All The Dirt

The back yard gardening movement has been taking off over the past few years, with more people realizing how good it can be to grow some of your own food. But what about doing it organically? And what about growing enough food to try to make a living from doing it? Where do you get started? All good questions, and some very good answers are now available in the form of a book written by three Saanich Peninsula farmers.  Saanich Organics is the joining together of three women who run farms in Saanich, along with some input from other organic or transitional organic farms in the greater Victoria area. But now, Robin Tunnicliffe of Feisty Field Organic Farm, Rachel Fisher of Three Oaks Farm, and Heather Stretch of Northbrook Farm, the heart and soul of Saanich Organics, have just published a book called ‘All The Dirt, Reflections on Organic Farming’.

The book really gives you an idea of what you might be getting into if you are considering creating an organic farming business. They have had hundreds of people ask them over the years about what it’s like to be an organic farmer, how they run their business, and as Robin Tunnicliffe explains, the book can provide all the answers to all those questions:
 "It’s the book we needed when we started out. Nothing like this existed when we started out and what you need when you start a new career is a real slice of life, especially a career like organic farming that's getting redefined.  It's a whole career and whole lifestyle, a whole philosophy and what are things going to look like for you in ten years, so in the book that's what we really tried to do."

The really great thing about this book is that although it is a how-to book, it is told through the personal stories of the three authors, so you never feel bogged down in technical talk, it’s just as though you did sit them down and ask them all the questions you could probably think of regarding their business, and all the ones you didn’t think of as well. It also takes you through their structure, the way they have diversified. They sell their products to residents through the weekly box delivery program, but also at farmers markets, to restaurants and to retailers, and they also spread their income out from over a hundred different crops, so that if a few fail because of pests or weather, there are always some backups in place.

Their success comes as a combination of things, definitely teamwork, hard work, and developing a sense of community. But it also has to do with growing their business in a part of the world where people are becoming much more concerned about where their food comes from and how it is produced. Heather Stretch says that even given that awareness, not everyone has caught on to the idea that this is the way we should be eating:
"We still import the majority of the food we eat here on Vancouver Island. We need more farmers like us, and we need more people to think about eating more than just the fancy heirloom tomato that gets sliced on top of their industrially-produced, imported greens."

Well, we do need more farmers, we need our municipal and provincial governments to be more farmer-friendly when it comes to loans, grants, incentives and infrastructure . If you want to pick up a copy of the book, which actually makes a good read even if you don’t want to be an organic farmer, you have an opportunity next Tuesday, February 28th at Cadboro Bay Books. Join Heather, Robin, and Rachel along with Saanich MLA Lana Popham, and long-time Sooke farmer Mary Alice Johnson for an evening discussion on local organic farming and to learn more about the growers in your neighbourhood. More details at the Saanich Organics website.

Food companies spend billions of dollars a year to advertise their products. Some of that marketing is targeted towards children, even if the foods advertised aren’t necessarily part of what health-care professionals call a balanced diet. This week on Food Matters, I looked at one of the first studies to link advertising to childhood obesity.

The study was done right here in British Columbia at UBC, along with some help from the University of Illinois, but it was looking specifically at the province of Quebec. Why Quebec? Well, way back in 1980 the provincial government brought in legislation that was the world’s first advertising ban of fast food. This was a ban of ads in print and electronic media targeted toward children of fast food and any toys associated with fast food. The study compared purchases of fast food by similar families in Ontario, and also obesity rates in children. Some numbers from the study are quite startling...

Tirtha Dhar

Assistant Professor Tirtha Dhar, a marketing expert at UBC’s Sauder School of Business says that the ban on advertising effectively reduced fast food consumption in households by as much as 13 per cent each week, and that even though Quebec children have one of the most sedentary lifestyles, they have one of the lowest childhood obesity rates in Canada.
In North America right now every two out of ten children are obese. A lot of that obesity is blamed on the consumption of fast food, junk food, and child health activists believe that these kinds of foods shouldn’t be marketed to children because the ads lead to greater consumption of those foods and that those ads should be banned. The product manufacturers don’t like being told they can’t market their products to a particularly malleable part of the population and always claimed there’s no link to obesity because of the ads, but the authors of this study claim that this is the first proof that the link exists in fairly black and white results based on a ban of advertising that’s been in effect for the past 32 years. Other data that was out there on this was from relatively small-sized surveys that gave more of a snapshot in time as opposed to this one where there was a wealth of information available from over three decades of census and health data.

To be fair, some changes started to be made voluntarily by Kellogg’s Canada, for example, about four or five years ago. They stopped marketing certain breakfast cereals to children that didn’t meet a set of nutritional guidelines they established, and they started to change the packaging on the cereal boxes to make it easier for parents to figure out what they were getting in the package. That doesn’t mean they actually changed what was in the boxes, just changed the packaging and marketing.

Marketers have always realized that children were a good target for some of their products. I went to a seminar a few years ago on this very topic and was quite impressed with a presentation from Brian Cook, a researcher with the Toronto Board of Health. He said that if there wasn’t a clear link between the power of advertising and how it affected children a lot of marketing executives would have been fired for spending millions of dollars on those ads targeted toward children. If it wasn’t working, they wouldn’t have kept doing it, right?

What has changed over the past few years is that there are so many more ways of reaching children these days. Toys connected with food have been out there for a long time, but now beyond toys and television, there are ringtones for kids who have cellphones, and there are lots of those, celebrity endorsement, contests, online games, websites with online games and of course social networking websites like Twitter and Facebook, where incentives are often offered if you ‘spread the word’.

Michele Simon

By and large food and beverage advertising in Canada is unregulated, or self-regulated by the industry, except in Quebec. Michele Simon is a public health lawyer who has been researching and writing about the food industry and food politics since 1996. She thinks that the processed food industry is not doing enough to curb marketing toward children and tries to place too much of the blame for overconsumption of junk food on parents. Simon would like to see more governments enact legislation that would end the use of cartoon characters, toys and websites targeted toward kids by processed food advertisers, along with other electronic methods.
And what about parents, what role should they play in what advertising their children are exposed to and what they end up eating? That’s a tough question. Kids are exposed to so much marketing these days and advertisers want to build brand loyalty when they’re young as a loyal customer can represent so much to a company over their lifetime. You can’t expect to raise your kids in a bubble, either. So somehow you have to strike a balance, try to educate them about the foods they eat and be careful about how you shop.

If you would like to listen to my chat with Jo-Ann Roberts on All Points West on this subject, just click here.

Mussels, clams, oysters, scallops and crabs...all important parts of the BC seafood economy, and all delicious parts of a healthy diet. But there’s a growing concern as to how these ocean products end up on our plates. 

Last Wednesday night I went to the first of a series of Slow Food seafood events at The London Chef cooking school and cafe on Fort Street. On the menu, mostly BC shellfish and Dungeness crab, with London Chef Dan Hayes showing attendees how to cook these BC products with expert commentary on how they are produced and harvested by Dr. John Volpe, who leads the Seafood Ecology Research Group at the University of Victoria. After downing a variety of raw oysters we enjoyed a very simple dish Dan prepared of fresh, raw scallops, farmed at Qualicum Beach. Dan: "All you do is just slice them, add a little salt, olive oil, dried hot pepper and a squeeze of citrus. (in this case lemon juice) This is the base for a ceviche, but instead of letting the fish 'cook' in the lemon juice, serve it straight away." The scallops were excellent, the sweet raw flavour still coming through loud and clear, augmented by the extra-virgin olive oil and lemon instead of being masked by it.

Farmed Scallop

The scallop farming industry has been growing on the BC Coast, as has most of the shellfish aquaculture component. The oysters we had before the scallops are all called Pacific Oysters, but none of them were actually native to BC. John Volpe told us that the native BC oysters aren’t that conducive to being farmed, so growers specialize in a Japanese species that has naturalized itself here. All the different names of oysters and shapes you see are actually the same oyster species, but where and how they’re grown give them the different flavour profiles. The BC government has been supporting rapid growth in the farmed shellfish industry, and this can mean a great density of oysters being grown in small areas, and that’s something Dr. Volpe says we have to be careful with, because waste from the oysters can have detrimental effects on other plant and animal life:

Farmed Oysters

"Of particular importance are the eelgrass beds, they are really the nursery system for so many other species. In studying how oysters release a lot of nitrogen via their waste into the eelgrass beds they have a negative effect on them and end up being able to dominate that ecosystem."

Dr. Volpe would like to see the provincial government pay a little more attention to densities in shellfish operations so problems like the one he described to us don’t grow along with the industry.

Dungeness Crab

Dungeness crab is still on the really good list of BC seafood to eat. It’s a wild product, the harvest is very strictly controlled so that it has remained sustainable over the past few years. And the London Chef takes an interesting attitude with it...he likes the shell more than the meat:

Dan Hayes

"So I like to break it up and saute the crab in a pan with some nice herbs, some butter and cream and that's it. I want to have the flavour of the shell in my dish, instead of discarding it. With a nice sauce all the joy comes out of licking and sucking at the shell, and dipping some hot bread in the sauce, which I think is much more flavourful than just a chunk of meat."

I think he's right! But I’m not a huge fan of cream sauces so I’ve made up a black bean sauce instead using fermented black beans, green onions, garlic, ginger, some chilli sauce and a splash of white wine. (more details below)  Later that evening we also enjoyed a big pot of mussels, simply steamed, and a delightful clam fettucine. While the mussels and clams are both farmed in BC, they are not BC species, mussels originate on the Atlantic coast and the Mediterranean, and they have transformed almost all the wild mussels in BC into somewhat of a hybrid of about four species, and the clams were Manila clams. While Dr. Volpe says while you shouldn’t stop eating these farmed products just because they didn’t originate in BC, you should be thinking about the overall impact we have on our ocean environments: "These farmed products that we're eating tonight actually need a pristine, wild environment in which they can be farmed, so we have to think about how we treat those environments and how they interact together as we take advantage of these products."

Gooseneck Barnacles

The Slow Food Slow Fish series continues at the London Chef on March 29th with small fish and bycatch, with Chef Dan Hayes and Dr. John Volpe leading the way once again and then at a date still to be announced, it is Sea Things, Seaweed, Sea Urchins, Sea Asparagus and other sea things. Other sea things include the gooseneck barnacles pictured at right, which were on display only that night.  The danger of red tide precluded any eating...and there is no commercial fishery for these barnacles, although there once was. (that's another story) They are highly treasured in Spain, where I saw them a few years ago where they were priced at 39 Euros for one kilo! 

Oh, if you live in the Victoria area and are interested in whether local restaurants and grocery stores offer sustainable seafood, there is a great little tool produced out of a Seafood Audit the Seafood Ecology Research Group did in 2010 in 29 Victoria-area restaurants and 10 grocery stores.  The results are quite revealing!

To listen to this week's Food Matters with me and Jo-Ann Roberts just click here.

And now the Crab with Black Bean Sauce recipe:

Ingredients:

1 fresh Dungeness crab, cleaned, body and legs separated into pieces

2 tbsp. vegetable oil

2 tbsp. fermented black beans, rinsed and minced

2 cloves garlic, minced

1-inch long chunk of ginger, minced

1 small shallot, peeled and minced

1 bunch green onions, green parts only, minced

1 tsp or more to taste sambalulek (hot chili paste)

1/2 cup white wine or sherry

chopped cilantro for garnish

Heat the vegetable oil over high heat in a large frying pan.  Fry the black beans, garlic and ginger together for a few seconds, then add in the shallots and green onions, stirring until the shallots are translucent.  Add in the hot sauce and the white wine, stir until the  wine comes to a boil and then add the crab pieces all at once. Stir to coat all the crab pieces in the sauce, then cover and simmer until the crab is just cooked through.  Serve in bowls with some of the sauce spooned over the crab and sprinkle with the chopped cilantro.

There is nothing small about the world-wide shrimp industry. Every year billions of dollars worth of shrimp are consumed, many of them having been produced in farms in third-world countries. And we happily gobble them down, without much thought about the consequences to the environment, and the people who farm the shrimp. I've started looking into shrimp situation and discussed it today on Food Matters.

The latest Government of Canada stats I could find about this put us at about 5 pounds a year of shellfish, which includes shrimp. Personally, I know I am above that because I love eating BC spot prawns and I’m sure I put away more than that each year...but the government stats from 2009 say about 5 pounds.

We import about 560 million dollars worth of shrimp every year while we export about 270 million dollars worth of shrimp. Why do we import more than we export? Because we like cheap shrimp. Most of the shrimp we import are farmed in third world countries where labour and land costs are low. Where environmental concerns are not so important and the monitoring of issues like chemicals used in shrimp feed and the ponds they grow in is not nearly as stringent as it would be in North America. I’ve been reading quite a bit about shrimp farming and it’s pretty scary stuff. Mangrove forests on the ocean shores are being chopped down and bulldozed to create ponds to grow shrimp. The ponds are then sterilized of other sea life using powerful chemicals and because growing shrimp so intensively can lead to disease, the shrimp are often sprayed or fed antibiotics and fungus killers, some of which stay in their systems when they are harvested. The people who work in these shrimp farms are often exploited through low wages and poor working conditions, and puts people in the more lucrative wild shrimp industry out of work. That’s it in a nutshell...but there’s a lot of material out there if you want to learn more, including a new book by New Zealand-based journalist Kennedy Warne called ‘Let Them Eat Shrimp: The Tragic Disappearance of the Rainforests of the Sea.’

You will find farmed shrimp everywhere in grocery stores that you see pre-packaged frozen or previously-frozen shrimp or Tiger prawns, they are most likely imported from Asia or Central American countries like Honduras, and they are cheap. Most restaurants serve cheap imported shrimp, that’s how they can offer those great all-you-can-eat deals. But there are those environmental and human costs that don’t show up in the price.

If you are concerned, the first thing you can do is stop eating farmed shrimp from any Third World country.  Then read more about it, and if you still want to eat shrimp, eat BC shrimp, especially those that are caught by traps and not by trawls, because trawling for shrimp creates its own problems with by-catch and destruction of habitat. We do export a lot of our shrimp, as I said before, 270 million dollars worth. It gets exported because people overseas in countries like Japan are willing to pay more for high quality, wild shrimp. If we were willing to pay more for shrimp, more of them would be consumed here in Canada and I know from talking to a local shrimper, he would be more than happy to sell more shrimp to folks here. And because he takes very good care of the product when he freezes it, the quality when you thaw is always excellent.

shrimp package front

How do we know what we’re getting? My standard answer is to ask questions, find a reputable fishmonger, because the people that stock the frozen bags of shrimp in grocery stores probably won’t know much about them. Earlier this week at Safeway I was looking at bags of ‘organic shrimp’. These are a product of Honduras as stated on the label, so they are farmed, and they have a very generic sounding certification on the package. Certified Organic by ‘Quality Certification Services’, it says. I looked up the website and although they are certified by the USDA let’s just say the website doesn’t leave me with a lot of confidence as to their practices...such as this line about the company’s requirements: QCS ‘strives’ to use qualified and trained

shrimp package back

inspectors. To me that should read QCS ONLY uses qualified and trained inspectors.  Here in BC there are six species of shrimp caught commercially and you can read about them on this Department of Fisheries webpage.

Tonight I’m off to a special Slow Food Event at the London Chef here in Victoria where I’m going to learn more about shellfish and bivalves including some words of wisdom from Dr. John Volpe at the University of Victoria and I will tell you all about that next week.


 

It’s one of those parental duties that you take on for years...making your kids lunches for school. It can be time-consuming and just one more thing you don’t want to think about the night before, or the morning of. And how do you make sure your kids are eating the right thing? Today on Food Matters, I looked at an innovative company that helps you provide your kids with a healthy lunch, and at the same time helps kids who might not even have a lunch to eat.

I don’t have kids but my mom faithfully made me lunch every day all the way up through high school, and while they weren’t imaginative they always included some fresh fruit, homemade cookies and a sandwich. She was a stay-at-home mom by the time I came along, so it was part of her day and she never complained about it. That was then, this is now. The family structure has changed, there are more two-parents-working families and time always seems to be at a premium.

This means more kids have to fend for themselves, rely on pre-packaged lunches, and then there are the hot lunch days, which have turned into fund-raising events for Parent Advisory Councils and that’s when Laurie Arbuthnot and Tina Vander Veen of Duncan got involved. They noticed that the foods offered on these days were typically fast foods like hot dogs and pizza and they thought that was wrong. So they started a company that would provide better foods at these hot lunch days, and as Laurie explains, they took it a little further when they realized that a lot of parents just don’t like making lunches or no longer have the time. The Good Bite Lunch Company, based just in Duncan for now, but what parents can do is go to their website, place their order for a day, a week, whatever, choose from the items available, pay and then the lunches are made in Tina’s commercial kitchen the night before or morning of and delivered right to the school for distribution. And they’ve spent some time using their own kids as guinea pigs so they are delivering lunches kids want to eat, including something called a pizza salad, which includes pepperoni made from free-range bison and fresh tomatoes along with a homemade Italian dressing.

They charge $6.49 per lunch, but that of course includes delivery and Laurie says when you compare how much a meal would cost at a typical fast food place it’s in the same ballpark, but of course their lunches are made from fresh, local, and as much as possible, organic ingredients, they even package everything in biodegradable wraps and containers so they can be composted at the school or at home.

Unfortunately, there are kids from families who can’t afford a program like this, or even to provide their children with any kind of lunch at all...so Tina and Laurie donate a portion of their proceeds to each participating school’s PAC to fund physical fitness programs and recreational equipment and they donate a lunch per day to a school in Duncan where many kids are not getting a lunch or snack. And by catering the special lunch days, Laurie hopes they can have some sort of influence on the way children learn about food and nutrition.

The really good news is that there are a few businesses in Duncan that think the same way that Laurie and Tina do, and they’ve come forward with some funding so that Good Bite Lunch Company can make some lunches at cost for some of those kids who would otherwise go without.

They started last February, so they’ve been at it for almost a year. It’s one of those ideas that everyone thinks is great, but it’s been a slow process to get people to sign up. Although once they do, they’ve been able to develop a good repeat business. If they get demand, of course they would like to expand to other communities in the area.

You can listen to my chat with Jo-Ann Roberts of All Points West on this topic by clicking here.

Advertising and marketing play major roles in our daily decision-making. We can easily be influenced by something as simple as a few words in a commercial, or even the colour of a label. Today on Food Matters, I discussed how much ‘greenwashing’ has become part of the sustainable language landscape. The term greenwashing basically means when a company spends more time or money telling you its products or services are ‘green’ or sustainable than they actually spend on making those products or services green. They're not quite putting their money where their mouths are. I didn’t realize that this term has been around since 1986, when a New York environmentalist called out hotel chains for all those cards they use to tell you to re-use your towels to save the environment really just resulted in more profit for the hotels.

Nowadays, food companies routinely use labeling to convince us their products are greener. Anytime you see a yogurt container from a large manufacturer with a picture of a cow grazing in a field on the label you’re being greenwashed. Large companies need copious amounts of milk to make their products, which means the diet and movement of the cows are strictly controlled...they live in barns and eat a mix of feed designed to make them produce more milk...they don’t graze on grass.

McDonald's Green

In 2009, McDonald’s outlets in Europe started changing their colour scheme from red and yellow to green and yellow. The company said the colour change was to reflect its heightened sensitivity to environmental concerns. Recently more supermarket chains here in BC all started to make claims they were now selling sustainable seafood products, products certified sustainable by 3 or 4 different agencies that are out there. But if you go into any of those supermarkets you will find the number of sustainable seafood products available is still far fewer than the number of products that wouldn’t be certified sustainable. One supermarket chain made a big fuss about two summers ago that they carried so many local products, but then rejected a pumpkin shipment from a local farmer because the pumpkins weren’t all the same size and some of them had mud on them.

This really extends into labeling food products when it comes to health benefits. We’ve talked before about the overuse of labels that purport the products inside to be natural or pure, or artisan. Ask yourself when you read those labels, what do those words really mean in conjunction with the food itself or the way it is produced.

Apparently Canada's Competition Bureau and the Canadian Standards Association are discouraging companies from making "vague claims" about environmental impact. Any claims must be backed up and when I looked at the CSA website they do have measurable standards companies can meet when it comes to categories such as Green Procurement and Environmental Claims and Labeling. But when it comes to food products I’m not sure how many of them actually require CSA approval to be sold, and since we don’t even require labeling of genetically modified products I don’t see that there is a lot of government oversight of environmental claims.

So how do we tell the difference between a real effort to be sustainable and an empty promise? Sometimes it’s obvious, as in the case of the words on labels like ‘all natural’. Other times it’s a lot harder. Hellmann’s Mayonnaise, a brand of Unilever Canada, has been promoting a Real Food movement – and two years ago Hellmann's public relations company offered me and other bloggers an all-expenses paid trip to Toronto to explain their support of eating local and healthy.  I didn't go on that trip, but on another trip to Toronto on business I put on my skeptical journalist hat and they did a mini-version of their presentation for me. I couldn't actually see the downside. They wanted to promote local food, help people to demand that from their local grocery stores, and were giving grants to people to help them start community gardens and other sustainable food projects.  A couple of weeks ago, I watched a very well done Eat Local Hellman’s YouTube video from 2009 that put forward some amazing stats about how we are NOT eating local, and it encouraged us to eat local, with the Hellmann's logo only coming up at the very end of the video. I posted it to my Facebook and asked my foodie friends to comment.

Michael Pollan

When this first came up I happened to have a chance to discuss it with journalist and Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Pollan. He wasn’t buying it for a minute. Definitely thought it was greenwashing, despite the benefits I described to him. With this latest video I posted to my Facebook page, the comments were more mixed.

I even traced this back to the parent company of Hellman’s, Unilever, and that multinational company has launched what sounds like a fairly major initiative, called the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, which says it includes: over 50 concrete targets that will:
• Help more than one billion people improve their health and well-being
• Halve the environmental impact of our products
• Source 100% of our agricultural raw materials sustainably

Quite bold. But is it real, how do you measure it? I found something called the Greenwashing Index website, run by the University of Oregon and EnviroMedia Social Marketing. All kinds of info there designed to help you figure out when you’re being greenwashed, and how you can participate by rating ads you see on tv.

Kilrenny Pasta Extruder

Eager eaters around Vancouver Island continue to hunt out and gather more and more local foods. And if you make it, they will eat it. Today on Food Matters I profiled two companies in the Cowichan Valley that are now bringing fresh pasta to the masses.

With my Italian background I have put away a fair amount of pasta over the years…two or three times a week at home growing up, lasagna was the special dish for family gatherings, but the funny thing is that we rarely ate fresh pasta noodles, most of it came out of a box with the exception of when my aunts would get together to make hundreds of little cheese or meat-stuff ravioli. Now of course I’ve learned how to make fresh pasta, and it’s fairly quick for me to crank out a fresh batch of spaghetti or fettuccine, but most people don’t take the time to do that…

Cowichan Pasta

Which is where fresh pasta companies come in, and I know that most supermarkets these days offer some sort of fresh pastas in the refrigerated section, but lately I've been tasting offerings from two companies, both in the Cowichan Valley, and both who started, by total coincidence, around the same time last year. First up is Cowichan Pasta, the brainchild of a young chef named Matt Horn. I caught up with him at his booth at the Winter Farmers Market in downtown Victoria on Saturday morning. Business was brisk, and he's making something he's always loved to cook with and eat. Traveling through Italy and seeing so many shops selling fresh pasta convinced him that we needed that kind of choice on Vancouver Island.

Matt makes 8 different kinds of pastas, 4 that are extruded and 4 types of ravioli he painstakingly makes by hand. He uses only Vancouver Island ingredients, including salt from Vancouver Island Salt Company, Cowichan Valley beef, BC spot prawns and vegetables and foraged items like seaweed and mushrooms with the seasons. Matt stresses you don’t need fancy sauces to complete the experience when you’re eating his pastas, you don’t want to overwhelm the delicate flavour of the pasta. The flour comes from Vancouver Island-grown hard wheat that is milled at True Grain Mill and Bakery.

Sourcing that flour locally makes it a more pricey buy, but once folks try it once he says they come back for more.  He's in the midst of adapting a food cart to bring to the markets so he can offer plates of pasta for sale there.

Deb Fahlman

 
Malfadine Pasta

The other pasta and sauce is from Kilrenny Farm, owned by Deborah and Russ Fahlman. I’ve been buying fruits and vegetables from the Fahlmans’ organic farm and booth at the farmers market for years now. They’ve had the dream of making pasta for sale for about 20 years, and finally last year they took the plunge, renovated their farm gate shop into a commercial kitchen, bought an Italian extruder pasta machine, visited Italy once again to learn more about making pasta, and started cranking it out. Deborah has been having fun learning to master all the bronze dies that came with the extruder, so today I brought in some malfadine, which is a ribbon of pasta that is very ruffled along the edges, really holds the sauce, which is Deborah’s marinara sauce made from tomatoes grown on their property. Along with egg based pastas Deborah also makes spelt and kamut pastas which are a lighter on the gluten factor.  So while her flour isn’t local all the sauces she sells are, because she either relies on ingredients they grow themselves or are available nearby, and they’ve started to offer lamb sausages as well from their own lamb, and that is one of my favourite dishes to make, a nice grilled sausage and maybe some fried onions poured over freshly boiled pasta.

The good news is that they are both developing a list of shops in Victoria and beyond that carry their products. But I have to mention that if you want to see in person how I use some Kilrenny Pasta you can sign up for my Romantic Roman cooking class at Kilrenny Farm just in time to impress your sweetie for Valentine’s Day.

You don't need to have made a New Year's resolution to 'become a writer' to sign up for my food writing and travel writing classes, which start in just a few weeks. All you need is a burning desire to share your experiences in the world of food or travel; I show you how to do the rest. 

  In-person courses take place at the UBC Point Grey campus starting January 30th. On Monday nights it's Food Writing, Tuesday nights, Travel Writing. Each course lasts for 8 weeks, with no classes the week of February 20th.  If you can't make the commitment to be there at the same time every week, you can sign up for the 100% online courses instead, which start the same week.  To enroll in any of the courses go to this page on the UBC Writing Centre website.

But I guess you're wondering what you're in for if you sign up... Quite simply: all the basic things you need to know to create and sell a story.  Notice I said 'sell'.  There are still lots of opportunities to have your work published in print or online and make some money doing it.  So, in each course I spend some time teaching you about generating story ideas for publications you've researched, as well as showing you how to approach editors with a query letter to convince them to hire you.  From there, I go on to help you shape your story and bring your experiences alive for your potential readers.  

Food students will also learn how to write restaurant reviews and construct recipes in a proper format.  Travel students will write about how to spend a weekend in their favourite destination, photography tips and the pros and cons of scoring some free travel.  Both online and in-person students get personalized feedback from me on all of your assignments.  Online students will have 1-2 opportunities to take part in live text chats with me and the whole class and more interaction is possible in online discussion forums.

What's expected of you?  Every week there will be articles to read that illustrate my lectures/lecture notes.  You'll be asked to research a publication for which you'd like to write and come up with story ideas appropriate to that publication.  All students will write a query letter aimed at selling their ideas and then write a story based on their successful query.  I act as your 'editor' throughout the process so you can get a sense of what it would be like to be freelance writer in the real world.

Each course does cover blogging as a way to get published, but if you want a real intense shot of learning how to construct your blog on WordPress and how to populate it with great content join WordPress expert Tris Hussey and me on Saturday, March 10th for 'Building and Promoting a Food Blog'. This day-long session (BYOL - Bring Your Own Laptop) will have you up and blogging by 5pm!

If you have any questions about any of these courses feel free to send me an email at don@dongenova.com. Hope to see you in a classroom or online soon!

The beginning of the New Year is usually a time for people to try going on diets, or at least trying to be a little more conscious about what they eat after the holiday excess. If you also want to put a little more ‘green’ in your diet by eating in a more sustainable fashion for the planet, you need to tread carefully.  There are many obstacles, though, to taking a more sustainable route to your shopping and eating:

A lot of it comes in the form of advertising. When food producers and manufacturers started to realize that people were getting on the local, sustainable bandwagon when it came to their food purchases, they started to take advantage of that in a couple of ways. When it comes to advertising you will note the increased use of the words, ‘natural’, ‘artisan’, and ‘local’, or anything else that will give you a feel-good jolt when buying their product. I’ve seen a couple of excerpts from a new advertising campaign coming from McDonald’s that feature some of the ‘regular folk’ farmers who grow potatoes or ranch cattle that turn up as McDonald’s fries and hamburgers. Of course it doesn’t tell you the entire story of what happens to the cattle once they leave the ranch or exactly how those potatoes are grown. And just ask yourself what it really means when you buy Wendy’s ‘natural cut’ fries?

The corporate world goes deeper into the idea of getting your dollars you want to spend on sustainable foods by purchasing or taking over smaller, successful, organic companies. For example, chocolate giant Cadbury bought Green and Black Organic Chocolate in 2005, Coke owns Odwalla Juices and Pepsi owns Naked Juice. They don’t necessarily make clear the ownership on their labels, so if you have a problem with large companies that produce non-sustainable products you might be contributing to their bottom line even if you think you are buying from a smaller, organic company. The other problem with this is that it makes it very difficult for those small companies who have to compete head to head with the large companies on grocery store shelves. So the economies of scale of production quite often means that one organic chocolate bar from a large global company will cost a dollar or two less than one from a local producer, and if people vote with their wallets instead of their hearts that is bad news for the local producer.

When it comes to less-manufactured foods like fresh fruit and produce that’s a tricky situation as well. The demand for organic produce has increased so much that in certain areas of Mexico, for example, there are organic farms producing tomatoes for our winter consumption that are putting a strain on the local water tables. The tomatoes pass the USDA organic standards, but they are kind of skirting around the issue of true agricultural sustainability. More and more organic produce is also coming out of China, which cuts local farmers out of the loop and puts you very far away from being to ask questions about exactly how those fruits and vegetables are being produced.

There is a silver lining when production it is done right. An Economist magazine article published last year cited some important strides in sustainability being made in emerging world economies:
“Manila Water, a utility in the Philippines, reduced the amount of water it was losing to wastage and illegal tapping by 50 per cent over the past decade by making water affordable for the poor. A Chinese aquaculture company recycles uneaten fish feed to fertilise crops. An Egyptian food producer set itself the task of reclaiming desert land through organic farming. A Costa Rican food and drink company adopted tough standards for the amount of water it uses to produce drinks.”

What can you do you want to eat more sustainably in 2012? Get out there and buy local. We still have Winter Farmer’s Markets on the go, there is one this Saturday in Victoria in Market Square. In the winter it is still possible to find free range eggs, organic or pasture-fed chicken and turkey, pork and beef, all from local farmers. Plan in advance to freeze or preserve the upcoming harvest. I was so happy over the holidays to pull out some of my peach preserves and blend them into drinks, top my oatmeal with a compote I had frozen earlier this year, and give gifts like my Paradise Jelly...made from quince from my tree, apples from my neighbour’s orchard, and cranberries from a farm up island in Yellow Point. And finally, start asking more questions about where your food comes from.

Resources:

The McDonald's Feel-Good Video

Wendy's New "Natural" Fries Caught Using Chemical Stew

Organic Agriculture May Be Outgrowing Its Ideals

Is Whole Foods Wholesome? The dark secrets of the organic-food movement.

Wal-Mart's Organic Offensive

Green growth: Some emerging-world companies are combining growth with greenery

Bill C-474, Triffids, and the genetically modified / engineered food debate we're NOT having

Organic food and drink sales slump

Organic Industry Structure

How Green Is Your Eco-Label? (aquaculture)

And the two free Smartphone apps I talked about yesterday that I downloaded onto my iPhone are 'True Food' and 'Good Guide'.  Both are U.S.-based, so while they provide some information they don't have full details on Canadian products. 'True Food' helps you determine which food products are GMOs, and the Good Guide is supposed to let you scan UPC codes with the camera in your phone and then reveal ratings on their health, environmental and social performance.  Too bad it doesn't have that large a database and it doesn't seem to include any Canadian products.
 

Michael Smith
 

I started with someone who is known for producing cookbooks that are for the relatively inexperienced home cook. The latest from Chef at Home, Chef at Large, and Food Network star Michael Smith is called Chef Michael Smith’s Kitchen, in which he has put together one hundred of his all-time favourite recipes that he makes at home on a regular basis. No fancy ingredients, not too many fancy methods and a photo for every recipe.

Mark McEwan

If you are looking for a book with just a little more technique, but still fairly easy recipes to make in the Italian fashion, check out Mark McEwan’s Fabbrica. McEwan is the chef behind quite the culinary empire in Toronto, with Fabbrica being his latest restaurant, what he describes as a casual but elegant, authentic Italian eatery. As he built the restaurant he built his collection of Italian recipes, so decided to put all those together in a cookbook. He takes pride in both the restaurant and the cookbook for being authentic Italian, and says you can learn how to do it, too.

Natalie MacLean

The perfect wine read for this year is Ottawa-based wine writer Natalie McLean’s second book, Unquenchable, A Tipsy Quest for the World’s Best Bargain Wines. For this book Natalie traveled the world to find bargains, we’re talking well under 20 dollars a bottle for the most part here...because there is a lot of wine out there we can experience at lower prices that is just as good or even better than the higher-priced stuff.

Other books you can consider as great gifts for this year:

Jacques Pepin: The Essential Pepin

Nigel Slater: Tender, Volume II

Jamie Oliver: Jamie Oliver's Food Escapes

Coleman Andrews: The Country Cooking of Italy

Edward Behr:  The Art of Eating

Becky Selengut: Good Fish

Ottolenghi: Plenty

My Last Supper - The Next Course

While researching this item it was a real pleasure to be able to interview Jennifer McLagan, Natalie MacLean, Michael Smith and Mark McEwan. The entire interviews cover much more detail about their books and other facets of their lives than I had time to mention on the show today, so if you'd like to hear more from them, just click on the files below to listen.

Don Genova Interviews Natalie MacLean

Don Genova Interviews Michael Smith

Don Genova Interviews and Mark McEwan

Don Genova Interviews Jennifer McLagan