Category: Eating for Ecosystems

Urban agriculture can change the world, if…

March 23rd, 2012 · eleanor · Eating for Ecosystems No comments

When I first heard about ‘urban agriculture,’ and saw that city people were supporting the movement by starting to grow their own food, I was skeptical.  Studying for a Masters in Food Policy at the time, I was reading about the massive worldwide problems in our food systems, and falling asleep at night pondering that:

(1) There’s plenty of food to go around, but still 850 million or more human beings are undernourished or starving.

(2) More than a billion global citizens are too heavy for optimal health.  According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, one-third (34.4%) of Americans qualify as obese, and almost one-quarter (24.1%) of Canadians do.[i]

(3) A lot of people subsist mostly on ultra-processed foods containing excessive salts, fats, sugars and chemicals.[ii]

(4) Food systems are owned and controlled by a small number of corporate agribusinesses, and local communities often don’t have much decision-making ability over food production.

We need wholesale transformation of our food systems, I thought. How could people’s growing their own herbs and salads do much more than make us feel good?

Then something happened to change my mind, to make me realize the power of urban agriculture.  My husband and I were traveling, and in London, England noticed a museum exhibit called The Ministry of Food.  We went, and found it breathtaking to discover how Britain fed its 50 million citizens during WWII.  I wrote an earlier blog post about this, so you can read more detail.[iii]

This was Victory Gardens, and much more.  It was government commitment to food sustainability.  It was buy-in from the populace of the idea of feeding yourself.  People dug up every possible square foot of land and planted crops and seeds, especially for nutritious sustenance like potatoes and hearty vegetables. They accepted rationing of imported goods like sugar, or ones that were resource-intensive to produce, like meat and dairy.  This was ‘the home front,’ a part of the war effort to which every person could contribute.  The program fed the population successfully during a long and painful war.  Nor did people become undernourished from the rationing and home production. Medical analyses show that Britons during the war were healthier – with much smaller disparities in physical well-being between rich and poor – than they were previously, or have been since.

Getting your hands in the dirt wasn’t easy.  Nor was it easy to do without luxuries to which people had become accustomed.  But most citizens were onside, because they knew they were at war.  According to eminent historian Tony Judt: “the British proved remarkably tolerant of their deprivations – in part because of a belief that these were, at least, shared fairly across the community.”[iv] But they were at war, while today the imperative is less clear. Yet many believe we are indeed in an undeclared war for the health of the planet and survival of humanity.

The case of the Ministry of Food taught me that urban agriculture can indeed change the world, if…

If it is widespread.  If it is taken seriously.  If it is engaged in by a large percentage of the population.  For those in Vancouver and cities everywhere who saw that before I did, and who have been on the frontlines of urban agriculture, I thank and congratulate you. My niece Christine Boyle is one social activist who has, as shown here with her wheelbarrow!  To get involved in Urban Agriculture, look for your nearest Farmers’ Market societies, other community food projects, and your local ‘transition’ initiative[v] helping communities become resilient in a coming world beyond fossil fuels.

[i] Margaret Shields et al., Adult Obesity Prevalence in Canada and the U.S. Data Brief from National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia. 2011.

[ii] Carlos Monteiro. The Big Issue is Ultra-Processing. World Nutrition, 1(6) 2010.

[iii] Could We Learn From the Ministry of Food? July 8, 2010. eleanorboyle.com/blog/

[iv] Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, NY/London: Penguin. 2005, p. 163.

[v] Transition Network. http://www.transitionnetwork.org/

How ‘ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm…?

October 13th, 2011 · eleanor · Eating for Ecosystems No comments

It’s been months since I’ve written regularly.  Life has been busy.  But I’m back.  And this week I’ve been thinking about two popular songs of the past 100 years and their relevance to rural life.

How ‘ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm… after they’ve experienced the big city?  That’s what a popular song asked early in the 20th C.   How ‘Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm? (After They’ve Seen Paree) was a well-known tune during WWI.  Written by Joe Young and Sam M. Lewis with music by Walter Donaldson, it was published in 1918, and performed by many artists in the post-war years.  The song expressed the expansiveness of a generation whose lives had been rocked by a calamitous conflict, but who suddenly had new options for their own lives.  The song also expresses the excitement of urban life that many of us feel.

But if we in North America, and elsewhere, are going to produce food sustainably we’ll need to revitalize rural areas, and that will mean helping some people move in the opposite direction — back to the farm.  Thankfully, while urban life has its allure, there are those who’d love to have that new, old option.   There are those who long for rural spaces and who would happily move to an acreage if small-scale food production offered a decent living.  So there are increasing movements today to help young people realize that dream and encourage more to consider farm life.

Just this week I received an email from a health action group, outlining proposed U.S. legislation called the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Opportunity Act of 2011, to recruit men and woman to become farmers and produce healthy food.  There are discussions for modern ‘Homestead Acts’ to help repopulate rural areas. Environmentalist Bill McKibben notes that the number of farms is actually increasing in some parts of the U.S, as serious people begin to realize the role of small-scale agriculture in sustainability.  People may have asked 90 years ago how ‘ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm, but when Elton John released Goodbye Yellow Brick Road more than 50 years later, singing about a man who happily left city life to return to his plow and his family farm, that album sold more than 30 million copies.

Would you move back to the farm, after you’d seen Paree?

[i] McKibben in Eaarth, p. 174.

Five Key Challenges for Food Systems II

April 6th, 2011 · eleanor · Eat Less Meat, Eating for Ecosystems, Food Policy One comment

As a biologist studying water quality, Dr. Eva Pip is concerned about Lake Winnipeg.  The water sample she is holding in this photo, sampled by her University of Winnipeg students near a public beach last summer, is full of toxins, as she has demonstrated in her lab.  Swallow a mouthful of this, Dr. Pip says, and you’d get very ill.

One of the courageous Canadian researchers I’ve had a chance to visit recently, Dr. Pip has for years been measuring and documenting high levels of toxins in Manitoba water.  Last summer she found levels of the potentially lethal substance ‘microcystin’ at 400 times the allowable limit for human health.  Thankfully the local beaches were closed at the height of the problem.  But that’s no solution to pollution.

Lake Winnipeg, one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world, has a pathological level of algae, partly due to excessive chemical runoff from surrounding agriculture — largely intensive livestock operations (ILOs).  One of the pork capitals of Canada, Manitoba has more pigs than people.  The province has a human population of just over one million, yet there were eight million hogs produced in Manitoba in 2010, according to a a report called Manitoba Pig and Pork Industry 2010.   And while the pigs/hogs are almost all kept in unnatural environments, crowded into factory farms, nonetheless nature calls to each of them each day to produce an amount of manure far beyond what can be useful fertilizer.

“If you say anything against ILOs, you’re considered to be anti-jobs and anti-business,” says Dr. Pip.  But large-scale hog production is one of the main contributors to the pollution, she says.

Factory farming on the Canadian Prairies is one example of numerous food production systems that damage the environment.  It illustrates the second of my Five Key Challenges for Food Systems outlined previously:

  • To feed a large and growing world population
  • To produce food ecologically
  • To consume food for human health
  • To act compassionately toward all living beings
  • To support community well-being.

What can you and I do?  We can cut back on our meat consumption, and thereby stop supporting intensive factory farming.  We don’t need to eat meat several times a day, as do many Canadians.  If, instead, we choose meat several times a week, we’ll be healthier personally and communally.

We can also talk with our politicians and other policy-makers to insist that they stop pushing large-scale, export-oriented industrial meat systems, and instead promote small-scale sustainable production of animal foods.

Intensive hog barns just south of Winnipeg, surrounded by black 'lagoons' of manure

Food Visionaries II(b): You and I can help develop better food systems.

January 30th, 2011 · eleanor · Eating for Ecosystems, Food Visionaries No comments

Small-scale sustainable agriculture in Canada is fighting for survival, and there’s a bunch we can all to do help.  That’s the message I got from Colleen Ross after visiting Waratah Downs, the Ottawa-area organic farm run by her and her husband, John Weatherhead.

Like others who speak publicly about the problems of industrial food systems and its casualties, Colleen knows of many examples.  There was the local family-run abattoir in southern Ontario that was driven out of business by unreasonable regulations, in a food system that is geared to support large corporate processors.  There was the small fruit canning factory – the last one in Ontario – that shut down in 2008 because local farmers could not compete with cheap fruit from China and elsewhere.

Working through the National Farmers’ Union, Food Secure Canada, and other organizations, Colleen and a network of committed individuals are working to turn the situation around.  For how we can help, I’ll summarize some of Colleen’s ideas as:  (1) Get into the kitchen; (2) Get out to the farm; and (3) Get involved.

(1) Get into the kitchen.  Colleen makes a most amazing minestrone soup, as I discovered, and you can too.  Many of us have become convinced that we need to buy processed and prepared foods, and have forgotten how to cook.  To support local food systems, we can pay more attention to food and spend time on it.  We can obtain real food, fresh and simple, and make it into meals.  Pick over the vegetables, save them, can them, freeze them.  Practice food sovereignty.

We can start with minestrone soup.  I won’t give away Colleen’s recipe, but I’ll give away mine to any of you who would like.

(2) Get out to the farm.   New small-scale farmers are appearing, according to Colleen, who are excited about the food movement and desirous of producing sustainable sustenance.  But there are not always enough committed consumers.  For example, Colleen and John integrate cows, sheep, and poultry into their organic farm, partly because the animals provide natural fertilizer in the way of manure.  But the farm sometimes has trouble selling the meat.  Like other organic operations, they’re out of the mainstream of food marketing and distribution, and can have difficulty finding buyers and supplying them.  To assist in the building of a strong good-food movement, discerning consumers can make it a regular project to get out to rural communities and buy food straight from sustainable producers.

Part of getting out to farms involves finding ones that don’t plant genetically engineered (GE) corn, soy, or other crops, also called GMOs or genetically modified organisms.  Colleen’s farm is surrounded by large agricultural operations rotating corn and soy, all GMO and all controlled to some degree by Monsanto or other biotechnology companies.   We can support biodiversity rather than biotech, by buying food that is certified organic, certified Local Food Plus, or the like.

(3) Get involved.  We can let our elected officials know we want better food policy, and new food systems that support local, small- and medium-sized farms that minimize pesticides and antibiotics, that do not pollute soil and water with synthetic fertilizers and chemicals, and that do not raise animals intensively in factory farms.

We can let our elected officials know that farm policies cannot be ‘one size fits all’ and still support local producers.  After the Walkerton water crisis a decade ago, Colleen’s farm and others were asked to implement ‘nutrient management plans’ requiring that they pave the barnyard and install curbing and channelling.   That’s the kind of response that too often comes from policy-makers purporting to make food and farming safer, and mandating expensive systems with which small farms can’t afford to comply.

We can let our elected officials know that food production should be owned and controlled by local farmers.  Cargill, Tyson, and Smithfield – all transnational agribusiness — are making money while many small farmers are barely hanging on.  It’s a result of policies focused on supporting large export-oriented food production.

We can get involved in groups, and support elected officials, that realize the need to revitalize local food infrastructure – as in the unfortunate case of the fruit processing plant mentioned above.  Called CanGro Foods, it was the last processing plant for peaches and other fruit in the Niagara region.  Local farmers and citizens had tried to save it, but to no avail with cheap fruit pouring in from overseas.  Cheap food is a big part of the problem, which we can all address by agreeing to pay more for better food.

According to Colleen, these are a few of the steps we can take to be part of the new food movement.  Get into the kitchen and use local, sustainably-grown food.  Get out to the farms that are producing good food.  Get involved.

Farmland has been diverted from food to feed.

October 24th, 2010 · eleanor · Eating for Ecosystems No comments

One-quarter of Canada’s seeded farmland is producing food not for humans, but for livestock.

I just received the data this week from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, in an informative email signed by federal minister of agriculture Gerry Ritz.  It was kind of him to take the time to dig up these figures.  Seriously, I was delighted to get an answer from Ritz’ department, on my questions concerning how much of our cropland is devoted to feeding livestock.  A total of 24.3% of seeded Canadian farmland produces grains, oilseeds, and special crops to feed species such as chickens, pigs, and cattle.

At least it’s not as bad as the situation worldwide.  33% of total arable land on the planet is devoted to growing crops for livestock, according to Livestock’s Long Shadow, the expert report published in 2006 that outlined the environmental crises caused by excessive meat production and consumption.  Nevertheless, we in Canada need to ask whether livestock feed is the best use of land and other resources.

Originally meat was supposed to be miracle food.  It was a way of turning cellulose into beef and lamb, and turning waste scraps into chicken and pork.  But now that we raise most livestock in factory farms, fattening them on large portions of grains and other feedstuffs, meat is no longer something from nothing.

It takes roughly 2-10 kgs of feed to produce 1 kg of meat, depending on the species and on other factors.  That’s one of the many arguments that we should eat less meat.  Given the large and growing human population, and the scarcity of land, water, and other inputs, we could feed more people if we and they ate lower on the food chain.