for him as “going to a place where there were no people, making a product for which there was no demand, from a material that was impossible to work with for its purpose,” Whitley’s talk ranged over issues facing all today’s eaters. There are the centralized production and monocropping issues that reduce choice for all of us and mean that in wheat breeding we’ve allowed production requirements to trump nutrition and taste (the only grains measured for such are for feedstock); the nutritional issues – the decline in nutritional value through breeding and milling “advances” (we have lost important mineral content through the change from stone ground to roller milled wheat, for example). And there’s the accelerated production time demanded by industrial operations, that rob our bread of the lactic acids and enzymes that work on naturally leavened bread to make it more digestible (not to mention tasty). He talked a bit about the Community Supported Bakery he’s supporting, the work of the Real Bread Campaign, and offered some ideas for bringing good bread to people who might not feel comfortable crossing the threshold of an artisan bakery. Bring our bread back home, he said, and gain liberation from larger corporations who don’t have our interests at heart.

And few would argue with that, enjoying excellent baked goods all weekend. We were certainly well fed and entertained through a superbly sunny and pleasant weekend. And really, how many times will someone offer you a slice of pie, freshly made with duck fat pastry and filled with caramelized apples? Not many, I’d say. I’ll be back…

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Eat there then

Sep 16

I’m a week behind in my entries, so here goes the catch-up. Last Sunday’s Eat Here Now festival looked to me to have been enormously popular, with lots of food being eaten and bought and talked about in Market Square.

The square had been divided into an eating and entertainment side, and a vendors’ side. Crowds seemed to be milling evenly between the two by the time I left, but as I arrived at lunchtime, I headed with sooo many others to the taste for a toony buffet provided by locally-oriented restaurants. Cosmo Meens, as always, drew a crowd, this time offering a curried tofu soup with focaccia, an offering from his new Hot and cold Cafe. Relish was there with a “Vietnamese sub” of house-smoked pork terrine and asian vegetables; Sooke Harbour House’s lovely little quinoa salad with salmon, seaweed and other local delicacies, came with an all-too tasty edible scoop, but I’d be surprised if many of them lasted long enough to do their job. All in all it was a hard day for vegetarians: aside from those mentioned, and some mushroom ravioli from Cowichan Pasta, almost every stand offered meat; of which Kulu’s spicy sausage got my vote, if only because it came laden with kimchi! (Luckily for the non-carnivores, Green Cuisine was open for business on the fringes of the festival.)

And then it was time to browse the vendors’ stalls, which of course included Haliburton Farm, where Farmers Nate & Mike were holding the fort; Libby Seabrook was doing a brisk trade in InfuseTea (her blueberry & rosemary blend is to die for, just for the record); Fry’s Bakery was selling mini-pizzas, blueberry scones and rather beautiful baguettes – can’t wait for them to open their shop on Craigflower Rd, which is rumoured to be happening later this month. City Harvest was there with urban abundance, Wildfire had some tempting shortbreads (lavender and local wheat were my picks) and Sun Trio’s tomatoes were as beautiful as the day was long and sunny.