The Rural Voice, 2005-12, Page 3About this issue
Eating local at Christmas
A lot of people have been paying attention to what Alisa
Smith and James MacKinnon are eating. With all the talk
about the average bite of food in North America travelling
2,500 miles (or whatever the latest figure is) before it
reaches your plate, the British Columbia couple decided to
set themselves the task of eating only foods that originated
within 100 -mile or 165 -kilometres from their Kitsilano
home. Their culinary adventures have been posted on the
B.C. online magazine The Tyee and as of early October
100,000 people had logged onto the website
(www.thetyee.ca) since July to see how they've making
out.
With that in mind, we set out to see just how local
Christmas dinner could be for people in midwestern
Ontario where diversified food production makes so many
things locally grown.
Also on the Christmas theme, Barbara Weiler recalls
Christmases past, both those of her own childhood and
those experienced early in the 1900s by her parents.
Christmas can be a sad time for those far from home
and no doubt there will be some moments of loneliness and
disorientation for the subjects of Bonnie Gropp's story on
the stresses of moving to an Ontario farm where others
around you speak a different language and even the
geography seems so different than what you grew up with.
An English -as -a -second -language teacher helps them
bridge the gap to join Canadian society.
There's good and bad to be found in the approach of
winter. While many dread the high heating bills or the
treacherous road conditions, many others revel in the
opportunities to ski and skate and snowmobile. Bonnie
Gropp spoke with some of the people who groom the
hundreds of miles of trails that criss-cross midwestern
Ontario making it a haven for snowmobilers once winter
arrives in earnest.
In the cold of December it's hard to remember the heat
of July but for poultry producers, now is the time to start
planning to avoid heat stress that can sap profits next
summer. Last summer was one of the hottest on record but
heat stress losses were remarkably low in Ontario's poultry
flocks, probably because of a lack of humidity. A recent
poultry producers update conference revealed other secrets
to avoiding losses.
In her recipe collection this month Bonnie Gropp
focuses on holiday appetizers.
Update
Hot news on firefighting
Our November 2005 issue contained a story on a new
training centre for rural firefighters and other emergency
workers: the Emergency Services Training Centre operated
by the members of the Blyth and District Fire Department.
In 2005 the ESTC joined forces with the Ontario Fire
College in Gravenhurst, providing two volunteer fire
suppression training courses. All told, more than a third of
the students trained by the Ontario Fire College took their
training at the Blyth facility this year. That's on top of
other training courses for midwestern Ontario fire
departments who have the advantage of getting top-rated
training close to home.
In 2005 the ESTC added a world-class, computer -
controlled, flammable liquids area, expended its burn
building by 320 square feet, acquired an additional pumper
truck and a 65 -foot silo for farm rescue training and a
substantially updated the propane emergencies area is
nearing completion.
It's all an example of the volunteer spirit of local fire
departments. By the spring of 2005 members of the Blyth
and District Fire Department had contributed an average of
130 hours of volunteer labour.
`MRural Voice
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Editor & Publisher: Keith Roulston
Editorial advisory committee:
Bev Hill, farmer, Huron Cty;
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Gerald Poechman, farmer, Bruce Cty.
Contributing writers:
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Pearce, Bob Reid, Mervyn Erb, Sandra
On, Janice Becker, Larry Drew
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