Happy new year! 2008 in review
Happy new year! Holiday festivities are now over for most people and there’s not much to do apart from dig yourself out from the snow and finish clearing out the fridge of festive leftovers. A friend of mine, Tom, suggests the following New Year’s Day recipe:
Humpty’s Last Stand
Take all remaining 2008 food, chop, add egg and bake. Ready for 2009!
I have already made turkey pot pie, stock, creamed turkey, a couple of coleslaws, and chilli and am now down to half a leek, a grapefruit, and a cup of gravy. Oh, and a pound of chestnuts. I fear it may require more than eggs to transform those ingredients into an edible concoction!
While you’re enjoying the revitalised dregs of 2008, here is a list of some of the top food stories from the past year. 2008 was a tumultuous year, which brought a huge amount of hardship to people worldwide–as well as some exciting developments that promise some hope of change in 2009.
- Although the first shocks were felt in 2007, it was in 2008 that the food crisis began to bite hard. Skyrocketing food prices, riots, privation, and starvation–it was a perfect storm formed from a combination of factors, including food commodities speculation, the rush to biofuels, crop failure, spiking oil prices, natural disasters, and governmental incompetence (or malice). Towards the end of the year, some organic growers and vendors (like Whole Foods) were beginning to feel the pinch as consumers looked for ways to reduce their food bills.
- The previous few years brought the term ‘locavore’ and the 100-mile diet to the fore, but in 2008 a backlash arose against the strict application of ‘food miles’ without consideration for other environmental impacts such as method of production. Turns out transport doesn’t count for everything when it comes to carbon emissions.
- In March, Brad Wall’s Saskatchewan Party government withdrew funding for Station 20 West, a non-profit public centre that was to include dental, medical, and mental health services for Saskatoon’s core neighbourhood residents. CHEP and the Elizabeth Fry Society were also expected to join the centre, as well as a cooperative grocery store (area residents have been without a full-service local grocery store for a decade). In April, thousands of supporters gathered to protest the cuts in a community march. Having spent the year fundraising, Station 20 West now plans to break ground on its revised centre (which will include the grocery store) this May.
- Uncertainty about the food crisis led to a sharp increase in the number of people planting gardens, many for the first time, this past spring. Seed sales skyrocketed in Canada, the US, the UK, and elsewhere. Many city people (including me!) dug up their front lawns to plant vegetables instead.
- It was another rotten year for rotten food–in Canada, with the Maple Leaf foods listeriosis outbreak, which killed 20 people across the country, and the E. coli outbreak from contaminated lettuce at a North Bay Harvey’s fast food restaurant. Fingers were pointed at the Canadian food inspection system. The US scrambled to find the source of a salmonella outbreak (first incorrectly linked to California tomatoes, then later to Mexican peppers), while in China, tens of thousands of babies were harmed by melamine-tainted milk (which had then also entered the global food chain).
- Honeybees, which are succumbing in droves to an as-yet-unsolved combination of ailments called Colony Collapse Disorder, continued to decline. Parasites and pesticides appear to be chief culprits, but many of the hive deaths and disappearances are unexplained.
- There were catastrophic floods in Iowa, as well as another year of catastrophic drought in Australia, as well as ever-increasing evidence of the effect of climate change on the ocean–salmon in Alaska attacked by a warmer-water parasite, while west-coast oysters were hit by a bacteria deadly to shellfish larvae that appeared to be connected to a new anaerobic dead zone in the ocean. These natural and unnatural disasters demonstrate yet again how dependent we are on the earth and weather behaving as we expect they should so we can grow sufficient food.
- Several more fisheries were forced to close or are driving themselves close to collapse because of insufficient fish, due to manmade contamination or overfishing–US west coast salmon from California to Oregon, and bluefin tuna in both the Mediterranean and off the coast of Japan. Taras Grescoe’s book Bottomfeeder warned of the imminent need for humans to stop eating so far up the ocean’s food chain and to reject unsustainably-caught fish if we are to prevent mass oceanic extinction.
- Seventeen Canadian municipalities, including the city of Toronto, decided to ban the sale of bottled water on their premises and forty-five more are set to debate the issue. It’s time to go Back to the Tap!
- ABC News’s Senior White House Correspondence Jake Tapper called Barack Obama “an arrogant, arugula-eating, fancy-berry-tea-drinking celebrity”, while sustainable food fans cheered when Obama revealed that he had read Michael Polan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Pollan wrote an open letter to the ‘Farmer in Chief’ and a campaign began to create an organic food garden on the White House Lawn. And he hasn’t even taken office yet!
- Burger King released a men’s cologne that smells like a Whopper hamburger. Well, I suppose it’s better to smell like one than eat one…
- The launch of Vert-à-Go! I’ve learned a huge amount since starting up this web site last March, and I’m looking forward to covering more food issues and providing more information on where to find sustainable, organic, local and ethically-produced food over the next year. Thanks for reading!
Vert-à-Go has a 
