ReallyGoodWriter | Food • Writing • Poetry Iambic Cafe

food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

They’ve really done it this time. A new GM corn variety has been approved for planting in Canada by CFIA without being subjected to any safety testing.

CBAN’s campaign asks us to let our government know this is not ok, and they have an email form you can send to Canada’s minister of health, Leona Aglukkaq, right this minute, while you’re thinking about it. Or you can send your message through Health Canada’s contact form.

This is what Health Canada’s own website promises, regarding the introduction of GE and other “novel” foods:

Health Canada assesses the safety of all genetically-modified and other novel foods proposed for sale in Canada. Companies are required to submit detailed scientific data for review and approval by Health Canada, before such foods can be sold.

The Globe & Mail did a good piece on the new variety that’s been approved without testing. This bit pretty much nails the problem:

The health agency said in response to questions from The Globe and Mail that it didn’t have to [assess the seeds for safety], because it is relying on the two companies making the seeds, agriculture giants Monsanto Co. and Dow AgroSciences LLC, to flag any safety concerns. But the companies haven’t tested the seeds either, because they say they aren’t required to.

Elsewhere this unbelievably careless approach to public safety is correctly but inadequately likened to putting the fox in charge of the hen house. Indeed.

I was by coincidence invited along to the last ever Grapevine event last Thursday.

The Grapevine was started five years ago by a group of entrepreneurial women who thought the best thing they could do for small businesses in Victoria was to bring them customers. They selected from among the best new small businesses in town and organized “grapings”, where a bunch of people from their 400-strong mailing list – usually numbering around 20-25 – would meet at a nearby location and walk to the graping point. They used all means licit and illicit to trick the owners into being their for their visit, so that they could have a chance to meet some consumers and tell them a bit about their business. The idea was that those who came to the graping would let their friends and colleagues know about it, and the organizers posted articles and photos on the website to spread the word. Simple, beautiful and now over, sadly, 5 years and 42 grapings later.

This last one was at a place I’d wanted to visit anyway: Village Family Marketplace is Victoria’s latest local food emporium. Seven young partners have pooled their resources and talents to start a grocery store downtown, where it might be difficult for locals to make it to farm shops or find good local produce. Two of the partners, Dustin and Justine, walk us through the history

and explain that everything they sell is either grown or produced locally. They’ve only been open for three weeks so the shelves are not yet as full as they will be. The professional kitchen in the back is geared to produce deli items, ready meals, condiments and treats to fill the display case. They have frozen goods including local organic meats, as well as dairy and produce,

a few items you won’t find everywhere, like purslane and lemon cucumbers and kelp

and a few dry goods. The group has dolled up a standard shipping container

and equipped it with coolers to add capacity; there are play stations for children; and they’ve build picnic tables so that one day there can be a place to relax out back. The interior makes use of reclaimed timber.. for example in the handsome front counter with its arbutus inlay.

So.. a happy morning spent poking round the shop and I’ll be making a return visit before too long. Not difficult since one of my other favourite food shops, the spectacularly well-stocked Mediterranean deli Blair Mart, is just about next door – and its courtly owner the Village’s landlord.

The blackberries have been calling me and I have been answering by the bucketful. These are, as I have said before, Himalayan blackberries, and they are the ones everyone thinks of when you say ‘blackberry’. They’re big, fat and in season from August through September.

The native blackberries, smaller and trailing, are now finished. They ripen in June and July and are very much worth the hunt. It might take three or four times the picking time to fill a pail, compared with Himalayans, but theirs is a different, more intense flavour.

Himalyans are not native to BC; they were brought to North America by Luther Burbank and have spread throughout the land with joy and vigour. The plant is highly invasive, and you need to practice extreme caution about putting any part of it into your compost. Moreover, as I saw happen during this spring’s ground-clearning at Haliburton, new plants can and will sprout from chopped stems. Perhaps if you decompose them for a while in black plastic bags, or make sure they are completely dried out they’d be safe, but they’re nasty and prickly any way you look at them so I think send them wherever you send other pernicious weeds. And don’t put berries into the compost either (birds and gravity put enough of them around).

Anton finds picking days Very Boring. He is like any 13 year old: if he could speak, his first words would be, Can we go now?

One excellent use you can put this booty to is a clafoutis (or clafouti), which I maintain is the righteous ancestor of the food known as impossible pie. Both these dishes are a kind of starched custard that creates its own base while enfolding the main ingredient in a soft eggy filling. They appear in both savoury and sweet versions; the savouries make good quick quiches, while the well-known coconut pie is an excellent dessert. Last night we had a blackberry and apple clafoutis which was exceptionally good. This recipe – which uses apricots and raspberries – is a good one to base it on. Serve it warm, but it’s not bad cold.

A second chance this morning to listen to the listenable David Suzuki, whose one hour special The Last Call is, happily, available on podcast. He took a look at our illusions about the immutability of the consumer economy and its effect on the planet’s limited resources.

Along the way he spoke to the Canadian CEO of Wal-Mart, trying to get him to answer whether he thought infinite growth of a consumer-based business was realistic (got the usual hoo-ha about how Wal-Mart is only serving the wishes of a buying public and what a wonderful thing the company is doing for people who can’t afford to pay more) (maybe someone should send this guy a copy of Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture?).

And to the wonderful Annie Leonard, whose The Story of Stuff is an excellent use of any spare 20 minutes you might have, and who clarified mr. Wal-Mart’s delusions about the real cost – to the environment and communities who produce and sell them – of cheap goods. And she remained, like Suzuki, stubbornly optimistic that we can change the way we live, but not by simply altering our consumerism (what can I buy to make things better) but by enlisting the power of community. With the ultimate goal of living happier and more convivial lives.

Not so optimistic is James Lovelock, father of The Gaia Theory, which proposed reasons for the interrelatedness of our ecosystem, and who holds that politics gets in the way of the possibility of any real positive change in our destructive use of the planet; put simply, politicians cannot take the measures needed and get re-elected, because so much drastic change in our ways of life is needed at this point. So his interests are more focused on how to survive the consequences of our environmental irresponsibility. (His latest book is The Vanishing Face of Gaia.)

Al Gore, of course, is on the positive side of the argument that salvation is possible, and has more faith than most in the political system’s ability to produce sudden radical change in times of need. Let us hope he is right.

Water is always an interesting issue. Take bottles of water for example. For ages tap water got a bad press: but it seems like a great many of the stories came from vested interests: sellers of bottled water, water machines or water filters. Now there are movements against bottled water, which may have only made the manufacturers work extra hard to sell in a shrinking market.

If you haven’t seen the Evian rollerbabies, check them out on Youtube. As is often the case, the ‘making of‘ clip is almost better. The interview is good too.

But — bottled water still a no-go area, for so many reasons: its use of plastics, its transportation waste and its plain expense. Here’s a 20/20 program from last year which held one of those taste tests that are so satisfying in their unpredictability…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3QBZac3MSY]

Let us not forget that Dasani is, after all, tap water. And any water in plastic bottles is suspect – whether tap or branded – and likely to contain Bisphenol A, particularly if it’s exposed to heat, so keep using those metal water bottles. But it seems that consumers are turning away from bottled water, whether because they can’t afford it or because that wave is ending. Let’s hope it’s the latter.

Even if it is, the sharks are circling as the dwindling reserves of good drinking water start to create scarcity. And where there is scarcity, there is opportunism, and unsustainable solutions to shortages.

The Current did a great series on water last year, called Watershed, which they’ve been repeating this summer. One of the programs I caught talked about desalination plants in Israel, which sound like a great idea until the cons were enumerated: the energy required for the process; the unknown effects on the ocean of pumping highly salinated residue back into it; the introduction into the ocean of byproducts of the process. And the speakers questioned the point of going through all that in order to irrigate desert greenhouses so that this parched nation could export its precious water in the form of fruits, flowers and vegetables.

Much more to think about on this subject. But friends and neighbours are aquiring Berkey water filters in the meantime, partly for health reasons and partly in the interests of water security (living on an island as we do makes one think about many things, as almost everything is ferried or flown over here, including chemicals for treating the water supply). As one of them said: please buy one – I don’t want to be the only one who has one!