The Beginning
I grew up in a home where my mother did all the cooking. She wasn’t an expert — a chef — by any means. She cooked basic dishes composed of a protein, a vegetable and a starch, all in roughly equal proportions. Her menu was limited. She tended a vegetable garden until it got to be too much work. She was an immigrant from Germany in the 1950’s and found the selection of food in Canada rather strange and limiting compared to what was available to her in Germany, even after the end of World War II.
Take the bread. In Germany, it was made from a variety of whole grains, and the product was dense and nourishing. In Canada, they’d just introduced white bread — airy, fluffy and insubstantial. A bread that fell apart when it got wet and had little or no taste. Neither my father or mother could understand how this new bread was even made, let alone how it could feed anyone.
When it was time for me to leave the house for University in Vancouver, my mother provided me with some basic recipes from her assorted books, some of whom were well-worn to the point of falling apart, supplemented with hand-written pages of other recepes she’d acquired from neighbours or magazines. Those recipes kept me alive through University but the one thing they had in common was their blandness. They were, essentially, tasteless. Other than salt and pepper, used willy nilly, the concept of flavour, or seasoning was an alien concept.
Once I’d completed University, I moved east to Ottawa to take my first job. The recipes followed but something else happened: I met my wife, a francophone from Montreal. She had a spirit that was open to experimentation, and she was melding influences from traditional Quebecois recipes as well as more refined French cooking in her own meals. The results were startling to my palette. Suddently, I was exposed to Laurier leaves, star anise, cumin and whole nutmeg; different cuts of meat and ways of cooking it (Beef Bourginon takes a whole bottle of red wine? You’re kidding, right?); vegetables I’d never heard of or ignored at the supermarket (brussel sprouts, beets and peppers).
Today, we both experiment widely with different cuisines, methods of cooking and different foods. I eat far better today — organic ingredients, leaner meats, more vegetables, less starch, more taste. I’d heard of Farm-to-Table and was actively seeking out more local ingredients. I was trying to respect the seasonality of the vegetables and fruits grown in a northern climate and pouncing on those ever-short moments when fresh, wild blueberries arrived at the market, or apples could be picked off a tree, or when carrots, leeks, potatoes and cauliflower from local farms flooded the market stalls in the Farmer’s market near our Montreal home to the point of collapse.
But it wasn’t until a vacation in Spain in 2013 that I had a revelation of sorts.
As with all vacations, I needed to bring along something to read. Along with a few beach thrillers, I had loaded into my Kindle Dan Barber’s The Third Plate. Through his careful prose and detailed accounts of his own journey into novel ways of growing of wheat and rice in South Carolina and Washington State, of harvesting fish and slaughtering pigs in Spain and the lessons he learned of how food is produced, I realized that, in order to get to where food actually tastes like food, you had to look deeper than organic or Farm-to-Table. You had to look at how the soil is managed, the methods used to farm fish or how the land is utilized to raise cattle and pigs — you had to look at the whole chain of production from seed to grain, the farming methods, how the crops were planted, what inputs they used, what soil they grew in, how animals are raised and what they eat, how they’re slaughtered and most important of all, the quality and stewardship of the land.
Barber argued that you had make a shift in what was served as well, relying more on what was on offer on a seasonal basis, rather than serving a set menu based on ingredients that are sourced around the world regardless of the time of year. He’s revolutionized what he serves at his own restaurants in New York State by linking his menu to what is harvested on his own farm; the menu changes weekly and frequently, there is no menu at all. The goal was to find and serve food that actually tasted like it was supposed to taste.
Take beef. If you buy beef from any supermarket that has been raised in large, industrial farms, it effectively has no taste, and no odour. It needs to be supplemented with copious amounts of seasoning just to make it palatable. So restaurants came up with exotic toppings that topped steaks, for example, to improve their taste. By contrast, if you taste beef that is raised ‘free range’, eating grass and wandering where they may, suddenly that ‘gamey’ taste and odour you get when you eat more exotic types of meat like bison or venison is there. And we’re not used to it anymore.
From Barcelona we wandered to Innsbruk and then to Vienna, and along the way, began to alter our vacation to seek out ‘nose to tail’ restaurants. We found one in Innsbruk that sourced all its menu items either from its own limited farm or from a grower they knew and could trust. We found another in Vienna that was similar.
That experience really got me thinking. Upon returning to Canada, I began to look at food in a whole new way. I paid attention to where the food I purchased was from, and tried to dig deeper into how it was produced. I sought out local producers of meat and vegetables and fruit. And I began to relish the recipes I was using in a new way; there was a taste there that was missing before.
And not only was the taste there, but I became passionate about food again. And I wanted to share this amazing experience with other people.
I’m a neophyte at this. I’m not a chef. I’m not a food journalist. I’m not an agronomist. But I do know how to write. And I’ve built up considerable expertise and knowledge about Government, and how they work throughout my career in Telecommunications. I want to find others that share the passion for good food, produced under sustainable conditions and ulitmately, will contribute to better health and a closer relationship with the food we eat. In addition, I want to make the link between the consumer and Government and their policies and regulations that affect how farmers plant and raise crops, how meat and bird producers raise and slaughter their animals and how all of that product gets to the consumer, and which consumers benefit, and which do not.
We’ve lost something in the last 50 years as food became mass produced in industrial conditions. We’ve lost that intimate knowledge of what constitutes good food, and what food tastes like. And with challenges such as globalization, climate change and fickle government policies, we need to hold governments to task for what they do in getting food to our tables. After all, we elect them to represent our interests. What could be more important for all of us than the food we eat?
And so I’m going to continue to learn. And as I learn, I’ll write about it so that a connection can be made, an experience can be shared and I can learn even more.
