Eric Reguly, in the weekend Globe and Mail, tries to compare and contrast two different crisis which originated in 2008: the European debt crisis, and the international food crisis. The two crisis were linked, mostly by nervous money fleeing the world’s debt markets for commodities (and both were precipitated by the criminal activity engaged in by various investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns prior to the housing bubble popping). The role of speculative money in causing the worldwide food price inflation of 2008 through 2011 is pretty common knowledge. Starbucks president Howard Shultz, as reported in the The Telegraph, has said:

… the current spike in the cost of commodities such as coffee and other foodstuffs is “not based on supply and demand” but based on market speculation. He said that the farmers who actually produce the commodities are receiving a “de minimus” proportion of the price rises.
“Right now we are experiencing a very strange and almost inexplicable phenomenon in the commodities market. Without any real supply or demand issues we are witness to the fact that most agricultural food commodities are at record highs at once, and coffee is at a 34-year high.”

Frederick Kaufmann, in The Guardian, follows up with a brief interview with Professor Yaneer Bar-Yam, of the New England Complex Systems Institute (Necsi):

“Prices have been way out of equilibrium in 2011,” Bar-Yam told me. “The bubble has not burst yet.”
According to Bar-Yam, the international thirst for biofuels has put a strain on arable land previously reserved for food production. At the same time as the rise of the biofuel mandate, the rise of investable commodity indexes and other electronically traded funds has offered investors of all stripes a chance to sink their cash in a sparkling new casino of derivative products. As a result, an ever-flowing spring of speculative capital sustains the status quo.
But just as food is no ordinary widget, speculation in commodity markets is not simply a matter of financial predation. “The high prices of food have resulted in accumulations of inventories at the same time as people can’t afford food,” said Bar-Yam, who noted that the Arab spring was triggered by the food-price bubble. In fact, Necsi’s quantitative model of speculation predicted the uprisings in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, and warned that if food prices remain inflated, riots and revolutions will go global sometime between July 2012 and August 2013.
“We are at a critical point,” said Bar-Yam. “We don’t have a stay-the-course option right now.”

Notice that quote: “The high prices of food have resulted in accumulations of inventories at the same time as people can’t afford food.” That makes it very clear that this is about speculation, not supply and demand.

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Yeah, there’s a couple of words you usually don’t see together. Or at all, really. But they are both words and they really do belong together.

photo compliments of : http://www.andrewdunnphoto.com/

The medlar is a fruit-bearing tree more familiar to those reading old English literature. The fruits of this tree are pomes, and as the word suggests, are related to apples and pears.

Medlar fruit photo from historicfood.com

I noticed this small (~1.5 metre) tree outside St. Saviours church and by the end of summer couldn’t help but see the fruiting bodies all over it. Medlars are about 25mm to 50mm across and not quite as deep, making them an oblate spheroid.

I had no idea what the tree was, until one day Paula came by with me. “Hey!” said she, “you’ve got a medlar tree! You know, those fruit are supposed to be edible….” So we picked the fruit and took them home. I peeled one and tried the flesh. It might have been edible, but it certainly wasn’t something I was going to eat. Just this rock-hard starchy thing.

So after some research (or, at least, reading the Wikipedia page for medlars), I discovered that the fruit had to be bletted before eating. Bletting is when certain fleshy fruits, after ripening, begin to decay and ferment. Much like an apple bruising, the flesh changes colour and undergoes physical changes. In the medlar, the flesh changes from white and hard to a soft, dark brown paste. At the same time, the starches convert to sugars, and the fruit becomes quite tasty.

There may be ways to hurry the process (one suggestion was freezing, but I’ve no back-up for that), but we simply laid the medlars out on a tea towel on a large baking tray and left them there in the kitchen. Two, maybe three weeks later I noticed some darkening patches on the skin and cut one open.

medlar part way through the bletting process

The paste is so tasty! The starches are being converted to sugars, and the hard texture is gone. We left the medlars a few more days until they were thoroughly bletted, and then Paula coarsely chopped them and boiled them down. After passing them through a jelly bag and adding sugar, they made a lovely deep transparent brown jelly that has an earthy, unusual taste that is amazing.

About six months back, Paula finally got a spot in the University of Victoria’s Community Garden. By the end of August, they were ready to move the garden to its new location. And since then, gardeners have been busy preparing things for the next growing season.

The garden is located in what was nothing more than a grassy field for years. Pipes have been laid for water, and after the plots themselves were laid out, the sod was lifted in each of them. The best thing about the garden is the two metre high deer fence around it–there are a lot of deer on campus.

Paula and Ben, our son, originally laid out the beds in the new plot. Formal raised beds are new to me–on the farm, we used a rotary tiller to break up the earth and then used a hilling blade to hump it into a rounded long mound. As you can see, here we have a much more formal series of boxes–each lined on the bottom with landscape cloth to discourage anything from working its way up from underneath.

The boxes are spaced so that they are slightly further apart than my feet are long–enabling me to stand between the beds.Each had a layer of leaves laid in, and then covered with a mixture of compost and topsoil.The recent rains seem to have compressed the soil a bit.

The old strawberry garden was moved a week or so back, so Paula planted some of the extras in the one bed. This still needs to be mulched.

I salvaged what was left of a soaker hose that had been run over by a lawnmower (not by me!), and cut it into shorter pieces to fit in the beds. I found some L and T fittings at Rona and laid the hose out until I ran out. So far, this bed and the strawberries have hose in them, and the third bed and the empty space are still waiting. But I got a clockwork timer today (spring driven) that will enable us to turn the water on and leave.

The polytunnel hoops are 25mm electrical conduit held in the D holders for the next size up. The conduit came in three metre lengths–longer than I wanted– but once I bent them into their holders, it didn’t seem necessary to shorten them. Poly clearly still has to be installed….

The fourth space in the plot isn’t being ignored; it is slated to have a cold frame built for it. Among other things, we’re hoping this gives us a place to overwinter herbs.

Its strange to imagine overwintering anything. Out on the prairies, most everything is planted in May and out of the ground by mid-October at the latest. Here, things are different. Up the peninsula, someone is successfully growing citrus trees. Kiwi fruit are farmed nearby. Here at the bottom of Vancouver Island, the temperate rainforest is modified by a local micro-climate that gives us even milder weather. A lot of rain in the winter, sure, but seldom snow, and even less seldom, -20C. I’ve never gardened out here, so this year looks to be very experimental.

A few years back–about 2008–there was rice rationing in the US and a great fear of rice shortages around the world. This lead to a certain amount of panic, particularly in Asia where citizens have traditionally consumed 70-80% of their calories in rice. The story of what actually happened is a combination of non-transparent markets, panic, reasonable actions on the part of governments, corrupt actions on the part of governments and their officials, reasonable actions on the part of consumers, screwy international trade activity, and just a general mess.

NPR ran a great story on the “crisis” and thankfully it’s available in a podcast of the show Planet Money.

Planet Money Podcast

There’s also a short interview with economist Peter Timmer on their website. But what is interesting are the lessons learned from the crisis. If you listen to the whole story, you hear that the lesson that the WTO and  Western economists take away from the “crisis” is exactly the opposite of the lesson learned by the governments involved. The interesting thing is, both sides appear to be right; open markets and transparency are good, but food security is a necessity. The problem is, neither side can see that maybe both lessons need to be learned

“… we should be asking ourselves what kind of agricultural system could produce the food and fiber we need in a world where oil is $250 and where we have twice the severe weather but only half the water that we have now. What kind of agriculture could we come up with? It’s an entirely reasonable question to ask and yet, no one wants to touch it because when you get down to it, no one has a clue.”

Frederick Kirchenmann, Leopold Center in Ames, Iowa

Spent much of the afternoon making jam yesterday. Put me in mind of a couple of things, not the least of which was Michell Shocked’s excellent tune “Strawberry Jam” from her Arkansas Traveller cd/tape/album/download. The song is a tribute to making jam—but jam becomes a metaphor for all DIY culture, and how culture is something made, not consumed. And how making things, particularly jam, is a liberating experience.

But standing there in the kitchen, mushing berries down and adding sugar (not too much, because I’ve been using Pomona’s Universal Pectin instead of Certo for a while now), put me in mind of my mother and growing up in Edmonton. Mom put up a lot of preserves.

My mother was not a great cook, but she was pretty darned good at putting up jars of fruit in syrup, jams, and the like. Growing up in the suburban sixties, our family kept contact with the land by picking local berries, and keeping a garden. Living in Alberta, we had access to wild Saskatoon berries. Mom and Dad would keep track of where the berries were heaviest and how ripe they were—in rural areas, Saskatoons grew along fence lines, so you had to park, cross the ditch at the side of the road, and then push your way through wild roses to get to the berries.

I have great memories of having a pail hung off my belt, a hot summer day with that high background sound of heat, mosquitoes,grasshoppers, and sun, stuffing handfuls of plump, sweet, purple berries into my mouth (and occasionally into the pail). It would take forever to fill the pail (I wonder why?) and when I came out of the bushes, Mom and Dad would have emptied several of the smaller buckets into the large pail.

I never thought about it, but when we got home, Mom would have to sit for hours, sorting the berries, tossing out all the crap I’d cheerfully picked (because it helped fill the bucket, you see), and prep the berries for preserving. She made mountains of jam, and also preserved Saskatoons in a sugar syrup. This was a long-time favourite of mine; there was always an air of festival when there were Saskatoons for dessert.

There were other berries in our lives; one of the first things the folk did when setting up the garden was to plant raspberries along the fence-line. As kids, we picked handfuls of them as they ripened, but the larger volumes were reserved for Mom. We also, like pretty much every house on our block, had rhubarb plants. In July, we would crack off the largest stalks and grab a drinking glass with a couple of centimetres of sugar into which we’d dip our rhubarb. At first you’d eat the sugared rhubarb, but by the end you’d just be sucking vaguely rhubarb-flavoured sugar off the stalk without biting it at all.

It was unusual to see a yard without a kitchen garden in it. In late summer, as the evenings lengthened, we’d gather in groups and roam the back alleys, hopping over fences to steal fresh vegetables and fruit from carefully tended plots. We’d eat fresh peas, and then chew on the shells for the blast of flavour, spitting huge mouthfuls of pulp as we went along. We’d search out massive carrots that were on the verge of changing from sweet to woody, rub the dirt off on our pants, and walk along talking, feeling that satisfying crunch as your teeth finally made it though the bright orange flesh.

Wed could simply have stayed home and eaten our fill of veg out of our family gardens, but “garden raiding” (as we called it) made the vegetables taste so much sweeter. The same with fruits; many families had apple trees (mostly the smaller crab apples), and you quickly became aware which apples were good raw, and which weren’t. Crab apples were also pickled—I still remember taking the entire apple into my mouth and pressing it with my tongue. The softened flesh and skin of the apple would mush into an explosion of flavours, and I would pull the stem with the core still attached out of my mouth through pursed lips, sucking the last of the goodness off of it. READ FULL POST

Since, most famously, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and, slightly less famously, Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de La Reynière invented food writing in the first quarter of the 1800s, food writers have battered language almost insensible trying to describe the transports of delight that food has wrought upon their palates. Brillat-Savarin famously said “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are,” in his Physiologie du Goût, ou Méditations de Gastronomie Transcendante; ouvrage théorique, historique et à l’ordre du jour, dédié aux Gastronomes parisiens, par un Professeur, membre de plusieurs sociétés littéraires et savantes. (commonly translated as The Physiology of Taste). The Physiology of Taste is available in a plain text format through archive.org. Sadly, Grimod’s Manuel des amphitryons : contenant un traité de la dissection des viandes à table, la nomenclature des menus les plus nouveaux pour chaque saison, et des élémens de politesse gourmande : ouvrage indispensable à tous ceux qui sont jaloux de faire bonne cher̀e, et de la faire faire aux autres (1808) is less accessible in translation (although available in French).

(It is fitting that, as I write this, I’ve been offered a sample of coffee with instructions to taste it like I would a wine; first the nose, then a slurp and swish to spread the taste over my whole tongue.)

In addition to his mots and aphorisms, Brillat-Savarin dealt with many of the issues that concern us today, such as the globalisation of of food and food culture. He writes:

Gourmandise offers great resources to fiscality, for it increases
customs, imports, etc. All we consume pays tribute in one degree
or another, and there is no source of public revenue to which
gourmands do not contribute.

Let us speak for a moment of that crowd of preparers who every
year leave France, to instruct foreign nations in gourmandise. The
majority succeed and obedient to the unfasting instinct of a
Frenchman's fever, return to their country with the fruits of their
economy. This return is greater than one would think.

Brillat-Savarin continues on to talk about how food and the businesses surrounding it contributed an extraordinary amount to France’s GDP and balance of payments. But he writes about the joys of the table:

The centuries last passed have also given the taste important
extension; the discovery of sugar, and its different preparations,
of alcoholic liquors, of wine, ices, vanilla, tea and coffee, have
given us flavors hitherto unknown.

Who knows if touch will not have its day, and if some fortuitous
 circumstance will not open to us thence some new enjoyments?
This is especially probable as tactile sensitiveness exists every
where in the body, and consequently can every where be excited.

We have seen that physical love has taken possession of all the
sciences. In this respect it acts with its habitual tyranny.

The taste is a more prudent measure but not less active faculty.
Taste, we say, has accomplished the same thing, with a slowness
which ensures its success.

Elsewhere we will consider the march. We may, however, observe,
that he who has enjoyed a sumptuous banquet in a hall decked with
flowers, mirrors, paintings, and statues, embalmed in perfume,
enriched with pretty women, filled with delicious harmony, will
not require any great effort of thought to satisfy himself that all
sciences have been put in requisition to exalt and to enhance the
pleasures of taste.

“[A]ll sciences have been put in requisition to exalt and to enhance the pleasures of taste.” A bold statement, although, considering the state of the hall described, a defensible one.

Brillat-Savarin was writing in the early 1800s, but, in many ways, he set standards that have echoed down the years. In his book Blue trout and black truffles : the peregrinations of an epicure, Joseph Wechsberg writes similarly about the Restaurant de la Pyramide in Vienne. In what turns out to be a sheer delight of a read, Wechsberg at first resists the pilgrimage to Pyramide:

I objected mildly that I wasn’t too much interested in the “show places” of la grande cuisine. France’s restaurants are, by and large, the best in the world, I said, and I could see no reason for patronizing fancy establishments when there is such an astonishing number of small restaurants all over the country where one can get a delicious omelet, a succulent blanquette de veau, a fine Brie, and a bottle of honest vin du pays for the equivalent of a dollar and a half.

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I wrote about the international fishery’s problems with by-catch about six weeks back, and how so many fish are being caught, killed, and then dumped overboard because they are not currently in season or are not in quota. Its a terrible waste, and is doing nothing to ensure we have a sustainable source of food from the ocean.

So the other day, gonzo filmmaker and favourite Victoria brother-in-law Karl Johanson spotted an article he thought would interest me. Recently, David Watson (currently a student in the Innovation Design Engineering joint course between the Royal College of Art and Imperial College, London), submitted a design for a retro-fit for fishing nets designed to reduce the problem of nets catching too many small fish along with the commercial-sized ones to the Victorinox sustainable design competition. It is a very interesting design in that it addresses a couple of problems; that small fish can’t escape commercial trawling nets, and that when they can escape, they can’t see the way out.

I know that when I think of a trawling net being pulled through the ocean, I think of a curtain where large fish get caught up trying to pass through the holes. The reality is a bit different, where an open bag is pulled through the water, and the netting’s holes collapse, allowing primarily water to pass through. Small fish either can’t get out or are crushed in the mass of fish being swept up.

David Watson’s design solution is fairly straightforward; reinforcing grommets that hold the netting open. And because the small fish often can’t see their way out, he’s included a couple of LED lights in each grommet (nicely powered by small turbine in the grommet, powered by the motion of the net through the water).

Its an elegant solution, one where you fit the net with reinforcing grommets and then pretty much forget about it. And its one solution that will never be used. Even if the cost of the grommets was a nickle each installed, the sheer number needed makes the cost prohibitive. And without effective international regulation, any requirements to install these grommets would quickly un-level the playing field, making adoption untenable. Such is the reality of a globalized food system: the worst and cheapest practices become the de facto standard.

Its the same on-land as it is in the oceans. If Ghana has no regulation on agricultural practices and produces cheap food, that’s the food that will end up on your plate. Unless, of course you’re paying attention and make a conscious choice not to purchase it. When it comes to fish, the Monterey Bay Aquarium produces a sustainable seafood guide that helps you make better choices about what goes on your plate.And keep in mind, that while prairie-farmed rainbow trout are a good choice, ocean-raised Atlantic salmon from the Pacific coast are a terrible choice.

Over in China, flooding has inundated over 1 million acres (just over 404 thousand hectares) of farmland, raising local food prices by a minimum 20%. Flooding has been bad this year pretty much everywhere–like southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Warm air holds more water than cold, and the steady upward drift of average global temperature means we’re going to face more of this. There’s a short article on the China flood in The Guardian.

In an op-ed piece in the NYTimes, Patricia McArdle writes about how the US is destroying one of the last locavore cultures with foreign aid. No surprise there. This has been the role of foreign aid since the mid-sixties and the birth of the “Green Revolution.” That the US is still pursuing a policy decades after it was shown to be misguided and wrong isn’t much of a surprise either; the US is a ship that may no longer be able to turn. Oh, and the locavore culture being destroyed? Afghanistan.

Verlyn Klinkenborg writes a very short piece (A Welcome Silence) on the joys of leaving the hearing protection on when working. It echoes one I read in Harrowsmith a decade or two back that suggested that rather than using hearing protection, one could just give up the chainsaw….

The summertime lobster sandwich from McDonald’s is back! Yes, Micky D’s serving a lobster which is only available in New England and the Atlantic provinces. Apparently the lobster is being sourced from lobster-men in Escuminac, New Brunswick in a move to try sourcing and selling a local sandwich.
Now, this feels really strange, but I have to compliment McDonald’s on this move. Locally sourced for local consumption,these are the actions we need to see in the food world. If we could add “sustainably harvested” to the list, we’d have the whole trifecta.
Honestly, do we really need to eat the same things everywhere in the world? I know that this is the concept behind food outlets like McDonalds. You serve the same thing everywhere, standardizing production, preparation, and service across your chain in order to present the same experience to every consumer on every visit. But we’ve done that, and it’s killing us.
Regardless of what we’ve been teaching ourselves for the last century, people are not all the same everywhere. Motivations may be, general needs may be, but that doesn’t make us identical. Just as an example, cow’s milk isn’t great for everyone (often, goat’s milk is a better fit). So force feeding everyone a burger and shake combination may not be the best idea.
We, as humans, have spent thousands of years developing local and regional cuisines. This food is one of the ways we define ourselves. I know most Canadians don’t get it (other than poutine, we really have no national cuisine), but most places aren’t Canada. Provence, Tuscany, Ethiopia, all of these places have things they eat or ways they eat that are particular to themselves. Parmesan cheese is not the white grainy food-like substance we consume in North America; rather it is particular to the Parma region of Italy. And when you feed pigs on the waste whey from making Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, you get a specifically-flavoured pig that, when you’ve butchered and salt-cured it, makes prosciutto. Salt-curing a ham doesn’t make prosciutto, terroir makes prosciutto. And that terrior is place-specific. Techniques are transferable (thus you can cure a prosciutto-style ham), but place isn’t transferable. If I cure a ham from a Berkshire hog on a farm north of Sudbury which I raised on whey from milk from Jersey cows made into a Cheddar style cheese, what I get is not prosciutto, but a salt-cured ham that represents the place in which it was produced. And no one can copy that terroir—which is why I shouldn’t be trying to represent that ham as being something its not. Call it Tondalayo Ham produced using adapted Parman techniques, which would explain what it was better than simply calling it prosciutto.
Eating local isn’t about sourcing the same items everywhere, it’s about letting farmers do what they’ve done for fifteen thousand years—figure out what grows well and grow it. And just because something exists doesn’t mean everyone should be able to get it. Total gratification of every whim is not just killing us, its killing the planet.

BTW, there’s actually an ad for the McLobster….

http://youtu.be/gPs6ocFO2PQ