British Columbia's Okanagan Valley is a breathtaking, 20,000 square kilometre strip of sagebrush-topped hills that slide into narrow lakes, where southwestern desert morphs into mountainous lake country in the space of an hour's drive. It is the hub of fruit growing and winemaking in B.C., industries that have been significantly (if at times invisibly) transformed by the North American Free Trade Agreement. It is also home, for eight months of the year, to 1,500 temporary migrant farmworkers.  

Conflict Kitchen is a restaurant in Pittsburgh that only serves food from countries the U.S. is in conflict with. Founded by artists Jon Rubin and Dawn Weleski in 2010, so far Conflict Kitchen has served up takeout dishes from Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea and now Afghanistan. I caught up with Jon Rubin by phone to talk about the restaurant that married food with politics.

Christina Turner: Where did the idea for Conflict Kitchen come from?

In March, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest report, a document the Independent labeled an "official prophecy of doom." Among other things, the report predicts that global crop yields will decrease by two per cent per decade over the next 100 years. The predictions of this report are already a reality in many places.

For the modern capitalist consumer, it's easy to feel as though you have no control over what you put in your body. Most of the food we eat is produced by a global system in which the average vegetable travels thousands of kilometres to our plates, a system governed by international trade agreements that privilege mass monocultures grown with the help of cheap labour, pesticides and fossil fuels. Only buying organic, locally grown ingredients is a better choice from an environmental and health standpoint, but total commitment to this diet remains a luxury available only to the wealthy.

Greetings! This blog is about food, politics and the politics of food. In recent years, after a slow recognition that most people in the developed world have very little control over their food, where it comes from, what is in it or how it is produced, there has been a movement toward taking control of what you eat -- buying your produce from a farmer's market, growing or cooking it yourself, avoiding ingredients with pesticides or hormones or scary multisyllabic chemical ingredients.