HAIDA GWAII LOCAL FOODS PROJECT

Haida Gwaii-wide, folks have pantries and freezers that feature preserved, locally grown, gathered, hunted and fished food.  Whether it’s a few jars of huckleberry jam or a winter or two’s store of canned, smoked, pickled, frozen, fermented and/or dried goods, their reasons for food preservation are common and many.  To name a few:

• Frugality:  most of the garden’s bounty and every edible morsel of the hunt or fish is saved and savored.
• Nourishment:  capturing fresh ingredients at their har-vesting peak ensures high quality nutrition and favor.
• Full-disclosure:  usually with homegrown or harvested food, there are no secret, hard to understand or unwanted ingredients.
• Self-reliance:  when the power goes out or the ferry doesn’t make a crossing or two, having stores of food equates a sense of security and peace of mind.
• Paying it Forward:  sharing food with family, friends and neighbors nourishes our human connections.

While food preservation drudgery is a common burden reported by many, for most, it is good, whole-some fun.  For some, the act of preserving food is healing and even spiritual.

It’s been a busy food preparation year for Port Clements’ Christine Lowrie.  Her pantry’s bounty includes canned crab, coho, sockeye and spring salmon, as well as huckleberry jam, blackberry jam, peach-es, peach chutney (made with peaches from Joe’s fruit truck), homemade BBQ sauce, tomato sauce, green tomato relish, salal berry jam, apple sauce, apple pie filling, baked beans and even a blackberry liquor.

Recently, on an exquisite fall day, I had the pleasure of chat-ting with locals, Jennifer Pigeon and Greg Morris.  Sitting on their sun-drenched porch, I was impressed to learn that 65-75% of all the food they eat they grow, harvest or hunt themselves.  “It’s a lot of hard work,” Greg shares, “but life is never boring.”  Jennifer adds, “It’s more rewarding than it is hard.”  Greg goes on to describe that by eating food you produce yourself, you are intimate with it.  “The critical mass of life force,” Greg says, “depends on getting intimate with our food.”  Greg is an industrious hunter and thus they are well-stocked with venison sausage, jerky, smoked shanks, ground, roasts, ribs, steaks, stuffed backstrap, heart, liver pâté and bone broth.  Besides a good supply of frozen food, Jennifer and Greg also preserve by canning, drying, dehydrating, brining and smoking.  Awe-inspiring self-sufcient living indeed.

Another avid and talented local food preserver is Skidegate’s Kim Goetzinger.  From butter clams that are dug, dried, smoked and then canned in oil or broth to her delectable candied salmon, Kim’s passion for local food is both eloquent and afective.  This year, from a plum tree in her yard, Kim decided to make a tasty treat: Salted Plum Leather.  Cooked with sugar, salt and spices, the plums are then spread out on a pan, dried, cut into strips and dusted with salt or sugar.  “They are to die for,” Kim reports.   Spending many hours gathering and processing edible treasures from the sea is also one of her joyous endeavors.  “Seaweed is my heaven,” Kim beams, “and the ocean, my sanctuary.”

For Marylynn Hunt of Tlell’s St. Mary’s Spring Estate, it is just another day for her to can three, twenty-six-pound boxes of Island Joe tomatoes.  For this article, she shared a food safety story about preserving pumpkins.  “Pumpkins are perfect for preserving – to put in things like soups and pies.  If you have a fall abundance of pumpkins and you don’t want to peel them every time you feel like throwing a pie in the oven, you can peel, cut up, cook until soft and jar up the pumpkin and then process in a pressure canner for 110 minutes.  With pumpkin being a low acid food, you can’t just process it in a water bath canner like you would salsa.  That would be an invitation for botulism!  As a young person, I almost poisoned my whole family because I didn’t understand how serious the difference is between canning low and high acid foods.  Luckily, there was a house free and all that pumpkin that I only processed for 15 minutes in a water bath canner got burnt up before we ate any of it!  Safe canning everyone!”

Of course, this is just a snippet of the many amazing things the people of Haida Gwaii do with local food, and I say, kudos to you all.  May we all work towards living simply, laughing often and eating well!