Bring Food Home Reflections
Posted: November 28, 2017
Categories: GoodFoodBites
Wow! Can you believe BFH 2017 Conference is already over?! Now a couple weeks into November, we are all reflecting on our experiences, conversations, brainstorming sessions, and speaker sessions. To everyone who came out, thank you so much once again for joining us in Ottawa for Bring Food Home!
The conference was attended by individuals including farmers, municipal staff, organization members, academics, and activists to work on collaborating, innovating, and building an action plan for the near future going forward to the BFH 2019 conference. And the streams this year were of: sustainable food enterprise; farming and farmland; food waste; municipal food policy; community growing; food justice; edible education; and Eastern Ontario local food conference.
There were inspiring speakers, tours, panels, and collaboration sessions. The tour downtown allowed us all to learn about agri-tourism and hot topics like farmer branding, or policies for urban agriculture, especially in the popular Byward market. The feedback from the value chain tour was all positive; everyone enjoyed the tours through the eastern edge towns in Ontario, as well as the visits to St. Albert Cheese co-op, Sand Road Maple Farm, and Beau’s All Natural Brewing Company and Pickle Patch Farms! This tour got us all discussing conservation projects, agriculture tourism, craft production, and organic value chain development.
Friday hosted a frenzy of activity, and excitement for everyone to get started. After breakfast and a beautiful opening ceremony in Marion Hall, we all broke off into the first speaking sessions around campus. In the sessions on Friday, we discussed topics of decolonizing land and food systems, engaging communities, working with legislation, food justice, advocating for youth, governance structures, farmland, regulations, protecting farmland, removing barriers, sustainability, case studies, and new farmers. There was also a really incredible pemmican demonstration by Aurora Felix, showcasing and demonstrating pemmican, a first-nations tradition of preserving and canning.
Friday night offered a thrilling Halloween Spooktacular at the Allsaints even space, filled with fantastic local foods, drinks, music, art, and of course, Halloween costumes. Thank you to our great social committee and the many volunteers who helped to put this together – we couldn’t have done it without you! Special kudos to Kat from All Things Food, Brenda from Kozroots Community Empowerment Projects, and Bruce and David from Two Rivers Food Hub who worked behind the scenes for months to source the food organize the décor, and bring the entire event to life. You all did a great job!
As the main highlights of the event, Chef Bruce Wood and Chef Wapokunie Riel-Lachapelle from Nikosi created a stunning and flavourful spread of regional delights. Chef Bruce wowed us with a charcuterie featuring over 20 items from Eastern Ontario, including products from Seed to Sausage, Lower Town Canning Company, Glengarry Cheesemaking, St. Albert’s Cheese Co-op, Zengerry Cheese Co., Bread By Us, Bea’s Bread, Marlin’s Orchards, Sonrisa Farms, and many more. Chef Wapokunie prepared two delectable wild or seasonally harvested samples featuring wild duck and smoked sturgeon from La Petite Brulée. The flavours from both were unreal and we couldn’t stay away!
For those of us who found the dessert table at the last minute, hats off to The Quirky Carrot, Simply Baked, Upper Canada Creamery, Simply Jennifer, Fairy Sweet Chocolates, and the many of other jam makers, coffee roasters, and dessert contributors who helped to satisfy our Halloween sweet tooth.
The live music put on by Jamming Around Man got everyone moving, and the local Beau’s beer and alcohol spirits from King’s Lock Craft Distillery helped to cap-off the entire event.
A final congratulation must be extended to our party costume winners, who dressed up with the theme of bee-keeping and pollination. You charmed us all!
Saturday was once again a host of activity and excitement with the series of speakers, presentations, and collaboration sessions. The topics of discussion were diverse: the integration of anti-oppression frameworks, working with school boards, community gardens as the source of capacity building, supporting new farmers, reducing food waste, food procurements, food policy, culinary tourism as food development, interacting issues, involving youth, leveraging community resources, food policy to create change, barriers to farming, measuring success, planning seed production, tech solutions, understanding systemic inequities, engaging communities, and soil!
The planning sessions ran long, but it’s because so many great ideas and conversations were being held, and the notes being brought to us showed the dedication, passion and commitment everyone was making to go forward with action plans for their stream of work.
By the end of the day, and by the end of the conference, we had multiple additions to the canvass tapestry, tweets and shares on social media, students on campus coming up to ask about BFH, and about local food systems!
After closing ceremonies on Sunday, we were all on our way, looking ahead to the next steps. Which for one, will be planning the BFH 2019 conference, and for that we will be taking a look at all of the evaluation and suggestions you have/ had! And it also means that we all want to stay in touch, and keep anyone connected who wants to follow up on points or ideas! Let us know! Cheers!