Back [to] Bacon

Much of the summer, I've either been escaping the city for beautiful places or hiding out trying to make a visible dent in my long dissertation "to do" list, and I haven't been paying a lot of attention to the things that normally inspire posts. In lieu of that, I think it's time I tell The Bacon Story.

I've been thinking a lot about the progression of my dissertation over the past few years.... I started out thinking about models for assessing food security and sustainability on an international scale (clearly a ridiculous venture for a mere 6-year doctoral project). Then I streamlined my thinking and moved on to what may be my best idea EVER: a fascinating and dramatic tale, and one that I still hope to investigate in the future. When that fell through for practical reasons, thoughts about cooking skills and globalization eventually led me to what I am doing now: an inquiry into what motivates people to engage in food system change in two very different but strangely similar places, India and Canada.

How I got here is one story. Thinking about how "here" has affected me has taken me on a journey of self-reflection about the interplay between my dissertation and my life and value systems. Each has had a huge effect on the other in many ways, but the thread that weaves it all together is made of connection, community, and spirit. One of the most visible effects this has had on me is my recent disregard of a lifetime of avid vegetarianism. Since deciding around age 3 that I didn't think it was a good idea to eat animals, I consumed absolutely no meat or poultry (with the exception of an unfortunate phase of processed and deli meats, which one can't really call "meat", during my youth) for another 32 years. I had experiments with seafood throughout my 20s and 30s, but that's as close as I came. I was deep into my field work in the summer of 2007 when I suddenly realized I was an omnivore. My lifetime sense of identity as a vegetarian was out the window and I wasn't quite sure what to make of it all.

At the risk of inspiring hatred, or at least extreme jealously, I have to say that my field work consisted largely of traveling to farms in southern BC and visiting people in all sorts of exotic places to look at, talk about, pick, shop for, cook, and eat a lot of really, really good food with all sorts of interesting people like Bollywood stars, elderly seed savers, university professors, and young activists. I also had meetings with bureaucrats and days of combing through policy documents, but that part wasn't nearly as much fun.

So back to the summer of '07 and my Conversion. I was spending the day in the Fraser Valley visiting farms with a bunch of city folk who had signed up for a tour to go and learn where their food comes from. We had arranged to have lunch at the home of an apple orchardist who also raised chickens, a few animals, and vegetables for a kitchen garden. He had asked in advance about dietary restrictions and I, along with about half the group, said that I was vegetarian. We had just finished touring the farm when we sat down for a fabulous outdoor lunch of fresh salad, homemade apple cider, and - for the vegetarians - egg salad sandwiches. The happy looking chickens (yes, I do think chickens can look happy) who kindly produced our eggs were running around in the field right next to our table. The sandwich was garnished with a few slices of very fragrant crispy bacon. Without even thinking, I reached out set the bacon quietly aside and enjoy my sandwich. I had the bacon in my hand when our farmer host started to tell its story. He and a neighbour had raised a pig from birth. Their kids had played with the young piglet. He spoke very fondly of that pig. And when the time came, he and the neighbour respectfully slaughtered and cleaned the animal right there on the farm (I'll spare you the details here). They cut and cured all manner of pork parts for their freezers, and they chose a choice piece from the back to make into bacon. For what seemed like 20 minutes, he described in great detail how they cured and brined and salted this bacon, how they aged it for months in the cool cellar below his house. This was the introduction to our lunch, and I still had that bacon between my fingers when he finished the story. He told it with such passion and respect and love that it would have felt fundamentally wrong to let any piece of that pig go to waste. My sense of responsibility toward the pig's life seemed so much more important than my own ideas of what was right or wrong to eat. That seemed self-centred and insular and no longer relevant to my own reality. Instead of putting it to the side of my plate, I silently thanked the pig and that piece of back bacon went straight into my mouth. It was heavenly.

For days after, I found myself telling my friends: "I ate bacon!", excited and giddy as if I had just won the lottery. I wasn't sure I could do it again, but it felt like the right thing to do at the time. In the following weeks and months, my field work took me to more farms and more meals at which I was offered more meat from animals that had been raised, and prepared with the utmost of respect for the animals, for nature, and for the people who would share the food.

Now that my field work is complete, I miss sharing those meals with people who were living out their passion for food in every aspect of their lives, but the effect of those meals has stayed with me. I'm hardly a raging carnivore, but I continue to eat meat from time to time when I know the animals were treated with respect or when it is offered as a gift from someone I care about.

Bring on the bacon.
.

The dump, and other culinary delights

I'm recently back from a 10-day trip to Yellowknife, NWT. I was happily sent there by work to attend the International Congress of Circumpolar Health, and stayed on an extra few days to see the sights and visit with my friend Shannon. If you haven't been to Yellowknife, I highly recommend it. It's a kooky little place with about 18,000 people who are tough enough to brave the cold winters and summer mosquitoes. Me being me, I was excited to check out the food situation there and try some of the wild northern delicacies. I'm happy to report that I managed to eat Arctic char every single day.

There are 3 major grocery stores in Yellowknife, the smallest being right downtown. On first glance, I was struck to see some empty space on the shelves, but noticed that the produce coolers were well stocked, and the quality and price of the fresh produce was far superior to what I saw in St. John's in March. The two larger shops, and particularly the Coop, were full of fresh food and lots of variety, all at prices only slightly higher than I would pay here in Vancouver. Restaurant food, on the other hand, was another story. Good, yes, but cheap it was not. I had a fantastic meal at the famous Wildcat Cafe, dinner in a northern French bistro bar, mooseburgers and pike tacos at the Folk on the Rocks fest, fine scotch at the local pub, and a fantastic meal of fried Arctic char and chips at Bullock's Bistro, where there's no menu – you just choose which fish you like (so good that it felt like a bargain at $50 for fish and chips and a bottle of beer).

This was all well and good, but left me ill prepared for my visit to the city dump. Now, anyone who knows Yellowknife will know that the local dump is THE place to go to find treasures and salvage the perfectly good things people throw away (they even have a blog!). So, we cycled a short distance out the highway en route to the folk festival to see what we could find. I was actually looking for a birthday gift for my dad (sorry Dad – almost had you a nice set of "learn to speak French" CDs, but the box was missing the beginner levels so I thought better of it). We were just about to leave with a prize stash of glitter glue and perfectly good mason jars when we saw a woman pull up in a truck and start heaving bags of fresh produce onto the garbage heap. I couldn't hide my shock and dismay so we pulled up on our bikes to see what was happening.

She looked at us a little dumbfounded at being caught wasting food. She explained that the vegetables were left over from a summer camp, and must not be good anymore since they had been in a cooler for a week. She had huge bags of organic carrots and sweet peppers in perfect condition, whole melons, loaves of bread, and who knows what else. Since there wasn't another camp for a few weeks, she decided to throw it all away. We suggested she donate the food to a shelter or pantry, but she apparently didn't know of any. Shannon explained that the Salvation Army was just down the road, but she wasn't going that way. So, examined the unopened bags still in her cooler, found them to be perfect, and strapped about 20lbs of carrots and a couple dozen peppers onto our bikes and backpacks and rode back into town to store them in the fridge before heading back out to the folk festival.

What was most disturbing about this whole situation certainly wasn't that we picked up vegetables at the dump (we took them straight from the cooler in the truck). Partly we were stunned that someone from a summer camp for kids didn't have a good enough sense of her community to know about (or have interest in) the social services available. Mostly though, it was the complete lack of knowledge about the food itself. Being fresh produce, this stuff didn't have expiry dates on it. You just have to look, touch, and smell to figure out if it's good. They had assumed that simply because it was in a cooler (not out in the open — in a cooler!) it MUST have gone off. The fact that the skins were shiny and taught, with no signs of blemishes and no softness or shriveling or mould, was no indication that this food was perfectly good to eat. It was in better shape than a lot of what I've seen in grocery stores! We were all quite stunned, and saddened, to realize once again that this kind of basic food knowledge is just not commonly shared by a lot of people. And really, if people aren't cooking with basic ingredients on a regular basis, they can't be blamed for not knowing anything about them!

(More pictures of Yellownife glory here.)

Real food is...dangerous??

My mother recently sent me one of those little tidbits of email wisdom that plague the internet from time to time, confusing people. I emailed her my thoughts, but thought I might just as well expose the rest of you my little rant. First, here's the gist of the email:

Written by Zola Gorgon - author of several cookbooks..
Watch out for those spoiled onions. I had the wonderful privilege of touring Mullins Food Products, makers of mayonnaise. Mullins is huge, and is owned by 11 brothers and sisters in the Mullins family....
The guy who gave us our tour is named Ed. He's one of the brothers. Ed is a chemistry expert and is involved in developing most of the sauce formula. He's even developed sauce formula for McDonald's. Keep in mind that Ed is a food chemistry whiz. During the tour, someone asked if we really needed to worry about mayonnaise. People are always worried that mayonnaise will spoil. Ed's answer will surprise you..
Ed said that all commercially-made Mayo is completely safe. "It doesn't even have to be refrigerated. No harm in refrigerating it, but it's not really necessary." He explained that the pH in mayonnaise is set at a point that bacteria could not survive in that environment. He then talked about the quint-essential picnic, with the bowl of potato salad sitting on the table and how everyone blames the mayonnaise when someone gets sick.
Ed says that when food poisoning is reported, the first thing the officials look for is when the 'victim' last ate ONIONS and where those onions came from (in the potato salad). Ed says it's not the mayonnaise (as long as it's not homemade Mayo) that spoils in the outdoors. It's probably the onions, and if not the onions, it's the POTATOES. He explained, onions are a huge magnet for bacteria, especially uncooked onions. You should never plan to keep a portion of a sliced onion. He says it's not even safe if you put it in a zip-lock bag and put it in your refrigerator. It's already contaminated enough just by being cut open and out for a bit, that it can be a danger to you (and doubly watch out for those onions you put in your hotdogs at the baseball park!).....
For some reason, I see a lot of credibility coming from a chemist and a company, that produces millions of pounds of mayonnaise every year.'

First of all, do you really want to take advice about what to eat from the man who invented McDonald's special sauce? Seriously, what's in that stuff? I'll tell ya:

Big Mac® Sauce:
Soybean oil, pickle relish [diced pickles, high fructose corn syrup, sugar, vinegar, corn syrup, salt, calcium chloride, xanthan gum, potassium sorbate (preservative), spice extractives, polysorbate 80], distilled vinegar, water, egg yolks, high fructose corn syrup, onion powder, mustard seed, salt, spices, propylene glycol alginate, sodium benzoate (preservative), mustard bran, sugar, garlic powder, vegetable protein (hydrolyzed corn, soy and wheat), caramel color, extractives of paprika, soy lecithin, turmeric (color), calcium disodium EDTA (protect flavor).

I've bolded the parts that aren't actually food, or that are likely to be genetically modified. Now I'll ask again, are you going eat what this guy tells you to eat?

Chemists know about chemistry. They know how to make something smooth, last for all of eternity, keep it moist, add fake taste, add colour, change the texture. Incidentally, all of these things are already there if you just eat actual food. The fact that a company produces millions of pounds of something every year is not an indication that it's good. It's an indication that they have good marketing. (The sauce above is a great example.) It's also not an indication that it's safe. Think about how much deli meat Maple Leaf produced last year, or how many jars of peanut butter came out of the Peanut Corporation plant in Georgia.

Which brings me to my second point. Are you really going to take advice about what to eat from a man who considers the fact that commercial mayonnaise will never spoil, even if unrefrigerated, a good thing? What does it take to make it last indefinitely, given that mayonnaise is supposed to be made by whipping raw egg yolk, vinegar, and oil (I know, I've made it from scratch). Although the acid in mayonnaise will slow down bacterial growth, its ingredients can spoil, and so they should. I'll take homemade any time, because if something won't spoil, I worry. It's a good general rule to never eat anything that won't spoil, because that's a pretty reliable sign that it's not really food but something a chemist concocted in a lab.

Another good rule for eating (and life for that matter) is to never put anything in your body if you don't know what it is or where it's come from.

To address the safety issue, I suspect what this guy is talking about is the fact that onions grow in the ground and thus get dirt on them. Depending on how you're farming, there could be all sorts of things in that dirt (another good reason to know where your food comes from). Even if the onions are washed off, something could remain on the skin, which will then get into the onion once your slice it from the outside in. Because onions are very moist, they are a great bacteria growing medium. This, however, is not unique to onions. This is why there have been problems in the past with contaminated melons. Slicing moves whatever is on the skin to the inside edible part. I guess we're just more likely to leave a cut onion in the fridge.

Breaking down the silos

A couple of weeks ago, I had the great opportunity to be part of a panel discussion following the screening of a new documentary call FRESH here in Vancouver. I encourage everyone to see this film if you get the chance. There are no more screenings scheduled for Canada, but you can arrange to host one, or order a copy of the DVD for yourself. Here's what it's about:

FRESH celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across America who are re-inventing our food system. Each has witnessed the rapid transformation of our agriculture into an industrial model, and confronted the consequences: food contamination, environmental pollution, depletion of natural resources, and morbid obesity. Forging healthier, sustainable alternatives, they offer a practical vision for a future of our food and our planet.

Among several main characters, FRESH features urban farmer and activist, Will Allen, the recipient of MacArthur’s 2008 Genius Award; sustainable farmer and entrepreneur, Joel Salatin, made famous by Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma; and supermarket owner, David Ball, challenging our Wal-Mart dominated economy.

It's a fantastic film, and presents a really positive view of what is hopeful in the food system. Ana the director gets her point across while leaving the viewers with a sense that the food industrial complex is not the only way forward.

Not surprisingly, a lot of what came up in the film reminded me of the issues I'm trying to address in my thesis, and the quintessential farm imagery of the silo really triggered some thoughts. In the film, Iowa farmer George Naylor (of Omnivore's Dilemma fame) talks about how the natural cycles that sustained the farm for generations were broken when the silos were put up on his farm. In academia, this metaphor of silos is used to describe how we operate in disciplines that lose connection with reality by not communicating with one another. Scientists and academics love to pull out one little piece of a puzzle and study it in isolation, and then attempt to relate the findings back to the real world. Efforts for transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and crossdisciplinary research try to reconnect research to reality. In reality, this tends to be a lot of rhetoric because the Academy and all its associated institutions are set up to operate within disciplines, or silos if you will.

To bring this back to the food issue, the silos on farms across North America are a fantastic representation of the way we have distanced ourselves from our food. This separation - of food from nature, of people from food, of farming from community - is my hypothesis of what is wrong in food around the world. It can be connected to issues of hunger, nutrition, obesity, social structures, and the list could go on. By putting grain into silos, we lose sight of it. When we lose sight of something, we lose control over it. When we lose control, we lose knowledge of what is really happening. When we lose knowledge, we lose any sense of real choice. The silos represent the start of wide scale industrialization, standardization, commodization, professionalization*, .....ization, ....., that contribute to a loss of food culture and the sense that our environment is something 'other' than ourselves.

We put food into silos and forgot where it came from. Everything changed in the way we eat once those silos went up, and as a society we didn't notice. The power over what's to eat shifted away from the farmers who grow the food to the corporations who sell it. They try to control nature by industrial agriculture and our diet by mass processing and marketing. When we put up silos, whether literally or figuratively, we distance ourselves from the natural world, and we aren't going to figure things out until we break them down. That's why we need the heroes, visionaries, and activists - those people in FRESH, and the ones I've been working with for my thesis - to drive this movement to help us reconnect, remember, and rebuild our cultural, ecological, and social connection to food.
_______
*By professionalization, I'm referring to the way we have passed authority over knowing what to eat to medical professionals who offer dietary guidelines that are so complex that nobody knows what to eat any more without professional advice. These guidelines are a victim of scientific reductionism and are based on nutrients and not foods, and arguably, further separate us from what we eat.
.

Look what I made!

In all my talk about the importance of connecting to our food, I try to do what I can to reconnect with mine. Usually this comes though in the way I acquire (i.e., buy) food, but I'm trying my best to step outside the usual retail system whenever I can. Food to me should be elevated beyond something as base as unconscious financial exchange. I think we can become far more nourished by our food if it comes with some measure of effort, a little bit of thought, and through some kind of human connection. I'm not about to ditch my city digs for a farm (for many reasons, one of which being I would likely starve to death), so here's what I've been doing in lieu.

• I go to the fabulous Vancouver farmers markets when they're in season.
• For the second year in a row, I've joined a CSA with a cooperative farm for produce during the summer and early fall. (CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. Basically, you buy a share in a farm in the spring and in return get a share of what is produced. We are shareholders in the true sense: we put up some of money to help the farm get going during planting time, and we share in both the risk and produce of the season. If it's a terrible growing year, we don't get a lot of edibles for our money, but we do get to know that we've taken a tiny bit of the burden off a group of farmers who are struggling even in good times. If it's a great year, we get the bounty of that in exchange for taking that risk and paying up front. My share is with a cooperative farm Fraser Common Farm in Abbotsford, which also happens to be the home of one of my research partners for my thesis project.)
• This year, I am proud to say that I am one of the founding shareholders in the Urban Grains CSA. This is a CSA that produces local grain...a rare find in these parts. Apparently the early settlers of the Lower Mainland of BC grew a lot of wheat and other hardy grains. This is no prairie, but if the settlers didn't grow their own, they would have starved. (It's good to remind ourselves from time to time that there are a number of conditions beyond our control - natural disaster or trade disruption being the most likely - that could bring us back to a similar state. And it's even more important to remind ourselves how absolutely unprepared we are for that kind of occurrence.) So, Urban Grains is trying once again to grow grain for human consumption around Vancouver. A local couple got the idea, found some heritage seed grains, and found a farmer willing to plant them. We members have put up some cash to get things going, and with a little luck and a hopefully dry summer, we'll each have 20 kilograms of freshly milled hard and soft wheat flour in the fall. Cool!
• One of my favourite new places to get food is a little shop down the street called Home Grow-In. A farmer from the Okanagan Valley opened this little place in my neighbourhood on a residential streetcorner. She sells only locally produced plants and food products. They don't take debit or credit, only cash or cheque. I was buying some strawberries and bread there yesterday and realized I was short on cash. It was no problem...I just took my stuff home and dropped off the rest of the money the next time I biked by. I bet they wouldn't let me do that at Whole Foods.
• And last but not least, I'm putting a twist on a popular Vancouver pasttime and "growing my own". My little city balcony is just about filled with pots of edibles at various stages of growth. I'm already on my second seeding of mesclun greens. There's a lovely zephyr squash just about ready to be picked, lots of herbs, kale and chard, some edible flowers (marigolds and nasturtiums), and tomatoes and onions on the way. I'd love to add a chicken and a goat, but I'm worried that my landlord downstairs might frown on that.... I am, however, putting my underground parking space to good use and raising worms. (Not for eating....my newfound omnivorousness hasn't quite gone that far yet!) They are eating my food waste and I am putting their waste back onto my plants as yummy compost and compost tea.

One of the things that been a great motivator - as if I needed any motivation to increase my personal food supply - is a group called VanGrow. We like to think of ourselves as something between a peasant movement and a gardening support group. It all started after a neighbour and local restauranteur, and owner of my favourite Indian restaurants Vij's and Rangoli, decided it was time to get more connected to both food and community and put an open invitation in the Vancouver Sun for people interested in joining her. We still haven't figured out what we are, but so far it's a loose collective of people interested in food and growing food, and interesting in sharing the experience with others. We share stories, ideas, skills, and seeds. Some of us got together to inoculate some logs with shitake spores and should have a nice crop of fresh mushrooms in the spring. It's pretty amazing to see how a group of complete strangers can come together over cups of tea and, in a few short months, create a movement of almost 200 people interested in doing more about their own personal food supply.