Tag Archives: Globe and Mail

How to Escape Global Food

Hey readers, LocalDelicious.com was mentioned in the Globe and Mail today! Way of the Locavore: Four Ways to Escape Global Food by Wency Leung offers ideas on how to go about local sourcing your food.

LocalDelicious.com was featured under Lesson 2: Start Small:

If you were to analyze the lifecycle of every grocery item you bought, you’d be paralyzed whenever you went shopping, says Liz Gaige, the Vancouver resident behind the website LocalDelicious.com.

“You don’t have to change your whole diet,” she says. “But if you just shifted 5 per cent of your grocery budget into eating more locally, eating more healthfully and … thinking about where your stuff’s coming from, it has this huge impact.”

Ms. Gaige says she’s always had an interest in “the artisan approach to stuff,” and has been buying her food at farmers markets long before it was popular to do so. She believes in supporting small, local businesses as a way of strengthening the local economy and building community ties.

But it doesn’t matter what your motivations are for dropping out, she says; every step has greater consequences. If you start buying organic meat, for instance, simply because you want a better-tasting option, that decision may also be better for the environment and more humane, she says. And once you start examining one aspect of your food, it becomes natural to scrutinize other parts of your diet. For example, if you consider buying organic, free-range eggs, you may soon find yourself buying organic, free-range chicken and other meats too.

“I never expected to be like a tree-hugger, but I kind of am just because of these small, incremental steps that I take,” Ms. Gaige says, noting that she grows some vegetables in her yard, and buys non-medicated meat and organic produce.

“I’m not going to agonize and spend my life freaking out about every food decision, but it’s about, on a greater consciousness, ‘Okay, what am I trying to accomplish here?’ ”

The online version is slightly expanded from the print version, so if you only read the newspaper you’ll miss some of the juicy parts. Check out the full article.

Is GMO Always Bad?

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.