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The Current Transcript for November 29, 2016

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

If we're going to be serious about reconciliation, we’ve got to allow the re-emergence of local economies on First Nations and also in low-income communities.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: He has gone from the bureaucracy to a new ideology, disrupting his own work and life to pursue the idea that to pull people out of poverty, one must create new opportunities out of the very things that stand in the way. He says it is working in projects in his home province of Manitoba and we are here to hear him out. Shaun Loney and his army of problem solvers in just a moment. Also today, the most visible gay rights activist in Cuba is straight. Mariela Castro—niece of Fidel, daughter of Raul.

SOUNDCLIP

My father, we always discussed it. He supported me and he would even tell me, “Fight for it. Fight for it and win it.” But as your father, I cannot help you.

AMT: All of which has some asking how much of her activism is for government show. As Cuba marks the death of Fidel Castro, we look at his record on gay rights from the roundups of the sixties to the laws that still have not changed. That's in half an hour. And you can make it with a cow, a yak, an ox, a sheep or a goat. It is industrial. It is artisanal. And it's probably in your fridge.

SOUNDCLIP

Butter is essentially one ingredient and yet it can result in many different variations. You know ones that are more fudgy, ones are a little greasy, ones that are super fatty and others that are lighter.

AMT: All things butter in an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti coming to you from Winnipeg today. This is The Current.

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Problems can only be solved if we support problem solvers, says entrepreneur Shaun Loney

Guests: Shaun Loney

SOUNDCLIP

I was in jail for double armed robbery and escaping lawful custody. At the age of 11 years old, I already had my first handgun. From going to selling drugs to robbing stores, robbing drug dealers, I was all accustomed to that.

AMT: Well, Chris Courchene's life has taken quite a turn. That was then. This is now.

SOUNDCLIP

To have to show up at work every morning, make sure the jobs that are put in front of me get done—it’s something else. Like, the normal life, you’ve got to wake up, you’ve got to make sure you're there and you’ve got to make sure you work hard every day regardless of your situation. You know there’s a lot of people out there right now that they have to hear what I say so they can get out of it too. You know it's not only about me. There's a thousand Chris Courchenes out there just waiting for a chance to get on this side of the fence.

AMT: Well, Chris Courchene credits a program called Build for getting him on the right side of the fence. Build is the brainchild of Winnipeg's Shaun Loney and it is one of several of his projects that he calls “social enterprises.” Their goal is to transform lives and entire communities by tackling society's most stubborn problems. His ideas are spreading across the country and he explains them in a new book, An Army of Problem Solvers: Reconciliation and the Solutions Economy. Shaun Loney is with me in our Winnipeg studio today as part of our series, The Disruptors. Hello. Welcome.

SHAUN LONEY: Hi. Good morning. Welcome to Winnipeg.

AMT: Well, thank you very much. It's snowing. Thank you for that. [laughs] Chris Courchene's story sounds incredible. Tell me more about how he got to that other side of the fence, as he put it.

SHAUN LONEY: Well, when I met Chris, he was very unemployable. You know scars, no grade 12. He had no work experience. And today he's an excellent co-worker. This is a guy that just needed a chance.

AMT: And so what is Build?

SHAUN LONEY: Build is a social enterprise, Anna Maria. It's a non-profit business and we've started 11 of these non-profit businesses across Canada now. It's part of a growing movement across the world and we can use entrepreneurial tools to solve social problems, social and environmental problems.

AMT: And so it's one example. Tell me more about social enterprise.

SHAUN LONEY: Well, we've started—Build does a lot of water retrofits and also insulation and we have a farm at the Garden Hill First Nation which is using the economy to solve a food problem there, and working with the Black Daddies Club in Toronto and also with several homeless youth in St. John's, Newfoundland. So these are economic ventures. They're not strictly—we shy away from government funding usually and economic ventures that are solving problems. And in our case, in Canada, we believe the defining issue is connecting people who most need the work with the work that most needs to be done.

AMT: You co-founded Aki Energy in Manitoba and you call that a social enterprise incubator.

SHAUN LONEY: Yes. So Aki is an Ojibwe word for Earth and we're doing geothermal on First Nations. But we've started several other social enterprises through it on many other First Nations in Manitoba. And in fact the two largest geothermal companies in all of Western Canada are social enterprises that we've started. They're employing people where there was no employment before.

AMT: And so in terms of—what was the goal originally with these geothermal companies?

SHAUN LONEY: Well, we see high utility bills on First Nations and for us that represents an opportunity because we come in with renewable energy options and lower those utility bills significantly and then use the utility bill reductions to pay for the upfront cost of the geothermal in the first place. And through that mechanism, we've been able to do seven million dollars worth of geothermal in just three years. And it's very labor intensive work so wherever that happens, we're employing people from the First Nations themselves and they're also engaging in an economic development process.

AMT: And now it's expensive to get geothermal hooked up to a house, isn't it?

SHAUN LONEY: It is. It can be between 15 and $20,000 but the bill reductions are so significant that we can use some of the bill reductions to pay back the upfront costs and we've been working with Manitoba Hydro on that here in Manitoba.

AMT: Right. I guess it's the long-term difference if you’re using that as opposed to other fuel sources.

SHAUN LONEY: Yes. But all of the rest of us in Canada, we have utilities that provide us the infrastructure to get things like water and sewer and electricity. But when it comes to renewable energy on First Nations, the federal government generally asks First Nations to apply for funding. And then what happens is that outside companies will bring in the services and there's no economic development in that whole process. So we've turned that on its head and said why don't we set up utilities the First Nations can operate and employ folks from their own nations to install their renewable energy and then use the bill reductions to pay for the upfront costs of that infrastructure? It's a very exciting turn of events in Canada.

AMT: And so what role does government play in helping there?

SHAUN LONEY: Well, actually the book as you said, An Army of Problem Solvers, talks about all the different ways the government gets in the way of this process happening. And astonishingly, in May of this year, they shut down an $8 million geothermal project [unintelligible] Ojibwe Nation and told us that if we wanted to keep doing this we instead had to apply for funding. And we’re refusing to do that because we think all First Nations across Canada should have access to this tools and all low-income people and all low-income families should have the tools to be successful.

AMT: So they're telling you you have to stop and apply for funding even though you were actually ticking along just fine.

SHAUN LONEY: We were doing it without any government funding, yes. And this is how colonial governments, how colonial departments do business. They want to maintain control and they don't believe that the First Nation families, Indigenous communities, can do anything for themselves. And we're showing them quite different. And so the book has come along at a great time because we're really challenging the government to think beyond a colonial past and let's look at Canada and how it can be in its next 150 years.

AMT: You've got some blunt observations about our history. You say, you write, “While governments were busy trying to take the Indian out of the child, they were also taking the Indian out of the economy.”

SHAUN LONEY: Yes. It was quite surprising to me. We're learning about residential schools, Anna Maria. Canada is waking up to what happened and what was happening there is becoming obvious to us but at the same time, back home on First Nations, they were working equally hard to make sure that Indigenous economies were not successful. So for example, there was an Indian agent that anyone selling anything off of a First Nation had to get the permission of the Indian agent—and this is quite well documented—that the sale would be done to somebody at a very cut rate. We have fishers that were getting half price of what non-Aboriginal fishers were making. We had farmers, Indigenous farmers that were not allowed to sell their product in Canada. So I document some of that rather astonishing history in the book but it's equally astonishing to me that we're still doing this today in the form of this example I gave you with the geothermal.

AMT: Well, you actually highlight a place called Garden Hill First Nation in northern Manitoba and one scene really struck you when you were there.

SHAUN LONEY: Yeah. So Garden Hill is a remote First Nation. Its goods and services have to be flown in and just standing there on welfare day and people are lined up in alphabetized lines and they get their cheque and then they go over to the northern store and that's really their only option. And the Northern Store cashes the cheque for a fee. It's a monopoly retailer and a grocery store and they sell—95 per cent of what they sell is unhealthy food. And so there's really not any opportunity for people to be successful in that environment. And what's happened is this diabetes cesspool—there's really no other way to describe it—huge government taxpayer expenditures and families are just struggling with the disease and 60 kids in Garden Hill have diabetes. It's amazing. But what's striking to me is that our federal government gives the Northern Store just in Garden Hill a million dollars a year to sell 95 per cent unhealthy food.

AMT: This is the Nutrition North subsidies that the government gives because things cost so much. But it's only for food that's flown in.

SHAUN LONEY: Yes. So we have a 13 acre farm there. We're using the economy to change outcomes. Thirteen acre farm, a thousand chickens and not one single thing that we do gets any federal government support at all and we have to compete against the Northern Store that gets a million dollars a year selling 95 per cent unhealthy food and doesn't that sound to you like an Indian agent? And this is 2016.

AMT: So you actually got a $300,000 start-up grant from the province for that, did you not?

SHAUN LONEY: From the provincial government. That’s right.

AMT: You started a farm.

SHAUN LONEY: We started a farm, yeah. It's wonderful. We employ a dozen people full time and this place is called Garden Hill. Clearly they were so proud of their food history that that's how they chose to name their First Nation. And so the federal government needs to realize that you can garden in Garden Hill. It is possible and you can do this all across northern Canada but they have to make the conditions for First Nations to be successful.

AMT: And so in other words again, you're looking at something that where everyone else would see—you described the scene there—lined up for their cheques and then they get in a water taxi because it's on an island.

SHAUN LONEY: That's right.

AMT: But you basically make the point that where other people see entrenched poverty and dependence, you had an aha moment.

SHAUN LONEY: Sure. We call it the up side of down, where high food prices are actually an opportunity for profit margin and 4,400 people living in Garden Hill is a big local market. The fact that there's diabetes means people are going to be motivated to buy healthy food and the community has a long history of local food production which all First Nations have. And so what's missing now isn't what the desire of the local folks to do well. What's missing is government policy that is actually encouraging bad results. And you know Canadians are demanding better and taxpayers are demanding better.

AMT: Now I mentioned your ideas are being adopted elsewhere in the country. You mentioned as well in Newfoundland. Sheldon Pollett is in St. John's. He's the executive director of Choices for Youth which he modeled on Build. He says there were initial concerns in his communities over bringing in this kind of social enterprise. Listen to him.

SOUNDCLIP

When we came back from Winnipeg and said wow, this is fantastic. We really want to see this happen. We had two partners we needed to work with—Newfoundland and Labrador Housing who were very supportive and it was really clear that we also needed to work with CUPE which is their union, so that it wasn't seen as taking away from union jobs and all of that stuff which is certainly understandable. So once they really understood what this is really about and it was very much in line with union values and a lot of those union members certainly could also identify with a lot of the stories from our young people, they had a very supportive function in the whole process.

AMT: So how hard is it, Shaun Loney, to get people to buy into a new way of working such as union members even.

SHAUN LONEY: Well, sure. In Toronto, Toronto housing is desperately wanting to work with our sister social enterprise we set up there called Building Up. And they should because Building Up is going to hire their tenants and provide better results and hopefully move people out of public housing so that they can afford their own place. But the labour movement has locked down on all the work that happens there so we're in discussions with them and trying to work something out in that front. But a much bigger problem isn't the labour movement. We share the same goals in the end. The much bigger problem is government that is just so focused on problems and what the book is saying is that you need a problem solver to solve a problem. We're missing that step.

AMT: You need an army of problem solvers.

SHAUN LONEY: You need an army of problem solvers and what we've shown in Manitoba and other places across Canada: it's exciting. It's entirely possible.

AMT: So you talk about government. You're not totally disconnected there. You were in government. You left bureaucracy. What were you doing before?

SHAUN LONEY: I was a director of energy policy with the provincial government and it just seemed to me it was just too frustrating a place to make change. And change is now coming in entrepreneurial fashions and outside government. And I think that when we're outside government, we can have an impact on what government does. I wouldn't have been able to write this book otherwise. And we've received a lot of you know feedback from governments all across Canada and how they can start focusing on economic ventures that are going to solve problems.

AMT: And you tie this right back to reconciliation. There is a real tie to how Canada has treated its Indigenous people and how you're trying to change that. Talk to me a little bit more about that.

SHAUN LONEY: I just don't—there's no way we can achieve reconciliation in this country at the same time as we're suppressing local economies from re-emerging and energy and food are the places to start. We've made major inroads in both of those places. You heard from Chris Courchene. How many Chris Courchenes are there across Canada? And what we're saying—it's actually exciting news to the country—is that Chris Courchene, a guy who we normally would write off and walk past on the street actually makes a very good employee. Can fill vacancies, can mean a lot to our economy. He's paying taxes. He's being a great parent. He's, you know reconnected with his kids. This is what Canada needs right now.

AMT: You know it's interesting because I'm here in Winnipeg. We're getting ready for a town hall tomorrow night on missing and murdered Indigenous women and our virtual reality project on the Highway of Tears. And it's interesting because when we go to communities and talk to people, they connect the dots to all of these things. They say our communities are suffering economically and so we can't give our young girls and our young boys opportunities. They have to go away. The Highway of Tears, of course, people were hiking away because there was nothing there even for jobs.

SHAUN LONEY: Every women's centre in this country, Anna Maria, should have the opportunity to set up a social enterprise so that the folks that they’re working with have an ability to make an income. And not only are we battling the federal government, but just yesterday in Manitoba, we were broadsided by our own provincial government that significantly reduced funding to us right here in Manitoba. And it was done in the auspices of reducing the size of government. Well, we've reduced to more costs for the provincial government here in Manitoba than they'll ever be able to do through any kind of budget cuts. We just have to really ramp up this type of problem solving economic activity.

AMT: You talk about your struggle trying to get governments to understand this kind of thinking. What about Indigenous leaders? What about band councils? What about the Assembly of First Nations?

SHAUN LONEY: No. They're ready. First Nations people are ready. I mean we have lineups that go around blocks. We have stacks of resumes. It’s one of the myths we have in this country that low-income people, Indigenous people, don't want to work. I have seen absolutely no evidence of that. And that to me as a Canadian is really exciting and we're going to see this re-emergence and we're going to see it profoundly in every corner of the country. But first, government must create an ecosystem where social enterprises and other progressive economic ventures can be successful. And right now, we're battling them every day.

AMT: It sounds like you're winning though. It sounds like—I know it's a battle—but in fact you're kind of leaving them in your dust.

SHAUN LONEY: Well, we're showing them what can be done despite them. But just imagine if they were to say, in places like Garden Hill, we're going to take a million dollars from the Northern Store that's causing a problem and we're going to invest that in local food production in Garden Hill. That would itself create dozens and dozens of jobs, begin the economic development process, move people off social assistance and show how we can have healthy families.

AMT: And so you're saying that this can be replicated right across the country.

SHAUN LONEY: In every corner. In every corner. And that's just a super exciting concept.

AMT: Okay. Well, thank you for coming in.

SHAUN LONEY: No, thank you for having me.

AMT: Well, that is Shaun Loney with me in our Winnipeg studio. He is the author of the book, An Army of Problem Solvers: Reconciliation and the Solutions Economy. Let us know what you think about what he's saying. You can tweet us. We're @thecurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. You can go to our website, www.cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link. Should governments be listening to Mr. Loney? Should they be putting on a plane right now so they can hear more of what he has to say and how he thinks they can actually take the problem and turn it into an opportunity? Stay with us. The news is next and then night hunting is supposed to end fatally for animals such as moose, elk and deer. It's not supposed to kill livestock or people. In Manitoba, concerns that hunting at night is becoming too dangerous—we'll talk about that on the other side of the news. This is The Current coming to you from Winnipeg. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti.

[Music: Sting]

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Fidel Castro should not be celebrated, says journalist James Kirchick

Guests: James Kirchick

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current coming to you from Winnipeg today.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, not all butters are created equal. Some are worthy of divine praise. A rich history of butter coming up. But first, Fidel Castro spent his lifetime fighting for freedom but took it away as well. A look at the late Cuban leader's history of violence toward the LGBTQ community.

SOUNDCLIP

[Through translator] I was here very early with all Cubans at this very sad moment. But well, I have the consolation that our commander is here and will be here forever. He is an example for all Cubans in this country.

AMT: The sounds of sorrow in the streets of Havana as scores of Cubans mourn the death of Fidel Castro, the communist leader who ruled Cuba for almost 50 years. He died Friday at the age of 90. For many, Fidel Castro was seen as a revolutionary figure who defied the United States, survived countless assassination attempts and defended the poor. But in Miami, Cuban exiles celebrated the passing of a man they viewed as a brutal dictator.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Crowd cheering]

I am so happy. I wish that my grandmother was alive. She died six months ago and she would’ve died to see this.

[Sound: Crowd cheering]

AMT: The legacy of a figure as divisive as Fidel Castro is mixed and complicated. My next guest has looked at a chapter in Cuban history that saw the oppression and murder of gay people in that country. And he believes those facts cannot be ignored as we talk about Fidel Castro. James Kirchick is a correspondent for The Daily Beast and we have reached him in New York City. Hello.

JAMES KIRCHICK: Hi. How are you?

AMT: Take us back to the sixties. What was life like for gays and lesbians in those first years when Fidel Castro first came to power?

JAMES KIRCHICK: It was not a very nice place. Gays—gay men in particular—were rounded up, collected and put into basically labour camps or even concentration camps, you could call them. They were called Units to Aid Military Production and they were not very humane conditions certainly, where many of them were killed or died from exhaustion.

AMT: And why was that community singled out?

JAMES KIRCHICK: I think there were two reasons. One was a general Latin American machismo that was certainly not exclusively unique to Cuba. I mean there's a certain history of homophobia in these societies. But it was politicized in a way by the communist revolution that saw homosexuality as a bourgeois decadence, as a sort of capitalist import that distracted people from the class struggle.

AMT: It's interesting because you write that they call it at the time a deviation. And they didn't think that they could even be considered true revolutionaries.

JAMES KIRCHICK: Yeah. Precisely. Che Guevara was a real homophobe and would often you know call people faggots basically and it was certainly not exclusive to Cuba as a socialist society in the Soviet Union was also not of very hospitable place to gay people in this sense, despite having decriminalized homosexuality during or right after the Bolshevik Revolution.

AMT: Now Cuba decriminalized same sex relationships in, what was it, 1979?

JAMES KIRCHICK: Yes.

AMT: Did things improve after that?

JAMES KIRCHICK: I would say that they improved somewhat in that perhaps the crackdowns were not as aggressive on the part of the government. But it was only a few years later into the 1980s that the AIDS crisis struck globally. And on the islands, the governments quarantined HIV-positive people into sanitariums that were referred to at the time by the head of the World Health Organization’s AIDS program as being pretty prisons. And so while this may have done something to avert the spread of the disease on the island, it was a very inhumane treatment.

AMT: So they were essentially rounded up again.

JAMES KIRCHICK: Yes. HIV-positive people, yes.

AMT: And so that was the eighties and there was the Mariel Boatlift in the eighties as well.

JAMES KIRCHICK: That was in 1980 and that was when Castro basically allowed around 120,000 people to leave Cuba and to go to Florida. And a significant portion of them were homosexuals and there were also many prisoners that he released. And it was basically a way to embarrass the government of Jimmy Carter by basically forcing this massive refugee crisis onto him late in his presidency.

AMT: And he didn't want anybody in the LGBT community even there then. He was happy to let them go.

JAMES KIRCHICK: He was happy to let them go and he referred to them as worms, very derogatory language, yes.

AMT: So in 2010, he admitted that his revolution had treated gays unjustly. He actually said that it was a grave injustice. What did you make of that statement?

JAMES KIRCHICK: I thought it was a little too little too late frankly. Even the way that he discussed his apology, it was sort of couched in the excuse that he was very busy fighting the Yankee imperialists at the time, he wasn't really in charge of the government but Raul was, that he didn't even really know what was going on. So he couldn't even really take full responsibility for what his regime had done.

AMT: Mariela Castro, Fidel's niece, Raul’s daughter has emerged as an LGBTQ activist. Is that a sign of progress now?

JAMES KIRCHICK: I think on the margins it can't hurt to have the daughter of the current dictator basically you know mouthing these nice things about the LGBT community. At the same time, we can't forget that Cuba is still a totalitarian dictatorship and people lack basic political freedoms so any discussion of gay rights has to take place in that context. And I think it says a lot about the country that the most visible LGBT activist is the straight daughter of Raul Castro. The regime does not tolerate independent organizations whether it's an independent newspaper or an independent labour union or in this case an independent gay rights group. So I see this as really being window dressing for what is still the only dictatorship in the Western hemisphere.

AMT: And so that's really what sort of trying to give a message to North America and other places that they are trying to be progressive but not.

JAMES KIRCHICK: Yeah. I think this is a pretty clever understanding on the part of the regime that on the international left which has always been very supportive or elements of it have been very supportive of the Cuban regime, that identity politics in particular, you know gay rights has become a very important issue. You often hear people say—they'll cite you know the gay rights in the litany of wonderful things that the revolution has provided for like you know free healthcare and education and whatnot, which I simply respond Canada has universal healthcare, quite good, I believe and very high literacy rates as well. It also has a parliamentary democracy and a free press and independent labour unions. I don't see why these things are mutually exclusive. I don't see why Cuba can't have a free press and independent labour unions and parliamentary democracy and gay rights as well.

AMT: And so given the issue specifically about LGBTQ rights and more generally about human rights, how do you react to what you're hearing from world leaders following the death of Fidel Castro?

JAMES KIRCHICK: Well, in particular I thought the remarks by your prime minister were rather embarrassing. I understand where he's coming from. His father obviously got along famously with Fidel Castro. But I think he owes an apology to the many, many Cubans whose family members were killed by the regime or who died while trying to flee the regime. I think it says really all you need to know about Cuba that this is a country where thousands of people risk their lives every year swimming in shark infested waters to get to Florida. You don't see them going in the reverse direction. To see Prime Minister Trudeau not able to understand this is pretty worrying.

AMT: Do you think those pushing for the LGBTQ rights specifically and Cuba will feel at all emboldened following the death of Fidel Castro?

JAMES KIRCHICK: I'm not sure about that. This is something the regime has been prepared for for many years. Fidel has been sick for quite a long time. His brother’s basically been running the country for the past decade. So I would not expect any dramatic political or economic change certainly not, you know even on the LGBT front. I think that's a pretty minor issue in the eyes of the government.

AMT: Okay. Well, James Kirchick, thanks for your perspective on all of this.

JAMES KIRCHICK: Thank you for having me.

AMT: Well, that is James Kirchick, correspondent for The Daily Beast. He joined us from New York City.

[Music: Bridge]

AMT: We are coming to you from Winnipeg today on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM and online on www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti.

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Manitoba wildlife group raises concerns over big game night hunting

Guests: Rob Olson, David Chartrand

SOUNDCLIP

We've tried just about every light on the market. We are very particular in what we need out of a light. If it's not going to get the job done, it’s not going to work. We've got to have a light that's made by night hunters that knows exactly what we need every time that we get in the back of that truck to go hunt.

[Sound: Wild animals]

AMT: If you are hunting big game at night using a technique called “spotlighting”, you will need a light like the one we just heard advertised. “Spotlighting” involves shining powerful light into the eyes of animals such as moose, elk or deer to stop them cold in their tracks and make them easier to target. The practice is banned in many parts of Canada including Newfoundland and Labrador, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, but Indigenous hunters do have the legal right to do some night hunting. And now the Manitoba Wildlife Federation is raising the alarm about night hunting. It says farmers and rural property owners in the province have seen an increase in spotlighting in the past few years and they say it's led to accidental shootings of cattle and even people. It wants the Manitoba government to work with Indigenous groups to ban the practice entirely in some areas of the province. Rob Olson is the Wildlife Federation's managing director. He's with me in our Winnipeg studio. Hello.

ROB OLSON: Hello there.

AMT: So the practice has been banned for some time. What's changing? Why are you raising concerns about this now?

ROB OLSON: It seems to be getting worse. About three years ago we started getting phone calls from farmers, cattle producers from many parts of Manitoba saying that they hadn't seen the intensity that they were seeing. It was just getting worse and worse and getting really unbearable. So we're not sure what's causing that but it just started getting to a point where people just kind of couldn't take it anymore, living in a kind of a constant state of fear, hearing shots around the farmhouse. So these stories were constant and continued today. This week I've taken probably five phone calls from different parts of Manitoba so the situation I think is dire out there.

AMT: Tell me a little bit more about spotlighting because I have to admit I’d never of it before.

ROB OLSON: So spotlighting is—it's just an incredibly, incredibly effective way to hunt. And actually it's interesting. We've got a dialogue now going with eight First Nation communities on the east side of Lake Winnipeg and I think there may be a difference between spotlighting and night hunting. Some remote northern communities hunt moose by moonlight and always have. But I think what we're starting to see is spotlighting is something different. It's driving with trucks. It's hunting off ATVs. It's shining lights around land. And basically it's an incredibly effective way to find animals. The problem is the animals are often intermingled with cattle. They're often around farms because farms often have habitat in food. So it puts night hunters in close proximity to farm people which is disastrous.

AMT: Why would you want to hunt at night at all? Are they out more? What is it?

ROB OLSON: They’re out more. So these animals are very active at low light conditions so sunrise, sunset is a really active time but they're very active in the middle of the night so it is a really effective time to hunt but it's just not a safe time to hunt.

AMT: So you say that you're getting calls and you've got stories. Tell us a few more of what anecdotal things—

ROB OLSON: Yeah. Well, there's a farm mother up by Eriksdale who won't watch television in her front room anymore. She lives in a hotspot where there's lots of deer around her yard and there's so many shots going off at night around her house. She watches television in the basement now. She's just afraid. Farm family up by Winnipegosis, they had a bullet come through the bedroom window just above their grandmother's head. The deer was standing in the field right in front of the house. A woman out by Carberry had a show horse. She took it to fairs all across Manitoba for about 15 years. Its bottom jaw got shot off. People thought it was a moose or elk. And on and on and on—bullets going through farm tractors, bullets going through farm buildings, dead livestock. In the last month there's been two more cows shot. Up at Teulon this year, there was a cow shot. There was a horse shot at Dauphin. People thought it was a moose. And it just continues on like that. And it's widespread.

AMT: There was a man who was killed by a shot earlier this fall. Was that related?

ROB OLSON: Yeah. The details are not real clear yet but it was a young lad named Dylan Hapa from Sioux Valley First Nation. There was an accident. It was a night hunting situation. Don't know all the details. 2010, a man from Sagkeeng was shot in the head by his partner. His partner thought he was a moose. It was at night. He had a headlamp on and he thought it was the eye shine. So the eyes shine when you shine the light in their eyes. So he shot his friend because he thought it was a moose. So preventable. Preventable. If there had been any sort of sunlight or daylight, he would not have shot his friend and that man’s four kids wouldn't be orphans now. So it's about trying to improve safety with hunting. It's about trying to do it as best we can. You got to respect Indigenous rights. There has to be a conversation here. And what we're talking about is defining where does it not make sense? And I think that's Agro- Manitoba. Where night hunting could make sense from a First Nation, from a Metis perspective, you know maybe that's in remote areas. So there needs to be a dialogue. But the biggest thing is we don't have any conservation officers left. There's very little rural law enforcement.

AMT: Why not? Where’d they go?

ROB OLSON: In the last 20 years the province has slowly whittled away our rural conservation officers from 145 down to under 90, maybe 85 frontline people enforcing. So now there's just very few people protecting huge areas. And so I think the trespassers have figured out that there's just not enforcement. So the province hasn't prioritized the safety of rural people enough in our view. If you cut that many police—if you cut that percentage of police officers in Winnipeg, they’d be screaming from the rooftops.

AMT: How do you know that the people doing the shooting are Indigenous?

ROB OLSON: No, no. Well, I never said that.

AMT: But you're asking for the—because it's illegal to do it if you're not Indigenous.

ROB OLSON: It is illegal if you're not. It's legal sometimes if you're Indigenous. So part of the challenge we have now is there's a lot of night lighting going on, spotlighting on private land, but we have no idea who's doing it. Right? So the part of the thing is just to say, we want to say, let's just make it illegal in rural areas where there's lots of people in farmhouses and cows for everybody so it's clear for enforcement. When they find someone spotlighting around a farm, around cows, it's just not on. But that's something that has to come from dialogue now.

AMT: And the communities that you're talking about, what's the mood like there right now?

ROB OLSON: They're desperate. They're sad. They're sad. They're despondent. They're feeling hopeless and helpless. They're living in fear. I met a woman out by Pipestone. She was out checking her horses in low light conditions. She's got a baby in a backpack carrier with orange over the whole thing. And she's scared to go out there. So they're living in fear and what they describe is imagine being in a farmhouse at night and you hear boom and you know the bullet goes two miles. Where did it go? Do they know my cows are out there? Do they know where the farmhouse is because you know and those kinds of things. So it's just a feeling of fear and I don't think that’s right.

AMT: I want to bring someone else into the conversation now. David Chartrand is the president of the Manitoba Metis Federation and he is in our Winnipeg studio as well. Hello.

DAVID CHARTRAND: Good morning.

AMT: As you listen, what are you thinking?

DAVID CHARTRAND: Well, first thing I'm thinking is there's no doubt there seems to be a portrayal this is Indigenous people that are the bad guys here and doing all of these things and it’s unfortunate that seems to be the case. But let's understand something. You know you go to pick up Google and go inside Google and start checking accidents occur during the day time also. So there's a bunch of variables that it could happen especially when it deals with any kind of weapon. There’s issue of challenge and an issue of concern.

AMT: Give us a better sense of what the law says for Metis and First Nations’ rights when it comes to hunting at night.

DAVID CHARTRAND: Well, the law is very clear that Indigenous people can actually utilize—what do you call it?

AMT: The spotlighting? Yep.

DAVID CHARTRAND: Spotlighting. I was trying to look at the proper language.

AMT: And they can hunt.

DAVID CHARTRAND: And they can definitely harvest at night with that, as long as it is for sustenance, for food.

AMT: You call it harvest.

DAVID CHARTRAND: It’s harvest.

AMT: As opposed to hunt because of the nature of it.

DAVID CHARTRAND: It’s the nature of it, it’s harvesting, it’s harvesting for food. And so again, and what really is starting to take place and what you're starting to see is a change in the focus. First of all, you look at the Manitoba Wildlife Federation. They talk about we want to be partners. We want to talk Indigenous people. Well, we had a relationship with them some time ago, the Manitoba Federation. We had an MOU with them. The president that's presently in place actually ripped it up.

AMT: MOU, a memorandum of understanding.

DAVID CHARTRAND: Yes. Yeah.

AMT: So you had a deal.

DAVID CHARTRAND: We had a deal. Let's talk. We had the foresight of the previous president John Williams who actually saw it as it’s time to sit down with the Metis and start organizing how we both work together towards conservation, towards relationships and so forth. But the Manitoba Wildlife Federation felt it was not feasible anymore to work with and respect the Metis rights so they ripped it up and said there's no more agreement. In fact, the president campaigned against us on that issue. So it talks about, let's talk about how we build relationships. Well, first of all, you’ve got to respect the other partner if you want to talk to your other partner. What I'm hearing here is that obviously the campaign that the Wildlife Federation is actually doing is campaigning changing the law and that's what I hear here. I'm not saying I support spotlighting. Let's make that very clear. We still have to do consultations with my people across this province and establish what have we been doing.

AMT: What do the people you represent—do they share some of the Federation's concerns though about the safety of night hunting? Obviously if those bullets are flying around, they can hurt the people you represent as well.

DAVID CHARTRAND: Well, safety of course is an issue for any hunter. Whoever is out there carrying weapons, safety should be a number one issue. But from the perspective of the Metis, we have for example and in our province, we have our own harvesting laws. We have our seasons. We have limits. We have all kinds of stipulations when it comes to harvesting and conservation in Manitoba. So the media are way progressive ahead in the sense of where we're going in this country of how we ensure that conservation is fundamental. And safety is no different. We promote that issue. We support it very strongly. But what is clear here is what I keep on hearing is that you know what, sitting innocently by watching and listening to this morning presentation here, this kind of anecdotal statement that it's— Manitoba Wildlife Federation which basically states we're the protector of conservation and Indigenous people are the harvesters and the hunters of that area. And we're trying to find a way to change that and change our laws and change our rules as we move forward. I don't know where that changed because we've always been conservationists as Indigenous people for thousands of years, for us Metis, hundreds of years. And it's been—the days that a buffalo—we had laws even at that time in the 1800s. So we've always been very proactive and when it comes to conservation and safety and protection. But somehow it’s being portrayed that we're the ones out there doing all this killing, all the shooting. And I hope that's going to end. So facts are facts. If you have facts, bring them to the table. If you don't have facts, don't inspire that it’s Indigenous people doing this.

AMT: Rob Olson is shaking his head at the idea that he's the only conservationist. Do you want to speak to that?

ROB OLSON: Sure.

AMT: Get you both to share that mic there. Go ahead.

ROB OLSON: Yeah, no. Look, I respect David's passion obviously. Look, the reality is that we're open to working with any Indigenous group and we'd love to have discussions again with the Metis Federation but we're talking right now with First Nations on the east side like Winnipeg and they're very interested to talk. They're very positive. And we have lots of Metis members. We have some clubs and chapters who are almost entirely Metis hunters and they're concerned about night hunting. It's a safety issue. You know we have to respect the rights of Aboriginal people absolutely and there has to be respectful dialogue and we're open to that at any time at all times. And our little partnership on the east side of Lake Winnipeg actually has been really illuminating because those people in the communities are also afraid of night hunting. They want to protect. They want to protect their ability to hunt at night in moonlight but they're afraid of spotlighting and they see the dangers.

AMT: Dave Chartrand, there's also concerns that the moose populations are dwindling in part of Manitoba. How do you react to that concern?

DAVID CHARTRAND: Well, from our perspective we believed in closures. In fact we had our own closures before the province—

AMT: Closures, you mean areas you can’t hunt in, yeah. So what are you guys going to do though? Because obviously you say you both have concerns. How do you go forward in this without getting the province to shut the whole thing down?

DAVID CHARTRAND: Well, let's start with this process.

AMT: You have briefly. Go ahead.

DAVID CHARTRAND: If the Manitoba Wildlife Federation—firstly as I said, we had an agreement. This new president campaigned completely against Metis rights and ripped it up and he's now the president. So there's no relationship. You could hear that he’s dealing with First Nations, not with us. But secondly, what I have a lot of concern on is that it is very clear that there is a right that's here. And if the Manitoba Wildlife Federation believes in law-abiding issues, law-abiding citizens, then at the same time they should respect the laws that are by the Supreme Court of Canada, by the Constitution in this country, that we have the right to harvest for spotlighting. But what we need to do amongst ourselves as Indigenous people is come to terms with that. How are we going to move ahead on that? But not somebody trying to tell us we're going to push and change a law on you and take it away from you.

AMT: And in the meantime, how do you deal with the concerns that communities have or whoever is out there missing the animal and shooting the houses? What do you do? What do you guys do?

DAVID CHARTRAND: Well, I think firstly given that people have that right, I think there's got to be a lot of dialogue with those harvesters, that the dangers in what they are doing can actually take a life or also takes personal animal life. So what we need to do is do some strong campaigning and education of the dangers of spotlighting and ask them if that's the right approach to take and if it’s the right approach, that they need to be cautionary of what they're doing and the danger it could cause.

AMT: Okay. Thank you both for talking about this. Thanks for coming in.

DAVID CHARTRAND: Thank you.

AMT: That is Dave Chartrand, president of the Manitoba Metis Federation and Rob Olson, the Manitoba Wildlife Federation's managing director, both with me in our Winnipeg studio. I should just mention why is she in Winnipeg you are asking because we are getting ready for our town hall tomorrow night in the City of Winnipeg as we continue with our project on missing and murdered Indigenous women. We have brought with us our virtual reality documentary, The Highway of Tears, and of course that is available online to view as well. We are looking over the course of our season at the whole issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women as the inquiry continues or gets underway. And you will be able to hear that. If you can't be in the audience, you will hear it on air next week and you will find it online. Stay with us and we will be back. We're talking about butter next. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Where in the world is the best tasting butter?

Guests: Elaine Khosrova

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

Is there anything better than butter? Think it over. Every time you taste something that's delicious beyond imagining and you say what is in this? The answer is always going to be butter.

AMT: The movie Julie and Julia told the story of a young woman named Julie Powell who decided to cook every single recipe in one of Julia Child’s cookbooks over the course of one year. And there's a theme in the cooking she takes on.

SOUNDCLIP

The day there's a meteorite heading toward the earth and we have 30 days to live, I am going to spend it eating butter. Here's my final word on the subject: you can never have too much butter.

AMT: Well, you don't have to convince Elaine Khosrova of the joys of butter. In fact the former food editor has just written a book called Butter: A Rich History and she's in Toronto. Hello.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Hello.

AMT: Julia Child and cooks such as her really knew the value of a good dollop of butter. But what got you thinking about it as more than that yellow lump in the fridge?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Absolutely. I really became fascinated with the science and craft of butter because I was working. I worked for about five years for a dairy magazine. It was primarily about cheese. But it took me behind the scenes to farms and dairy processing and I came to see that you know butter is essentially one ingredient and yet it can result in many different variations. You know ones that are more fudgy, ones that are a little greasy, ones that are super fatty and others that are lighter. The colours, the textures, you know there’s quite a lot of variation.

AMT: You went from cheese to butter?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: I did.

AMT: Full time?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yeah. I'm very lucky. [laughs]

AMT: I think I want your job.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yeah.

AMT: But okay. Let's keep going.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yes.

AMT: So as you look at butter, how far back can you trace the origins, the history?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Well, we'll never know precisely. We know that it began with the domestication of animals and it would have been sheep and goats. It would not have been cows because they weren't domesticated until quite a bit later. So we're talking about 9,000 years ago. The earliest recorded history of butter making is the ancient Sumerians who carved on their temple images of churning and that was 2500 BC. So it's been with us for a really long time.

AMT: Okay. So it's not European North-American. It goes far beyond that.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Oh, far beyond that. Yes. That came much later.

AMT: And so when other cultures are developing butter, tell me a little bit more about the development. Like was it an accident? What?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Oh yes. Well, yes. It was most likely an accident in the same way that cheese was an accident. You know if you have milk that's in a container and it would have been probably an animal sack way back when, thousands of years ago. So if it's in there culturing a little bit and then it gets rocked on some journey across the land, you know lo and behold, you open up that bag and you can have these morsels of delicious golden butter. I mean it had a real magical quality, butter, for many thousands of years because people couldn't understand like how is this that liquid can yield this rich fat? So butter was really kind of mystical and magical as well as valuable.

AMT: So you traveled around actually, on the butter chase.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yes.

AMT: Tell us about the butter you saw being made in Bhutan.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yeah. So I wanted to go to Bhutan. I wanted to go to the Himalayas to really see yak butter production as it has always been done for centuries and centuries. I would have loved to go to Tibet. I wasn't able to get in because of certain travel restrictions so I went to Bhutan and my husband and I hiked 13,000 feet up—not easily—to camp among the nomadic people who have yaks and that's their livelihood is to keep these yak herds and to make butter and some cheese from their milk. So I really wanted to not only taste this product but see historically you know it's a little like time travel, when you can watch how someone has made butter with a very primitive churn for thousands of years.

AMT: So tell me more about what you saw and what you tasted.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Well, I saw first of all that you know the women do everything, of course. I mean that's historically always been true that women were the ones responsible for milking and any kind of milk processing. In fact it was taboo for men to have anything to do with those dairy arts. So I watched as this woman milk the yak in the open field. You know on the highlands of Bhutan, there are no barns, there's no fences, no corrals. The animals just roam free but they come back to the herders. There's a relationship they have with these nomadic people. They come back for the milking which happens every morning. And so I watched that process and then they collect the milk and put it into a plastic barrel and sit it in a stream so it can cool down a bit. You can't churn milk when it's cold. And by the way they don't skim off the cream like we do in North America and in Europe. That's how butter has always been made is by skimming off the cream and churning that. But in Bhutan, they take the whole milk and they ferment it slightly. While it's sitting in the stream, they put in these branches, these wild branches that have a particular bacteria that helps culture the milk a little bit. So then once it has cooled down and fermented for a few hours, I watched as this woman put the milk into the churn. And then by hand, just up and down—it's called a plunger churn—she just kept moving the plunger up and down, up and down. It took about 40 minutes and then we had this beautiful, rich butter. But actually the flavour was quite mild. Yak butter has a reputation of being very funky and strong because most people taste it down in the valley. They don't taste it fresh.

AMT: Oh, when it goes to market.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: When it goes to markets.

AMT: But they don't have refrigeration, huh?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: They don't have refrigeration. It's not pasteurized. It's raw. It's slightly cultured. So by the time it gets down into the valley to the markets, it's developed you know quite a strong flavour.

AMT: And do they put it on bread? What do they do with it?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: They mostly put it in their tea. You know yak butter tea is a tradition across the Himalayas and they drink this mixture of black tea and butter and salt and they essentially whisk it to make it a little bit frothy and emulsify the fat so it's not like floating on top.

AMT: Did you taste that?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: I had that quite a lot. And again, I was expecting to gag on it because I've read that yak butter tea can be very strong. And yet, the version that I had in Bhutan was really quite nice. The thing that I didn't like was the salt. I mean I am a tea drinker and the salt was a little weird but the butter wasn't weird at all.

AMT: Okay.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: I enjoyed it.

AMT: So you go to Bhutan and then you're on a mission.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yes, yes.

AMT: And you end up in India with water buffalo.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yeah, that was the other—see, butter can be made with the milk or cream of all kinds of ruminant animals. I mean you can even make reindeer butter, you know sheep, goat butter. But I really wanted to get to India because the water buffalo tradition of making butter is disappearing. You know cows have moved in. They've been able to breed cows to withstand the incredible heat in India. Before, it was only the water buffalo that could withstand that so they had this long tradition of water buffalo butter. I wanted to taste that and see it but also, India has a very unique—the women in India—have a unique system of churning using ropes that essentially wrap around a center pole. And so they alternately yank on the ends of this rope and it spins the center pole which has a little cross-piece on the bottom and that makes the churning happen. And every other country that I've seen has either this plunger type or we spin it, you know. We rotate a barrel or something like that to churn the butter. So this was a very different technique that I really wanted to see in action. It was not easy to find because in fact, now women are using blenders and things like that even in the small villages.

AMT: Right. So this is a very traditional way. What part of India did you find this?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: I went to the Punjab region so it’s up north and I was able to find it. They were churning it in an industrial bucket, not the typical beautiful you know metal vase that they would have a generation ago. But I was able to actually take the ropes myself and give it a try. It was not very easy. I made a little bit of a mess.

AMT: Do a little churning. And what did it taste like? What did it look like?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Oh, it was delicious. Absolutely delicious. And I think it's because they—I'm certain in fact—is because they take that milk, it's a super rich milk, and they ferment it overnight. They make something like a yogurt, a super delicious yogurt and they churn that whole milk yogurt. I've had water buffalo butter from Italy that's nothing like the one in India. So I do think that whole culturing overnight gives it an incredibly rich, deep, complex, nutty buttery flavour. It was one of the best butters I've ever had.

AMT: And it's white, right? It’s not yellow.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: It’s white. It’s white. Yes. Yes.

AMT: And again just because of the nature of what you’re working with.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: There's quite a lot of white butters in the world. And I think most people are familiar with the range of colours in cow's butter and in general, the lighter that a cow's butter is, the lighter the colour, it's a pretty good indication that that animal, that cow is not eating too much grass. They're eating more grain. But when you have these naturally white butters, it doesn't indicate that at all. It has to do with the animal metabolism. That's why they're particularly white. So it's not an indication of what the animal's eating.

AMT: Okay. So you go on this butter chase around the world looking at different kinds of butter. But for most of us, it comes in convenient sticks from the grocery store, I guess that's industrialized. When you talk about the tastes, what might—well, what am I missing? What am I missing because I buy—and what's the difference between industrial—you know the industrially made butter and this kind of stuff?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Mmm. Yeah. Very, very different. It helps to realize that butter has three major agents that make it possible. So the butter maker—a man, a person, a woman—and then the animal itself and then the animal feed. So those three factors greatly affect the way a butter looks, the way it tastes, its aroma, its texture. That's why we can have so many variations. It's a little hard to tell I think for most of us who just buy industrial butter in the supermarket. We buy what we always buy.

AMT: And most people who buy it like it.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Right. And there's nothing to knock. I mean I have no grudge at all against the industrialists. When that production started to happen in the mid-20th century, it really raised the bar on sanitation and standardization of the products. You know it was a much safer, better product especially for cooks and bakers. You know you don't want your hollandaise to turn out one way one day and then the next day it doesn't quite turn out. So it's really—we're very lucky to have such standardized butter. At the same time, there are many of these smaller batch butters that if you put them side by side with an industrial butter, you'll see these you know subtle and sometimes stark variations.

AMT: How so? What do you see?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yeah. Well, you'll see first of all, colour is a big one. But texture is to me the most fascinating because I've had butters that were a little bit greasy, a little bit loose, some that are as dense as fudge, very chewy almost because they have so much butter fat in them.

AMT: And what would you be making butter from that would have that texture? What’s the animal?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Primarily cows. Cow’s milk.

AMT: Oh. But it's the way it’s made.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: But it’s the way it's made.

AMT: So it's all in the churning and the fermenting ahead of time or?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: It’s the churning and the draining. If you drain more buttermilk off of the butter, then you end up with a butter that has more butterfat, so more solids. You have to have 80 per cent butterfat at least to make a butter. If you have any less than that, it is not considered butter officially. But if you have 82 or 84, 86 per cent butterfat, you end up with a much different product. I mean it behaves differently, especially in baking.

AMT: And so when you look at how butter is used around the world, is it essentially used the same way as it would be used in North America or do you see variations in why butter has become like a universal food?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yes. Well, you know if you go to India, they are the largest consumers of butter but of course they take their butter and primarily make ghee out of it and ghee is in all of their cooking. You know they're not inclined to have much toast with butter on it the way we do. So there's a huge variation in the way people use butter around the world.

AMT: There are also religious and spiritual uses for butter that you discovered.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yeah, it was one of the great surprises in my research because I found that so many ancient cultures used butter as a sacred tool in their spiritual practices. And I knew for instance that the Tibetan monks you know still do these beautiful butter carvings that are the centerpiece of their practice. You know whenever they have a prayer festival, beautiful, elaborate coloured butter sculptures. But I found that the Sumerians, the Druids, Vedic Aryans, Hindus, they all had these practices you know way back when that involved using butter.

AMT: And did they use it purely as butter? Did they mix it with other things to make sculptures?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yes. Well, like the Druids made an effigy you know using the handle of a churn. And they used some butter. They would put butter in various parts of the parade procession for their particular festival that they have each spring or had each spring. So it was across the board the way they used it. And there was one group that worshipped a fire god and when they were in the midst of their ritual, they would take ghee, which is clarified butter, and sprinkle it on the flames and cause them to crackle and dance and they would sing these verses that related to butter and how butter made the gods happy.

AMT: It’s fascinating stuff, huh?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: It is amazing stuff. Yeah.

AMT: And so when you look at butter in the lives of North Americans, when did things really change? Was it the industrialization?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yes. When you get into—well, actually the late 1800s, late 1880s was a huge game changer here in the dairy world particularly the butter world because that was when the invention of the cream separator came along. So before the cream separator, people would put—farmers, dairy women—would put out their milk and wait 12 to 24 hours for the cream to rise to the top and then skim it off and make butter. So there was this long process and during that waiting time while the cream was rising, the cream and the milk would ferment slightly. So you never actually had truly fresh cream. And then the cream separator comes along which through centrifugal force, you can basically separate the fat portion from the liquid portion and now you instantly had cream that you could turn into butter. So once that happened, it essentially caused—I say it caused butter to leave home. Butter left the farm where it had always been since farming existed and it went into the factories because now they could separate at the factory, make all the butter at the factory, and then we were on the road to industrialization ever since that particular moment.

AMT: Hmm. At one point, butter becomes enemy number one in our diet. How did that happen?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Oh yes. I did a lot of research on this particular chapter and I do have a degree in food nutrition. It's from the eighties. So my research actually involved unlearning a lot of what I learned in school about fat because fat was being demonized in the eighties and butter in particular. And that was essentially built on a theory that intuitively made a lot of sense to people. You know if we have fat in our arteries that's causing us heart disease it must be because we're eating fat. So let's just eliminate fat. And now we know you know 60 years later, 70 years later, that that simplistic theory you know holds no water at all. It's not true and it led us down a path. You know it's unfortunate because there were other people saying at the time 50 years ago, wait a minute, you know sugar also causes your body to produce fat that can end up in your arteries. What about trans fats? There were a few other scientists back then you know waving this flag saying wait a minute, it's not so simple. But that was ignored essentially by politicians who wanted to create a diet policy that Americans you know could feel good about like okay, now I know how to prevent heart disease. I just won't eat fat.

AMT: And we know of course that this did originate in the United States and it was really one doctor whose views overrode the research of other scientists, nutritionists, doctors at the time.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Ancel Keys. He was quite an ambitious scientist. There's definitely—you know you learn about the politics within the research world when you study this episode. It was pretty fascinating.

AMT: And when we talk about the politics of butter, we can't leave out margarine.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yes, I know. Margarine.

AMT: So even in this country, right? The fight over the colouring of margarine to be yellow to make it look like butter was a fight I think with Quebec dairy farmers, was it not?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: It wasn't until 2008, I believe, that they finally in Quebec, they reversed the law saying that margarine had to be white. It could not be yellow. It couldn't be confused with butter. And actually Canada outlawed margarine completely. In the States, there were a lot of different regulations you know state to state but it wasn't completely criminalized as it was in Canada. So it is a very long battle.

AMT: And when did that change in Canada?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Well, they had a reprieve during I believe it was the First World War because there was a butter shortage so they did allow some margarine in. But I think it was 1948 when it was decriminalized.

AMT: And why was it banned originally?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: To protect the dairy industry essentially. I mean there was a lot of—what I discovered in my research—there was a lot of really poor quality butter on the market and this would have been in the 1800s, early 1900s. If you couldn't afford good butter, you know you ended up with butter that was often rancid or dirty, you know it had foreign objects in it, you know hair from animals. There was a lot of bad butter. So when margarine came along, it offered people who you know couldn't afford the good stuff a pretty good alternative. In fact it was made with beef fat originally. It was made with whale oil. It was quite a natural product. I can't imagine what it tasted like but it was still better for a lot of people so it was an instant threat to the whole dairy industry and that's why they fought it you know so viciously. I mean they had laws in the States where the margarine had to be coloured pink or black. You know it was essentially let's stigmatize this thing too. So it was a really fascinating battle.

AMT: There were so many different kinds of butter. How has that developed today?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yeah. Well, it's developed—again you know we have cultured butter because the original butters were cultured. You know as I was saying with the milk having to sit, they were naturally cultured. So some countries, in particular Europe, you know have kept their preference for cultured butter. So now we still have that. But then here in the States, once we had sweet fresh cream that took over. So those were two very different kinds of butter. But now you know there's something called whey cream butter which—one of my favorites actually is a Canadian whey cream butter—and that's made from the leftover whey from cheese making. So the whey actually still has some butterfat in it that's leftover enough. You know when you make tons of cheese, that little bit adds up so they skim off that fat and they make what's called whey cream butter and it has a very nice taste. You know it's definitely more complex. A little toward the cheesy side but you still know you're eating butter.

AMT: And how easy is it to find different kinds of butters like that?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: I think it's harder in Canada [laughs] because you have some pretty strict import quotas here, I think again to protect the dairy industry. In the States, it's quite easy to get different imported butters, you know different degrees of butterfat, whey butter, you know many different kinds. And you can also make your own butter so there's another whole option, you know?

AMT: What's your favourite?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Well, I still rhapsodize about that water buffalo butter in India.

AMT: But you can’t have your own water buffalo in the backyard, right?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: [laughs] Definitely not. Not in the Hudson Valley. There’s really so many good butters out there. I can more easily remember butters I didn't like and usually maybe because they were just kind of bland than all the many butters that I have like. I do like cultured butter but there are some sweet cream butters that I think are so well done, really delicious.

AMT: And what's your favorite thing to do with butter?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Well, yeah. I do really love a great pie. You know a tender, flaky buttery crust. But I can't eat pie every day. But I can eat bread and butter every day, just about.

AMT: And do you?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Pretty much. Yes, I do. But you know it ends up being a tablespoon. You know it sounds like a lot—oh, butter everyday—but it's not like we sit down and eat it or me, I certainly don't. My family, we don't sit down to a stick of butter or a half a stick of butter. It's a tablespoon here, a tablespoon there you know. And I generally look for grass fed butter. I know that it nutritionally—it tends to taste better and it looks better but nutritionally it definitely has more nutrients in it than butter that's from feedlot or grain fed cows.

AMT: Okay. You've gone from cheese to butter. What do you do next?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Mmm. I'm not actually done with butter. I'm still hoping to get to places like Ethiopia which has a really old rich butter culture and they have lots of rituals where they for instance, brides are slathered in butter and clay before they're married. It's part of their process. And in Morocco, they bury butter in the ground when a girl is born and they take it out on her wedding day. It's this aged butter that is buried in the ground. So I'm really hoping I can continue this journey. The book is done but I'm not done with butter. [laughs]

AMT: Well, happy travels.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Thank you.

AMT: Thank you for coming in.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Thank you very much.

AMT: Elaine Khosrova, author of Butter: A Rich History and to see pictures of butter making in India and Bhutan from her travels, check our website: www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. While you're there, go ahead—share your butter stories. Click on the contact link or tweet us, we are @thecurrentCBC. That is today's edition of The Current. Stay tuned to Radio One for q. British folk legend Shirley Collins is back with her first album in 38 years. She's talking to Tom Power about the breakup that left her too heartbroken to sing. I should just point out that Kelly Crowe is going to be the host of The Current for the next couple of days. We are preparing to record our town hall in Winnipeg which is why I am in Winnipeg as part of our virtual reality project on the Highway of Tears and missing and murdered Indigenous women. You will hear that on the air next week. You'll be able to download it and you can always watch our virtual reality documentary online. Just go to our website and follow the instructions on how to view that. Now earlier we were talking about Fidel Castro as you know. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau initially remembered Castro as “a legendary revolutionary, an orator who made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation.” While the prime minister only later acknowledged the other side of the Castro legacy with a statement saying, “While a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro's supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people.” And just like that, a hashtag was born. Twitter had a field day condemning what many call a tone deaf eulogy. Tributes mocking Prime Minister Trudeau's words are still pouring in on Twitter, mourning everyone from Darth Vader to Julius Caesar. We're going to leave you with a selection of tweets with the #TrudeauEulogies. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti in Winnipeg. Thanks for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: While controversial, Henry the Eighth loved all of his wives equally and was a purveyor of women's rights.

VOICE 2: It is with sadness I learn of the death of Lord Voldemort, a man so revered and so skilled, few would even speak his name.

VOICE 3: Today we honour Pablo Escobar, a true small businessman, an unlicensed pharmacist.

VOICE 1: Today we mourn the loss of Norman Bates—a family man was truly defined by his devotion to his mother.

VOICE 3: While 99 per cent of the Titanic's voyage was a complete success, the haters concentrate on the last one per cent.

VOICE 4: Sure, Julius Caesar was a ruthless conqueror, but he provided the world with a great drink and a fantastic salad.

VOICE 2: While controversial, Darth Vader achieved great heights in space construction and played a formative role in his son's life.

VOICE 4: If nothing else can be said for Hannibal Lector, at least he had great taste.

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November 29, 2016 full episode transcript

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