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Buying locally, thinking globally, and eating better

Forget butter. Don’t worry about salt. Ignore the dollop of sour cream and the sprinkling of bacon bits, cheddar cheese and chives.

Forget butter. Don’t worry about salt. Ignore the dollop of sour cream and the sprinkling of bacon bits, cheddar cheese and chives.

Fresh Pemberton new potatoes boiled in a little water don’t need any fancy dressings; they’re just plain delicious on their own. Simply pop one in your mouth and savour the flavour.

These small potatoes are just one part of the smorgasbord of delights coming from the rich Pemberton ground, just 20 minutes up the road from Whistler.

The time is ripe to buy local food.

Doing so moves Whistler one step closer to sustainability, helps local farmers thrive, and, as international studies show, goes a long way towards protecting the environment.

On top of it all, some say it simply tastes better too.

"There’s just no comparison," said Whistler’s Chef Bernard Casavant, referring to the food that’s grown locally and arrives freshly picked at his restaurant.

At Chef Bernard’s in the Upper Village, Casavant never quite knows what will be coming through the back door, fresh from the farm, on any given day. It could be bundles of sage and oregano from Lillooet or boxes of Pemberton produce.

It doesn’t really matter. When you’ve been a chef at the Four Seasons in Vancouver and the executive chef for the Fairmont Chateau Whistler, you can improvise with what gets thrown your way, especially if it’s just been picked.

"It can’t get any fresher," he said.

"Twelve to 14 hours from field to the plate. That’s how it should be."

According to the David Suzuki Foundation, that’s not the norm. In most North American households the average meal travels 2,400 kilometres to get to the plate.

"The longer distance it comes from, the more compromised it is in terms of quality," said Heather Pritchard, an organic grower and director of the non-profit Vancouver-based organization FarmFolk/CityFolk.

"Things are harvested before they’re ripe in order for them to be shipped longer."

When that happens, the produce loses some of its most valuable nutrients.

At the same time, the great distances covered bringing food from the field to the consumer means harmful emissions and greenhouse gases are spewed into the environment.

Compare those 2,400 kms to the food from the Helmer farm along the Pemberton Meadows Road. By the end of the summer everything on their dinner plates will be from their farm, just a few hundred metres from field to plate. And the meat portion of the dinner will be from another nearby farm.

"It’s sort of a living example of what you can do," said Lisa Helmer, the youngest of the three Helmer daughters who all pitch in at the family farm.

Standing across a neat field of potatoes at the Helmer’s it’s hard to believe the traditional family farm is becoming a thing of the past.

According to the 2001 Census of Agriculture the number of farms in BC declined 7.1 per cent in the five years since the 1996 census.

Here they are just gearing up for another busy summer season.

Beyond the Helmer farmhouse, three distant figures are crouched low to the ground, concentrating on the task at hand. Today is the first potato harvest of the season and a row of Warba new potatoes, followed by a row of Pontiacs, must be pulled from the ground and prepared for the Whistler Farmer’s Market the following day.

As the blazing noontime sun beats down, the dark freshly turned soil on their knees and hands offers them cool relief from the heat.

The day is almost half over and there’s still a lot of work to be done, but this job is a true labour of love.

"It’s about feeding your body and feeding your soul," said Lisa Helmer.

The 88-acre farm has been in the family for three generations. They still have some of the original farm equipment to prove it, in working order no less! The first tractor to farm the land was driven right up the Sea to Sky corridor by their grandfather back in the 1960s, before there was even a road to Pemberton.

You could say that farming is in their blood and that is perhaps why all three Helmer children stay connected and working on the land even as they follow other pursuits.

About 15 years ago when the family decided to start commercially farming, a few restaurants and stores encouraged them to pursue organic farming.

This was the push they needed, which guaranteed them a market for their product in what was seen as a fairly risky business at that time.

It took five years but by 1994 they could put the certified organic sticker on their produce. Now the stores, restaurants and even the locals can’t get enough.

"It’s come to the point where if you produce it, they’ll buy it," said Helmer.

"They’re always asking for more."

Although many people are specifically looking for organically grown food when they go to the markets these days, the Helmers have noticed that there is an increased awareness in buying locally grown food too.

"There’s a terrific demand," said Jeanette Helmer, the mother of this farming family.

"And it’s not just organic either. It’s local. People really want to buy things that haven’t travelled thousands of miles to get here and they can just tell by the taste."

A study conducted by the American-based Union of Concerned Scientists recommended that Americans should eat organic food to minimize the impact on four major world problems: global warming, air pollution, water pollution and habitat alteration.

The study estimated that the three biggest categories of impact are the houses we live in, the food we buy and the ways in which we get around town.

Buying organic food was seen as one of the ways to make a significant difference.

The David Suzuki Foundation, along with Canadian food experts, followed the same study but came to a slightly different conclusion. Rather than focus on organic food, the best way Canadians could positively impact those four world problems would be to buy local food. Of course organic local food was the best choice above all.

There were two main reasons for the different conclusions.

A lot of organic food in Canada comes from south of the border in California and Mexico. That food still has to travel a fair distance to get to a Canadian market with repercussions on our air quality.

"So we wouldn’t be actually cutting down the transportation of food to eat organic," said Ann Rowan, project director for the Web of Life at the David Suzuki Foundation.

In addition, the prime agriculture land in Canada hugs the border of the US. The bulk of the population is also clumped there. The theory is that if the local farmland is not utilized, it will eventually fall to the encroaching pressures of more urban development.

"By buying local foods we will in a sense give more financial support to local Canadian producers as well as try to begin to build those connections between urban consumers and farmers where we can begin to communicate our desires to move to more sustainable agriculture," said Rowan.

This connection between the farmer and the city dweller is crucial if Canadians are to understand where their food is coming from, how it is grown and indeed what they would like to see changed.

"It’s the contact," said farmer Al McEwan, who has met a steady slew of visitors from Whistler, Squamish, Lillooet and the Lower Mainland this summer.

They have been coming from far and wide to pick McEwan’s strawberries for the past three weeks.

Kids walk by the field, their buckets knocking against their legs, excited to get to work on the farm. It hardly seems like work to them. Along the rows people are pulling back the big green leaves of the plants, teasing off berries that are ripened to the core.

Though they buy them a bucketful at a time, McEwan said they’re not coming to his farm for the strawberries alone.

"It’s about being on the land, handling the crops, talking to the farmer, the experience of it all," he said.

"I think they do it just for the pure pleasure of spending a few hours in the confines of the Pemberton Valley."

This is a true farm-gate operation. The three acres of strawberries which have been harvested over the past three weeks, will out-produce the rest of the farm hands-down, even when the potatoes and carrots go on sale in September. The success of the June berries is critical to McEwan’s farm. That success is dependent on people physically coming to the farm and spending time on the land.

"Without this market, we may have given up by now," said McEwan, matter-of-factly.

Once visitors meet the farmer during strawberry season and understand how he runs his farm, the idea is that they’ll come back to the farm gate for the fall carrots and potatoes. A simple taste test of the June berries should be more than enough to entice them back for more.

Despite busy farm-gate operations like McEwan’s, the bulk of the population is getting further and further removed from the farm experience, both physically and mentally. They live in growing cities and they don’t have the time to collect their food at a farm. Nor do they expect to do so.

"Most people can’t go to the farms and I don’t think that that’s realistic to expect them to do," said Pritchard at FarmFolk/CityFolk, an organization which is helping build a sustainable local food system in the Lower Mainland.

"Going to the farms is often kind of an outing, it’s their recreation as well. And if you’re doing that for a day in the country or to expose your children…that’s really fun. But it’s not really sustainable on an ongoing basis."

And so, if people can’t come to the local farms, then the farms can come to the people.

Local farmer’s markets are one of the best ways of rebuilding that connection with the farmer, learning where food comes from and how it is made.

Sitting outside his restaurant in the Upper Village, Chef Bernard shakes his head in amazement at a steady stream of people meandering through the Whistler Farmer’s Market on a hot Sunday morning.

Eight years ago it was just 12 vendors including the Chef.

Now the stalls stretch the length of the cobbled Upper Village street selling fresh berries, vegetables, salad dressings, homemade pies, and rhubarb juice, along with the clothes, furniture, knick-knacks, soap and jewelry crafted by local artisans.

To Chef Bernard it’s simple.

"The farms will be gone if you don’t support the local farmer," he said.

The food has most likely been picked the night before or at the crack of dawn to arrive fresh in Whistler for the market.

The Helmer family is there on Sunday after their first harvest of the season.

The two long rows of Warba’s and Pontiacs that were cocooned in the ground the day before have now been picked, washed, sorted, and bagged with a stamp of organically certified approval.

There is a jovial air as people jostle in commerce. This isn’t just about getting your weekly supply of groceries. This is about enjoying a Sunday morning at the market.

Modestly, Anna Helmer, the oldest of the Helmer sisters, said that their farm is really just small potatoes in the grand scheme of things.

"We’re a very small little speck of dust in this valley," she said.

Though they made be small, they fed a lot of people last Sunday night.

After about three hours at the market, they were completely cleaned out, a Sold Out sign heralding the bad news for the latecomers.

The hustle and bustle of the market may not appeal to everyone. But nowadays the farm is coming directly into the home in the form of home delivery.

Small Potatoes Urban Delivery, or simply SPUD, may have seemed like a long shot five years ago when it first began but in a few short years it has become the largest organic grocery home delivery service in Canada.

SPUD was designed to bring the local farm to the home in the shape of boxes filled with organic food.

Since then they have fostered good relationships with local farmers to get more local produce into the organic boxes. When the company first began, there were only 26 weeks of the year where SPUD could provide BC organic carrots to their customer. The rest of the time the organic carrots would come from farms south of the border. By encouraging BC farmers to do a second planting, organic carrots are available for 48 weeks a year now.

The company made a conscious decision very early on to provide their customers with only certified organic produce, even if that means it travels farther to get there than a local non-organic choice.

"Quite soon on we realized it’s better to have a customer that’s happy and still insists on buying some non-local things to not have a customer and have them go back to their regular retail store, in some cases a non-organic store," said David Van Seters, president of SPUD.

He said SPUD encourages customers to be aware of their organic choices, prompting them to choose locally when the option is available.

As such, the average SPUD box has food that has travelled between 800 to 1,200 kms, less than half the distance travelled by the average meal.

"We’re giving them information so they can see which products are travelling the most distance and then our hope is that they would choose to buy the more local option if there is a local option that they would prefer," said Van Seters.

Whistler is one of the best markets for SPUD’s organic home delivery.

Whereas the company services about one per cent of the households in the Greater Vancouver Regional District, it delivers to about two per cent of the households in Whistler, or one in every 50 homes. And the percentages are even higher in the Pemberton area he said.

The choice seems logical for both environmental and health reasons.

"There’s an amazing intersection here between what’s good for the environment and actually better for us," said Rowan at the David Suzuki Foundation.

The Foundation has made buying local food part of their Nature Challenge, a program highlighting the small steps that individuals can take to begin to make a difference in this world.

On the broader scale, buying local produce is key in getting communities moving toward sustainability.

Van Seters said buying locally creates jobs, it maintains the farming community and it’s environmentally friendly with less transportation.

"So really it has an environmental, economic and social benefit and it’s because it works on all three pillars of sustainability that we feel that buying locally is one of the most important consumer choices that people can make to create and more healthy and sustainable world," he said.

Another consideration is that if Canada is relying on other countries to provide one of its most basic elements of life, there is the threat that food supply can be severed at any given moment. Then where would we be asks Pritchard at FarmFolk/CityFolk.

"If we’re importing everything we’re really at risk in many ways from that food supply…being cut off for whatever reason," she said.

"Food and water and air are the essentials of life in order for us to be alive, let alone sustainable. And no culture is sustainable unless they have a secure food source.

"It doesn’t make any sense for us to import something that we can grow well ourselves and in some cases even grow better than the places we’re importing it from."

It’s all about the way we think about our food. And British Columbians are some of the lucky ones with a wide range of treats to tease the palate, from the hot house peppers and cucumbers from the Lower Mainland, peaches and nectarines from the Okanagan and the hearty vegetables from the Fraser Valley.

Not to mention what’s growing right in our own backyard.

WHERE TO GO FOR LOCAL GROW — a few suggestions

Wild Cherry Farmers Market

The grand opening of the "Make It, Bake It, Grow It," community market in Squamish is on Sat. July 19. The market takes place in Downtown Squamish at 34875 Cleveland Avenue at the MGM feature film movie set location of "Walking Tall." It will feature Squamish and Whistler area artists, First Nation’s artists, fresh baked goods and local farm produce. There will also be some live entertainment. The Wild Cherry Farmers Market is open on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. until Labour Day weekend.

Whistler Farmers Market

The Whistler Farmers Market stretches the length of the Upper Village. Vendors with baked good, fresh produce, soaps, herbs, flowers, knick-knacks and much more gather every Sunday to hawk their wares. The market runs from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. until Oct. 12 in the Upper Village alongside the Fairmont Chateau Whistler.

North Arm Farm

Head up Highway 99 to number 1888 in between Pemberton and Mount Currie to find a wide range of treats at the North Arm Farm and Bakery. This is where you’ll find fresh baked bread, oven-warmed pies and all the chutney’s, apple butter and jam you can think of. In the back cooler there’s a colourful collection of fresh produce, straight from the farmer’s fields. The bakery is open daily from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

A Country Fair

The Pemberton Women’s Institute is holding a fall fair, just like a one-day farmer’s market, on Sat. Sept. 27 on the Museum grounds. Anything baked, made or grown can be a part of this country fair. There will be artists, a petting zoo and even some horseback rides. To book a table call Jeanette Helmer at 604-894-6618.



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