Centennial Food Guide #3

© The Canadian Centennial Library 1966

I'm re-reading The Centennial Food Guide this week, and am sharing a short excerpt each day.
Novelist Hugh Garner compiled this "Devil's Dictionary" of  food-related euphemisms in the 1950s:

   A grill is a room with tables in a hotel basement, where yesterday's dining-room remains become today's businessman's hash. A cafeteria is a chow line where the saving on waitresses is not passed on the the customer. A café is a restaurant with toothpicks on the table. A lunchroom is a counter with stools, carved out of the ladies' wear shop next door.  A French buffet is an American invention, at which you try to pile three bucks' worth of food on a plate that holds less than a dollar's worth. A smorgasbörd is a Scandinavian caper to get rid of leftovers when they have no icebox. A lunch wagon is a superannuated streetcar, in which the fry cook hypnotizes you with his skillet gymnastics so that you fail to notice that the chips have been pre-fried and the round steak pounded with a piledriver.

   European cuisine means that everybody in the kitchen is an immigrant, and they put garlic in the hamburgers and beets in the soup. A delicatessen lunch is a sandwich bar with dill pickles.  A drugstore eatery is dedicated to eating on the fly, but gives the customer a fighting chance for survival by seating him five feet from the bicarbonate of soda. A health bar is a joint where neurotics pretend that carrot juice will replace the martini, and, ambiguously, where they serve nuts with their salads. An espresso bar is where a machine as complicated as Univac grinds, burps, and bubbles away, and brings forth a lousy cup of coffee. A tea room is a resting place for varicosed virgins where the creamed potatoes are stamped into forget-me-nots.

Good News For Bees

Image via Wikipedia

The Guardian is reporting today (16 Jan 2013) that:

The world's most widely used insecticide has for the first time been officially labelled an "unacceptable" danger to bees feeding on flowering crops. Environmental campaigners say the conclusion, by Europe's leading food safety authority, sounds the "death knell" for the insect nerve agent.
The chemical's manufacturer, Bayer, claimed the report, released on Wednesday, did not alter existing risk assessments and warned against "over-interpretation of the precautionary principle".
The report comes just months after the UK government dismissed a fast-growing body of evidence of harm to bees as insufficient to justify banning the chemicals.
Bees and other pollinators are critical to one-third of all food, but two major studies in March 2012, and others since, have implicated neonicotinoid pesticides in the decline in the insects, alongside habitat loss and disease. In April, the European commission demanded a re-examination of the risks posed by the chemicals, including Bayer's widely used imidacloprid and two others.
Scientists at the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), together with experts from across Europe, concluded on Wednesday that for imidacloprid "only uses on crops not attractive to honeybees were considered acceptable" because of exposure through nectar and pollen. Such crops include oil seed rape, corn and sunflowers. EFSA was asked to consider the acute and chronic effects on bee larvae, bee behaviour and the colony as a whole, and the risks posed by sub-lethal doses. But it found a widespread lack of information in many areas and had stated previously that current "simplistic" regulations contained "major weaknesses".

 There are other reasons for the rapid decline of the honey bee population (like habitat destruction), but we have at least one smoking gun. There is and will be considerable push-back against limiting the use of this class of pesticide, just as there was with DDT, but bees are simply too important for action to not be taken. I hope.

The Food Waste Phenomenon

Food security issues are becoming quite mainstream. Over at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, there's a report released on the problem of food waste in the global supply chain. IMechE is a UK-based society, so the interest in food security makes sense; food issues are pretty top-of-mind in the UK.
And it makes sense that engineers--particularly mechanical engineers--would be interested in agricultural issues. The past hundred years of progressive industrialization has occupied the time and intellect of a lot of engineers. And systems rationalization is one of those things engineers do. So taking on the problem of waste is right up their alley.
They certainly recognize the problem:

Today, we produce about four billion metric tonnes of food per annum. Yet due to poor practices in harvesting, storage and transportation, as well as market and consumer wastage, it is estimated that 30–50% (or 1.2–2 billion tonnes) of all food produced never reaches a human stomach. Furthermore, this figure does not reflect the fact that large amounts of land, energy, fertilisers and water have also been lost in the production of foodstuffs which simply end up as waste. This level of wastage is a tragedy that cannot continue if we are to succeed in the challenge of sustainably meeting our future food demands. [from the IMechE website]

With the projected growth in population to 9 billion over the remains of the century, reducing food waste and improving food handling will be essential. The difficulty will be in providing  technically and culturally suitable solutions.

customer-supplied image on Amazon

Which leads us to the Ugly American problem. The Ugly American is a 1958 political novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer that has since been widely misunderstood.

The novel takes place in a fictional nation called Sarkhan (an imaginary country in Southeast Asia that somewhat resembles Burma or Thailand, but which is meant to allude to Vietnam) and includes several real people, most of whose names have been changed. The book describes the United States' losing struggle against Communism—what was later to be called the battle for hearts and minds in Southeast Asia—because of innate arrogance and the failure to understand the local culture. The title is actually a double entendre, referring both to the physically unattractive hero, Homer Atkins, and to the ugly behavior of the American government employees.

 The "ugly American" of the book title fundamentally refers to the plain-looking engineer Atkins, who lives with the local people, who comes to understand their needs, and who offers genuinely useful assistance with small-scale projects such as the development of a simple bicycle-powered water pump. It is argued in the book that the Communists are successful because they practice tactics similar to those of Atkins. [from Wikipedia]

This is a point which has stayed with me since I first read the novel in the mid-sixties: Technology must be appropriate to the culture.  there's no use introducing refrigerated mega-storage to a country that cannot guarantee reliable power. Devising appropriate-level technology is going to be a challenge. Here's hoping these engineers are up to it.

Centennial Food Guide #2

© The Canadian Centennial Library 1966

I'm re-reading The Centennial Food Guide this week, and am sharing a short excerpt each day.
This is from a young Ukrainian immigrant named Gus Romaniuk whose family lived in a moss-chinked log home with a thatched roof and earth floor in the Manitoba Interlake region in 1912. Ill, he developed a craving:

   I couldn't stand the thought of wild chicken. The fact that there were no domestic chickens in the entire neighbourhood complicated matters. As a substitute, father shot a sparrow. Mother cooked the little bird and also made some sparrow soup, which she placed by my bedside.

   Unselfishly, I insisted that the bird be divided into four equal portions; one for each of us children. It made something like a small tidbit of meat apiece... My main meal for the mext few days was boiled sparrow and sparrow soup. Then father started shooting blackbirds. These were larger and meatier. The soup, too, was more nourishing. And on this strange diet, I gained some strength, although I was still invalided in bed.

Nova Scotia From The Air

Farms in Kentville, NS 1931. From the archives

Beautiful images of Canada from the early days of both flight and aerial photography are available from the Nova Scotia online archives. These photos were taken by lunatics photographers with plate-style box cameras hanging out of airplanes. They've been digitized and are just gorgeous, detailing a time that really wasn't that far back.
The farm above looks nothing like my grandfather's farm in Manitoba, but, like his, the farm buildings outshine the house.
From the archives:

It was Harold Reid who took most of the photographs in the McCully aerial collection, while Marty Fraser, an ex-RCMP officer and military pilot, flew the plane. According to author Dan Soucoup, McCully was "convinced that the aviation age would provide great opportunities for exposing people to exciting new ways of seeing the world around them.... In May 1931, a young pilot named Marty Fraser flew Reid as far south as Fundy Bay and up into Kent County, and the result is a fascinating collection of aerial photos that reveal the landscape in wonderful bird's-eye views that capture an age long vanished."²
In the summer of 1931 Reid and Fraser also flew over Nova Scotia, where Reid took equally fascinating photographs — 221 of them survive, in fragile glass-plate negative format, and were acquired in 2012 by the Nova Scotia Archives.

This is really cool stuff, and deserves a look.

Centennial Food Guide #1

© The Canadian Centennial Library 1966

I've been re-reading the The Centennial Food Guide: A Century of Good Eating, Comprising an Anthology of Writings About Food and Drink Over the Past Hundred Years by Pierre and Janet Berton, which was part of the Canadian Centennial Library project back in 1967. My folks bought the series and I read most of them to one degree or another. My favourites were the book on a century of Canadian humour (from Sam Slick to Stephen Leacock and beyond) and the Food Guide.
The Food Guide had pages of antique illustrations and countless short and long excerpts of people writing about food in Canada over the previous hundred years. I thought I'd share some excerpts with you over the course of the coming week. First up, a short piece from famous Canadian economist John Kenneth Galbraith with his memory of the early years of the cocktail:

Once a commercial traveller from Toronto had called for a cocktail and gave instructions on how to make it. The patrons were outraged but Johnnie McIntyre quieted them down and went out for ice. This he got from a little iceberg by a tree in the yard. It owed its origins to the dogs who frequented the tree and to the Canadian winter which quickly converted all moisture to ice. Johnnie thought this would return the man to whiskey and so did those to whom he quietly confided the stratagem. the man from Toronto praised the flavour and called for another.

Raising Meat and the Research Issue

Over at the New York Times, James E. McWilliams, back on April 12th 2012, published an op-ed piece called The Myth of Sustainable Meat. It's an attack on the idea that meat can be raised under better conditions than the farm-feedlot system currenty used in the industrial world. This was a direct attack on the techniques employed by Joel Salatin at Polyface Farm--and Mr. Salatin was justifiably upset. And he fired back.

from the Polyface Farm website

Pictures like the one above are what people think of when they think of raising animals on a farm--a picture out of the first half of the century repeated in endless kid's books and in popular culture ever since. But it simply isn't the case any more. Instead, sows are confined to gestation crates in massive hog barns.

credit: Wikipedia

People don't like to think that their food has been tortured before eating, but that's pretty much the way it is. CAFOs, Confined Animal Feeding Operations, pretty much dominate modern meat production, and as awareness of the way they operate spreads, they find themselves under increasing pressure, both from consumer groups and legislators. When Howard Lyman, a fourth-generation rancher in Montana became disgusted and enraged with the way cattle were being treated (and having suffered two bouts of cancer), he ended up on Oprah Winfrey's show in 1996, talking about how cattle are abused. The National Cattlemen's Beef Association decided a SLAPP suit (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) was called for, but they lost that suit in 1998, when both Lyman and Winfrey were found not guilty of any wrongdoing.

Samantha's Chocopops

From Samanthaschocopops

Had a chance on Saturday morning to try a small--entirely too small--sample of Samantha's Chocopops while having my morning cuppa. Nice chocolate, it went well with my chai, and wasn't over-flavoured or given too many weird inclusions. Samantha has a lovely selection, starts with good ingredients, and has a delightfully presented final product. And 10% of profits go to a local charity--until Valentine's Day, that's Cystic Fibrosis Vancouver.  So, if you've someone in your life who needs chocolate--even if it's you--this is a great way to fulfill that need!

From Prison to Farm

Over in Illinois, residents spend $48 billion a year on food, 90 percent of which comes from elsewhere. But those who don't think food security will play in Peoria should think again. Peoria received a kind-of gift of an old prison and radar site that comes with some significant restrictions on the land.

Matt Dayhoff / Journal Star

The Hanna City correctional institution was converted into a radar site for the FAA to track aircraft. The state signed the whole place over to Peoria, but because it was still an active radar site, it came with restrictions on what could be done to it.
But now a local resident, Mary Ardapple, a Peoria County board member who owns a local bakery, has taken a look at the place--including the greenhouse. And it's given her the idea to turn the ex-prison into a a food hub and farm incubator site.
Grist has covered the story quite nicely, including how the Illinois Food, Farms and Jobs Act is requiring state institutions like universities and government agencies to source 20% of their food requirements from local sources. I can't even imagine what that would do to local food production; the University of Victoria is now sourcing a lot of its food locally and that alone is changing the face of south island agriculture.
But it's also interesting to note how Illinois is thinking of converting a former prison into a farm and farmer training centre, while here in Canada a proven positive program, that of having prisoners growing a significant part of their own food, has been cancelled because it's not punitive enough.

The Food Bubble

Frederick Kaufman is interviewed on his Harper's article The Food Bubble: How Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away With It. This Democracy Now interview, by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez takes us through the market manipulation that brought on the 2008-2009 food crisis.