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?

Fullness of summer-taste of the valley

The taste of the valley is in my mouth. The summer has been wet and buggy here in Edmonton, but this afternoon was bright and breezy, so I went down into the ravine for a walk. The saskatoons are still ripening- a few are wizened and past their prime, some fully ripe and others still tinted pink. The saskatoons (Amelanchier alnifolia) are not as sweet as some years, perhaps because of cooler weather and less sun- but they still refresh the mouth. Misaskwatomin….important food plant for the Cree of the Prairies, and ingredient in pemmican. The soapberries (Shepherdia canadensis), also known here on the prairies as “russet buffalo berry” were abundant, very juicy and sweet on a patch of bushes in a less fertile gravelly area [soapberries have the ability to fix nitrogen, so thrive in dry sandy or gravelly soils with little organic matter]. Not so appreciated on the prairies, the saponins in the eponymous soapberries enable making soapberry froth “Indian ice-cream” or, to the Gitksan in northwest British Columbia, yal is. I always eat a spoonful when passing the bushes. They are medicinal as well as food, said to be helpful for arthritis and for stomach problems. The medicinal dose is one spoonful. Soapberries are also high in vitamins A and C, and have relatively high calcium content, as well as sugars. So they are nutritious as well.

I’ve been reading Nina Etkin’s last book….it came out in 2010 after she passed away in 2009. It’s entitled Foods of Association, Biocultural Perspectives on Foods and Beverages that Mediate Sociability (University of Arizona Press). In it she explores the ways that foods are social actors, or facilitate association, and also (being Nina Etkin) looks at the nutritional and medicinal consequences of ingesting– or not ingesting– these foods. One of the chapters I found very rich was the consideration of street foods, not to be confused with (industrial franchised) fast foods. Etkin points out that street foods are not new, and that many of the world’s peoples have relied on street foods for a significant part of their nutrition for a long time. This is a sector of the informal economy, often the realm of women, or at least prepared cottage industry style by women in their homes. Although usually associated with urban areas, recent migrants and dislocations, Etkin demonstrates that the Hausa village she worked in in northern Nigeria also had street foods. She reminds us that, as a Muslim village, the women observe a form of purdah and do not venture out of their compounds to participate freely in public life, a gendered dimension of street foods I hadn’t thought of. Hence men, and children, more often have access to street foods than women (who usually prepare it). Neither can the women ordinarily sell the foods they produce– but their children can, sitting outside their mother’s compound. I was also fascinated to hear her analysis of the significant nutritional input that street foods could have for children….this is a polygynous society, so one man provides for several wives and for their children. His contributions are distributed evenly among the wives and their children. However, the women ordinarily contribute only to their own children….so women who have more cash (perhaps earned by selling street foods) can send their children to buy the (usually quite nutritious) street foods, thereby significantly enhancing the quantity and quality of food available to them. My connection to the book today was through considering my casual supplementation of my diet with a snack of local berries. I also spotted several large Agaricus specimens (perhaps A. augustus, the Prince) growing in the compacted and mowed meadow where people go to run their dogs. Several species of Agaricus, and also shaggy manes (Coprinus comatus) can be found in the meadow after summer rain, and I brought them home to cook up for dinner. Local foods….together with the mixed herb salad I picked earlier from my own back yard (Good King Henry, sorrel, lovage, chives, tarragon, a leaf of apple mint, and a handful of raspberries for the vinaigrette).

The Solstice is past and the light slowly diminishes, but the earth has not yet peaked in its warmth…the ancient Celts recognized this in their Sabbats which are halfway between the Equinoxes and Solstices. The Solstices and Equinoxes mark the shift of light regime, while the Sabbats track the seasonal shifts in the soil and air temperatures, vital for agriculture. There is inertia in the warming and cooling of the land. The feast of Lughnasadh or Lamas is coming up. In the Celtic cycle, as now understood in Neo-Pagan writing, this is the time of first harvest. In our northern latitude, fruits are ready, but the grain lags. In any case I think of it as the fullness of summer, and praise the ripening raspberries.