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Film and food
The Victoria Film Festival‘s on our horizon. Now that we can see the horizon between lashings of rain.
It has some food elements, including Mad City Chickens, a film about (what else?) Mad City Chickens, urban poultry farmers in Madison Wisconsin. There’s a wonderful link from the film’s web page, to a really helpful website: BackYardChickens.com which has some amazing examples of chicken coops and tractors for people to copy.
And Know Your Mushrooms promises to reveal “the miraculous, near-secret world of fungi”. Apparently it all started with a mycocidal conversation with Jim Jarmusch, followed by a visit to the Telluride Fungifest, and ends up like so:
Combining material filmed at the Telluride Mushroom Fest with animation and archival footage along with a neo-psychedelic soundtrack by the Flaming Lips, KNOW YOUR MUSHROOMS opens the doors to perception, takes the audience on a longer, stranger trip and delivers them to a brave new world where the fungi might well guide humanity to a saner, safer place… with extra cheese…
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Professor President and Whopper Virgins Remix
BBC Radio 4 provides me with most of my entertainment these days (I bless the internet that brings it to me) and I was spellbound the other day by a documentary called Professor President, which explored Obama’s intellectual and teaching life. Well worth a listen while it’s available (will only be up for a week from broadcast date).
I’m also a fan, it’s been said before, of Kootenay Coop Radio‘s Deconstructing Dinner radio show; they’ve done a very special remix of the Burger King ‘Whopper Virgins’ atrocity on Youtube. The soundtrack is quite amusing: George Bush finally says what he means (all he needed was a good editor).
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Food and politics
You can start the new year off in an activating sort of way by exercising some civic muscle on the new federal budget. We, my fellow Canadians, have been invited to offer some guidance to our country’s budgeteers, and share our views and priorities to help Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty pull together the federal budget for 2009. So, if you want food and culture on the table, you’d best let him know.
The budget will be delivered January 27, and you have until January 9 to send him your ideas: www.fin.gc.ca/scripts/prebudget-prebudgetaire/1-eng.asp
For ideas on culture, check out the brief submitted by the Writers Union of Canada.
On Tuesday, January 13 at 7 pm, if you are anywhere near the Mary Winspear Centre (Charlie White Theatre) in Sidney you have another chance to catch Island on the Edge, a locally produced film about farmland & food security for Vancouver Island. It’s an event to meet others and hear the latest news on The Farmlands Trust’s bid to acquire historic Woodwynn Farm. They have a couple of other events coming up as well, in February and March, as they continue to try to raise funds to purchase the farm.
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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.
