Local Foods, Food Self-Sufficiency and Food Sovereignty

Thinking about local foods again. The global food system is complex and severs links with place at the same time as it offers a dizzying array of food products from all over the world, and also does in fact alleviate famine at the local level- as long as one has the foreign exchange to pay for food. This Saturday at our local Farmer's Market in Edmonton I came across a new vendor– a sheep's milk cheese dairy. Grass fed West Friesian sheep are pastured in eastern Alberta near Kitscoty, and amazing Camebert style cheese and Pecorino produced within 200 km of where I live has appeared.

I have recently been buying sheep and goat's milk cheese at our local Italian grocery; these products come from Greece, Holland and Spain.... wonderful to be able to support sustainable "niche" farming in Alberta now when I buy cheese. This morning with my cereal (not local Alberta made) I went to my freezer and pulled out a tub of frozen saskatoons which my friend and I harvested in the summer in Mill Creek Ravine, a local semi-natural area and park steps from my door. And poured organic Alberta milk on it (the yoghurt is from somewhere in Eastern Canada).

Of course I accompanied the whole thing with good strong espresso coffee made from locally dark roasted fair trade beans; the beans were a combination of Ethiopian and Peruvian fair trade coffees. Definitely not local. Possibly more socially and environmentally responsible than Folgers or Nabob. This summer we had quite a bit of rain, for semi-arid central Alberta. That meant that local urban yard fruit trees bore heavily. For the second time in a decade or so local apricots were abundant, so much so that it was literally impossible to process all of the fruit before it spoiled. My friend Rod was calling friends and acquaintances to come pick. I made amazing "gourmet" apricot preserves and butter from his fruit, small and flavourful hardy yellow and orange apricots.

Again, the sugar to make the preserves was not Alberta beet sugar, but was fair trade cane sugar from the tropics. Hopefully less damaging than standard sugar, with its horrific labour practices. I find that certain tropical products I am motivated to buy fair trade when possible (bananas, sugar, chocolate and coffee are the prime products).

(coffee cherries photographed in Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca, Mexico in 1999)

unroasted coffee spread out for sale in the market in Huautla de Jiménez. People used to have garden plots in their yards. The old yards in this city were laid out with space for food gardens. Most of us have landscaped in the recent past, but tubs of tomatoes are found on decks, rhubarb plants lurk amongst the shrubs, and raspberry canes grow along garages or fence lines. I planted an apple and a sour cherry in my yard, and this year got the first substantial harvest of apples, enough to make two batches of apple butter and some pies (supplemented with fruit from a friend's abundant crop). My friend Riva, who learned the joys of berry picking on walks this summer, also converted a patch of quack-grass in her yard to a small garden, and was excited to harvest her own carrots.

She was proud to share, and pleased when I added some of her carrots to a bison stew at a recent potluck. That was local food par excellence - provided one grants the range of half a day's drive to market as "local". Bison from the Peace River country, onions,parsnips and parsley root from Camrose, carrots from Edmonton, herbs from my garden. There are areas of community garden in Edmonton, as well as in many other cities, and these also provide varying amounts of very local food to their participants. I am troubled, though, that eating local is no longer possible for many. Fast food is cheaper and ubiquitously available. Multinational businesses aggressively market their products in all corners of the globe. The Slow Food movement champions the distinctive qualities of the local, but many people cannot or choose not to afford these foods, which may cost more money and often cost more time, requiring life style commitment. So how much do these various efforts contribute to local food self-sufficiency? How much impact does our participation in local food production and marketing make? When I choose Fair Trade and organic exotic products, am I driving local prices up in the areas they are grown so that people may find it hard to access the foods that they grow? What about the pressure to grow luxury products like shade coffee or artisan chocolate? How do their ecological and human rights report cards come out?

Of Lowbush Blueberries and Memory

Lowbush blueberry photo taken at Seeley Lake August 26, 2011


Lowbush blueberries (Vaccinium caespitosum) are sweet and delectable, with a tinge of apple to their flavour. They grow on low bushes (hence both the common and scientific names) some 15 cm (6 inches) in height, and the tiny berries are a bright blue, hiding under the waxy spoon shaped leaves. I have encountered these lovely berries rarely, as they are easily overgrown by bigger, faster growing species, but the memories of the places I have found and tasted them are sharp. The first time was now thirty years ago on a rocky alpine ridge just above timberline on the Seven Sisters in northwest British Columbia. I was hiking with my friend Joan while our husbands were canoeing on the Stikine River….we decided to take an overnight trip up the old Magnatron Mining Road to treat ourselves to something special. On the flank of the ridge above the trail in a rocky fell field were tiny blueberry bushes sheltering among the stones…. these minute bushes were not above 3 or 4 inches tall, but the berries were sweet. I remember my sense of wonder at their hardiness and tiny size. I remember our camp on a bench overlooking the Flint Creek basin below, our pup tent pitched in a flat grassy patch beside a tiny pond among the rocks, the northwest flank of Weeskinisht (Wii Ska’niist, the Big Mountain) with its small remnant glacier and snowfields above us.

My next real encounter came on another trip in the Coast Mountains, this time about 1985. My then husband and my daughter Rose and I hired a floatplane to take us in to a pair of lakes in the subalpine just below Telkwa Pass. We camped with another couple, Sheila and Peter, and the plane hauled our canoes in as well so we could explore the small lakes. Access to these with a canoe is impossible any other way, as the Burnie Lakes empty by way of the totally impassible Chlore Canyon, draining west into the Copper (Zymoetz) River near Terrace. The rugged glacier clad peaks of the Howson Range soar above the lakes, which are a milky blue with rock flour. Fishing for trout (camo-coloured a grey blue on their backs) was noteworthy, because you couldn’t see the trout until it was nearly landed, though the water looked clear enough. After a hike up to the snout of a glacier above the upper Burnie Lake, we moved camp to the second lake, walking by trail the short distance between the two. Here in the more sheltered woods along the little stream were mega-lowbush blueberry bushes, nearly a foot tall, and loaded with their delicious sweet berries.

In the years after those initial encounters, I began to study Gitksan and Witsuwit’en ethnobotany, and I learned that these little blue berries were ‘mii yehl in Gitxsanimax, and yintimï in Witsuwit’en. People used to manage the encroaching brush and grass by landscape burning, ensuring abundant and productive fruit. The area in the valley bottom between 2 Mile and Hagwilget was “just blue with berries” Alfred Joseph, Gisde We told me in 1987. People often used toothed berry pickers to strip the tiny fruit, and I could see why. But in the time I lived in the Skeena, lowbush blueberries were scarcely ever encountered. Berry patches became pastures, gravel pits, or were brushed over. Trails up the mountains to berry patches were overgrown or truncated by logging cuts. The little bushes linger in some places, but, in common with most blueberries and huckleberries, don’t fruit well when shaded.

On a visit home this past month, I was restless for places to walk. My friend Shari’s place is amazing and beautiful, nestled beside the Bulkley River between Hagwilget and Bulkley Canyons, with eagles perching across from her dining room window…. and bears walking casually through the yard in search of berries or heading down to the beach to fish. August is the “hyperphagous” stage when they are putting on fat for winter…. so walking the trails along the river seemed ill advised. However, driving down the Skeena toward Kitwanga, I decided to stop at Seeley Lake, a beautiful little lake right under the towering flank of Stekyoodin, known officially as Rocher de Boule. (Seeley Lake has its own stories, of the supernatural aquatic grizzly Medeek, and how it punished youth for failing to respect the beautiful fish of the lake- see Men of Medeek by Will Robinson as told by Walter Wright, Northern Sentinal Press, Kitimat 1962. The story is also briefly recounted on one of the Ksan 'Hand of History' signs at the shore of the lake.)

There is a little provincial park on the lakeshore with campsite and picnic area, and after enjoying the view down the valley, I noticed a sign for a hiking trail. Here on the rocky knoll by the lake and in a campground I was less likely to interrupt a foraging bear, so I set out on the trail…. and realized that one of the better stands of low bush blueberry I’d seen in years grew under the open tree canopy on the thin soil over the rock…. I began to scan for fruit, and picked a couple of small handfuls, reveling in their remarkable flavour. I mused that if I came back with a container, I could probably pick enough to take home. Because the knoll is so rocky, lusher brushy vegetation does not thrive, but the tough little blueberry bushes spread well.

A couple of days later I was back, enjoying the opportunity to walk and botanize again…and I remembered my yoghurt container to pick into. I realized that there was actually quite a lot of fruit in some areas, though it was hard to see as it was under the low leaf canopy for the most part. As I picked, I thought of my Elder friend Lavender, and her stories about picking lowbush blueberries some 65 years before. Lavender is from Fife in Scotland, and came to Kitwanga with her decorated Gitksan war hero husband Ray in 1945, a fiery and diminutive 18 year old. In 1945 the village was still quite traditional in many ways; the last longhouse was still standing, and the road had only been in for a year or two, though the rail line had run down the Skeena since the Great War. In summer of 1946 Lavender was recovering from the birth of her first child Naomi. She spent a lot of time sitting on the ground in the sunshine picking lowbush blueberries. Her mother-in-law Martha suggested she prepare the fruit in the traditional way and give it to the Elders. They were so delighted the Frog Chief adopted Lavender, and gave her a name that reflected her wonderful gift of berries. I think it was translated as something like “bringer of gifts from Heaven”. Lavender is 85 now, and stopping by her place in Kitwanga a couple of hours before I had just learned that she is in the clinic in Houston, frail and debilitated. I decided that I would give the berries to Lavender when I stopped down to see her later that afternoon, and redoubled my focus on picking.

We sat on her bed in the late afternoon sun, and Lavender lay back savouring the tiny berries one at a time, perhaps thinking back to happier times when she and her late husband were young and her little daughter was by her side. And I reluctantly headed East on the highway in the morning, returning to the city where I now live.

On Cranberries

Lowbush cranberry or lingonberry, Vaccinium vitis-idaea growing in moss under pine. Southern Yukon 2004.
A year ago I wrote more generally on the ethnobiology of Thanksgiving. Today I want to write about cranberries. Botanists have been somewhat indecisive about whether cranberries are, as it were, a red wetland-dwelling blueberry with a very tart flavour, or whether they should be segregated in a genus of their own, Oxycoccus (‘sour ball’) because of their trailing stems and vine life form, and their azalea like pink flowers which differ from the little heather urn-shaped flowers of blueberries, blaeberries, huckleberries, whortleberries, bilberries and their ilk. And of course their eponymous sour fruits, while blueberries are generally sweet when ripe. The cranberry of commerce is the large New England species designated Vaccinium macrocarpon if we take the position that “true” cranberries belong in the genus Vaccinium. This is the large tart berry associated with Thanksgiving sauces and jellies, and now ubiquitous in the form of jugs of sweetened cranberry juice and also common as dried sweetened cranberries. These cranberries find their native habitat in acidic wetlands, that is, in peat bogs. In the course of researching this blog I have learned that, although natural wetlands were formerly the sites of cranberry cultivation, now industrial cultivation involves stripping the fertile soil and leveling the future cranberry field, and surrounding it with dikes made of the topsoil, while placing acidic sand on the carefully leveled field. These diked fields are then managed in a manner reminiscent of rice paddies, being carefully flooded at specific times in the growth and harvest cycle of the fruit. I read that industrially produced cranberries are harvested by flooding the fields and sucking up the floating berries with huge mechanical harvesters. These fruits, often bruised, then are immediately processed into canned cranberry jelly or sauce or perhaps for juice. Apparently to get a quality that can be sold as unfrozen berries, you have to harvest the fruit dry, and humans run the machines that pick these higher quality berries, a mere 2 or 3% of the cranberry harvest. At some point in the past, there was a scare about pesticide contamination, so industrial growers are now very careful with the chemicals they apply.
Although a lot of commercial cranberries are no longer cultivated in wetlands, cultivation on the periphery of wetlands in soils naturally moist and acidic still occurs. This cultivation has the predictable effect of altering the hydrology of wetland areas, and can introduce chemical contamination from agricultural chemicals (e.g. nitrogen or pesticides) applied to the crop. As bogs are naturally highly oligotrophic (low in nutrients) this can cause decline in native bog species on the periphery of the cultivated area and invasion of weedy species, threatening unique bog ecosystems. Not to mention the decline of biodiversity in the cultivated plots themselves. Cranberry cultivation has been one of the threats to Burns Bog, a large peatland wetland area on the Fraser River Delta in British Columbia which exists in the midst of extensive urban and cultivated agricultural landscapes. This site is highly revered for its wildland bog habitat and recreation potential within the Lower Mainland, but has also been threatened with a number of schemes for its transformation or elimination, from housing developments to landfills, and its sensitive hydrology is threatened by various proposed dikes and drainage ditches. I recall learning about the environmental risks of the commercial cultivation when I still lived in BC, and there was concern about contamination with agricultural chemicals. This led me to try to buy organic cranberry products whenever possible.
What makes a cranberry? The classic cranberries of bogs (Vaccinium macrocarpon, V. palustris, V. oxycoccus) are viney evergreen members of the heath family living in peatlands, and which have persistent tart red fruits that develop from lovely spreading pink flowers. In northwestern North America we would call these “bog cranberries” and our local species has much smaller leaves and fruits than the classic cranberry of commerce, and is much lower in productivity. The taste is the same. And we also have what we would call “low bush cranberry”, which I have also seen rendered as “mountain cranberry”. This is Vaccinium vitis-idaea, the “blueberry” ‘grapevine of Mt. Ida’, also a low growing, but not viney, member of the genus Vaccinium with glossy evergreen leaves, usually growing in moss…but here the feather moss of spruce or pine stands, not usually of sphagnum bogs….which has small tart red fruits that taste like cranberries. These develop from classic heather family urn shaped flowers of white or very pale pink. In Scandinavia, where they are revered, they are lingonberries, and a national food of Sweden. When I have the opportunity, these are what I pick during late summer fieldwork to freeze for my Thanksgiving cranberry sauce. Alas, not only was it a poor berry year this past summer, I left the Yukon too early, before the cranberries were even minimally ripe. So it will be purchased V. macrocarpon for me this year.
Cranberries (aka lingonberries) are one of the most important fruits for northern Athapaskans. For Gwich’in in the Mackenzie Delta region of the Northwest Territories there are “yellowberries” nakal (Rubus chamaemorus, the cloudberry) a golden bog dwelling raspberry, blueberries (Vaccinium uliginosum, the bog blueberry) and cranberries. Cranberries last the longest, keep the best, and can be harvested in larger amounts. In the boreal forests of the southern Yukon, Kaska love cranberries too. They are called itl’et in Kaska, and people pick and freeze relatively large amounts. Cranberries can be eaten in the spring after they thaw. Anore Jones quotes a poignant tale of death and survival of a Yupiq woman in her “Plants that we eat” (1986 Maniilaq Association). A woman who was widowed and travelling alone with two small children managed to survive on sparse spring cranberries. One of her two children also made it. This was the grandmother of one of the elders Jones worked with in the 1980’s.
Cranberries are good for more than survival. A Kaska elder friend said she treated her husband’s urinary tract infection by feeding him cranberries. Contemporary herbal medicine also suggests cranberry juice, or cranberry capsules, for prevention of urinary tract infections or chronic cystitis. Cranberries, along with blueberries, apparently contain lots of anti-oxidants, considered to be cancer preventative through combination with free radicals. I buy cranberry capsules at my local organic food store which I take faithfully to prevent cystitis.
The Wikipedia article on “cranberry” mentions that some species of Viburnum are also called “cranberry”, which they consider erroneous. No, merely ethnobotanical…fruits of various species of Viburnum, locally V. edule and V. trilobata have red fruit that ripens in the fall and it is the gustatory quality of astringence, sour and a bit bitter, which makes them “cranberry”, not their botanical affiliation (they are in the Caprifoliaceae or honeysuckle family, and grow on tall woody bushes). Though they have large flat white seeds which make the fruit dissimilar to “real” cranberries to eat, they make a fine sauce or jelly. They lack the large amount of pectin of true cranberries, so the sauce is runny…but delicious. I wrote last fall on highbush cranberries (aka the Viburnums). I’ve been snacking on them as I walk in the ravine by my house. I’ll close now and wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving, and hope they are enjoying cranberries in one way or another to mark the holiday.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranberry
http://peterwood.ca/res/research/burnsbog/Burns%20Bog%20Protection%20Values%20and%20Management%20Options.htm
Jones, Anore. 1983. Nauriat Nigiñaqtuat, Plants That We Eat. Kotzebue, Alaska: Maniilaq Association.

other sources which discuss cranberries:
Parlee, Brenda, Fikret Berkes and Teet'it Gwich'in Renewable Resource Council. 2006. Indigenous Knowledge of Ecological Variability and Commons Management: A Case Study on Berry Harvesting from Northern Canada. Human Ecology 34(4):515-528.
Andre, Alestine and Alan Fehr. 2001. Gwich’in Ethnobotany, Plants used by the Gwich’in for Food, Medicine, Shelter and Tools. Inuvik: Gwich’in Social and Cultural Institute and Aurora Research Institute