KI encouraging healthy eating through local food production

Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (KI) is looking to grow a wider variety of vegetables to encourage a healthier diet among community members.
“We’re just at the process where it’s just small individual plots,” said KI Chief Donny Morris. “Now our next goal is: can we do a larger community-based plots.”
Morris said the community grew potatoes, onions and carrots in the individual garden plots and is now looking at developing a new site for growing more vegetables.
“For us, it’s more or less trying to get people into a healthy lifestyle,” Morris said. “And then again, one of these days, service is not going to be provided to these communities and we obviously need to start looking after ourselves.”
Morris said the community used to have more vegetable gardens in the past.
“They used to have cattle here and goats and other animals,” Morris said. “That’s why we brought in 17 goats, just to see if they would survive if we put them on an island. And they did (survive).”
Morris said the goats ate poplar and birch bark while living on the island. While some were attacked by dogs, the other goats were roasted and consumed by community members.
“They ate these poplar and birch barks, just like the moose eats, so if they were put there longer, I think the meat texture would soon taste like moose meat,” Morris said.
Morris said the community also completed a feasibility study on using waste heat from a proposed diesel generating plant to heat an adjacent greenhouse.
“We would capitalize on the heat exhaust that comes out of (the generating plant) and blow it into this greenhouse,” Morris said.
Morris said the community used to collect a variety of foods from the land in the past and construct fishing weirs to catch fish.
“The only time we come across them is when we go out camping or travelling,” Morris said about one variety of food, which looks like a pale carrot. “If you come across it, you harvest it.”
Morris said the vegetable tastes sweeter and is softer than a carrot.
“When you look at the mushrooms and the thicker roots, there were things that were done, but people don’t aggressively pursue these edible plants,” Morris said. “And then there are the berries.”