Vert-à-Go

A doomsday email about proposed US food safety legislation (H.R. 875) has been making the rounds, scaring a lot of people and making a lot of unfounded and rather hysterical claims. Here’s the beginning of it, which will give you the gist:

House and Senate are about (in a week and a half) to vote on bill that will OUTLAW ORGANIC FARMING (bill HR 875). There is an enormous rush to get this into law within the next 2 weeks before people realize what is happening.

Main backer and lobbyist is Monsanto – chemical and genetic engineering giant corporation (and Cargill, ADM, and about 35 other related agri-giants). This bill will require organic farms to use specific fertilizers and poisonous insect sprays dictated by the newly formed agency to “make sure there is no danger to the public food supply”. This will include backyard gardens that grow food only for a family and not for sales.

If this passes then NO more heirloom clean seeds but only Monsanto genetically altered seeds that are now showing up with unexpected diseases in humans.

…etc, etc

I have not read the bill myself, but there have been rebuttals to the email’s extreme claims from a number of well-respected sources. Here are a few:

Tom Philpott at environmental news blog Grist asks, “Would new food-safety legislation criminalize organic farming? No.”

Food and Water Watch has a background page to H.R. 875 that tells you exactly what the bill does and does not cover. And a blog post on the subject.

Professor and author Marion Nestle ‘debunks 6 viral myths about H.R 875′ at The Daily Green.

Factcheck.org also has a great post dealing with a differently-worded email, from a decidedly non-panicked backyard organic gardener.

To sum up: although it looks as if it could certainly do with an amendment to protect small organic farmers from the worst expense of new food safety compliance rules, H.R. 875 will NOT force organic farms or backyard gardeners to use specific fertilizers and sprays, nor will it outlaw heirloom seeds. If you receive this email, please reply to the sender with the above information to reduce unnecessary panic.

The Environmental Working Group has just released the 5th edition of its Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides. This handy cut-out-and-carry card lists which fruits and vegetables have the highest (and lowest) levels of pesticides so you can see at a glance when it’s most important to buy organically-grown produce and when the benefits of organic are less dramatic.

An EWG simulation of thousands of consumers eating high and low pesticide diets shows that people can lower their pesticide exposure by almost 80 percent by avoiding the top twelve most contaminated fruits and vegetables and eating the least contaminated instead. Eating the 12 most contaminated fruits and vegetables will expose a person to about 10 pesticides per day, on average. Eating the 15 least contaminated will expose a person to less than 2 pesticides per day. (Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides)

Living in Saskatchewan, it’s much easier to find organic versions of some of the Dirty Dozen than others, especially if you prefer to buy more locally-grown produce. For instance:

• I don’t remember ever seeing organic BC peaches, nectarines,  pears, or cherries–I have seen Washington-grown ones at Safeway, but their taste was disappointing (I’ve eaten amazing organic soft fruit while in Washington, so freshness is obviously the issue, not inherent quality!). Most times, I would really rather eat something else entirely rather than risk spending a lot of money on imported out-of-season fruit that turns out to be sour or woody.
• Grandora Gardens (at the Saskatoon Farmers’ Market) and other vendors sell bell peppers treated with biological controls during late-spring/summer/early-autumn. You can grow your own in the summer.
• It has become much easier to buy organically-grown strawberries in the supermarket–both Safeway and Extra Foods often have Driscoll’s organic berries for sale during the spring and summer (imported from California). Local u-pick strawberries are not organically grown and although they certainly try to minimise chemical application, I am unsure about the level of pesticides involved. It’s pretty easy to grow your own–they are perennials and like all berries, taste a thousand times better picked straight off the plant.
• Organically-grown celery is easily found at (most/selected branches) Safeway, Sobey’s, and Extra Foods–let me know if you have trouble tracking it down.
• I’ve not seen organically-grown kale, but suspect it would be available at Dad’s–this is not really something I ever buy as there are so many other options for locally-grown greens (buy grow, freeze, or sprout your own year-round).
• Lettuce, again, is available from Grandora Gardens and other farmers’ market vendors in season. It is also ridiculously easy to grow your own from early May-September.
• Chilean grapes are often treated with up to 17 different pesticides. If you can’t find organic ones, US-grown grapes use fewer pesticides.
• Organically-grown carrots are available in grocery stores, but the ones from the farmers’ market are far superior in taste. I don’t know if conventional Saskatchewan carrot growers need to use as many pesticides on their carrots as those grown further south–our drier climate and colder winters can help reduce the need for many fungicides/insecticides.

And as far as the Clean 15 goes?

1. I tend to buy onions either from the farmers’ market, but I have no qualms about buying conventional Manitoba-grown ones from the grocery store.
2. I don’t buy a lot of avocados but will likely continue to get the odd regular one from the grocery store.
3. I tend to buy fresh corn in season from the farmers’ market, and then conventionally-grown frozen.
4. I generally have a greater concern about whether pineapple (and other tropical fruit) is fair trade and what the working conditions are for the farm workers than whether it’s organic.
5. I’m not a huge mango fan!
6. I buy asparagus in season from the farmers’ market. I never buy it from South America as the food miles are just too appalling.
7. I buy fresh peas from the farmers’ market and am still trying to find a large-enough, sunny-enough patch to grow my own. Otherwise, frozen conventional.
8. Kiwi fruit gives me an anaphylactic reaction, so I never buy them! It is very high on the list of allergy-inducing fruit, so be careful before giving it to children or serving it to guests.
9. I buy cabbage from the farmers’ market is so fresh and delicious and economical, but good to know that the grocery store is an acceptable backup.
10. I have personally never figured out how to make eggplant edible, myself! I’ll happily eat someone else’s.
11. I don’t think I’ve ever bought a papaya!
12. I never buy watermelon out of the summer season because it comes so far and tastes so dreadful, but will feel more comfortable about buying it from the grocery store when I do (now, if I could just find a fool-proof method for choosing a good one! Any advice?).
13. Interesting that broccoli rates so highly. I would have thought it would have ranked much worse because of all the tiny flowers that are vulnerable to pests! I like to buy it locally when it’s in season because it’s so beautiful and fresh, and bought organic when it’s on sale. But I will feel much happier about picking up a bag of regularly-grown from the bargain bin in future!
14. Again, interesting that tomatoes rated so highly. I would have thought they’d be worse, although I suppose if they’re grown in a greenhouse, pests are not a huge problem. My main issue is that grocery store tomatoes taste vile, and conventionally-grown tomatoes can be vulnerable to salmonella due to bad growing practices. Avoiding pesticide residue is not the only reason to buy organic! I grow my own in the summer, and buy from Grandora/other farmers’ market vendors during late spring/summer/autumn. (it takes a *lot* of energy to heat a greenhouse in Saskatchewan, or even BC, in the winter–very possibly moreso than growing them in a hot southern field and trucking them north). Seasonality is my main consideration–I haven’t bought a fresh tomato for months (and yes, I am missing them A LOT).
15. Sweet potato is something else that I’d usually get at the regular grocery store.

Here are the lists of the best and the worst–you can get a printable version of the EWG Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides that you can put in your wallet here. Remember, avoiding pesticide residue is not the sole reason for buying organically grown produce–organic practices can help improve soil, reduce water usage, improve environmental conditions for animals, birds, and insects, and may (but certainly not always!) go hand in hand with better working conditions for farm workers. It often (but again, certainly not always) may have a lower risk of disease or contamination. Conversely, local conventionally-grown produce may in fact have a better environmental footprint than imported organic. But reducing pesticide exposure is a pretty major concern for most organic consumers, and so it pays to know exactly what you’re eating.

The Dirty Dozen (always buy organic)

1. peach
2. apple
3. bell pepper
4. celery
5. nectarine
6. strawberries
7. cherries
8. kale
9. lettuce
10. grapes–imported (this is a US guide, so this would mean non-US-grown grapes)
11. carrot
12. pear

The Clean 15 (lowest in pesticides)

1. onion
2. avocado
3. corn
4. pineapple
5. mango
6. asparagus
7. peas
8. kiwi
9. cabbage
10. eggplant
11. papaya
12. watermelon
13. broccoli
14. tomato
15. sweet potato

Terroirs are “vibrant and innovative spaces that define the people who live there and reflect a marriage between traditions, culture and the natural environment.”

The Terroir Identity and Seduction Symposium (presented by the Assemblée communautaire fransaskoise (ACF) and its partner, the University of Regina’s Institut francais) plans to bring entrepreneurs, farmers, governments, researchers and consumers together reflect on the enormous potential of terroir development for Saskatchewan’s rural communities.

Symposium participants will attend Saskatchewan-focused workshops dealing with a variety of local themes (regional development, culture and food, organic/natural gardening, agri-tourism, project development, and slow food, among others). The weekend’s schedule also includes discussion panels, a local taste show and gala banquet (featuring La Raquette à Claquettes).

Terroir Identity and Seduction Symposium

When: 20-22 February

Where: Saskatoon Inn, 2002 Airport Drive, Saskatoon, SK (Google map)

COST: $20 (show only), $50 (banquet only), $100 individuals/$150 corporate (entire event)

For more information: Terroir Symposium web site, or call the ACF at 1-800-991-1912

The theme of the 39th annual convention of the National Farmers Union, which starts today, is “Food and Community: Local to International”.

Keynote speakers for the convention include:

• Raj Patel (author of Stuffed and Starved): “Markets, power and the hidden battle for the world food system”
• Judy Rebick (CAW-Sam Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy at Ryerson University in Toronto): “Rebuilding the food system for the future”
• Bob Kingston (President of the Agriculture Union of the Public Service Alliance of Canada): “Agriculture quality and food safety”
• Larry Hill (Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Canadian Wheat Aboard): “Strengthening farmers’ market power”
• Juana Ferrer (leader with the National Confederation of Rural Women of the Dominican Republic): “Food sovereignty: feeding the pople”
• Paul Nicholson (International Representative for the Basque Farmers and Ranchers Union): “Farmers and the global food crisis”
• Elwin Hermanson (Chief Commissioner of the Canadian Grain Commmission): “Bill C-39 and changes to the Canada Grain Act”
• Jacques Laforge (President of the Daiiry Farmers of Canada): “Supply management: a system that works for everyone”
• Darrin Qualman (Director of Research for the National Farmers Union): “Building solutions to the livestock crisis”

The Organic Connections conference starts today in Saskatoon. Tomorrow, I’ll be checking out the trade show and taking part in some of the workshops. I’m also looking forward to the talks by farmer and alternative agriculture guru Joel Salatin (”Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal”) and peak oil expert Richard Heinberg (”Now That the Party’s Over”). Xingji Xiao will be speaking to conference delegates about organic agriculture in China (he is the leading expert on the topic and was the first organic inspector in China) on on Tuesday morning.

The three-day conference features an organic tradeshow, workshops and a strong program covering topics of interest to producers, processors, consumers and traders in the areas of marketing, healthy living and production. It is also an opportunity to celebrate good, healthy organic food and recognize the people who contribute to putting it on tables around the world. (Organic Connections web site)

Farmers interested in making the switch to organic growing methods will find the Transition to Organic workshop series invaluable, while experienced organic farmers can learn more at the Advanced Agronomic workshop. The Organic Incubator will also give everyone the chance to meet fellow producers, processors, buyers, marketers, and certifiers, as well as the speakers, in an informal environment. To schedule an impromptu meeting in the space, talk to the organisers at the Organic Connections booth.

See you there!

When: Sunday 16 November to Tuesday 18 November

Where: TCU Place, 35 22nd St E, Saskatoon (Google map)

For more information: Organic Connections web site, info@organicconnections.ca

Barack Obama now seems to be all-but-confirmed as the Democrat presidential candidate. Why should we care in Canada? Because the US produces a disproportionate amount of the world’s CO2 emissions*, and is therefore poised to make or break the global fight against climate change.

This is it, folks. If we don’t take care of it in the next decade, we’re not going to get a second chance.

Here are the links to Obama’s plan for:

Farming & rural communities

Energy and environment

* For all our smugness, Canadians produce only a fraction fewer CO2 emissions than Americans (in 2004, Americans produced 20.4 tonnes, Canadians produced 20.0, the UK produced 9.79 and the people of Chad produced 0.01). Our population is much smaller, but we have absolutely no right to moral superiority. We need to change our behaviour now.

(right: photo by Stephanie, aka wishymom)

Over the past year, honeybees have been dying in droves across the world. To compound this already alarming development, the bees often haven’t even simply just dropped dead–they’ve completely vanished from the hives altogether. Scientists and beekeepers are still trying to identify the root cause of the skyrocketing bee mortality/vanishing rate, so for lack of a definitive answer, it has been tentatively attributed to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) .

CCD is an umbrella term for a number of possible factors, including environmental change-related stresses (such as travel or climate change), malnutrition, disease, pests (such as the verroa mite), exposure to certain pesticides (such as neonicotinoids or imidacloprid) or genetically modified (GM) crops with pest control characteristics (like transgenic corn). Mobile phone radiation appears to have been ruled out, but at this point it is just not known which factor, or combination of factors, is responsible for the die-off–about 30% of hives have been lost in both Canada and the US, with Saskatchewan suffering losses of 24% .

When I first heard about this disturbing phenomenon last year, I did not realise that the vast majority of the affected bees were not native bees, but rather honeybees raised by commercial beekeepers. These bees produce honey, obviously, but they are also responsible for helping to pollinate a large number of fruit and vegetable crops in Ontario and British Columbia. These types of bees are also extremely important to the US agricultural industry, as they are shipped in from long distances every year to pollinate an estimated one-third of American fruit and vegetable crops, mainly in California. A decade ago, the value of bees to crop pollination was pegged at $782 million yearly in Canada (and about $14 billion in the US in 2000) .

Honeybees therefore have a huge role to play in the North American food chain. In response to the die-off, beekeepers have been replacing their bees at great expense with unaffected queen bees from New Zealand. But how long can that continue? It is simply not financially viable for beekeepers to replace a third of their stock every year–and what happens if CCD starts to affect New Zealand bees as well?

The die-off has helped raise awareness of how dependent we are on insect pollinators, and about how they can be all too vulnerable to unexpected collapse. So, what can we do about the problem? Interestingly, bees turned loose to pollinate organically-grown crops have not experienced near the same attrition levels as bees that pollinate crops exposed to pesticides. This could well indicate yet another good reason to buy organically-raised produce. You should also try to buy locally-produced honey, as it supports local beekeepers and helps to boost local honeybee populations. It’s easy to find (try the Farmers’ Market, Steep Hill Co-op, or the SaskMade Market). Or at the very least, stick to Canadian-produced honey, which has much higher quality controls than some other parts of the world–as with all food products, it’s just not worth it to buy dirt-cheap honey.

It’s also a good idea to help encourage bees by providing bee-friendly habitat in general. Did you know that there are 800 different species of bees in Canada? Our world would be a strange, less lovely, and much hungrier place without them. You can find plenty of tips to help them here:

Hinterland Who’s Who: The Bumblebee (Bee Courteous, Bee Safe)

10 things to do to help honeybees

A guide to urban bee-friendly gardens

(photo by Neil Wilkinson)

Here’s a quick round-up of five of the most fascinating food issue articles I’ve read lately:

Our personal actions to halt climate change can sometimes seem depressingly insignificant, says Michael Pollan in the New York Times. But the best way to start is to grow some–even just a little–of your own food. (registration required)

Genetically modified crops are not the solutions to world hunger that Monsanto claims they are, says The Independent. In fact, a major study has found that GM soyabeans produce 10% less food than their non-GM counterparts.

George Monbiot, writing in the Guardian, says never mind the credit crunch–the real crisis is global hunger. And if you care about it, eat less meat.

Forget carbon: you should be checking your water footprint, says Amol Rajan in The Independent. A new Dutch web site, waterfootprint.org, can help you work out how much water is used to grow, manufacture, and transport common foods and products.

Japan is a market pioneer again–it’s the first industrialised nation to run out of butter. This surprising shortage proves that even wealthy countries are not immune from the issues of self-sufficiency and food security, says Leo Lewis in the Times of London.

(photo by Travis Gray)

I went to hear Richard Heinberg speak at the Broadway Theatre last night in support of his book Peak Everything: Waking Up to a Century of Declines. It was not a talk for the faint-hearted.

Heinberg is one of the world’s foremost Peak Oil educators. I first read about the issue of peak oil about a year ago in James Kunstler’s The Long Emergency, and it completely threw me for a loop. Peak oil is part and parcel of the undeniable argument that oil, like every other resource on our finite planet, is someday going to run out. Up until fairly recently, it was assumed that we had many years of oil left, and that in our infinite human ingenuity, we would come up with some kind of alternative energy source long before that distant day would come to pass.

Unfortunately, it looks like all the previous oil reserve estimates were wildly optimistic. And guess what? We haven’t come up with anything else that comes even remotely close to making up the energy shortfall.

So how much have we got left? The main problem with pinpointing the peak of anything is that you can only see it clearly in the rear-view mirror–once you’ve already passed the hump and have started heading down the downward slope. But Heinberg believes there are some fairly obvious hints that we are riding the top of the wave right here, right now:

• global oil production has plateaued in the past three years (the all-time record set in May 2005 has not been bettered since, despite the incentive of very high prices)
• oil companies are now drilling 3-4 times as many wells just to achieve the same level of production
• oil production has already peaked in 33 out of 48 oil-producing countries, including Kuwait, Russia, and Mexico (the US peaked in 1970)
• the number of big oil field discoveries is dropping off
• new fields are depleting more quickly
• prices are spiking to all-time highs (a decade ago, oil was selling for US$12 a barrel. Now it’s at over $100)

Even the CEO of Shell, Jeroen van der Veer, has declared that “after 2015 supplies of easy-to-access oil and gas will no longer keep up with demand.” It took us 200 years to reach the peak, but skyrocketing demand means that it will run out way sooner than that. Once all the cheap, easy oil is gone, it will take an ever-increasing amount of effort to extract an ever-diminishing amount of oil, until we will eventually reach the point where it will take more energy to get it out of the ground than we can get by burning it. Heinberg thinks that we have already started feeling the oil pinch, and it is only going to get worse from here on out.

The potential implications of mismanaging the forced withdrawal from our oil addiction are pretty obvious, and very grim. Food inflation. Economic collapse. Ever-increasing environmental devastation (deforestation for biofuels, a return to coal, tar sands development). Oil wars. Wait, doesn’t that sounds familiar already? It’s pretty easy to see ahead to the collapse of industrial civilisation as we know it. After all, 26 civilisations have already collapsed. Why should ours be any different? As Heinberg says, the party’s over. Our way of life is going to change forever, and if you’re under 50, it’s definitely going to happen in your lifetime.

But what will we eat when the oil runs out? Unsurprisingly, Heinberg’s answer was ‘local, local, local’. We need to start growing our own food, emulating the famous WWII Victory Gardens, embracing permaculture, establishing more community gardens, and waking up to the fact that farming is going to become much more dependent on manual labour in the decades to come.

If you weren’t able to make it out to Heinberg’s talk, you can watch a very similar version here:

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3     Part 4     Part 5     Part 6