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Finding my way back to the farm

Lisa Richardson maps out the logistics of a 100-mile diet, pondering community greenhouses, organic farm harvest boxes, and how to live without avocados.

Award-winning non-fiction writer, JB MacKinnon must have learned a few things about culture-jamming during his stint as editor at Adbusters magazine. After all, his 100 Mile Diet, in which MacKinnon and partner Alisa Smith committed to only eating food grown within 100 miles of their Vancouver apartment for an entire year, tapped a psychosocial vein, and sprouted a movement.

I pull out my protractor and draw a circle around Pemberton. 100 miles. Could I do that?

Food experiments aren’t unusual in my life. As dirtbag rockclimbers – striving to live on as little money as possible in order to avoid gainful employment, thereby allowing more time for climbing – my partner and I have experimented with dumpster-diving, bear-proof storage container raiding, and the Indian Experiment, during which we limited our consumption exclusively to Indian cuisine (it’s cheap! no refrigeration required!), developing a vast repertoire of dhal recipes that all tasted pretty much alike and a temporary case of repetitive strain injury from rolling out rotis with wine bottles.

For Vancouverites MacKinnon and Smith, the 100 Mile Diet was a crash course in the effects of globalization. By foregoing foods grown beyond 100 miles, they spent nine months on a bread-fast until they sourced a grower of heritage grains on Vancouver Island, renounced their vegan ways for seasonal fish and free-range eggs from the UBC garden, and effectively eliminated chocolate, avocadoes and bananas from the table.

That’s a lot of good stuff to forego. I think with longing of my mum’s garden in Australia where she grew, without any apparent effort, mangoes, bananas, avocados, passion fruit and a host of herbs she’d send me to raid before dinner.

I canvass my refrigerator and realize the ugly truth – demographically, I belong to the second-generation of fast-food eaters. I have come to take convenience for granted. I eat with wanton disregard for the seasons. I have very little idea how to prepare raw produce, unless there is a wok or bottle of salad dressing involved. Exhibit A: the incriminating pantry staples. Frozen pizza that makes late-night dinner prep emergencies smack of freezer burn, edamame, white bread, peanut butter, crackers, muesli bars, cheese… a serious dearth of fruit and veggies apart from the bananas and frozen berries that blend into a fine smoothie.

Verdict? I am guilty of crimes against gastronomy.

I’m intestinally ready for an overhaul. I’m politically ready for an awakening. A food experiment, à la the 100 Mile Diet, could hardly hurt.

On the Eating Local buzz

Eating locally has become a buzzword for a new political paradigm. Why is it arising? Because we’re at a point in time where we could not be any further removed from the source of our food – in terms of geographic distance, or emotional connection.

We humans might still be at the top of the food chain. But between us and the food we’re consuming is over 2,500 kilometres of chain-links. Two-thousand-five-hundred kilometers of asphalt, container ships and loading docks and refrigerated trucks, middlemen, commodities brokers, packagers, abattoirs, inventors of elaborate plastic holding devices, those annoying people who put the stickers on your fruit… Chemical companies and seed-patenters and antibiotics distributors… Lobby groups who resist any effort to label foods… Public health officers testing for mad-cow disease or avian flu…

And as for the farm – the soil at the source – it is so far away, so far beyond our sights, that it has become invisible. Many kids don’t even realize a farm is part of the dinner equation, or that dirt is involved in the food story. Or what else that story might involve… Are producers feeding their cows the ground-up flesh of their bovine brethren? Spraying toxic chemicals all over the strawberries? Paying their pickers slave-wages? Manipulating the genetic structure of their produce?

We just wouldn’t know.

Industry resistance against mandatory labeling shows just how much the industrial food complex wants to keep us in the dark as to what they’re dishing up.

Which leaves us with a call to action… It’s time to go back to the farm.

The Harvest Box Experiment

"Community-supported agriculture" is a low-commitment, low-risk form of shareholding. If your investment portfolio is short on edible commodities, you might want to diversify into CSAs.

Essentially, you are buying a share in a farm business. And your return on investment comes as food. You share the risks with the farmer that the harvest will be poor. You share the bounty if the season is good. You invest in the vitality of your foodshed, which is about as ethical as it gets.

It’s as simple as signing up for a Harvest Box.

In the Pemberton Valley alone, local producers grow strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, organic mixed greens, beets, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, zucchini, spinach, cabbage, rutabagas, parsnips, chickens, lambs, cherries, plums, crabapples, roasted coffee, corn, wine, garlic, shallots, potatoes, eggs, honey, natural beef, celeriac, organic hazelnuts, carrots.

In Squamish, independent small growers produce honey, eggs, vegetables, herbs, fruit, berries, llamas, pigs, sheep, goats, and chickens, on approximately 100 acres of land.

There’s clearly no need for a local diet to be bland.

Going into its fifth year of Harvest Box deliveries, Pemberton’s Across the Creek Organics will deliver every week, to your door or the nearest pickup location, a box of produce fresh from the farm. It’s well within the 100 mile zone for anyone in the Sea to Sky corridor. In fact, for me, it’s a 12-kilometer bike ride from my door, arriving within about 24 hours of being harvested.

That is radical.

It’s also a slightly daunting prospect to be presented with foods I don’t really know what to do with. Celeriac? Arugula? Turnip? How exactly do I prep these?

I wish my grandmother were still alive, so I could call her up for advice on making pickles and jams, for prepping obscure vegetables, or adding pumpkin to scones for a flash of colour. But she’s not. She is not around to witness my utter ignorance of life’s most fundamental survival skills.

But I don’t have to stay ignorant. I’m going to start with an experiment in eating what’s seasonal, when it’s in season. I’m going to transform my life… I’m going to single handedly take on the industrial food complex…

I’m going to need to buy some recipe books.

Mapping My Foodshed

Whistler 2020, the municipality’s Comprehensive Sustainability Plan, envisions "chemical-free, organically-grown food produced in the Sea to Sky corridor available year-round at a price affordable to community members."

As yet, the Health and Social Strategy has not developed any major action items to achieve this.

However, Steve Milstein, the whirling-dervish energy behind the Community Greenhouse project, has lobbied into existence a committee looking at the feasibility of installing commercial greenhouses in Whistler, heated by methane gas from the landfill or heat generated by the sliding centre.

Avid tomato-growers in Whistler know that the resort’s altitude, while good for snow-harvests, is less conducive to garden-bounty. Whistler’s natural foodshed extends beyond the resort boundaries, and its food sustainability is intricately linked with what’s going on in Pemberton and Squamish, where the agricultural land (and a sizable chunk of its working population) is located, and urban initiatives like community gardens and Fruit Tree harvest projects are in their infancy.

Social-service providers and community planners throughout the corridor are identifying one of the key ways to immunize ourselves from the rising costs of oil is to cultivate our backyards for food production. Be it community-gardens and greenhouses, edible landscaping, or community kitchens for the preparation and processing of locally-grown food, the solutions will be close to home.

My grandparents knew intuitively that the bounty of their table depended on the happy fertility of their neighbour’s chickens, on whether the drought across the range would break, on whether they could pick and freeze enough strawberries in season to last the year. They knew there was nothing so delightful as a handful of grapes from the backyard trellis, or the first sun-warmed berries of the season, or a glass of homebrew at the end of the day. They knew that if they had extra, it should be shared with those who didn’t have enough. And they knew that the social response to war was to plant "victory gardens" on every available space around their house.

Now, I buy eggs from the grocery store for less than $3 a dozen, secure in the knowledge that even in the event of a flood, cheap eggs will be helicoptered in so I don’t have to go without my morning omelette. Giant tasteless strawberries are available all year around. The food bank takes care of the hungry, and I drop the odd box of Rice-a-Roni into the donation container to cover off my social obligations. My neighbour sprays Round-Up on his yard in preparation for cultivating the perfect lawn, and the air hums with the sound of lawnmowers.

And all the while Iraqi civilians are being shot and killed, a puppet government is running Afghanistan, and oil wells are more valuable than humans or wildlife preserves.

The time is ripe for our own 100 Mile Movement in the Sea to Sky corridor. To start to build capacity for a vital local food system by reducing the degrees of separation between us and our food, by reducing the distance between farm and table. It starts with baby steps. Order a harvest box. U-pick a freezer full of strawberries. Discover what’s in season. Drop by the farm-gate or the Farmer’s Markets. Oil your bike chain in preparation for Slow Food Cycle Sunday. Ride your bike more often, and redirect the money you would have spent on gas towards local produce. Ask your local grocer to stock locally grown food and to label it clearly. Ask your favourite chef to develop a 100 Mile dish. Plant a patch of herbs in a container, on your window sill, in a corner of the garden.

Experiment.

The FoodWeb:

MacKinnon and Smith’s 100 Mile Diet was told in 11 parts on the Tyee, and can be read at http://100milediet.org

Slow Food Cycle Sunday returns to Pemberton Aug. 20. For updates on the progress of the Harvest Box Experiment as well as information on this year’s Slow Food Cycle event, visit www.slowfoodcyclesunday.com

Whistler’s first Feast of Fields will be held at Sturdy’s North Arm Farm on Aug. 19. Ticket information is available at www.ffcf.bc.ca.

Across the Creek Organics Harvest Boxes can still be ordered online at www.acrossthecreekorganics.com. Tickets to the farm’s June 24 Solstice Dinner are available. Chef Grant Coussar of Whistler Cooks will whip up culinary magic with the first Harvest Box ingredients, following a Chefs Garden Walk.



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