Is your organic food 'organic'?

Interesting article on how the non-organic ingredients allowed in certified organic food has risen from 77 in 2002 to 250 today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/business/organic-food-purists-worry-about-big-companies-influence.html

Scotland Recycling and Vegetable Production

Well, it seems I may need to eat some crow and post some updates to my comments regarding recycling and food production in Scotland. 

I was contacted by a work colleague from a company I used to work at, who is a proud Scott and had read my entry.  He was not in agreement regarding my comments on both the lack of recycling in Scotland and the lack of fresh-locally-grown vegetables.  This interaction encouraged me to do a little research.

I have contacted each of the establishments I stayed at and have asked for the status of any recycling programs they may have.  I will post the replies as received.  In the meantime, I did some Google searching regarding recycling in Scotland and found some great info. Programs do exist, but they seem to be limited in regions served and frequency.   

A great site to start at is http://www.recycleforscotland.com/recycle.asp.  I was unable to get a match for any of the locations we stayed at (may not have picked the right regions), but it seems the program is centred around major urban regions only.  For many of the listed areas, there does seem to be great service including a ‘Blue Box’ program similar to our own.  The site claims 93% of households in Scotland have access to kerbside recycling facilities and the rest have “Recycling Centres & Points” to take your recycled products to.

Another great site was http://www.zerowastescotland.org.uk/ which seems to be more of an educational and support organization and not into the day to day activities of recycling.  It appears that through education and lobbying, this organization is creating a greater awareness and need to recycle and reduce.  It had great information on the need to recycle and how recycling impacts our planet and material stream.

I then Goggled “Recycling Centres & Points” for each of the locations we stayed at and found that some had a Centre close enough to be practical.  For instance, The Isle of Mull had a centre in the very town we stayed in: Tobermory.  Dornie had a point at their town centre.  Some spots like the one in Balquhidder, did not appear to have any reasonable options.

So I am a bit perplexed, both my wife and I are very used to recycling at home and out and about in our daily lives.  Even our ‘remote’ vacations in Tofino involve separating all recycling into provided bins and taking the ‘loot’ with us to drop off at the local centre (about 20 minutes away from Tofino near Long Beach) when we are heading back to the Mainland.  So we are very used to looking for the bins, yet in all of the places we stayed at, there was no obvious facility to separate out the recyclables from the main garbage stream.  I would imagine that the Blue Box programs are fairly successful where available, after all, how much effort is involved with throwing goods into a blue box compared to a garbage can.  But if a resident has to store up the recycling materials and bring them to a location that may be 30 minutes or more away, I can understand (unfortunately) the hesitance many would have in participating in such a program.

Does this mean that even though the facilities may be available, they are not used by a large percentage of the population?  Do only ‘urban’ residents participate?  I do not have the answers.  If you are reading this blog and live in Scotland, I would love to hear from you.

As a side note – I also checked on Chicago and confirmed it does NOT have an active recycle program.  The cost of the blue box program was turned down years ago and has to date never been re-initiated.

So, now to the topic of Scottish produce.  Again, I turned to Google.  The first site I visited (http://www.scotland.org), advised that Scotland grows 2,400 tonnes of raspberries, 4,600 tonnes of strawberries,  and over a million tonnes of potatoes per year. 900 million eggs are produced annually, 1,300 million litres of milk and there are more than two dozen cheese-makers across Scotland, ranging from the industrial cheddar creameries to much smaller-scale cheese producers (I wonder if this is a misprint as we probably have 2 dozen cheese producers in our local Gulf Islands). The site went on to state "However, beef is now the single most important sector of Scottish agriculture, worth around £400 million a year: more than fruit, dairy and poultry combined!" It also stated "The jewel in Scotland’s crown is her fish with nearly 200 shellfish farming companies. Salmon farming is the most important economic development in the Highlands and Islands over the past 30 years, and the retail sales value of Scottish salmon is around £300 million per annum. Scotland is the world’s third largest producer of Atlantic salmon and enjoys a reputation for quality fresh and added-value products such as smoked salmon."

http://www.nfus.org.uk indicated that most of the soft fruit farming is in Tayside, Angus, and similar fertile areas near Dundee (an area we did not visit but is near where my colleague grew up and forms the basis for his points of view).

I then visited http://forsythfreshproduce.co.uk/index/fresh-produce-seasonal-report and read where all the salad ingredients come from basically the UK and Holland.  Most of the vegetables were UK/France/Spain/Holland.  These results are for June which arguably is some of the best growing weather for crops like salad greens.  This information aligns with the information we were given by the ‘locals’ on our trip. “Veggies and Salad greens are not grown locally and imports are often expensive”.  Additional sites indicated limited cauliflower, broccoli, and leek production was also present in Scotland.  It was interesting to see that the Beef industry was so big in Scotland.  We saw our first cow when leaving Scotland near the Inverness airport, up until that time we only saw sheep.

http://eatscotland.visitscotland.com/food-drink/in-season/ was an excellent site to show what is potentially available fresh and local per season.

So again, I am left a bit perplexed.  If the growing conditions support fresh vegetable production and they are available in the marketplace, Why are they not served more often?   

One of the locations we stayed at (Monachyle Mhor) had its own garden, and we did have some lovely cooked greens and carrots while staying there, but our first real salad did not occur until the end of our journey at The Old Inn in Gairlock.  Our stays in Edinburgh, Tobermory, Dornie, and Nairn had considerably less choice for products that grew above the ground and left us wanting more.   

Why don’t more residents have their own mini-gardens to bolster their vegetable availability?  There certainly was the room for them in most locations we visited.  Are there difficulties I am not aware of?  Or is this just a menu preference of many of the Scottish peoples?  If so – why?  Where has the habit of game and root vegetable dominance originated?  All topics for someone else’s blog I am afraid but I would love to hear from any of you that may have some insight.

Our general experience was a starting lack of fresh vegetables being made available to us during our journey.  This is the experience that initiated the original blog entry.  The thought process then evolved into our society’s general reliance on transporting fruits and vegetables and other produce clear around the world, regardless of seasons.  This is a global phenomenon and certainly is much worse at my local supermarket than anything I encountered in the UK.   

It is I believe not a sustainable practice.  It is one I hope to curb in my personal life once I finish my upcoming build and would be able to set up a garden in our back yard.  I hope to provide a majority of our vegetable needs for at least three seasons of the year.  Will I still buy Japanese mandarins every Christmas, California cucumbers in the winter, and Mexican fruit in the early spring?  Probably, but in the mean time, I am also trying to find many more local sources of produce that is grown or raised in BC to limit the energy it takes to get food to my table.

Finally Re-Started

I can proudly say, as of yesterday, I have finally restarted the design process for the floor layout with an effort this time to maximize the sun’s exposure for living areas (align living areas along the south side and utilities along the north) and minimize the floor area in general in order to lower costs and also fit within the District of North Vancouver’s floor space ratios (even with my thicker walls).  In a jet-lag-induced-stupor, I broke out AutoCAD (which I use for prototyping), blew away all the walls on my previous designs and started the process over. I have done this probably a dozen times over the last 10 -12 years and it always surprises me that the ‘next’ design is often substantially different than the last design.  As my priorities and goals change, so does the layout of our home.

For instance, when I intended for this to be a retirement home, I did not worry about what would make the design ‘marketable’, but only on what we as a couple needed and wanted.  This resulted in a 2-bedroom house with lots of extras like a gym, second laundry, office & study, theatre room, etc.  Then about 5 years ago, I came to a realization (my wife also to a lesser extent) during an annual stay at a vacation rental house on Chesterman Beach in Tofino, that I really did not want to live in North Vancouver for the rest of my life.  When I moved here 13 years ago, it was a drastically different place, and I intended to ride out the remainder of my life here.  But, in my view, the North Shore has deteriorated substantially since then.  Traffic is my number one concern.  Because the Upper Levels Highway has reached capacity, a lot of traffic now spills onto Marine Drive and through residential areas.  In my neighbourhood (which has not seen ANY increase in the density of homes), the flow of traffic at a nearby intersection has gone from 2400 vehicles a day in 2008 to over 5000 vehicles a day last March (this increase is generally vehicles cutting through the neighbourhood between the Upper Levels Highway and Marine Drive).  Marine Drive has now become choked for a large portion of the day and it can often take 15+ minutes to get to a nearby mall during the day (10 blocks) when the same trip at night only takes three minutes.  And now the District is supporting heavily increased densities along Marine Drive without any meaningful plan to address the traffic.  Until and unless the North Shore Communities demand that the Province upgrades the highway and bridges, the problem will only get worse.

But I digress. That is a conversation for a totally different blog.  The point is, I do not see that this will be a pleasant place to live for decades (if ever), and so the emphasis of my design will now be marketability as opposed to personalization.  In this region that means bedrooms, the more bedrooms the better.  It does not really matter on what size the bedrooms are and many are filled up with a queen sized bed.  If I were truly building to market demands, I would also add more bathrooms.  Many homes in my neighbourhood have a bathroom attached to each bedroom.  But in my books, this is just nuts.  My generation and my parent’s generation managed just fine with only one bathroom in the house.  Yes that’s right one bathroom!  Can you imagine?

Although I will be building with marketability in mind, I still believe that builders should be providing a legacy in the structures that they provide and not a liability.  So I will be trying to provide the ‘features’ that the current buying public want, but not at the expense of the building envelope and compactness of the home.  I will talk about this and my design process more in future posts.

For now though, I would like to leave you with some thoughts I have as a resident of the North Shore on my return from a holiday to Chicago, Scotland, and London.  I feel I am further up the curve of what I consider a sustainable path through life, just by the programs in place where I live when viewed in contrast to these recently visited regions.

Let me start with Chicago.  This is a LARGE city by Canadian standards (approximately 4-5 times bigger than Greater Vancouver) and there was a lot of waste produced and a lot of traffic.  What was not visible were recycling efforts or car pool/transit lanes.  

When I talked with our drivers, they did not think anything of the traffic, and felt it was acceptable to commute through communities in order to miss the back-up on the highways.  Really???  The City is looking at adding ‘green-wash items’ like bike lanes in the core, but what about the gridlock?  Why not reward drivers who carpool and take transit by allowing those drivers/passengers an expedited path through the gridlock.  This will help solve many of your problems including road capacity (encourages denser passenger ratios), pollution (less stop and go traffic), and less cars means less damage to road structure.

As a resident of Greater Vancouver, I was also shocked at the lack of recycling generally available in the City.  For any city in any part of the world, recycling just makes common sense.  Yes there is an expense to do so, but let’s consider the savings.  The pickup costs are largely offset by the reduction in garbage pickup volume.  Reduced garbage volume means less pressure on the landfills.  Much of what is normally recycled are often items that do not readily break down in landfills and can often leach all kinds of nasties into the surrounding soil and groundwater.  By recycling them we can reclaim many of the materials in the products we throw out.  This reduces costs to remediate dumps, reduces manufacturing costs (recycled material is by its nature pre-processed and so often easier to incorporate into a manufacturing process than raw material and usually much cheaper to purchase as well), and of course recapturing raw materials puts a lot less strain on the diminishing natural resources on this planet and reduces our need for their exploitation.

Scotland also lacked any visible recycling program, and I felt horrible, throwing away plastic, paper, and glass while there.  With a total population of just over 5 million (less than Chicago) and a land mass of 30K square miles compared to Chicago’s 1487 square miles, their logistics challenges for collection is understandable.  But I am sure that the Country could come up with some innovative methods if they put their heads to it.  For me, it felt almost barbaric,  like living with an attitude that stated - Not a problem – we have LOTS of room to just dump it.

The other surprising point for me in Scotland was the food.  It was generally heavy (meat and potatoes or seafood and potatoes), and often lacked the addition of fresh vegetables.  Salads were never a standard part of the meal in most locations we visited.  One server just could not understand that we wanted vegetables with our dinner and not chips. Near the end of our trip, I remarked on this to a Chef at an Inn in Gairlock, and the son of one of our neighbour’s.  He advised that the growing season in Scotland just does not support the production of produce.  Indeed in my travels, I did not drive by even one farm, lots of fields of grazing sheep, but no crops of any nature.  He advised that the vast majority of the Countries’ food is imported from the nearby European neighbours.  They apparently do not even eat a lot of lamb and instead export that product because it is generally too expensive for the ‘locals’.  Fortunately, he followed up our conversation with a large salad course to our meal that was a welcomed addition. 

This, however, got me thinking about the sustainability of that type of culture, and the need for innovative solutions.  If we can grow tomatoes in a greenhouse in the Vancouver region, why can’t others?  It made me realize that a lot of the things I take for granted back home are really very innovative and environmentally responsible, compared to the practices in many other parts of the world:

• We generally have car pool and transit lanes on many arterial routes into and out of the cities (still LOTS of room for improvement).  We provide special parking for small cars, electric cars, and co-op cars.
• We recycle a lot of our trash (the percentage is growing all the time – the District of North Vancouver recently introduced a food waste recycling program) and if our Municipalities are unable to provide recycling pick up or drop off, there are companies like Pacific Mobile that provide drop-off service for many non-compostable products that we as a society would otherwise throw out. 
• We have available to us locally grown and raised produce.  I can even go to a major chain and buy vegetables and fruit grown locally in BC (far less often as we should be able to, but it is a start).  And if I am willing to split my shopping trip up, I can buy fresh and often organic meat and vegetables from smaller stores or directly from the producers.
• We in BC enjoy one of the cleanest electricity grids in North America if not the world. 
• We in BC have much better building standards for insulation, soon to be air tightness, and requirements to keep water out compared with much of the world.

I leave you with this thought:  

WIKI describes “produce” as a description that is often implying that the products are fresh and generally (being made available) in the same (region) where they were harvested.  

Think about this the next time you pick up a bag of grapes, melons, or even snap peas at the local supermarket.  Look at the labels for where the ‘produce’ was grown.  I think you will be shocked.   

Now, think of all the actions required to get the product from where it is grown to the shelf that is now in front of you.  Think of the fuel burned in trucks, boats and planes to move that product. Think of what chemicals and pollutants the ‘produce’ may have been exposed to back in the growing country.

Ask yourself. “Are these sustainable practices?”  I know my answer!