WORD OUT! The Blog to Build a New Society

Happy Friday! Looking for a simple yet satisfying seasonal supper this weekend? Enjoy this heartwarming, mouthwatering Portuguese Potato and Kale Soup, courtesy of the Hollyhock Centre on beautiful Cortes Island, and featured in the fabulous Hollyhock Cooks!

Portuguese Potato and Kale Soup

Potatoes come in a remarkable variety of shapes, sizes and colors. Ask your local grower for their favorite color and variety of this wonderful vegetable, brought to North America originally from the Andes Mountains. Kale thrives on Cortes Island all through the fall and the winter and it shows up in the most interesting dishes, like this delicious soup with its proud European overtones. Drizzle olive oil over the top.

Ingredients:

3 cups diced onions
2 tsp minced garlic
1/4 cup olive oil
2 tsp salt
8-10 cups water or vegetable stock
5 cups peeled and diced potatoes
2 cups finely shredded kale leaves or packed collard greens
black pepper to taste

Instructions:

1. In a heavy-bottomed soup pot, sauté the onions in the olive oil until soft, approximately 4-5 minutes. Add the garlic and sauté for another minute, stirring constantly. Add the salt, water or stock and diced potatoes. Bring the soup to a boil.
2. Reduce the heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the potatoes fall apart.This will take about 1 hour. Mash any remaining large chunks of potato with a potato masher or a large spoon until you have a coarse purée.
3. Add the shredded kale and let it simmer for another 5 minutes or so, until the kale is tender but still bright green. Season with pepper to taste.

— Hanyu Wasyliw

For more excellent vegetarian and seafood-based recipes with a focus on eating healthily and sustainably, check out Hollyhock Cooks: Food to Nourish Body, Mind and Soil. Enjoy!

It's always great to know when people are paying attention. So I was thrilled to hear this morning that a blog entry I wrote a few weeks ago about the global swine flu vaccine surplus was mentioned on examiner.com. Laura Harrison McBride has written an extremely thoughtful article which delves deeper into the way that a combination of greed, media hype and irresponsible behaviour on the part of various government and intergovernmental agencies led directly to “one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century”.

From Laura's conclusion:

We could call it greed. We could call it Jeremy for that matter. But if we call it anything except what it was - willful endangerment, for profit - we will be setting ourselves up for a fall, like the sheep farmer who excused the boy for his wolf-crying antics.

If we do anything except hold the authors of this bogus cry accountable, we are as unethical as they are. And a whole lot dumber.

For an excellent update on the situation, including coverage of the Council of Europe's hearing and the World Health Organization's response, check out Niko Kyriakou's article on the Huffington Post.

From the article:

Inquiries into WHO misdoing are likely to plunge deep into the statistical methods for data collection, however, it takes no expertise to see that health agencies' data about H1N1 was wildly misleading.

In addition to bad guesses about how many would die, a study released December 7 by the Harvard School of Public Health found that the WHO also estimated the deadliness of H1N1 to be 40 to 250 times higher than it was.

Proving the drug industry squeezed WHO into selling swine flu is very difficult to establish, but the string of clues which points to this corruption is not hard to follow.

The WHO is of course steadfastly denying any wrongdoing. And links between WHO officials and the pharmaceutical industry will be difficult to uncover. But it's critical to get to the bottom of this before the next "pandemic" comes around.

Three weeks ago, on the same day as Haiti experienced its devastating earthquake, I broke my wrist. Not a bad break, but painful, and enough to send me into town to get treated in Emergency. The injury caused enough of a disruption in my routine that I actually didn't hear of the Haitian disaster until much later. So while I sat waiting for treatment, my thoughts were not on the tragedy that had struck so many, but rather on my own selfish concerns - how inconvenienced I was, how much discomfort I was in, etc. Nothing but whining really, whining from my position of incredible privilege.

I spent a few hours in Emergency, and emerged with a cast, a prescription, and orders to arrange a follow-up visit with my family doctor. The care I received was compassionate, caring, and professional, and served to remind me of how lucky I am to live in a country with universal health care.

A couple of days ago while listening to the CBC, I heard a story about medical care in Haiti. The physician being interviewed was saying that since his arrival he had found that he was performing a heartbreaking number of amputations - many as a result of secondary infections and gangrene that would have been preventable in other circumstances. A child's broken bone that in Canada would have been relatively uncomplicated, in the context of the chaos in Haiti, could easily result in the loss of a limb for life.

And what kind of life will a Haitian amputee have? It's not an easy life in Haiti if you have two arms and two legs.

For me, this just serves to underscore the fact that it is critical not to forget what is happening in Haiti. With our global attention span measured in nanoseconds, how can we remain focused on the work that needs to be done there, not just in the coming weeks, but months and years? And how will we balance the needs of Haiti when the next disaster happens and massive aid is needed elsewhere.

I think the key is in remembering that we are a global village - in remembering that what happens to our neighbours could just as easily happen to us. My broken wrist - a minor inconvenience in Canada - could have been so much worse in another time or place. In taking care of Haiti, we must remember we are taking care of our own.

We are pleased to be participating in the upcoming Federation of Canadian Municipalities conference: Growing the Green Economy: Practical Solutions for Sustainable Communities being held in Ottawa, Ontario from Feb. 10-12.

Join us at this national forum for leading thinkers and planners on sustainable community development. Keynote speakers include Lester R. Brown (Founder and President of Earth Policy Institute), Mayor David Miller, Avi Friedman, Steven Guibeault and Bob Willard, author of The Sustainability Champion's Guidebook.

The FCM 2010 Sustainable Communities Conference is a one-stop shop for the knowledge, tools and experts that will help you:

• CONSERVE water and energy
• CREATE a sustainable community plan
• DESIGN a low-carbon community
• DIVERT more waste from landfill
• GREEN your buildings and your workforce
• IMPLEMENT environmental pricing reforms
• MANAGE storm water close to the source
• MAP your community’s energy assets
• REDUCE greenhouse gases and COMBAT climate change
• REINVENT a suburb
• TAKE STEPS to create active, walkable communities
• TRANSFORM abandoned sites into vibrant mixed-use or eco-industrial developments
• UNDERSTAND the big picture from a systems thinking perspective

For complete information please check out the Federation of Canadian Municipalities website - hope to see you there!

On the eve of the Games, as Olympic fever slams into high gear, a group of Gabriola activists has released a new video highlighting child poverty in the province of BC. According to First Call, British Columbia's child and youth advocacy coalition, BC had the highest child poverty rate in Canada for the sixth year in a row in 2007, and over one third of children in BC experienced at least one year of poverty in the six years from 2002 through 2007.

These sad statistics are in striking contrast to the untold millions being spent on Vancouver's Olympic effort. While residents of "the best place on earth" incur huge capital costs and a legacy of debt, the profits end up in the pockets of realtors and developers. It truly is a Five Ring Circus.