The rally at the legislature on Saturday was warmly attended by groups including COG:

The cavalry rode round and round the grounds:

There was a pleasing diversity of age and slogan:

with some rabble-rousing by Brent Warner

NDP candidate Lana Popham

farmer, beekeeper and food activist Linda Geggie

organic farmer Heather Stretch

and farmer-writer-editor Tom Henry

There’s another opportunity for Islanders make their food interests visible to politicians, at a gathering on Thursday April 30.

More information at the BC Food Systems Network website; including the Food Security Election Primer which is a terrific tool to use on any visiting electioneers, and a handy fact sheet on the issues for educating yourself, your friends and neighbours.

I spent yesterday morning following a spring bee inspection with some of my bee-owning classmates from last year’s bee-keeping class, led by Larry & Marilyn, who kindly lent me a bee suit for the occasion. I had a few curious customers stop by to admire my gloves.

Some of the girls hang out on their mom’s shoulder.

Saw lots of crazy comb, including one with a donut hole in the middle:

Here are a couple of queens (the long orangy ones; one of them is marked in red; colours are agreed on each year so you can tell how old the queens are):

I brought along some of the honey I’d bought in Italy for people to sample; one of the varieties evoked some discussion about rhododendron honey, which is said to produce Mad Honey Disease. And here’s a poem featuring death, rhodos and bees (but not mad honey disease).

This Saturday afternoon, April 18th, at 1.30pm, there’ll be a Farms, Farmers & Food Security rally at the BC legislature, a proper foodie kick-off to the May 12 provincial election. There are many related issues we’d like our politicians to be better informed about, including the

• decline of agriculture in BC
• lack of support for local food production
• unaffordable farm land
• vanishing meat processing capacity
• erosion of ALR
• food crisis affecting all of us
• many other food security issues

The Forest Land Reserve, the taller cousin of the Agricultural Land Reserve, is open to similar abuses by money-grabbing developers, and has been in the news lately. The Capital Regional District attempted to undo the damage done by the provincial government, which released the lands from the FLR in 2007, and protect the area from development, but the BC supreme court said no, and the appeal won’t be heard until June.

Yesterday’s fun was helping to build a hoop house at Haliburton farm

and then attending a talk by Ed Ishiguro

about food-borne illnesses (and common pathogens salmonella, listeria, campylobacter and e.coli). Ishiguro has spent many years exploring e. coli 0157:H7 and had interesting things to say about the dramatic – unprecedented – rise in food-borne pathogens over the past forty years or so, coinciding rather dramatically with the rise of industrial food production, whose profit-driven livestock overcrowding methods have not just allowed but actually facilitated the spread of pathogens. He is also adamant that the low-dose feeding of antibiotics to all our industrial food animals (too low to prevent disease, as he says farmers are led to believe, but rather used to make them grow faster) has caused the antibiotic-resistant diseases that are infecting our hospitals. A no-brainer you might think, and yet governments in North America have been lead-footed in their response; he cited encouraging (though he felt not yet convincing) research results from Denmark where a ban on antibiotic growth promoters have actually caused antibiotic-resistant diseases to decline, and more treatable ones to emerge.

Some good background as I prepare for tomorrow’s Foodsafe class…