Join us for a triple book launch to explore the topics of civil society, public policies and the right to food with Andy Fisher (Big Hunger), Annette Aurélie Desmarais (Public Policies for Food Sovereignty) and Graham Riches (Food Bank Nations).

Light refreshments with be provided, please RSVP.

Speakers include:

• Andy Fisher, a founding director of the Community Food Security Coalition in the USA and author of Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance between Corporate America and Anti Hunger Groups (MIT Press, 2017).
• Annette Aurélie Desmarais, CRC in Human Rights, Social Justice and Food Sovereignty, University of Manitoba and co-editor of Public Policies for Food Sovereignty: Social Movements and the State (Routledge, 2017).
• Graham Riches, emeritus professor of social work, UBC and author of Food Bank Nations: Poverty, Corporate Charity and the Right to Food (Routledge, 2018).

Moderated by Laura Castrejon Violante, ISGP PhD student, Land Use and Global Environment (LUGE) lab, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and Liu Scholar.

Copies of books will be available to purchase.

Co-hosted by: UBC School of Social Work, UBC School of Public Policy & Global Affairs, the Liu Institute for Global Issues, the Food Systems Network (a Liu Scholars and CSFS group), and the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems (CSFS) at the UBC Farm.

Are you intrigued about fermenting? Learn about what it is, the health benefits, and how to do it yourself in this joint Village Vancouver-West End Neighbourhood Food Network and West End Urban Garden Club workshop. We’ll explore vegetable fermenting (e.g. sauerkraut and local seasonal ferments), water kefir, milk kefir, and kombucha. Find out what’s involved, what equipment you need, where to find supplies and ingredients, and how much time and space it takes.

We’ll have a community seed library present – pick up some free seeds for your garden (or swap or donate seeds).

Advance registration required. FREE for Seniors (50 and over).

Please join us for an evening of conversation with Graham Riches and Andy Fisher. Both of their recently published books critically explore the root cause of food insecurity in the Global North. Their work puts the adequacy of food banks on trial as a primary solution to this nation-wide issue.

Andy Fisher is a leading national expert on community food security in the USA. He is a co-founder of the Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC) which has successfully brought together food security advocates across the country and influenced federal nutritional legislation. More recently he served as the Executive Director at Portland Fruit Tree Program (2015-2017). He currently consults on various food system organizations and speaks throughout North America about his vision for addressing hunger. Fisher recently published Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance Between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups (MIT Press, 2017).

Graham Riches is a former Director of UBC’s School of Social Work (1998 – 2008). He is a co-founder of Vancouver Food Policy Council. He has written extensively about food poverty in Canada and first world hunger in wealthy nation states from a right to food perspective. Riches book Food Bank Nations: Poverty, Corporate Charity and the Right to Food (Routledge, 2018) has just been released.

The Future of Food Global Dialogue Series presents Annette Desmarais from the University of Manitoba.

By analyzing how food sovereignty is conceptualized and practiced in the Basque Country, this presentation will explore what kind of global political project food sovereignty seeks to build and mobilize. This case highlights the significance of building solidarities from below and across space in struggles for transformative social change.

Located at Macmillan Building – Room 350, University of British Columbia

This event is brought to you by the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems at the UBC Farm.

This is the first event of the WESTSIDE SEED SERIES hosted at Kits House in partnership with the Westside Food Collaborative, Westside Neighbourhood Food Network, and Village Vancouver.

Want to learn how to save your own seeds? Pick up some free seeds for your garden? Help sustain the new community seed Library at Kitsilano Neighbourhood House and also support local food efforts? Then come to one or more of the Fall Westside Seed Series activities. Presented to you by Kits House, the Westside Food Collaborative, the Westside Neighbourhood Food Network, and Village Vancouver.

At this Fall seed saving workshop, instructor Rhiannon Johnson will provide you with the knowledge needed to understand the basic principles of seed saving and the skills necessary to begin saving seeds on your own. The community seed library will be available at this workshop! You will have an opportunity to swap or donate seeds as well as pick up some free seeds for your home garden.

Tickets – cash at the door. Subsidies available – please inquire.

Please register by phone or email: 604 736 3588 ext. 133 or zoel@kitshouse.org

Interested in learning how to make those famous “Indian” tacos? While enjoying some traditional food, learn about medicine wheels and what it means to Indigenous cultures. Take home a medicine wheel magnet of your own and leave with a full belly and a recipe on how to make fry bread at home.

These Indigenous-led workshops are about learning and understanding our true community history. Today’s youth will share their ancestry cultural roots through traditional foods and crafts. These sessions are led by RISE (Responsible Indigenous Strategy for Empowerment) leaders Jessica Savoy from the Squamish Nation and Shaniece Angus from Nisga’a & Tsimshian Nations.

These workshops will take place in the lobby of the Mount Pleasant Community Centre.

The Mount Pleasant Community Centre is located on unceded Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaɬ(Tsleil- Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) territories.

Join us this Fall for Saturday afternoon Seniors’ Social – a brand new program! Registered Dietitian Joyce Chow will work with you to prepare four servings of a delicious and healthy 3-course meal. Three servings can be packed up and taken home, while one can be enjoyed together as a group at the end of our session. Please come prepared with take-home containers!

Register for Saturday sessions throughout the month of October:

• October 6: Mandarin Orange Salad with Almonds, Chili with Corn Bread, Coconut Tapioca Pudding
• October 13: Seaweed Salad, Pork and Vegetable Dumplings, Sweet Potato Dessert Soup
• October 20: Pumpkin Soup, Homemade Quiche, Cranberry Oatmeal Cookies
• October 27: Beef, Vegetable and Bean Soup, Curry Chicken with Rice, Winter Fruit Crisp

The breastfeeding paradox, politics of infant food charity, and second-hand baby food environments with Lesley Frank

Dr. Lesley Frank is an Associate Professor of Sociology from Acadia University and a Visiting Associate professor in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems.

In this talk, Dr. Frank will share insights from a number of her projects on Infant Food Insecurity in Canada. She will describe several key issues related to the topic, such as the relationship between household food insecurity and breastfeeding outcomes, the threats to breastfeeding as a sustainable food system, the challenges of finding formula when infant feeding politics trumps infants’ right to food, and the resulting quest for infant food in the second-hand goods economy on-line. Collectively these issues reveal serious problems of unequal food access, potential food risk, and food inequities that are unique to families and infants in food insecure households.

Dr. Frank researches primarily in the areas of child and family poverty, food insecurity, infant feeding, and social welfare policy. Dr. Frank is a leading emerging scholar in the area of infant food insecurity in Canada with research published in the Journal of Food, Culture and Society, Food and Foodways, Canadian Food Studies Journal, and Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Wednesday, October 10, 2018
12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.
Liu Institute for Global Issues – Multipurpose Room, 6476 NW Marine Drive

Join us for a Community Garden Harvest! Work as a team to harvest some of what’s in season, and then head into the kitchen to clean it up and prep it for home. At the end of the session you’ll have a delicious collection of fresh produce ready to be enjoyed.

All Community Harvests begin at 11am.

Please meet by the garden gate. Come dressed for the weather and bring reusable containers and bags to take your goodies home in.

A minimum donation of $2 (with all proceeds returning directly to garden maintenance and programming) is recommended & welcomed, but not required.

Join Still Moon Arts for local herbal teas and blackberry jam, served with sourdough bread. Enjoy tea while listening to Cease Wyss share Coast Salish stories of the land.

Join us this Fall for Saturday afternoon Seniors’ Social – a brand new program! Registered Dietitian Joyce Chow will work with you to prepare four servings of a delicious and healthy 3-course meal. Three servings can be packed up and taken home, while one can be enjoyed together as a group at the end of our session. Please come prepared with take-home containers!

Register for Saturday sessions throughout the month of October:

• October 6: Mandarin Orange Salad with Almonds, Chili with Corn Bread, Coconut Tapioca Pudding
• October 13: Seaweed Salad, Pork and Vegetable Dumplings, Sweet Potato Dessert Soup
• October 20: Pumpkin Soup, Homemade Quiche, Cranberry Oatmeal Cookies
• October 27: Beef, Vegetable and Bean Soup, Curry Chicken with Rice, Winter Fruit Crisp

In this workshop presented by the Tonari Gumi Garden Club, you’ll learn about Japanese vegetables and how to grow them.

It may seem a bit early to think about growing vegetables for this spring, but this past year many of the seed for Japanese vegetables were sold out really early in the season! Now is the time to explore and find out more about these wonderful, easy to grow and nutritious veggies.

Tonari Gumi Gardeners will be discussing the how and why of growing your own Japanese vegetables. Workshop participants will take home plant starts or seeds, and enjoy sampling some of these vegetables in simple Japanese recipes.

Village Vancouver will have a community seed library present – pick up additional free seeds for your garden, swap or donate seeds. Advance registration required.

Join us at the Kits House Monthly Community Potluck for the launch of the new community seed library!

Ross Moster from Village Vancouver will explain how the library works, how you can help, and how you can go home with free seeds for your garden.

The community potluck is a great place to meet your neighbours and connect, collaborate, build community, and have fun while enjoying good food. Bring your friends and family! All ages welcome.

Please bring a dish to share if you can (vegetarian preferred but not obligated). There will be a kitchen to heat up your dish. Plates and cutlery will be provided.

Join us for a Community Garden Harvest! Work as a team to harvest some of what’s in season, and then head into the kitchen to clean it up and prep it for home. At the end of the session you’ll have a delicious collection of fresh produce ready to be enjoyed.

All Community Harvests begin at 11am.

Please meet by the garden gate. Come dressed for the weather and bring reusable containers and bags to take your goodies home in.

A minimum donation of $2 (with all proceeds returning directly to garden maintenance and programming) is recommended & welcomed, but not required.

We have a huge challenge ahead of us. In a world where the climate is rapidly changing, water is depleting, and governments are disagreeing on immediate actions to take, many people around the world are doing positive change for the planet. Come and watch the documentary film Tomorrow. Find inspiration from a growing movement of people who start small to grow big in their own communities all around the world.

TODAY, we sometimes feel powerless in front of the various crises of our times.
TODAY, we know that answers lie in a wide mobilization of the human race. Over the course of a century, our dream of progress commonly called “the American Dream”, fundamentally changed the way we live and continues to inspire many developing countries. We are now aware of the setbacks and limits of such development policies. We urgently need to focus our efforts on changing our dreams before something irreversible happens to our planet.
TODAY, we need a new direction, objective… A new dream! The documentary Tomorrow sets out to showcase alternative and creative ways of viewing agriculture, economics, energy and education. It offers constructive solutions to act on a local level to make a difference on a global level. So far, no other documentary has gone down such an optimistic road…
TOMORROW is not just a film, it is the beginning of a movement seeking to encourage local communities around the world to change the way they live for the sake of our planet.

Join hua foundation for a night of noodles and musings as we convene an inspiring and necessary public conversation about race and food.

We’ll explore how our experiences of race, identity, appropriation, racism, and more intersect with what fuels our days and lies at the heart of our homes: food.

The night opens with a presentation by food designer, design educator, and hua foundation board member Amanda Huynh, followed by a guided discussion among attendees. Your $25 ticket includes appetizers and a meal courtesy of our friends at Rhinofish Noodle Bar, who will be running a cash bar. Attendees for whom cost is a barrier can purchase a limited number of tickets at a pay-what-you-can rate. Click on “Tickets” for payment options.

Come for the noodles and sour plum cocktails. Stay for the conversation that needs to be had, and is seldom heard.

Date: Thursday, October 18
Doors open: 6:30pm
Event runs: 7:10-8:30pm
Doors close: 9pm

The leaves are red and so are the apples (well, some of them)! Join us on October 20 for Riley Park Community Garden’s annual Apple Festival. The garden will be home to an apple potluck (bring a dish!) cider pressing and a “Show and Tell Tasting”! Bring the kids and take a big bite out of autumn.

This event will also welcome our new neighbours at Little Mountain’s temporary modular housing development to the neighbourhood. We encourage everyone to pop by the garden and give them a warm Little Mountain Riley Park hello!

Celebrate the launch of brand new book Our Edible Roots: The Japanese Canadian Kitchen Garden. This book is part gardening, part recipes, and full of cultural history. Featuring research, interviews, and gardening tips from members of Tonari Gumi, the Japanese Community Volunteers Association.

This book showcases growing and foraging tips and stories from seasoned gardeners. 40 delicious recipes (with vegan options) highlight these wonderful vegetables. Guides to using Japanese ingredients and methods for traditional culinary techniques are also included. Perhaps most important highlight is the telling of the Japanese Canadian experience through stories and interviews with community elders.

Celebrate the stories, taste a sampling of the recipes in this book, and pick up a copy for yourself! All proceeds of book sales will support seniors services at Tonari Gumi Japanese Community Volunteers Association.

Limited space and RSVP is required. Please email tg.gardeners@gmail.com to reserve a spot.

Join us this Fall for Saturday afternoon Seniors’ Social – a brand new program! Registered Dietitian Joyce Chow will work with you to prepare four servings of a delicious and healthy 3-course meal. Three servings can be packed up and taken home, while one can be enjoyed together as a group at the end of our session. Please come prepared with take-home containers!

Register for Saturday sessions throughout the month of October:

• October 6: Mandarin Orange Salad with Almonds, Chili with Corn Bread, Coconut Tapioca Pudding
• October 13: Seaweed Salad, Pork and Vegetable Dumplings, Sweet Potato Dessert Soup
• October 20: Pumpkin Soup, Homemade Quiche, Cranberry Oatmeal Cookies
• October 27: Beef, Vegetable and Bean Soup, Curry Chicken with Rice, Winter Fruit Crisp