Tag Archives: government regulation

What’s a Starving Student to do About Food?

Posted on by
sausage-omelette

The first step is to learn how to cook. The second step is to find local sources of quality foods. Give yourself time to learn home processing skills. Last year we learned how to make sausage with the help of an experienced neighbor. Learning new skills is a challenge, but the rewards are great!

Recently, I was contacted by Mimi Nakamura, a fourth year journalism student at Thompson Rivers University. She was working on a story in her journalism class regarding local foods in Kamloops. After the interview, I started wondering if other people on a budget might find the information useful. Here is our interview.

1. How did you decide to start the website eatkamloops.org?
I started the eakamloops.org website because I was new to Kamloops and I was finding it difficult to find local food. I wondered if other newcomers were having the same problem. I was a member of the Weston A Price Foundation and decided I wanted to do more for my community so I became a WAPF Chapter Leader. Part of my responsibilities is to maintain a list of local food producers. (Local food producers can be found here.) Doing a website is beyond what the WAPF requires but I thought it would be easier for people to get information about local food this way.

2. Do you personally buy local food? If so, what do you usually get?
My family gets most of our fresh produce and meat locally. We look for organic, un-sprayed and/or pasture-based food. We tend to do large bulk purchases once or twice a year for dried goods and “exotic” foods. When we buy food from farmers we don’t know, we buy certified organic. We buy whole foods and avoid processed foods:
Winter Storage I
Winter Storage II
Presently, we produce a number of products for our own personal use: raw dairy, pastured eggs, pastured fowl, and some produce. We use organic grains, legumes and un-sprayed hay. We give the animals whole food supplements such as kelp, unrefined sea salt, oyster shells, rock minerals, etc.

3. What is the importance of consuming local food?
Local food is important but it is just as important how the food is grown. Ideally, buy local food that is grown using organic principles and/or pasture-based. What’s the good of “local” food that is loaded with herbicides and pesticides filling the local environment with poison? There is a new good reason to buy certified organic foods. Certified organic foods do not allow GMOs. There is mounting evidence that GMO crops are contaminating non-GMO crops, including organically grown crops. No one really knows what will happen to our ecosystem due to these changes in the basic genetic structure of our food crops. (This is a scary thought. These genetic changes are permanent and cannot be stopped.)

4. What is the challenge that local farmers are facing right now?
The greatest barrier for small farmers and ranchers is government regulators with their one-size-fits-all-regulations. We will not have a local food system if those guys get their way. Many of the regulations now needed in the Industrial Food System were caused by the practices of the Industrial Food System itself. I would like to see consumers being able to buy directly from the farmer or rancher without onerous government regulations. Read some of my posts on raw milk. Just remember, this issue has nothing to do with ?safety? and everything to do with ?control?. I talk about this sad state of affairs in Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick.

5. Do you have any suggestions for university students to buy local food but stay on their grocery budget? (Any suggestions for cheap but healthy local food diet?)
Everyone’s situation is different but I would suggest a student read 25 Steps to Nourishing Traditional Foods and Where to Start: Limited Time and Budget. The student should try to work on one new step every two weeks. Some steps are easy, others are costly, and some require planning. Many of these steps will save money in the short and long term. Having a stable household would be ideal but for many students this would be difficult. Before looking for “cheap” food, a student should get reacquainted with their kitchen and learn how to cook real food. Without the skills to cook whole foods, the food will go to waste which would be costly for the student. After the student masters cooking with whole ingredients, the student should stop eating processed foods out of the Industrial Food System. The Industrial Food System specializes in “cheap” convenience foods but the student will pay again and again with their health. Cheap food isn’t very cheap when a student is always sick and weak.

At the same time, my family eats extremely well, cheaply. We produce many expensive foods ourselves by putting in our own labor. We are very careful about how we feed and treat our animals so the food we produce is of the highest quality. Foods we do not produce ourselves, we get in bulk from quality sources. We eat our meals together at home and we almost never eat out. When we are traveling we bring our own food.

I have another suggestion for the starving students looking for good, cheap food. I just found a new website by Arabella Forge. She is the WAPF Melbourne Chapter Leader and has just written a new book called Frugavore. Unfortunately, her book is not available in North America yet, but her website is very helpful. Take the Frugavore Challenge!
Frugavore introduces modern readers to the fundamentals of peasant cuisine, in which nothing is wasted, every part of the animal eaten, abundance from the garden preserved in traditional ways, and delicious meals prepared from scratch with fresh, local ingredients.
Thumbs Up Book Reviews by Sally Fallon

Updated December 9, 2010: Wendell Berry has been writing passionately about local food and farming issues for over forty years. For more information please read Wrong Turn and Are you a producer or a consumer?

Updated Feburary 13, 2011: I got out of school during in the late 1980s during a really bad recession. It was impossible to find work and it was one of the reasons I ended up starting my own business. During those early years I read a book that changed the way I looked at money. The book is called Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicke Robin. I would highly recommend this book for any young person getting out on their own and trying to get control of their finances. I also got a chance to read Frugavore. It’s a fun book with great money saving recipes.

Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal

Posted on by
illegal

This book tells the sad story of how farmers are being made into criminals because of onerous government regulation.

I just finished reading a very interesting book by Joel Salatin called: Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal. Joel Salatin runs Polyface Farm which disregards conventional industrial farming methods. They have designed a system of “perennial prairie polyculture” which includes tree planting, a massive composting program and pond development. They have invented a unique system of portable animal shelters which is part of a daily rotation of pasture. All their animals are grassfed. This daily rotation of pasture is followed by successive use of the pasture by different types of farm animals. By stacking different farm animals on a pasture and using the animals natural abilities they achieve a robust farm ecosystem with the input of human management.

Unfortunately, everything innovative he wants to do is illegal. Government regulation makes it difficult or impossible for him to offer food to his local community in a sensible and cost effective way. He has found many possible innovations die on the drawing board because the government regulations are set up for conventional industrial farming. The new operation does not have the ability to test new products on the market before committing to a large financial investment. He feels small operators need to be exempt from excessive rules or innovation will be stifled. If you would like to read this book it is available through inter-library loan at the Kamloops Public Library.

Joel Salatin, Micheal Pollan and Will Allen are featured in a new documentary called Fresh. It is about sustainable agriculture and small family farms. If you would like to get more information about this documentary go to: www.freshthemovie.com.

Slaughtering in BC: Information You Need to Know

Posted on by
rainer-skinning

Rainer Krumsiek of Big Bear Ranch shows us how to start the skinning process.

A video Where is the Meat was forwarded to me from Big Bear Ranch. The video was produced by Wendy Aasen and Pamela Tudge. Pamela Tudge is doing a masters degree at UBC Okanagan at the Center for Social, Spatial and Economic Justice which is part of Community, Culture and Global Studies. If you would like to read Pamela Tudge’s blog go to: okanaganfood.blogspot.com.

New slaughtering rules in BC are a serious issue for anyone interested in local food produced in a traditional manner. The government has implemented these rules to make the food supply “safer”. Of course, if more rules made the food supply safer we would not have had 20 people die from Listeriosis last year from Maple Leaf Foods’ contaminated processed meats. If a big, heavily regulated corporation like Maple Leaf Foods can have such a big problem, more rules won’t make us safer. For an update on the Listeriosis outbreak read: Up to 10,000 Could File Claims.

Maybe we need to look someplace else for food “safety” other than government regulations. Small local farmers and ranchers can produce animals for food in a humane way. These pastured animals live a more “natural” life compared to industrial confinement methods. Pastured animals are healthier and need less medical interventions than confinement animals. Most pastured animals never need antibiotics, while confinement animals get antibiotics in their fed just to deal with their living conditions. Many specialists believe that feeding grain to a ruminant acidifies their gut and has caused the evolution of acid tolerant strains of Escherichia coli such as 0157:H7. These strains of E. coli can get through our stomach acid and make us very sick or kill the weak among us. If you would like to read more about acid tolerant strains of E. coli read: Simple Change in Cattle Diets Could Cut E. coli Infections.

shaen-learning-butchery

Here's Shaen learning how to cut up a hog haunch. Considering how little we knew everything went very well.

Finally, animals are less stressed when they are killed on the farm compared to being loaded into a large trailer and trucked across the province to a government approved abattoir. They end their life in a strange place, killed by people that don’t know them.

The government would like to see all animals butchered in a government approved abattoir. A farmer cannot kill one chicken and sell it to you. Doing so, the farmer becomes a criminal. The farmer must ship the animals and fowl to these government approved abattoirs, sometimes across the province, which may not be cost effective. This doesn’t make the food supply safer. It just puts the farmer out of business.