Well, Vancouver woke up to snow again today. Snow is pretty rare here, usually, and normally not so late into the winter. This snow most likely has damaged many overwintered plants, because they would have already come out of dormancy and started growing by now. I will be watching with curiosity, which ones come back to life and which ones falter.
Weather events like this weeks makes me begin to think about how I would feed myself, and my family, if we didn't have access to cheap imported foods. Our current diet is so conditioned by the fact that "its summer on the other side of the world," this morning for breakfast we had bananas from Ecuador, grapefruit from Florida, green tea from China, and pancake mix from who knows where. Other than some of our left over frozen garden pumpkin, the only strictly Canadian thing on the table was Maple syrup, and that still had to cross the continent to reach us on the West Coast. Myself and many people around the world have been thinking about these issues recently, and we benefit from a healthy local food movement because of it. But, it we actually had to put our food security system to the test, especially this time of year, I suspect that more than just our taste buds would suffer.
Historically, spring famines were a significant worry and incentive to try to put away enough in the fall, but weather and nature are unpredictable, and even with the best intentions some times families would starve. And this was in the times when these people knew how their food was made and where it came from.
