To the editor,
My husband Stephen and I have been stalking the Vancouver Island Diet (VID) for the last 15 years.
We did our wedding with Vancouver Island food and wine. It was superb. The variety, quality and expertise are phenomenal, in many cases prize-winning, in some world class, but as with all farming and food production seasonal variance occurs, not to mention our rapidly changing climate. This should provide even more motivation to get it right.
This is why we have to make the Vancouver Island Diet an Island-wide community adaptation and mitigation project we can all, literally, buy into.
Though doing well bringing in organic produce people want to eat, the Islands’ established grocers live in the past, tripping on transition, dependent on contract-driven systems, unsustainable in every way.
We won’t get rid of contract but we can create sustainable agreements.
Implementing the Vancouver Island Diet, a non-copyrighted, public domain, community marketing initiative we can revitalize the uptown core. We can create a sustainable economy that supports everyone to become food producers, if they so desire, producing food with highest nutrition and healthy outcomes in mind.
It will require a close relationship with VIHA to address all the legislated health concerns and to create an ongoing forum where these issues can be discussed openly and sensibly by all Vancouver Islanders.
And for the gods’ and goddesses’ sake let’s get the industrial traffic off the uptown roads in Port Alberni.
We are trying to diversify our economy, give us a break. To forestry, hands off our watershed, we’re going to need that water to realize our diversified economy.
Jen Fisher-Bradley,
Port Alberni