food system
Big yellow taxi was one of the first Canadian songs I learned. A friend of mine had a copy of Ladies of the Canyon where the song was first released. Its environmental theme appealed to me and its catchy chorus became forever etched into my memory. From that point on, any cursory glance at parking lots would bring back Joni Mitchell’s playful alliteration:
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot.
For the past 11 years, ReFrame Film Festival has served us an amazing platter of engaging, insightful, moving and tasty stories. Every year the Festival helps us gain a deeper understanding of critical issues related to human rights, the arts, environment and social justice, all framed through the lens of the best film-makers in Canada and beyond. This time, festival organizers sprinkled an extra dosage of delicious offerings: nine food films! Truly a bumper crop!
Want to prepare some delicious recipes, follow 7 Days of Green. Today's recipe is served by Kawartha Choice FarmFresh.
While Greening Your Plate you may be interested in discovering how you can Green Your Week. As you will see from the calendar, there are many activities for everyone. I had the opportunity, yesterday, to join community gardeners at the Stewart Street garden.
As I sat with Jill last week I learned how she fell in love while interning. This love affair forever transformed her life. Truth be told, it was not quite love at first sight, but almost. The farm she had selected for her internship was well-known for its heirloom tomatoes and one of Jill's roles there was to save thousands of seeds from all these tomatoes. "That's a bit of a gross job," Jill tells me, "there's lots of fermentation, there's mold but then when it clears out, you see all the seeds."
Under the leadership of the Community Foundation of Greater Peterborough, Vital Signs brought together community leaders and stakeholders, professional consultants and statisticians, as well as everyday citizens in assessing our regional vitality. The purpose is to understand and evaluate how we, as a community, are doing across a number of “issue areas,” while helping us identify significant trends, and highlight our community’s needs and strengths.
Nourish is currently working with Peterborough Community Garden Network to grow a new dream: establishing a Community Seed Bank. Creating a seed bank offers an opportunity to access seed and education while building community. Ultimately it enhances our region's biodiversity and grows our collective resilience.
On Tuesday, the Ontario government re-tabled a bill that had been lost to the proroguing of the legislation in 2012. The Local Food Act, also known as Bill 130, is now being reintroduced in the Ontario Legislature.
The Act starts with the following preamble:
I mentioned in my last post that most of the seeds sold and/or exchanged at Seedy Sunday were heirloom ones. You may wonder what is meant by that. In general, heirloom seeds are defined as old, open-pollinated cultivars. In other words, these seeds were introduced before the 1950s and when planted they should grow 'true to type.'
Kitchen Literacy illustrates that our relationship with food has undergone radical changes in the past 150 years. Nothing is static... which means that everything can always change. Indeed, we are seeing lots of new changes taking place in the food system. By joining community gardens, shopping at farmers' markets, enrolling in CSAs or food box programs, people are starting to alter how they consume food or connect to it.
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