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The Whole Pig … And Nothing but the Pig

As Ontario pork producers, Martin and Teresa Van Raay have pledged an oath – to sell the pig, the whole pig, and nothing but the pig – by taking their already-successful pig farm and adding a new business approach by delivering whole, half, and quarter pigs to end customers. It is a unique concept that is gaining them recognition in the industry as recipients of two awards in 2011: the Premier’s Award for Agri-Food Innovation Excellence, and the Entrepreneur of the Year Award for the South Huron County Chamber of Commerce. Read more

Revival on Rye

David Sax is a Toronto-born, Montreal-educated author who currently resides alongside the most successful delicatessens in New York. The number of delis in New York has been dwindling – numbering close to two thousand at its zenith in the 1930’s, decreasing to 150 in 1960, and currently home to only a few dozen – and Sax cannot believe that with outstanding food and rich history that they are experiencing such a downfall. Toronto also has seen a decline from several dozen delis twenty years ago to only six now. Unfortunately, like many family-run businesses in the shadow of corporate entities, delis are on the brink of extinction, shutting down at a rapid pace because of increasing rental prices and other operating costs. If the love of Jewish food could keep a business open, there would be no problems, but monetary constraints and slowing economy interfere. Sax set out to draw attention to his beloved restaurants with his book, Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye, and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen. Read more

A Bird for All Seasons

There are few products that create a more memorable culinary image than a whole roasted turkey glistening with golden skin at the Thanksgiving dinner table. For over 60 years, Hayter’s Farm in Dashwood has done its part filling holiday platters with these traditional birds. In fact, Tradition is a word imprinted on their logo and the farm has been run in the most traditional of ways by passing down the family-run business through three generations. Read more

Living La Vida Local

I recently travelled south to sample the flavours of Ecuador. But it wasn’t nearly as far as you might expect, not as far as the country itself in the northern part of South America, but a mere 60-minute drive southwest of London. With a Spanish name to match its philosophy, Lo Maximo Meats is an offshoot venture of Spence Farms near the tiny community of McKay’s Corners in the Municipality of Chatham-Kent. The people responsible for the Ecuadorian food I sampled are Canadian-born farmer, Paul Spence, and his wife, Sara Caiche, born and raised in Gauyaquil, Ecuador, who now shares her style of cooking with our part of the world. Read more

The Innocent Foodies Abroad

It all starts with a determined, food-conscious bride baking her own wedding cake. From there the new book by Ann McColl Lindsay, Hungry Hearts: A Food Odyssey across Britain and Spain 1968-69, blossoms into an enjoyable account of a liberally-minded couple’s affair with food, life, and each other as they follow their whims to travel across Europe in a Volkswagen camper. Restless to take a break from their teaching careers, Ann and her husband, David Lindsay, set out to find what the world had to offer, but little did they expect such a series of food-related revelations, including a “gradual change from two innocents raised on white bread, tinned soup, and cherry cokes, to adventurous eaters, appreciative of baby eels and bouillabaisse.” Read more

At a Snail’s Pace

Escargot will never be something I willingly choose from a menu. Not that I can’t stomach a few snails if I need to when pressured into a Survivor-style challenge, I just prefer my shelled food to come from salt water rather than the garden. My wife doesn’t have such hang-ups and has been begging me to try escargot for years, insisting I will love the buttery and garlicky morsels. I often remind her that before we met I had never eaten escargot, never even considered putting those dirty little things in my pristine mouth, and I have gotten along just fine. Read more

Live & Uncorked with The Thirsty Traveler and The Surreal Gourmet

Without television cameras on them, Food Network stars tend to let loose a little. Londoners found this out firsthand when Bob Blumer and Kevin Brauch rolled into town for their Live & Uncorked tour, giving us a taste of some high-energy antics with food and drink not seen on their TV shows. Blumer and Brauch have both been fixtures on Food Network since its inception and the live performance was advertised as an irreverent, behind-the-scenes look at their culinary careers. If this performance were ever to air on television, there would be plenty of censoring – the alcohol was flowing generously, the four-letter words were flying freely, and there was even a titillating video display of Blumer making S’more shooters with a topless woman in a see-through apron on the Naked News. Not your typical Food Network stuff. Read more

The Taste of Place

The pleasures of identifying unique flavours in food based on where it comes from is something that started in France with regional wine. The French call it terroir, meaning the taste of place adds something unique to certain foods. Even though the idea was conceived in France, it is spreading as a culinary concept as Rowan Jacobsen elaborates on in American Terroir: Savoring the Flavors of Our Woods, Waters, and Fields, taking us through some of the North American regions that give unique terroir to foods around us. He writes: “If you want to tour the museum of old terroir masterpieces, go to France and Italy. If you want to visit the galleries where new artists are trying new things, look around America.” From the southernmost tip of the Central American country of Panama to the northern reaches of the Yukon River in Alaska, this book covers an entire continent. Maple syrup, coffee, apples, honey, potatoes, mushrooms, oysters, avocados, salmon, wine, cheese, and chocolate take on elevated stature as High-Mountain Maple Syrup of Vermont or Totten Inlet Oysters of Puget Sound becoming “great foods that are what they are because of where they come from.” Read more

Literary Food for Thought

Michael Pollan has become a writer of distinction in two ways. His writing is held in high esteem with numerous awards to its credit, and his distinct and specialized focus on food writing has made him an expert in the field (or as Stephen Colbert put it in an interview in 2013 when Pollan released Cooking: A Natural History of Transformation – “Michael, I think you have a food-book problem). Pollan’s breakthrough food manifesto, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, came out in 2006 and needs no further accolades after receiving numerous awards, including the prestigious James Beard Award and a nod as one of The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year. Since then, Pollan has written In Defense of Food: An Eater‘s Manifesto, a continuation of his food studies, as well as a children’s version of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and, most recently, a thin, instructional guide, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, on putting his philosophies into action at the dinner table. Read more

Food through the Ages

Most books about food rely on recipes and cooking, but An Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage strays from these basic functions and looks at food from a different perspective. Food is important on a personal level at breakfast, lunch, and dinner to sustain us on a daily basis, but this book takes a wider view of food looking at its pivotal role in the collective history of humanity. By asking the central question “Which foods have done the most to shape the modern world?” Standage gives us a crash course in history, politics, geography, social change, and economics.

The foods highlighted in the book include basic items: corn, wheat, spices, potatoes, sugar, and rice. These foods act as the impetus for Standage’s commentary on critical events that have impacted civilization as we know it, such as the role of sugar plantations in the history of slavery and how expensive spices in far-off lands lead to global exploration and commerce. Hunting and foraging may have been the first natural method of feeding ourselves, but farming allowed for the settlement of certain peoples, the establishment of societies, and the opportunity for cultures to specialize in crop production. There are many theories as to why farming started out in the first place, the most interesting being that “it has been suggested that the accidental fermentation of cereal grains, and the resulting discovery of beer, provided the incentive for the adoption of farming, in order to guarantee a regular supply.” But regardless of the main reason, food production is a primary occupation of humanity, currently employing 41 percent of the human race in the farming industry, with farmland covering 40 percent of world’s surface. Also looking into the future of farming, Standage teaches us about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault hidden away on a remote Norwegian island, which has the storage capacity of housing two billion seeds as backup to the world’s plants. The vault preserves as many diverse seeds as possible to propagate any species that become extinct through dire circumstances of man-made or natural catastrophes.

“A farmer creates useful things that do not occur in nature. This is done using plants and animals that have been modified, or domesticated, so that they better suit human purposes. They are human creations, carefully crafted tools that are used to produce food in novel forms, and in far greater quantities than would occur naturally.” Farming may seem like a natural process, but it really comes down to human manipulation of seeds, plants, and animals to be produced in bulk. Genetic engineering may be looked upon negatively today, but it is only the latest technological trend in agricultural history that dates back more than ten thousand years, because all farmers have modified crops in some way. Pictures in Standage’s book indicate that modern corn, for example, does not even resemble the natural maize from which it originated.

With the larger quantities available from farming, came the idea to import and export foods (such as corn from the Americas and rice from Asia) to other parts of the world through commerce and colonialism, resulting in the ultimate sharing of local delicacies around the world. The food most sought after in exploration were spices of all sorts, often written about by Columbus as having as great a value as gold and precious stones. Spices had a great allure of decadence and privilege, often mythologized with magical powers, even listed as a preventative measure against The Black Plague. Dutch explorers garnered huge profits in the spice trade to help boost the national wealth and usher in the “golden age” in Holland in the 17th Century. But it was shortly after this that spices seemed to become more prevalent and more affordable, losing some of their lustre as luxury items. “Today most people walk past the spice in the supermarket, arrayed on shelves in small glass bottles, without a second thought. In some ways it is a sorry end to a once-mighty trade that reshaped the world.”

The book also makes reference to many “food fights,” not so much like the airborne cafeteria warfare in the tradition of Animal House, but rather the fight for survival during the Irish potato famine and the role food plays in military battles, such as starving armies into defeat by cutting off food supplies or destroying natural food sources. “We are used to thinking of food as something that brings people together, either literally around the table at a social gathering, or metaphorically through a shared regional or cultural cuisine. But food can also divide and separate. In the ancient world, food was wealth, and control of food was power.” At certain points in history having access to food translated into wealth and power, and food has even been used as currency in certain countries. Money is still referred to as bread or dough echoing back to food’s association with wealth. Sometimes its correlation with power led to unfortunate results, such as the failure of collective food initiatives in Communist countries and how the Soviet Union collapse in 1991 was largely due to the country’s inability to feed its people.

“Food’s historical influence can be seen all around us, and not just in the kitchen, at the dining table, or in the supermarket,” writes Standage. “That food has been such an important ingredient in human affairs might seem strange, but it would be far more surprising if it had not: after all, everything that every person has ever done, throughout history, has literally been fuelled by food”