Vert-à-Go

The Rights and Democracy delegation at the University of Saskatchewan presents its second annual forum entitled “Fair Trade Forum: Producers, Consumers and Social Change” tonight at the Frances Morrison Library Theatre.

This forum will address questions such as “Why fair trade? What are the goals of fair trade? What are the benefits of fair trade? And how does fair trade relate to issues of human rights and development?” from both a global and local perspective. Speakers will include STM sociology professor Dr Darrell McLaughlin, Marla Carlson of the organic prairie farm co-op Farmer Direct, and Carole Samdup (Rights & Democracy).

When: Thursday 23 April 2009, 7-9pm

Where: Frances Morrison Library Theatre (basement), Saskatoon (Google map)

Admission: FREE (refreshments will be served)

For more information: Facebook event page, or email rightsdemocracy.uofs@gmail.com or stan.yu@usask.ca

I confess that I do struggle against climate dread. Any new news about the environment is very seldom good news, and it is demoralising beyond belief to walk home from the farmers’ market with a bag of locally-grown organic food, only to be blown past by someone chucking a McDonald’s wrapper out of the window of their Hummer.

But we can’t sit around and do nothing, even if somewhere out there our evil twin is itching to replace every ounce of carbon that we struggle not to emit. And the food that we choose to eat can make a real and instant difference to our ecological impact. It’s important to educate yourself about what is in the food you eat, where it comes from, how it is produced, and what impact it has on your health, the people who grow it, the animals who provide it, and the environment. As Wendell Barry puts it, “Eating is an agricultural act.” We need to pay attention to our food, not just be mindless consumers.

Here are a dozen things you can do right now to radically reduce your food footprint. Most of them will save you money and improve your health, too!

1. Eat less meat

2. Grow some food to eat this year

3. Eat seasonal, locally-produced food

4. Eat organic food, preferably locally-produced

5. Choose fair trade food products

6. Only eat fish and seafood from safe and sustainable fisheries

8. Reduce your consumption of industrially-produced/processed/fast food

7. Walk, bike, bus or carpool to the store, market, or restaurant

9. Plan your meals ahead and keep track of leftovers to avoid food waste

10. Drink tap water, not bottled water, and don’t forget the carbon/water footprint of other drinks too

11. Compost your food waste

12. Use more energy-efficient ways to cook your food

…and check out Reiko’s Bento Lab–-just because I guarantee it will make you smile!

(this post is mostly a rerun–but it still says everything that I want to say. Happy Earth Day!)

One of my fondest childhood holiday memories was driving into the city after school with my parents to go late-night shopping and then finishing up at the candy counter at the Bay. We were each allowed to pick out several different kinds of candies that we would set out around the house on Christmas Eve, each in its special little dish. We had to choose carefully, because we only got to do it once a year, but there were some permanent standbys. Peppermints, macaroons, rosettes, slowpokes, butter mints, chocolate-covered raisins and peanuts, chocolate buds, butter mints, After 8s, willow crisps…it was almost better than Halloween! (we graciously let the grownups keep the boring old unshelled nuts and wield the scary silver nutcracker themselves.)

I still enjoy having extra treats around the house at Christmas time as an adult. But what about the dark side of the chocolate trade, which exploits cocoa bean farmers and plantation workers (many of whom are children working in slavery?) Fair trade rules for cocoa bean production prohibit child labour, increase the amount of money paid to farmers, and encourage safer and more environmentally sustainable farming methods. And you can rest assure that there are plenty of ethically-produced (and locally-available) goodies to satisfy your seasonal sweet tooth.

10,000 Villages is a good starting point (not only for edibles but also for beautiful fair trade Christmas decorations and gifts)–there, you can pick up Divine fair trade chocolate-covered mint wafers (After 8-style), as well as charming chocolate advent calendars (the calendars are also available at Turning the Tide Bookstore). 10,000 Villages also carries Amazon Flame’s chocolate-covered brazil nuts (both milk and dark). You can also perk yourself up in festive fashion with Just Us holiday blend coffee, described as “robust and mellow with a hint of spice”.

Cocoa Camino has a wonderful range of large fair trade chocolate bars in various flavours (bittersweet, milk, dark, espresso, orange, white with cocoa nibs, moccachino, almond, and mint). One of my favourite quick and easy desserts is broken-up chocolate bars piled on a plate with fruit (thank you, Nigel Slater!). These would be fabulous for that. You can also get semi-sweet chocolate chips and cocoa powder for your baking, as well as hot chocolate mix (both dark and regular). Cocoa Camino products are available at a number of stores, including Dad’s Nutrition Centre, Herbs and Health, and Steep Hill Co-op (these stores carry other fair trade chocolate bar brands as well, including Endangered Species Chocolate).

You can also buy Cocoa Camino chocolate and cocoa from Nancy Allan, who runs a home-based fair trade business called Just Delights (call her on 664-6071). Nancy carries a wide variety of other fair trade products, including coffees and teas, and is often seen with all of them on display at her booth at information fairs throughout the year (like Seedy Saturday and World Food Day). She had a Christmas open house yesterday, where I picked up a couple of chocolate bars. Of course, yesterday was Buy Nothing Day, but having already decided that vegetables from the farmers’ market couldn’t possibly count, I went one further and decided that fair trade goodies didn’t count either!

You can also pick up chocolate cherry almond bark (made with local sour cherries) from Wayne and Clare Pearson at Prairie Sun Orchard (call 242-7573 or email prairiesunorchard@sasktel.net). They have a stall at the Saskatoon Farmers’ Market on Saturdays, where they also sell their stupendous ice cream. The cherry swirl, cherry chocolate, and raspberry flavours (again, made with their own fruit) are all divine.

The quintessential holiday treat, of course, is the candy cane, and you will be happy to know that you can get wonderful ones from Pure Fun (available at Dad’s Nutrition Centre). Pure Fun’s candy canes are made from organic evaporated cane jucie, organic brown rice syrup, organic fruit juice, and natural peppermint oil. They are really delicious and I (and my kids) highly recommend them. Now, if only I could convince myself that they won’t all surreptitiously disappear off the tree before the 25th!

Spotted at the 2nd Avenue 10,000 Villages store yesterday…50% off Amazon Flame fair trade chocolate-covered brazil nuts (both milk and dark chocolate). These are regularly $4/85g box and are now just $1.99/box. I’m not sure if all branches of the store have this special or just this one. You might want to call ahead (242-2991) to find out if they still have them before making a special trip.

On Monday, 24 November, Robert Massoud of the fair trade organisation Zatoun will deliver a lecture entitled “The Taste of Peace”. Zatoun (the Arabic word for “olive”, which is the symbol of peace, light, life, hope, and the divine) is a nonprofit organisation that aims to build bridges through the sale of cultural and symbolic products from Palestine to North America. Its main product is fair trade olive oil, but it also sells soap, za’atar herb mix, embroidered handicrafts, note cards, and other gift items.

Massoud, who was born in Jerusalem to a Christian Palestinian family, and who now lives outside of Toronto, pioneered the project in 2003, calling it:

“a people-sized initiative for those who want to make a difference” but who “throw up their hands and walk away” in despair from seemingly hopeless cycles of retaliation in the Middle East….”I turned to the sale of olive oil because it’s a life-giving substance that binds us together in the human experience of eating and sharing, and a symbol of life, hope and peace,” he tells me. “The world today is in dire need of bridge-building. This is an invitation to walk the bridge.” (NOW Magazine)

Zatoun’s proceeds are used to support Project Hope, which brings international volunteers (many from Canada) to the refugee camps of Nablus to teach therapeutic painting, drawing, drama, and music to the schoolchildren living there. Zatoun also donates money to replant the ancient olive groves destroyed by the construction of the Israeli wall in the West Bank (it is estimated that a million trees have been destroyed since 1967). The wall has cut off many Palestinian families from their ancestral farmland, often preventing them from harvesting their olives and putting them at extreme risk from armed settlers:

At the top of the village, on a windswept hillside, Fawzan Nasassiri, 67, waves at some 20 acres of trees that he can’t harvest. Nasassiri, whose brother was shot and killed while harvesting his olives near here a few years ago, says he probably won’t take the risk this year; he’ll let his crop go to waste.

“I cry when I think of my land,” the farmer says. “It only brings grief to my heart that I cannot get near it. My children and I worked very, very hard to replant the land that they burnt.” (NPR)

When: Monday 24 November, 7pm

Where: Grace Westminster Church, 505 10th St E, Saskatoon (Google map)

Cost: FREE

For more information: Facebook event page, inquiry@turning.ca, Zatoun web site

Sponsored by SCIC, Saskatoon Peace Coalition, Project Hope, and Turning the Tide bookstore

The Chinese melamine poisoning scandal caused a lot of people to take a closer look at their Halloween candy this year. I suspect that a lot of candy labelled ‘Made in China’ was simply thrown away by nervous parents after their kids brought it home. I know that I culled a fair amount of my kids’ treats–some because it was made in China and didn’t have any ingredients listed, some because it was overwhelmingly composed of corn syrup and modified palm oil. Other stuff got axed because it was just too ridiculously sugary for little kids (such as…tubes of powdered sugar). I didn’t really fancy dealing with a squishy-style bender, and preschoolers aren’t known for the thoroughness of their toothbrushing technique (besides, I just really fancied those Twizzlers).

But health considerations aside, there are other reasons that we need to look twice at that mound of brightly-wrapped chocolate. Most cocoa beans (from which chocolate is made) are grown by farmers and plantation workers who live in dire poverty and often suffer appalling working conditions. Over 100,000 of those workers are children–and most of them are working against their will.

The US Department of State has estimated that more than 109,000 children in Cote d’Ivoire’s cocoa industry work under “the worst forms of child labor,” and that some 10,000 or more are victims of human trafficking or enslavement. These child workers labor for long, punishing hours, using dangerous tools and facing frequent exposure to dangerous pesticides as they travel great distances in the grueling heat. Those who labor as slaves must also suffer frequent beatings and other cruel treatment.

–“The Cocoa Protocol: Success or Failure?”, June 2008, International Labour Rights Forum

Although the cocoa industry agreed to abolish child labour seven years ago, little or no improvement has been made. Cocoa companies promised to make their cocoa “child labour-free” by 2005, and when they completely missed that target, promised to

make 50% of farms child labour-free by 2008. That hasn’t happened either. In the meantime, tens of thousands of children and their families suffer in grinding poverty–earning only about 1 cent from the dollar or so we pay for a chocolate bar.

So what can we do to help the children who are the victims of the international cocoa trade, especially at this prime candy-buying time of year?

• Buy fair trade chocolate. Certified fair trade chocolate production prohibits child labour, increases the amount of money paid to farmers, and encourages safer and more environmentally sustainable farming methods. I bought mini Cocoa Camino chocolates to give away to trick-or-treaters this year. Try 10,000 Villages, Steep Hill Co-op, Herbs and Health, or Just Delights (664-6071).

• Go Reverse Trick-or-Treating. This Global Exchange campaign sets kids up with samples of free trade chocolate and postcards detailing the benefits of buying fairly traded chocolate, which they can hand out as they make their rounds. It’s a great chance to sweetly introduce people to the concept of fair trade!

• Think homemade (if and where possible). Homemade treats have mostly gone the way of the dodo bird, due to fear of tampering by unknown nutters. But you could still give out your great popcorn balls or cookies to the kids and parents you know well. It’s a sad state of affairs when people are so afraid of their own neighbours that they won’t let their kid eat a home-made treat from someone they see every day, but will let them scarf all the trans-fat laden, non-identifiable mystery-ingredient junk they can stomach. Maybe you could make it a personal challenge to get to know as many of the families on your block as you can and break down that distrust–a summer block party can be a great way to get people to open up to their neighbours.

• Try alternatives to chocolate. When I was a kid, we used to get apples. How delightfully retro! We weren’t always overjoyed, but we still ate them. This year I gave out little boxes of raisins along with the chocolate. You could also try something like Pure Fun candies–organic, kosher, vegan, fair trade candies made in Canada and the USA. They make lollipops, as well as individually wrapped sweets. Dad’s and Nutters carry their products–ask them to bring in the Halloween pack! There’s also peanuts in the shell (I wouldn’t hand these out unless there is a parent right there to say it was ok, in case of allergies), fruit leather, chips, pretzels, savoury snacks, juice boxes, applesauce/fruit cups…

• Politely pester retailers to carry fair trade candy. Stores won’t bring it in unless enough people ask them for it. So ask for it! We need to create alternatives to the mainstream chocolate and candy trade so that they know what they should be doing when their customers abandon them for their unethical business decisions.

photo by naathas

I went through the fridge today and finally dealt with a weird assortment of things that had been lying there neglected for some time, including:

• a 1L container of partly-cooked pumpkin (about 1 week old)
• about 2 cups of buttermilk (waaaaay past its best-by date–but buttermilk can stay good for weeks. Just make sure it hasn’t permanently separated)
• 1/2 cup of half and half (expiring today)
• 2 links of garlic farmer sausage (1.5 weeks old–I’d bought it fresh at the farmers’ market, so I wasn’t worried about it)
• rather limp-at-the-end green onion (1.5 weeks old)
• some beets, complete with starting-to-wilt greens (1.5 weeks old)

First I took the pumpkin (we had roasted it and used half for soup last week before running out of ambition–a whole pumpkin can be rather overfacing all at once!) and cooked it for about another 10 minutes in the microwave because it was still rather hard. Then I puréed it, getting about 3 cups worth. The purée, along with the buttermilk, was just what I needed for these fabulous and fibre-rich pumpkin chocolate chip muffins (I stuck the other two portions of pumpkin in the freezer for future use):

A most virtuous pumpkin chocolate chip muffin

Dry ingredients (combine in a large bowl)

• 1-1/4 cups whole wheat flour
• 1/2 cup wheat bran
• 3/4 cup ground flaxseed
• 2Tb wheat germ
• 1Tb cinnamon
• 1Tb baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 cup chocolate chips (I used Cocoa Camino’s fair trade organic chocolate chips for the first time, which were delicious and completely worth the extra 80 cents)

Wet ingredients (combine in a medium bowl)

• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1 cup pumpkin purée
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup All Bran Buds cereal

Add the wet ingredients to the dry, stirring until just mixed. Bake at 400F for 20-25 minutes. Keep a close eye on them–I have found 400F to be a little hot for them in my oven and had good results at 375F today for 20 minutes only. You don’t want them to get dried out. My original recipe says that it makes 12, but I today got 12 large ones as well as a full pan of mini-muffins (based on 12, they are 210 calories each, with 6 grams of fat and 8 grams of fibre). I took the mini-muffins out at the 15-minute mark.

Afternoon snack out of the way, I used up the rest of the (shall we say mature?) ingredients in a hearty soup for supper. I combined two different recipes (here and here) to approximate a favourite restaurant dish of mine:

At-home Summa Borscht (because you can’t go to Taunte Maria’s every day)

• 3 cups of 1/2-inch cubed potatoes
• about 4 cups of water (if you had a ham stock or a bone to throw in, that would work well)
• 2 links farmer sausage, casings removed
• 1/2 cup green onion, chopped
• dill to taste (1/4 cup of fresh dill is best, but I used the last of the dried stuff from the garden because that was what I had on hand)
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1/2 cup half-and-half
• 1 cup chopped beet greens
• salt to taste

Put the potatoes in a large saucepan with the water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer until the potatoes are tender. While they are cooking, cook the farmer sausage in a frying pan (break it up with a spoon, but keep it fairly chunky). When the potatoes are ready, stir in the sausage, the green onions, dill, beet greens, and buttermilk. Bring it back to a simmer (until the beet greens are tender–you don’t want them to turn to sludge). Season to taste–depending on the saltiness of the sausage, you may not need to add any salt at all. Stir in the half and half before serving with some lovely bread & butter (and don’t forget the dill pickles!).

Cleaning out the fridge=good food. Go see what you can rescue before it’s too late!

I confess that I do struggle against climate dread. Any new news about the environment is very seldom good news, and it is demoralising beyond belief to walk home from the farmers’ market with a bag of locally grown organic food, only to be blown past by someone chucking a McDonald’s wrapper out of the window of their Hummer.

But we can’t sit around and do nothing, even if somewhere out there our evil twin is itching to replace every ounce of carbon that we struggle not to emit. And the food that we choose to eat can make a real and instant difference to our ecological impact. Here are a dozen things you can do right now to radically reduce your food footprint. Most of them will save you money and improve your health, too! I’ll be putting up detailed posts about each item in the series soon.

1. Eat less meat

2. Grow some food to eat this year

3. Eat seasonal, locally-produced food

4. Eat organic food, preferably locally-produced

5. Choose fair trade food products

6. Only eat fish and seafood from safe and sustainable fisheries

8. Reduce your consumption of industrially-produced/processed/fast food

7. Walk, bike, bus or carpool to the store, market, or restaurant

9. Plan your meals ahead and keep track of leftovers to avoid food waste

10. Drink tap water, not bottled water, and don’t forget the carbon/water footprint of other drinks too

11. Compost your food waste

12. Use more energy-efficient ways to cook your food

…and check out Reiko’s Bento Lab–just because I guarantee it will make you smile!