Gillian Flies of The New Farm. Photo courtesy The New Farm.

The first time I visited The New Farm, Brent Preston and Gillian Flies’ bucolic 100-acre spread near Creemore, Ontario, the barn was kitted up with twinkle lights. Bundles of hay provided seating for a play and, later, for listening to the foot-stomping tunes of the Sunparlour Players. Professional chefs cooked up a delicious dinner with veggies fresh from the fields, and we hung around a campfire as the stars popped out of the big sky. It was every urbanite’s fantasy of rural life.

Of course, after five years working the land, former city dwellers Preston, Flies, and their two young children don’t have many illusions left about the tough daily reality of organic farming.

“It’s gotten easier as we’ve gotten smarter, but it’s taken longer, been harder work, and cost a lot more than we ever expected,” says Preston with a laugh.

Still, the couple, who met in Malawi and spent nearly a decade working to strengthen democracy movements in Africa, South America, and Indonesia, aren’t going anywhere. In fact, despite the challenges, The New Farm has become a leader in Ontario’s food movement. The family sells over 75 varieties of its heirloom organic veggies at farmers’ markets and to top restaurants—all while advocating for small producers, their rural community (where Preston was recently elected councillor), and engaging young people through farmer training internships.

But the most innovative partnership they’ve forged is with the least likely place: a Toronto food bank and community food centre called The Stop. Still, the fit seemed natural. “We love our customers, but we didn’t get into this to only offer our food to the wealthy,” explains Preston. “And The Stop does more than just hand out food. Like us, they look at the whole food system.”

In fact, The Stop has become The New Farm’s single biggest customer. Farm fundraisers like the one I attended (proceeds go to The Stop, which buys New Farm produce for its many food programs) are the biggest money generator for the partnership. But an entrepreneurial venture called Grow for The Stop—New Farm veggies are sold at independent grocers with 10 percent of proceeds going back to The Stop, which spends the money on more fresh produce—is gaining ground.

It’s a win-win situation. The Stop gets healthy organic veggies for its low-income neighbourhood—where diet-related health problems are rampant—and the New Farm has a ready market for its produce, and its values.

“The potential for collaborations like this is huge,” says Preston. “In fact, we think this holistic approach is the only way to change the food system.”

It may be anticlimactic for those who picture transgenic animals as products of zany laboratory cut ’n pastes, but Canada’s first genetically engineered animal to be raised for food looks just like the ordinary farm pig that shares its DNA.

Dubbed “Enviropig,” its creators at the University of Guelph say it’s a boon to the environment because it excretes 30–70 percent less phosphorous than a regular pig.

But critics are skeptical of its practicality and concerned about its potential place on your dinner plate. The pig is currently undergoing reviews by Health Canada and the FDA for approval to be commercially bred and marketed in Canada and the U.S.

We spoke with Steven Liss, University of Guelph professor and Enviropig spokesperson, and Lucy Sharratt of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network about a few of the issues raised by this complicated animal.

Regulatory/Access to information

U of Guelph says: The world of transgenic animals and their approval for human consumption is relatively new. Enviropig puts Canada at the forefront of this technology.

Flipside: How Health Canada determines if a GM animal is safe is not yet public knowledge. And so far, Guelph has not publicly released its Enviropig application to Health Canada.

Biosafety

U of Guelph says: Enviropig is a genetically enhanced Yorkshire pig. Liss says that scientific testing supports that both types of pigs are equally safe to breed, raise, and eat.

Flipside: As previous food safety scandals have shown us, when it comes to what we eat there’s no room for error. Genetically modified pigs have not yet been approved for human consumption and there has been no independent testing of Enviropig or the impact it could have on both food safety and the environment. Sharratt notes that genetically engineered foods don’t have labels, and there’s been little public oversight and little public debate over such items in our food supply. “The advent of Enviropig raises all of this at once.”

Livestock management and the environment

U of Guelph says: “The primary benefit is to the environment,” says Liss. Enviropig’s special digestive system allows it to better digest the phosphorous in its plant-based diet. This results in less phosphorus in the pig’s manure—and that means less phosphorus leaching into nearby waterways. Result: less algae growth and fewer poisoned fish.

Flipside: By reducing phosphorous output, farmers could theoretically raise more hogs while still meeting environmental regulations, so Enviropig may not actually lessen the stress on the environment. Enviropig also does nothing to address other issues associated with large-scale meat production like air quality problems or the spread of disease. And the phosphorus in a pig’s manure can already be reduced by up to 50 percent by simply adding common supplements to its diet.

Economics

U of Guelph says: Enviropig could save hog farmers money by reducing the costs associated with the phosphorousreducing supplements they already feed their animals and by cutting back land costs for spreading hog manure. Commercializing and licensing the pig could also mean big money for the groups—including the University of Guelph, Ontario Pork, and the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs—that have invested at least $1.4 million in its creation.

Flipside: As a trademarked technology, the cost of Enviropig is likely to outweigh the cost of buying competitively priced, phosphorous-reducing supplements for regular pigs, argues Sharratt. She also believes the Enviropig could shatter consumer confidence in pork, an industry already in financial crisis. Meanwhile, taxpayers have shouldered the cost of developing the Enviropig through the use of public funds.

Most Canadians live in cities. Why is our literature so relentlessly rural? Illustration by Graham Roumieu.

When he delivers public lectures, editor and writer John Metcalf is fond of illustrating CanLit’s paradoxical obsession with tales of the rural past by describing the query letter he once received from a then-unheard-of Russell Smith. Metcalf claims that Smith introduced the manuscript for his debut novel, How Insensitive, by asserting something along the lines of, “You probably won’t like this because it’s a Canadian novel but it isn’t about angst on the farm. CanLit always seems to be about angst on the farm.”

Thing is, most Canadians don’t live on, or even near, farms anymore. More than 80 percent of Canadians live in cities, yet the CanLit spotlights continue to shine on rural literature, usually of yesteryear. Why?

I’m entirely confident that this fall’s big fiction awards—that rise and fall of media attention as brief and predictable as a stadium wave—will once again prefer a rural yesterday to an urban today. In his new novel, Galore, Michael Crummey is clearly showing some CanLit thigh with not just rural Newfoundland history, but multiple centuries of rural Newfoundland history. Before lamenting the prevalence of these propagandistic tales from ye olde fishing village or down in them pit mines, let me clarify that this is not another urbanite’s call for more stories of hedge funds and wine tastings. All four of my grandparents were born on Canadian family farms, and I’ve spent half of the last decade in a fishing village of 200 souls. But with publishers, big media and universities giving us one rural yarn after another, someone has to put a stopper in the maple-syrup jug.

Ex-Saskatchewan novelist Michael Helm has been quoted as saying, “There’s a sense that the ancient agrarian rhythms [of Saskatchewan] still are there, and the question for a writer is how this rhythm works its way into your writing.” Oh, please. Helm is a professor. at York, one of our biggest universities in our biggest city. Gastropubs, bureaucratese, and tenure are more likely to influence his writing than are “ancient agrarian rhythms” (whatever they are).

I wonder why book clubs of contemporary urban women who live stories of career-and-home conflict, medically enhanced (or hindered) pregnancies, and life in the post-nuclear family choose to read Ami McKay’s The Birth House, a novel about a bygone, semi-literate midwife prying rural babies out with a washboard. Previously, I’ve commented on how unpredictable book reviewing is in Canada, and our lack of reliably critical voices is one reason no one cries foul on these tales of rural fowl suppers. More indicting is the fact that setting stories for urban audiences in (a) rural areas and/or (b) the past is another Canadian example of admiring something from away. Like an offshore queen or a neighbouring superpower, the rural past is elsewhere and well known, which is all that seems required by the CanCulture establishment.

We’ve become content to tell ourselves fictions about our fiction. The Nova Scotia of contemporary fact finds 40 percent of its population living in Halifax, a city with four universities (one of them devoted to the fine arts), over half a dozen yoga studios, not one but three artist-run centres (those hotbeds of poverty, creativity and incest), and higher per capita spending on reading, the performing arts and museums than Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver. Yet the Nova Scotia stories that get publishing and media support are almost all the same: an octogenarian remembers the rural past, usually by returning to an old house. That’s exactly the plot of Don Hannah’s recent novel, Ragged Islands.

David Adams Richards moved from New Brunswick—where he still sets all his fiction—to Toronto over a decade ago, yet each new Richards novel finds another year from the past to inhabit. His fiction has the Y2K bug and can’t spin on over into this century. One-quarter the population of Newfoundland and half the population of Manitoba live in their capital cities, yet we still get one outport and farm story after another.

Sadly, the (mostly urban) study of CanLit worsens rather than corrects this preference for a literature of rural clichés over relevant ideas and lasting honesty. Far too many CanLit courses still contain Sinclair Ross’s prairie novel As for Me and My House (a lobotomy between two covers). Metcalf’s memoir Shut Up He Explained and CanLit scholar Robert Lecker’s Making It Real expose the marketing spin that sees Ross’s soporific novel perpetually described as “a Canadian classic.” If this book of dour prairie lit (excuse the redundancy) had truly sounded such a Canadian chord, why was it published in the United States and the U.K. a full 16 years before it found a Canadian publisher? Why, as Metcalf meticulously points out, were its Canadian sales so weak? Only conscription, in the form of university courses, keeps this moribund farm novel alive.

Literature’s job is to be incisive, not to be blindly contemporary, and the right voice can make any story gripping. A novel about sexting and YouTube isn’t inherently more interesting than one about muskeg and bison drives. But I for one am tired of counterfeit stories with no more heart than a provincial tourism poster.