ReallyGoodWriter | Food • Writing • Poetry Iambic Cafe

food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

This last was a spectacularly warm weekend in Victoria, perfect for the fifth Organic Islands festival. On Saturday the Terralicious team talked us through a sneaky way to ply your family with vegetables.

Tina and Dayle concocted a couple of lovely pizza combinations, with fennel and potato as the main stars.

Then there was a talk on the topic of Reviving the Vancouver Island Diet. Food security by any other name, it featured a crew of familiar faces and voices. Local farmer and writer Tom Henry

spoke about the need for Canadians to pay a fair price for their food – to allow local farmers to produce it; to encourage politicians to help small local meat producers raise and humanely/ locally slaughter food animals; and he stressed the importance of staying on top of local politics where these might impinge on food security – citing a potential loophole in Metchosin’s secondary suite provisions that could allow the unscrupulous to subdivide farmland.

He appeared with Carolyn Herriot, talking about food security, the power of the land to provide a living, and her irritation with corruption in local politics; she has a long-standing mistrust of the nutritional value of foods reared hydroponically and so felt affirmed, if shocked, to read recently that greenhouses block the UV light needed to form antioxidants in vegetables.

Bill Code talked about the power of food to heal, and the community value of the Island Farmers Alliance; and Jen Fisher Bradley championed food collectives, debt forgiveness (student loan debts/young farmers) and the Vancouver Island Diet.

After too much sun, an organic hot dog and a dribbly cornetto di gelato, it was time to crowd beneath the tent to hear Jeremy Fisher play some old and some things from his new cd Goodbye Blue Monday.

There has been a fair amount of coverage of the plight of Canada’s literary magazines over the past few months, which risk an untimely end if the wrong-headed Canada Periodical Fund comes into being as proposed in February: their long-term fate still hangs in the balance. The conditions of the fund are that support will only be provided to journals with paid subscriptions of more than 5000, which rules out pretty much every literary journal in the country. The summer break is a good time to carry on reminding our legislators of the importance of these publications, and that they cannot survive if pitted against for-profit publications.

In these crazed times where market-happy management grads attempt to reduce every aspect of life to a business model, we need to wake up and admit that not everything – certainly not culture, not food production – can or should be run on a ruthlessly corporate model; and that you may cripple or ruin some of your most essential industries by imposing “efficiencies” and cost-cutting measures upon them.

Literary magazines are hugely important to Canada. They’re the first place we’ve seen so many of our literary greats in print; they carry a permanent legacy of our literature’s evolution – the paper and ink of print publication, blending more and more with an online presence; and they simply cannot survive in our under-populated country without the aid of grants, any more than can our literary publishers.

If you’re a Canadian, please take a moment to sign the online petition that The New Quarterly has set up; or print off the pdf version from Arc. You can also join the Facebook group: Coalition to Keep Federal Support of Literary, Scholarly and Arts Magazines.

This week’s excitement was helping out Terralicious, the gardening & cooking school at Haliburton farm. There was a hungry crew to feed lunch to, while they worked to restore the wetlands area that’s attached to the farm and which the university uses to study amphibians and other wetlands wildlife.

Tubs of farm-grown lettuce to wash.

Some sage butter for the squash pasta sauce:

Rather beautiful appetizers: cucumber slices topped with berry cream and tayberries

and anchovy butter and radish.

Much enjoyed.

Two kinds of pasta sauce; the squash and sage, and/or the arugula pesto with sautéed tomato halves.

And for dessert, some divine crumble, of rhubarb and berries and apples, before

and after, with a dollop of ginger cream.

Meanwhile, in the park, a couple of hummingbird babes are nearly ready to fly…

Blackberries (Himalayan) getting pollinated…

Blackberries (Trailing) getting ready to pick…

Canada Day was fine… many namesake geese on the Gorge, gorging in the sun.

Some garlic scapes on offer

and a bit of Morris dancing.

And here’s my little tribute to the day… Anton scored a couple of free treats from the dog biscuit lady.

I was trying to regain a bit of poetry in my life by looking through a birds & bees-ish poetry collection that’s been by my bed for a few weeks now. I belong to the Poetry Book Society which brings surprising books into my life every few months. This one was Weeds and Wild Flowers, by Alice Oswald, which is a beautiful-looking book as well as another skilled collection of poetry. See how she describes a snowdrop:

A pale and pining girl, head bowed, heart gnawed,
whose figure nods and shivers in a shawl
of fine white wool, has suddenly appeared
in the damp woods, as mild and mute as snowfall.
She may not last. She has no strength at all,
but stoops and shakes as if she’d stood all night
on one bare foot, confiding with the moonlight.
…

And as for bees, Seeds of Diversity Canada has a campaign going to try to find out just what pollinators we have out there. Pollination Canada has a downloadable kit to allow you to be a Pollinator Observer and take measure of the bees, beetles, birds and other critters out there helping plants to propagate. There’s another organization, the North American Pollinators Protection Campaign, which also aims to help endangered pollinators.

Back to the battles with crawlies: Haliburton has been fighting wireworms

for a while. Lately these little devils have developed a technique of attacking cucumber seedlings by crawling up the stem and sucking the life out of them, so they end up keeling over like this:

The organic solution is to use potato bait, for a wireworm loves nothing so much as a nice feed of spud. So the farmers have been cutting potatoes into pieces, skewering them with wooden skewers, and burying them near the seedlings they’re trying to protect. Every so often you just pull them up by the skewer and pick out any perpetrators for a swift dispatch. Results:

Meanwhile, I was thunderstruck – delightedly so – to learn that despite the best efforts of our legislators, there is in fact labelling of genetically modified foods in North American produce sections! Who knew? But if you check the Produce PLU – A User’s Guide 2006, you will find the following right there on page 17:

Q How is organically grown produce coded on a PLU label?
A The number 9 is added to the front of the regular four digit PLU code. (e.g. an organically grown banana would be 94011.)

Q How is genetically engineered produce coded on a PLU label?
A The number 8 is added in front of the regular four digit PLU code. (e.g. a genetically engineered vine ripe tomato would be 84805.)

We owe this to the International Federation for Produce Standards, for establishing PLU (Price Look-Up) codes, which are 4- or 5-digit numbers primarily used on fresh produce items and typically appear on a small sticker applied to the individual piece of fresh produce (info from the Produce Marketing Association). My lingering question is how much GMO produce actually gets labelled in this way, when it’s still something that is only, by law, done voluntarily in this country.

The business about what gets called “organic” when it comes to compost horrified me so much that I asked for guidance from my new best friends at the appropriately-named farm & garden suppliers Integrity Sales. They were helpful and sympathetic. The key, they said, is to look for OMRI (Organic Materials Review Institute) certification (was relieved to discover my favourite soil amendment, Sea Soil, is OMRI certified.. and guaranteed free of sewage sludge).

So I guess “organic” is one of those loophole words, like “fair trade“, that has been pounced upon for marketing purposes. Anyone can use the word, and a lot of opportunists will do so, counting on public ignorance of what it should properly mean, to make a quick buck. So you have to be alert and remember to look for certification.

Bernadette posted a link to the Meatless Monday website: a grand idea, I thought. It describes itself thus:

Meatless Monday is a non-profit initiative of The Monday Campaigns, in association with the Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health. Our goal is to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal health and the health of our planet.

Which, given what I’d read in Food Matters, by Mark Bittman, back in January (he quoted an FAO statistic, that “global livestock production is responsible for about one-fifth of all greenhouse gases – more than transportation”) is a nice, easy-to-remember way of reducing consumption. (Hopefully people are not simply replacing meat with fish in this day and age.)

I’d think the meatless Mondays should be added to any meatless Fridays our Catholic friends might already be practising, of course. And speaking of religion, anyone wanting to go for the weight control and health benefits of the Mediterranean Diet should be aware that the people studied for this (Cretan men in the 1960s) were actually eating very little meat to start with, and reducing their meat consumption in large part because of the numerous fasting days prescribed by the Greek Orthodox Church.