Local Delicious

Via the dangers of YouTube I’ve discovered a new way to “waste” time, brought to you by GOOD Magazine. First it was Drinking Water, now it’s all about food.

I love the quick, bite size snacks of information I get from the GOOD Magazine YouTube channel and, despite the fact that I too am guilty of letting food rot in the refrigerator, I come away from this clip feeling more motivated to avoid waste than bad for my occasional lapse.

I don’t know about you, but as kids we were reminded to think of all the starving kids in Africa, whenever we didn’t want to finish our dinner. One kid from school who got powdered milk in her lunch used to perform a solemn ritual each day, pouring it down the toilet and reciting with due respect, “God bless all the children in Africa” while flushing it away with a flourish.

I really can’t blame Mauvereen (really, it’s nasty stuff). In fact, maybe in her honour we could pause to consider the local hungry kids — and the ones in Africa — before we toss out that barely bruised banana.

YouTube is a dangerous place for me to visit, as it can result in me spending a great deal of time watching fascinating and enlightening TED Talks. Occasionally I follow a thread and come across other great sources of compelling information, like my recent find from Good Magazine.

This one, on drinking water, describes the health impact of contaminated water sources and notes how easy it can be to clean it up. It really makes me wonder why this is still such an issue in developing countries when the downside is so devastating.

Check out other Local Delicious posts for more on water issues:

Drink Local…Water I Mean
Who Owns Your Water
Enjoy the Luxury of Local, Drinkable Water
The Switch From Bottled Water

There are a lot of reasons I like shopping local. I have been a passionate supporter of small business for as long as I’ve been in business (via my “real job“), I like to be part of making my local community economically viable, I like knowing that buying local has a positive effect on things global like carbon emissions, and I like to know what’s in my food.

Yeah, about that last one…

Remember all that scare about BPA, the nasty substance found in plastic bottles? There was quite the outcry and public awareness campaign with the result that Jill and Joe Average now know to choose plastic products that don’t contain the stuff. But did you know it also shows up in your food?

Yup, you read that right. Poison in our canned soup. Known to be toxin in small doses.

Sigh. I sure wish we didn’t have to goad and coerce industry into making their products safe for human consumption. I wish that were a given.

You can learn more about BPA in foods and how to make choices that allow you to live without it at Care 2 Make a Difference.

On the plus side, once we’re educated, consumers have the control here. How you can help:

1. Don’t buy food you know contains BPA — companies don’t make stuff people won’t buy;  and
2. Tell us about it — that’s what Local Delicious is here for.

Make sure your information is from a credible source, and not just someone trying to bad-mouth for personal reasons. Then tell your friends and let them know the source. The only way change has ever been effected is one step at a time. Be one of those steps.

I was chatting with a colleague this morning about mass agricultural commercialization vs. small scale total organic farming, and the idea that maybe the sustainable truth is somewhere in the middle. We discussed how important it is to hear each side out, and see where there’s common ground and a balance for the common good.

Then someone forwarded me a tribute on the life of Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Norman Borlaug, who passed away recently on September 12, 2009.

According to Andrew Steele’s article in the Globe and Mail, The Death of the Greatest Human Being Who Ever Lived, Borlaug spent his life focused on genetic research “specifically to alleviate starvation in the developing world. His goal was always to attack famine, not merely to improve margins in agribusiness.”

In favour of which side does one rule, in the moral dilemma when GMO’d strains of grain saved hundreds of millions of lives that might otherwise have been lost to starvation?

Hmmm, for me, that’s food for thought.

Here’s how I know the food revolution is going mainstream: I chanced upon an exposé foreign indie film at Blockbuster on the weekend, which isn’t where I typically go for that kind of thing.

Our Daily Bread is the Manufactured Landscapes of the commercialized food production industry. In its disturbing and enlightening travels from lettuce to chickens to peppers to salmon and beyond, the film moves from large expanse to large expanse detailing the vast reality of how our grocery store food is manufactured. And I do mean manufactured.

On the livestock issue, I was expecting some shock and horror tactics — anyone who’s gone vegetarian after some nasty film footage knows it can work — but the film didn’t sensationalize the reality and in so doing, made the reality all the more stark. What’s done with absolute mundane, unemotional repetition is all the more horrific.

Just as bad, though perhaps less obvious, is the wholesale spraying of toxic chemical vapour on factory farmed vegetables, and the massive greenhouses that protect the plants from bugs, fungus…and sunlight.

None of the trailers I watched after the fact did the film justice. Maybe it’s just too hard to capture the full impact, the magnitude in a 2 minute clip. Food is a living organism and somehow the nature of commercial food manufacture reduces it to much less than that. It’s a little depressing.

I do have the perfect antidote, though. When you’re done watching Our Daily Bread, check out Tableland.

If you do want to see a clip, I’ll just warn you, Babe the Movie, this is not…

Learn more about food issues, both locally and internationally, at this year’s Stone Soup Film Festival. Presented by the East End Food Co-op and the Grandview Woodland Food Connection, the festival will explore health and nutrition, food economics, agricultural worker rights, and urban agriculture over two days of great films.

October 17 & 18, 2009
Britannia Community Services Centre
1661 Napier Street, Vancouver
Purchase a pass for $15: 604.718.5800

The film festival is a part of the Stone Soup Fall Food Gathering, also taking place at Britannia Centre. Events will include:

• “DIY” Food Day on October 3, a day of sessions where participants learn the art of making and preserving food
• Community Potluck on October 15 from 6:30 – 8:30 pm
• Food Justice Forum & Discussion on October 8 from 7:00 – 9:00 pm

More information (pdf)

Planning to attend? Leave a comment and let us know how it went.