I looked into the City of Vancouver’s policies and was mildly encouraged.  It didn’t look too complicated, or expensive, save for one minor detail- there was a list of foods that were allowed and those that weren’t.  Unfortunately to the quality or diversity of streetside fare, the allowed foods are limited to hotdogs, pretzels, and nuts.

Now hotdogs and pretzels are a decent combination, in certain times of need, but to be honest I have never had much luck with the street side dogs served in this wonderful city, despite the wonderful smell of frying onions.  How much better would it be if those fried onions were to accompany not a questionable, low quality hotdog, but some delicious, homemade, wholesome (and vegetarian) perogies?

Luckily there looked like a loophole.  “With respect to offering other food products,” said the City’s website, “you will have to obtain approval from Vancouver Coastal Authority (Health Department) who regulates food products and handling of food products at (604) 675-3800.”   So I called the number and got a hold of David Jansen (sic).   I asked him about the perogy situation and to my great disappointment, the City, according to the Health Department, had some incorrect wording up on dispalay. Apparently the possibility for approving another food was not in the dice.

“That’s the list and we don’t believe we will be expanding that list,” he told me. “We like to keep this list very limited.”  He made reference to the simplicity of a hotdog operation, and expressed his fear that if you allowed other foods, you might end up with oversized mobile kitchens all over the city.

I asked him why they allow hotdogs.

“hotdogs are pre-cooked,” he said, and didn’t require much preparation.

I told him perogies were precooked, and that they could be prepared just as easily as the hotdog, with the exact same thing as a hotdog stand.  Even the condiments would be identical.

“I know all about the perogy,” he answered, mildly annoyed in a somewhat pedantic, condescending tone.   He went on about how they would prefer servers of food to “make an investment” and that if I wanted to sell perogies so bad, I could start a restaurant.  I told him he was cutting down on small business opportunities and the possibility of having good food served by streetvendors.  And so ended our unhappy conversation.

If you wonder, as these people do, why the street vending in this city sucks, it’s because there is an arbitrary rule that makes it shitty.  But before you move to New York, where you can find some real streetside vending action, take faith in the fact that it’s a rule you can’t really logically defend.  Like the complete ban on street vending in this city not even twenty years ago, let’s hope it changes.

Called the Healthy Land Healthy Future Project, the study is funded by Health Canada as part of a national program aimed at eliminating the perception that wild food is increasingly contaminated with industrial pollutants.

Richard Lawrence of Health Canada, who is involved in the project, said that the purpose of the study is ultimately about addressing the fear of contamination that is “pushing people towards less healthy western diets.”

Diabetes, cancer, higher rates of heart disease, and obesity are all growing problems in First Nations communities, I was told at the workshop, and traditional foods can be excellent ways to live healthier.

“In general, the greater the extent of perceived risk of exposure to contaminants through the consumption of traditions foods, the more reluctant First Nations are to harvest such foods, so, instead, they acquire western foods as an alternative,” said Lawrence. “The perception of risk can present a barrier to accessing traditional foods which prevents First Nations from obtaining the benefits of traditional food consumption.”

Nowhere is this concern more pervasive perhaps than in Takla, the site of substantial resource development including logging, mining, and a failed attempt at building a railroad to Alaska.  Margo French, who is working on the study gathering soil and animal samples, is familiar with many of the contaminated sites throughout the area, including Bralorne Mines.

“When we were kids our families would camp there,” she said.  Today it is on the list of crown contaminated sites, an abandoned mercury mine that exhales mercury vapours from its soil at levels considered unsafe.

Margo French stands in front of the remnants of the Bralorne Mine

During the war, when they operated it, it was one of the largest mercury mines in Canada. They would ship out glass tubes filled with mercury like giant thermometers on barges.  At least one barge went down, and thousands of pounds of mercury with it.  Other remnants of the mine, like bricks, were allegedly used in the hearth of a local guide’s lodge. Another story was that a road crew used contaminated fill to crown a stretch of road, which, in the dry summer heat would be sent up in clouds of dust to be eaten by the truck and its driver behind.

“Many of the families who grew up harvesting in this area now suffer from mercury- and heavy-metal-related illnesses,” says the Talka Band’s backgrounder on mining. “To date no human health studies have been done to address the Takla people’s health concerns.”

Other concerns have related to the aerial spraying of herbicides to control non-marketable plant species and the lingering effects of a railroad and a nearby sawmill and wood-treatment plant that was buried, leaving the soil saturated in PCP, garbage, and oil.

While the study aims to eliminate the cause of the fear- contamination- it may not determine that there is nothing to be afraid of.

“It is important to note that some traditional foods do have contaminants but also contain valuable nutrients not easily replaced by market foods, which is why it is valuable to undertake research to assess the levels of risk and to weigh risks vs. benefits,” said Lawrence.

James Steidle

But a recent article by UofT professor Pierre Desrochers and economic consultant Hiroko Shimizu suggests this logic is flawed.  Among the highlights: in the UK a consumer driving six miles to buy Kenyan green beans emits more carbon per bean than flying them from Kenya to the United Kingdom; also in the UK,  tomato production requires heated greenhouses, in Spain they do not- the result is UK tomatoes emit 2,394 kg of CO2/ton compared to 630 kg/ton for Spanish tomatoes, their transportation included.

I asked Bill Rees of UBC’s School of Community Planning what he thought of the argument and he pointed out they do have a point.

“Some years ago one of my students compared BC green-house (hydroponic) tomato production with field farm production and found that the green-house crops used 14-20 times as much energy, fertilizers, maintenance material/energy (for the green-houses) per unit produced, as did field farms.”

A big difference.  And one Rees thinks is big enough to mean a field tomato shipped in bulk from Mexico or California would have a smaller eco-footprint than locally-grown greenhouse products.

Fair enough.  But does this mean all local food is bad for the environment?

Not necessarily, says the report’s author, Pierre Desrochers.

“Local food generally makes economic and environmental sense when people are willing to pay for it because of attributes other than the fact that it was grown in close proximity.”

Like what?  According to him, if the food is good and fresh.

“In-season [local] produce that tastes fresher/better and are priced competitively when compared with the alternatives available at that moment in the local market [are going to be better for the environment],” he told me.  “The same produce, however, might not make sense six months later after having been stored in a refrigerated warehouse when it has to compete against Californian or southern hemisphere competitors (which will be typically fresher and less expensive).”

So the point is not to buy local for the sake of it being local, but for the sake of it being cheaper or better.

Nothing too new, if you read the Tyee’s online series on the hundred mile diet and this article in particular, which effectively echoes Desrocher’s point. You can eat locally without doing more harm than good.  But you need to plan based on the seasons. It means eating green tomatoes in the spring, canning them for the winter to avoid refrigration. Knowing whether or not a greenhouse was used.

All of this begs the question why we don’t have labels on our food telling us this, including how much carbon was produced in its production.   The notion isn’t that hare brained, and is being adopted in England according to this article. But then again they already have labels for genetically modified food, something we don’t even have here in Canada, allegedly because it would be too hard to come up with enforceable labels. Desrochers echoes the argument.

“To be honest, they strike me as very arbitrary and simply impossible to document for all the product we have to deal with (where do you set the boundaries of your analysis? How can you factor in everything?).”

What that leaves  us with is their prices.

“Although they’re not perfect, I believe that prices convey enough information to make informed choices in most cases (they factor in all sorts of trade-offs after all.)”

But what’s in a price?

While it may include the cost of transportation and the amount of energy used in producing food, it does not include other environmental and social costs, according to Geoff Andrews‘ new book, the Slow Food Story.  The global standardization of produce and food has led to the domination of fast food chains and big agribusiness at the expense of the small producer.  The cost is a lost identity, a dumbing down of culture and the loss of local artisanship, or as the French would say terroir.

Bill Rees also added that there are many other local benefits of supporting local agriculture as well.    It diversifies the economy, adds to our agricultural self-reliance, which can be a good thing if offshore suppliers fail, and adds value to agricultural land, which can help prevent sprawl.

“We are often cajoled into making decisions based on one or two variables or values,” he told me. “Globalization and trade, for example, are sold almost exclusively on the basis of the apparent efficiencies associated with specialization–do just one or two things well and you will earn enough money to buy from someone else all the things you no longer do. And, by the way, total or global production will increase, creating more wealth for everyone.”

But that logic is oversimplified, says Rees.

“Overspecialization leaves the producer out to dry if specialized markets fail; it deskills whole populations and deprives communities of economic diversity (which might be valuable during downturns such as we are now experiencing).”

I thought of my hometown Prince George, its reliance on cutting trees, and how susceptible it is to economic downturns when lumber is no longer demanded.  I also thought of Jane Jacobs’ book The Nature of Economies and how her ecological take on economics makes the case that diversifying your economy is akin to self-refueling.

Rees makes the same point. “Whatever happened to self-reliance as a virtue and import displacement as an economic development strategy?”

The case for local food, he told me, and the reduction of food miles, isn’t just about efficiency.  Its about the uncertainties of our environment and the need to think ahead.

“I suspect that if the future unfolds as expected we will rue the short-term economic logic that allows local agriculture to disappear for want of markets and paves over the most productive land in the country. We may need it and soon. These may be at least as strong arguments for buying and eating locally as any purely ecological ones.”

James Steidle

Think of wine.  A good wine grape is too sour to eat.  So too should a good cider apple be too sour to eat.  Crab apples get close, but there are even more specialized varieties.   Yarlington Mills or Kingston Blacks I am told are good.  But I couldn’t find them.  After some searching I am sad to report buying cider apples in Vancouver is next to impossible.

What I did find, though, was Derek Bisset, a hobby farmer in Langley who has a small orchard of cider trees he keeps for his own cider.  A member of the BC Fruit Growers Association, he is one of the few to dedicate his time to the craft, growing a few acres on his plot on a bench just above the Fraser River. Interested in visiting him and his operation, Cohen, his roomate Jen, and I took a trip out to see it.

Taking a two hour bus trip through the burbs with a bus driver who happened to brush his teath, while driving, we got off in Maple Ridge.  We rode down to the Albion Ferry, crossed the Fraser and rode past Fort Langley where we saw these massive vultures or eagles that were I swear to god some of the biggest flying creatures I have ever seen.  We got to Derek’s at around noon and stepped in for some tea.

I am not sure what I was expecting in Derek.  Part of me was prepared for a meandering visit that involved drinking a lot of cider and forgetting the finer points we had come in search of. But Derek, a retired highschool teacher who had Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought opened on the table, wasn’t prepared to let us off easily.

The first point he made was that apples don’t grow from seed.  You throw that apple core in the trash heap and, assuming it grows, it only has a one in fifteen thousand chance it will produce an apple that you can eat.  “You’re liable to grow something from Kazahkstan,” he said, where the wild progenitor of the modern cultivated desert apple can still be found.

The reason for this is that every apple seed carries with it a blueprint for a very different apple tree.  “Heterozygosity,” I later read is what they call it.  Only very rarely does an apple tree come into existence with the right kind of apple you are looking for.

The way to do it is to wait for one of these lottery-winning apples and clone it, which you do by taking clippings from the desired tree, what he calls scions, and grafting them onto some root-stock, a specialized tree that determines how large the scion grows and how early it fruits. Apparently there are only a few standardized root-stock varieties available, called weird names like M9, M26, and MM106.   Don’t ask me what happens if a disease kills this limited rootstock-pool, though these people are trying to find out.

Derek’s trees come from the Merridale Cidery on Vancouver Island, which, along with Sea Cider, maintain some of the only cider apple orchards in the Province.  Merridale’s founder Al Piggott got the trees originally from Herfordshire and Somerset. Derek says these varieties are “rare” and “completely unknown in North America,” adding that “there are not many places in the world where specialty apples are grown just for cider- other is Normandy.”

What followed was a crash course in cider.  “Cider can be made from any apples, like wine from any grapes.  We used to make wine from Thompson seedless when we were desperate. Can’t remember if it produced anything but a headache.”

Canadian cider has been equally mindless.  “The Okanagan cideries make cider from any apples they can find,” he said, comparing the product to the wine made from Thompson seedless.  “Making proper cider from cider apples was not something people thought about.  It was’t something people thought was available.  Nobody knew what it was, didn’t think there was anything else.”

The art of Cider, from what I could make out, was currently in a bit of a dark age. From the days of Johnny Appleseed through to the early 20th century, most people either had a cider orchard or had access to one.  An apple was more likely to be fermented in a cider barrel than eaten.  But once the temperance movement began brandishing the axe, a symbolic gesture aimed in part at the destruction of the cider-orchard, the cider-apple’s days were numbered.  By the time of prohibition, apple growers focused on the sweet varieties, like the Red Delicious and Macintosh, and the bitter old varieties bound for the cider barrels fell by the wayside.

Even England, the life-blood of cider, had lost interest.  Factory-made plonk like Bulmers replaced the small cideries. Then football hooligans adopted the drink for its alcohol content.  “Hooliganism,” said Bisset,  “meant by the 60’s cider had a very bad reputation.”

The result of all this has been a steady deterioration of cider that has left many of us, including myself, clueless to what it was, or could be.  The popular, booming varieties, even the top sellers like Strongbow mentioned in this old Globe and Mail article, weren’t it.  Nor were the standard Okanagan ciders, sweet, flacid and headache inducing, doing it for me.

It took one sip of Derek’s rich yellow home-brew to understand just how far off mark we have allowed cider to come.  Fermented to dryness over a year relying on natural yeast and patience, it was sharp, alcoholic, and left a pleasant taste that followed us out into the orchard, where, with the fog still hanging over us, we kicked around at a few trees, looked at some grafts, and talked about when the snow would melt so we could come back and buy some for our own nascent cider orchards.

James Steidle

I witnessed a few ungulate deaths.  All of the times were from my late teens, when I went out fairly regularly with my best friend and his dad.  Mostly it was for the purpose (at least from my perspective) of drinking the dad’s whiskey, not without its own risk.  The dad had the tracings of a killer, an old brawler who now drove a logging truck, and drank, hunted, and fished in his spare-time.  I had heard his stories around the campfire from when I was a kid and exagerated they were not.  I had experienced his wrath before.  I had borrowed his prized fishing rod once when we were 13, and crossing a raging river, I fell in and chose to swim for  my life rather than hang onto it.  I had never heard the end of it and he no doubt saw me in lesser eyes since then.

But perhaps it was just as well. Hunting to him was less the romantic ideal of relating to nature it was to me then a piss-fest aimed at telling enough insulting jokes and put downs to establish his dominance.  And of course, nailing that big trophy.  If there was anything that really excited him, it was the opportunity to take home a rack big enough to get in the trophy books.  It was this prospect, however remote, that inspired him the most.  The age-old competition of measurable size.  I’m pretty sure he kept the trophy book under the seat in case he needed to reference it. It wasn’t something that mattered much to me, and in the end, I was just happy with a few moose-meat steaks.

I killed my first and only mule deer in Forst St. John, on a trip with the same friend, his dad, and his friend, a somewhat mysterious logging truck driver who rode a harley and listened to Kris Kristofferson, i.e. he may have been a repenting hippy.  I was 18 and working at a sawmill outside of Prince George, a fact relevant since the dad bet me his pay cheque against mine I would never shoot anything with my open-site 30-30, a relic I borrowed from my dad (it was the farm gun) that had practically no range and questionable rifling.  I was insecure and intimidated and I never bet him.  But that morning, through a line of trees into a grain field, I shot and killed a four-point buck who was too brave to run when my first shot missed (he was with some does).  He died instantly, the bullet going through his heart.

It was never easy, killing animals.  On the farm, the worst part is having to put down the sick cow, a task that had fallen on me a few times and not by choice.  They are always the profound moments  in an otherwise routine life of chores- which, if you distill out the core of it, is to give and maintain life.  But those moments of death and the loud shock of the rifle that sends the herd in panic, if anything, sum up like little else the power of humans over nature.  In that one surprising moment that is almost fast beyond comprehension, you finally understand in practical terms one of the most banal observations, that we humans really have things under control.

And yet we don’t. Animals, it seems, are adopting evolutionary strategies to avoid being hunted.  They are getting smaller, and reproducing earlier.  The phenomenon is discussed in a new study of exploited fish and animal populations.  It shows that humans, through harvesting the biggest of each species, are turning the order of survival upside down.  Rather than big having an evolutionary advantage, the reverse is true.  The result?  Smaller animals with a predisposition to begin reproducing earlier are now more fit to survive in a human-predated landscape.  But these smaller specimens don’t reproduce as well, sometimes not replacing population losses, and so the spectre of extinction.  Scientists are predicting as much for the Atlantic Cod, and now, because of the growing popularity of sushi, bluefin tuna. This all comes on top of news of the possible extinction of salmon runs along our own coast.  The meaning of all this? I haven’t hunted since I shot the deer, and I don’t eat much meat otherwise.  The study only underscores this decision, though, if I ever do hunt again, I will make sure I spare anything big and go for the sickly ones that appear to be on the verge of dying. As for fish, that is a harder question. I love sushi and salmon, and I don’t see how we can selectively harvest the smallest of these species.  I will have to accept less of it, if that means preserving them as a species.

James Steidle