Sharing Food & Knowledge; Hali work party; Food Matters! and Planet Earth

Last week was a busy one for Vancouver Island's food security community, with two significant meetings and a last Seedy Saturday on top.

Tuesday about 50 of us gathered at the university for Sharing Food and Knowledge, a meeting of people involved in food and educational issues convened with the support of UVic's Office of Community Based Research (OCBR). We had a speedy stream of presentations, kicked off by one from Linda Geggie, introducing the afternoon with an overview of the OCBR's Capacity-Building Project, which includes UVic and five Vancouver Island post-secondary institutions. Areas of interest include food security and sustainability, and the group aims, among other things, to capture, share and meet research requests by working with interns and researchers. They'll also do a survey of programs and curricula as well as identifying areas of research already underway.

Other speakers included Steven Earle, from Vancouver Island University, speaking on peak oil and the future of food production on Vancouver Island. Some of the looming consequences of our current situation that he identified include

• reduced food supply
  
• increasing food prices
• rationing of oil
• conflict
• less available food for all
• and less transported food

He was asked to provide some ideas about what needs to be done on the Island, and these include

• farm without chemical fertilizers and pesticides
• move away from mechanical farming and increase farm labour
• care for the soil
• improve water efficiency
• plant winter crops and storable summer crops
• use open pollinated vs hybrid seeds - i.e. practice seed saving
• practice mixed farming
• and buy local

Tom Child also spoke about his work studying environmental contaminants in the marine foods of coastal first nations in BC. Food sources he's studying include harbour seals, dungeness crabs, sockeye salmon and butter clams. The highest PCB and PBDE levels he found were in seals (makes sense to find these things at the higher end of the food chain), but the sockeye has the highest consumption so its contamination levels will be the most important.



and Fiona Devereaux, who talked about the Feasting for Change project, which is part of the Aboriginal Diabetes Initiative



and aims to restore knowledge about aboriginal food traditions by putting youth and elders together to talk about traditional foods.

Wednesday was another work party at the farm



where preparations include moving strawberry runners into new beds:



Thursday evening a group of us got together to share some food and hammer out vision and mission statements for the Food committee of the Victoria Transition Town initiative.

Friday was Food Matters! - a day of workshops and local food hero celebrations. The meeting was held at the Native Friendship Centre and attracted lots of foodie folk from thither and yon. The day started with workshops, including one on community kitchens operating in Victoria. Some of these are participant-run, where people gather to share bigger cooking tasks, like canning, for largely social reasons (with some education picked up along the way) while others are funded and incline towards helping people on low incomes learn to manage food and nutrition through communal cooking. In both cases, participants work together to prepare meals or dishes on a large scale that are divided into portions to take home.

A lunch followed, which was a little disappointing - I played count the seasonal vegetables in the veggie wrap and came up with... one: asparagus, which is seasonal in California just now. It also featured zucchini, red pepper and eggplant (at best these last two will have come from BC greenhouses at this time of year, but that's not an ideal source either). The halibut chowder



was both seasonal and delicious and was the work of Carrie Pollard (who runs the HEAL - Healthy Eating Active Living - program at the centre)



and the VNFC's own community cooking enterprise: this brings locals together to prepare a soup each Friday for the centre's Friday soup kitchen, which provides soup, bread and fruit to people who wish to participate. (But of course I have recently seen End of the Line and any fish consumption is now troubling to me.)

Linda Geggie read an excerpt from farmer-poet-novelist-memoirist Brian Brett's Trauma Farm - a happy coincidence as later that evening I learned that Brian will be reading in Victoria next week.



There was a talk by Gilbert Wilkes called Demystifying New Media: how media can help us reach and engage our audiences and each other. This covered a lot of ground and was particularly focused on ways foodies could use feeds and aggregators to filter food information.



At the end of the day I wandered out to see the garden that volunteers from the centre and the community have been building, and it is in enviable shape, all the raised beds waiting to be filled:



Friday night was Planet Earth Poetry, with three featured readers: Michael Kenyon, from Vancouver/Pender Island; local poet Michael Bond,



who gave us his first full reading, after several years of popular appearances at the open mic; and Richard Lemm,



wrapping things up.

Does food matter? And the birds and the bees.

So does food matter? If so, to whom? Why not to everyone? How do you make people care, or what should you expect them to do to prove they care? I've been asking myself many such questions in recent weeks.

I've been to two less-than-crowded gatherings lately, organised with the purpose of showing politicians in the provincial election that the voting public cares deeply about its food and about agricultural issues affecting food production. Apparently the current government correctly deduces that the public is not concerned enough to show up en masse, and so neither must they. No Liberal politicians bothered to accept the invitation to come and defend the government's record at the legislature rally or the all-candidates forum on food security last week.

It's odd, because if you ask around, you do find a lot of people out there who do seem to care, and who are acting on their concerns by buying local foods, supporting local farmers, growing their own food; vegetable seeds and starts are selling in record numbers; restaurants and shops that specialise in local foods are springing up like weeds. But then again, when I peek in the carts of my fellow shoppers in grocery stores, I see convenience foods; imported out-of-season fruits and vegetables; highly processed foods laden with hfcs, preservatives and fats; cases of pop, and generally a totally unsustainable lifestyle carrying on around me. And a miniscule percentage of the public turning up at food and agriculture rallies.

Farming Today, the straight-on BBC Radio 4 program on farming issues, talked honeybees last week. You can catch the full week's worth - which includes an interesting exchange about the part that pesticide group neonicitinoids may play in unexplained bee deaths - for another six days. This week it's on to chickens...

It's definitely turned into spring here. My new mason bee house filled up a week after I mounted it on the fence



so I've added some high-density housing



along the lines of what Haliburton uses; I think I need to cut the tubes down in mine so they're better protected from the elements.



Haliburton has also brought in some wireworm specialists to help with integrated pest management in the fields. They're young but willing.



And finally, a walk through the woods proves the arrival of spring: Trillium in bloom



and food on the hoof: salmonberry



and oregon grape both in flower.



Arrrrr...

Food security on the Island

I went to Courtenay to attend a day of meetings on food security last Friday, organized by VIHA and held at the Crown Isle golf club. Not the most appropriate setting - all that farmland covered with artificially managed turf is a bit troubling to say the least - but it was comfortable, and the food was good.

About 90 of us, I'm told, made the trek from all over Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands to sit together and talk about food security. The concerns were many and of considerable weight: though there's been questionable record-keeping on our food supply on this island, it's considered accurate to say that only 5-7% of our food is raised here; the rest is ferried over from the mainland. There are widespread concerns about the water crisis in California which will inevitably affect our food supply over the coming year. Like the rest of the Western world, we have food quality challenges - and the correspondingly poorly nourished and increasingly overweight population - that are increasing the strain on our health systems. And we as a planet sit on the edge of predicted world-wide shortfalls in food.

So there is huge impetus to improve the island's self-sufficiency in food production, against the economic and political weight of real estate development. The agricultural vote has historically been too low to get the attention of politicians -- but there is a provincial election coming.

We broke into groups to tackle food security ("A situation in which all community residents obtain a safe, culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through a sustainable food system that maximizes self-reliance and social justice" --Hamm & Bellows, from a 2003 article in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior) by discussing three questions. Firstly, what knowledge, skills and abilities are needed in communities to become food secure and work towards sustainability, and how are these to be identified and shared; secondly, how do communities move towards long term food sustainability while dealing with short-term and immediate needs; and finally, how do we work together to become a collective voice on food security, and what steps can we take today to improve the security and sustainability of our food supply?



There was a lot of discussion, of course, from nurses, nutritionists, farmers, students, chefs, food retailers and more. Some points I found interesting:

• Education has in a way been our food supply's nemesis: the farmers' children leave the farm to get an education so they can have a better life than their parents. Schools feed this removal from the land and the ensuing loss of respect for farmers which helped to rob them of a livelihood; as did the cultural and economic shift to commodity production over market gardening or backyard food production.
• Half of the province's ALR land is apparently not currently farmed.
  
• Taxation that is set according to a minimum return from farming sets an impossible hurdle for new farmers.
  
• Greenhouse growing, a viable way to produce food, was initially encouraged on the Island, using coal heating to support the local coal industry; but now coal is a carbon tax bad-guy and the capital outlay to start over is crippling for nonprofits.
  
• Food preservation is a central, much-needed skill which seems to be much in demand.
  
• The school system badly needs a mandatory agricultural component, but cracking the curriculum is very difficult.
  
• Government policies should include mandated backyard food growing.
• We need to start thinking of food as medicine.

Some interesting organisations, places or sources of information I encountered at the meeting include:

• The Aboriginal Agriculture Education Society of British Columbia
  
• ATTRA - the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Source (American)
• BC Food Systems Network
• Cowichan Green Community
• CR-FAIR (Capital Region Food and Agriculture Initiatives Roundtable)
  
• Food Link Nanaimo
  
• Heritage Foodservice Co-operative Association - an article about this here
• Innisfree Farm
  
• Island Farmers Alliance
• Island Organic Producers Association
  
• Lush Valley Food Action Society (we had a fab reception here the first night, which included some drumming and milling about with excellent nibbles from Brambles, and some irresistible fry bread that went well with some jam that resulted from the Lush fruit tree project)
• Small Scale Food Producer Association
  

And all that talk about food makes a person hungry. We had started off with a good breakfast - smoked salmon hollandaise, house muesli, fresh yogurt and so on - and broke for an even better lunch. I don't think I've been at a meeting that had such a good one. Fresh local greens, lots of seafood - including beautifully cooked planked salmon, Fanny Bay oysters, crab legs, spot prawns, tuna carpaccio and several smoked fishes - and apple-rhubarb crumble and local cheeses to finish.



Well deserved kudos to the chef.



In the last of the three sessions I was in, about steps that can be taken now to help the food security situation, we had a participant who floated the idea of an Island food infrastructure investment fund - a fund that could be drawn from in order to tap the many matching grants that are out there but beyond reach since few have the money to kick things off. So by the time we left the room the fund had begun at $60. By the end of the wrap-up plenary, it had jumped to $250.



As we left, there on the golf course was a small crowd of wild food to wish us farewell.



I couldn't leave town without visiting Brambles, the new (3 months old) market



which sells only local (Vancouver Island or BC) products. I'd had some gorgeous beets (golden and rainbow) at the reception on Thursday which had come from here, so I made a beeline for the produce (a lot of which comes from my local farm shop hangout, Michells). They had many other tempting things too, including tins of line-caught albacore tuna, an amazing looking meat counter (they make all their own sausages), lots of great fruit juices, local cheeses and chocolates. Lucky for my food budget I was taking the long way back to Victoria so had to pass on the perishables.



That night we said a proper farewell to Courtenay at Locals, an exceptional restaurant tucked away in a strip mall.



As its name suggests, it serves local foods and wines. Everything we had was excellent, from the smoked tuna salad with its natty daikon sash






to the fresh sablefish - baked in a cloak of fennel



or pan-seared in sesame seeds with a bit of black bean, and some nice fresh vegetables - more pretty beets -



and since the dessert menu is abnormally tempting, they offer a boon to the indecisive, a sampler that includes pumpkin-chai latte brûlée; a chocolate tower; lavender ice cream with oregon grape jelly; and a kind of apple crumble which was much better than that may sound.



After a last stroll along Fanny Bay - where we experienced the other side of the herring run, which is the herring roe that washes up on the beaches



in such quantities you think at first there's been a spill of sawdust - it was time to head back down the island.