The Locavore

What a week of Locavore events!
What I enjoy most at the events are the question and answer sessions and these highlighted for me the big issues for local food in Canada today. At Toronto’s Culinarium, where we had a book club-style meeting with fabulous food to eat, the big question was how to take local [...]

Just when I thought my interview with Hai Tran, owner of the Toronto restaurant Hanoi 3 Seasons, was coming to a close, I asked about spring foods. Of course, in Vietnam, a tropical country, there are seasons too!
When I think spring eating, I think fiddleheads, asparagus, the fresh chives that pop up out of the [...]

Yesterday’s Jane’s Walk was incredible! Author Lorraine Johnson and I met up with 136 people who are interested in urban agriculture for a walking tour of the area around Trinity Bellwoods Park. We tasted Red Bud flowers and talked about the role of greenhouses in a local and sustainable urban foodshed. We discussed urban agriculture [...]

I’ve been eating farmhouse and artisan cheese from Quebec for years, and yet I had a profound discovery at the Fromagerie Atwater counter last week in Montreal.  I was at the market to tape an interview, with the CBC Radio program C’est la vie, about the chapter in my book that tells the history and [...]

I woke up early this morning in Ottawa to head to the Queen Street CBC studio for an interview with Kathleen Petty on Ottawa Morning. I asked the cab driver how business was and he replied it was horrible. Driving a taxi, he said, is a terrible job. “My father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather, they [...]

Sunday was a gorgeous day in Prince Edward County, Ontario. The sun was shining on the spring-green fields, the sky was blue and the waves of a windy Lake Ontario were crashing on the beaches that run along the county’s coast. And so I was especially thrilled to see a good turnout at the Slow [...]

The difference was astounding. Truly astounding. I put a spoonful of the polenta I made from open-pollinated, stone-ground corn meal I’d bought from Mark Trealout at Kwartha Ecological Growers and I swear I heard birds singing, felt the wind in my hair and the hot sun on my face as I was transported to the [...]

I’m embarrassed to admit it but I’d never eaten congee until this morning when I ventured to a very cool Hong Kong style restaurant in Toronto’s Chinatown for a first taste. I’ll be talking more about this great resto for my CBC Radio column this coming Wednesday, April 7th, but in the meantime, I’ll report [...]

I stayed up way too late last night reading Mark Kurlansky’s compilation of depression era food writing titled The Food of a Younger Land (with an extremely long subtitle). What a gem! A window into another time when people made food a big part of their lives, when cooking was something you did because you [...]

Sarah Elton
From Saturday’s Globe and MailPublished on Friday, Mar. 05, 2010 2:08PM ESTLast updated on Friday, Mar. 05, 2010 4:07PM EST

The view of the Nova Scotia highway from the rental-car window was bleak for me, a foodie on a road trip. The sky was grey, the road too, and the only possibilities for food in sight were [...]