Who's 'me', you say? Guess I should have signed my post.
Linda

Many thanks to Pieter for teaching me how to do this. What fun!

I've just been looking at this year's program for the World Community Film Festival, and it's looking like again this year there will be some inspiring food related films.  I find it very hopeful that the focus on food issues by the film industry seems to be shifting towards positive actions and community-based approaches to food security, and less at scary agribusiness and GMO documentaries.  
In particular, the film 'Good Food' looks interesting!  Check out the full festival program here.  

Just as the Second World War had its Victory Gardens, the great economic tailspin of 2009 will have its Survival Plots, it seems. Campaigns are underway to persuade households, including even those at 10 Downing Street and the White House (no word on Sussex Drive), to plant vegetable gardens this year as buffers against dismal economic times.

It may conjure images of a desperate Scarlett O'Hara digging for radishes outside the looted Tara, but still, encouraging widespread planting of vegetable gardens is a positive response to the times. Or at least it should be.

There is just one problem.

When our grandmothers brought baskets of tomatoes, beans and potatoes in from their kitchen gardens, they knew what to do with them. This generation does not. Many don't cook.

Some don't even boil water.

Really.

For far too many people, cooking has become one of the many lost arts. But, unlike letter writing and darning, it is one they can't afford to do without. An inability to cook leaves people even more vulnerable to economic turmoil. There is not much victory in a garden if you don't know how to cook your harvest.

How did we forget how to cook?

It has been a cultural shift. Cooking takes time, something people insist they have little of.

And, unless you like to cook -- and many people still passionately do -- it is all too easy to get by without doing any. Processed, ready-to-serve food has been cheap and plentiful in recent years.

What is more, during recent flush economic times, growing numbers of people simply stopped eating at home very often.

In New York City, tiny apartment ovens are famously used to store dishes, or books. In middle America, families were eating out more than ever in history until recently. Speed replaced quality. Happy Meals replaced chicken noodle soup as a favourite family comfort food.

Yes, food television and literature have flourished in recent years, and with it the rise of a foodie class. More recently, the runaway popularity of local produce markets and 100-mile diets has made it seem as if we all had returned to our senses and learned to love food (and cooking) again. Or at least to be competent at it.

But that's not true.

Cooking good food became a leisure activity, enjoyed mainly by those who could afford both leisure time and good food.

For everyone else, there is prepared food and takeout. Or fast food, which is experiencing a revival. "Would you like fries with that?" has replaced "Finish your vegetables" as the mantra around many meals.

I would not have believed that so many people no longer cook until I took a trip to the United States recently.

There, in a giant modern grocery store, I found row after row of ready-to-serve, highly processed or partially prepared food, but had to search repeatedly for basic ingredients to make dinner.

Then it struck me -- this is a grocery store for people who don't cook. They may assemble, or heat up, but they are not cooking.

This move away from food has been so gradual that many of us didn't even notice.

We buy shrink-wrapped meat that bears no resemblance to the animal it once was.

We buy boxed and canned food, often paying more attention to the packaging than the contents.

We give up more and more of the food preparation -- we don't grow our own, can our own, or butcher our own anymore -- and as a result, we don't understand food.

As a society, that makes us vulnerable, particularly now, and particularly those of us who have lost, or never had, any cooking skills.

It is not difficult to make cheap, nutritious meals, but you have to know some basics, such as how to cook with dried beans and how to make soup and casseroles, how good food should taste. And, to really make use of a garden, you have to know how to freeze or bake with the overflowing produce.

What's the alternative? It's what those who are food illiterate do when money gets tight -- they rely on fast food, sandwiches, even cereal.

"People are going to economize and as they save money on food they will be eating more empty calories or foods high in sugar, saturated fats and refined grains, which are cheaper," worries Adam Drewnowski, director of the Nutrition Sciences Program at the University of Washington.

The result, he says, will be a worsening obesity epidemic and growing health problems for those who are least able to deal with them.

He suggests a "diet for a new Depression," featuring such staples as beans, ground beef, cheese, potatoes, tomatoes, soup and rice.

I would also suggest some basic cooking courses for high school students -- boys and girls -- as well as courses offered in the community on how to cook and eat well for less.

Vegetable gardens are a great symbol of a badly needed new common-sense approach to food.

But once you grow them, you need a plan. Call it cooking, or just plain survival.

Elizabeth Payne is a member of the Ottawa Citizen's editorial board.
E-mail: epayne@thecitizen.canwest.com
© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service

In the battle between Big Ag and Small Food there were notable victories on either side.

As 2009 closes out, the dominant issues in the world of food could be
lumped into two competing paradigms that have framed much of the decade. In one corner we have Big Food: factory farms, fast food restaurants, mystery meat, biotechnology and other examples of when the economics of scale are applied to how we feed ourselves. In the other corner is Small Food, whose players include farmers' markets, ecology-based agriculture and seasonal diets of minimally processed food.

In a victory for small food, 2009 will perhaps be remembered as the year
gardening returned to mainstream consciousness. Much credit goes to
First Lady Michelle Obama, thanks to the organic veggie patch she
planted on the White House lawn. The symbolic gesture created an instant buzz, and many other politicos around the world have followed suit. There are now gardens on the grounds of city halls, governors' mansions, and other houses of leadership around the world, providing countless opportunities to educate and discuss why gardens are good.

According to the National Gardening Association the number of households with gardens rose from 36 million in 2008 to 43 million in 2009.
Michelle Obama's garden certainly deserves some credit, but so does the
recession, which inspired many people to stick their hands in the dirt,
not only to save on grocery bills, but to find economical ways to enjoy
their leisure time.

Ironically, this proliferation of home gardeners bears some of the
responsibility for the rapid spread of a late tomato blight fungus which
nearly wiped out the commercial tomato crop on the East Coast. Many
gardeners bought tomato starts from stores like Home Depot, Kmart, Lowes and Wal-Mart, nearly all of which were raised by the Alabama nursery Bonnie Plants. Plant pathologists believe the nursery sent out infected plants, which slipped under the radar of agricultural inspectors and brought the spores to all corners. Unusually heavy rainfall encouraged the blight to take hold, prosper and spread. The take-home message: buy your plant starts from local nurseries, or grow them yourself from seeds.

In addition to kitchen gardens, another beneficiary of the recession is
a 93-year-old great-grandmother named Clara Cannucciari, whose YouTube videos combine salty commentary about life in the Great Depression with hands-on demonstrations on how to crank out simple delicacies that average 50 cents a serving. The videos helped win Clara a contract with St. Martin's Press, which published Clara's Kitchen: Wisdom, Memories, and Recipes from the Great Depression this past October.

It's impossible to discuss the year in food without an update on the
activities of biotech giant Monsanto, whose year can be summed up in a
single word: "chutzpah." In April, the company sued the sovereign nation
of Germany when its agriculture minister banned the planting of a type
of Monsanto corn engineered to thwart the advances of the corn-borer
moth. Monsanto was unsuccessful in forcing Germany to allow its farmers
to plant the corn, and recent research suggests Germany's concern
(shared by several other European countries) may have been warranted:
French scientists published a paper suggesting adverse affects of this
corn -- and two other types of GM corn -- on the kidneys and livers of rats.

While health and environmental concerns over GM crops are commonplace, in September federal judge Jeffrey White in California's Northern District ruled that Monsanto's sugar beets provided an economic threat to farmers who wished to grow organic or non-GM crops. Beet pollen is carried on the wind, and will pollinate chard as well as beets. In Oregon's Willamette Valley, where much of the nation's beet and chard seed is grown, the presence of Monsanto's "Roundup Ready" sugar beets threatens the livelihoods of farmers growing the non-GM varieties of these plants. It's also likely that after a few years of Roundup Ready sugar beet cultivation in the Willamette Valley it would be difficult to get non-GM beets or chard anywhere in the nation. According to judge White, Monsanto's sugar beets posed "...the potential elimination of a farmer's choice to grow non-genetically engineered crops, and the
consumer's right to eat non-genetically engineered food." The ruling,
against the USDA, forced the agency to complete an EIS examining the
potential impacts of the GM beets on organic seed growers and consumers before the Roundup Ready beets can again be planted.

Meanwhile, Monsanto's marketing practices have placed it on a collision
course with the U.S. Department of Justice, which this month indicated
it's considering anti-trust litigation. Monsanto's string of acquisitions have squelched almost any possibility of competition, while its seed prices have risen by an average of 42 percent. When the DOJ dispatched some of its lawyers to meet with Monsanto to discuss these developments, the company engaged the services of Jerry Crawford, an
Iowa lawyer who is a friend and financial supporter of USDA chief Tom
Vilsack. It's further indication that keeping Monsanto in line is about
as easy as wrestling an anaconda.

Monsanto owns the rights to genetic sequences found in more than 85
percent of corn planted in the United States, and 92 percent of soy.
Given the prevalence of corn and soy in the American diet, it's hard to
take a bite of any packaged food without eating Monsanto's handiwork.
What's scary is how little research has actually been done in the area
of food safety, and that nearly all such research has been conducted by
the company itself.

While touting its products as safe for humans and the environment,
Monsanto's main sales pitch is based on the claim that genetically
engineered seeds will increase crop yields and facilitate pest control.
But last summer, a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists concluded that genetically engineered seeds actually don't increase productivity.
 
Another study, by the Organic Center, found that since the introduction
of "Round-Up tolerant" corn, soy and cotton, farmers have sprayed 382.6
million more pounds of herbicides than they otherwise would have. This
is partly due to the proliferation of Round-Up resistant weeds: between
2007 and 2008, farmers increased the use of different herbicides by 31
percent in an effort to combat these superweeds. Nonetheless, the
company's Web site promotes the seeds as a key component in "sustainable agriculture."

While Monsanto has co-opted the term "sustainable agriculture," retail
giant Wal-Mart, already the world's largest vendor of organic food, is
poised to capitalize on the popularity of locally grown food. Wal-Mart
is looking at ways individual stores can carry foods grown by local
farmers. Another large grocer, Safeway, has this year begun aggressively
pushing a "locally grown" marketing campaign, while blatantly taking
advantage of the ambiguity in the term "local." A writer by the name of
Food Dude, on the Portland, Oregon blog Portland Food and Drink, busted Safeway with photographs of produce bearing out-of-state stickers next to signs announcing "I'm Local!" and "Locally Grown."

That large corporations are jumping on the sustainable, local and
organic bandwagons is arguably a good sign. It shows that these words,
and what they represent, have infiltrated the mainstream consciousness. One of the most powerful vehicles to deliver this message was Food Inc, the movie whose depressing yet important message about the American diet was seen by enough people to make it the highest grossing documentary of 2009.

The year closed with the anti-climactic climate summit in Copenhagen,
where U.S. Agriculture Secretary Vilsack acknowledged the huge role that livestock plays in global warming -- more than transportation activities by most estimates. Vilsack announced plans to build methane capture facilities at large dairy farms in order to turn that potent greenhouse gas into an energy source. He deserves credit for helping to keep agriculture at the forefront of climate change discussions.

On the other hand, searching for ways to enable the cattle industry,
while politically expedient in the short-term, are shortsighted in the
long-term. Which brings us to my prediction for next year's (or next
decade's) hot topic: serious soul-searching on the pros and cons of all
things bovine. From the atrocities of feedlots and slaughterhouses to
the environmental destruction wrought by cattle, given the skyrocketing
worldwide demand for meat, the human addiction to cow products is
reaching a breaking point.

By Ari LeVaux, AlterNet. Posted December 27, 2009.
http://tinyurl.com/yde8f2l

I'm not one for New Year's resolutions, but this year already I have a feeling that a lot of new things are happening.  For one, we have a new meeting space... and for another, it seems like we have a lot of new people and renewed energy around the board table.  We also are planning a new garden at the HUB, and I'm so excited about that!  


I'm also excited about the recent UBC food security project report (available on our Google Group), and the possibility of starting some urban agriculture programs in the Valley this year.  I had a chat with someone the other day at the Farmers' Market, and they were lamenting about how there's hardly any local veg available this time of year.  It's true there's not much beyond onions and kale; farmers quickly sell out of products that are more difficult to store fresh.  But at home, I still have many things that I'm nursing along.  There's so much that can be stored fresh or harvested through winter, but you have to do it yourself.  In fact, with enormous pride, I just used my last homegrown Indian Moon tomato!  


It was delicious; like eating July in January.  


It got me thinking about how much home growing contributes (or could contribute) to food security, quality of nutrition, self-confidence, and quality of life.  (Not to mention the contribution to climate change that the Mexican one that I'll be eating today has made.)  


I am a bit of a tomato geek.  I want to be able to have a tomato for every season.  I enjoy doing it so much, that I often try new things, and I forget that a lot of people don't know how, or don't have the confidence in their ability, the inspiration or the time to 'Do It Yourself'.  Next year, I'll be growing more good keepers, and I look forward to selling more heirloom tomato plants and winter veggies at the market, but I also hope that we can work on developing some programs for promoting this form of self-reliance for families in the Valley.  


Let's do it ourselves, and do it together!
Megan
Secretary@lushvalley.org