Author: Fraser

Food and Health

The truth about ‘organic’ food

Big money and a lack of oversight has rendered the label meaningless
CATHY GULLI | September 10, 2007 |
While working as an independent organic food inspector, Mischa Popoff says he felt like “a police officer without a billy club or handcuffs.” When he found four jugs of herbicide — each containing four litres of prohibited spray — inside one organic farmer’s garage, Popoff ordered crop sampling be done at a lab. But that never happened because, he was told by the certifying body that hired him, “it’s too expensive to run tests,” Popoff recalls. When he asked a pig producer who also grows certified organic produce to prove that he wasn’t putting liquid hog manure on those fields, which is often forbidden under organic guidelines, the farmer couldn’t, and the matter ended there.

Continue reading “The truth about ‘organic’ food”

Food and Health

The latest hit: blueberries gone wild

Are field-grown, cross-pollinated, sprayed and mechanically picked blueberries really ‘wild’?
PAMELA CUTHBERT | September 10, 2007 |
All wild blueberries are not created equal. For one, take their “untamed” habitats. In Ontario, the little indigo-stained fruits are at the heart of a fleeting summer cottage industry, hand-raked on forest floors or rocky beds and brought fresh to market by gatherers. But in the wild blueberry belt, which runs from Quebec through Eastern Canada and down into Maine, the picture is generally less sauvage: the same species of the pea-sized berry is cultivated on vast, cleared fields, cross-pollinated with the help of imported bees, sprayed with chemicals when necessary, mechanically harvested to an average yield of 80,000 tonnes a year, frozen and then, for the most part, exported.

Continue reading “The latest hit: blueberries gone wild”

Around the Web

Sarah Harmer – Escarpment Blues

In 2005, Harmer co-founded PERL (Protecting Escarpment Rural Land), an organization which campaigned to protect the Niagara Escarpment
from a proposed gravel development which would see parts of the
wilderness on the Escarpment destroyed. To support the organization,
she and her acoustic band embarked on a tour of the Escarpment, hiking
the Bruce Trail
along the Escarpment and performing at theatres and community halls in
towns along the way. A documentary DVD of this tour was released in
2006 as Escarpment Blues.

Her fourth album, I’m a Mountain, was released in Canada on November 8, 2005 and in the United States in February 2006. It was nominated for the inaugural Polaris Music Prize,
a critic’s selected $20,000 cash prize for the Canadian album of the
year. Harmer has performed and canvassed in support of the NDP and Marilyn Churley, her friend in the fight for the protection of the Niagara Escarpment.

In February of 2007, Harmer received three Juno Award nominations. I’m a Mountain was up for Best Adult Alternative Album and her DVD Escarpment Blues
was up for Best Music DVD. Sarah herself was also up for Songwriter of
the Year for her work on “I Am Aglow”, “Oleander” and “Escarpment
Blues”. Also in 2007, she reunited with Weeping Tile to record a song,
“Public Square”, for the Rheostatics tribute album The Secret Sessions.

Source: Wikipedia (extracted Sept. 9th, 2007)

Continue reading “Sarah Harmer – Escarpment Blues”

Around the Web

Clean Air Auto Loan

Like you, we care about our environment. So, we do more than just applaud your decision to purchase a low emissions vehicle. We reward your environmental efforts by saving you money on your car loan.
Our Clean Air Auto Loan is a personal loan for up to $35,000 with a fantastic rate as low as Prime.
The low rate could save you up to $3,000 in interest over five years* and at the same time you contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Continue reading “Clean Air Auto Loan”