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?

Reflections on local food self sufficiency-

Processing local apples today for apple butter and applesauce. I prefer to use the fruit of local trees…besides being pesticide free, they often represent old varieties, or the unique qualities of fruit trees grown from seed. The flavours are distinct, more interesting, less bland, than applesauce made from commercial fruit. When I lived on the Skeena, I used to harvest the fruit of a motley assortment of apple trees, each one distinct, that had been planted 50 years or more before by an early homesteader, and apple trees from seed “planted” by birds sitting on the fence post, or by the scat of a passing bear. I used to pick the fruit green to try to get it before the bears broke the trees down, harvesting the fruit the same way they would the berries of a tall saskatoon bush. The flavours were unsurpassed, and the fruit was tangy, sour, bitter. My daughter and I would sit on a low stool and run the cooked pulp through a hand cranked Foley foodmill in the kitchen of our cabin cum new-old-farmhouse. The pectin from the green apples made the sauce thick before it was reheated with sugar to can.
Today I am processing the fruit from three old Edmonton apple trees. Apple trees planted by homeowners decades before are often neglected by contemporary supermarket-oriented residents, the fruit a nuisance rotting on the ground. Fruit trees are an investment that take decades to reach their prime, and stability over decades is a rare thing in today’s urban areas. The mentality to put food by, the skills and equipment to can or make jelly, are no longer universal, especially in urban areas where even home cooking from “scratch” is increasingly rare. I went to the market to buy apple juice needed for the cooking liquid to make apple butter…the closest source I could find was organic apple juice processed in Chilliwack near Vancouver. The sugar I will add is organic fair-trade demerara- hopefully ethically produced and both socially and environmentally “OK”….but certainly not within my 100 mile radius for “local”. I would have to search out a local honey producer for that, and I would find, in our climate, that the overwintering bees must be fed on sugar syrup, most likely tropical cane sugar, and neither environmentally nor ethically produced…so the honey I eat is local, but the bees are sustained by the global food system. We cannot escape the connections.
In urban North America our social system no longer supports food self-sufficiency either; we have jobs and time commitments. There is neither time to harvest food nor time to process it around our work obligations and our family and other social relationships. Today is a work day, and I have a nagging sense of guilt as I process the apples rather than marking papers, reading student web posts, working on my new course. We don’t get time off for harvest…but the apples need to be processed now. They have their own seasonal imperative.
Yesterday I also nibbled some high-bush cranberries on a walk and collected some mushrooms in the ravine by my house, an urban greenspace used mostly for urban dog-walkers, joggers, and mountain bike enthusiasts along with occasional pram-pushing parents taking babies out for a walk. The mushrooms are a gourmet treat- wild relatives of portobellos. The trick is to find them before they are too old, riddled with the larval excavations of mycetophylid flies. And of course to wash them well. I manage to find enough for a couple of skillets full that are still good, and now have a couple of freezer packs of “wildcrafted” mushrooms in the freezer. Mushroom harvest requires experience, local knowledge, and detailed ethnobiological knowledge of how to recognize edible kinds and distinguish them from unknowns or poisonous varieties. Some of my fellow harvesters come from mycophllic cultures like Italy or Poland. Most of my Euro-Canadian neighbours lack the skills necessary (and the inclination) to add local edible fungi to their diets.
I found it poignant when we were in Regina a couple of weeks ago after my partner’s mother’s death to go out into her tiny backyard to pick some things for my sister in law to add to the family lunch and find a neatly tended and highly productive vegetable garden, with chard, carrots, potatoes and onions ready for harvest. Few yards in my Edmonton neighbourhood have a ready source of fresh vegetables outside the back door, though it was common a generation ago. Jean came from a farm family, and valued growing her own.