Category: Food and Health

Books and Resources, Food and Health

The 100-Mile Diet

The remarkable, amusing and inspiring adventures of a Canadian couple
who make a year-long attempt to eat foods grown and produced within a
100-mile radius of their apartment.

When Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon learned that the average
ingredient in a North American meal travels 1,500 miles from farm to
plate, they decided to launch a simple experiment to reconnect with the
people and places that produced what they ate. For one year, they would
only consume food that came from within a 100-mile radius of their
Vancouver apartment. The 100-Mile Diet was born.

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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.

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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.

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Food and Health

Prescription for a Healthy Canada – David Suzuki Foundation


Prescription for a Healthy CanadaWhile most developed countries have adopted national health and environment strategies, Canada has not.

Prescription for a Healthy Canada
calls on the federal government, in collaboration with the provinces
and territories, to adopt a national environmental health strategy for
Canada.

Each year, millions of Canadians become ill or disabled
after being exposed to environmental contaminants linked to asthma,
gastrointestinal illness, poisonings, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease,
Parkinson’s disease, developmental disorders, birth defects, and
reproductive problems.

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Food and Health

USC Canada

Founded in 1945 as the Unitarian Service Committee of Canada, USC is a voluntary organization working to promote strong, healthy, and just communities in developing countries.
We work with partner organizations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to strengthen community livelihoods, promote food security, and support peoples??? actions for social justice and equality. In Canada, we build awareness and support for international social change through public education and policy dialogue.

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Food and Health

Eating Better Than Organic

Not long ago I had an apple problem. Wavering in the produce section of a Manhattan grocery store, I was unable to decide between an organic apple and a nonorganic apple (which was labeled conventional, since that sounds better than “sprayed with pesticides that might kill you”). It shouldn’t have been a tough choice–who wants to eat pesticide residue?–but the organic apples had been grown in California.

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