Thanks to Mary’s tip, I was able to watch this clip, recently featured on 60 Minutes, to see Alice Waters talk about why good, clean and fair food is worth the investment.
And Alice Major will be reading in Sechelt this week, and after that points east, as she promotes her lovely book The Office Tower Tales.
Katie sent me this beauty. A cooking video that will not make you hungry, at least not for food!
http://www.todaysbigthing.com/betamax/betamax.swf?item_id=273&fullscreen=1
Meanwhile, I spent a pleasant afternoon shovelling dirt, pulling weeds and moving strawberries around on my first Wednesday work party of the year at Haliburton Community Organic Farm, where things are looking readier and readier.
There’s a demonstration garden
going in on the Terralicious plot, to show people how they could manage to grow food, keep chickens and still have room to play in a standard sized city plot; there are seedlings sprouting and a big beautiful new veggie stand waiting for action.
It was just over a week ago I said goodbye to Saskatchewan,
touched down briefly in Calgary…
and then returned to Victoria where the herring run is in full flow, which brings out the fishermen
and the seabirds, including mergansers,
as well as harbour seals –and the odd otter.
Meanwhile, thoughts turn to plantings; I have some wading pools and car tires ready to roll. I’d heard that you can plant lots of potatoes using a stacking method and car tires, so I’m going to try that. On the other hand, this guy has had pretty good luck growing everything from corn to eggplant to okra in his Tennessee garden using 163 car tires. The wading pool idea came from this article about inner city gardening, which says they last at least 6 years in Chicago, so hopefully will prove even more durable here. The article also describes using car tires (with plastic liners), feed bags (you can use big burlap sacks as well) or other discarded containers like wooden crates, bricks, barrels, and plastic pails with holes in them.
But at present I don’t have to do anything more than plan, since we had a surprise snowfall this morning – though it is melting as best it can.
Luckily there’s poetry to keep us warm. I’m looking forward to David Cavanagh‘s reading at Planet Earth Poetry this Friday.
I was at a talk the other night by an investment company in which the head of research spent a lot of time extolling the virtues of ‘high quality companies’ and suggesting in the strongest possible terms (by naming it at least three times, for its steady growth, its popularity in times of recession, and its admirable gifts in job creation) that we should buy into one in particular. And the name of this wonderful opportunity was Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart??
Quite rightly, the first question he got after finishing was whether he ever looked at the social record of companies he recommended. After some shuffling of his papers he admitted that no, he didn’t look at that at all. You folks, he said, pay me to find you companies that will give you good returns, not to examine how they behave. Shades of Gordon Gekko.
This chap had also spent some time explaining how lessons had been learned from the Depression so we couldn’t possibly end up back there.
But what have we learned really, if we’re being encouraged to put our money down into the same environment of amorality that caused the collapse of companies like Lehman and Bernard Madoff? If we are told it’s ok to overlook how companies behave, and never mind how they earn their profits, as long as they continue to pay us our investment income, then are we not responsible for kicking morality further into the gutter?
And holding Wal-Mart up as an investor’s paradigm? A company that can create all those McJobs precisely because it’s beaten its competitors into the dirt through use of sweatshops, tax dodges and keeping its pay scale right along the poverty line. And whose business strategy is to kill off small, independent and family-owned stores; the very stores that hire people who know their products and can provide intelligent advice when selling them. A company that wants to bite off the biggest chunk of our shopping dollar by driving down quality standards – nurturing public hunger for cheap, disposable goods; exporting our manufacturing industries to the cheapest supplier – and through opportunistic expansion into areas like organic foods.
We will surely get the kind of world we deserve, if this is the kind of company we choose to support with our investment money. And, it goes without saying, with our shopping dollar.
I had opened a jar of sauerkraut the other day and was pondering what to do with it. I still have some beets from my bumper Christmas organic box, and I started thinking about some borscht I once had that included both beets and sauerkraut.
But in looking for this recipe I stumbled upon several others for sauerkraut borscht which call for smoked sausages (like those St Gregor ones I have stashed in my freezer).
Which reminded me that borscht, to many of us, means a kind of beet soup, but that is a woefully limited view of a term that, like paella, can mean an almost infinite range of dishes under a common culinary umbrella.
Which led me to look further at the page I’d happened upon, which was a collection of Mennonite recipes. Last summer I made sorrel soup (here called Zummahborscht) out of some weeds I’d pulled at Haliburton Farm. The soup was delicious and lemony; the labour involved was a bit tedious, as I had to rinse and sort the leaves rather more than I would a grocery store bag of greens, but I think it was worth it and I’ll be volunteering for weeding duties again this year.
