Photo courtesy of teppei1111

It’s a choice that many pregnant women struggle to make. How much do you need to know about your baby before it is born?

For some women, knowing more would not be helpful. It could be a source of stress and anxiety. For others, the results from a genetic test could be reassuring; it’s a way of knowing and being prepared for what could come. It’s a deeply personal choice. No one can tell a woman what’s right for her.

There are many factors that influence a woman’s decision on whether to have prenatal genetic testing. For starters, the science behind the tests can be difficult to understand. Then there are the ethical questions raised by the test itself. Is it discriminatory? Is it sending a message?

To explore these questions, Monica Tanaka spoke to the people whose lives are in the thick of it. She talked to pregnant women who chose to have the test, and to those who chose not to, as well as to genetic counsellors and a bioethicist. The interviews, and the process of making sense of the issues, took place over nearly six months.

Click to listen to the audio documentary that takes you into the lives of two pregnant women who had to make choices about prenatal genetic testing. You’ll also hear from the experts as they delve into the details that stem from the process of offering these tests.

Correction: The laboratory mentioned in the documentary is the Prenatal Biochemistry lab, not the Molecular Genetics lab, at BC Women’s and Children’s Hospital.

For their final projects in the spring 2010 term, UBC journalism students reported stories related to local land and food issues. This map shows where their stories are situated in the greater Vancouver area.

The SOLEfood Farm in East Vancouver is part of a larger project to provide locally grown food in Vancouver’s poorest neighbourhood. However, it is finding it hard to grow produce at a cost that is affordable to the people in the area.

The farm is only able to offer only six jobs to Downtown Eastside residents, and none of its first harvest will be made available to the neighbourhood. Instead, it is planning to sell its crop to high-end restaurants in order to pay the bills.

Produced by Daniel Guillemette, Michelle Ha, and Grant Burns.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Many of the popular resources available on cosmetic products and toxic ingredients come from the United States. They include some useful databases and backgrounders, but their conclusions seem at times periphery to us Canadians. Up here, we regulate our cosmetics differently!

Image from FemmeToxic

You may be happy to then know that FemmeToxic, a Montreal-based campaign for safe cosmetics, launched last summer. Its goal: to inform Canadian girls and young women about the chemicals found in cosmetic ingredients.

FemmeToxic is hosted by Breast Cancer Action Montreal, a cancer prevention organization. The Girls Action Foundation also partners the project, and operates to promote girls “to speak out, build skills, and create action on issues that are important and real to them.”

“Youth specifically are more susceptible to toxins in the environment, at that stage in development, so they decided to launch this project,” Angela Day said, the safe cosmetics campaign assistant.

Day holds workshops for schools and community groups in order to spread awareness. She puts on an interactive workshop where she discuses the effects that toxins found in cosmetics have on youth and what they can do about it.

Another purely hands-on workshop she gives is meant to “move away from the toxic messages and products of the beauty industry.” Last Valentine’s Day she held the first of its kind, making do-it yourself facials and bath salts with attendees.

When asked why Canada hasn’t developed a similarly strong movement for safe cosmetics, in comparison to the United States, Day’s answer was two-fold.

The situation in the United States is more urgent because the country has fewer regulations on cosmetics than Canada, she explained.

Day also said that Breast Cancer Action Montreal is one of “few organizations that are working on cancer prevention in Canada and not for the cure. And so coming from that perspective there are just very few people working on it, and to address the issue it needs to come from that framework.”

The FemmeToxic project has recently started a postcard campaign directed at the Minister of Health. It also plans on going national in the next year by loading media art displays and other resources onto its website.

Click here to view a gallery of Fresh Roots at work

By Sarah Buell and Ryan Elias

This summer, Ilana Labow and Gray Oron plan to feed 150 people from six backyards in East Vancouver.

Labow is the director and Oron the head farmer for Fresh Roots, an urban agriculture project that turns yard space into farms and divides the spoils between hosts, gardeners and shareholders.

“We wanted to really test ourselves and see, can we really grow food on a larger scale in the city without having actual land and using people’s backyards that are laying covered in sod and not tended?” said Labow.

Converting a backyard is a labour-intensive 12 to 18 hour process. It begins with Labow, Oron and a crew of interns and volunteers converting empty expanses of grass and moss into lush, fertile soil which they then seed and irrigate.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The harvest

By mid-May, Fresh Roots will be producing weekly boxes of produce and herbs. Hosts and labourers will each get their own crate filled with the week’s harvest. The rest will go to shareholders who buy in at the beginning of the season for $650.

That amount buys them 22 weekly produce crates and sets aside $100 towards a farm investment fund which covers the cost of present and future conversions.

“These people are buying their vegetables for the year,” said Oron. “They support the farmer in a way that allows the farmer to have the cash that’s needed in the beginning of the season and use the full potential of the area that we have.”

Click here to view a gallery of Fresh Roots' gardens

Because the gardens are grown with permaculture techniques, each will bear a wide range of produce.

Over the course of the growing season, they will harvest over 100 varieties of vegetables, berries and herbs, including but not limited to:

• Four varieties of arugula
• 15 varieties of baby greens
• Edible flowers
• Spaghetti and butternut squash
• Carrots
• Tomatoes
• Strawberries
• Many kinds of herbs
• Garlic
• Several varieties of peas and beans

The business

Both Labow and Oron have day jobs: Oron is a software engineer and Labow the multifaith coordinator for Be The Change Earth Alliance. Fresh Roots was initially conceived as a side-project.

“The idea was we were just going to do a project, see how it goes and grow food in backyards,” Labow said. The question the pair sought to answer: “Is it possible to really grow food reliably in this way and make it something that the community can have access to?”

With the success of a one-garden pilot project in the summer of 2009, the two started converting additional yards last November. Neither expected it to quickly dominate their schedules.

Labow and Oron both work 80 hour weeks just to keep up. The administrative and logistical demands of running six farms with diverse owners and needs spread out over a two square kilometre area are greater than either anticipated.

“Farming on its own is a huge amount of work,” said Labow.

The host

Chris Anthony is one of the East Vancouver residents who gave over his backyard to the project. He heard about Fresh Roots through Oron, whom he met two years ago at MOBY, a local community garden.

As part of his contract with Fresh Roots, he’ll get a portion of the garden for his personal use.

“I think in areas like this a lot of the kids and a lot of people don’t get a chance to experience a lot of the same things that you could in other neighbourhoods,” he said. “I find this is a really good way to get people out and trying things that they might not otherwise get a chance to try. I think it’s really good for the community and for the people.”

The community

Though everybody involved in Fresh Roots is passionate about food, Labow and Oron hope to go beyond simply producing weekly vegetable boxes. They see the project as a starting point for education programs to rebuild food skills and knowledge.

Fresh Roots already has an internship program in place with UBC’s Global Resource Systems program. With a background working with underserved youth in Chicago, Labow hopes to offer vocational skills programs next year, possibly in tandem with the Vancouver School Board.

“The momentum of the possibilities of what we can do and what we can offer… it’s huge,” she said.

In the meantime, Oron is excited to get some of the region’s most fertile soil out from under sod and back in the hands of farmers.

“Cities were built on the best growing areas because that’s where people started living and expanded into,” he said. “We’re reclaiming that soil.”

Jenny Hughes has a problem with reusable shopping bags.

Hughes owns Me & You, a company that makes high quality, reusable bags in Vancouver. Her organic cotton totes hit the market at the right time: In 2004, plastic shopping bags had just become a hot-button environmental issue. She said that Me & You could barely keep up with the demand for its bags as consumers turned away from plastic.

High demand is still Hughes’ problem; unfortunately, the demand isn’t for her bags.

These bags may look like they are cloth, but they are actually made from plastic.

The reusable bag market has been taken over by bags that are flown in from China and sold for $0.99 at grocery stores. Most of these low-cost bags appear to be made from cloth, but are actually made from polypropylene, a synthetic plastic.

“I don’t think a lot of people get it when it says ‘polypropylene.’ I don’t think people actually understand it’s made from petroleum,” Hughes said.

Polypropylene bags are similar to conventional plastic bags, according to materials scientist Derek Gates. “The fact of the matter is that all of these synthetic polymers take a long time to degrade. Maybe 50 years, maybe 200 years, maybe much longer, ” he said.

Unlike plastic bags, polypropylene bags cannot be recycled anywhere in B.C., said Mairi Welman of the Recycling Council of British Columbia.

“When they bust a hole, it’s put some electrician’s tape on it or put it in the garbage,” she said.

Craig Foster, consultant for the Canadian Plastics Industry Association, explained the challenges of recycling polypropylene bags.

Jenny Hughes' bags are a little on the cheeky side. Photos courtesy of Me & You.

“You can’t grind them up in the same way you take a rigid container,” he said. “You’ve got all these strands and threads – they typically just bind up any machines they use.”

Foster questioned why Vancouver adopted synthetic reusable bags so quickly. “Nobody asked, ‘What do we do with them when they wear out?’”

“We’ve taken a product which people label as being bad, even though we had a recycling system in place that could manage it,” said Foster. “We took it out and replaced it with something we can’t reprocess which now has to go to landfill. How do we win?”

The plastic bag and pouch manufacturing industry in Canada is worth approximately $2 billion annually, according to Industry Canada. The most recent data, collected in 2007, shows a steep decline in net revenues and cut of more than 900 production jobs.

“If somebody loses a job in the plastic bag production industry, there’s no replacement job in the reusable bag industry because they all come from overseas,” said Foster.

Henry Wong, president of Solaar Portswear, has also been stung by the production of reusable bags in China.

Wong’s company manufactures a variety of textiles at a small operation in Mt Pleasant, including bags for Hughes’ company. Wong said business with Me & You has slowed since China started making reusable bags.

The tags on Hughes' bags highlight the fact that they're made locally

“You can’t compete with them. They’re bringing in those bags for under a dollar,” said Wong. “It’s all about dollars and cents now.”

It is rare for reusable bags to be produced in Canada. “We still stand apart, being made locally,” said Hughes. “When I go to Google and I type in ‘reusable bags,’ it’s shocking how many you can get for 20 cents from China,” she said.

Hughes said that the people who buy from her understand they are paying for a more sustainable product.

“I’ve heard from people who bought them six years ago who say they’re still in perfect condition,” said Hughes.

Me & You bags range from $19.99 to $29.99.

Reusable bag alternatives

Follow these links for more information on hemp, PET, organic cotton and recycled cotton.

Plastic shopping bags by the numbers

• 9-15 billion – Number of plastic shopping bags Canadians use each year
• 8.7 – Petroleum energy from this many plastic shopping bags can drive a car 1km
• 1000 years – It can take a single plastic shopping bag this long to break down
• 93% – Proportion of Canadians who reuse their plastic shopping bags two or more times, according to the Canadian Plastics Industry Association.
• 32% – The number of plastic shopping bags in B.C. that get returned to a retailer after use, according to the Recycling Council of British Columbia.
• 50% – The amount by which the Retailer Council of Canada and the Grocer’s Association of Canada have promised to reduce the number of plastic shopping bags they hand out in the next five years, according to the Recycling Council of British Columbia.

Vancouver arborists remove a diseased street tree

The high winds of the Easter weekend brought trees crashing down in Vancouver’s parks and across roadways.

In addition to appreciating the wrath of Mother Nature, you may have become more aware of our city’s trees.

This week Rod MacNeill takes a look a Vancouver’s urban forest. Listen to his report below.

Tourism Vancouver is expecting more visitors this year, one reason being the recent international exposure from the Olympic games. Though this is good news for the local economy, this influx in tourism comes with an unexpected price for the city’s natural beauty.

Jes Abeita, Rebecca Cheung and Ursula Diaz produced this report.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Students swarm into Sprouts, UBC’s student volunteer cafe, every Friday. They come carrying plates, bowls, forks and knives, and they come with an appetite.

It’s an appetite for more than a well-balanced, vegan meal. These students want to take a bite out of the huge amount of wasted food tossed into the garbage every week.

Community Eats receives boxes full of of produce every week that would otherwise be thrown into a garbage.

Students volunteer to chop, peel, stir and cook over 14 boxes of vegetables and slice over 60 loaves of bread as part of their Community Eats program. It’s a program designed to foster a healthy eating community to promote a sustainable environment.

Best of all, it’s free.

“It’s such a neat experience being here when there are 300 people lined up to get food,” said Renee Wild, a student who took up the role of Community Eats organizer and director after some of the founders graduated.

Wild latched onto the program after she volunteered as a cook and server when Community Eats started in 2007.

“It was really nice to see the community it was building,” said Wild. “What’s really great about Community Eats is you see what you’re doing and the happiness it creates.

“You’re cooking the food or going to pick it up in the warehouses where there’s tons and tons of food that’s going to be thrown away and seeing how grateful people are for a free meal and it keeps me involved.”

Every week Wild and other students collect bread donations from Terra Breads and Save-On-Foods, and vegetable donations from a local produce farmer.

Reduce waste

Students learn about the food and how to reduce waste when they enjoy their free meal. They savour the taste of dishes cooked using bruised, squishy and unwanted produce unsuitable for grocery stores shelves said Wild.


The meal is free because the food is all donated. Anyone who wants a bowl of vegan stew follows only one rule: BYOB or “bring your own bowl,” said Wild.

Food containers are a must because Community Eats strives to create as little waste as possible.

Students at Sprouts find the easy-going atmosphere ideal to socialize, study and eat healthy.

Wild hopes teaching students to use reusable containers, and feeding them delicious meals made from foods normally thrown away, will spark students to be more conscious about what they waste.

“It’s delicious,” said Alyse Alaouze, a student who decided to help with the food’s preparation after her friends convinced her to try Community Eats. She guaranteed anyone trying the food will be back for another taste.

“I try to be aware of our environmental situation. It means taking care of what we’ve got and making sure it lasts forever, and not abusing and over-using everything.”

Food waste is a major problem and 61 per cent of all wasted food could have been eaten if people buying it planned better and stored food smarter, according to a report done in the United Kingdom from Waste & Resources Action Program.

A single family in Toronto throws out over 275 kilograms of food every year, according to the Toronto Star.

“It’s about the bigger picture,” said Dr. Jennifer Klenz, from the UBC Department of Biology and Zoology.“When you start looking at everything you do as taking up a piece of land, it really makes you think because the earth is only so big.”

Klenz tries to teach her students to consciously think about the environment, and how they impact it, as “wasting less stuff and buying less stuff.”

“We’re pretty wasteful,” said Klenz. “You can keep food for quite a while after the best-before date.

“Another part of this eco-footprint stuff is just mindfulness. When you plan ahead, look at what you have in the fridge and use it instead of throwing it out. Re-cook leftovers and be creative. It’s amazing what you can get. It’s little, simple, common sense things you can do to make a difference.”

Community Eats utilizes all of the tips Klenz gives to students. The Community Eats cooks use whatever food is heading for the garbage bin.

“Every week is different,” said Wild. “On Wednesday we go and pick up this food and you never know what you’re getting. And then, on Thursday you’re cooking it into a full meal.”

Interesting concoctions

The stew is then served to droves of spoon wielding students on Friday, beginning at 11:30 a.m.

The volunteers dream up interesting concoctions, said Wild. Cooking is a learning curve and the cooks toss whatever they’ve got into a pot and hope for the best, she said.

But students dig into whatever veggie stews served and if they want to bring a small donation, that’s welcome too, said Wild.

“When you see the amount of food that would otherwise be wasted and you taste how good the meals are, it’s really amazing.

“Every time I look at the food it shocks me to think it would have been thrown out.”



While a vegetarian diet has its benefits, simply replacing your chicken with chard isn’t enough. The key to proper vegetarianism is supplementing the nutrients lost when animal-based foods are removed.

Mike Green, Brooke Hykaway and Jessica Michielin take a bite out of the equation that vegetarianism automatically equals healthy.

Click here to view the embedded video.