32 • The Columbia Valley Pioneer
July 27, 2007
Eat local, and save the environment Submitted by Alison Bell Invermere
Fresh, seasonal blueberries are among the produce sold at the Invermere Farmers’ Market every Saturday morning.
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Eating locally grown foods is nothing new. It’s how the people of the Columbia Valley ate until relatively recently. But we now have a wide variety of foods from all over the world to choose from all year long. Even though I suspect that the people who lived in this area 100 years ago would be envious of this bounty, I’m pretty certain they would be stunned by something else; the dearth of locally-grown foods on our dinner plates, even at the height of our growing season. Just to see how challenging it might be to prepare a dish using locally grown foods, Slow Food Columbia Valley held our first annual “Local Food Potluck.” The challenge was to make a dish using as many local ingredients as they could find. If you go by the parameters defined by James McKinnon and Alicia Smith, in their enormously successful book “The 100 Mile Diet,” you would only eat foods grown within a hundred mile radius of where you live. We decided to make it a little easier and stretched our boundaries to all of B.C. or Alberta, and if that wasn’t possible, since the majority of our food supply comes from the U.S., what the heck, use all of Canada! The results of the challenge were a feast, both for the eyes, and for the stomach. Here is but a small sampling. • BBQ’d wild Pacific salmon with fresh chive flowers and dill, served alongside grilled buffalo bratwurst from Golden with homemade tomato chutney. • Fresh-picked sorrel, spinach and arugula salad with fresh herbs and roast chicken from Parson’s Chinadoll Farms, stuffed with local garlic bulbs and lavender. • Fresh-caught rainbow trout became fish cakes with rhubarb-mint chutney. • Local asparagus was served with vegetable bruschetta made with tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers from greenhouses in Alberta. • Spicy elk satay and locally-raised roast pork flanked fresh-caught bass and a potato flan made with local eggs. • Huckleberry and rhubarb pies, rhubarb-stuffed crepes served with maple syrup, and bannock with dried cranberries. With the summer season upon us, locally- grown foods are now available around Invermere. Check out the Farmers’ Market for Patty’s Greenhouse, the Columbia Valley Botanical Gardens booth, locally-produced honey from Jubilee Mountain Apiary or Rocky Mountain Honey. Take a drive to Windermere to Win-Valley Farms, drive north to Edgewater to Brown Farms, or walk out to your own garden and pick a fresh pea. Stay tuned for information about Slow Food Columbia Valley’s upcoming events including our second annual Local Harvest Dinner, sponsored by the Columbia Valley Botanical Garden and Centre for Sustainable Living.