Where has all the food gone?

With a potentially devastating (read: another 4 years of Harper) election looming tomorrow, I can't help think about, well, food. Where is it? Why has nobody mentioned it during this election? In this of all years, I would have thought there was a chance to get food on the agenda. Until the bottom fell out of the economy last week, it's all there was in the news all year. Rising grain prices, reports in the Globe's business section about Saskatchewan farmers getting rich off the backs of people starving for wheat, E. Coli in peppers and tomatoes, melamine contamination (the most sinister of all food stories) in baby milk substitutes, Listeria in hospitals and seniors homes, the local food movement, the decline of BC's Agricultural Land Reserve....what does it take to get politicians to notice something?

If these things weren't enough, surely all the talk of Green Shifts and carbon taxes and environmental issues in general should have led someone to think about food, no? Apparently not. How can they not see that all of these things are connected?

Food imports are part of that economic system that's collapsing around us. We need two things to import food: (1) money to pay for it, and (2) someone to grow it, somewhere, who is willing to sell. If we don't have these, we had better learn to grow it for ourselves, which is going to get a lot harder if we keep building condos on all those farms. Still our agriculture ministries are mandated to export as much as they can of what we do grow.

Food just gets more and more centralized all the time. One little Listeria on one machine in one Maple Leaf plant killed and sickened people all over the country. I don't see how it's possible to add enough inspectors to protect us from a system so fragile that such a tiny thing can spread so far and wide.

Things are going horribly awry, and I fear all our potential leaders are too preoccupied with getting elected to notice.

So in the morning I will head down the street bright and early to vote. Not because I feel there is any great choice, but because that's just what I do. I've tried to not vote before but I just can't do it. Maybe it's an addiction (kind of like being a student....) or maybe it's just my silly commitment to democracy. I always get excited, nervous and giddy and that first date kind of way when I walk into a polling booth....

Terra Madre Forums

I may not have been blogging much of late, but I have been hosting one of a series of forums hosted by Slow Food in lead up to Terra Madre 2008 in October in Torino, Italy. For those of you not familiar with the event, Terra Madre "brings together food producers and workers from around the world, giving them the opportunity to discuss the major themes of food production. Together they share and compare the diverse and complex issues that underlie what “high-quality food” means to them: issues of environmental resources and planetary equilibrium, and aspects of taste, worker dignity, and consumer safety."

The online forums are available at http://forum.terramadre2008.org/. Each forum will culminate in a workshop at Terra Madre, facilitated by the online host. I am hosting the forum titled Stop the Cement - Preserving Farmland for Food, a discussion of issues facing protection of farmland globally that was jointly proposed by Heather Pritchard from Farm Folk City Folk and me. The forum focuses on the protection and preservation of agricultural land. Here is the complete description:

Preserving Farmland for Food

One of the biggest issues facing our ability to feed ourselves in the future is the protection and preservation of fertile land – and ensuring that land is used for food production and ecological services. Without adequate farmland and knowledgeable farmers to farm it, it will be impossible to produce enough food for a growing population.

Fertile land, much of which is located near cities, is at risk of land speculation and 'cementification' by commercial or residential development. Even protected farmland reserves may not be as secure as we think. Farmer attrition is becoming a serious problem as farmers either sell their land for retirement income or can’t find a new generation to take over the farm. In some regions, young people are interested in farming but can’t afford high land prices.

Through this forum STOPPING THE CEMENT, we hope to identify ways to protect farmland from price speculation, expropriation, and urban development; preserve indigenous rights to land for traditional hunting, gathering, fishing, and agricultural activities; educate and encourage the next generation of young farmers; and promote access to farmland for farmers. We also hope to highlight issues faced by communities from around the world related to farmland and farming the land. Ultimately, our goal is to share creative ways of preserving farmland for food and learn from the experiences of others.

I will be facilitating the actual workshop at Terra Madre in Torino, Italy in October, where I will also be representing the UBC Faculty of Land and Food Systems as an academic delegate to the meetings.

One more thing about corn syrup

Anyone who has been within a 5km radius of me in the past few years has probably heard me rant on about corn syrup, and I hinted at my feelings toward the substance here. Corn syrup — specifically high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) — has been in the news lately because:
1. The food industry has been trying to promote it as a "natural" ingredient.
2. The US Food and Drug Administration recently reversed a ruling stating that HFCS could not be labeled as "natural" because it contained synthetic fixing agents.

Well, an article in FoodNavigator, a popular food industry news site, explains why:
The process sees the enzymes for making HFCS being fixed to a column by the use of a synthetic fixing agent called glutaraldehyde. However, this agent does not come into contact with the high dextrose equivalent corn starch hydrolysate and so it is not "considered to be included or added to the HFCS"

Sounds like typical regulatory doublespeak, right? Right. They are saying that although this chemical, glutaraldehyde, is used in manufacturing this "natural" substance (Side note: Since when are natural things manufactured?), it is not actually in the food. That's all well and good, but perhaps the FDA neglected to reflect on the toxicity of a chemical like glutaraldehyde. They should know all about it, because they have been strictly monitoring occupational exposure to it for over 60 years.

Now, I know a whole lot about this relatively obscure chemical. Perhaps ironically, I wrote my master's thesis on, of all things, glutaraldehyde, along with few other chemicals that were being introduced to eliminate the use of such a toxic substance altogether (summary here). Glutaraldehyde is long known to cause respiratory and skin allergies as well as a debilitating and little understood form of occupational asthma—not from ingesting it but from just being around it.

Glutaraldehyde is commonly used in leather tanning, and as a high level disinfectant for delicate hospital equipment. It is used to clean endoscopes and other medical equipment that can't be subject to heat sterilization. This stuff can kill tuberculosis and HIV, and they are using it to manufacture "natural" "food" products?! Something is not right here.

Definitions of natural notwithstanding, this leads me to another perhaps more serious concern. Because glutaraldehyde is so toxic, occupational health regulations require that its use be minimized in hospital settings and it can only when there is no safer alternative for cleaning medical equipment. So why are we exposing factory workers to it and putting them at risk of debilitating respiratory illness simply so we can use up all that subsidized American corn to make a cheaper form of sugar for food processing? I suspect that those handling the substance in these factories don't have the same level of protection as Canadian hospital workers.

The FDA, nor its Canadian counterpart Health Canada, does not have a spectacular record of protecting employees over ceding to industry demands. After two years of pestering both agencies, along with the manufacturers of glutaraldehyde and several supposedly safer alternatives, I found that it didn't take much for these companies to convince the regulators that their new thing was not only safe enough for market, but safe enough to relax occupational health regulations.

Still here

I've had reports of complaints regarding my absence from the blogworld. I apologize, with the excuse that my trip to India became very busy, with almost no free time for such endeavours. On the up side, I finished all the India based field research I had left to do for my thesis. I'm now taking a short vacation with friends (and a surprise visitor) in Israel, and head back toVancouver on Friday. I've been saving up stories and promise I will get up to date soon. Since this is the end of my research travel, I'll have to work on making my life in Vancouver more interesting so I'll still have something to write about!

Life in the Information Age

The saga of my complicated relationship with India continues. As I near the end of my last planned trip to India I am filled with mixed feelings. In many ways I am looking forward to ending my time of trying to live in two different countries, always packing up and moving to the other just as I get back into a routine in one. It's been an exhausting year and a half and it will be nice to stay away from airports and large backpacks for a while (notwhithstanding my Big Chill Revisited trip to Quebec in August to visit the old St.John's crowd). Still, when I think that in less than two weeks I will be leaving here with no idea when I will return makes me a little sad. I feel there is still so much to do, so much to see. I've met so many amazing people, and they keep introducing me to more. One thing I am looking forward to is that open, friendly Canadian style of communication....

It would be so much easier to, well, do anything, here if only people weren't so averse to sharing information. One of the NGOs I've been working with had a tendency to ask me why I wasn't at an event, organized by them, that was directly related to my research - the day after. I don't think they were keeping information from me, but it never occurred to anyone to tell me in advance. They seemed to think I would know. Direct and pointed questions are key, but you need to know what to ask. It's also important never to ask a question that could require an "I don't know" reply, because I have never heard these words uttered. This usually happens when asking directions, and if the person doesn't know they will make something up on the spot and tell you with the utmost surity how to get there.

Today was another example of how I will NOT miss this.

I was supposed to take a day trip by train to Alappuzha today to meet with a research contact. We spoke on the phone last night and decided to meet here in Thiruvananthapuram instead, since she has to come here on Monday. This means I could cancel my train ticket. Off I went to the station to make the cancellation and get a refund. I knew there was a separate reservations desk I needed to go to, but I couldn't find it so went to the information booth. I was told my morning ticket couldn't be refunded until after 8pm, and the return couldn't be refunded until today. So I left and went back this afternoon. I got in the wrong line up - 1/2 hour in the midday heat - to be told where the reservation office actually is, in another building. I went there and took a number to find there were 200 people ahead of me. I was clearing going to miss my afternoon appointment so I left and returned a couple of hours later. I was not looking forward to the wait so went to inquire that I could in fact get a refund. I was told I had to write a request for refund on a piece of white paper, which was procured for me with some difficulty, and I was directed to the station manager's office. The manager ripped up my request, wrote something on my ticket, and sent me directly to a wicket (no waiting!). Turns out I was too late to refund my morning ticket (why couldn't they do it last night!?) and because my return train was leaving within 4 hours I could only get a 50% refund. Again, why couldn't any have told me this earlier?! So I took my refund and left, thankful that at least I didn't wait for 3 hours in the line for what turned out to be $3.50. Cost for 3 rickshaw trips: $3.25.

Slow Food IS Good Food

Finally, a week after leaving Italy, I think I may soon be hungry again. Maybe. I Spent the first few days talking food at Slow Food, and spent most of the rest of my visit just eating food. My diet was basically wine, espresso, gelato, cheese, and cured meats. And pasta of course. The few days I spent in Bra let me see a little of the inner workings of Slow Food and its University of Gastronomic Sciences, and I liked what I saw. They truly do seem to be living their rhetoric. Food is really, really important to these folks.

My meetings with the organizers of Terra Madre were fruitful. The workshop on agricultural land stewardship that I proposed along with Heather Pritchard from Farm Folk City Folk has been accepted as one of 28 thematic streams at the 2008 gathering. So, in addition to representing the UBC Faculty of Land and Food Systems at Terra Madre, I will be facilitating our workshop, moderating comments from farmers and activists around the world. Based on contributions to the online forum, we will identify the key issues from different places and arrange for as many people as possible to speak at the October meeting. I will then facilitate the discussion at Terra Madre.

What really amazed me about Slow Food and Italy is the way people really seem to live Slow Food. We had the Slow Food restaurant guide and ate at as many recommended places as possible. Unlike in Canada, the best restaurants in Italy are ALL about the food. There's no pretence, no need to dress up, and there's no show. It seemed that most places to eat were about the same price range (expensive). Nothing was really cheap and almost nothing was exhorbitant. The atmosphere in the really great places we went was relaxed and homey. Most were family run places, with the owners doing everything from cooking to serving tables. And they are proud of what they do.

It's completely normal to eat 3 or 4 courses at any meal, even lunch. Once the food was so good that Nathan ordered his main course of oven roasted pork a second time. They didn't raise an eyebrow. We never did figure out how to get tap water, but the wine flows free so it was never a big deal. Most restaurants have their own house wine available by the glass or part bottle. One place we went in Florence had bottles of house red on all the tables. You just pull the cork and drink as much as you like, and they somehow charge you for what you drink. No one was getting trashed, but it's perfectly acceptable, even expected, to have a glass with your sandwich at noon.



In Florence we found a great Slow solution to fast food. There
were sandwich restaurants that were seemed to be an abundance of either open to the streets or just tiny little places. They served only sandwiches, and had a list of combinations of meat and cheese and occasionally vegetables. You just choose one and eat it right there. One even had a little stand for your glass of wine (served in real glasses, even out on the street). It was pretty cheap, pretty healthy, waste free, and only served real food. Nothing in a package. All local ingredients. And simple. So very simple. And did I mention how GOOD it tasted?

Bra Bus

I’ve been in Italy 2 days, and already have had some great adventure. I spent the first two days in Torino with Nathan and his mom. We ate a lot. I had a meeting with some folks at Slow Food on the day Mrs. Leamy had to fly out, so I left on the train early in the morning with plans for Nathan to meet me in Bra (the town) later that afternoon. It seemed very simple: I had train ticket to Carmagnola where I was to transfer to a bus to Bra, arriving with an hour and half to spare.

I was at the door as my train approached Carmagnola, ready to jump out, but the button that opens the door didn’t do a thing and I found myself still on the train as it pulled out of the station. What to do but stay there and get out at the next station and then try to figure out how to get to Bra from there? Fortunately, the woman in the ticket office spoke enough English to understand my story and give me a ticket back to Carmagnola (fortunately, towns in Italy are very close together). I got to Carmagnola and things got a little more complicated. I had already missed my scheduled bus to Bra and wanted to find out where and when to get the next one. The station was tiny – basically a platform and a few chairs – and no one in the ticket booth. I found a bus and driver waiting out front and tried to ask the driver about getting to Bra. He didn’t speak a word of French or English and I thought I was out of luck and about to miss my meetings. I was wandering around, trying to decipher the posted schedules, when he motioned for me to come back. He took my bag and motioned for me to get on the bus. I followed, thinking that this must be the Bra bus.

The driver put me in the seat next to him, and that was when I noticed I was the only one on the bus. Then the realization: “Oh my god, he’s going to give me a ride to Bra!” Seemed crazy, but we had no shared language so I went with it. It took 45 minutes to drive there, during which we somehow conversed about all sorts of things in our separate languages. He didn’t know my hotel, so called the number I had to find out where it was. I told him I was a tourist, and a student of agriculture. He told me he lives alone in a big house in Liguoria where he hosts students on some sort of hospitality basis. He told me I should come stay there instead of my hotel. I wanted to halt that idea pretty quick, so told him, by moving my ring to my 4th finger and trying out a few words, that I was meeting my “husband” at the hotel. At first I think he thought I was asking him to marry me, but I eventually go the point across. He wanted to know if my husband was Italian, so I told him he was American. He asked how old I was and was surprised to learn my real age. And he kept telling me I was a “bella donna Canadese” (a beautiful Canadian woman) and he was an Italian....something.

We drove into Bra and I told him I just needed to go to the station. He kept driving past it, at which point I started to get a little nervous. Turned out he was just taking me closer to my hotel. He dropped me off at the side of the road and pointed in the direction of my hotel which was down a tiny street near a little piazza. I don’t really know how this all happened – the bus trip or the 45 minute conversation – but I was pretty glad it did. I got to Bra just in time to drop my bags at the very cute B&B and grab a really great Italian coffee on my way to my meeting. More about all that later.

The back story

Doing a PhD can be a long and lonely path. At one point it felt like an existential crisis, but I've since begun to think of it as an existential journey. From time to time along this journey, I question what I'm doing, how I'm doing it, why I'm doing it, and what might come out of it at the end. (I'm hoping it will actually end one day). That often makes me think about how I became so interested in food in the first place. I grew up far from any farm, and somehow I now find myself writing a dissertation on agriculture.



Anyone who knew me as a child would probably never have guessed I would end up studying nutrition and food. I was possibly the pickiest eater ever. I didn't like eating at all, and only ate a select few things, making family mealtimes stressful. I would eat meat, but only if it was processed enough that it couldn't be recognized as animal flesh. I didn't eat many fruits or vegetables either, so it was a good thing that my grandmother made just about the best bread in the world. Of course, Newfoundland in the 1970s wasn't exactly a haven for fresh, local food. Vegetables came from who knows where, and were a far cry from the fresh, flavourful vegetables I have access to now on the west coast. It was the age of mixes—cake mix, instant mashed potato mix, pie mix, sugary drink mix, pancake mix....you get the idea. Scratch cooking was out of fashion, and my family was no exception. As a case in point, our traditional Saturday night dinner consisted of frozen McCain french fries and boiled or fried bologna. Maybe if we had regular access to the kind of food I eat now, I would have been much less picky.

Despite my lack of gastronomic experience, I do have fond childhood memories of growing and gathering food. I think my grandparents are largely responsible for any interest I had in food. My grandfather (Uncle Frank, to those who knew him) always kept a vegetable garden in their backyard. He mostly grew potatoes and carrots, probably because that was about as much as one could hope for in that soil and climate. I remember climbing up the cherry tree behind those same grandparents house, eating almost as many cherries as I could pick.

Every fall, I would tirelessly pick blueberries and partridgeberries in the woods behind my other grandparents' house around The Bay. This effort inevitably ended with me sitting at the kitchen table being presented with a bowl of freshly picked berries and cream by my grandmother. Below that kitchen was a root cellar where they stored the potatoes and turnips and other things that grandfather (Bop, to those who knew him) grew in his plot in the forest. I was fascinated by the dark damp space from which food would occasionally emerge. When not picking berries, I would go fishing with Bop, jigging for what seemed like an endless supply of giant cod, and occasionally squid or lobster. He would clean and cut them in the boat before docking at some small island to cook up a feast of fish and brewis (although my pickiness ensured that my participation in the meal ended with the fishing, something I sorely regret now that I know what I was missing). Every once in a while, Bop would trick me into helping him catch rabbits, also for food. He would tempt me into a walk in the woods with him, which I loved, and suddenly I would find there was an ulterior motive, as Bop collected a dead rabbit from a hidden snare.

Just down the road from my grandparents' house in The Bay, my aunt Marie was an avid gardener. I remember her taking me out to a collection of gardens she looked after around the small town. She managed to produce all manner of vegetables—corn, broccoli, beets, bitter greens, cauliflower, tomatoes, lettuces. She was a huge fan of home grown food. For some reason I don't recall actually eating this food, but mostly learning from my aunt about the importance of nurturing plants and connecting with and respecting Nature. Years later, my cousin married a farmer. They were much older than me, and as I child I idolized him, and I loved to be taken out to see the farm he was struggling so hard to maintain.

Despite my lack of enthusiasm for eating, I developed a great fondness for cooking and baking. I still remember my little Easy Bake Oven and the tiny cakes that would come out of it. By the time I was a teenager I had started cooking my own meals, largely to support my now official vegetarianism. As I began cooking, I began experimenting will all manner of new foods, and simply deciding that I would like them.* One of my favourite places in town was Mary Janes, the one and only (and now defunct) health food store in St. John's. There I could find bulk grains and dried fruit, whole grain baked goods, and tofu veggie burgers. My other favourite place was Lars Market. Lars was an old fashioned produce market, one of the last to survive in a land of large chain grocery stores. It had an ever-glowing line of blinking coloured lights rimming the display windows outside. I loved the colours and the smells, and the exotic imported fruits they sometimes had. And the custard cones. Real soft serve ice cream made the original way, with custard powder. Such a creamy rich flavour and sumptuous texture.

One of most influential moments of my initial forays into foodie-ism happened on a high-school trip I took to New Brunswick to visit my friend Lori. By this point I had long gotten over my pickiness. Lori and I were visiting her grandmother in the Miramichi. We picked the salad for dinner out of the backyard garden. It was the first time I remember eating anything so fresh, except for berries. If I close my eyes, I can still feel the sweet tomatoes bursting full of flavour in my mouth, and the crisp juicy greens crunching between my teeth. It was a spiritual experience, and I felt very connected to....something. I would never forget how wonderful a freshly picked vegetable can be.

Around the same time, I was taking a high school nutrition course. Mrs. Zwicker was the one who taught me that food is political. I learned about the environmental impacts of factory meat production. I learned about the evils of trans fats as an unfortunate creation of the food industry. I learned about world hunger, and about Nestle's practice of pushing baby formula in Africa, effectively killing thousands of babies fed formula made with non-potable water and improper proportions. Not to mention their promotion of Carnation Milk as an acceptable baby food in the outports of Newfoundland not long before. That became my first boycott, which I've pretty much maintained since 1988.

Once I went off to university and lived in residence, I was forced to find my food in the Laurier cafeteria. Vegetarianism wasn't so popular in Kitchener in those days, and I found myself getting malnourished and anemic on my diet of milk, bran muffins, and lettuce sandwiches. I was far more content once I got my own apartment and was able to be fully responsible for feeding myself. Those days were my first introduction to the farmers' market. The nearby Mennonite town of St. Jacob's has one of the biggest and well known markets in the country. Here I first bought food straight from the farmers, where I was able to ask about their pesticide use and other practices. It was a long bike ride uphill to get there, but it was always worth it.

Living back in Kitchener a few years later, I was at the local market at 7am every Saturday morning. That was where I began working at Full Circle Natural Foods where I became well versed in the ways of ethical meat, organic farming, food additives, and all manner of food politics. I eventually worked up to Purchasing Manager, giving me a peak into the world of the health food industry. At the time I still held idealistic views of this industry that I now know has been profit-driven and co-opted by the Big Guys.

I left Kitchener to finally get a university degree and studied nutrition at Mount Saint Vincent in Halifax. I went in with ideas of doing nutrition counselling, and came out with a deep concern for community based nutrition, food culture, poverty, and global hunger. Here I learned about Structural Adjustment, global agriculture, and childhood malnutrition. I also delved into some of the dark side of food safety and regulation, researching the controversy around the approval of bovine growth hormone (rBST) and a brand new technology producing genetically modified foods.

I came out to Vancouver to do a master's degree in nutrition, but left after a semester because I disagreed with the focus of the program there. I missed food work and finally got in touch with a local women's shelter where I started a community kitchens program. I eventually got to do some work on contaminants in the food supply, which readily took my focus away from my master's degree in occupational hygiene. In the end, I realized I was meant to work with food, and the existential journey began.

* Since that time, I've only tasted one food that I wholeheartedly dislike: parsnips. They are like failed, anemic carrots and I just can't get into them.

Flipper pie, anyone?

The Newfoundland seal hunt officially began today, and I don't feel I can let the moment go unnoticed, especially as I know Paul Watson's ship is on its way to the Grand Banks. Some might say my history makes me biased, but I've thought about this a lot and I think I have a fairly balanced view of the whole situation.

Watson and his Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, along with other groups such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare, are doing everything they can to once again shut down the North Atlantic seal hunt. Didn't they learn anything from the stupidity of Paul McCartney's comments to Rex Murphy last year? I am not exactly a vociferous carnivore, I don't exactly have a lot of fur in my wardrobe, and seeing cruelty of any kind hurts me to the very core of my being, but I do not agree with this effort to stop the hunt.

The debates pro and con the hunt are easily available online. And yes, it can be considered cruel and it is ugly to see. No form of killing, no matter how humanely done, is pretty. What really bothers me, aside from the inaccurate information touted by these organizations—they kill baby seals; it's only for the fur; they skin them alive; they kill them more brutally than necessary......in fact, seal meat is a Newfoundland delicacy; it's been illegal to kill white coats for 20 years; the hakapik and the club look nasty, but kill quickly, and quick is what you want—is the hypocricy.

Paul Watson claims to be upholding international law by his activities, which include ramming sealing ships on the North Atlantic, putting hundreds of lives at serious risk. A few minutes after making this claim in an interview with Shelagh Rogers today, he followed with "I don't really have much respect for the Ministry of Fisheries and Oceans." These would be some of the people making the laws. Hmmm, something isn't quite right here. Watson is breaking international law to stop something that is fully within international law. (Unlike Sea Shepherd's fight against many other kinds of marine hunting, the Canadian seal hunt is fully legal.)

It's not so much that I am pro sealing; I'm just not violenty opposed to it. And I do adore seals. It's just that I see this issue as an easy target. Hunting seals on the ice provides vivid imagery. They are furry and cute, even after their coats turn grey. Red blood shed on white snow makes a striking picture. The cries of seals sound eerie against the silence of the north. It is exactly because we can see all this that we are bothered by it. And we should be bothered by it. The killing of living beings, regardless of how humanely it is done or for what purpose, should never be taken lightly.

My question to people who oppose the hunt is this: Have you ever eaten meat that came from the supermarket, a fast food outlet, or pretty much anywhere other than your own farm? If you answer yes, I don't think you have the moral right to oppose the seal hunt. The atrocities that occur in CAFOs and industrial slaughterhouses are well documented by journalists and authors from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) to Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006).

Our food system is wrought with problems, particularly in the way we produce and process animals. The success of this system is dependent on people's ignorance of what is really going on. It would take a hardened soul to visit a CAFO and slaughterhouse and immediately after sit down with a burger. But we buy our meat ready-cooked, or on nice little styrofoam trays at the supermarket. We no longer even need to visit the butcher, where evidence of the fact that we are consuming flesh is still evident, even if hidden behind the plastic curtain. Whether it is meat, organic spray cans of pancake mix, or so-called organic lettuce, we are disconnected from our food sources and rarely know where it has come from, how it got here, or even what's really in it (who can understand the ingredient lists on most foods without a chemistry degree?).

And so we see the brutal reality of the seal hunt, and naturally it stirs feelings of disgust and remorse. If we could see the brutality or absurdity of many of the other foods we eat, wouldn't we have the same reaction? I think so. Aside from meat, our carefully constructed processed food products systematically remove any remnants of nature or real food from the things we eat. We rape the land of its fertility by growing crops in huge chemical-dependent monocultures. We allow rural communities to decay because small farmers can't squeak out a living growing real food. We use huge amounts of oil shipping food back and forth across the globe in the name of efficiency, even those foods that we can grow locally.

In the end, I think the debate over whether the seal hunt
is or isn't excessively cruel is irrelevant. (Never mind issues of cultural heritage, disappearing cod stocks, attacks on fisherman, slander of the Newfoundland people, and so on.) The sanctioned violence in the mainstream industrial food system far outweighs anything that happens on an ice floe a few weeks each year. The social and ecological violence caused by industrial farming, processing, and long distance transport is massive, but how can it ever compete with those big brown eyes* looking into the barrel of a rifle?

*And why do they always show pictures of the whitecoats, which are not part of the hunt? If they have a legitimate issue, they shouldn't have to stretch the truth to get support.

Down on the farm, on the radio

Back in October, I was at Bija Vidyapeeth, home of Navdanya's organic teaching farm and seed bank just outside of Dehradun, India. While I was there, Bija Vidyapeeth was host to Vasundhara, a huge gathering of farmers from all over India who came together to talk about farmers' rights, traditional regional crops, and seed saving.

Tonight, while cooking up a nice late winter supper of noodles, kale and chickpeas in a peanut sauce, I turned on CBC Radio and found that tonight's episode of Dispatches had a piece on Indian farmers' civil disobedience. Turns out it was recorded by David Kattenburg, a freelance journalist from Winnipeg who I met during Vasundhara. Next thing I knew, I heard my own voice talking about my research.



Missed it? No need to panic, because you listen here or download the podcast. (It's the second part after the stuff about Chavez and his Venezuelan baseball players.)

Organics Gone Wild

Um, I should probably refrain from writing about this until the shock wears off, but I just can't wait. Thanks to one of my trusty food-nerd listervs, I just discovered this new "food," if I can use the term loosely. Batter Blaster is a spray can of pancake/waffle batter. It's like CoolWhip or spray cheese that you squirt directly onto the skillet and cook like a pancake.

This alone is worthy of comment. The ad talks about how labourious it is to mix up milk, eggs, and flour to make pancake batter for one's children. (I've never timed myself doing it, but I think that process takes about 3 minutes.) I am of the old school mindset that pancake mix was a ridiculous thing; is it really so hard to mix 3 ingredients, or so much easier to "just add water"? Especially if one is concerned about providing a wholesome breakfast for the family, as the Batter Blaster ad says.

It's really worth the time to watch the demo video from the website. It shows a miserable child pouting while waiting (apparently for aeons) while her mother mixes up pancakes. This raises a few points in my mind. First, it doesn't take long to mix pancake batter. More importantly, while is the child sitting miserably while her mother does it? Why isn't she helping, and learning how real food works and how to make it? Children take great pleasure in mixing up goopy things and can learn a lot from doing it. This child, who will be an adult one day, may never know what pancakes really are: flour and eggs and milk. What will she do when oil and commodity prices go so high that it's no longer economical to process the hell out of everything and we have to go back to [gasp!] actually cooking? I suppose we can only hope that she is wealthy enough to hire an immigrant cook, displaced from her own country by the impacts of climate change on food production.

Cultural trends in cooking skills aside, what really got my attention about Batter Blaster is the fact that it is USDA certified organic. That's right. Organic. You know, that movement started by a bunch of hippies interested in getting in touch with the land, stepping outside the corporate system, living sustainably, and eating wholesome food. What has happened to a regulatory system that will certify spraycan pancakes as organic?

I will admit, the ingredient list isn't as bad as I expected, nor as frightening as some other foods found in spray cans. Still, aside from the flour and cane sugar (I'm amazed it's not corn syrup!), all of the ingredients are chemicals derived from commodity crops. They are not in fact actual foods and never were. The crop varieties used to produce these constituents ('ingredient' seems too generous a term here) are not actually edible in their raw form, yet their descriptions on the label make them seem fairly innocuous. It's what goes on between the farm and the spray can than nobody knows anything about, and that's the part that really scares me.

Batter Blaster Ingredients:
Filtered water; Organic wheat flour (unbleached); Organic cane sugar; Organic whole egg solids; Organic soybean powder; Sodium lactate (lactic acid from beet sugar); DiCalcium phosphate and Sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) (leavening agents); Organic rice bran extract propellant

Part of me wonders if this is all real, or just a fabulous joke. I sincerely hope it's a hoax, but I'm not that confident. I think it is a frightening commentary on our culture that we put so little value on the time it takes to prepare a meal. I refuse to accept that spending 5 minutes — or 3 hours — cooking food is a waste of my time. It's creative and nurturing to feed people, and by putting a little time and effort into it we can hopefully find our meals fulfilling, rather than simply filling.

Diet water?

I'll be the first to admit that I insulate myself somewhat from mainstream media. I watch TV only while falling asleep in hotel rooms in strange cities. I only listen to CBC radio. My occasional magazine reading is limited to things like Harper's, Shambhala Sun, The Walrus, and The NewYorker. Somewhere along the way, the world went even crazier than I had suspected.

Today I was at my cushy Yaletown dentist and absentmindely picked up some glossy pop culture mag in the waiting room. As I was flipping through, an ad for some kind of diet product got my attention. When I looked closer, I realized the ad was for water. It only had 25 calories, in comparison to the competitor's water which had 125 calories. Now, I know I didn't finish my dietetic internship, but last I checked water didn't have calories. It's water. WA-TER. But, this ad wasn't for any old water; it was for Propel Fitness Water. Apparently, PepsiCo has found a way to make water—one of the most ubiquitous substances on earth and the one that constitutes almost 2/3 of the human body—even better. These guys are good.

The word is out. Get out there and get your Propel, because you'll have to exercise a whole lot more to burn off the calories in that old brand of water.

.....SSSSSHHHHHH. Nobody tell PerpsiCo, but there's stuff that's been around for millennia, ironically also called water, that has absolutey ZERO calories, and in much of the world it's even FREE (for now).

Michael Pollan is plagiarizing my mind

I found myself saying that the other day while talking about Michael Pollan's new book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. Nothing personal Michael, but there are some ideas in there that relate closely to what I have been planning to write either in my thesis (which, sadly, is still just in my mind) or to a lesser extent in a different sort of manifesto that I plan to write. The elusive thesis, of course, is really about the cultural and spiritual place of food and its relationship to health and sustainability. It's about caring and thinking about what you eat — eating mindfully, you might say — so that all the rest (nutrition, rural livelihoods, community vibrancy, social relations, culture, etc.) just falls into place without use having to be so conscious of it. If we are mindful of our food, what it is, how it got to us, who grew it, how they grew it, who's handled it in between and what they did with it, we'll probably eat things that are good for us, good for the farmers, and good for the ecological life of the planet. My not insignificant job is to try to figure out how to go about making this the norm. I realize this is a somewhat radical departure from my dietetics and epidemiology training, but what can you do?

When I talk about what I do, people inevitably ask me what they should be eating. Over time, I've heard myself repeating many of the same things. I started to compile an unofficial manifesto in my mind of how I think people should eat. A colleague and friend from the Schumacher Centre for Development in India suggested I write it down in an article for one of the Delhi newspapers because he thought it was useful stuff for people to hear, and most people had no idea about. My roommate is encouraging me to create a website information about food, health, culture, and sustainability. These ideas, and a few others that are still being filtered through the maze of my mind, were close to being written down when I read Pollan's fabulous new book.

So for what it's worth, here is my own set of guidelines for how and what to put in your body:

• Eat things that taste and feel good, and enjoy them.
• Eat foods, not brands.
• Eat food, not nutrients.
  
• Eat foods with as little packaging as possible, preferably none. Avoid eating things that come in a box.
  
• If it has more than 5 ingredients on the label, don't eat it.
• If you can't identify or pronounce an ingredient, don't eat it.
  
• If an ingredient name includes a number or an acronym, it's not a food, it's a substance.
  
• Don't be afraid of fat or carbs. They are not evil. They are your friends.
  
• If it seems strange that it doesn't need refrigeration, be wary. (I have seen various forms of bacon, French fries, cheese, and cream in the aisles of grocery stores.)
• Don't eat anything without a shelf life. Real food rots.
  
• Avoid too many white foods. Eat foods with colour, but not dye.
• If it makes a health claim, be suspicious.
  
• It's made to be microwaved, don't eat it.
• If it's fortified, think about why that is necessary, and find something that actually contains those nutrients.
• "Improved" on a label really means "less bad."
  
• If it seems impossible to make at home (culinary skills notwithstanding), it's not real food.
• Run screaming from high fructose corn syrup (aka fructose, corn syrup, dextrose, maltose, golden syrup, .... the list goes on).
  
• If the ingredients for a recipe have ingredients themselves, it's not cooking but home assembly (kind of like "building" IKEA furniture).
• Avoid the middle aisles of the supermarket, or better yet, avoid the supermarket altogether.
  
• Visit a farm. Hug a farmer.
• Join a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) group, buying club, or go to a farmers' market.
• Eat as many different things as you possibly can.
• If it seems too cheap, it probably is.
  
• Eat mindfully.
• Eat with people you love.

Side note: I should clarify here that I am not actually accusing MP of plagiarism. I love his writings. That title is just something that came out of my mouth and I liked the way it sounded. I'm actually quite glad that these ideas are not as freakish as they might have seemed a few years ago, largely thanks to folks like MP. And just to clarify, all the stuff above is from my own mind and not a book.

With An American in Paris

I had the great fortune to spend my most recent birthday in Paris. It was my first trip to Paris, to France, and to continental Europe, which was exciting. It was my first real vacation in a few years. It was a much needed break in the midst of lots of work. And I was going to visit Nathan, which was even better than all that.So, Paris. It's hard to sum it all up. Mostly, we ate, walked, and then ate some more. In between all the eating and walking we did a little shopping, looked at some art, and saw some really old and really nice buildings. And all those stereotypes about French people walking around with baguettes in their purses: true. Thankfully, the stereotype about everyone smoking may still be true, but it's kept in check by a recent ban on smoking in bars and restaurants in Paris. The stereotype about all the meat and dairy eating is also true, so I was glad that I've successfully re-introduced dairy products into my diet and that I've been making selective forays into the consumption of flesh.

Side note for those of you who don't know yet: I broke my 20 years of vegetarianism with some homemade bacon on a farm last summer. Sure, I've been eating the occasional fish for the last few years, but mammals and birds was a whole new world. I couldn't really say no to farmers who offered me any kind of food produced on their land, so I ate the meat when it was offered. I kinda liked it, so from there I've gradually starting eating little bits of meat when I feel comfortable with what I know about where it came from.


Anyway...... some highlights of Paris, from my nerdy foodie perspective:

• Bread is serious business. There are laws in France about allowable ingredients for certain types of bread. To be called a baguette there can only be a few specific ingredients. And the same goes for many different kinds of loaf. Even fava bean meal is considered an adulterant. This is refreshing after reading the ingredients on an average loaf of whole wheat health bread in a Canadian supermarket, or after being in India where the adulterants of concern are actual toxins rather than a deviation from the traditional recipe.
• The shops and supermarkets are full of yoghurts, crème fraishe, and beautiful cheeses. The average supermarket chain carries more and better cheese than most specialty cheese shops in Canada. I bought goat cheeses I had never seen, and sheep's yoghurt in tiny glass pots. Even Picard, the new chain of frozen food shops, sells beautifully constructed frozen meals. Perhaps these are the beginning of a slippery slope to TV dinners, but for now they are real meals that happen to be frozen. If you are not going to cook, which is difficult in the tiny little Paris apartment kitchens, these aren't so bad.
  
• Meals in restaurants are slow, long, important events. You stay as long as you like, and everyone seems to eat dessert. (I've developed a whole new appreciation for dessert after all the crème brulée, and the amazing cake Jess brought for my birthday dinner.) Being a waiter or any kind of service industry workers is considered a career and people are given respect. People seem happy to be doing this work and are respected for doing it.
  
• Breakfast, it seems, is bread (if you must) and coffee. The place we went for breakfast on my birthday listed the menu as bread, butter, orange juice, coffee. So that's what we had.
• The best ice cream in the world is on l'Ile de la Cité. Maison Berthillon. Yummy. €3,50 for two tiny delicious scoops. The vanilla would be worth selling your first born for. I also tried the fig, and the cherry, both fabulous.
• Coffee (café) is treated with the respect it deserves. There is no drip coffee, no syrupy lattes, although I did see a few sad little Starbucks popping up here and there. Normally, there is only espresso, or espresso with milk. I didn't have any that blew my mind, because I didn't find the specialty places, but every random brasserie and bistro had good coffee.
  

All in all, a pretty amazing visit. Nathan. My dear friend Jess. And more wine, coffee, cheese, bread, sugar, and fat than I thought possible to fit into my little body.

The complexities of taste

So the latest news from the New York Times is that MSG ain't really so bad for you after all. The Guardian came up with the same idea two years ago. They put forth a good argument. MSG is a synthetic form of the the amino acid glutamate. It was first commercialized by the Ajinomoto* Corporation in Japan in 1909.

According to these articles, glutamate is naturally found in many foods, most notably Parmesan cheese and tomatoes, which are often used to season dishes. Traditionally, glutamate was added to foods in Japan by boiling kombu seaweed to produce a broth. Apart from the naturally occuring glutamates, the synthetic monosodium glutamate is added to all kinds of things, under all sorts of names, including monopotassium glutamate, glutavene, glutacyl, glutamic acid, autolyzed yeast extract, calcium caseinate, sodium caseinate, E621 (E620-625 are all glutamates)**, Ajinomoto, Ac'cent, and Gourmet Powder.

Apparently, the MSG myth has been debunked; there is no evidence to support that people are sensitive or have health effects to it. The authors of these articles suggest that MSG is in a lot more than Chinese foods and people are eating it all the time. I disagree, as I have been aware of many of its names and avoid eating it in anything. Not so hard, since I avoid eating those foods - soup mix, Worchestershire sauce, Doritos - for so many reasons.

My argument is this: there is a difference between the naturally occuring and synthetic forms of any chemical. MSG is not identical to what you get when you boil seaweed. So it makes sense that people will react differently to the two substances. For example, I like corn (the vegetable). Corn the vegetable tastes good and feels good. I also like fruit, which naturally contains a sugar called fructose. Corn syrup and processed corn in all it's ubiquitous glory does not agree with me so well. I can tell immediately if I've accidentally eaten something with corn syrup, especially high fructose corn syrup. Once you start messing with things in the lab, they are different, and our bodies react differently to them. (I could go on at length about the biochemistry behind behind synthetic corn syrup metabolism, but I'll spare you unless you really want to know.) Moreover, MSG is manufactured from starch, which in today's world pretty much always come from processing corn. In the end, I'm not convinced yet that synthetic MSG, or fructose, are just like what is found in real food, and I'm still not gonna eat it.

There's just one problem. The Guardian article singles out the "yeast extract" in Marmite as MSG. I thought it came from the sludge left behind after brewing beer, and according to the Wikipedia entry for Marmite this is true. If it really is MSG, it would be the only form of synthetic MSG I've willingly consumed, and I haven't noticed any serious aftereffects. I don't eat it often, but it's a food I hold in high regard - a vegan source of vitamin B12!!. (Yes, I am on the pro side of the Marmite debate. I don't believe it is a weapon sent to destroy society, as some people I know do.) So what to do? I'm going to have to get me a new jar and test it out, or else do a little research on the Marmite company. I hope they don't let me down!


*This explains why, after months of trying figure out how to ask for food without MSG in the many mediocre Chinese and Thai restaurants in India, I finally discovered it was referred to as Ajinomoto. This didn't sound very Hindi to me, but now I know why.
**Another mystery of India explained. These E### additives were in so many packaged foods in India that I refused to buy. It was described as an "approved food additive," which is true but sneaky. In a place with so many problems of food adulteration with unapproved additives, I guess this is important to know.

So many bugs, so little time

Now that I am living back in Canada and have regular email access, I can't seem to post any blog entries. Hmmm. Time seems to go by at warp speed here, unlike in India where weeks can seem like months (and vice versa at times). Coming back to the western world, living in Heather's spare room for 2 weeks, moving into a new home, and getting to know a new roommate took a lot more energy than I had been counting on. Seems like I just managed to pull it together enough to do what needed to be done for the two classes I am TAing: Land Food and Community III and Nutrition Education in the Community. That's been really fun, but a steep learning curve and pretty time consuming, especially the first time around.

Still, TAing 2 courses, which can be expected to take more than the 15 hours per week I'm getting paid for, shouldn't be a full time job. So why was I so exhausted and not even able to think about my thesis? I couldn't still have jetlag after a month, could I? And fatigue, as it turns out, is even more tiring when you are struck with waves of nausea every couple of hours combined with the occasional bit of vomiting. Memories of eating and drinking questionable foods and walking barefoot in the jungle sent me to the doctor for a checkup.

After spending a fun Saturday morning mixing my poo in little vials containing formaldehyde, I learned that my body was riddled with parasites. Not just one kind, but three little critters had been sqatting in my body for who knows how long. I was the proud host to Giardia lamblia,

Entamoeba histolytica (you may have heard of amoebic dysentary?),

and my personal favourite, Blastocystis hominis.


so it's amazing I was walking around at all.

On the up side, I got some Flagil, a nasty drug that turned the skin on my face to leather and made me itch all over, I started to feel better just in time to go to Paris. I think I've said a final goodbye to my unwanted guests, but will get the confirmation in a week or so. Hopefully I can stop feeding the parasites and start feeding my brain so I can finally get some writing done!

First run

Today was the day. I went for my first run since leaving Vancouver in September. I didn't run in India because the crowds, the traffic, and the smoky air would be too much for me. So needless to say, I'd been anticipating this moment for some time, and it was indeed glorious. Now that I'm living 3 blocks from the beach, the logical place to go was along the sea wall. I headed out in the late afternoon, running along at an easy pace with a park to one side and the beach to the other, listening to the silence and the sound of the ocean lapping against the shore. It was a clear, crisp day - one of those that you savour in Vancouver because of its beauty and rarity. The downtown skyline was silhouetted against the bright blue sky (no haze!). The low sun made the calm water of English bay shine a brilliant silver grey blue. As the sun gradually set over the islands and the Point Grey peninsula to the west, the sky became a rainbow, morphing from pink to brilliant orange to yellow before opening up into the vast grey green blue above. These days always make my heart flutter a little, but today, especially today, after the oppressive haze of Delhi, it all made me understand once again how fortunate I am to live here. India's smog does make for spectacular sunsets, but I wouldn't trade this air for anything.

Return to Lotusland

I finally made it back home to Vancouver, with mixed feelings as usual. I don't quite feel at home yet, even though I've been back for 10 days now...probably because I haven't had a home yet. I've been sleeping in Heather and Charles' spare room (thanks guys!) waiting for my new apartment to get painted. My stuff finally got moved in today, and I will follow it tomorrow.

Life back in Canada, i.e., real life, is busy. I am a teaching assistant for two fourth-year courses this semester, on top of my commitments to Slow Food, Farm Folk City Folk, and that little thing called a thesis. I haven't even had to time to really digest the last four months yet. I have all sorts of fleeting thoughts running through my head but no time to put them all together. So much has happened, yet in some ways I feel like I've hardly been away at all.

I'll write more thoughts on things past and things to come once I get myself settled in. It's nice to be home where things are relatively easy and the air is clean, but despite all it's difficulties, India still has some things that I miss very much already.

Welcome to the "Good Times"

I had a little trouble finding a flight from Kochi back to Delhi. Internet booking with a foreign credit card doesn't always work, and travel agents tend to be sketchy and largely useless. They either call the airline or go to a public online booking website. The one agent in Kumily couldn't find me anything on an airline I was willing to fly, and my attempts online got me nothing. I was getting a little nervous, because flying into Delhi means risking an overnight delay due to fog, and I have a lot of stuff to do there before flying home early Wednesday morning. Finally, I managed to call some airlines directly and get myself a flight for a decent price. Sure, I'm stuck in Chennai airport for 6 hours between flights, but otherwise it's OK. I called up Kingfisher Airlines, the best of the domestic carriers, which happens to be owned by the same guy who owns Kingfisher beer. He's an Indian Hugh Hefner type, who likes to call himself "The King of Good Times." When I got through to the ticket agent, I was greeted with a "Welcome to the good times, Miss Karen," and I knew I must have made the right choice.

To be honest, I was kind of hoping I wouldn't get a ticket and would have to delay the whole thing. Leaving Kochi meant a goodbye I wasn't looking forward to. Now that I've left, I know I was avoiding it with good reason. It was probably the hardest farewell I've ever had to say. All of India seems to exist within a strange time-space warp, but this time I just couldn't get it to work in my favour. After a tear-filled night and a morning that came way too soon, I was reluctantly whisked off, bleary eyed, peering out the back window of the white Ambassador taxi to start my journey back to a city that I love to hate.

Life in the High Range

We spent the last few days of our vacation with Nathan's sister Claire up in the Western Ghats of Kerala, in the little town of Kumily, which is nestled between the Periyar Tiger Reserve and endless spice, tea and rubber plantations. It was a long bus ride, and we arrived tired and dirty but happy to have some cool air after the heat of Kochi.

Day 1 - Dog attack!
Kumily may be a quaint little mountain town, but like all of India, it is full of dogs. Some have owners, many do not. All look a little sketchy. Our first morning in town we were on our way to breakfast to sample some of the local coffee (which, incidentally, was weak and bitter) and two dogs next to use started fighting (or humping, it's hard to tell). A local guy broke them up and one barking and growling at us. When Nathan stuck out his foot to try to shoo it away, it took the opportunity to wrap its jaws around his bare foot. It didn't do too much damage, but it did break the skin in a few places. Rabies is rampant in India, and although someone came and took the dog away on a chain (we still don't know if it was taken home, beaten, or killed - all are plausible) the chances of it getting tested for rabies was less than zero. We had to get Nathan a rabies vaccine, and quick. The guidebook said this is almost impossible to find in India, and given where we were, we got a little nervous. We cleaned up the wound and rushed off to the local Catholic hospital, where Nathan got a clean foot, some antibiotics, and the first of 6 nasty shots in the arm, all in less than an hour all for the low low price of about $10. Dunno if the guidebook was wrong, or if it's just Kerala's history of quality accessible health care, but the whole process was remarkably easy. The hospital was simple but efficient and hygienic. The female (!) doctor seemed very competent, and the nurses got the job done well.

Day 2 - Spices spices everywhere, except in the food
We took a tour of the Aroma Organic Spice Garden, a small home-run place run my Mr. MS Sebastian and his wife. He gave us an amazing tour of the garden, looking at, smelling, and tasting all kinds of different spices. He had cacao, ginger, turmeric, clove, nutmeg, allspice, coffee, pineapples, holy basil, chillies, pepper, vanilla, cardamom...... and a few very cute goats. It's amazing how low-maintenance most of these things are. With the exception of a few root crops, most are trees and don't seem to require much attention until picking time, which is incredibly labour-intensive. The fresh young ginger was juicy and strong, like no ginger I've ever seen. It hadn't had the time to develop the woody lignin fibres that make ginger stringy, and the flavour was amazing. Pepper, as it turns out, can be processed four different ways to make black, white, red, and green peppercorns. The black pepper is simply picked and dried. Red is left on the vine for longer to bring out the colour. White pepper, the most expensive, is soaked overnight until it becomes white and gelatinous, and is later dried into the hard peppercorns we get. The best part of all this was the vanilla. We could smell it drying in the sun as soon as we pulled up at Mr. Sebastian's driveway. The oily seeds inside each pod give such an amazing aroma that hangs in the air like late autumn harvest moon.

Mr. Sebastian's spice garden is small and family run. He and his wife are a sweet couple who are clearly very excited about spices and eager to show off what they are doing. Mrs. Sebastian grinds all their foods by hand using a giant mortar and pestle that is almost as tall as she is. She grinds all the coffee (of which mister drinks 10 cups a day), rice, spices - yet claims not to work as hard as her husband because she just works in the house. They proudly told us they were Catholic, and described all the saints in the pictures decorating their small living room/bedroom/office. They beamed as they told us about their son, who works at the cardamom trading centre in town. We saw not only his photo, but his college magazine, diploma, and countless other mementos. We were still keeping up our story that Nathan and I are married (keeps things simple in a conservative country like India), and now we had a sister. This clearly gave us some street cred with these two.

Despite the wealth of spices growing on plantations, in small gardens, and even wild in the forest, we had a lot of trouble finding any sign of them in our food. The restaurants in Kumily were either invisible to foreigner eyes or geared strongly toward rich Indian tourists and western backpackers. These people and their unadventurous palates have given all foreigners a reputation for disliking spice (and apparently any kind of flavour), and we have to suffer the gastronomic consequences. One thing I miss about the north is the ability to get, if not great, decent food in a restaurant.

Day 3 - Long walk to Tamil Nadu
We couldn't leave Kumily without a visit to the Tiger Reserve to catch a glimpse of some large and wild beasts. On the recommendation of the man who organized our visit to the spice garden we avoided the crowded government boat in the main part of the reserve and instead booked our own jungle walk with a local guide. We were told we would be taken to a less touristy part of the reserve and assured that hiking shoes were not necessary. I was concerned since I only had flip-flops, but we were assured they would be no problem. The only worry was leaches, and the guide would have leach socks and powder.

So, we set off on foot at 5:30am, and our guide quickly left the road and directed us into the jungle. (First warning bell: What the hell are we doing here in the dark with a stranger, instead of going off by jeep like all the other people we saw out at that hour of the morning?) We were directed to put on the leach socks - basically huge cotton gaiters with full feet that tie at the knee. Claire and I stuck these inside our sandals, but mine kept slipping out of my backless flip-flops. We quickly realized this was no walk in the park; this was a full-on hike through the mountains into the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu. Up and down over the hills, mostly off trail. I was working double duty just to keep my shoes on, and eventually gave up and walked shoeless in the leach socks. Once they got wet and heavy, the guide said it would be OK to just walk barefoot in my sandals. I trusted him (Mistake #2). By the time we stopped for food near a little stream, I was soaked to the knees in water and mud, starting to get blisters, and really tired and sore. I took off my shoes and rinsed my feet in the water. Then I found the leach stuck to the bottom of my foot. Rabik, the guide, plucked it off and covered all our feet in tobacco powder to kill leaches. We set off, but not before Rabik washed his huge knife in the steam to cut up a pineapple for us to eat (Another warning sign ignored. Stay tuned...) Anyway, after 4 hours we were all tired and I was miserable, so we asked Rabik to take a short cut out of the park. I didn't get any more leaches, but it took some serious scrubbing and soaking to return my feet to something resembling their normal colour. No major damage, but lots of small cuts that seem like ideal parasite access points, and I still haven't gotten the dirt out of my cracked and calloused heels. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. And that pineapple? Well, I avoided it, Nathan got lucky, and poor Claire, having only been in India a few days, hadn't built up a lot of stomach resistance yet. The nausea started soon after, and we had to make many emergency pit stops along the road during our 6 hour drive back to Kochi in the afternoon. Thankfully our taxi driver was kind and responsive, and Nathan and I were able to screen her from passing cars by holding up a dhoti.

So, for all our efforts we saw:
- giant squirrels
- black monkeys
- bison
- lots of funky birds
- elephant tracks but no elephants
- n'ar sign of the elusive tiger (which is maybe OK)