Traced Elements

Tag: food and farming in pemberton

  • The Frogs are Croaking!

    The Frogs are Croaking!

    In these strange times I have been waiting (impatiently) for the frogs to start croaking. First come the pussy willows, next comes the frogs. And tonight I heard them – over on Urdal Road. They will slowly migrate west to Collins Road and Pemberton Meadows Road soon but for now you have to tilt your ears to the east. I always am excited to hear the first frogs, but this year I have been really anxious for them – a sign that outside of the human species, life goes on as normal.

    Thank you to our farmers. This pandemic and crisis has re-alerted me to the importance of food security. When I first moved to Pemberton 16 years ago Anna Helmer explained all this to me. I hadn’t a clue, being raised in Vancouver and buying my groceries at Safeway. I didn’t know what the ALR was. “Pave paradise, put up a parking lot”, sang Joni Mitchell in Big Yellow Taxi. More recently, she wrote in her song Shine: “Shine on fertile farmland buried under subdivisions”.

    We need farmers. We need farmland. This cannot be outsourced. Farmland must be protected. We are learning this now during this crisis. The hard way.

    When the Hellevangs recently announced that they were selling big 50 lb bags of Yukon Gold potatoes I jumped on it. And for the last 2 weeks we have been eating a lot of baked potatoes. I visited the UK for the first time nearly 30 years ago, and my Mum and I stayed with her friends who had a very young and “highly-spirited” (bratty in our view) child. She would only settle down with the promise of a “jacket potato”. At a village tea room or at their home these jacket potatoes seemed to have magical powers.

    Not sure why it’s taken me so long to embrace the simple but sublime jacket potato – but if you have some chili on hand (my recipe for deer chili is posted on this blog), plus sour cream, chopped green onions, butter and crumbled bacon, and of course some beautiful Pemberton Yukon Gold or Russet potatoes, you have such an easy and delicious meal.

    Frogs, farmers, potatoes. Pemberton we will get through this!

    Pemberton Baked Potatoes: (serves 4)

    4 large Russet or Yukon Gold Pemberton-grown potatoes, scrubbed well.

    Method: Using the tines of a fork, poke the potatoes in 5 or 6 places.

    Bake 1 to 1.5 hours at 350F. (Time depends on size of your potatoes.)

    Serve with butter, sour cream, green onions, bacon bits, or chili.

  • The Dirt on Food and it’s Power to Heal

    The Dirt on Food and it’s Power to Heal

     

    chooks

    Fuck calories.

    To which I would add, fuck “clean eating”, fuck salmonella poisoning, and fuck the commodities trading of food futures.

    Let’s bring eating back to earth.

    By which I mean, let’s put the dirt back on your produce, the scruffiness into your hospitality, and relationships back into your consumption.

    Let’s put ecology back on the table.

    Literally, let’s place the dinner table into a web, instead of at the end of supply chain. Let it be part again of a network of living things, that flow through and from the table, in a million different forms – energy, sunlight, worm food, fresh produce, dead animals; as an anchor to conversation, to nourishment, to relationship, to healing.

    Reclaim the table, and the garden, the power that food has heal – not just our bodies, but our relationships, our sense of agency, and our role as stewards and restorers of the earth. And the opportunity food offers us, to grow – not just out there in the soil, but as humans.

    We’ve been consumers for long enough.

    This website is a place to map food stories, from the heart of the Pemberton Valley, in order to turn consumers on to the idea of being growers, creators, culture-shapers and restorers of the planet. Without guilt. Without pressure. With joyful messy experimentation, scrappy gardens, candour and dirt.

    Community Garden