Shades of Grain

Report from beyond our sprawling fringe:

A few weeks ago, myself and two other City Seed aggies took the weekend to tour farms in the area of Clinton in Huron County (2.5 hours north of here). Until this point, we had mostly been interacting with small- and medium- scale farm operations. Not so, in Clinton. It’s all about BIG GRAIN up here. We’re talking 100s and 100s of acres per farm.

I enjoy checking out the rural scene. We, as urbanites, are so disconnected from the issues that plague the farmers that surround us. And they from us. It’s nice to find out what’s up out there beyond our sprawling fringe.

Interesting things:

On the U.S. When it comes to big grain, the U.S. is top dog, and we are but a flea upon its back. Yet the Canadian government, when it comes to big grain, acts as if the U.S. doesn’t exist. “Our government supports us nil, and we are 50 kilometres straight east of Michigan. In grain, Ontarians are absolutely worse off than our American counterparts. In the senate, California has 28 million people with 2 senators, North Dakota has under 1 million with 2 senators. Nebraska has 2 senators. Iowa has 2 senators. So what Iowa wants, Iowa gets. Go figure.”

On biofuels. “My pet peeve of the day is biofuels. Try to explain to a starving child that her interests have been well-served by having 4 billion bushels of corn go into ethanol. You can’t.”

On conflict between eastern and western Canada. “We don’t know what we’re doing. Never have, never will. We had the three western premiers saying recently “We need more export-oriented stuff.” Eastern Canadian premiers said, “No, we don’t need exports, we need to protect our dairy and poultry. We’ve got a classic case of… put it this way, Canadian agricultural policy is the policy equivalent of constipation. Nothing goes anywhere.”

On income stability. We sat down with a guy that does the taxes for about 90 farmers up there. Only 2 of the 90 farm full-time, while everybody else earns the majority of their income from other sources – like carpentry, brick-laying, plumbing, etc. That’s the reality of farming in Canada.

So that is what is up in Clinton!

Recall of 'In-Store baked goods'

I came across this hilarious recall on the Loblaw's website.

I love how it exposes, so starkly, the discrepancy between what is marketable to consumers - cute, home-cooked, mama's-oven styled cookies, BAKED IN STORE, versus the secret economies-of-scale truth: They mass-produce this dough for national distribution, with so little care for each individual cookie, that shards of metal ended up in batter all over the country, undetected. Mama would never have let that happen.

Please find the hilar parts italicized and bolded.

Voluntary Recall of In-Store Baked President’s Choice® Decadent Chocolate Chunk Cookies, 352g package

To Our Valued Customers:

Loblaw has issued an advisory not to consume in-store baked President’s Choice® Decadent Chocolate Chunk Cookies with the UPC number 0 6038383903 8 because the product may contain small round, one millimetre in diameter, metal pieces.

The affected product, in-store baked President’s Choice® Decadent Chocolate Chunk Cookies is sold in the bakery department, in packages of eight cookies weighing 352g with UPC number 0 6038383903 8. Please note this recall only affects this specific in-store baked President’s Choice® cookie.

Customers are advised not to consume the affected product. They can return the product to any Loblaw store where the customer service desk will provide a full refund or contact customer service at 1-888-495-5111 or customerservice@presidentschoice.ca

We have removed all the potentially affected products from our shelves in our stores across the country.

We apologize for any concern this recall may have caused. The health and safety of our customers is paramount to us and we are committed to providing our customers with a clean and safe store environment and offering products that are produced, sourced and handled responsibly.

For more information regarding the recall, please contact:

President’s Choice Customer Relations
1-888-495-5111 or customerservice@presidentschoice.ca

Ontario's bounty

As this experiment unfolds, I am populating the following map with the farms that produced the food I have purchased. Check it out!

Ontario bounty on Toronto's shelves

I discovered something awesome in the process: Canada has an egg-tracing program! If you are so inclined, you can take an egg out of its carton from your fridge, go to the egg-tracing website (EggSacTrace), type in the bar-code that can be found on the egg, and it will tell you the farm that produced it.

THEN, take a trip out to the farm and meet the farmer! Just kidding. Well, half-kidding...

On the Radar

Food security has been on people's minds lately. You see it in the newspapers all the time, in positive and negative lights:

The Enviropig
BC company seeks approval for gene-modified apple
Cheese recalled due to listeria
Mad cow, e. coli
Large-scaled wine shipments from New Zealand versus small truckloads of wine from Ontario, which is better? For the people? For the air?
Michael Schmidt acquitted of all charges in raw-milk case
The quiet but crazed shift from Ontario to Chinese garlic
Food imports at an all-time high, yet demands for our exports to the US shrinking

What are your thoughts on this? Do you even think about it? Talk to me.

Year of the Locavore

Hello and merry December, y’all!

You may have noticed that the last entry was in first-person, following a host of third-person entries described as ‘CSF,’ in general. The farm has been a group effort, to be sure, with a posse of urban farmers tearing around on our steeds (bikes) and tearing up the sod, but the ‘I’ behind the last entry is me, Erica Lemieux, the facilitator behind the foliage of CSF.

A coordinator of cultivation. A sower of seeds, a SPINner of spinach.

And I have an announcement!

I am conducting a 30-day experiment. Starting DECEMBER 1^st (aka yesterday), I will ingest only local food for one month.

This mad undertaking is for the purpose of obtaining a better understanding of where our city’s food comes from, and thus more effectively doing my part to increase our urban food shed.

Some of you may be thinking, Didn’t you do this last year, Erica?

Yes, yes I did.

Why aren’t you just a permanent locavore, then?

It’s not easy! How could I live without grapefruit?! Coffee?! Chocolate?! Shark fin soup ?! (just kidding) But I have learned a lot this year, and am once again approaching this wild world of FOOD with a concerned curiosity that I just can’t shake.

My culinary boundary will be Ontario’s borders, for sake of practicality. I have noticed that food is not necessarily labeled from the farm at which it is grown, but from where is processed or packaged or distributed, making it nearly impossible to make a set limit of kilometres. (Or is it? I’m going to experiment with googlemaps… more on that later)

It is not going to be pretty, this experiment.

Or necessarily healthy,

Or with the smallest energy budget or carbon footprint,

Or the tastiest.

No, in fact, it will be none of these things. It is Ontario in December, not at all a realistic time or place with which to confine sustenance. On top of this, I’m a gal from the city, so my acquaintance with our surrounding rural stock is fragmented at best.

These days, we have huge knowledge gaps between what we eat and where it came from. Where did it come from?! I ask, in regards to a nugget of cereal resting in my hand. How could one possibly know, from the information we are given on the label. Knowledge gaps so large and encompassing and embedded, that I didn’t even know that I didn’t know, you know?

It’s kind of like those little cartoon fish in the ocean. Those two little fish and the one older fish. The older one, swimming past, says to the two younger ones, ‘how’s the water, guys?’

Puzzled and contemplative, the little fish swim on. Finally, one says to the other: “What’s water?”

That’s what I want to find out. What the HELL water is.

Except, you know, human-stylez.

It is almost 2010, The Year of the Locavore, and what better way to ring in the new year than with some local chicken thigh, VQA red wine, and some all-Ontario borscht. This is going to be a bizarre and, at times, unpleasant experiment. Some may even say foolish, or pointless. But I say, hey, the proof of pudding is in the eating.

Local pudding?

History of The Junction

While sprinkling zoo-poo on a patch of land on my street, I wondered: what makes up this soil?
What growing, trampling, eating, dying, fighting, dispersing, gathering, arranging, rearranging of things makes up this brown stuff underneath our lawns?

This is what I found. Below you will find 11,000 years boiled down into one blog entry:

The Junction (and surrounding area)

11,000 years ago: Ice age recedes, people start to emigrate from the south. Iroquois and Huron groups arrive on the scene.

Deciduous forest stands quietly. It is made up of black walnut, butternut, tulip, magnolia, black gum, oak, oak, oak, more oak, hickories and sassafras.

1600s: Early European settlers arrive. Etienne Brule finds five big lakes. Due to the rich soil and moderate climate, much of the area begins to be cleared for agriculture.

Forests give way to slash-and-burn-styled agriculture. Tobacco, corn, squash and beans supplement a hunter-gatherer diet of fish and venison.

1640s: Many Hurons contract smallpox and measles brought in by the British, die. The Mississaugas move into the area. Henry Hudson sets up shop in a bay. Lots of battles happen. Land is seized, lives are lost. The Brits take land from the French, who had taken it from the Huron.

Subsistence life gives way to trade. Agriculture intensifies. Lots of animal husbandry. Lots of furs and pelts. Lots of bartering. The waterways are good for that.

1787: The area is purchased from the Mississaugas by the British, who four years later name it "Town of York."

1830s: John G. Howard buys land in the area for $1000, converting a portion of it to farm sheep. He later sells his sheep farm to the City of Toronto, but stipulates: "for the free use, benefit and enjoyment of the Citizens of Toronto for ever and to be called and designated at all times thereafter High Park."

1850s: Just north of the park, a horse racetrack is built by the Keele family. (My street, High Park Avenue, was one of the straightaways of the racetrack. Pacific Avenue was the other. Crazed! Little did I know I walk the path of the ghosts of galloping Seabiscuits and Roan Inishes of the days of lore). First Queen's Plate in Canada: my street. No big deal.

1880s: Daniel Clendennan buys up the racetrack, converts it to railroad. It links the Canadian National Rail with the Canadian Pacific Rail.

1884: The village of West Toronto Junction is founded. Industry starts popping up wildly. Foundries, mills, wire factories. Heintzman's Piano Company, Canadian Cycle and Motor Co, Campbell Milling.

Agricultural land gets divided, sub-divided, and sub-divided again. Farms turn into urban properties.

1900s: Clang clang. Hammer hammer. Foundations are laid and the sky is scraped with buildings. People pour in from all over the world on the same waterways that once brought fur out. Urban agriculture is encouraged by Mayor Conboy to 'expand the production battalion' during WWII. 'Dig for victory!' he cried from his onion patch on Bloor Street.

Buildings churches schools hospitals houses galore. Land gets pigeon-holed into little rectangles and European-styled lawn is rolled out like carpet atop the soil. It looks very nice. The victory gardens fade away, along with the threat of war... The perception of fruits and vegetables growing out of the ground becomes inconceivable by young urbanites. I, for one, imagine that apples have always appeared in pyramidal form, shiny and waxed, under the glowing lights of a grocery store, naturally. They grow back there in the room marked 'Employees Only,' right?

2010: The two churches on my street are being converted to condos. Worth mentioning just because it's hilar.

2010: The enterprise City Seed Farm arrives on scene, begins rototilling lawns, converting aesthetic greenspace to productive food gardens! Yee-haw!

2011 and beyond: Every yard in Toronto is edible. Sound like a plan?

Prepping the land

Two CSF gals prepare a backyard by planting a cover crop and mulching it with autumn leaves.