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food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

I’ve been reading Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, by Ellen Ruppel Shell, and have just had my heart broken. I’m a longtime fan of Ikea, like the rest of the world have admired their brilliant marketing and positioning, but have now had to face the reasons their prices are so low, and they are the same reasons cheap food is underpriced. Somebody’s getting exploited along the way, only this time the victims include the world’s most vulnerable and least protected forests.

Ruppel Shell does interview Ikea’s forestry coordinator who is responsible for ensuring the wood they use is harvested sustainably, and notes that they have fired suppliers for using illegally harvested wood, but then goes on to say:

“Unfortunately this approach is unlikely to prevent all or even most infractions because the suppliers are too many and too dispersed to ensure adequate monitoring… Her team consists of eleven forestry monitors worldwide – five in all of vast China and Russia combined, certainly not enough eyes and ears to closely monitor such a massive enterprise. [Anders] Dahlvig [Ikea president & CEO] said that he regretted this but could do nothing about it. Hiring more inspectors would be costly, adding to the price of his company’s products. This, he said, was unacceptable.”

She also explains that Ikea’s founder has made a deal with Vietnam’s prime minister for lower tariffs, docking fees and ‘ensured access to wood’ in exchange for hiring more Vietnamese.

“Vietnam, itself in constant threat of deforestation, is a major Southeast Asian hub for processing illegally logged timber. While Ikea suppliers are instructed to follow the Ikea way, Vietnamese enforcement of environmental and human rights regulations is notoriously haphazard.”

Illegal logging contributes hugely to worldwide deforestation, the book points out, and is thereby contributing in unknown quantities to climate change. But nobody wants to talk about it because then we’d be facing (deja vu) the real costs of what we buy. Only this time we’re talking about remarkably cheap furniture; Ikea is by no means the only culprit as worse offenders include other large North American discount chains (like Wal-Mart, Home Depot and Lowe’s).

The book is fascinating and reveals the roots of discount culture, the psycho-manipulation we’re subjected to when we shop, and the big business interests behind it. Essential Christmas reading!!

Meanwhile, Raj Patel (of Stuffed and Starved) is proving again why he is an author of our generation. He created a blog around his last book (and a Facebook page) and is busy promoting his new one, The Value of Nothing, with a snappy Youtube video (directed by Scott Hamilton Kennedy, who made the Academy Award nominated documentary The Garden, which exposed the political machinations behind the fight over a 14-acre site in Los Angeles). Check it out:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P03nNeYiJo]

My Christmas gift to the environment is a month of carlessness. My insurance is due tomorrow and – for budgetary as well as altruistic reasons – I am going to postpone renewing it for at least a month. I have looked at some numbers. It’s not an expensive car to run, but averaged over a year with insurance, gas and maintenance, it cost me $225 a month last year. Here in Victoria it’s very difficult to get everywhere by public transit, and the options for travelling on the Island are severely limited as well. Monthly bus passes cost $73.25 (plus tax, making it around $80) or $2.25 a trip; the buses are all, I believe, equipped with bike racks so you can combine your modes of travel. Taxis start at $3.10, and the fleets are almost all hybrid vehicles now. I’ve seen a dog-taxi around town too, which is good to know. There is a car co-op in town but membership is fairly steep with few vehicles (and no cars in my neighbourhood).

I will most miss being able to nip out to the farm shops on Saanich Peninsula: most are unreachable by public transit, and the urban farmers’ markets are closed till March. And old Anton may need a few more trips to the vet over the season…

So… interesting times ahead.

The Slow Food Vancouver Island & Gulf Islands is as slow as its name is long.. we celebrated Terra Madre Day – really December 10 – on December 13, with a Christmas potluck and book exchange at Merridale Cidery.

As might be expected, it was a well above average selection of winter foods which we thought we’d better tuck into before they got cool – a definite issue in the chilly confines of the distilling room

where we gathered and managed to warm with many bodies, excellent food and beautiful music.

Many fine foods, including local Dungeness crab,

Tourtière

local prawns

an amazingly delicious chard tart,

and Hilary’s Cheese:

A convivium, demonstrating what is meant by the name:

After the food, we had a short film about Terra Madre and some short talks by people who’d attended the event as delegates in previous years. Then there was the traditional (to this convivium) cookbook exchange which involved a fair amount of thievery as people were allowed to steal previously opened books before opening one from the pile. The most-stolen book: Alice Waters – Chez Panisse Cookbook.

Here’s a bit of 60’s style prescience that Gabe passed along, which might have been a more weirdly entertaining warm-up (ha ha) viewing for all at Copenhagen than what they got. Have you ever seen anything so strange?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DEoOdcYKbc]

I also love this take on Cap & Trade, which explains the notion in words of few syllables but with great passion. Maybe they need to see this in Copenhagen as well.

As for the rest of my life, I’ve been preoccupied with a sick laptop followed by a sick dog followed by a sick me, compounded by general busyness and the near audible crunch of deadlines…

Sat in on a Google Book Settlement webinar with Access Copyright today, which was enlightening. The new and revised settlement has some encouraging improvements, from Canadian writers’ perspective. One key change is the settlement is limited to works published in Canada, the US, the UK and Australia, making 50% fewer works included than previously. That Google has already violated the copyright of everyone else is up to them, unfortunately, to sort out separately.

Another interesting point we discussed is that opted-in writers can ask to have their books removed from Google Book Search, and the request will be honoured (though Google still gets to keep a copy of your book). However, if you are opted out, you can ask to have your books removed, and Google says it will honour the request, but if it doesn’t, it will be up to you to chase them for copyright infringement.

The arguments for remaining in the settlement – and claiming the settlement fee for having your copyright so publicly violated – are that if you are in, you have more control over what Google does with your books; you can negotiate to have better fees (than the current 63% author/37% Google split) going forward; you are no longer precluded from seeking and making better deals with new digitizing operations; and you can withdraw your book or change the size of the “snippet” (one of the most contentious aspects since some books are presented almost in their entirety at present). But the question of how your new books – published since January 2009 – will be handled remains an unknown; we got no advice on that score other than to monitor Google Book Search. You can’t, apparently, demand that your new and future books be excluded from future digitization.

The Cowichan Agriculture Association managed to lure farmer-speaker-activist Joel Salatin (he actually prefers the label Christian-Libertarian-Environmentalist-Capitalist-Farmer) to come and spend the day speaking in Duncan last rainy Saturday. The house was packed – I’d guess around 200 folk, mostly farmers, many of them young – and he put on a good show, commencing with a slideshow talk about Polyface Farm.

From this we learned about his ways with cattle bedding, which were surprisingly complex. He keeps the cattle in a shed, roofed but mostly open, and lays down whatever wood chips (=carbon!) he can get hold of. This absorbs the cowpies and urine so that conditions are reasonably sanitary (any farm that smells bad is a badly managed farm, according to Salatin). He scatters corn into the chips every so often. And keeps layering like that until winter’s over, by which time the bedding could be up to four feet deep. He has devised supports to keep the cows from toppling over, and cantilevers to keep their hay at mouth-level. Once the cattle are out in the fields again, he brings in the pigs, who root for the fermented corn and in the process turn over the compost, aerating it and making it ready to spread on the fields to grow the forage for his cattle. So pigs, cattle and farmer = all happy.

From there we go to the fields where the pasturing is similarly well thought out and involves chickens and a lot of mobile fencing. In fact mobile equipment is big in Salatin’s vision: he doesn’t believe in single-purpose equipment and he really likes to be able to move his animals around the fields – and woods – so that he can manage their feeding and the fertility of his soil at the same time.

He is truly a libertarian, wanting freedom from the shackles of government regulations which, he couldn’t say forcefully enough, are intended for the industrial farming practices that have crippled farmers’ ability to make a living, severed the eaters from knowledge of what they eat, and poisoned our food.

He was generous with his time answering questions and sharing opinions on everything from the timing of hog slaughter to how to cook grass-fed beef to why he likes hobby farms. He recommended many books, including New Rules for the New Economy by Kevin Kelly; Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond; and City Chicks by Patricia Foreman (whose husband Andy Lee wrote Chicken Tractor). As well, of course, as his own books, most notably Everything I Want to do Is Illegal.

And he described some of the innovations he’s come across – evidently a pleasing sideline for him in his extensive travels – that are helping to save “embedded heritage local food systems from the machinations of large scale industrial food systems.” Some examples: The Urban Farm Store in Portland, Oregon; the New Roots Urban Farm in St Louis, Missouri; and the Local Food Hub in Charlottesville, Virginia.

While he advocates the “just say no” approach to the enforcement of unreasonable regulations wherever possible, he also has a simple suggestion for all of us: learn to cook from scratch. “Opting out of processed food is the ultimate mark of independence.”

And if that ain’t enough, here’s the man himself, talking food safety in Portland Oregon last summer.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=6168497&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Farmer Joel Salatin Talks Food Safety in Portland from Mayor Sam Adams on Vimeo.

A bit of a pause here while I deal with my recent computer crash (a literal one, onto the floor) and so have delayed reporting on a couple of very interesting talks last week. On Thursday last, I attended a COG-VI meeting to hear a discussion of grain growing on Vancouver Island.

Tom Henry, to many a bit of a guru in this field, spoke first about his experiments with Red Fife wheat, using organic and conventional growing methods. He said that it was, in his experience, almost impossible to grow a flour-grade red fife wheat that was certified organic. The reasons were to do with weed control and nutrients. Organic growing, he said, means a later start than conventional, because you have to leave time for weed control: wait till the ground is workable, let the weeds grow, till them under and plant your seed. In order to gain enough protein to be usable in bread flour, the red fife has to be drought-stressed at the right point in its growing cycle. But a later planting means that the drought period comes earlier for the seedlings.

Prairie growers don’t suffer this problem because of differences in climate, so it’s easier to get organic red fife wheat with appropriate protein content from there. And easier to balance land use: he observed that in a small land base like Vancouver Island, it’s hard to justify digging in a legume crop to prepare the soil for a grain crop; overall it would take four years to set up one crop. That having been said he also observed that until 1949 this was the best grain growing area in BC because of climate (although this was likely grain for animal feed rather than for milling).

Another interesting point that Henry raised was that most home bakers used to conventional flours run into difficulties using flours made from artisanal grains like red fife. This is back to protein: artisanal flours are typically lower in gluten proteins than the ‘bread flour’ we’re used to which is extremely high protein (but lacking in the flavours and nutrients of artisanal grains). But if the proteins are good quality, even if they’re low, you can get good bread with proper handling. In addition, higher protein flours absorb more water and the resulting breads keep longer. These differences can usually, as I understand it, be overcome to some extent by using levain or longer-rising recipes (perhaps like the famous no-knead bread recipes), and of course by mixing artisanal with high protein bread flours.

After Henry, we heard from Brock McLeod and Heather Walker, whose Island Grains project consisted of a very successful grain CSA last year. They invited members of the public – some farmers, some just interested people – to come and learn with them how to grow grains on a small scale and were awestruck at the response. 51 people had signed up in just three weeks. Participants were given a piece of land and shown how to plant, tend and harvest it, by having a series of speakers walk them through the various elements.

They took this on in a spirit of self-sufficiency, and were extremely low-tech about it, harvesting the grain with scythe and scissors; threshing in a pillowcase and blowing the chaff with a hairdryer. They are upbeat about their experience, and said that you could grow enough grain on a very small amount of land – 1,100 square feet – to make 60 lbs. flour, which amounts to a couple of loaves of bread a week for a year.

They’re now using their website to share information about small-scale grain growing.