Footnotes to a Conversation, November 29, 2021

This is a food-centric issue of Footnotes to a Conversation.

A survey of 500 English and Welsh farmers found that 86% of them were selling to supermarkets, but only 5% would prefer to continue doing so. That’s a big gap! “The top three preferred places to supply food were a food hub (55 per cent), direct sales, such as through a veg box scheme (36 per cent), and the eating out sector (29 per cent). The reasons cited for why farmers preferred these options were a better price, business stability, more control, direct links to customer, and supporting climate and nature ambitions.” Yet more proof of the importance of farmers’ markets. [Wicked Leeks]

Our food system is fragile, as witnessed by the floods in BC interrupting supply chains. Indoor urban farms have a role to play in guaranteeing a local food supply. Nuleaf Farms in Calgary has achieved price parity with basil and thyme. Their goal is to be able to supply locally grown strawberries for the same price as those from Mexico. [CBC]

The Next Supper: The End of Restaurants as We Knew Them, and What Comes After by Corey Mintz explores the issues confronting restaurants in the past, present, and future.  “ ‘At every stage in our food system, there’s tension between what food actually costs to make, and what people are willing to pay for it,’ Mintz writes. He goes on to say that when a meal is cheap, ‘it costs us somewhere else,’ such as with our health, at the exploitation of workers or the environment or both.” Mintz ends each chapter with things we can do to address the problems currently faced by restaurants, such as tipping delivery workers in cash, finding out where your favorite restaurant sources its ingredients, or researching food justice issues in your community. [Modern Farmer]

The humble pomegranate is weighted down with symbolism and therapeutic benefits. A meditation between life and death, immortality and resurrection, fertility and reproduction but also barrenness and death, the fruit has been used as a contraceptive, a laxative, a soporific, an expectorant, a soporific, and more. [JSTOR Daily]

Footnotes to a Conversation is a weekly Monday feature covering an assortment of topics that I’ve come across in the preceding week – books, art, travel, food, and whatever else strikes my fancy.

If you share my love of nature, I suggest you also read EcoFriendly Sask that I publish in collaboration with my brother, Andrew. Check out EcoFriendly Sask’s Nature Companion, a free nature app for Canada’s four western provinces.