I’m not going to say much about this video, except that it is an excellent example of mashup art (an endangered species) and that you will be doing yourself a favour if you watch it.
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Via BoingBoing, I think.

I’ve had these pics on my computer for a while now, but I’ve been trying to document my adventures in urban foraging.  Almost a month ago, I spent the afternoon finding wonderful free food, like elderflowers, wild garlic scapes, wild grape leaves, mullberries, wild cherries, and black raspberries.

I couldn’t help but brag about this when I visited my friend Alex in Toronto, so we went on an urban foraging walk.  And so I present to you:

Things you don’t expect to find in a park in Toronto.

Namely, food.

Like Mint

Oregano

Wild Strawberries!

then your teas, lavender and bee balm

And finally, your edible weeds like Lamb’s Quarters, which can get up to 4 ft tall and are delicious steamed like spinach

And plantain, the young leaves (2 inches long for the skinny ones and 1 inch long for the broad-leafed ones) of which are delicious fried with rice (especially stuffed into wild grape leaves).

Before I left, Alex promised me he would try some guerrilla composting, because of the garbage strike.  I’m not sure if he did, but I love the idea of him digging his veggie scraps into the ground in a park where there are tennis courts, before stopping for a strawberry snack.

Michigan is proposing build a pipeline to drain 322 million litres of water from Lake Huron. Ontario hasn’t agreed to it yet, because the proposal doesn’t contain assurance that the water “will stay in the Great Lakes basin and be used efficiently.” Since moving water from the Great Lakes sounds a lot like the plan for solving Lake Mead’s problems without addressing the issues of wasted water.

The people murmuring about Water Wars are starting to look less and less crazy as time goes on.

Sarnia solved the issue of water conservation. They raised water prices and imposed watering restrictions, and a miraculous thing happened. “The water is so bloody expensive, that’s why people are not using it,” according to Coun. Anne Marie Gillis. They cut their water down to 81,000 cubic metres/day from the 181,000 it’s licensed to sell. So, to celebrate, they are begging people to waste more water, because the loss of revenue is putting them in the red.

Water is more valuable a resource than coal, oil, or gold. Three days without it and you die. Period. And as we start to watch folks around the world try to deal with their water shortages, it’s probably a good idea to look at our relationship to it. The average American uses 4500 litres of water per day (and I can’t imagine the Canadian numbers are much different—but if you know your food consumption in kilograms, you can calculate your water footprint). It’s not so surprising when you realize that it takes 200 litres to make 1kg of plastic, or that it requires 2-4 barrels of water to extract a barrel of oil from the tar sands. And then, of course, there’s food.

Food requires a tremendous amount of water to produce commercially. Like 70 litres for 1 apple, 1300 litres/kg of wheat, 3400 litres/kg of rice, 15500 litres/ kg of beef [More stats >].  In my backyard garden, I can get away with not watering my vegetables because I drought-proof it. But when you have a sterile field fed with chemical fertilizers, you need a lot of irrigation (oh, and you have to remove nitrates from the groundwater afterward, but that’s another story).

So when you import grapes from Israel (75% of whose water footprint falls outside of their country) for example, it’s pretty much the same thing as importing fossil water, which can never be replaced. And the really sad thing?
Most of that irrigation water is just wasted, due to runoff (which poisons surrounding ecosystems, and groundwater supplies—remember Walkerton?) and evaporation. How efficient can something called “flood irrigation” be, do you think? Yeah.

But like many things, shit has to get really bad for it to get better. California’s water pressures (“We’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California”) have resulted in innovations in technology to ensure more efficient irrigation practices, and farmers are beginning to return to hardier heirloom fruit and drought-proof practices, encouraging their tomatoes, apple trees, almonds and oranges to grow deep, healthy roots and wait for the rain. As it turns out, drought-farmed fruit is a lot tastier and more disease resistant than the fruit coming from lazy, shallow-rooted plants. They’re finally making more of less water. But what can individuals do to consume less water so we’re not dying of thirst in the future?

Well, for starters, get to know your farmers. Half of the fun of going to the farmer’s market is learning about the farms that supply your meals. The smaller the farm, the more likely they are to act responsibly. If you’re lucky enough to be in a city where Mennonites frequent the farmer’s market, you can be certain that they’re not using wasteful irrigation systems.

Your choice of food can make a difference too. It takes a lot less water to make a grain-based meal than a rice-based one, and it takes much, much less water to make a meal without meat.

And I can’t tell you enough that you need to try growing some food of your own. A one block diet saves more water and fuel than anything else you put in your mouth. The earth, and your stomach, will thank you.

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.

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

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.

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:

Hellmann’s – It’s Time for Real

First Broccoli of the season… and it’s huge!

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.

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