Parent Profile

Sarah Pugh - It's handy eating locally

As I pushed the stroller through the snow last week, well into March, I thought through my questions to ask mama Sarah Pugh about her local diet, which she estimates makes up about 90% of her family's yearly grocery purchases. The snow that collected and stacked up to an inch thick on my scarf, mitts and hat seemed out of place with the stories of fresh local beet greens and green house harvested peninsula salad greens and cherry tomatoes that Sarah told us about half an hour later, as the snow continued to fall out the window.
 
The view from Sarah's second floor suite in a heritage home in James Bay looks out over her neighbour's and her yards. Her neighbours are also her landlords, and the carriage house out back, which you see through the kitchen window, is where Sarah lived for 4 years before marrying Stirling and moving in with him to their present location on the same property 6 years ago. Three years ago Rowan was born and joined them in their cozy home. When we arrived, Rowan was having breakfast, a pale green-coloured egg from the chickens that her landlords keep in the backyard. The fences have been removed so that the families all share the yard space, and the children can all play together. Sarah's garden space in the back is not very big, so she devotes space to growing what she finds "entertaining" rather than trying to stock their larder herself, and the pot rack full of pots and pans for different uses and shelves of implements including a pressure cooker, fish poacher and kettles and tea pots all belie Sarah's devotion to food.
 
I started by asking Sarah how she worked her way into the local food production and supply scene. She told us that it was "an evolving process" that happened dynamically over a course of years. It started in 2001 when she began buying produce from her friend, Dave, who runs Madrona Farm on Blenkinsop Road. She wanted to support a local farmer, contribute to local economy, and know where her food is coming from and how it is grown. She supplemented with grocery store purchases, but it did not take long for her to realize that if Dave could grow enough food to sell, "other people probably could, too; so I started looking and realizes you can get locally produced food all year long here, as long as you are willing to eat seasonally." She says that her family now eats seasonally year long, even though this means going through long periods of eating a lot of parsnips and kale, two vegetables she has found many uses for.

Her appreciation of food started at a young age. Her dad provided the family with sustenance through hunting, fishing and berry picking. She did not grow up eating seasonally, though. Summer was for producing, fall for preserving and freezing, and then through the winter and spring, the food was the same but had been picked at the height of freshness and ripeness rather than picked and shipped long before its peak. Her work at a restaurant near Duncan in 2002 introduced her to being adaptable to seasonal food, as the owner and head chef focused on local produce and creating innovative and creative dishes with what was available rather than sourcing out specific ingredients for a desired dish. Her restaurant training and experience serves her family well still.

Rowan, who reminisced about salmonberries while she heard our food talk, has the benefit of  eating in rotation. Sarah has noticed that each year Rowan forgets that the previous year she did not like a particular vegetable and will eat it when it is reintroduced. Rowan spends 2 days each week with her grandmother where she is exposed to the Wonder bread, Kraft Dinner diet. While she has sampled both the good life in food source and the not-so-healthy lifestyle of the typical North American, Sarah guesses that she is still too young to truly appreciate how good Rowan has it at home. She remembers her own childhood and that at 10 years old, it was "not the coolest thing" to have moose meat sandwiches on her mom's homemade bread,

but she loved the food she had at home and eventually was proud of her upbringing. (Her dad was a dentist who was influenced by the research and teachings of Weston Price.)  Pictured above: Sarah's locally grown grocery haul in the middle of March
 
On the topic of meat, Sarah says that Rowan is naturally carnivorous and that as a mama, Sarah is happy with this. She feels that meat is "a dense source of nutrients with lots of vitamins, lots of nutrients and lots of fats for their little developing brains", but she "really abhors the idea of factory farms" and does not ever buy meat from grocery stores. She knows that "responsibly farmed animals have a really good life." She has seen firsthand that local farms embrace the positive side of animal husbandry.
 
Listening to Sarah's reasons for making the food choices she does, it is obvious that she has done her research. We sympathized over having overdosed on reading nutritional information about the benefits of certain foods. She points out that the notion of "super foods" or specific nutrients is flawed because the food or part of food is taken out of context. So while the saturated fats in meats may be labelled bad because they are saturated, this does not take into account the other, beneficial properties of this natural food source that is good for our bodies. Likewise, Vitamin E, for example, may be great for us, but when it is taken as a supplement, out of the context of a whole food source, its properties are altered and it does not have the same effect.
 
As for organic growing, Sarah has found that the growers on Vancouver Island do not have much of a pest problem and therefore little reason to use chemicals. She says that the diversified crops and the good soil make pesticide use low and she feels safe buying locally grown food over organically labelled produce. She also figures that the Victoria area is small enough that farmers cannot get away with unethical growing or farming practices. She sees one of the benefits of local food production to be local community and the ability and responsibility to talk to the people growing her food.
 
For dairy, Sarah and her family own part of a cow (this is how raw milk, an illegal-to-sell item, can be provided and procured) and pick up milk from the Sooke farm where the Jersey cow is raised. She does buy Island Farms cream and milk to supplement Stirling's "10-cup-a-day" tea habit and her coffee. Eggs come from chickens she has met and seen are happy, free-roaming birds who enjoy a greenhouse in the winter and lots of foraging in the summer. (Chickens have a season too! They are out of season now, with foraging being hard to come do when it is so cold and wet.) Home canned salmon, homemade pickles, sauerkraut and kimchi (which she is out off right now because she has eaten it all) and homemade bread all make up the household diet when Sarah is in the kitchen. Rowan helps with baking and is in charge of cleaning greens.
 
As a parent, I had the impression that Sarah is pretty relaxed and gives Rowan a lot of freedom. She shares that she is now, but the first year was pretty rocky. She says that after a difficult birth, much post partum bleeding (that caused trouble with her milk production for a couple of months) and some family dynamics (ah, family...), she suffered post partum depression for most of a year. Because of her challenges in her first year, she has begun her studies to become a post partum doula and help other women through this time.
 
Each week Sarah enjoys two days off from her parenting duties while Rowan is at grandma's house. She keeps busy with half a day of volunteer work for the Madrona Farm fundraising campaign and half a day of grocery shopping for herself and her neighbour who wants to benefit from Sarah's knowledge of the local farm market but does not have the time to dedicate to it. (Hearing the names of all the different farms, grocery stores, bakeries and specialty stores Sarah shares as she talks about her food choices and all the visits and inspections of the farms and growers, it sounds like food collection takes up a lot of her time. She estimates, though, that it only takes about 3 hours a week to gather all her shopping. And while she may end up doing more driving than the average Victorian in purchasing food, it is easy to see how her dedication to local farming contributes to less food transportation cost and distance overall by not buying imported food.) Other free time is spent for herself, browsing through the beautiful wool shops in town, "a vast sucking vortex of time and money is what they are... but fun!," walking the dog or going for a run and writing for her blog, The James Bay Beacon newsletter, blurbs and press releases for Madrona Farm and The Land Conservancy and an upcoming article for the Victoria Natural History Society. This leaves her able to focus 100% on Rowan when they are together, since they do not have to go grocery shopping or do other errands that Rowan is not as interested in. The sense I had after my visit with Sarah is that this is one mama who has figured out what she needs to create balance for herself and be present and available to give fully to her family and create a happy and healthy home through nourishing food and a rich emotional life.

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