Brendan

It has been some time since I have reported on the status of buying local.

I have managed to find a source just about all my fruits and vegetables.

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After being in Japan for over 4 years, I have still yet to climb Mt. Fuji. That is all about to change come this weekend.

The plan is to climb from the Fujinomiya entrance on the south side (rather thank the Lake Kawaguchi on the North) in the morning and come down in the afternoon. This means that on the plus side it won’t get that cold but on the minus side, I won’t get to see a sun rise or a sun set from the peak. As a result, I can pack pretty light and all I really need to bring is a shell and food and water.

Really looking forward to it.

I was saddened to learn yesterday that Bill C-517, An Act to amend the Food and Drugs Act (mandatory labelling for genetically modified foods) was not passed in Canadian government.

This is especially saddening because 88% of the Canadian population (Reference Here) want to have generic modification labelling on their food yet the bill was defeated 156-101. With a government that is supposed to represent the people and 88% of the people agreeing (and rarely does the population of a country so unanimously agree on something), one would think that that such a bill would be passed.

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Over the Golden Week holiday here in Japan, I took 2 weeks off and did another cycling trip in Japan. This time I took the train to the southern portion of the Kii Peninsula to a city called Shingu, Wakayama Prefecture. Its a good place to start bacause its only one change of trains away from Tokyo. From there I went North through the mountains of Nara, Wakayama and Mie Prefectures though Osaka (by train Osaka to Tsurga, about 100km) and then along the sea of Japan coast as far as I could which wound up being Akita City in Akita Prefecture. The total was 1400km in 16 days which is not too bad.

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At the outset of this local diet I thought that one of the harder staple food items to find might be flour. Some of the people who tried to do the 100 mile diet in Vancouver, Canada, found that one of the hardest things to find was wheat (flour) and they missed it a lot. I also assumed that a lot of the wheat in Japan would be imported from aboard (from places such as Canada).

While searching the web a couple of days ago I found the website for a company called Maeda Foods (link (Japanese), but only to a small website that sells the flour through Rakuten, a website that hosts poeople’s shops), that sells flour from Kanto (the area of Japan in which I live). Kanto entirely fits within the 200km radius that I set up so this was a good first sign.
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