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food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

Apparently August 7 is National Mustard Day, at least in Wisconsin. They were already celebrating it in the Napa Valley with a mustard festival earlier this year. You could get in on a six-course mustard dinner which sounded like a hot ticket.

And this is the moment in any mustard conversation when good Canadians quietly ask whether you know that 90% of all mustard seed used in Dijon mustard production in France is imported from Canada?

And if you are interested in the politics of mustard seed oil in India, you can read this piece by the wondrous Vandana Shiva, about another Monsanto dirty trick.

Other things to know about mustard include its use in crop rotation trials in Prince Edward Island, where the potato crops are being ravaged by wireworm. It seems to be of some value there, as brown mustard is high in chemicals called glucosinolates, which when they break down produce isothiocyanates, compounds which are actually toxic to wireworms.

On the darker side of the family, Garlic Mustard is a problem weed that’s invading fields in BC and many other parts of North America, where it was introduced by settlers as a salad green and medicinal herb (it’s said to be helpful internally against bronchitis, asthma and eczema, and externally for minor injuries, slow-healing skin problems, rheumatism and gout).

A convergence of schools of thought on fish, and some opportunities to make your views known:

Alexandra Morton is inviting Canadians to take action on proposed federal Pacific aquaculture regulations, which have been offer a 60-day public input period (page 1933 of this hefty document). Now is the time to give some thought to how you want to see Canada’s Pacific coast used in future: the deadline is September 12.

Morton’s views on fish farms are well known and always make interesting reading; she delivers again in this article which unpicks the politics of Canadian fish farm regulation for The Tyee.

Also chugging through its 60 day public input is this document on Canadian organic aquaculture standards. Deadline for this one is August 30.

Some good background reading on the question of wild vs farmed fish can be found on Barry Eastabrook’s excellent Politics of the Plate blog, which features a review of Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food, by Paul Greenberg. Discussing the fate of salmon, sea bass, cod, and tuna, and offering thoughtful suggestions for going forward with, the book sounds unmissable.

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.;

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…

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:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zkc1A2SjETA]