Volume III, Issue II
AUTUMN 013
HIGHBRAU
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THE HARVEST
HIGHBRAU MAGAZINE HBMAG.CA Volume III - Issue II - AUTUMN 013
Words 17 15-16 12 4-5
ANONYMOUS CAROL BAST BILL CRYSTAL BRADFORD & LIAM KIJEWSKI ADAM COCHRAN BRONWYN FREY MURTAZA RAWAN ZOE SAWCHUK R. SCHULTZ THERESA SCHUMILAS ANDREW WHITE Mark Ciesluk
IMAGES
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DANIEL BILEU BILL CRYSTAL BRADFORD JUSTICE COLWELL JEANETTE JOBSON ONVIT KWON ZOE SAWCHUK R. SCHULTZ CARA VANDERMEY
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Cover: JOHN GOSSELIN BACK COVER: IAN WILLMS
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Graham Engel
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HB #11 - FUTURE MEDIA Highbrau Media is stubbornly proud to be something of an anachronism; we love our printed format and our FM radio shows and how they tie us into the methods and traditions of the past. However, we are anything but blind to the rapid changes afoot all around us - in our three years of production we have seen several local print publications rise and then fall, swept away by harsh new economic realities of the media landscape and buried under an avalanche of celebrity tweets. In the spirit of keeping an eye on what’s coming next, we’d like you to offer us your views on the future of any or all media, be it traditional, social, or as-yet uninvented. What is the future of local media? How will we get our news and share our artistic output in the near or distant future? What new formats lurk just over the horizon waiting for the next technological or cultural leap forward?
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MEDITATION ON A KNIFE BY ZOE SAWCHUK
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remember when I got my first knife. I was four, and I loved to spend my weekends whittling in the backyard. I always tried to convince my dad to let me take my knife with me to the park or when we would go on walks, so that I could whittle and carve things to my heart’s content, but I was never allowed to. My family found my hobby somewhat strange and unnerving, but I never saw the knife as anything other than a tool for creativity. The second time I was given a knife I had just turned twenty. I was living in a small town in the northwestern part of Nicaragua. I had been working with a man on his family’s farm for two weeks. The family only had two knives: one Don Reynaldo kept with him at all times, and another used mostly for cooking and food preparation. Every Thursday, we would take the horses saddled with crates on their backs down the mountain to the farm in order to collect all the produce that was ready to sell at the market in a neighbouring city the next day. Thursdays were always my favourite days. We would spend the mornings collecting crates full of different types of lettuce, chard, cilantro, parsley, and radishes, amongst other vegetables. For the first few Thursdays that I worked with him, my job was mostly washing vegetables and putting them into crates to
be taken back up to house. I loved to be on the farm. It was in a low part of the mountains where you could look out and on a clear day see the volcanoes in Honduras, and it was walking distance to a small lagoon or waterfalls. I often got lost in the mountains, but on Thursdays there was no time to stop and stare, we had to work quickly to get back to the house before the rain would start.
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ne Wednesday evening I was sitting outside the house whittling. Nearly everyone had gone to the evening mass, except for Don Reynaldo. There were some political issues, which were tied to the church in the community so he didn’t go as often as his family did. He asked if I wanted to go visit a friend of his, so we went up
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the mountain about twenty minutes to visit a man named Mario; he asked me to bring my knife with me as well. Mario had a massive plot of land, which was almost exclusively used to grow cabbages (at any given time there were over a thousand cabbages ready to be harvested) to sell to one of the major grocery companies in the capital city. Mario did, however, have a small part of land, which he had set aside for small-scale production. The three of us walked through the smaller plot, as Reynaldo picked out what he thought he would be able to sell. Reynaldo showed me the techniques he used for cutting different types of vegetables. From then on I went to different farms with Reynaldo, or without him sometimes, to collect the vegetables from different members of the community to sell in the market. The small pocketknife I had been using for most of my life was no longer just a tool for creativity, but also a tool which provided me with a different way in which I could interact with and access agriculture.
Zoe Sawchuk
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PROTECTING POLLINATORS BY CRYSTAL BRADFORD AND LIAM KIJEWSKI
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assive honey bee die offs... monarch butterflies missing... and someone stole the maple syrup. It’s not just honey bees and monarchs that are in decline, but many other pollinator populations have reached a critical point - for example, bats are being affected by white-nose syndrome. We have hundreds of species of native pollinators that can use our help. Bees. Wasps. Beetles. Flies. These species can all help with our food production as well as performing other functions that would be impossible without them. The role pollinators play as decomposers and as food for other species cannot be discounted. Insect larvae contain more protein per pound than beef and are one of the first steps in transferring the sun’s energy through the food web. Bees and other pollinators play a vital role in production of fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. It is estimated that 75% of flowering plants rely on pollinators and 1/3rd of our food is produced as a result of pollinators. Studies show better yields in fields that are adjacent to pollinator habitat. We need pollinators for our gardens and farms, for our groceries, for endangered plants and animals, for balanced ecosystems. Pollinators continue to vanish as a result of a number of human related causes, so what can we do?
R. Schultz
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Protect, restore, and increase natural areas and habitats : Habitat loss is the number one threat for most species. Provide areas of flowering trees, shrubs and perennials to increase bloom availability, and increase food and shelter for pollinators and other wildlife. This can help with erosion and water conservation and increase overall yield next to a crop. Make sure to include early and late season bloomers to provide as much food as possible. Use natural practices around the home and farm : Leave buffer strips. Don’t mow or plow to the very edge. Leave dead wood wherever safe, as it provides food and shelter for so many species. We live next to a nest of wild honey bees living in the cavity of a dying tree. When the tree needs trimming, the portion with the nest will be left. As well as pollinators that occupy large cavities of dead wood, there are many pollinators that occupy small holes in wood or dead stems of flowering plants. You can make bee homes that simulate these little tunnels with a variety of materials. The majority of bees live in the ground so avoid using landscape fabric when possible, and try to leave areas of bare exposed soil. Where possible, convert lawns into gardens or natural areas : Lawns are often referred to as ‘green deserts’ because they don’t support very much biologically. Mowed turf grass can also be semi-impermeable and doesn’t do a great job of allowing rain to absorb into the soil. Mowing less often and at a higher height will help with this and allow for small weeds, like violets, to flower and provide food for pollinators.
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Include native plants : They are tolerant of the local growing conditions and, planted in the proper location, are very resistant to stressors. Many native pollinators can be specialists and have adapted to our native flowers. Moth and butterfly larvae are often host-specific feeders, meaning they will lay their eggs on specific plants with leaf chemistry that their caterpillars are adapted to and will consume. For example, the Monarch butterfly is toxic to most animals just like the butterfly’s host plants, Milkweeds, which contain toxic chemicals. By excluding native plants from our landscapes, we are creating environments that do little to feed and sustain the pollinators that do so much for our crops. Including a wide selection of plants and crops increases biodiversity, which will help with pest control and provide food for the wide variety of native wildlife.
R. Schultz
Prevent and remove invasive weeds including trees and shrubs : Invasive weeds can quickly form large colonies that crowd out other flowering plants and reduce the quantity and duration of bloom in an area. Some, such as Buckthorn and Garlic Mustard, do this by exuding chemicals that can be toxic to other species and prevent seed germination. Support responsible farming by getting to know your growers and their practices : Paying local, ecologically minded farmers a fair price for their product allows small farms to compete in the market without using unsustainable farming approaches. This means fewer pesticides, herbicides, and an-
tibiotics in our food, and less damage to our ecosystems. It also means the ability to run a small scale farm, with care and attention paid to overall biological health of the soil and ecosystems, at a profit. Large industrial scale agriculture has reduced and contaminated available suitable forage habitat for the hundreds of species of native pollinators. Because of their size, blueberry farms on the East coast and almond farms on the West coast have to pay beekeepers from out of province or state to bring their
first for lower toxicity levels, studies now indicate toxicity of these chemicals is higher than initially reported. These chemicals can persist in soils for months or years after their use; measurable amounts were found in woody tissue 6 years after application. Some studies indicate a relationship between the use of neonicotinoid pesticides and honey bee population declines.1 The European Union has placed a temporary 2 year partial ban on them.2 Meanwhile, at home, Health Canada admits the cur-
Crystal Bradford
hives during bloom time to pollinate the crop. Acres of monoculture crop only allow for a few weeks of blooms, and with most pollinators traveling a few hundred meters from their nest to forage, a large monoculture field will be relatively devoid of pollinators. This is why buffer strips, cover crops, mixed crops, and adjacent natural areas are key to healthy pollinator populations.
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esticides, herbicides, and Genetically Modified (GM) crops are another issue. A major issue for farmers right now is a group of pesticides, called neonicotinoids, that are known to be toxic to birds, mammals, bees, and other pollinators. Praised at
rent use of neonics is unsustainable and is advising farmers to try tactics like planting early in the morning or evening when bees are less active, to be careful with their planting, and to communicate with honey beekeepers so they can move their hives when chemical exposure is worst. Considering the small window of time large farms have for planting, the hundreds of species of native pollinators that are affected by farming practices, and that pesticides are contained within the living plant, these recommendations will not likely be very effective at preventing pollinator deaths. Groups are lobbying the Canadian government to ban Neonicotinoids. Groups are also lobbying to HBmag.ca
keep the chemicals in use. There are concerned farmers in both groups. After hearing opinions from both sides, it seems that the farmers opposed to a ban on neonicotinoids are concerned about short term economic health, and farmers supporting a ban are concerned about long term ecosystem health and long term economic health.
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pread the word so people can make informed decisions and make improvements to keep our farms, homes, and ecosystems healthy. Talk to your friends, neighbours, farmers, and politicians about the issues you feel they should know about. Increasingly, pollinator habitats are being protected, created or enhanced by school groups, service clubs, conservation groups, parks, and golf courses because there is a growing public awareness. In a time when spraying our food crops with poisons is called ‘conventional farming’ and beekeepers are reporting continual death of colonies, pollinators can use all the help they can get. So volunteer yourself or some land to create, restore, or protect a pollinator paradise. Crystal Bradford and Liam Kijewski are passionate restorative ecologists in Southern Ontario. Find out more information at their website: www.wildlifegardening.ca [1]: For examples, see Mason, Tennekes, SĂĄnchez-Bayo, Uhd Jepsen, in Journal of Environmental Immunology and Toxicology, 2012 or Suchail, Guez, Belzunces, in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, 2001. [2]: Bees & Pesticides: Commission goes ahead with plan to better protect bees. Found at http:// ec.europa.eu/food/animal/liveanimals/bees/neonicotinoids_en.htm Some great resources for more information are : The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation: www.xerces.org Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife With Native Plants by Douglas W. Tallamy Evaluation of Canadian Bee Mortalities in 2013 Related to Neonicotinoid Pesticides - Interim Report as of September 26, 2013. Health Canada: www.hc-sc.gc.ca
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LAB GROWN MEAT BY ANDREW WHITE “The mouthfeel is like meat. I miss the fat; there’s a leanness to it, but the general bite feels like hamburger. What was consistently different was flavour.”
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his was Chicago-based food writer Josh Schonwald’s response to eating the $325,000 burger, that was cultured and grown in the Netherlands based lab of Dr. Mark Post. No doubt, reading Schonwald’s response to eating lab grown meat paints a picture in the mind, and part of that picture is a feeling of disgust with the mere idea of eating something grown in a lab. But, at a time when human “parts” are grown in a lab, be they an ear, a windpipe or even an organ, and surgically implanted into the body,
why is there such hesitation and discomfort with lab grown meat? Consuming lab grown meat is certainly a less complex issue – you chew it, swallow it, and digest it. It doesn’t need to interact with the complexities of the human body like organs would. Besides, as Winston Churchill said in 1932, “Why grow a chicken if we only eat a breast and a wing?” I want to paint another mental picture. This time, you’re in a small airplane flying over rural Texas or Alberta. You come across a factory feedlot. All you can see to the horizon in every direction, are pen after pen after pen filled with animals, so confined that they are covered in their own excrement. You can feel, even up in that plane, the suffering these
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animals are going through. These animals are treated simply as a raw material for meat consumption. There are over 60 billion land animals being kept as raw materials, for dairy, meat, eggs, and leather goods. These animal production systems use 70% of the world’s arable land, and account for 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions, mainly in the form of methane (leading to the analysis that a vegetarian driving a hummer may be more environmentally friendly than a meat eater with a bike). Animals are extremely complex, sentient beings, but, when broken down for the relatively simple tissue products we use them for, are extremely inefficient. Livestock have a bio-conversion rate of only 15%, which means that only 15% of what we put in is converted to useable animal tissue. With the World Health Organization predicting a doubling of meat consumption by 2050, we’ll need over 100 billion land animals under the current system. And convincing people
to change their behaviour to become vegetarians is extremely difficult, as any attempt at behavioural change is. Besides the obvious environmental issues, these factory systems are a breeding ground for disease, and are interlaced with food security issues (droughts, floods, etc wiping out the crops used to feed the animals). With 50% of meat consumption accounted for by hamburger, this seems like a good place to start.
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n the surface, growing meat is a relatively simple process. A small tissue sample is taken from an animal, and from that tissue sample, muscle stem cells are harvested. Stem cells have an amazing ability to divide and multiply, with a theoretical yield of 10,000 kg of tissue being grown from a single cell. Next, anchor points are put into a petri dish (Dr. Post uses Velcro that you can buy from any store), the cells are put into the dish, and the dish is put into an incubator for 7-8 weeks to grow. After the growing period, you’ve got muscle tissue
Fishy Bits! Jeanette Jobson is a visual artist living on the northeast coast of Newfoundland and Labrador with a love of fish and water. Fishy Bits! is a series of unique relief prints designed and produced by her in 2013. This series provides an “up close and personal” view of twelve individual species of cold water marine fish. We are excited to feature five wonderful images from Jeanette, and she is excited to be able to contribute something representing the bounty of the seas to our Harvest issue. The full set of prints and other works can be found on her website: w w w. j e a n e t t e j o b s o n . c o m
that you can grind up into hamburger. None of this is new, either. We’ve had thousands of years of experience in producing food from cell cultures – beer, wine, and yogurt, for example. Now, go back up in that plane. Fly over the City of Toronto, where the 401 and 427 interchange is. You’ll see the Molson brewery, but now instead of brewing mediocre beer, they’re using what used to be the beer tanks that have now been converted into another bioreactor, this time being able to produce mass quantities of muscle tissue. This muscle tissue is then used to supply hamburgers to all the McDonalds in the Toronto area. (Why use McDonalds as an example? Well, there’s only so much room in this article, but I believe that there will always be demand for low-cost meat of the variety that McDonalds serves). Under the current system, the only way to get low-cost meat is through the use of factory feedlots and factory farms, and by using economies of scale by processing hundreds of animals at a time. Instead, we can use local production for the low-cost hamburger to supply to the McDonalds and to grocery stores. Low-cost hamburger that has a significantly reduced environmental footprint, and that was produced in a manner that did not cause suffering to countless animals, and low-cost hamburger that frees up thousands of hectares of farm land for either vegetable food production, natural reclamation projects, or other uses. With development, multiple tissue types can be grown, fed into a 3-D printer, and used to print a T-Bone steak that is indistinguishable from the real thing.
Then, in 2025, when we can buy lab grown meat at the grocery store, it won’t be such an unknown. Perhaps then, as a modern society we will find ourselves, as Forgacs puts it, “ready for something more cultured.” Further Resources: Modern Meadow www. modernmeadow.com Maaschrtict University, “Cultured Beef ” The Atlantic: “Is Lab-Grown Meat Good for Us?” The Week: “What does a lab-grown burger taste like? “ TED.com: “Andras Forgacs: Leather and meat without killing animals.” “Meet the new meat: A TEDx talk to pair with the first lab-grown hamburger.” “Would you eat ‘in vitro’ meat?”
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o how do we get people comfortable with consuming lab-grown meat? Andras Forgacs, CEO and co-founder of Modern Meadow, thinks he has the answer. Instead of starting with lab grown meat, he’s starting with another animal tissue product – leather. Leather can be grown using the same process as meat, and since it’s not being consumed, it avoids the cringe factor associated with lab grown meat. HBmag.ca
Daniel Biléu
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DON`T THROW THAT OUT BY MURTAZA RAWAN
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small bungalow home, set among many like it. Three bedrooms and small attached garage. That’s where my small family of seven settled, immigrants to Toronto, Canada, by way of Afghanistan. In that home we grew, we struggled, and we fought to make our new lives. There were daily culture shocks, monetary squabbles, and even some memorable laughs. But the food was the centrepiece to the entire fiasco. Rice was not a staple - it was an edible dish on which your korma, masala, khoresht, and kebabs were served. You would then sprinkle on your chutney, pickled veggies, and hot sauce, never forgetting your garlic infused yogurt. Cutlery was an option, but the flavour connoisseurs would arm themselves with pita bread sliced by hand into scooping wedges. For variety, there would also be dumplings topped with sauce and spices, fried pakoras and samosas, the odd roasted potato with cumin and parsley. Then there was dessert, after dinner tea, and nightcap fruit. Sometimes when we had guests we would have a fancy dinner. It does seem odd to look back at the general poverty we lived in and remember the copious and ever flowing food that was available and imposed on us. Every day, plates were filled and then were emptied either with zest or under threat of corporal punishment. The food train never stopped flowing. I have had breakfast, lunch, and dinner daily since I can remember. But how things have changed.
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was emptying out the fridge, ridding it of expired goods for the 5th time since June, and it was only October. Every month I have had to throw away what was once good produce, now a different shade of purple. Some items would have been a Dar8
winian wet dream. Adding the organic waste to the physically impossible tower of recycling by making the garbage run from my third floor walk up, a thought implanted itself and would not stop bugging me for weeks: “Why so much waste?” Granted the first trigger to this thought was caused by laziness. I hate doing the garbage run. As the thought matured, it became harder to dismiss as just laziness. I started to examine my relationship with food in comparison to how I grew up and some interesting trends emerged. Troubling ones. Ones that make you sit up and write about them. Because as far back as I remember doing garbage runs, my family of seven produced in one week’s waste what my roommates and I (four healthy young adults) produce in three days. So why all the waste?
Onvit Kwon
I eat pretty healthily, as do my roommates. We are comprised of two couples, so eating and food prep happens in pairs, lending to a pretty efficient use of kitchen materials and resources. But twice a week there is so much garbage and recycling that I have formed an informal relationship with the bottle lady in my neighbourhood. We do not even drink regularly, but I now have basic banter about weather and local traffic with the HBmag.ca
homeless woman that scavenges our building’s waste bins. Not that I mind the interaction - I like to give her any bottles we do have, but I see her more often than some actual friends, and that is concerning. How did my parents feed seven people daily, manage to keep within budget, and produce so little waste? It seemed impossible until I did a little research called, “talking to my parents.” The funny part is that though they found it odd that we were wasting so much, they could not tell me right away what we were doing wrong. It took a second step I have termed “observation” to find out the key behind all the mystery. Actually, it came in the form of an imperative order when, in my audacity, I helped my mother clear the table and was about to sweep the bread crusts into the bin. “Don’t throw that out!” t hit me pretty hard to realize that they never threw out left over food just because it no longer served its original purpose. Bread crust aside, the discards of veggies: the tops of carrots, the pepper stem and seeds, the skins of potatoes and citrus. They had uses for all of them. (This is not a Martha Stewart article, but if you are interested in what to do with food scraps other than composting, there are several resources available online.) They did not throw out glass and plastic containers, but they bought very little prepackaged anyway. Everything was repurposed. Ok, not revolutionary or mindblowing in itself. Many people have been doing this for some time, even before Martha told everyone how kitschy and cool drinking out of Mason jars was. But what had taken me aback was how ingrained it was to my parents. How natural they thought it was. So much so that they had not even considered that I might not be behaving this way. Why was I not following in their footsteps? For one, I lived downtown now. Originally, we had settled in Scarborough’s sprawling folds of suburban
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communities. We were surrounded by neighbours and residential streets, interrupted by the odd school or park. There were no restaurants, cafes, or bistros. You could not pop out for a quick bite, and the closest corner store was hell to get to in winter. Our food had to come from the grocery store, and the grocery store was a twenty minute drive away. Now looking at the zucchini I can bend in half without snapping, I remember the plans I had for it; the sauce or stir fry it was to star in. But I was tired and had a burger before coming home and being distracted by modern life. It is too easy to leave the cooking off to later. A friend wants to have a drink, there is a new Thai place down the road, and the list goes on. My parents would think it sacrilegious. The other factor is that I have money now. I can buy the foods I like. I can afford the premium cuts of meat, the organic and seasonal produce, the hand milled preservative-free grains. I can buy all these things! And because there are now two 24-hour grocery stores within walking distance, I can do this when the mood strikes.
I do not have to be concerned with mortal trivialities such as left overs or storage! I do not think this way, but I have been behaving as such. Letting food go to waste is bad. I am not rich enough to take $10 out of my wallet and set it on fire every week. I know six figure yuppies that would not do it for all the Facebook likes in the world. But here I am, throwing away my good money and someone else’s hard work, while adding to the landfill. How could I have become food-conscious and yet sensibly devoid?
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here is an obsession with food in our society. There is a new superfood monthly. It comes in time for the new research to point out that coffee is bad or good for us. There are more active food lobby groups than centres for abuse victims. Everyone I meet from my local bartenders to my dental hygienist is a nutrition expert. The experts give way only to the connoisseurs. The trendy, disposable income abundant, taste hunters. But everybody eats organic, local, and seasonal. Off hand, I have not been able to get a direct answer to, “when is your let-
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tuce expiring?” or, “what do you have planned for dinner in two nights?” Like a post apocalyptic survivor, once faced with my own situation, I looked around for others only to see us all drowning in the same hypocritical tidal wave. Too many of my friends and peers purchase their food prepackaged, and only use the “good bits”. Too many can recite the menus of innumerable gastro-pubs, but did not know if the milk was still good in their own fridge. And like a survivor from before the great whatever, I remember the good ol’ days. Maybe I will recount to my kids how grandma used to use veggie discards and old bones for stock, and fruit leftovers for jam. Maybe I will actually be able to teach them how to do it. I think back to when a couple of immigrants from a war torn country fed seven on scraps better than how young professionals can feed themselves now. My parents never thought about organic or green lifestyle, because they did not buy prepackaged or preserved foods, and they wasted as little as possible. Funny that I had to think about it so hard when it should be so natural.
Jeanette Jobson
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Har-vest BY THERESA SCHUMILAS Noun: 1. The act or process of gathering a crop; 2. The crop that ripens or is gathered in a season; 3. The measure of the crop gathered in a season; 4. The time or season of such gathering Verb: To gather (a crop) as in ‘To harvest’
and CSA pick-up, lifting each one a fourth time. After which, I lift each unsold squash a fifth time to put it back into storage until the next week. It’s not very romantic. Ah you say, “How can you not love to see the fruits of your labour?” Well, I probably would love it if I was pulling a few carrots here and there or picking a big fresh tomato for supper.
From the old English ‘haerfest’ or ‘autumn’
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ndeed, my first name (Theresa) in Greek means, “the harvester.” It all sounds so warm and fuzzy - and conjures up images of pumpkin pie, thick tomato sauce, and aromas of pickles. Really? Sorry to burst into that bubble. But to small produce farmers like me, the word evokes quite different images. Words like ‘sweaty’, ‘heavy’, ‘exhausted’, ‘backache’ and ‘soaked’ come to mind. Indeed, of all the chores on the farm, “the harvest” that most of you celebrate - is the part of farming I hate the most. To me, “the harvest” doesn’t really look like people seem to imagine. There are no wide-eyed children trying to lift giant pumpkins from the field. There is only me in my rain gear lifting pumpkins and squash into a cart. Then driving them to the wash station and lifting each one a second time to wash it off. Then I drive them to the drying shed, where I lift each one a third time onto a table to cure. Starting in late September, I bring a selection into my packing shed for my on-farm market 10
bunch and pack everything for 50 shares in one day. I do the root vegetables the day before. I start with them because they take a long time and the work is heavy. I start with radishes because they always seem so cheery to me - it’s almost like they are smiling at me as I pause in the bunching for a sip of coffee. 50 bunches - 2 bins into the cart. I do the same thing with the beets - who are also grinning at me this morning. I muse that the different kinds of beets are likely talking to each other as they snug up close in the bins. (This speaks to the mid-season mental state of the CSA farmer – it would be a great research project.) The cart is now full - off to the washing station. Everyone – including me - gets a shower. I grab a (likely soggy) snack from my pocket and sit for minute while the radishes and beets drain. Then I load them into the cart again, drive them to the packing shed, and carry them into the cooler. 9:00 AM : Same process for green onions, Spanish onions, baby leeks etc.
But to a CSA farmer, vegetables are not the ‘fruits of my labour’ - the fruit IS the labour. On my CSA, which runs year round, I harvest weekly from April – October AND I also process food every week so we can eat local and organic in the winter too.
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hat does my harvest look like?
7:00 AM : Day before my CSA pickup: I can’t possibly harvest, clean, HBmag.ca
1:00 PM : Roots are done. The last bins going into the packing shed seem heavier than those cute Cara Vandermey little radishes that started my day. Time for lunch and maybe a swim. The above ground pool has paid for itself over and over again in my reckoning. On a CSA farm, it is as essential as the tractor. 3:00 PM : Road trip. I operate what is known as a multi-farm CSA, so I get produce from other local organic farms to supplement my own and I’m off to do some pick-ups. It’s relaxing in the car; I can sing along with my
tunes and turn up the air conditioning. I “buy in” things that I am not good at growing (like broccoli) and vegetables for which mechanized harvesting is possible (like storage potatoes and carrots). 6:00 PM : After supper, I prepare whatever greens I need for tomorrow, and harvest my flower orders. These items benefit from some time to condition in the cooler. I harvest lettuce, spinach, salad mix, bok choy and so on. These are then dunked into deep sinks and rinsed. I don’t have a commercial salad spinner (next year I think I’ll get one). I put the greens into clean pillowcases which I spin around outside, looking quite silly I’m sure. The greens finish drying on towels in the packing shed. I go out to harvest, strip and arrange the flower bunches I need and put them in the cooler. Greens are weighed, bagged and put into the cooler - which by now is pretty tightly packed. 9:00 PM : Time for snack, maybe another swim, and maybe a mojito. Before bed, I organize myself for tomorrow. I log my harvest into my yield spreadsheet, check out any last minute requests from members, print off pick-up and delivery lists, work out prices for the market, finalize plans for baked goods and decide which kind(s) of fresh vegetable juice I’ll be offering.
of everything from asparagus to zucchini - counting, rinsing and packing as much as I can outside - and then dropping everything into the packing shed. (I likely have no cooler space left - so mostly they sit on the floor, sometimes with damp towels on them to keep them cool.)
be a really simple problem to solve and yet I haven’t managed to do so.) It is now a race against time and every minute counts. People will arrive at 4:00 (hopefully no one will be early) and I need to appear composed, clean, welcoming, friendly, relaxed… and all the things I am not at the moment.
10:30 AM : Frantic Hour - all hands on deck! I draw in whoever I can to help line up and pack the shares for delivery. I give hurried instructions to my workshare members, volunteers, and family helpers for last minute things. The compost needs to be taken down. The upper terrace needs to be mowed so people can pick-theirown flowers. I need a sign to show people where to pick the extra cherry tomatoes. I didn’t get enough beans picked yet….
3:30 PM : Helpers and family now bear the brunt of my frenzy as I snap orders. Outside signs need to be put into place. I need signs for all the produce. Shoot - I forgot to pick the basil – someone needs to do that. What do you mean you don’t know where it is? I’m short on bell peppers - how will I handle that? Oh the fridge - it really needs to be wiped out. What is the price on the organic chicken breasts that arrived this morning? Oh, I promised a member I’d set aside some extra beans - did any more get picked? It’s so hot – we should bring up the sprinkler so the children can run under it while I chat with their parents. I need to make a label for the green juice so people know what I put in it - that was hours ago - can I still remember?...
11:30 AM : Car is loaded and I’m again cranking up the air conditioning and singing along to tunes. 2:00 PM : I’m back - baking is done, packing shed has been cleaned (she is worth her weight in gold). After a quick snack, I start setting up for my farmers’ market and CSA pick-up. Everything goes out onto tables. I never seem to have enough bins or boxes at this point (It seems like that should
4:00 PM : First member arrives. Reminiscent of Fantasy Island, I say to myself, “Smiles Everyone!”, and open the door.
6:00 AM : Day of CSA and on-farm market - I get started early. If I’m getting a delivery of anything, then I like to get it first thing so that I spend 4-5 hours uninterrupted in the fields. While I’m waiting for deliveries, I make fresh vegetable juice for sale. It changes weekly depending on the harvest. 7:00 AM : An assistant arrives to do baking in my on-farm kitchen for the day’s market & CSA pick-up. I stay out of her way and head down to the field; coffee and snacks in tow, to harvest anything I didn’t get to yesterday. I go through my mental list
HBmag.ca
Onvit Kwon
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BILL`S GARDEN 2013 BY BILL
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t started out slow and a lot of cloud cover over the first few months, with dry spells. The jalapeno and hot banana pepper plants were removed because they didn’t grow bigger than when first planted. The 2 chili pepper plants got half as large as usual and produced one to two dozen chilies. Out of 6 tomato plants, the two small cherry tomato plants were twice as big as usual and had a lot of bee activity from the herb garden across the path. The roma tomatoes were eaten by insects when they were ripening, so I picked them slightly early and allowed them to ripen in a paper bag on my counter; the beefsteaks were producing as usual. My dad decided to put two English cucumbers at the back of the garden by the wall. They were slightly shaded in the morning, but got lots of afternoon sun and radiant heat off the stone, so they have been overgrowing and have been cut back several times. I have gathered about a dozen 1-footers and some smaller cucumbers. The red and white onions still needed a bit more time to get larger, but depending on weather I might pick them early; they are about 1.5 to 2 inches at the time of writing. My two chive bushes survived the move to the herb side of the garden, which gets shade from the fence at different points in the day. I have started to take in some of the herbs for drying and they smell delicious. Small space, but big results, just needs a little effort and it’s a lot easier than having to cut a lawn. I am all for converting your yard space to garden space. Our original plot was 6 feet of dirt and it took a few years of additions, but I now have a nice place to garden and reflect in my backyard. Here is a great recipe. Feel free to make substitutions for dietary needs or taste. Sometimes I add extra honey or molasses and my dad likes to add chopped up jalapeno peppers for a kick of spice. Makes ½ a dozen regular size muffins, so double if you want more.
Bill’s Patented Space-Age Corn Bread Muffins 2/3 cup Flour 1/2 cup Fine Grind Cornmeal (sometimes I also add 1/4 cup coarse grind for crunch) 4 tbsp Sugar 1 tbsp Baking Powder 1/4 tbsp Salt 4 tbsp Vegetable Oil 1 Egg 1/4 Cup Milk
Preheat oven to 400F. Combine dry ingredients. Combine oil, egg, milk and beat together in a separate bowl. Add to the dry ingredients. Grease an 8x8 loaf pan or muffin tins. Bake 15-20 min or until a nice golden brown, remove from tin and let cool for 5 mins. Enjoy! HBmag.ca
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Photos by Bill
YEAR-ROUND HARVEST LIBRARY BY R. SCHULTZ
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tend to look at the gardening process holistically. For me, gardening doesn’t start with preparing your soil; it is planning crop placement in the winter and saving seeds in the fall for next year. Gardening is not just about growing vegetables; it is about nourishing your body and important people in your life with your harvest. If you plant a large garden, it follows that you will have lots of extra veg you will want to keep for colder months. You eat what you preserved in the fall during the darker winter months while waiting to get out in the dirt again. I am very fortunate to have access to fresh vegetables and fruit from a variety of inexpensive sources: I garden at home and at my family homestead, friends are happy to trade what they grow, I forage in the spring and fall, and I shop at farm stands and markets. This can also mean that it is easy to get overwhelmed with food. You must give your attention to the bushel of free apples before they attract fruit flies or pickle your beets before they grow sprouts in storage. The books below represent a core base of my harvest processing knowledge and are the heart of my heritage reference shelf. I hope that they will inspire you to see the harvest season as being the whole year long. The Backyard Homestead, Edited by Carleen Madigan You have to have produce before you can cook or put away, so the harvest season actually begins with planning a garden and getting to know what your yearly requirements are. Backyard Homestead makes this process seem realistic and worth the work. My favourite part of the book is the suggested homestead layouts for a variety of yard sizes (from 1/10th of an acre to a half acre) that use biodynamic
farming principles by including increasingly larger sizes of animals. Saving the Seasons, Mary Clemens Meyer & Susanna Meyer My grandmothers, aunts, and mother can. My friends and I can. Most of the women I am closely related to can. Big family meals or gifts usually have something that was canned by grandma or an aunt. Beets, pickles, relish, or peaches are commonplace. It made sense that I would apprentice canning with my mother and then move on to do it at home myself. Admittedly, this skill took a while for me to be timeand material -efficient with. Now, I’m able to make apple or pear sauce one weeknight and then heat it up and put it away the next day as fruit ‘butter’. Last season, my mother and I spent more than three whole Sundays canning over 40 quarts and 30 pints of tomatoes we grew ourselves. The same season, my husband and I must have processed over 2 bushels of green and yellow beans for freezing. Saving for the Seasons includes great coverage on the topics of canning, drying, and freezing. If you are just a beginner, then I suggest trying some basic freezing. It is an easy way to start, and you learn how to quickly prepare and cut foods for preservation. Real Food Fermentation, Alex Lewin I am a big fan of home food processing that does not involve electricity to store. This means canning, drying, and lacto-fermentation. However, every time I hot-water can, I am aware of the amount of energy the process takes. There is a lot of water and heat involved, which ultimately means that we need electricity. Fermenting food, on the other hand, requires HBmag.ca
mainly human and bacterial energy to create and store. I was happy to find a way to turn almost any excess harvest veg into sauerkraut-esque deliciousness with beneficial cultures for my gut health. I have fermented the usual cabbage in addition to carrots, beets, daikon, cucumbers, onions, garlic scapes, and more using a variety of recipes for different flavours. While I learned about lacto fermentation from Jackie McMillan at a Little City Farm event, Real Food Fermentation by Alex Lewin helped expand my knowledge of techniques and flavour combinations. There are great pictures for beginners who would rather try at home than in a workshop as well as ferments for vegetables, beverages, fruit condiments, and dairy. Want to hear what the fermentation gurus have to say? Then try Sandor Ellix Kat’s Wild Fermentation. I’ve made some pretty nice T’ej (Ethiopian-style honey wine ferment) out of my family’s own honey. Nourishing Traditions, Sally Fallon I have saved what I believe is the most important cookbook for your library for last. The more I grew myself and sourced locally, the more I needed to change the staples and regular ingredients I had stocked. My supplies consisted of foods that I just pulled from my garden or that were coming out of storage in the colder months. My baking cupboard is nearly non-existent after a few years of transitioning to a simpler diet. Nourishing Traditions includes a detailed preface explaining why the recipes in the book work with the way your body was intended to function. You will not see white sugar or white flour in this book. I was pleased to see sections on fermenting and preparing organ meats (an ongoing personal culinary challenge!).
Onvit Kwon
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JUDAISM’S (NEW?) SUSTAINABILITY BY BRONWYN FREY
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f you’ve given up on organized religion playing a positive role in environmental awareness, the Jewish community in Vaughan, Ontario would be glad to show you otherwise. Since 2009, schul and school groups, synagogue members, and families have learned about organic food production and environmental responsibility in the greenest corner of the Lebovic Jewish Community Campus, Kavanah Garden. The Hebrew word kavanah means “intention” – specifically, the kind necessary for performing Jewish rituals. In this case, religious intention is not just directed towards ancient customs, but also toward solving ecological concerns. Although few of the agricultural laws in the Torah and Mishneh Torah apply outside the land of Israel, Kavanah adopts those that are optimally translated to a contemporary, ecologically conscious setting. The law of orlah stipulates that in the first three years of growth, the fruit of a
tree must not be eaten. At Kavanah, this law used to practise restraint and gratitude toward nature. Lo tashchit commands that when waging war, the trees of an enemy’s city may be eaten from, but not cut down. Today, this passage has become an injunction against waste. At Kavanah, lo tashchit is most notably evident through compost. Tikkun olam, or “world repair,” originates in the Mishnah and is also associated with medieval kabbalah, but has come to designate social responsibility and improvement. It is perhaps the law that applies most generally to the garden’s mission. For the second year in a row, Kavanah has been featured in Slingshot, a Jewish activist magazine, as one of fifty most inspirational projects. The garden is obviously having a powerful effect on the Jewish community. But does it have anything to offer non-Jewish Canadians? Yes and no.
Jeanette Jobson
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lthough I’m not Jewish, I volunteered at Kavanah in 2011 for reasons I’ll explain below. I mostly helped kids garden, look at bugs, and play in the river. Most activities had tie-ins to ecological or Jewish concepts. The kids and families were Jewish, the signage was in Hebrew and English, and I heard food blessings so often I found myself chanting along, “Barukh ata Adonai ...” Rachel Rosenbluth is Kavanah’s director of education. Her description of Kavanah’s activities, of course, shows how they are explicitly linked with Jewish traditions. “Meet a Tree” begins with Pokeiach Ivrim, a prayer thanking God for opening the eyes of the blind, followed by a discussion of blindness and the metaphor of “opening one’s eyes.” Children are then blindfolded and led to a tree to encounter it with their other available senses. A new program this season is Urban Teva Adventures. Teva means “nature,” and the adventures lead groups through Toronto’s parks and ravines. “The garden is in the suburbs, so this is accessible for the downtown crowd,” Rosenbluth explains. “We’re doing hands-on activities through ravines in the city ... guided nature walks that let people connect to their space, and all these are weaving in Jewish teachings.” Though most of Kavanah’s content integrates Jewish teachings, Rosenbluth also offers three acrossthe-board gardening tips. First, companion planting can preclude the need for chemical fertilizers and pesticides. “Instead of just having a whole backyard full of tomatoes, you’ll have tomatoes and lettuce together with onions. And the reason why you do this is the plants can actually support each other in their growth. So the lettuce will, say, provide shade for an onion, and the smell of the onion can deter the bugs that like the lettuce.” Mulching, whether with wood chips, dried leaves, or straw, has numerous benefits. “On one hand [mulch] is slowly decomposing and
feeding the soil new nutrients, and it’s also preventing water from evaporating, and it’s suppressing weeds.” Her third suggestion is to have a small-scale worm bin or, if space allows, a personal compost. The worms decompose food scraps, which in turn feeds the soil fresh nutrients and helps grow new plants. Rosenbluth recommends this process because it can help gardeners to “feel the cycle of the growth and destruction.”
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hile Kavanah offers a wealth of ways to connect with nature and grow food sustainably, most of this content is packaged and marketed specifically for Jews. It’s not that Kavanah excludes or proselytizes. The garden has signs with quotations from all traditions as well as Judaism, and Jewish tradition requires potential converts to be turned away three times. As a religious studies student who spent too much time indoors, I enjoyed working with the soil and observing the inspired ways in which Jewish kids and families could experience their heritage. But I clearly lacked the particular religious and community awareness to fully appreciate the experience. Like Kavanah Garden, other traditions and secular society should seek out, promote and create their own inspirational sites for environmental responsibility. Southern Ontario already offers several such opportunities. Old Order Mennonite estates sell their chemical-free produce in markets and along the road. A few, like Leonard F. Martin’s strawberry fields, allow customers to harvest produce themselves, offering a more in-depth experience of the region’s heritage. Some certified organic farms also allow you to pick your own. Others, like The Cutting Veg in Sutton, have internships for sustainable farming. Kavanah demonstrates how ancient traditions can dynamically interact with social and environmental responsibility, and there are plenty of resources for similar initiatives outside the Jewish community as well.
A TIME FOR CELEBRATING FOOD SECURITY BY CAROL BAST
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mm... harvest time... the sense of abundance that I feel when I almost breathe in the brightly coloured piles of just-picked fruits and vegetables at the market. Harvest time is truly a celebration of life as a biological being and our ability to experience pleasure. A time for experiencing our gustatory selves, in all that we can enjoy: smell, sight, taste, hear, touch... and the anticipation of partaking. The intermingling of bodily senses with conscious thought. A beatification of sorts - a gratitude for all that is the rational, and that which is beyond the rational. It is a c e l e b r at i o n of the planet once more providing for our needs and wants. A c e l e b r at i o n of gratitude for those who use the earth to provide us with the opportunity to explore and appreciate everything that culminates in gratifying the senses. This extends to sitting around the dinner table feasting with family and friends - a celebration of relationships. A walk in the woods, or for those who can, a trip to Algonquin Park, is a celebration of gratitude to our environment - the brilliance of the landscape, savouring the gains of the growing season, and preparing for the coming winter. How everything seems crispy under a brilliant sunny autumn day - the air, the leaves under our feet. All in all, harvest time Celebrations are a form of gratitude for everything that is working in our lives; for being alive or what we’ll miss when we HBmag.ca
are dead. So what do we do with everything that isn’t working, like the often empty Food Bank box at the grocery store? The homeless guy asking for change? The scary diagnosis or aches and pains we don’t want and can’t take time off to deal with or else we’ll be the guy with the cardboard sign asking for money for food? The job insecurity that hangs over our heads or those whom we wish to be happy and healthy? The policies and activities in the public realm that are not harmonious with our world views of what should or should not exist? The strife that we see in the news about the increasing numbers of the working poor having to use the Food Bank? The things we fear; our anxieties about being a pay cheque or two from relying Jeanette Jobson on the Food Bank? If this is a time of celebration, then we are challenged with either ignoring everything we have that we don’t want or to develop a way to celebrate it all. To experience joy in the moment that is presenting itself. Compartmentalization works, in that it allows us to move forward in the face of what seems insurmountable or out of our control. It may well be a form of acceptance of the things we cannot change or are not in our sphere of influence.
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ow we celebrate our suffering, past and present, are very different approaches. Past events are over, we can celebrate that we survived; were able to move forward to thriv15
ing, gained some strengths by going through the event and gratitude for the actions of others that helped us through it. Present events and situations are full of doubt and fear about whether or not we will make it to the other side, to the celebration. I’ve heard wise ones respond to this by saying that if we can breathe then enjoy the breath; if we can see then enjoy the sights; if we can hear then enjoy the sounds. Begin with gratitude for what is present. Yet I am left with, “how does one enjoy an empty stomach that is screaming to be satisfied regardless of having taken a walk in nature or seeing a market stall brimming with the fruits of farmer’s labours?” When we witness suffering, it is easy to desire to help others to be well, to enjoy life, to do and to be, to contribute their unique skills and talents to making their own little corner of the world a great place to live. If we don’t run away, busy ourselves into not seeing, then the questions
soon become, “What is the nature and scope of the problem?” and, “How can I help?” The Nature and Scope of Security in Waterloo Region
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irst is to know that our tax dollars are going to good use. To that end, a quick, good first read is Waterloo Region’s Public Health report, Income Gap (2013). It outlines income gap trends, health impacts, vulnerable groups, the impacts of poverty and recommends that ameliorating the underlying issues resulting from the growing income gap requires a strong social infrastructure. As the report states, “when individuals are capable of achieving and improving their health, this impacts their ability to provide for themselves and their families, and contributes to the well-being of the community-at-large.” The Region also helps us to further understand the affordability aspect of food security through it’s publication
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Food
of the Nutritious Food Basket, which “...is a costing tool used to estimate the cost of basic healthy eating for individuals and households. It is based on the National Nutritious Food Basket (2008), which includes 67 food items, representing the four food groups in Canada’s Food Guide, and excluding foods that contain higher amounts of fat and sugar.” The 2013 Nutritious Food Basket’s data, based on pricing from seven different grocery stores in the region, yielded a quick and easy to use estimator of the weekly food costs for a household based on the number and age of its members. Food cost examples given were: 75 year old woman living alone ($43.58); 35 year old man living alone ($59.96); and a 35 year old woman with 2 children, an 8 year old girl and a 14 year old boy ($134.45).
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ost important for those who are food insecure due to affordability, the Region and other interested parties publish lists of places to obtain emergency and low cost food. The University of Waterloo, Conestoga College, and Wilfred Laurier University all have on-campus food banks for students. Some have hamper limits on the number of times they can be used and on the amounts and types of food. Food banks are not meant to be the sole source of food for a household. The Food Bank of Waterloo Region’s 2012 Annual Report states that those who are employed have now reached 12% and single people, in contrast to couples or families, have reached 27% of the people who obtain their food through charity. There are many ways to help. A donation to the food bank is but one of these ways, and an important one for those who need the food bank’s offerings. Donations to the Food Bank can be made online or through local Food Bank Drives and Boxes at your grocery store. At this time the 5 most needed items are peanut butter, beans in sauce, canned fish or fruit, and cold cereal. Generosity is always a wonderful way to celebrate our abundance.
URBAN SPRAWL & SOUTHERN ONTARIO FOOD SYSTEMS ANONYMOUS
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hirty years ago, there used to be horses and cattle directly behind the fence of my childhood home. Beside that, fields upon fields growing a variety of foods, in abundance. Now, all that’s there are homes. Massive monsters of luxurious indoor space with walk-in closets and ensuites on postage stamp lots, so close you can touch your neighbours out your side window. These particular homes were slapped together using cheap materials as quickly as possible in order to make the most profit, starting the framing process before the foundation was even partly cured. Less than two years after they moved in, complaints began about cracks and shifting; the venting had been done wrong and mould was growing in most of the attics. The problems were multiple and many of the homes had to be entirely rebuilt. The family farmstead that previously occupied that land had stood for more than a hundred years and probably would have stood for a hundred more if it hadn’t been torn down. The land, which was passed down through eight generations, was bought through eminent domain - the expropriation of land by the government for public use. Development marches on.
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t’s a common sight along those former country roads. My hometown in Southern Ontario was once a rural community of several hundred people; now it’s a massively growing city necessitating several shopping centres, high schools, and community centres. Entire communities simply showed up, moving from the cluster of the city to live the suburban dream. Each year, our urban centres consume farmland the size Hamilton1 to redevelop to other uses and in the process we lose more and more of our food security. Only five percent of Canada’s
total land base is considered prime agricultural land and only 0.5% of that is considered Class 1 farmland with the highest productivity for a wide range of crops.2 Ontario is home to over half (52%) of Canada’s Class 1 farmland and 18% of that has already been urbanized. The rest is facing an even more rapid transformation.
Justice Colwell
Farmland makes an attractive sell for a developer. It has already been cleared and is mostly leveled. Cities typically grew up around productive farm communities, so proximity is generally close. Some of the other land in this province would be far more expensive to convert and would be farther away from the large cities, and the jobs that exist there. Many farmers, working long hours for little income and stuck in the farm debt cycle, begin to see the attractiveness of the severance of part of their farm for extra cash or giving up and selling it completely.
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ime marches on, and while we can’t stay stuck in some nostalgic view of “the good old days” afraid to change anything, we can be smart about how the future develops. Food is at the very core of our being. It nourishes our bodies and our souls; without it, we will die. So we should take some serious care in considering where the food we eat comes from and how it gets to our tables. We should have some sort of plan in place to protect our food sources and ensure they continue in the future. HBmag.ca
Our homes and yards could be bounties of harvest. Instead, they become slabs of concrete, two-by-fours, and drywall surrounded by grass. We go to the grocery store, and we can get oranges and apples and all the fresh fruit and vegetables we want all year round, so we often don’t give it a second thought. So much of what we eat is imported. It travels halfway around the world, and is sometimes even picked early and ripened on trucks using chemical sprays. Yum. That sounds delicious! In the process, it wastes a ton of fuel, thus tying the cost of our food to the ever increasing prices of gas and oil. It’s only going to get more expensive. It’s an interesting paradox that Canada, one of the world’s foremost food exporters and one of the largest donors of food aid in the world, also has one of the shortest growing seasons and does little to protect the farmland that grows this bounty. We have some of the top agricultural schools in the world (like the University of Guelph), yet we see our own cultural heritage - generations and generations of hearty strains and quality topsoil being decimated and lost to monoculture and suburban sprawl. Our food yield is not yet outpacing land loss.
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he food tasted better in my youth. Perhaps that’s just a projection of my feelings of a happier time, but I remember running down the rows in the apple orchard, picking a nice plump one off the tree, and taking a bite into its crisp flesh, the juices running down my cheeks. I hope that generations to come can have this connection to the harvest. To the freshness of food as it comes off the tree, the vine, the bush. I hope that instead of rows and rows of crappy homes, they can still see rows and rows in a field and know where their food came from. I hope it’s not all gone by then. [1] University of Guelph, “Protecting Farmland in Southern Ontario” [2] University of Guelph Farmland Preservation Research Project, “Farmland Loss in Ontario”
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STOLEN SOVEREIGNTY BY ADAM COCHRAN
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e live in an arrogant and polarized culture, where arguments are commonly taken to their extremes. Everything seems to be black and white - from kids fighting in class, to debt ceiling clashes on the US senate floor - everyone has a “my way or the highway” view of the issues and it causes a great deal of strife. It seems the world lacks sensible adults, and nowhere is this clash of concepts more prevalent than in the debate on genetically modified food. Everyone sees it as sock-and-sandal wearing hippies clashing with corporate suits, who only care about their bottom line – and it’s a shame because it means we all too quickly forget that this is a human problem with so many other players involved. I, personally, don’t like the concept of genetically modified foods. In fact, when I sat down to write this piece, it was to be something very anti-GMO. At times I can be a bit of a naturalist. When I’m able to, I am very conscious of what goes into my body. I keep food to fresh and basic ingredients and I avoid putting myself in a situation where I need to choke down a handful of pills to survive the day. But, I know life happens and I don’t beat myself up when all I have time for in the day is a drive-through cheeseburger (I savour and enjoy that rare treat), or if a tighter budget prevents me from buying the $4 organic green pepper and opting for the $0.99 one right beside it. Maybe I’m just
pragmatic about it all, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t fall into either major camp on the issue. I don’t know if it’s fair for anyone to.
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et’s look at it this way, GMO foods are indeed unnatural. To me and my personal philosophy on health and well-being, that’s a negative. That being said, there has yet to be a study on GMO foods that I believe that has conclusively shown any negative side effects on the human population. So far my uneasiness comes from the
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Jeanette Jobson
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same place as the uneasiness that many people had to the first microwave-oven - “it’s not natural, it must be dangerous.” Having this personal philosophy of what I put into my body, and being in an affluent enough lifestyle that I can afford to make some choices related to my nutrition, I will opt towards GMO free foods whenever possible and support the idea that they should be labeled so that I can retain the sovereignty over myself to make such choices. On the other hand, I can greatly respect the fact that GMO foods have done some very positive things for humankind. We’re now able to grow food in regions that we never could before, sustain organic life in temperatures it could never have survived in, and we’ve greatly increased our food yields while lowering the cost of many foods around the world. To those who do not live in the same affluent societies, where the choice is instead a GMO green pepper or no food at all, genetic-modification has been a blessing and should continue to be made available. hile I am sure some hardcore fanatic of the anti-GMO movement will at this point throw their magazine on the ground huffing and puffing about how I’ve said it’s acceptable to feed genetically modified food to the poor, I can assure that is not the message I want to send. Rather, what I mean to suggest is that there are layered issues here. I feel that basic-GMO foods (pest-resistant, fungal-resistant vegetation, and non genetic manipulation of animals) are an unsatisfactory, but sufficient alternative to hunger around the world. By ‘sufficient’ I mean to say that it’s
better than nothing, but, by ‘unsatisfactory’, I mean to say that it would be a crime against humanity if we allow ourselves to stop here and think this is the final solution. When faced with a situation of starvation, I think it’s best to do what we can to provide food to sustain the human race. But beyond that, the situation becomes a little more complex. Imagine you are walking down a single path, from point A to point B straight in front of you. Behind you is a barren wilderness filled with savage creatures, and in front of you is a walled city, that looks less than savoury and has poor living conditions, but could indeed keep you alive. At this point, your choice of action seems nothing short of obvious. This scenario illustrates the choice between GMO food and no food at all. Now, let us change the scenario a bit. You are once again walking down a path, behind you the barren wilderness filled with perilous creatures, but in front of you now is a split path, that leads in three different directions to three cities. The first one is the city from the first scenario that will take you in for $5 a night but the living conditions, while unlisted, are notably poor. The second city will take you in for $10 a night and doesn’t list any living conditions. The third city will take you in for $25 a night and its living conditions are listed as excellent.
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o doubt after reading the above scenario there is something about it that makes you feel cheated. It’s a human condition, you can’t escape it. While you’d love to save money in hopes that the $10 town is safe, you also don’t want to take the risk
with something as key as your health, and the lack of disclosure makes you feel that you don’t really have a choice at all. This is called the case of “stolen
sovereignty”; when a key piece of information is missing that would allow us to make an informed decision, then the decision is actually stolen away from us, we lose the sovereignty over ourselves and that freedom of choice as we are evolutionarily conditioned to go with the sure thing. Those of us who are strapped for cash will always go for the cheaper option, and those of us who aren’t will always go for the safer option, all because no one required the $10 town to label its living conditions. This is the current state of affairs with a lot of GMO foods. There are some foods you KNOW contain GMOs, such as corn, soy, canola, and cottonseed oil, which are in many foods found at the grocery store and are cheap and readily available. There are some middle of the shelf prodHBmag.ca
ucts that MAY contain GMOs, but you aren’t too sure. There are niche premium products that are clearly labeled GMO-Free, but that peace of mind costs you an arm and a leg. This is where the real problem lies. The fight can’t be about whether GMOs are good or not, or whether they should be banned or not – at least not yet, as no one has enough evidence to argue conclusively that we are endangering ourselves. What we should require is that food providers clearly label which foods contain GMOs. At the end of the day if it doesn’t matter to you, then it’s no big deal – and it certainly doesn’t cost providers much more. What it does do is enable Daniel Biléu those who don’t want to consume GMOs to re-capture the sovereignty over themselves and make the choice about what they want to put into their body, regardless of the cost.
I
t’s foolish of us to get so worked up and polarized about issues. The world is not a black and white (or blue and red) place and we need to pragmatically look at every situation, understand the elements at play, and let information reign supreme to enable people to make enlightened free-will choices, about themselves, their lives, and ultimately, the state of their nutrition. Having clearly labelled products and an increasingly informed public debate will enable us to resist having our sovereignty stolen, and better yet, will help us exercise it.
19
3 OUTSPOKEN CITIZENS
R
achel Parent is a youth activist with ‘Kids Right to Know’, a notfor-profit organization that pushes for the labelling of products containing genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) that enter the Canadian food-system. She engages in speeches, debates, and public awareness campaigns to encourage young people to become educated about the issues facing our food system, and to involve themselves in advocacy and action that would make it healthier and environmentally safer. She started Kids Right to Know when she was 12 years old, and in the relatively few years since, has taken her campaigns to the local, provincial, and national stage, most famously in a debate with Kevin O’Leary on national television. She also has a standing challenge to Rona Ambrose, Minister of Health, to engage her in a debate over the safety of GMOs in our food systems that would include Dr. Thierry Vrain, a now retired former Health Canada Scientist. Concerned “that children are [potentially] more susceptible to the health risks associated with GMOs,” Parent makes the case that children and youth should be involved in advocating for a system that labels these products appropriately, so that they are free and able to make informed choices about the food they are eating. She says that “labels currently have to disclose the ingredients, fat content, calories, vitamins and minerals, and even if it was made in a manufacturing plant that makes products that may contain peanuts, but nothing about whether the food was made from genetically modified ingredients.” Point taken. Here is a different perspective. You may have heard of Mark Lynas, a former British anti-GMO activist who recently made a public apology for his years advocating against GM crops. 20
In this apology, he admits that he didn’t know enough about the science underwriting his anti-GMO activism, even though he had made a point of adopting science-based standards in his work on climate change. “For me this anti-science environmentalism became increasingly inconsistent with my pro-science environmentalism with regard to climate change. I published my first book on global warming in 2004, and I was determined to make it scientifically credible rather than just a collection of anecdotes,” Lynas explains. This lead to identifying, researching, and ultimately addressing the myths he had led himself to believe, resulting in a complete turn-around in his views on GM crops.
A
n alternative to Lynas can be found in the aforementioned Thierry Vrain, PhD and former geneticist. Since his retirement, he has come out with concerns over the handling of the ‘controversy’ surrounding the legitimate assessment of the safety of GM foods. “If you aren’t a scientist you don’t understand the science,” he explains, “if you are a scientist and discover things that are of concern, then you are accused of doing ‘pseudoscience’ and often viciously attacked by the industry and academics on the payroll.” This has happened many times, for example to Arpad Pusztai in England and Ignacio Chapela, who discovered GMO contamination in native corn in Mexico. He was attacked and almost fired from his post at the University of California. A year later his findings were confirmed. Thierry is similarly concerned about the potential unintended effects of ‘rogue proteins’ that may not have been tested for during the original evaluation of certain GM prodHBmag.ca
ucts. Thierry believes that rogue proteins could combine with other rogue proteins to potentially cause increases in toxins, allergens, nutritional deficiencies, and further organ damage in animals that have been subjected to feeding tests of the GM product. He feels that it is too easy to dismiss these tests because they are from an ‘irrational fringe’ of researchers and their promoters, especially now that you can find studies emerging from peer-reviewed journals and scientific sources.
P
arent, Lynas, and Thierry share a passion for knowledge and information, and want the public to form well-founded and researched positions about the food systems they participate in. This piece is intended to show three individuals and their respective journeys in regard to trusting the overall benefits of genetically modified organisms in our food systems. It has done nothing to involve concerns over potential effects on broader ecological systems, such as the effects of GMO oriented agriculture on pesticide use and related environmental impacts. It has not looked at overall health trends in countries that have banned or allowed GM crops over the now 20+ year period they have been in play in the North American food system, to see whether there is a noticeable difference that could be argued as potential correlation. And it has failed to examine any legal implications for farming practices, i.e. seed-saving or lawsuits from when your crop is contaminated by wind-swept pollen of the patentable GM variety. These issues are wide-ranging in scope, and multi-disciplinary, and to get a solid grasp of them requires that all of us need to do a lot of background research, and work hard to understand our findings. We need to raise the bar higher when it comes to what assumptions we are willing to accept, and what beliefs we are going to share with the world, and why. We hope that you find the inspiration to engage in this process.
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