The Locavore

During canning season last fall, an article in the New York Times Magazine quoted a woman who said when she canned peaches and pears, she was making an investment she knew would pay off. Well, every time I hear that pop when I open a  jar of jam I made last summer, or open my freezer and pull out vegetables I processed during the harvest or turn a jar of crushed organic tomatoes my sister and I prepared in September into dinner in less than 10 minutes, I think of those words.  I might have written (even wearily) last summer that I felt like a pioneer with a deep freeze, I was spending so much time preparing food for winter. But what a fruitful investment!

I saved money buying produce locally (even organic) and processing it myself for storage–not to mention the greens I grew, then steamed and froze. And while I did invest a lot of time processing the cauliflower and the broccoli and the pumpkin and the gooseberries and more, it does save time to cook in bulk. Now when I want to make a soup or a stir fry, all I need to do is chop an onion (I still am using onions from one of the 10 lb bags of Ontario onions I bought for about $4 in the fall) throw in some frozen veg and serve with a cooked grain.

In my stores I still have: frozen greens from my garden, frozen cauliflower, gooseberries, pumpkin cubes from Halloween, many jars of jam and tomatoes, onions and squash and lots of lamb.

Locavore officially launched on Saturday at the Green Barns market in Toronto. It was a lovely affair-with delicious food made by Dawn Woodward and Ed Rek of Evelyn’s Crackers and featuring Ruth Klahsen’s (Monforte Dairy) spectacular cheese. The launch was one of many, many Locavore-related engagements. There have been already 18 interviews on radio and television, there was an event in Burlington at the library last night, there have been stories in newspapers and online, like The Good Food Revolution’s piece about the book as well as lots of warm chatter on twitter.

I have long known that the issues wrapped up in local food touch so many people in a profound way. And yet I’ve been so happy to see first hand all the interest in the book. Because if people are interested in the book, it means that they are interested in local and sustainable food and that’s good news for Canada!

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 had to (sounds negative but I mean this in a good way; we lose something if we don’t connect food with our survival, I think.)

I particularly enjoyed the description of Boston baked beans. The dish is a reminder of how politics and power and economics influence what we eat–always have. The reason they eat baked beans in Boston, says Kurlansky, is because of the cod-slave-sugar trade route of which the city was a hub. Baked beans simmer for hours in molasses. And the dish was intimately linked to the household in that people could cook those beans for hours and hours and hours because they would simply put the pot on the hearth that was keeping the house warm.

The remarkable writings are the product of a federal works program in Depression Era USA that hired writers and would-be writers to record the eating habits of a nation. It certainly is an interesting look into what the food we ate was like before the entire food system was industrialized after World War II.

I enjoyed my interview this morning with Andrew Krystal, host of Maritime Morning News, 95.7 out of Halifax. His show broadcasts to PEI, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia–and everywhere else via the internet, of course. It was a pleasure to talk to someone who was so enthused about local food. Andrew had a question about every chapter in my book. We talked about Quebec cheese (chapter 7) and the gastronomy of place (chapter that is developing on Vancouver Island and about the many interesting farmers I visited while travelling in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

The interview reminded me that the issues bound up in local food speak to people of all backgrounds. It doesn’t matter where you work, where you live, what your background is or how much money you make, chances are you care about where your food comes from. The local food movement is often criticized for being populated by yuppies who love their heirloom tomatoes. But as I saw when I travelled across the country, there is not one kind of person who cares about local food. The issues speak to all of us.

I’m really enjoying a book I came across by accident titled Serve the People: A Stir-fried journey through China by Jen Lin-Liu, an American journalist who moved to China after graduating and found herself wanting to explore food as a way of exploring her cultural heritage. She enrolls in a cooking school and begins to learn to cook.

What I’m enjoying most are the descriptions of the changing food culture in China. As Lin-Liu learns about different aspects of traditional Chinese food–who sharpens knives, how to buy food at the market, how to cook simple homemade meals–the old ways are quickly being replaced by the new. The knife sharpener who used to cycle around the city offering his services is now upstaged by pre-sharpened blades. The younger generation who grew-up eating homemade dumplings, now eat out or survive on what their parents feed them. The wet markets where Lin-Liu likes to shop are being leveled to make way for apartment towers, and multinational supermarket chains are stepping in to feed the people.

It seems ironic to me: just as many of us in the west are rediscovering the pleasures of local food and the beauty of markets and are becoming aware of the problems with long-distance food chains and a global food system, countries like China are hurrying to catch up with exactly what we are beginning to question.

Maybe one day I will travel to Beijing and eat in Lin-Liu’s restaurant, The Black Sesame Kitchen. I’ll bet her food is just as good as her book!

Last week, my 5 year-old daughter came home with a note from her school explaining that if she orders a submarine sandwich from Quiznos at school next week, the sandwich company will donate money to a Toronto District School Board nutrition education program. The note came with a checklist of toppings–did she want ham and cheese, lettuce, or maybe mayonaise–and the promise of a drink and a bag of chips she could enjoy with her classmates next week.

I was a little surprised to learn that a fast-food company was helping the public school system raise money for nutrition education and was nevertheless contemplating participating (my children suffer enough with me, a food conscious mother). Then I looked up the nutritional information for the sandwich. According to the company’s own nutritional information, the six inch sandwich they were proposing to feed my kid contained as much sodium as she needed in one day–1100 mgs.

The irony was too much: my kid would eat a sodium-stacked lunch in the name of nutrition. This served as a reminder of how much education needs to be done around food in our schools–not only for the kids but for the educators themselves.

It’s not that we only eat kale and bulgur in our house. We sometimes–well, pretty often–eat treats like cookies, chocolate, ice cream and I frequently make fun foods like pizza and sweet potato french fries. But that’s just it, they are treats.

Schools should be teaching our kids about nutrition, not only in the classroom, but by example. When it comes to food, schools should be kept to the highest standard. As for books, schools choose to teach texts with literary merit. They read Shakespeare not the Twilight series. Not because kids should never read mass-marketed best sellers but because school is supposed to be the place where you learn to read at the highest standard.

So by holding pizza lunches and allowing pop at events as well as fast-food fundraisers, Toronto schools are educating children in poor eating habits. There’s a childhood obesity epidemic out there and it seems that schools still don’t get their role in fighting it.

I’ve been dreaming about having my own backyard chickens for a long time, but my dreams became full fledged jealousy on Friday. I visited my friend’s house and, from her kitchen window, watched her hens peck about their chicken run. On her fridge was a big basket of eggs. I yearn for two, maybe three, hens of my own to peck about my yard and feed me eggs.

But there are many reasons why I can’t have chickens. The backyard is too small and we park our car in it too. My husband and I agree on most things but when it comes to animals, particularly livestock, our opinions differ. So even if Toronto were to change its bylaw and we were to move, I still think chickens would be a stretch for our family–so here’s to my sister’s husband coming around so I can keep a hen in her yard.

I’ve also started to read Novella Carpenter’s Farm City which has me yearning to grow more of my own food. Problem is, our yard is mostly shaded and the south-facing roof would need to be reinforced if I wanted to turn it into a food producing one. I am looking at my neighbour’s sunny lawn with envy… looks like this urban ag thing may be yet another cause of real estate lust here in the T-Dot.

I watched Julie and Julia last night and, despite finding the Julie part of the movie to be terribly tedious, was inspired to take my old copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking to bed with me. I inherited the book from my grandmother a few years ago and was only motivated to cook from it after reading My Life in France this past fall. I’ve made a few dishes (like the the beef stew, a daube, that I ate for lunch today) and each effort has been well worth it. The complex flavours of her meat dishes in particular are astounding! (Though I really didn’t like braised Brussels Sprouts with butter. They were exactly as I remembered from childhood and not worth revisiting prepared in this way. Now Brussels Sprouts with fish sauce is another story.)

But last night, I read the opening of the book and proceeded to the sauce chapter. By then it was past my bedtime but I was imagining boiling thick beef bones for the stock that forms the base of a brown sauce. I was salivating at the description of the mayonnaise. And the Hollandaise… ahh.

I am fully aware that it is a cliche to say you love Julia Child these days. But how can you not love a woman who worked so hard to create accessible recipes so that everyone could eat delicious food?

I’ve been having a blast writing about the Canadian local food movement for The Atlantic’s Food Channel. Topics covered so far include our country’s underground backyard chicken movement and Jonathan Forbes’ search for the matsutake mushroom in Northern Quebec. It’s great that people outside of this here country and taking an interest in what we’re doing!