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World Food Day 2020

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Imagine you and your family live in a lovely house. It is the place you grew up in. The doorframe into the mudroom has notches that documented yours and your siblings growing bodies over the years, as you got taller and taller – and now there are new notches tracking the growth of your own children. Out in the backyard, there is the most awesome tree in whose branches you played, swung and built the tree fort, and from those lofty heights you surveyed the world around…

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Helping Out

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It is early October and it’s still warm enough to have the window beside my desk open. I can hear gardening sounds that keep distracting me. Across the alley from my house lives an elderly Italian woman named Domnica. She is trimming a very impressive grape vine on her property. I moved to this neighbourhood at the end of January this year. We had just started to locate all our belongings and enough space amongst the detritus of our lives to begin looking outward towards our new neighbours when the pandemic hit BC. Suddenly all my plans for connecting with our new neighbours, of finding common interests over the fences and moving towards shared meals and garden harvests…

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Brilliant Beans

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I gathered my second harvest of dry beans the other day, when we had a long enough break from autumn rains to dry down the pods. It was a welcome exercise that followed an earlier and larger harvest. It was during my first harvest that I took note of the bean pods not yet ready and still others far from harvestable. This obligation to return to complete the harvest once, perhaps twice, is nature’s way of ensuring that there will always be food and seeds, of fostering food security. …

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Rural Slaughter Modernization – Call for Input by November 16

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The BC government has released an intentions paper and is seeking input on how to make slaughter more accessible and viable for livestock producers.

Fields across the Central Kootenay have long been home to assorted grazing animals. From the earliest settlers here, livestock have made important contributions to farm income streams, community food security and to soil fertility. For many people in rural and urban communities, the provisioning of food has included the culture and practice of sourcing meat directly from the farmers who raise the animals.

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COVID-19 & Food Systems – New Meeting Schedule

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The Food Policy Council continues to engage with those involved in food systems (farmers, food processors and businesses, non-profits, local government) who live and work in the Columbia Basin to discuss our work, our challenges and to help find a path forward in this pandemic – for the immediate and the long term.

We are now meeting monthly on the first Thursday of each month.

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COVID-19 & Food Systems

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The Food Policy Council is now hosting bi-weekly meeting to provide space for those involved in food systems (farmers, food processors and businesses, non-profits, local government) who live and work in the Columbia Basin to discuss our work, our challenges and to help find a path forward in this pandemic – for the immediate and

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Righting the World – the journey towards food security

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When my son was little, he had an imaginary version of the world around him that he called “backwards land”. Since I myself did not inhabit backwards land, I had to assume that things were somehow opposite to what I experienced.

More recently, I have wondered about the wisdom of my wee son as I observed the antics and culture predominating in North America. As a one-time classics student, I have not been able shake the image of Emperor Nero fiddling while his Rome burned. It feels like we have all been dancing and spinning faster and faster with the distractions of accumulation and social media in order to avoid facing the reality of the world around us…

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Y2K was a dry run: Reflections on COVID-19 and food

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In the late 1990’s, I spent the better part of 2 years educating people about how to grow, make, and preserve food in their own homes. It was part of a pro-active measure taken by my then employer, the Kootenay Country Store Cooperative in Nelson BC, to respond constructively to the concern that many were feeling about the possible havoc that Y2K might wreak. Then, as now, people were concerned about the security of their food supply—though less so about toilet paper. If no fuel was available to run the trucks that bring so much of our food, how could we best protect and prepare ourselves locally? …

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