Vert-à-Go

(right: Gnome Suzuki. Admit it. You want one. Bad.)

The other night we had someone from the Saskatchewan Environmental Society come to the door about their Pesticide Reduction Project, which has had great success over the past two years. The SES has surveyed over 400 Saskatoon residents, and almost 80% of those surveyed have agreed to try going pesticide-free for this growing season. Approximately two-thirds of all those surveyed also agreed with the idea of implementing a bylaw to eliminate the use of cosmetic pesticides (similar to what has recently been enacted in Ontario).

We have already eliminated the use of pesticides in our gardens and were happy to put up one of their Pesticide-Free signs in the front garden (from the Canadian Cancer Society, who, along with everyone else here, classifies insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, rodenticides, and fumigants under the banner of ‘pesticides’). The SES is still looking for volunteers to help with the 2008 Pesticide Reduction Project:

We need lots of volunteers to help with our door to door surveys. Yes, this means knocking on doors and asking people about their pesticide use and attitudes about pesticides. Overall, doing these surveys has been a very positive experience. It is a great way to get out and meet your fellow citizens, to discuss important environmental issues with them and to make your city a safer and healthier place to live. If you are interested in helping out, please contact the SES office at 665-1915.

The SES also has a great bunch of information sheets about how to maintain healthy lawns and gardens without the use of harmful chemicals here.

If you’ve taken the plunge and gone pesticide-free in your green spaces, you might want to show off your handiwork by entering the David Suzuki Digs My Garden contest. Send in a photo or video of your garden, and you could win prizes–including a chance for Gnome Suzuki to pay a visit. By signing up, you’ll also get tips on growing your garden ‘drug-free’, and find out how to take action to ban pesticide use in your home province. I’ll definitely be entering our newly remodelled front garden!

(right: photo by HarlanH)

A few of us co-hosted a baby shower a couple Sundays ago for friends who are imminently expecting their first baby. Here’s part of the menu, which consisted mainly of organic and locally-grown food, and which featured those vanguards of spring, fresh rhubarb and asparagus.

• hummus (homemade with organic tahini sauce and lemons) & whole wheat mini pita breads
• pickles (my sister’s, homemade with last year’s Farmers’ Market cucumbers)
• cheddar cheese puffs
• salsa (my mom’s, homemade from her garden) & hand-cut organic tortilla chips (Que Pasa from Sobeys)
• crudité (grape tomatoes, carrots, sweet peppers, and cucumber from the Farmers’ Market)
• asparagus, chive & goat cheese mini-quiches (Farmers’ Market, Safeway, Herbs & Health, Bulk Cheese, my garden)
• rhubarb cake (homemade) with organic strawberries (Safeway) and pineapple (Dad’s Nutrition Centre)

Asparagus, chive & goat cheese mini-quiches

• pastry
• thin asparagus
• chevre
• chopped chives & shallot
• eggs
• milk
• salt & pepper

I first blanched the asparagus spears for about a minute, then dunked them in cold water to revive them. They could be marinated at this point with something nice (lemon juice, white wine, salt & olive oil)–I didn’t do that and think they could have used a bit more zing. I then chopped off the tops of the spears, reserving them for later, and chopped the stems into cm-long pieces. I then filled pre-made quiche shells (pastry is not yet my forte, but I have vowed to master it this year) with the chopped asparagus stems, sprinkled in a bit of Canadian chevre and chopped fresh chives & shallot (I found the shallot lurking in my onion bin from last year’s farmers’ market and grabbed chives from the garden).

Then I poured in a mixture of egg, milk, salt & pepper (2TB milk to each egg–I used 3 eggs and 6TB milk to fill 29 shells), topped each quiche with an asparagus tip, and baked them at 400F for about 15 minutes, until the crusts were nicely golden.

For a non-vegetarian version, I would have added a smidgen of chopped bacon (pork from Pine View Farms or beef from Benlock Farms). Next time I will marinate the asparagus beforehand for extra tang! If I had found fiddleheads at the market that week, I would have tried them in the quiches too (I did see some later at Bulk Cheese–they are an amazing local spring delicacy that I only tried for the first time last year).

My sister also made this delicious spring-y coffee cake, which she found in the food column of the Western Producer a few years back, with the first rhubarb from her garden:

Ladies of the Western Producer rhubarb cake (with posthumous thanks to Emmie Oddie)

• 1 c. brown sugar
• 1/2 c. white sugar
• 1/2 c. butter
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 2 c. flour
• 1 c. buttermilk
• 1-1/2 c. fresh rhubarb, chopped
• 1 egg

Topping: 1/4 c. white sugar & 1 tsp cinnamon

Cream butter and sugar. Add egg and vanilla. Mix flour and salt together. Put baking soda into the buttermilk, then add to mixture, along with flour and rhubarb. Pour into a greased 9×13 pan. Sprinkle top of batter with the sugar/cinnamon mixture. Bake at 350F for 30-40 minutes.

“We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. The condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to live free.”

- Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating” from What Are People For?

My great-grandparents’ homestead near Hawarden, SK

“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.”- Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste, 1825

“Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.”

- Orson Welles

So what’s for lunch? Over the past few years I’ve become increasingly concerned about that very question. I’ve read one too many news stories about hamburger recalls, about e. coli in salad greens and mercury in seafood. I’ve read Fast Food Nation; I saw An Inconvenient Truth. I started reading about peak oil and the impact of rising oil prices on future food costs and availability.

It has became more and more obvious that the current food production and distribution system is not only potentially dangerous to me and my family right here and now—it is completely unsustainable and environmentally hazardous in the long term. We simply cannot continue shipping the majority of our food from 1,000 (British Columbia), 1,500 (California), 3,000 (Costa Rica) or 6,000 miles away (Chile).

I grew up on a mixed farm about an hour south of Saskatoon in the 1970s and 1980s. It was pretty typical for its time; my parents grew wheat and some barley, raised enough steers to keep a small circle of family and friends in steaks, and when I was old enough, my sister and I took over the small chicken and egg operation.

We also had the standard farm garden—lettuce, spinach, chard, chives, parsley and dill, corn, zucchini, peas, beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, radishes, carrots, beets, onions, rhubarb, strawberries, a raspberry patch, chokecherry bush, crabapple tree, and a Saskatoon berry bush that never managed to do much of anything, to be honest.

A lot of that home-grown food went into our freezer or the cold room for the winter. But there were plenty of summertime meals where we looked down and realised that we had grown everything on the table (and in most cases, had just dug it up or picked it off the vine half an hour before supper). It always gave me a thrill of self-sufficient pride, and made the meal seem extra-special.

Since leaving the farm, I’ve lived in cities small (Saskatoon) and large (London). I’ve come to love food from all around the world, and eaten things that my farm-girl self would have thought unbelievably weird or exotic. But I never lost the taste for those first baby potatoes fresh out of the ground, the handfuls of raw peas scooped straight from the bowl, or the mouthwatering tang of chokecherry syrup drizzled over vanilla ice cream. So I started heading back to my roots—buying local food, raised how my mom and dad did it when I was a kid.

In many ways it was easier than I expected to replace food from far-flung places with something grown closer to home, especially in the summer and autumn. I already had a small city garden, and the farmers’ market could provide me with everything that I either didn’t have the sun, the space, or the expertise to grow myself.

But in the depths of February, I still found myself in a big grocery store reaching for a California green pepper or a head of garlic from China. I could do better next year, I thought to myself, if only I knew exactly what kind of food was still available right here and now, and where I can get it, or if I had more recipe ideas for winter vegetables, or if I knew what and when I needed to preserve in the summer to make sure that we didn’t have to live entirely off carrots from October to April.

Thus, Vert-à-Go was born! Over the coming weeks, I’ll be posting information on where, when, and how to get locally-produced food (eventually this will be a searchable database), and also what to do with it when you do find it. It can be more difficult to find local food, but it is not impossible—and you just might be surprised at what’s out there!

Susan Pederson-Bradbury (susan@vert-a-go.com)