AND LET'S DITCH THE TERM "ORGANIC" TOO

Last time I posted I was chasing after the use and abuse of the words artisanal and rustic. I proposed that we ditch them, at least for awhile, until we can give them meaning and substance again…

The next word on my hit list, even more abused and distressing, is of course “organic”. Do we really want to keep on with this hopeless label? I remember when the first mindful grocery opened in my hometown of Ottawa, an “organic” shop in the Market area, selling bulk this and that and vegetables and fruit fresh and dried and frozen, grown without pesticides or other chemicals. It was entirely new as an idea for a food shop. I’d been lucky: most of what I’d eaten growing up had come from my mother’s vegetable garden, or from local farmers, and bore little resemblance to the offerings in the grocery stores, for sure.

But why is it called “organic?” I remember asking the woman who owned the store. Well we want to convey that it’s “naturally grown or naturally produced food” she said. You know, like the magazine “Organic Gardening”.

Yes, I knew the mag, for my mother had a subscription. Sometime later she also took out a subscription to Harrowsmith, then a small Canadian-published magazine.

I don’t think the words “sustainable agriculture” were in the air at all then. We knew about pesticides because of Rachel Carson’s work… but still, they weren’t scary to most people. Soon after the opening of the store I had a chance to work with farmers and people in small rural communities in the Ottawa area. I met a woman who was very engaged in local political issues. She and her husband farmed, and she also had a huge vegetable garden. It’s so great she told me, I have no weeds in my garden. The pesticides my husband puts on the fields also go into the garden before I transplant my starts in the spring. It’s so clean and weed-free.

Yikes! I thought, but tried not to show any appalled reaction to her. I did ask her if she wasn’t concerned at all about the pesticides, and no, she wasn’t. It’s such a small amount, she said. And the food is washed and cooked…

There are probably still many farm gardens which produce huge amounts of food for families thanks to chemical fertilizers and the application of herbicides to keep weeds down. For sure people need to be fed.

But it occurs to me that perhaps we’d have less wasted food if it tasted better and if we paid a little more for it. Wouldn’t we be more mindful as we shopped? And more mindful about figuring out how to use leftovers?

So if when you see the word ‘organic” you try substituting the word “sustainable”…see how it feels. Of course we all have different views about what sustainable means. But it’s less about “purity” (not achievable and frankly an elitist idea don’t you think?) and more about process and an acknowledgemnt that we’re all in this together.

We need to figure out food systems that give us all access to food that tastes good and has nutritional value, and in a way that enables us to go on farming and feeding humanity. That means paying more for food, paying attention to food and how it’s grown and produced, and most of all, that means having respect for the people who do all the work of directly feeding people every day, all over the world: the farmers, the people who transport and process agricultural production, and those who sell it, as well as the cooks who get it onto the table. 

SEASON OF FRUITS...AND GRATITUDE

An online friend tells me I have been negligent in not giving any glimpses or news from the Oxford Symposium on Food of early July. There’s a reason I haven’t written about it I think. It’s a place where people come and meet and give talks and discuss food issues both large and small, famous and obscure. The being-there is the point. And I am not a reporter. So I end up stumped and stopped, unable to find the ease and juice to write interestingly about it.

But that online prompting in turn is making me think about the nature of the communicating that goes on on FB and Twitter. I post a link to an interesting story, thinking others might also find it interesting. That’s a kind of curating or giving access to others. And I also post notes about things I’m thinking about or situations I’ve just been in or even something interesting that I made myself for breakfast. Why do that? It’s hard to say. Is this taking the place of quick phone chats with friends? Is it an unloading of thoughts that would otherwise just run through my head? What purpose is served? 

On the other hand, this networking can be so useful for linking people and their needs. The other day I was at the Farmers’ Market that takes place every Tuesday (8 am to 2 pm) in front of Sick Children’s Hospital a few blocks from my house. The dazed parents and others who find themselves visting a sick child in the hospital can at least get refreshed by stopping by. It’s a reminder of a better happier world than the hospital. And a reminder that there is good food in the world; hospital food is still so disgracefully bad around here.

But the farmers who come in to the various farmers’ markets in Toronto pay a real price. They have the cost of gas and the time it all takes to drive in, or else the cost of paying someone else to drive in and to sell for them. I was talking to the woman who manages the market about whether farmers could share transport chores, take turns doing the drive in, whatever. But they come in from all directions, not from a single community or area. Still, if there were a good on-line bulletin board, so growers/producers could communicate their where and when and what kind of transport they needed, perhaps it could lighten their market burden. So, said the manager, find me someone to design the app who can give us a good price…

We clamour for local food, but many aren’t willing to pay the cost of it, and the farmers are caught in a squeeze. Perhaps modern methods can give this “old-fashioned” market idea new life and increased resilience.

With the peaches and blueberries I bought on Tuesday I made a couple of cakes: my skillet cake standard. I say "standard" but of course each time the cake is different, as I use a variety of flours (this time all Red Fife) and flavourings and toppings. I included a few wild blueberries in the cake batter, and I also cooked peaches briefly in white wine with more blueberries, then spooned them onto the cakes when they were half-cooked. Delicious. I like the unpredictability, the fresh discovery each time I make the skillet cakes, as I vary ingredients and proportions. It’s such a forgiving recipe, the best kind. I leave fine patisserie and over-precision to those who love it. Give me Home baking and a casual approach any day.

And on the subject of fruit, I had a large basket of blueberries to work with, not wild ones, this week. We’ve been eating handfuls of them as a snack at all times of day. But even so there were still a lot left yesterday and I was worried that they would start going off. So I tossed them into a pot with a very little bit of water and some sugar and cooked them a little. The intensification of flavour was fabulous. There definitely is a good argument for cooking some fruit – not raspberries or sweet cherries, but rhubarb, blueberries, sometimes peaches…

And more fruit talk: I have some sour cherries frozen, from a few weeks ago. I want to figure out a moraba (preserved fruit) recipe for them, to try to come close to the fabulous carnelian cherry moraba I tasted in Georgia.

Of course I am kind of rolling a rock uphill here. First, sour cherries and not the same as carnelian cherries, which, in fact, are not “cherries” at all, though they look like brighter red, slightly elongated cherries. (Their Latin name is Cornus mas and they are in the dogwood family; here’s a link http://www.wildmanstevebrill.com/Plants.Folder/CarnelianCherry.html)

I’ve seen them growing at the agricultural research station in Mount Vernon, in Washington State (where the Kneading Conference West is held each year – this year it’s September 12 to 14, and will be great), and wonder if any of you have worked with them.

Despite the rock-uphill aspect, I think it’s worth a try, this recipe testing/development with sour cherries, for morabas can be eaten as preserved fruits, but also, my favorite thing, their sweetened intensely fruit-tasting syrup can be used as a concentrate to make a delicious drink, essence of summer in the winter. Or you can drizzle the syrup over ice cream or use it to glaze a cake or…!

FEASTING & FIGHTING, IN A CAST OF THOUSANDS

It’s chilly this evening, as we pass the halfway mark in October. Perhaps I’m feeling the chill a little more because I’m tired this evening. It’s been quite a day.

I woke early, at around five (because I’m still a little jetlagged), then drove out of the city headed north. Foodstock, an event designed to raise money and awareness to help stop the Mega-quarry that is being planned for a huge area of farmland north of Shelburne, in Ontario, took place today. There are many problems with the quarry, among them its scale and also the fact that the quarry is planned to be so deep that it will destroy the water table of an area that is the source of many rivers.

So this is serious. It’s a food issue, an agriculture issue, an environmental health issue. The land has been assembled on behalf of a large US company; those who sold were told the buyer was planning to farm. Now what?

Well some locals, chefs and food people and others, decided to fight the Mega-quarry, and to do that by holding a huge event. They sure succeeded. Latest estimates are that 28,000 people came out to “Foodstock”. It’s an unimaginable number, when you think that they travelled on country roads to get to muddy fields, where they parked, then walked miles in the harsh wind to a forest, where at last they found chefs stationed under trees serving all kinds of different foods, all freely available for the suggested entry fee of ten dollars. The generosity of the chefs and farmers and others is hard to comprehend. The chefs work to make a living, and so do the coffee and tea people and other purveyors who were there, and the farmers who donated produce. And all of them were donating their livelihood to the cause.

Stunning.

Now the next thing is to figure out how to stop the Mega-quarry once and for all. Definitively.

In the meantime the sight of people from near and far eating pulled pork in a freshly made tortilla; or Monforte goat cheese on an artisanal cracker from Evelyn’s Crackers, topped by saskatoon berry jam, or crabapple tkemali; or Hungarian goulash served in freshly boiled cabbage leaves; or black cod on rounds of daikon from Sakura; or buffalo prosciutto (a whole beautiful leg of it) from Buca; or the stunning rillettes from a place in Collingwood (sorry I forget the name, but dazzling, young people of the best kind); or “Ontario Salad” a mix of many ingredients, fresh and lively and local, one of my faves of the day; or chowder served in a carved out bun/roll; or fresh oysters shucked right there by guys with stamina to burn; or sunchoke soup; or warming pasta e fagioli; or Jamie Kennedy’s fries, made with potatoes grown on the farm we were on; and then lots and lots more; was just wonderful, because everyone was so pleased to be there.

In between the cooks there were musicians: singers, guitarists, drummers. It was like a medieval fair on steroids. We were in a hardwood forest, with the scent of fallen leaves perfuming the damp air, and you could see the colour and movement as the crowds walked along paths in the distance, peopling the landscape.

In the middle of all those people queueing for food and eating or serving it, there was Michael Schmidt of raw milk fame, looking a little gaunt in the face. Why? because he’s on the fifteenth day of a hunger strike (he’s on water and lemon juice only). He’s trying to get the government to shift its crazy and destructive stance on unpasteurised milk. Raw milk in Ontario is treated as toxic and dangerous (while processed meats routinely sicken people with no-one criminally charged). There does seem to be something wrong with this picture, no?

In any case, there was Michael, a non-eater surrounded by a horde of people enjoying the best the province has to offer.

Meantime in the City of Toronto the Wall Street protest continues to take shape; and today the Marathon happened, thousands more people not protesting, not out eating, but instead running their hearts out.

Maybe the whole city feels like I do tonight, a little windblown and weary! Time for a hot bath, or a nip of Scotch perhaps? I have bought a new-to-me single pot Irish whisky, 12 years old, called Redbreast. That’s what I’ll start with, followed by a bath.

And in the next few days I’ll write about what I’ve been doing in the more-than-two-weeks since I last wrote here. There are pork pies in the story, and offal, there are double-decker buses, as well as thoughts of change and evolution. At this falling-golden-leaves time of year there’s the exhilaration of colour and dramatic skies, and the pang that they signal the fact that cold weather and shorter days are upon us.