Archive for July, 2009
Ontario Energy Audit
If you or anyone you know lives in an old house, check out the ecoENERGY retrofit program. They just increased their grants by 25% (and if you’re in Ontario, the provincial government will double your grant payments), so even if you’re renting, i’m sure your landlord will be interested. The grants totally covered the cost to insulate our walls and attic, and helped us replace our obsolete furnace with a high-efficiency one, so we’ll be laughing when we get our gas bill this winter. Plus, they’re letting us apply for an extension (but still sending the cheque for the work completed did so far), so hopefully we’ll be able to do more.
Food Standards, eh?
The Food Standards Agency wants to help you make an “informed choice” about your food. They’ve put together a study, comparing the nutritional value of organic versus non-organic food. Of course, calling it a study is a little misleading. They’ve read other people’s studies, and have parsed out the answer: there’s little nutritional benefit to organic food. Of course, “The review rejected almost all of the existing studies of comparisons between organic and non-organic nutritional differences,” so it’s easy to see how they came to that conclusion.
Oh, and they didn’t think it was important to consider the effects of eating pesticides, many of which are carcinogenic. Thanks, Food Standards Agency; I could have made a terrible environmentally conscious decision if you hadn’t opened my eyes (again)! Eat on…
Via BBC
Water water everywhere, and not a drop to…eat
My garden is swimming. Every day I look up at the sky and think, “oh, come on, can’t we have just one day without rain?” I’m fighting a war against fungal diseases on my tomatoes (spoiled milk is an amazing weapon!) because it’s been so cool and wet… and Alberta is becoming a desert.
This year we’re really getting to see what slaves we are to water. We still don’t have corn in Ontario because of the wet cold, while Alberta’s crops are about 2 weeks behind normal because of their drought. For Alberta cattle farmers, that means that rising feed prices are forcing them to sell huge percentages of their livestock because there’s no grass for grazing.
“We’ve had about an inch and 2/10ths (three centimetres) total since the snow left, and we didn’t have any snow,” one farm worker is quoted as saying in a Calgary Harold Article.
Mexico’s water shortage is now an emergency so bad that they’ve announced a 10 month water rationing plan, according to the Latin American Herald Tribune.
“If we don’t act now, both the government and the citizens, we won’t have enough water in the city during the dry season – February, March, April, May, primarily,” Ebrard said, adding that 13 of the metropolis’ 16 boroughs could be completely without water.
Does this sound familiar?
Imagine having to cut your water use by 10% Sunday’s through Thursdays, 25% on Fridays, and 50% on Saturdays (I’m not sure how the math works to get through 4 months even with these reductions). Imagine trying to supply North America with tomatoes etc with those kinds of restrictions.
It’s not just oil prices that are causing food costs to rise. You can’t grow food without water.
Did you know that it takes the same amount of water to produce 2 pounds of beef as to shower every day for a year? Two Pounds.
But we don’t think about the cost of water until things get bad, because the planet is covered in it. Sure, most of it is saltwater, and more and more of it is being contaminated every day, but it’s everywhere. Take Australia, for instance. They’re surrounded. Of course, they learned pretty quickly, as Treehugger points out, that you can’t grow food without fresh water:
Water shortages drop Australia's rice production to almost zero
And we can only expect the water crisis to get worse as the earth warms.
More on clear gold this week.
Canadian Food Import facts
If you’re looking for motivation to eat local, here’s a good start:
EDIT:
Youtube’s taken it down (I can’t imagine it was Hellmanns that asked them to do it); watch it on Vimeo:
The Literary Type
Hello all,
The New Quarterly has just launched a blog called “The Literary Type” where I have posted a rant about CanLit, if you’re interested.
Business School Grad on Urban Farming
I have to admit, sometimes I feel a little crazy about my urban homestead obsession, and though I try very hard to encourage the people around me to grow food (it’s so easy!), I know that sometimes the scale that I’ve taken it to can be a little intimidating. That’s why I get excited when my web developer friends grow heirloom tomatoes on their apartment balcony (Gavin: “When the tomatoes started growing, I though it was a diseased growth. It didn’t occur to me that tomatoes start out as these little green things”).
My friend Alec, a business school grad, has been courting my garden for some time now. Last summer, we took him home to show him what we were growing. He was excited about it because, as he says, he spends a lot of time thinking and reading about peak oil/climate change/sustainability issues, but he felt kind of powerless to really do anything about it. But again this year, he was still talking about gardening, because he hadn’t felt prepared to start his own. (Trust me, it’s not as hard as you think!) So this Canada Day, I invited him to join us for a day of gardening. He gave me 9 hours of labour on a holiday, and sent me an eloquent thank-you note, as if his slave labour hadn’t been a tremendous help:
I realized it’s been almost two weeks since we spent the day gardening, and I never really followed up to say thanks. So…..thanks. It really was kind of you to take the time to share with me some of your knowledge about a very important skill for the future. I must admit, whether I was thinning radishes or planting tomatoes, there was a voice inside my head quietly asking “what the f@*! are you doing dude?!?” Mind you, that same voice was basically saying the same thing when I was being force-fed business school propaganda. (As I’m sure you can tell, I have a tough time hiding my bitterness with the mainstream economic/business establishment – another reason I’m seeking a positive alternative.) In any case, I’m glad I took the time to learn something new, and that you were willing to help me along my way. No doubt I have much still to learn, but the planting of that metaphorical seed was definitely a step in the right direction. I’d love to help out again sometime if you guys would be down. Anyhow, I just wanted to say thanks again. I know it probably wasn’t a big deal for you guys, but it was definitely a small, but meaningful step in the right direction for me.
Cheers ,
- Alec
from the ARE YOU #$@% KIDDING ME department…
We all know that food safety issues are a problem. Although the cardinal law of business is “don’t kill your customers,” businesses like Peanut Corp. of America and Earthbound Farms are negligent or evil enough to continually attempt just that.
“If we want to have bagged spinach and lettuce available 24/7, 12 months of the year, it comes with costs.” -Bill Marler (the lawyer who represented plaintiffs in the 2006 spinach E. coli outbreak)
In an article that could be out of a spoof magazine, this article in the San Francisco Chronicle outlines how, rather than holding Big Ag and food processing companies accountable for food safety, giant food retailers are imposing new restrictions on farmers. Okay, that’s fair enough, I guess… except when their regulations are based on pure paranoia, at the expense of science.
In perhaps an unconscious nod to the fact that it’s managing the perception of safety rather than safe practices, it’s called the “leafy greens marketing agreement.” Here are some of their great ideas:
- An Amish farmer that uses a horse to plow his fields can’t sell his greens to retailers, who would much rather purchase bagged lettuce trucked from hundreds of miles away (check the “product of” signs on those packages)
- neither can a farmer who has children under 5, because, of course, diapers are our biggest threat to food safety.
- “I was driving by a field where a squirrel fed off the end of the field, and so 30 feet in we had to destroy the crop” “On one field where a deer… didn’t eat anything, just walked through and you could see the tracks, we had to take out 30 feet on each side of the tracks and annihilate the crop.
- ponds are poisoned and bulldozed, poison traps are placed on the edges of fields and between rows, and companion plantings on the edges of fields are razed for “bare-dirt buffers”.
in the name of sterility. Because everyone knows that the ecosystem is out to harm us, and the best way to interact with a system that has sustained life since the beginning of time is to beat the living shit out of it. Real live UC Davis scientists understand that “vegetation buffers can remove as much as 98 percent of E. coli from surface water”, but the perception of safety is more important than actual safety. News flash: we’ve been growing food in the dirt for a very very long time. Did you ever notice that food safety issues seem to be happening more now than they ever did?
“In 16 years of handling nearly every major food-borne illness outbreak in America, I can tell you I’ve never had a case where it’s been linked to a farmers’ market,” Marler said.
Farming isn’t the problem. Sustainable farming definately isn’t the problem. Gigantic companies that can afford the occasional customer drop off here, in the name of saving some cash there, are. (Which do YOU think is more dangerous: a container of poison, or a toad?) Instead of buying your food from companies that are trying to kill you, or that think that scorched-earth practices are a good idea, visit the farmer’s market. The businesses there are small enough to know the value of a healthy customer. Or better yet, grow your own. The dirt won’t hurt you, I promise.
(just remember to wash your food!)
Man-Eating Plants
You may have thought that you were in charge, but your garden wants to eat you.
Seriously, the human body provides an excellent source of nutrients to your plants that you may not have considered:
Hair: chemical (dye/perm) free hair provides an excellent source of slow release nitrogen to your soil.
Finger/toenails: Put your clippings in the garden. They’re a source of calcium.
Blood: an excellent source of nitrogen. If you use a menstrual cup, or have a nasty blood spill to clean up, empty it out in the garden. Of course, blood meal works too.
Bones: bones are very high in calcium and phosphorous, which is essential for healthy root and fruit development. If you don’t want your plants to eye your limbs hungrily, I recommend bone meal.
Urine: is a convenient nitrogen-packed liquid fertilizer. It’s safe to pee directly on most mature plants, but it’s easier and safer if you just pee in your watering can and dilute it. The smell of your territorial markings will also help deter animals that want to steal your food.
Feces: Human waste is sold as “malorganite” in garden stores. General knowledge tells us that we should never use manure from animals that aren’t vegetarian, but no one told the guys who make this shit. What you should never use is waste from animals that eat chemicals that they can’t pronounce, and are passing things like fluoride and lead through their bodies. Did you hear about the lead contamination in the Michelle Obama’s organic Whitehouse garden? From malorganite being used on the lawn. It’s a great way to poison yourself twice: the lead that passes through your system can be absorbed by your plants so that you can eat it again. yum! That being said, vegitarians can make excellent use of composting toilets for an eco-friendly way to flush, to recycle those waste nutrients.
July Bounty
Eating seasonally at this time of year is amazing. Just when you think you can’t stand another salad (a staple since April), wonderful new things come up to make it better. Last night’s garden bounty: spinach, beet greens, and Genovese basil with green onions, and the last of the peas, plus feta, balsamic vinegar and olive oil. French Breakfast radishes and the first of the beets– the white one is a Chiogga, which is very sweet (when it matures more, it’s supposed to have a bull’s-eye pattern).
Plus, it’s strawberry season of course. That means jam.
We combined recipes to make strawberry rhubarb ginger jam:
1 lb rhubarb, cut into pieces and cooked in hot (not boiling) water until soft
2 1/2 cups crushed strawberries
6 1/2 cups sugar (nik: “is jam a way of preserving food, or flavouring sugar?”)
1 1/2 Tablespoons fresh grated ginger
1 1/2 teaspoons lime juice
1 pack pectin
-make sure you drain your rhubarb well, or your jam will have too much liquid, and not set. Stir in the strawberries, ginger, and sugar. Heat, stirring constantly, until it boils. Boil for 1 minute, then add lime juice and pectin, stir for another minute, seal in hot jars and process.
and canned strawberries. You’ve never heard of canned strawberries have you? Neither had I, but found the recipe on a hunch. This is an example of bad canning: the head space (the air space on top) is too big in the large jar, but these won’t be around long enough for the extra air to be a problem. The reason that the fruit floats on top is because I processed them too long. That doesn’t change how safe it is, but it certainly won’t impress anyone.
