Before we jump into the ocean, I wanted to share some resources for parents who might be struggling with how to talk about racism and the anti-racism protest movement with their kids. The first link is a written guide that provides a framework for having these conversations. And the second is a link to the Sesame Street/CNN Town Hall aimed at kids and parents.

How to Talk to Kids about Race and Racism
Coming Together: Standing Up to Racism

Last weekend, I took a beach vacation to the other end of town. It was a perfect chance to see some of the many ways people connect to the ocean. There were kids playing in the sand, kayakers, people in sailboats, and even some brave swimmers using the ocean for recreation and exercise. There were also container ships and what looked like a gravel barge being pulled by a tug boat, sowing the commercial importance of waterways in our global society. And on the beach were many small clam and mussel shells and seaweed, hinting at the food the ocean provides. And, of course, many gulls, geese, and herons connecting land and water ecosystems.

This interactive story from Ocean Wise, part of the elementary Ocean Literacy course, is a great place to dive into how oceans and people are connected. Ocean Wise has lots of other fantastic resources to learn more about our oceans, too!

Ocean Literacy: Oceans and People

Fresh Roots was fortunate to be part of something very exciting last week. Our LunchLAB: Chefs for Families program in partnership with Growing Chefs! was gifted 100lbs of the first catch of BC spot prawns from Organic Ocean. BC spot prawns are a delicacy and only available for a few weeks a year. Why the short time frame? It’s because BC spot prawns are an example of a sustainable fishery. That means the seafood is caught in a way that doesn’t harm the ecosystem and leaves enough of the seafood in the ocean for future years.

Sustainable fishing is important for people because somewhere between 1 and 3 billion people around the world rely on seafood for their primary source of protein. Seafood is also a traditional and culturally important food for many Indigenous peoples around the world, including in BC. Indigenous people eat 15 times more seafood than non-Indigenous people globally, according to a 2016 study from UBC. That means that preserving and protecting seafood stocks for future generations is not just an environmental issue, it’s a justice issue, too.

This classic sustainable fishing simulation from the California Academy of Sciences is easily modified for a family game night – just use fewer food items or have a longer “fishing season”. Feel free to substitute any small food item for the crackers and popcorn. I’ve always played it with M&Ms!

Sustainable Fishing Game

While today our oceans are faced with over fishing, that hasn’t always been the case. For thousands of years, Hul’q’umi’num and WSÁNEĆ peoples of the Gulf Islands tended clam gardens as a form of sustainable aquaculture. Clams and their bivalve cousins mussels and oysters are some of the hardest working creatures in the sea. As filter feeders, they absorb toxins as they gather plankton, cleaning the water around them! Traditional clam gardens may be up to four times as productive as untended clam beds, which allow them to provide a continuous source of food for people while actively improving water quality. This is just one example of Indigenous knowledge of how to live in mutually beneficial relationship with the ocean and its inhabitants.  Listening to and learning from Indigenous and other marginalized communities is needed to care for our oceans. We need everyone’s knowledge and ideas to solve the problems we face today.

Check out this web page from Parks Canada to learn more about clam gardens and their project to connect ecological and cultural knowledge. Be sure to watch the video!

Clam Gardens – Learning Together

For our recipe this week, I brought in one of our new Experiential Learning team members, Marije! She’ll be working with me this summer to run Camp Fresh Roots, and you’ll be seeing more of her on the blog over the next few weeks as well.  Here’s what she had to say about seaweed!

“Maybe it’s because I didn’t grow up next to the ocean, but I used to imagine seaweed as one thing: long, green and wavy. But there are so many different kinds; seaweeds of all shapes, sizes and colours! British Columbia has an incredible amount of seaweed biodiversity; there are over 530 varieties right here on the shores of Vancouver! (Bates 2004). A member of the algae family, seaweed is classified into three groups: green, red, or brown.

“Seaweeds of the Pacific Northwest is a guide to identifying 25 common seaweeds that we can find right where we live. Some are edible, some are beautiful, all play important roles in Pacific Ocean ecosystems. Next time you’re at the beach, try finding as many different seaweeds as you can. See if you can classify it by looking at its colour: is it a Chlorophyta (green), Rhodophyta (red), or Phaeophyta (brown)?

“Seaweed isn’t really a “weed”, a better word might be sea-vegetable. Seaweed (or sea-vegetable; start the movement!) is super nutritious, full of vitamins, minerals and iron. Nori is an edible seaweed that is part of the Rhodophyta (red) family. After it is harvested, it is shredded, pressed and dried into thin sheets, similar to how paper is made. Here is a recipe using nori sheets as the base ingredient; you can use any combo of your favourite veggies and/or protein for the filling for these rolls!”

Nori Rolls Recipe Card

Wondering why you have to let regular bread dough rise, but you can whip up banana bread and pop it in the over right away? Curious where the holes in your bread come from? What’s the difference between baking powder and baking soda anyway? Looking for an alternate way to blow up balloons for your next party? Check out this activity and learn the secrets of leavening! This one is great for kids as young as kindergarten, and there’s an extension for older kids who really want to get scientific.

Uplifting Leavening Activity Guide

June 1 is World Milk Day! To celebrate both milk and microbes, there’s nothing better than yogurt! Yogurt is cultured, which in this case doesn’t mean it’s read all the books sitting on it’s “should read” pile. It means it’s a happy home to a number of strains of beneficial bacteria, which gives it it’s thickness and that tangy flavour. And best of all, it’s super easy to make at home! All you need is a pot, some jars, a food thermometer, milk, a little yogurt from the store, and a warm place. This recipe for the BC Dairy Association will get you started.  It’s really great with the rhubarb compote from our Stems week!)

Make Your Own Yogurt

Sourdough is having a moment right now. But what is it? While most breads are leavened with baker’s yeast, which can be purchased in packets or jars in the grocery store, sourdough is leavened using a starter culture of wild yeasts and helpful bacteria. Those yeasts and bacteria live all around us, and will find a happy home in some flour and water in your kitchen. The fun thing about sourdough is that the exact strains of yeasts and bacteria are different in different places. You may even have different microbes in different parts of your house! These helpful yeasts and bacteria out compete and harmful ones.

Even if you don’t want to get into sourdough baking, you can still make a starter for science. Sourdough for Science is a citizen science project collecting information about sourdough starters around the world. You follow their instructions to make a starter and collect data for 10 days, then submit you data online!

Sourdough for Science!

So many every day foods rely on fermentation, even ones you’d never think of. Hot sauce? Fermented. Chocolate? Fermented. Tea? Fermented. Soy sauce? Cultured with mold and then fermented. Here are some fun videos showing how a few common foods are made. How many fermented foods do you eat?

How Soy Sauce is Made
How Tabasco Sauce is Made
Cocoa Fermentation

One of our most exciting community workshops is You Can Kimchi! where we talk about fermentation and it’s importance to food, and make a simple kimchi recipe. It’s messy, spicy, and a lot of fun!

I always start by admitting that I didn’t learn how to make kimchi from a Korean mom, grandma, aunt, or other cultural knowledge keepers. I learned from the internet, from someone who did learn from a Korean mom. And if you have a kimchi maker in your family, you should definitely reach out to them for teaching! Traditionally, kimchi was made collectively by groups of women in an extended family, as it’s had to make just a small batch. Traditional kimchi also includes seafood in the form of fish sauce or shrimp paste, but I’ve left it out of this version to make it more allergy-friendly.

The recipe may look like a lot of ingredients and a lot of steps, but none of them are difficult. Try your local Asian grocery store for the gochugaru (ground red pepper) if you can’t find it where you regularly shop. You could use a different kind of ground chiles, but it won’t quite be kimchi.

The Lactobacillus bacteria that give kimchi it’s crunch, fizz and tang come from the different ingredients in the mix, including the cabbage and gochgaru.  Lactobacilli are anaerobic bacteria. That means they live and multiply where there’s no air. So for your kimchi to be kimchi, you need to use a mix of ingredients, and keep the air out by making sure your veggies are under the brine and there are no big air pockets in your jar.

Food Safety Note: While the lactobacilli are generally great at out competing for harmful fungi and bacteria, if your kimchi grows mold or smells bad, throw it out and don’t eat it!

Simple Kimchi Recipe Card

Fresh Roots grown (mainly) vegetables on our schoolyard farms. Our farmers plant rows of peas, squash, chard, lettuce, parsley, and more. We can grow nearly 100 different varieties of plants in a single season! That might sounds like a lot of biodiversity, but plants and farmers are just a small part of the whole biological picture. Discover how everything from crows to fungus to the air around us contributes to the biodiversity of our farm. We do versions of this activity with kids as young as 8 all the way through adults. (Hint – making the web is only the start of the discussion!)

Farm Ecosystem Web Activity Guide

Biodiversity isn’t just on the farm, though – it’s all around us! This activity from VanDusen Botanical Garden will help you seek out the biodiversity in you yard, neighborhood, or local park. You might use it on a casual stroll, or make it a game and see how many different living things your can find in 10 minutes. And if you find something you don’t recognize, this could be great time to pull out the Seek app from our Earth Day Fresh Five.

Biodiversity Detectives Teacher Guide
Biodiversity Detectives Student Worksheet

Working primarily from home for the last couple of months has given me more insight on my neighborhood birds. There is a family of European starlings who nest in my neighbor’s rafters every spring (and wake me up at sunrise every day). The black-capped chickadees love to hang out on the apple tree in the backyard. The house finches and sparrows mostly stay across the alley in the blackberries, but will sometimes come over if there’s any weeds that have gone to seed. Crows come by occasionally, and on special days the neighborhood ravens will fly over. Gulls like to sit on the roof of the church behind my house, and every once in a while, a bald eagle can be spotted soaring overhead. And that’s just in my urban backyard without any sort of bird feeder!

Do you like watching your backyard birds? Scientists want to know what you’re seeing! The Schoolyard Bird Blitz is an annual bird survey organized by Birds Canada to get students looking for birds, and contributing to scientific knowledge about the prevalence of bird species across Canada. This year, they’ve switch gears from a Schoolyard Bird Blitz to a Backyard Bird Blitz so everyone can participate!

Bird Blitz at Home!

Crows can be trouble on the farm. They love yanking out newly planted started to get at the insects and worms in the freshly turned soil, and they’ve even been know to pull the protective covers off our plant babies. They dig trash out of the trash cans and throw it everywhere. And if you’ve ever walked under a crow’s nest during baby season, you’ve likely been dive bombed by the protective parents. But crows are also extremely intelligent tool-users, and will build relationships with humans who treat them kindly. (They are still wild animals, so please don’t try to make your neighborhood crow into a pet!) And, just like humans and other animals, they have complex relationships with the biodiversity of their ecosystems.

This activity from Science World will get you thinking like a crow! As you build you nest, think about what other types of life are necessary for crows to build their nests.

Crows Nest Activity

I’m so glad that my local farmer’s market is open again! It was worth waiting in the long, physical-distanced line to get my local eggs, veggies, and a pastry treat. It will be even more exciting when Fresh Roots’ produce is available but that’s still a few weeks away. One of the things I got recently was some of the first local kale. I eat a lot of kale, in smoothies, sauteed with eggs, in pasta or soup, or in salads. Raw kale can be… a lot. Massaging your kale with a little salt, fat, and/or acid for a few minutes starts the mechanical process of breaking down those tough cell walls, making it easier for your body to digest, and makes it less bitter.

And there are so many ways you can top your massaged kale! I like a little red onion, feta, dried cranberries, grated carrots, and candied pecans in the fall, and snap peas, crumbled goat cheese, fresh strawberries, and toasted sliced almonds in the spring. Just like biodiversity is good for ecosystems, biodiversity of foods is good for our bodies! Different foods have different balances of of the energy and nutrients our bodies need to thrive, so mix up your salads, and have fun!

Massaged Kale Salad Recipe Card