Thanks to these events, one group of seniors knows where to get a variety of fresh local foods, from fish, berries, and produce, to quail and quail eggs, and breads made using locally milled, organic flour, and another group has the fermenting skills they need to get more out of their home gardening efforts.

In the Coast of Bays, community conversation around food security continues to yield immediate positive change and collaboration, including the new gardening initiatives outlined in this blog post.

You know you’re off to a good start with a new project when things start changing for the better before the project has truly begun! Our latest Our Food NL project will assess and address issues of food security in the Coast of Bays region of our province. By simply talking about the project among each other, one community is already seeing positive changes. 

Leo’s family has been fishing for a living for 200 years. His video focuses on preparing fish.  He goes beyond removing the fillets, to showing us all the other goods available from fresh cod that, for too long, were being discarded as waste, including one of Leo’s favourites – the nape – which is a thin slice of belly meat. 

Donna and Garth were married before their town had electricity, and therefore refrigeration, so bottling was a common practice to preserve foods. The video shows us how easy bottling is, by walking us through Donna’s recipe for bottled beets. She even reveals her own prized recipe

Warren jokes that upon retiring as a fisherman at 60, he installed a root cellar to make work for himself. As his video demonstrates, you don’t need a traditional root cellar to keep your veggies over the winter. Warren’s father built one under their house, because he never had a basement, whereas Warren built one below his shed.

When Garfield’s father-in-law asked him to promise he’d keep the community garden green in Port Blandford, he picked the right man for the job. This video is full of very simple, but very effective tips for home gardening

Marg taught grade 6 before retiring. In this video she teaches us how easy it is to grow your own potato patch year to year without having to buy your own seed. She's kept her own garden patch since she moved to Gander in 1964

Unlike most of us, Hope & Lewis never have to run to the store for a bottle of jam, because they grow a bounty of berries in their backyard. In this video, Hope walks us through her technique for making freezer jam; an alternative to cooked jam.

Penashue is a grandmother to 53 grandchildren: that’s a lot of people to pass her wisdom along to, and she has plenty of food skills to share. 

“We were taught to cook fairly young,” Marina reminisces, “everybody in the house could cook fairly good. We had to take turns making special cakes for the weekend. [Our] vegetables came from the garden; fish would have come from Port-Aux-Choix, from the local fisherman.”

In Late March, Food First's Executive Director Kristie Jameson spoke at the Maple Leaf Centre for Action on Food Security's inaugural Food Security Symposium. It was a national  forum that convened over 160 participants from national and international organizations focused on food security.