ottawa foodies

a matter near and dear to my heart not just at home but my workplace

Sustainability

today, with the overpopulation of our planet, we, the gluttinous, need to take heed

I am hoping to turn more and more ears towards sustainability
making sure what we now enjoyed will still be there to be enjoyed by others later and not just a vague memory
....

I am not tree hugger (no offense BDM), but I have in the last 15 years, have notice how much non composable bywaste I toss in the garbage so, now I recycle

I noticed while it lovely to have cherries in the dead of winter, they just don't taste the same as those that come about locally so, I've been trying to source as much as possible locally and in season during OUR season, not Southern Hemisphere

100 mile diet? don't think I could do it...I would die without mangos and pineapples, mangosteens, sweet potatoes, shrimp, king salmon, banana leaves, plantains, etc.... but most of my other produce and foodstuffs are produce locally

Organic, good for you. If it is there, I will get it (personally). Free trade, yea, same. But if I know something looks better, smells better and taste better, I can deal with the ramifications....I am only in this life once...I might as well enjoy it

now my biggest challenge: sustainable seafood

I love hamaichi but now know there is kona kampachi a close relative, farm raised in open pens

shrimp, I gave up 7 years of vegetarianism for you...love you love you
now I spend the extra $$ to get wild caught California shrimp...not because I still have a love affair with California but rather I know they are not farmed and not destroying the ecosystem

same with wild caught Pacific Salmon

now, things that really really really hurt:

*giving up ahi, bigeye, and the sushi equivalent and substituting albacore and skipjack...not the lush colour or aroma or mouthfeel but they will still be there in 20 years while the bigger breeds are being woefully overfished...bye bye toro

*being very selective where my scallops (hotategai) is sourced.... BC/Cali and NS but no where else

*ama ebi...very rare to find and when you do it is probably farm raised and having had a bout of salmonella from undercooked shrimp while I was younger will never eat this again less I know it is wild caught

now for the killer:

UNAGI- farmed raised and a detriment to the waters they are farmed in
hopefully soon anago (wild sea eel) will be found in ottawa sushi restos
probably a delight to Nanook's ears and eyes
if so I do hope they will bbq it and glaze it with tare sauce like unagi
(so much for my idea of a unagi burger for the resto :S)

I do hope these thoughts will at least make you think before tossing that bag of shrimp harvested off thailand in your shopping cart
well and other things

2 cents

peace

Chef Obi - Good topic... and if I recall your first "long one"... lots of passion, and thats good too.

I grew up as a country girl, so the 100 mile diet was a way of life... hate to say it but it was a matter of economics not trend-o-nomics. Lots of food out of our garden (frozen for later on in the year), homemade sauces and pickles etc. Local fruits and berries became jams and pies. Inexpensive cuts of meat, slow cooked. Root veggies by the bushel.

Downside... salad and tomatoes only in the summer. When the frozen veggies ran out mid winter we switched over to canned veggies, ICK!

As a country girl our diet was also complimented with a lot of local fish and game... grew up with salmon, trout, and other catches... and of course there was the Bear, the Venison, and Ducks that were garnered during hunting season. I still like the fresh fish (I will eat just about any type of fish), but have long given up most of the wild meats (partly due to my disinterest in hunting here in the southern Canada as sport, and I it just never had that much appeal to me taste wise).

Didn't discover "exotics" until my teens, mind you back in the early 70s we didn't have access to as many things from around the world as we do now. Remember I used to ask for a Pineapple & a Coconut for my birthday. Expensive treats... and no doubt has fueled my love of warmer climates ever since.

Seafood, I didn't discover until I left home and headed off to the big city... believe it was Shrimp Cocktail... soon followed by Scallops, Scampi, Lobster, Clams and Mussels... Oysters came much later on, and well that is an acquired taste, circumstance & ceremony.

Today I try to be aware of where my food comes from... more so since joining Ottawa Foodies (I've learned a lot here). I also am getting more back to basics... and away from the "conveniences" I've come to depend on over the last 15 years or so. I also tend to shy away from products from particular countries... previously that was Mexico, today it primarily is China (they just scare the living daylights out of me) before I was concerned about their fishing & seafood practices, now it is just about everything... the more I read the worse it is... melamine pretty much sealed the deal for me.

Anyways, I'm obviously not as atune as someone like yourself who works with food everyday (LOL, didn't know half the stuff you referred to in your post) but the point is that I am learning.

F&T,
age wise and experience wise we are not disimiliar
only my backyard change frequently (jamaica, florida, northen cali)

exotics? what is exotic is commonplace to some while what you consider commonplace is exotic to others
I did not know what chocolate tasted like til I was 15 and that was a reese's pnut butter cup

knowing what is out there, good or bad, is bypassing the BS tossed in your face by marketing experts
ie.... black tiger shrimp, alberta tripleA beef.........

we are all learning
on different levels and on different subjects
the day we stop learning is the day we die gastronomically

and thank you for listening to my rant

Chef Obi - No problem, you no doubt read mine earlier listened to mine earlier this week.
;-)

dear lady, i need no reason to rant
I have many
lol
it's all timing
and yes I did read that rant and while I did not comment at time, I knew I did not need to as the post was counter culture to what Ottaw Foodies is, so my actions would have been redundant

I agree wholeheartedly. I freeze things, buy limited amounts of food so it doesn't spoil and compost any leftovers. I buy organic and free trade whenever possible and try to purchase local goods. I tend to avoid most fish due to unsustainable practices, though I can refer to www.seachoice.org/ prior to any fish purchases. I tend to avoid beef and eat more free range chicken should I wish meat.

*shrug* I'm a greenie.

Beef can be free range too :-) 98% of the stuff I eat is. And grass fed, because grain fed uses about 5 times the resources.

And composting leftovers isn't green. Eating leftovers is green :-) No waste.

Like Chef Obi I choose local over organic, though preferable I get both. e.g Beau's beer is all organic, but the malts are all imported from Germany. So doesn't transporting them here cancel out any "greenness"? I actually recently changed my base malts from German to Canadian for this reason. Though many specialty malts are impossible to source domestically so I still get those from Germany.

But I don't like to call myself a "greenie" or "environmentalist" or anything like that, because I don't think I deserve to. I'm pretty sure my lifestyle still has a negative overall impact, so I'd be a hypocrite to do so. For starters, I still eat meat, and still drive a personal vehicle. These are the 2 biggest negative impacts someone can have on the environment, and so long as I am still doing both of them I'm only kidding myself if I call myself those terms. Though I am proud that 90% of the meat I eat is local organic, grass-fed, which is significantly lower impact (only about 3x more resources consumed as a vegetarian, vs 15x for normal meat)

Oh, certianly. I eat free range beef when possible, I simply eat less of it then many. As for the composting "leftovers", I had a bad choice of words. I meant to say kitchen scraps, peels and the like; the things left over from cooking.

I try to eat less meat and have no personal vehicle, plus I work in an environmental field which together makes me feel marginally less guilty then I would otherwise feel. I am still horribly wasteful in terms of my lifestyle, but a number of little actions can lead to global improvements.

not asking for epiphanies
just we do alittle
some will do more than other
not saying to totally devoid yourself of things you love but when given the option, once in a while choose the higher cause

I am not totally green myself
but I try
and that is all I ask: we try

and even to diffirentiate between home and work
at home, I get all my beef from oBrien's in Greely
at the resto, I do have to watch food cost so, being I sell more seafood and poulty than beef, I sacrifice my integrity on beef to assure I can get the best seafood and poultry I can

ty Jag and Zym for the input

the rest of OF is invited to discuss
even if it is to say I'm an idiat

one of my favourite mentors in life: Dr Leo Buscaglia--->

"I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate - it's apathy. It's not giving a damn."

I was about to post something on this topic last night when the power went out, and my little composition went back to being stray electrons. Maybe this was a sign. Oh well, at least my roof didn't blow off, as happened to a place just three blocks away. Another house, just half a block away, now has a large tree resting on its roof. A wild night.

Anyway, it's sad to see this thread peter out so soon, so I'll toss out a few comments. I think lack of sustainability in fisheries, not to mention many other facets of our modern lifestyle, is another one of those "inconvenient truths" that a lot of folks just don't want to think about. Most of us foodies are willing to do some of these easier things, like buying more locally-produced produce and supporting local small businesses, but when to comes to doing things that involve real lifestyle changes and some degree of sacrifice, the ranks start to thin out rather quickly.

As Chef Obi illustrates so passionately, supporting the sustainable seafood movement is one such area. For a seafood lover, this can be a bitter pill to swallow. To get some idea, take a look at the "avoid" list on the SeaChoice site (www.seachoice.org). Farmed Atlantic salmon, farmed shrimp, shark, many kinds of tuna, etc... a lot of common and popular stuff there. What makes it trickier is that the location and method of catch are all-important for many of the species, and restaurants and seafood merchants often can't (or won't) provide that information to customers.

Anyway, this doesn't have to be an "all or nothing" proposition - it can be incremental. Download and get familiar with the guide, ask more questions when you dine or make purchases, start weeding out the bad choices, and little by little, we'll get there.

"It's not easy being green" - Kermit.

a need to re-awaken this thread made me do it

It's irksome, isn't it, to feel passionate about something but to feel our influence on others is so limited?

I have been thinking about this today too: I have a baby and have been using cloth diapers part-time. The amount of money and waste saved is astonishing. Now I have gone out and bought a full supply of cloth diapers and I don't intend to ever buy another Huggies Mega-Pak. I want all my other mommy friends to do the same, but they are disinclined.

My sudden passion for cloth diapers is awakening other, green instincts in me. I want to eat more local food (easier now that summer is here) and am thinking of ways, little ways I can do things that are better for the environment (other small things: soapnuts to do laundry, instead of chemical laundry soaps; taking my own bags to the grocery store). I can't compost as I live in an apartment, so am wondering how I can reduce the amount of garbage I produce. I've been reading about the damage shrimp farming does for mangroves, but I love shrimp and they are quick and easy to prepare so...

But slowly I will try to find seafood that is harvested sustainably, and take other small steps to have less impact on the earth. And I will mention cloth diapering again to my friends, gently...

Oh, and I would like to add one other local food-environmentally sustainable thing I do: I breastfeed my baby.

Artificial baby milks require: energy and resources to make the formula, shiny tin cans and pretty labels; gas to ship those tins vast distances; and gas to drive to the store to buy the formula. Then, there is the waste generated when those cans get thrown away.

But all that goes into making breastmilk is the good food I eat and my baby's suckling to stimulate milk production. His food grows within inches of his little pink mouth. It doesn't get more local than that!

lol@ms. Foodie
good thinking with the babe
and diapers
yes little steps count and they don't have to always hurt

as for shrimp, I too love them and I get wild caught Cali shrimp from the Pelican
and yes farm-raised is decimating the mangroves along the SE Asia coastline

please instruct me on soapnuts

Hey Ms Foodie, if you bought your diapers here www.extraordinarybabyshoppe.com you may have bought them from my wife :-) Tell your friends to go in and see my wife sometime and she'll get them passionate about them. In fact when we had our first just over 7 years ago my wife was very against cloth diapering but eventually gave in to me on the matter. It took less than a week for her to turn around completely and now she is a cloth diapering evangelist! And believe me, she can convert just about anyone over.

It's great to hear the passion expressed in this post (as opposed to the hyperbole in the FG thread). May I add the following: in your support of local farms, let's protest the existence of box farmers in our city farmers markets by boycotting their stands until 95% of the content is local. Every morning I have to walk this gauntlet of Ontario/Quebec stands selling fruit and veg from far away places.

While we have the Savour Ottawa program (www.ottawatourism.ca), the market at Lansdowne and true farmers markets in surrounding communities (all good things), it's infuriating that workers at these stands pulling bananas out of a box are allowed to operate under the pretense that they farmed the food they are selling. True, we should all know better, but there are people who think this stuff is local and somehow superior to the stuff at the local supermarket. (Anyone agree we might have a legitimate complaint under the Competition Act?)

Compared to other city markets where you can buy fresh eggs, cheese, oils, etc., it's so sad that we face stalls at the Byward and Parkdale where one variety of each vegetable is presented at every stall as diversity of choice. Let's vote with our feet, bicycles, cars (when the markets are far away) and wallets by supporting farmers who sell tasty, in-season local food.

Arugula, this is the first year that all Ottawa markets must sell local produce when in season. I admit i have not yet been to the Parkdale Market this year to see what effect it will have. Sure they will still be allowed to sell bananas as they are not grown here, but anything that is grown here is supposed to be local when in season.

Chef Obi - you can buy soapnuts at most health food stores, Rainbow Foods for instance. You can read all about the product on the product site here: www.soapnuts.ca/

Zym, I definitely appreciate the fact that Ottawa markets will be enforced to sell local produce when its in season, the fact of the matter is, as Arugula points out, many of these stands are merely acting as retailers, taking away space from potential farmers. There's one family of retailers in particular at the Byward market who have six or seven stalls, and all they sell are apples. From March until August, they have seven stalls. It somehow seems wrong to me to take away real-estate from people who are producing goods in our region.

As much as I think it's great that they will have to sell "local", I'm curious to find out who determines "local", and how they will deal with the resellers who buy from other local, large-scale farms.

I agree with you completely, but guess what - most farmers cannot afford to have someone full-time at the market. Bryson Farms used to have a stall at the Parkdale Market and they were only here 2 days a week. Last year there were a few actual farmer stalls and one of them that I can think of had a pretty erratic schedule.

But it does seem to be getting better. I was down there today and noticed a couple of farmer stalls - one was new that I don't think I'd ever seen there before. We shall see how it goes this year.

So while I'm all in favour of forcing the merchants out in place of farmers, I'm only in favour of doing that if there are farmers actually looking for the space and can run it 7 days a week from 8am til 6pm. If they cannot, then I'd sooner have a merchant in there selling local produce.

There are currently 2 stalls in the parkdale market selling food. One is a savour ottawa member farm. The other is selling bananas. So much for this new "law".

Jane-Buck, the law states that it must be local "when in season" which IMO is still a huge step up from what was in place last year. We buy bananas in our house anyway so might as well get them there.

Zymurgist, thanks for the clarification on the new policy. It's a work in progress -- maybe in five years there will be nary a tropical fruit in a city farmers market.

yea!
dialogue!

interesting news on stall vendors but ya gotta be alittle out of touch if you think bananas grow in the Ottawa Valley
esp since it takes 3 years to get any fruit

but if anyone knows of a green house experimenting let me know....banana blossoms are damn tasty

Yes, if we follow the 100 mile diet--no tropical fruit, coffee or olive oil (and much more but these are must haves for alot of us!) And yes, I know the fruit is what is at the markets...
chef obi--I haven't tried banana blossoms but zucchini blossoms are very good.

Although I am not following the 100 mile diet (yikes - no coffee!) I try to shop local as much as possible. I do it for a number of reasons but mostly because I like supporting a local business. I am also bothered by the listeriosis, salmonella, etc. appearing in factory farmed foods.

As for the farmers markets the one thing that bothers me most about the Byward market is that they are reselling factory produced fruits and veggies. I understand the city introduced a by-law to encourage more locally produced foods but a quick search on the City of Ottawa's website turned up nothing. (If anyone knows more than I please feel free to jump in...) When I was at the Byward market at the end of last week I was delighted to see a Bekings Farms stand there as well as the Elk Ranch and Glengarry Cheesemakers. They are only there certain days of the week and I would be more than happy to plan my shopping schedule around them.

Nice to see this topic resurface! Most people give little thought to where their food comes from. Pity. Most people resist any significant lifestyle changes too, but we all can make small, incremental changes that produce some momentum in the right direction.

Aside from buying more locally-produced goods, everyone who has some space to do it should consider veggie gardening - you just can't get any more local than that. Besides which, there is something very satisfying about planting, nurturing, and ultimately consuming, your own veggies. This spring, I finally removed the last bit of grass in my backyard - it is now 100% lawn-free. Now I have one more patch of land where I can grow something more useful.

Think locally - act locally!

My favourite stand in the Byward Market is Guy & Diane Drouin's (stall #39)...their farm is in Vars. Their produce is excellent. Last year they kindly supplied me with a whopper LOAD of beet greens that I made a special request for. Just looking at Diane's...uh, earthy...hands affects me into paying more than their bargain prices. Love 'em.

bdm - Yahoo, on your backyard use.
I know you can do a lot with a little in regards to gardening but...I grew up in the rather idyllic era of small house/big yard.
We were on Tweedsmuir Avenue and our back yard - and garden - was enormous...ditto with most of our neighbours. Harold, two doors over, besides keeping rabbits had a tractor - his garden was THAT big. Imagine that NOW. Ahhh.
p.s. Most of those yards are infill housing now.

"we all can make small, incremental changes that produce some momentum in the right direction"

Word!

bang on guys!
keep up the good work and fight the good fight
lol (Triumph!!)

Doh! Jagash beat me to it in this forum www.ottawafoodies.com
-----------------------------

An article ( www.cbc.ca ) today on CBC claims that 'Food Miles' (such as 100 mile diet) is a flawed concept. The basic gist is that transportation is a relatively small component of the footprint of growing things, and that it is just more efficient to grow some things, in some places. Example was.. that it is more efficient (by an order of magnitude) to grow strawberries on an acre in California, than on an acre in Ontario. What he doesn't point out, and also what some 100 mile dieters also forget, is that a REAL 100 mile diet isn't about eating oranges grown (at great expense) in Ontario, but is about eating things that grow efficiently, and abundantly in your climate. For us, I'm guessing that would mean a lot of kale, and root vegetables, and not so much tomatos and green peppers... Thoughts anyone?

Pete-In-Ottawa - Hooey!

I believe that we look back about 100 years (and not so much 100 Miles) we would have a better concept of what did and didn't work for the environment. Long before the days of synthetics and chemical abundances.

I eat whatever can grow here in season (be that everyday peas, beans & carrots, or tomatoes and peppers in the heat of summer) along with those root veggies which not only grow well in our climate but also "keep over" well during the winter. But I also know that my ancestors grew things that weren't necessarily native to Eastern Ontario & West Quebec, but did ok here (like fruit trees - Peaches, Pears, Plums, etc).

So I don't buy the argument that we'd only exist on hardy veggies.

IF I lived a life like they did (on a farm or acerage) I certainly would grow a garden that was diverse. As it is, I live in the "big city" and have an "invisible backyard" so I try to buy local and with today's technology am able to freeze things, or can up items (like pickles, jams, spaghetti sauce). My ancestors did similar things only in their day they grew it all themselves and stored it all in a pantry, root cellar & larder (where big hunks of ice were kept below ground in the summertime). And this wasn't so long ago... as it was a homesteader property, these traditional spaces co-existed with a modern day refrigerator & freezer.

Ok so there were none of the exotics (like Pineapples) things that we now in the 21st Century take for granted, but there was diversity in their diet, and they ate well.

We certainly could do better... I think that there will be a movement in the next 100 years to roll-back the way we live to something closer to the Victorian age, so that every property has space for a garden / orchard or there will be more means for these growing spaces to be available in a community.

Those Victorians drank a lot of tea... I wonder where that came from. They also ate a lot of spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, pepper, etc. The 100 mile diet in the strictest interpretation has rarely been feasible... there has been inter-continental trade since the beginning of agriculture. There are over ten million people living in Ontario, how reasonable is it to be able to grow enough local food to sustain that population in this climate? The natives were here long ago, but they didn't have 10+ million mouths to feed and they most likely traded with peoples who lived more than a hundred miles away.

Like it or not agricultural advances have been key in allowing humans to be able to feed a quickly growing population while maintaining growth. Now, whether this growth was a good idea or not is certainly questionable, but the solution certainly isn't in semi-arbitrary kneejerk responses that may or may not make sense and in figuring out and implementing sustainable and reasonable methods of feeding the populace, whatever they may be.

Transportation may be a tiny portion of it right now, today. Talk to me in 50 years when peak oil is 20 to 30 years behind us. When it is too late to ensure the food security of your community.

They'll just ship it with a schooner. :)

Did someone say with a Schooner ?
;-)

glad this got alittle attention while I was away
LOL @ F&T