Local food insomnia

I love autumn for the wealth of produce that's extremely local and in season. Neighbour Bob's apples taste better than anything we can ever buy at the grocery store. Our pear tree overflowed with its goodness to us and the many people we are able to offer pears (the busdriver that took me to my dental appointment downtown this morning calls me the "pear lady"), and we're swimming in carrots, zucchini, spaghetti squash, beans, kale, and tomatoes. We even have six nice-sized pumpkins this year, which thrills me like I never imagined pumpkins could. Yes, I know I'm weird, but I have this incredible pumpkin soup recipe...

But a bout of insomnia like the one I had last night sets me to worrying about our world and its food habits. Why is it that, at 1 a.m., all the world's problems loom larger than the universe? Two years ago, our bee population took a noticeable hit, and my usually humming yard was empty of fuzzy buzzing friends. They haunted my wakeful should-be-sleeping hours at that time. This year the bees seemed to be almost back to their usual population density, fighting over blossoms in the yard, so it's not them that kept me awake last night -- it was our Late Blight Disease, the one that caused the great Irish Potato Famine in the middle of the 1800s. It made an appearance in Edmonton this fall, spoiling a lot of gardeners' tomato and potato yields and spreading quickly because of the unusual, highly humid weather we've had (today is only our fourth mostly sunny day this month, and we're back to rain tomorrow). The thing about the blight is that if you've got it, you can't plant any tomato or potato relatives (peppers and eggplants don't do well here, but still...) for at least three years.

What had my brain spinning last night was this: in our highly urbanized world, we city-folk have become extremely dependent on distant places to send us the food we need to keep us from starvation. Very few of us know anything about growing food for ourselves because we can buy strawberries from Argentina (and everything else from everywhere else) on a whim. (Aside: my daughter's friend didn't know that the main ingredient in salsa was tomatoes, so far are we separated from food production, sigh.) In the meantime, our small local farmers' livelihoods and lands are being threatened from all sides -- by developers, mega farming corporations, overapplication of chemicals, genetically modified foods, peak oil, you name it. And we are, for the most part, oblivious to the fact that, should the food system break down for whatever reason, we might once again have something like the great famine on our empty plates.

I'm not trying to be alarmist here... it's just what went through my brain while I was longing for sleep. It was enough to make me think that it's time to get really serious about shopping weekly at the local farmer's market even if I have to drive twenty minutes to do it, and after that, to eventually get me dreaming about making a big, steaming pot of hearty beet borscht from my backyard ingredients. The food I'll buy at the farmer's market (once my garden produce is put away to feed us for a little while at least) won't be travelling across an entire continent -- or keep me awake at night wondering if I've done enough to support local food producers.