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.