I spent my spring semester last year in the Netherlands, at the University of Wageningen (WUR). The town of Wageningen is very small, and is essentially made up by the student population base. However, I thought that the university was outstanding, and would highly recommend it to anyone studying food in any capacity.

While there, I took Globalization and Sustainability of Food Production, Lifestyles and Consumption, Organic Agriculture and Society and The Psychobiology of Food Choice and Eating Behaviour. I do not yet know what these courses will transfer back as, but when I do, I will post what UBC accredits them as in the comments for anyone interested!

The Psychobiology of Food Choice and Eating Behaviour was by far my favourite, perhaps partially because I haven’t looked at food through such a lens before. We focused on topics such as physiological signals of satiety, food reward and hedonic Eating, the role of context on food choice, and food choice across the lifespan.

I am not only interested in how our food choices affect the environment, but also how they affect us personally, both mentally and physically. My term project for the course was about the “Milkshake Study”, as it is known – a study that showed that what we think about our food actually affects biochemical changes and markers in our bodies when we consume it. The placebo affect is of course nothing new, but it was a groundbreaking study in the field of nutrition, where so often things are black and white – calories in, calories out. If I were to continue my studies, I would consider a masters in food through either a sociological or psychological lens, or perhaps a combination of both. I am hoping to live and work in Europe for a while once I have completed my undergraduate degree here at UBC, and intend to look into the options offered both at WUR and elsewhere.

I was very happy to have had the chance to study abroad, and would urge anyone that is interested to apply and go!

One thing that I ended up doing a fair bit of research about this semester was Veganism. Both personally, as well as for class: I set myself a goal of being vegan for one month for my International Nutrition class as part of an assignment with the goal of helping alleviate world hunger. The reason that I chose to be vegan, as opposed to any of the other suggested ways to make a difference was mainly because I believe that change must come from each of us, alongside the efforts of specific groups and governmental policies.

Veganism is touted by many people in our western world as a supreme diet in for three main reasons: it’s cruelty-free, better for the environment and better for our health. For my purposes, I focused on the fact that it is said to be better for the environment, as this is what has the most effect on world hunger.

The production of livestock, poultry, dairy and eggs is known to have huge effects on the climate. As Kim Barnouin, a strong vegan advocate who has now written several persuasive books on the subject, succinctly lists the, “five major ways that food systems are contributing to our demise: 1. Greenhouse Gas Emissions, 2. Water Supply and Pollution, 3. Deforestation, 4. Lack of Biodiversity and 5. Fish Depletion.” (Barnouin, 2010, pp. 17-20) Of course, I think that many of us as GRSers are well aware of these impacts.

With this in mind the fact that “Animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined,” and, “is the number one cause of climate change.” (Foer, 2009) means that one way to make a difference is to try and mitigate climate change through diet change. Stehfest et al. (2009) in their research on the, “Climate benefits of changing diet”, found that, “a global food transition to less meat, or even a complete switch to plant-based protein food [would] have a dramatic effect on land use, …methane and nitrous oxide emission would be reduced substantially.” And concluded in their study that, “dietary changes could therefore not only create substantial benefits for human health and global land use, but can also play an important role in future climate change mitigation policies.”

However, being vegan was extremely difficult for me. I did not expect the unpleasant effects on my digestive system which resulted from such a sudden change in diet. The physical difficulty made the challenge I’d created for myself more difficult than I had expected. However, when it came to making meals and food, I found that I was quite inspired to create new concoctions in the kitchen, and to ‘veganize’ some of my favourite recipes. I discovered early on, thanks to the abundance of foodie blogs on the internet these days, that cashews make quite a good milk, cream or cheese substitute in many recipes, and this allowed me to avoid the over-use of purchased nut milks (which I’m not convinced are healthier than dairy!).

The whole process definitely opened my eyes to the fact that I am able to eat a vegan diet without too much effort in that regard. I found new recipes and options for breakfast, which have definitely inspired me to continue experimenting with a more plant-based diet.

In the end, however, I didn’t feel like I really made a difference. Not only because I failed to meet the goal that I had set out to, because I think that perhaps I would feel similar even if I had. It’s not that I don’t believe that the action I took doesn’t change anything, but it’s so hard to quantify such an impact. Stats and figures can lay it all out: “A low-fat vegetarian diet requires less than half an acre per person to produce that food. Compare that to 2.1 acres per person for the meat eater.” (Barnouin, 2012), “the current world grain harvest could support 2.5 billion at the average US level of consumption…and in the US, ~12.5% are consumed directly, [while] most are used at feed, and that’s where the big difference comes in” (Rideout, lecture notes, 2015), “livestock accounts for 70% of agricultural land and provides 15% of total food energy” (Rideout, lecture notes, 2015), etc. but it’s obviously hard to see the effects of this. They are not tangible. This though, is perhaps the crux of the problem: what we cannot see or understand, and do not feel, we have trouble caring about. Not to say that people don’t “care” or aren’t empathetic, but it’s difficult to take action when your actions seem futile. Perhaps if we were somehow more interconnected, and could feel the impacts of our choices more profoundly, either morally or physically, things would change.

Interestingly, I discovered through my research that the debate about whether or not humans should be eating meat has been going on for almost as long as agriculture itself: Plato wrote a dialogue between two characters almost 2, 500 years ago debating the consumption of animals, in which one character, Socrates, tells the other, who wants to feed his citizens meat, that, “ this luxurious city will be short of land because of the extra acreage required to raise animals for food. I thought that this was incredible!! We’ve been having this debate for almost as long as agriculture has been around!

The thing that connected with me most strongly was reading a book called The Vegetarian Myth. I am undecided as to whether or not this was because we tend to find reasons to support things we already believe in (Plous, 1993), but regardless, it had a profoundly impacted the way I see things. It doesn’t help solve world hunger. But it made me think about food choices a little bit differently. The author, Lierre Keith, had been vegan for twenty years before she wrote the book, and had switched back to an omnivorous diet for several reasons. The part that hit home was I her introduction, where she described how, in her early twenties, as a keen and principled new vegan, she had tried to start a backyard garden. To her dismay, her plants were not doing well. In order to remedy the problem, she began to search out soil amendments. However, she then was faced with an interesting choice: either buy industrially-manufactured minerals, or add bone meal, or blood to her unhappy tomato plants in order to get them to grow. And so she was faced with an inevitable fact of life: things must die in order for other things to live. Without death, the carbon cycle is not complete, and things would not go on as they do. Veganism is an attempt to remove ourselves from this inexorable circle of life. This also sheds light on the fact that even plant-based diets require inputs that are not always positively affecting our world.

On a less profound scale, the nutritional side of it also made me re-think things a bit. There are many vegan books which claim that a purely-plant based diet is the route to the holy grail of health, and despite the fact that I do think I would perhaps have to give it a longer period of time before really knowing how I truly feel once my body adapts – Campbell, T. & Campbell II (2006) state in their book that, “the first moth can be challenging, but it gets much easier after that”.

Despite already being aware of the damage which our food systems cause, and the implications of our diets, this project made me much more acutely conscious of my food choice. I have already researched where I can get raw milk in the lower mainland (illegal, I know, but I do believe that more natural products are healthier), and last time I went to the supermarket, purchased organic eggs and local, grass-fed yoghurt. I am also aware that my choices are being made from a place of privilege. In the future, I would like to have my food choices be flexible. I intend to incorporate more plant-based foods into my diet, and focus on eating locally. I realise that eating locally isn’t always the most sustainable option, but I firmly believe that being more connected to the whole process – from the seed to the production to the harvesting and sales – is an essential step in understanding and thus transforming our food systems. My goal is to one day have a farm, where people can re-connect with their food. I have always wanted to have a mixed system (plants as well as animals), as I believe that that is what functions most holistically. Stehfest et al. (2009) also point out that, “a global transition to a low meat-diet as recommended for health reasons would reduce the mitigation costs to achieve a 450 ppm CO2-eq. stabilisation target by about 50% in 2050 compared to the reference case.”

This knowledge, combined with the echoes of Lierre Kieth’s book The Vegetarian Myth, have led me to the conclusion that awareness, balance and understanding are the most important things when it comes to making change: without awareness, there is no reason to start, without understanding there is not motivation to continue, and without balance, we soon lose sight of the goal as we struggle to find the pieces without looking at the whole puzzle.

References

Barnouin, K. (2010). Skinny Bitch: Ultimate Everyday Cookbook. Philadelphia, PA: Running Press Book Publishers.

Campbell, T. & Campbell II, T. (2006). The China Study. Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, Inc.

Foer, J. (2009) Eating Animals. New york, NY: Hatchette Book Group

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. (2015). Agriculture and Food Security.

Retrieved from http://www.fao.org/docrep/x0262e/x0262e05.htm

Freedman, R. & Barnouin, K. (2005). Skinny Bitch. Philadelphia, PA: Running Press Book Publishers.

Murphy, T. (2012). Do the Math: Using physics and estimation to assess energy, growth, options. (Web log comment). Retrieved from http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/flex-fuel-humans/

Plous, Scott (1993). The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Scarborough, P. et al. (2014). Dietary greenhouse gas emissions of meat-eaters, fish-eaters, vegetarians and vegans in the UK. Climatic Change. 125:2, pp 179-192

Stefest, E. et al. (2009). Climate benefits of changing diet. Climatic Change. 95:83–102

DOI 10.1007/s10584-008-9534-6

When I found out that one of the options for LFS 350 was a project on Galiano Island, I was determined to be part of the group that went. Luckily for me, one of the people in the group wanted out because of his work schedule, and I managed to trade in.

Visiting Galiano was absolutely amazing, and I was so inspired and excited by the farmers we met. I would like to have a farm one day, and part of the reason I am pursuing a degree is to figure out what I want that to look like, and where I’d like it to be.

Two farms in particular were of incredible inspiration to me. The first was Cable Bay farm, where the group and I stayed for the weekend. The most exciting thing I learned about there was farming equipment that I had no idea existed – one which builds the beds and covers them in biodegradable plastic, and another which plants the seedlings via a large hydraulic wheel (and two people sitting on it to place the seedlings onto the wheel). These two simple pieces of equipment drastically reduce not only the time to plant in the spring, but also reduce the workload all season since the beds don’t need weeded given the plastic covering. The system also uses drip irrigation, which is put in by the bed-building machine, and thus reduces water usage by 80%!! Amazing.

The second place that truly inspired me was a a farm run by a lady who had moved to the island with her husband in the seventies. They had two children in diapers, and when they got to the property, lived in a canvas tent for the first year. This proved rather miserable in the rainy winter, and so they built a 12×16 cabin in which to live while they built their home. There was no power, and no running water. They had five forested acres, with a steep slope in the middle. Logging the lower portion created an area for the gardens and orchard, where there are now three large garden beds and an orchard of over 50 varieties of apples, all of which they planted. The logs were hauled up the hill and they built their beautiful family home by hand.

When we walked in the driveway, we met this incredible pioneer woman picking figs off of two of the biggest, most beautiful fig trees I have ever seen. She then took us on a tour, showing us the greenhouse with grapes that exploded with flavour, and tomato plants tied up with strings to the ceiling. Her husband was outside with a couple bins of grapes, de-stemming and sorting, as they make their own wine from the vines. Window-box squares with greens growing happily in October were spaced out on the lawn. On the back side of the house, which was south facing, we were shown three massive kiwi trees: two females and a male, absolutely loaded with kiwi fruit, which we were told would be ready for harvest in January.

We finished up the tour with a glass of her homemade kombucha as we sat in the sunshine on the porch of the little cabin that was currently housing a dehydrator full of apple slices and multiple musical instruments. She told us of the incredible amount of hummingbirds she feeds, and we sat and chatted, soaking in her amazing story.

Before leaving we had a rummage through the jars that lined the back porch: preserves and treats of all kinds that she makes on a two-burner hot plate in their wood-heated home. Jams and jellies, all kinds of pickles, dried fruits and even echinacea tincture which she grows and extracts.

I had no idea about Galiano’s incredible micro-climate before going there. It’s an amazing place to grow food, and I found the tiny community to be so hospitable. Waiting for the ferry, I had a look at the real estate listings…

As I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, one of the main things that attracted me to the GRS programme was that we had to do either an exchange or an internship in order to gain local/hands-on knowledge in relation to our degree. For my exchange, I went to SciencesPo in Paris for the first semester, and to Wageningen in the Netherlands for the second. It was two very, very different experiences! For anyone who is thinking about going on exchange, I would urge you to do it. And for anyone interested in going to either France or the Netherlands, I will share some thoughts.

Paris is a very expensive city, and was a difficult place to be a student, due to this, but I had my heart set on living there for a short time. It was an easy city to walk, and I loved having access to all of the museums and art galleries with my student card. To sum Paris up, I would say that it lives up to every one of it’s stereotypes. Because it is a university of political science, my classes there were SciencesPo almost all electives,. Professor Carol Lock was amazing, and I would definitely recommend taking anything that she teaches – I took The Business of Wine in France and A Table! Why Mealtimes Still Matter in France, and really enjoyed both.

Whenever someone asks me about Paris, I tell them that I wouldn’t have said I liked the city while I was there, but then when a friend who was travelling through asked me what he should see on his way through, I sat down to write back to him from my new place in Wageningen, and suddenly all the amazing memories poured in. I looked back through my messages to find what I’d written, and decided just to include it here, since it’s what I would have told anyone after having just left!

Paris…. hmmm. Depends what you want to do and see. I would recommend a month in a city, minimum. haha But on a tight time budget… maybe three days? The Louvre is worth seeing, but Musee d’Orsay was my favourite. It’s good to have a day up in Montmartre (older part of town, up on the hill). A great view of the Eiffel tower is from Trocadero. The Jardin du Luxembourg is a very classic French park, nice to walk through, and the Tuileries are similar (and my favourite statue in Paris is in the Tuileries).

Definitely need to have a baguette, and hit up a market (that’s where all the French people do their shopping – cheese there shouldn’t be too much more expensive than in the supermarket). My favourite patisserie place is called Sadaharu Aoki – its Japanese fusion and makes incredible macarons. Another really good one is Un Dimanche a Paris. If you’re interested in food culture or shopping culture at all, the Bon Marche is a huge department store, somewhat similar to Harrods in London – some pretty amazing stuff, but very pricey.

French people love to picnic down along the seine, and taking a bottle of wine is pretty much required (if its warm enough). I would recommend buying wine around the 7/8 euro mark – it should be a good quality/price ratio. Although, the 2 euro bottles are sometimes worth it… you just never know. haha

I never did the Eiffel tower, but its worth walking around for sure, and standing underneath. Oh! There’s also a very Parisian falafel neighbourhood, and if you like falafel I can give you the name of the best one. Musee Rodin is quite good, and has The Gates of Hell (very famous sculpture by him). You can also go into the opera house which is beautiful, but you do have to pay – depends if its worth seeing a halls of chandeliers and mirrors for you or not.

Let me know what neighbourhood you’re planning to stay in – might be able to make some local recommendations. Also, I have a friend who is still there this semester, and if you’d like a tour guide for a day she’s really lovely and I could put you guys in touch.

It’s choppy, as I wrote with images and experiences flashing back through my mind, but in writing it out, I realised that there were definitely things about Paris that I loved.