India calling

It seems that my scholarship from Shastri was just the start of a series of serendipitous events that are, I hope, the beginning of a year that will see me back to India. It seems that old and new connections are making sure I don't stop thinking about India.



In the first week of 2009:
- I received a scholarship from the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute.
- I saw a fabulous movie set in Mumbai called Slum Dog Millionaire.
- My friend Dana took me to my very first Canadian kirtan.
- I read a book by Anita Desai called In Custody, set in old Delhi.
- My dear friend Ramesh emailed to say he is coming to the west coast of North America, from Dharamsala, and hoped we could visit.
- Dr. Giri, head of the Schumacher Centre for Development in Delhi and one of the many amazing people I met at random there, reignited our email correspondence and began a discussion of potential co-authoring. He may even make it to Vancouver this year.
- Another research contact from the GREEN Foundation who I've only spoken with on the phone found an old text message from May, found my email address, and got back in touch. He's now with the AME Foundation and we will try to connect next time I'm there.

I'm choosing to take all this as a sign that (1) I need to go back (no surprise there), and (2) it is finally time to finish that pesky thesis so I can go back with a light heart and feeling that I have contributed something to this place that seems to have become such an important part of my life.

Beginning anew

Well, it's another new year (and no need to count how many there have been since I started this PhD thing) and time to start fresh. My dissertation has been on extended hiatus since I came back from India in June - it lost out in favour of things like teaching, finding a place to live (twice!), and earning a living. I think I've found some degree of balance in that, and am looking forward to having only one job (at the NCCEH) and maybe the occasional contract. This of course means there should be room to work on my thesis.

Yes folks, I will resume work on my thesis starting this week. There. I said it. Publicly. Yikes, now I have to do it!

I got a friendly kick in the pants in the form of a $2000 scholarship from the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute - just enough for a flight to India to reconnect with people and give back some results to my research contacts. Naturally, I can't do that until I have some results to give, but knowing that I can pay for the flight is a nice prize to work toward.

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.