By Gagandeep Ghuman
Published: Oct. 6, 2012
Sheri Lee and Brad Ray were picking food from their garden bed at the Squamish CAN community garden when Lee felt someone tug at her shirt.
She turned around and saw a kid with bright red carrots in her hand.
“These are my carrots,” the child said, offering the food. She then looked at the oddly shaped tomatoes growing in Lee’s garden bed.
“We’ve been watching your tomatoes,” she said, as Lee and Ray laughed.
It’s the best gift a community garden can give to kids: Teach them how food grows, the shapes it acquires, how it travels from farm to the fork.
For many kids, Brad says, the question of where the food comes from will elicit only one response: grocery store.
For the families and young children who planted their own vegetables, the answer is different.
In a span of a summer, local activists like Lee and Ray, along with Carolyn Morris, and Krystle tenBrink have brought new life to a barren empty lot in downtown Squamish.
In the past four months, the community garden has built community, filled in some food security gaps, and taught young minds the journey of food.
Most of all, however, it has brought into focus some of the weightiest issues we all must confront: climate change, carbon emissions, and the need to grow and eat local.
Owners of InBiz Print Centre, both Lee and Ray joined for both personal and environmental reasons.
Lack of enough light in their Valleycliffe home was one reason.
But it was involvement with Squamish CAN and a deepening environmental consciousness that moved them to start a community garden.
The idea took roots this April, when a land donation from August Jack Motor Inn helped Squamish CAN to begin work on the project.
Carolyn Morris says the idea found immediate support when it was introduced to the community in Feb. this year.
Community Food Action Initiative (CFAI), Squamish Savings, Quest University, Quest student council, Elaho Medical Clinic, Kitchen Quickies, Carbon Synch, and District of Squamish all contributed donations and in-kind help to make the idea a success.
More than 50 volunteers pitched in, and this summer nearly 53 families paid $40 per annum for a full bed, and $20 for a half-bed, to establish a connection to the soil and food that is often missing for most people.
There are 13 families who are on a waiting list to rent a bed.
Community garden underscored the pleasure of growing and eating local, especially when transporting food is polluting environment at an alarming rate.
Natural Resources Defense Council, NYC based environmental group, has studied the link between transportation and environment.
NRDC analyzed the transportation related impacts of importing agricultural products into the state’s ports, including the large ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland, and Otay Mesa on the Mexican border.
NRDC found out that almost 250,000 tons of global warming gases could be attributed to the import of food products.
That was equivalent to the amount of pollution produced by more than 40,000 vehicles on the road or nearly two power plants.
NRDC also found that nearly 6,000 tons of smog-forming oxygen oxides were released into the air-the equivalent of almost 1.5 million vehicles or 263 power plants.
“We’re shifting goods around the world in a way that looks really bizarre,” remarked Paul Watkiss, an Oxford University economist, to the NYT recently.
Watkiss said Britain, for example, exchanges 20 tons of bottles water with Australia, and imports 15,000 tons of waffles every year.
In fact, we might even be subsidizing part of this transportation cost.
Under a little-known international treaty signed in 1944, as many as 52 states signed on to exempt fuel for international travel and transportation of goods.
These global challenges also have local ramifications, and activists like Morris and Ray are committed to work at the grassroots level in Squamish to raise awareness of these issues.
The community garden has also served as an anchor for the downtown.
“We have seen tourists who come here and take pictures,” Morris says, smiling.
For Brad Ray and Sheri Lee, being part of the community garden is also about meeting new people and eating food that is relatively inexpensive.
Both Lee and Ray collected fresh peas at least three times a week, along with romaine lettuce, spinach, and basis.
“That food would cost us hundreds of dollars,” says Ray.
Food security, or lack of it, is closely tied to the need for locally grown, sustainable food.
There are troubling statistics when it comes to food security in the province, and in this region.
According to the annual report by the Dieticians of Canada, the average monthly cost of a nutritious food basket in the province is $868.43.
That number goes upward in our region.
The average cost of a similar basket in the Vancouver Coastal Health region: $944.16.
Gerry Kesten, community nutritionist for the region, says it’s easy for families to meet their calorie need, but not their nutritional needs.
“Income barriers related to social and housing cost all play a factor,” Kesten says.
This is where a communal effort like the community garden can fill the gap.
Morris, through Shifting Growth, is talking to the owners of the Chevron gas station to use their empty lot in downtown Squamish for a similar garden.
“I think we are really at the stage of reconnecting with our food, a stage of reawakening where people begin to value local grown food,” says Morris.
