Margaret Atwood just updated her tour blog: http://marg09.wordpress.com/ and here is what she had to say about her visit to Kingston and more specifically, her discussions with Susan. Click on the link to her blog for the full posting, including pictures!

“Wayne drove us out to one of the site of the Community Harvest Working Group’s gardens, where Susan Bellyea – co-ordinator of Loving Spoonful (http://www.opirgkingston.org/lovingspoonful) (‘delivering fresh surplus food to people in need”) — walked us around the public allotments and communal vegetable gardens. Community Harvest runs local food markets, teaches organic gardening and cooking, and runs a gleaning program whereby families in need can go into fields after harvest and pick up any extras.

Ron Mann and his film crew trailed us and the wind blow my pink sunhat around as Susan explained how the programs work, and how families use the gardens and surrounding area for play and outdoor recreation.  Then she told us of the disturbing plan by the Federal Government to close all the current Canadian prison farms for no good reason – they have not said how they will use the land they will have grabbed by doing so, or how they will replace the food currently provided by the farms, but rumour has it they want to build vastly expensive battery-hen big-box crime incubators of the kinds that have been so thoroughly demonstrated to produce nothing but more and better criminals — and of the opposition of the National Farmers’ Union to this scheme. For full information, go to their site at http://tinyurl.com/yc24jsu.  This is an issue that cuts deep in Kingston, home of Canada’s famous old Penitentiary – which is, not incidentally, the main setting for my novel, Alias Grace.”