ReallyGoodWriter | Food • Writing • Poetry Iambic Cafe

food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

Now that I’m harvesting just about a meal’s worth of greens every day, at least those I can wrest from the appetites of the resident slugs, I am starting to think about what to do with them. It’s mostly rocket/arugula/rucola, a bit of kale, and a bit of spinach. (This picture includes purple sprouting broccoli which is done now.)

Spinach is a funny one. It used to be the champion green, loaded with iron… until we discovered (back in 1937) that someone had misplaced a decimal point and it’s not the Popeye dream after all. Now I learn that its oxalic acid content makes it hard to digest what iron it does contain; and tea and coffee can also make it harder to absorb. Apparently drinking a Vitamin C-rich drink with your meal will help your body along.

I am always entertained by other people’s scientific experiments with food, so I enjoyed this quest for the perfect pork crackling.

And as seafood generally becomes more problematic, I am particularly leery around tuna. The popular wisdom is eternally contradictory. For example, I hear that bluefin is out, but troll-caught albacore is ok due to sustainable fishing methods (so says the ‘impartial’ advice from a website called PR web, and a number of albacore fishery websites). Then I read this article which explains that sushi grade albacore is the worst for mercury levels. I think I will have to go on mostly avoiding it.

There is so much happening in food nowadays that when you hear the latest cool idea, it’s hard to resist the urge to feel you should up sticks and move wherever it is. Halifax is one such place, where the new farmers market has made a little history by greening its power supply: after recent winds here in Victoria I am green with envy over their new wind turbines.

Rick passed along this nice article about making butter from scratch.

My alma mater is offering a very cool course of study in sustainability and food policies with instructors who include some of the food world’s demi-gods: Tim Lang, Vandana Shiva and Carlo Petrini. Partly online, it concludes with face-to-face time at Terra Madre, in Turin this October. Applications are being taken until May 31.

This course of study is designed as no ordinary learning opportunity, where you walk away with fond memories and a bit of paper to frame, but in true ambitious Slow Food style, aims

“to produce a guideline document per area addressed to stakeholders (governments, companies, NGOs, institutions) keen to adopt food policies encompassing the latest analyses on ecological, economic, social and sensory sustainability.”

The coursework builds on the contributions of the subject matter experts, and they aim to have a document completed by the end of Terra Madre, October 25, ready to present to policy-makers worldwide after final publication in time for Terra Madre day on December 10.

I don’t have a television, but I do (obviously) have an internet connection. And it gave me some pleasure to come across one of Jamie Oliver‘s programs (in 8 pieces): Jamie Oliver – Eat To Save Your Life will show you many interesting things you don’t see every day, including a quick look at how sugar, salt and fat have been added to the modern diet; how an extra latte and a bowl of crisps each day can add about 40 lbs to a woman’s weight over a year; what fitness looks like internally; where your organs go and what happens to their size if displaced by a fatty liver.

I like the tone of this (despite its moments of over-the-top silliness) – brutally frank but kind and positive – and the constructive social purpose at the heart of it. It covers much of the same ground as Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, but does it more efficiently and intelligently. It certainly shows up the stylistic differences between British and North American tv.

Being as I am in North America, I am so grateful to have given up tv during the era of reality television which has no social or technical virtues and is to me entirely unwatchable; on the other hand, perhaps I should be grateful for reality television, since it was the pointlessness and pervasiveness of this kind of North American programming that made giving up tv possible!

My English friends tell me constantly that the quality of British television has declined drastically over the years I’ve been away, but maybe that’s ok too. (You can always turn it off and pick up a book?!) Gone are the days when fewer channels meant more common ground, and television was more truly a shared cultural experience. Sonny, in my day, when I first moved to England, we had four channels and something to talk about.

However. I am cheered to hear a lot of people here talking about Food Revolution. Which, being for Americans, has been presented in the American reality tv style. Although its irritating soundtrack, staged dilemmas, ponderous pace and trying-too-hard laughs would drive me up the wall, it does indisputably have a positive social purpose, targets the “food” that is fed to children, and is generating some unifying interest: so perhaps he’s even striking a small revolutionary blow for television as well. (But I still don’t want one.)

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There’s a lot of buzz around the salmon walk (Alexandra Morton’s Get Out Migration) which has involved a land-based migration of activists travelling by foot from Sointula, on Malcom Island, down Vancouver Island, raising awareness about the risks to wild fish of ocean-based fish farms (or, as they are described by some, Norwegian feedlots). It commenced on April 21 and is due to end in Victoria on May 9. Here’s the itinerary if you want to join in or just see what’s happening where.

Some good news around meat inspection regulations in BC; the protests were heard – to some extent – and the regulations have been changed. A little bit. It doesn’t solve the problem for a lot of farms, but it’s a start. When the regulations were changed initially, many small livestock producers on this island had simply packed in their business when the regulations made it impossible for them to carry on; it will be interesting to see how many are willing to get back into this. Meanwhile, I hear that the reduction in livestock has meant a reduction in the amount of manure available to farms and gardens, which is causing problems for farmers wanting to carry on building their soil without artificial fertilizers. (When oh when will we be able to remember that everything is connected?)

Sourdough seems to be everywhere I turn these days. Here’s a great website that explains how to make a reliable starter using wild yeasts (which are present on the grain, not floating in the air as many suppose… which is what Back Home baker Mark Sinclair told us at the sourdough workshop he gave in Victoria). There’s a good article about sourdough in the Wall Street Journal, and another in the Atlantic.

Lovely Lorri Neilsen Glenn read at Planet Earth Poetry‘s season closer on Friday. Before she was allowed to get on stage she had to eat some Cowichan Bay Chicken confit with very local purple sprouting broccoli and organic beets & cumin;

greet the herons in Cuthbert Holmes Park;

and help pack up Rhona’s Own Baking for the Haliburton farm stand.

We got to the venue to join a packed house

in time to hear the open mic which included series founder Wendy Morton

and Yvonne Blomer, seeing out her first season as host

and then, and only then, was Lorri allowed to read to us from her superb new collection, The Lost Gospels.

On Saturday she flew the coop, heading east, and I was forced to seek other entertainments, including the Haliburton Farm garage sale

which was meant to raise money for repairs to the farm stand and greenhouse. The day was also the opening of Haliburton’s farm gate sales, featuring vegetables, seeds, herbs, seedlings and even a bit of baking.

It’s been a busy busy week!

Seven days ago, I started off up a murky old Malahat

to spend the day taking tickets at lovely Fairburn Farm,

home of Vancouver Island’s famous herd of water buffalo,

where Mara Jernigan

and her team presided over a Stinging Nettle Festival.

Farmer John Ehrlich, of Alderlea Farm, talked about the biodynamic farming uses

while Katy Ehrlich talked about medicinal and nutritional aspects of stinging nettles.

Mara gave a demonstration on the making of nettle spanakopita.

Nettle tea was on offer

You could have nettle pesto (and extremely local buffalo mozzarella) on your pizza

or a flowery bowl of nettle soup

or a piece of nettle tart

and end, if you wished, on a piece of rhubarb tart.

Much of the rest of the week was taken up with food preparation and planning for a one-off catering event. On Thursday, Dayle and I celebrated Earth Day and the new municipal cosmetic pesticide ban by providing a pesticide-free lunch to 100 people at Saanich City Hall. We had musical accompaniment

and a good-ish crowd who milled and ate over the lunch hour, checking out the pesticide alternatives information and talking to stall-holders like Glendale Gardens. I was very happy to be able to give a resounding NO to the person who came by to ask if the food being served would be hamburgers?

With the help of Dayle’s versatile farmer Jordan, we served cauliflower-lime soup with cumin,

Michell’s farm hubbard squash soup with ginger and tamarind; accompanied by Wildfire croutons,

raw almond-carrot pâté wraps (wrapped in kale, collard or chard leaves)

and chocolate-beet cupcakes.