food theory applied |
Philosopher of Food who digs the theory and the practice |
One of the vendors of the Toronto Office Markets, the fruit and vegetable vendor, Fresh City Farms, has just released a new 90 second spot, shot and produced by the same company that shot the 60 second spot for Alimentary Initiatives. Penguin Perspective is one talented outfit.
These past few weeks have been full of good days. Working on the Toronto Office Markets initiative at Alimentary has been rewarding in many ways…
One Thursday this month, in particular, we had the chance to visit a local food entrepreneur and sample some of the best savoury pies I’ve come across in ages. The company is called Yorktown.
I love pasties and pies for their promise, for their package-like quality, for the surprise factor, hiding and then revealing their fillings, first by aroma, then by sight, then by taste. I prefer a pie that hides its insides to a pie that shows it all.
We visited the dapper Mason at 94 Ossington, a beautiful high-ceilinged but somewhat ramshackle former bar on the Ossington strip between College and Queen. The place was full of possibilities: big windows onto Ossington, a sense of space, ceiling fans, a commercial kitchen and a bar toward the rear.
While Deb and I imagined a supper club in this space: each of us silently working out where the tables would go, how the candles would look, the mismatched chairs, Mason disappeared into the kitchen and re-emerged with a flat basket holding three Cornish pasties. One was filled with Ontario minced lamb, another with (never frozen) Alberta bison and the third with a stout and beef stew.
We each took a seat around a wee table, the three pies, plump and steaming seductively on its surface. In that room, lit by the street's winter sunlight, dust particles visible in its streams, we took a moment, soaking up the film-set atmosphere, enjoying the pasties' aromas.
We might have been in Cornwall. We might have been in Belfast. We might have been in Stoke Newington, in north-east London. But we were in Toronto, on Ossington Avenue, eyes transfixed on some delightfully promising savoury pastry.
I’ve tasted my share of Cornish pasties and meat pies. There are some smashing eel and pie shops in London, and some amazing pies in some pubs, but I describe the exceptions. I’m sorry to report that most of the ones I’ve tried, primarily in the UK, were simply sad, sad, sad. Tired, rubbery “pastry”, and far too much of it, cat-food smelling fillings, dry, and unappetizing. Most were industrially produced and locally distributed in pubs and corner stores.
But not these lot. These Yorktown Pie samples were beautiful, triangular wonders of a half-rolled puff pastry and the ratio of pastry to air to filling was masterful. The looked scrumptious. The aroma as Mason cut the first one open was tantalizing and the taste delivered with confidence. As a rule I avoid eating wheat. I ate wheat that day. They were quite simply too good to resist.
Yorktown Pies are in business to steal your pie heart away. We were sampling these pasties and a host of our delights in the pie range in our bid to find new vendors for the Toronto Office Markets expansion of Alimentary Initiatives. Why savoury pies? Because people who work full-time, even those of us who love cooking, sometimes just need a solution for dinner. But we’re choosy. We want well-prepared food, with ingredients of good provenance and we want the food to be sustainably produced. Locally prepared food with choice ingredients fits the bill. And while I love cooking, I also love a solution for dinner that means I don’t have to spend loads of time cleaning my kitchen afterwards. I want to be able to buy a beautiful beef and stout pie for dinner, pop it in the oven for 20 minutes or so, and then perhaps make a salad. That’s a dinner solution and when it tastes as good as these pies taste, I’m sold.
There’s one small problem for me. As I mentioned, I don’t eat wheat and neither does my son. So, we had a doubly lucky Thursday, because we also got a chance to sample some astounding gluten-free pies, savoury and sweet, from another baked goods company called Defloured. The savoury swiss chard and chevre galette was delicious. Another dinner solution and one that works for me but not for Noah who’s allergic to dairy.
But Defloured has got us covered.
They know that a lot of people who avoid wheat also avoid other of the main allergens and they do a line of gluten-free and vegan baked goods. I’ve yet to try those but I will. Both Yorktown and Defloured will be featured in the Toronto Office Markets roster. Look for the newest Toronto Office Market at the ING DIRECT café starting with our Preview Market on Thursday March 1st with the official launch the following week on Thursday March 8th at 11:30 am. This office market will be open to the public, so if you’re in the neighbourhood of Yonge and Shuter streets, come on by and taste the scrumptious food for yourselves. With vendors like these and our wonderful pilot vendors, Toronto Office Markets is set to bring astoundingly good, local food to whichever offices are ready for us.
Contact aruna@alimentaryinitiatives.com for more information. Or visit our website: http://alimentaryinitiatives.com
five lunchtime labs investigating ingredients 
At each lab, we will discuss five ingredients, & sample dishes featuring them. You will leave knowing where to find them, how to prepare them and with a recipe or two drawing from both old and new world cuisines. The samples would satisfy a modest appetite as lunch; many of us would likely want to bring along a little something extra.
Lab 01 Exploring the Sour: new ways to pucker up Friday January 27, 2012: 1:00-1:45pm
Sorrel
Tamarind
Sumac
Kaffir Lime Leaves
Key Lime
Lab 02 Taking Your Pulse: wondrous beans & peas Friday February 3, 2012: 1:00-1:45pm
Toor dal
Puy lentil
Fava bean
Chick pea
Romano bean
Lab 03 Black is the colour: food by colour Friday February 10, 2012: 1:00-1:45pm
Black sesame
Black chickpeas
Black onion seed
Black noodles
Black rice
Lab 04 Apiaceae or Umbelliferae Family Friday February 17, 2012: 1:00-1:45pm
Fennel
Cumin & Carraway & Anise seed
Asafoetida
Carrot
Celery
Lab 05 Cracking the egg Friday February 24, 2012: 1:00-1:45pm
Carp roe
Sustainable caviar?
Quail egg
Chicken egg
Duck egg
Price: entire series (five Friday lunchtime sessions) $75; single session $17
Bonus: Book & pay for entire series by7 pm on Wednesday & receive a $10 discount
Centre for Social Innovation-Annex Room 4 (except Feb 17, Room 1)
720 Bathurst St. Toronto, ON Bathurst Subway: BIXI Bathurst & Lennox
More information? Want to sign up? Contact aruna@socialinnovation.ca
PLUS:
FRESH CITY FARMS
Did you know that Fresh City Farms, a local organic farm located within Toronto's city limits offers an ultra convenient weekly home delivery service and that you can customize your weekly box or add products to it like Nice Buns fougasse and organic wine? And for this week only, the first box is discounted and available for half price: that's $15 and change for a box of mostly local, organic produce! Crazy. 
Sign up here:
(Photo: Penguin Perspective)
It was just a single day-trip. It began slightly behind schedule, partly because I got lost in the labyrinth of tunnels at the York Mills subway station. But at 7:20 am, I emerged from the underground and joined Phillip in his warm car, sipping the hot coffee he had ready, and off we headed westbound for Stratford.
The idea for this trip was hatched when I first met Phillip in his beautiful greenhouse that is part of his and Ran Goel's company, Fresh City Farms, in Downsview. That morning some weeks ago was quite magical and in our discussion, Phillip mentioned that he was interested in visiting a farm that was off the grid.
I sent my friend Daniel of Monforte Dairy an email asking him if he knew of anyone we could visit who was farming off-grid and Daniel and his mom, Ruth, suggested we could visit their good friend David, who is an orthodox Mennonite farmer living not far from Stratford. So, here we were on the fourth day of the year, headed west on the 401 to visit Ruth's dairy and to visit David's off-the-grid farm.
What a glorious day we had: the perfect day trip. After breakfasting at a local diner in Stratford, we met Ruth and Daniel at the dairy just after 10 in the morning. Daniel gave us slippers to cover our shoes and hair nets for our heads and led us on a tour of the dairy.
We started with the receiving room, into which the milk is delivered and stored in huge stainless steel vats that resemble outsized front loading washing machines. Next the pasteurizing room. Daniel confided that pasteurizing was a bit of a bore of a job and somewhat nerve-wracking as it requires precision in terms of pressing the various buttons, and that if a mistake is made, it's a real pain because the incorrectly pasteurized milk starts to travel through a series of stainless steel pipes into the processing room.
The processing room is filled with a series of large stainless steel tubs, some of which can heat the milk and some of which are designed for cheese that requires cold processing. The processing involves the addition of rennet and cultures which encourage the milk to form what Daniel calls a flan-like texture within a scant half hour. Then the curds are cut with dairy knives which resemble screens that are pulled through the vats in order to break up the single tub-sized huge curd into small cubes of curd. This helps influence the texture of the cheese. Then the curds are put into molds and allowed to drain of their whey overnight. The whey is used to feed David's pigs, and apparently they simply adore it.
Then the cheese goes into one of the ripening rooms. Two of the three ripening rooms are currently empty, but the third room, the one Daniel refers to as the "Wild Room" was full of a variety of goat, sheep and cow's milk cheeses in various stages of ripening. The smell in this dark room was a heady mixture of cheese aromas tinged with some mold smells. The molds help the cheese to develop their rinds. Daniel washes some of the cheeses with olive oil, brushes others with bristel brushes and still others are left to ripen without much fuss.
We returned to the shop at the front of the dairy and purchased (at deeply discounted prices) a variety of cheeses, charcuterie and a Monforte apron. After a spot of lunch in town, we began our magical food and farm tours with all four of us in Phillip's car.
The first family we visited happened to be in the midst of sausage-making. This was unplanned but extremely fortuitous. Perhaps eight people were in the kitchen tending to various stages of sausage preparation. I wanted to stay and learn how to make the sausages from them: it was breathtaking to see the volume of meat they were processing (six pigs had been butchered). While some in the kitchen were stuffing the casing and putting the sausages into jars for processing, others were making lard, by boiling down the fat, which process releases a huge amount of water. Four huge pots were dedicated just to the lard-making, which can take several hours. When finished the lard was to be stored in buckets for use until this time next year. In an adjacent room was a freezer in which various meats and baked goods were stored. In addiiton to sausages for each of the four of us, we were given cookies, including gluten free ginger snaps, and a huge liver. I will try to make leberwurst with this.
Next stop was David's farm, but as we pulled into the drive, both Ruth and Daniel were quite sure that David was not in fact home, as the garage door was wide open and the buggy missing. David's farm has no electricity and no telephone and so we'd no way of making our appointment in advance, short of writing a letter.
We visited briefly with his wife, from whom I purchased wheat flour, grown and milled by David, as well as a huge all-beef summer sausage which will make fabulous sandwiches for Noah in the coming months. Phillip and I also bought a dozen eggs. Ruth suggested we go tour the barn and there we were met with the huge plough horses that David uses to farm his land. Some cows, pigs and chickens kept the horses company on the ground floor, while upstairs three litters of piglets lolled about in the company of cats as the sows lay on their sides clearly exhausted by motherhood.
Then we went in search of David in town. We espied his buggy in the bank parking lot and found him across the street in the local corner store. David keeps his meat in the freezers in the basement of this shop, as he has no such facility on his off-grid farm. I purchased some bacon, some ribs (for rillettes as he had no other bones on hand), a loin chop, a hock and another batch of sausages. David was curious about our relationship to Ruth and where we came from. He invited Phillip and I to come to the farm another time in the early summer when he could give us a proper tour. He wrote his address down on a whisp of paper so that we could pre-arrange our visit next time.
After returning to the dairy to drop off Daniel, we proceeded in two vehicles to our final stop, a farm on Highway 8 past Shakespeare and on the route back to Toronto. This farm is where Ruth stables her two Clydesdales. The horses were magnificent with lovely gentle personalities. Ruth recently purchased a buggy and showed us the vehicle and it made for a lovely imagining: Ruth with her beloved 25 year old work horse driving her buggy alongside the highway.
I grew up in this area and have grown to love the landscape west of Kitchener and onto Stratford, Rolling hills, the familiar site of the Mennonite buggies by the side of the road, and seriously delicious food.
When I arrived home laden with an astounding selection of foods of the region, I prepared myself a simple ploughman's dinner of headcheese, creme fraiche, and chevre all purchased at the dairy. A bit of salad, some fruit and a ginger snap rounded out the meal. A perfect end to a perfect day. 2012 is shaping up well indeed.
You’re starving.
It’s 12:37 in the morning. You long for a slice of ooey gooey pizza but you don’t want to pay out. You’re not after an entire pie. Just a slice. You’re home, alone and ravenous.
This is the remedy:
Take your smallest cast iron pan and set it on the burner. While it heats up, assemble the following humble ingredients:
an egg (I prefer duck eggs but a chicken egg will do just fine)
about a 1/3 cup of quick rolled oats
a t of olive oil plus a bit to drizzle
a smidgen of sea salt.
some black pepper
cayenne to taste (optional)
The pan is warming by now.
Add the olive oil.
If you’ve got it in you, add some finely chopped garlic or shallots or onion, but never fear if you don’t have these to hand or have them but simply can’t be bothered.
Add the oats. Let them roast a bit. Stir them around if they get too toasty.
Clear a spot on the pan bottom and add a drizzle of olive oil to coat and crack in your egg.
Mix the lot about to combine. Add the salt, a grind of black pepper, some cayenne if that’s your pleasure and stir until the egg is quite set.
Spill the lot into a bowl. Add some Sriracha or your favourite daily hot sauce (no need to squander the good stuff).
Find a lovely bit of video fun on Youtube or the paper you haven't yet read and go wild.
Way cheaper than a pizza, way faster and twice as good for you.
Nightey night.
At the recent meeting of the Centre for Social Innovation Food Constellation, we took the time to do a bit of visioning about what we'd like the future to look like as it relates to food. I highly recommend working this activity into your next dinner party. It's quite exhilarating.
For myself, I would like to walk down my high street and shop for locally produced breads, charcuterie, condiments and fruits and vegetables, family farmed meat each and every day. I want my local shops to stock these locally produced and locally grown foods. I want us, all of us not just the 4.5%, to eat our scenery.
I also want to discover what Toronto really tastes like. How does kimchi produced in Toronto with locally grown cabbage differ, if at all, from kimchi produced in Seoul? This question is one that I'd like to answer soonish. Toronto is one of the best food cities in the world. We have some of the best alluvial soil, and we have the wealth of food know-how from across the globe. So, how do we understand terroir when we talk about the soil, the sun, the growing conditions and we combine that notion with the incredible mix of the influences of the world's various culinary traditions?
I am a lucky woman. There are others who share my vision for the future of food. They are the local food artisans and visionary farmers who are determined to see this vision through to its conclusion. Fresh City Farms is growing beautiful salad greens, killer beets and so much more right within our city limits on land in Downsview near Keele and Steeles. Their greenhouse is a place to behold. So smart, so efficient, so gorgeous and growing the food that I now purchase regularly in my office building's food market each Tuesday. I can only recommend a visit. I felt wonderful being there. It might have been the oxygen all those plants were exhaling but I put it down to the energy and dynamism of Fresh City's team: it's quite infectious. Hard workers and beautiful produce. I'm in.
Nice Buns, a sole proprietorship bakery that has no funds for bricks and mortar and so has its baker, Sara Lapell, baking wherever she can find an affordable commercial kitchen, most recently at Len Senator's The Depanneur, makes astoundingly good fougasse, a sour dough savoury herb and onion bread which smells as good as it tastes. Her white loaves sell well too. I'd like this calibre of bread to be available in every neighbourhood.
Len's place the Depanneur has been instrumental in helping small producers get their brilliant wares to markets. He barters with them in exchange for the use of his commercially approved kitchen. In the same venue, located at College and Havelock, he hosts the Rusholme Supper Club, where this past Friday I had the very good fortune to sit at the table for their Terra Madre dinner cooked by the masterful Grant "Prairie Boy" MacPherson, who not only prepared an exquisite dinner but also grew many of the vegetables he served. His dinner made me weak in the knees. Supper clubs are springing up throughout the city, but I'd like them to more prevalent. Len's model permits chefs to propose a dinner and then cook it for 20 people who buy tickets for that menu. Len wants to see the model spread around town, the country and beyond. Me too.
Earth and City, a raw and vegan food purveyor about which I've written before, is another example of the sort of companies I want to thrive. They have everything it takes to be wildly successful, except the bricks and mortar. You will find them at markets across the city and fortunately also at ours.
I'd like fresh, locally grown and locally produced food to be a snap to find. Like many people in this sector, I want to be able to pick up this food each and every day and prepare and eat it fresh. If you're a regular reader of this blog, you'll know that I unplugged my fridge for three months earlier this year in a bid to reduce my food waste. I have since replaced my enormous-but-standard-for-most-North American-kitchens fridge with a svelte model (the Audrey Hepburn of fridges) and so now I want to be able to buy daily amounts of fresh local food regularly.
Instead of fast food joints lining the high streets of my city, I'd like to see chocolatiers like Boardwalk Chocolates which produces custom-made chocolate truffles and offers a unique selection of dark chocolate delights that are fair-trade and organic. Boardwalk on the corner, please.
And Chocosol--imagine a tortilla joint in which the tortillas are made from corn by the taco maker. Not corn meal, not corn flour, but fresh corn.
I'd like to stop in at a Soup and preserve shop like Augie's Soups on my way home from work and buy a jar of a lovely soup featuring local ingredients prepared with care and without preservatives. And then stop by a cheese shop featuring Monforte Cheese and onion chutneys, and maybe a deli with local charcuterie and Jesse Mudie's Luscious Dips featuring hummus-like dips made with root vegetables.
None of these companies has yet got the bricks and mortar on my highstreet. So, if you want to find these delectable local foods like the preserves of Niagara Presents, you have to do a bit of searching, you have to be committed, you have to be in the know. That's just not right.
Buying locally produced food should be as easy as buying industrially produced food is now, only a lot more fun! You shouldn't have to endure an endless parking lot, or musak, or artificial aromas intended to get your gastric juices flowing. (Actually Fresh City Farms has a home delivery service, so you could have fresh local produce delivered to your door, which is pretty convenient...)
Together with like-minded people, we are trying to realize this dream, this city of our imaginations. We've been running a market in our offices as part of a pilot to see whether small office buildings could support a weekly market offering of local produce, breads, cheeses and prepared foods like soups, root vegetable dips, crackers and preserves. We're gearing up to roll this concept out to more offices in downtown Toronto.
So, we dream in stages. The idea of Toronto Office Markets is to make locally produced food more convenient, more accessible and easy peasy to find. With the genius help of Penguin Perspective, we are trying to get that idea transmitted via video across the continent, and we'd love to see people organize the Albuquerque Office Markets and the Vancouver Office Markets.
View the video here.
In Toronto, we're starting with private spaces like offices, but in the second stage, we'd like to see these sorts of markets in subway stations across the continent. And these markets would feature local produce, local breads and local cheeses. The third stage is that our high streets once again feature a preponderance of proprietor-owned shops featuring local foods. How lovely would that be?
(photos: Penguin Perspective)
Just like my friends who claim to hate offal, “I don’t eat heart, kidney and the like,” they tell me then confess a weakness for sausages (and what exactly goes in there, d’ya think, and what’s that stuff holding that sausage together?), most of us have, however unwittingly, eaten bugs.
Do you dig grains? You’re a bug-eating vet, guaranteed. Peanut butter? Uh huh. Cereal. Oh yeah!
Tenebrio Molitor is a beetle that loves to live in mills or granaries. And since there is no easy and efficient way to get rid of the little critters, well you let them slide . In cornmeal for instance, the US Food and Drug Administration allows, and I quote “Average of one (or more) whole insects or equivalent per 50 grams”. Gotta love those parentheses. Sounds like no rule at all to me.
But perhaps you’ll grant me that we are, most of us anyway, bug eating vets.
So, I’d like to solicit agreement that given the choice, it is better to eat well prepared gourmet foods with excellent local ingredients than industrially prepared dishes with ingredients of no known provenance, yes?
And so, then, it would seem to follow, that as bug vets all, we’d love to eat some choice, locally produced bug dishes, instead of those bugs of little distinction that we merrily eat in peanut butter, right?
Abigale Miller has had three (3) years to get up close and personal with her Tenebrio Molitor critters. She’s developed cracker recipes, for instance. She’s discovered that the young Tenebrio Molitor (a rather saucy fellow) is quite nutty when he’s been toasted a bit. She’s going to share all this and more with us during Alimentary Initiatives inaugural cocktail hour talk. A little cava, a little night music, a little aria, a little canapé and a scrumptious talk by Abigale Miller (dig her last name given her favourite protein).
Get your ticket here: http://tenebriomolitor.eventbrite.com/
or reserve by emailing info@philosopheroffood.com
info: http://alimentaryinitiatives.com/future-food-series/
Oh, and in case you've just gotta know what else you're eating on the side as it were: click here. Warning though: you may find it hard to eat industrially prepared food ever again.
People want to eat locally grown food -- but only if it's convenient. Toronto Office Markets makes it convenient by delivering fresh, local food directly to the workplace.
Learn more at www.alimentaryinitiatives.com | Produced by Penguin Perspective
Attended the Sustain Ontario conference this past weekend. Sadly, I missed Raj Patel’s talk; nevertheless, I met with many great people who are doing terrific work, often for breadcrumbs or less. These are community workers, writers, cheese makers, the province’s only food lawyer, (Carly Dunster—one of my food heroes), policy makers, funders and so many more. It was very cool to meet, hang out, dine, listen to, drink with and talk with these people. Very cool, and I feel very fortunate to have been able to attend to represent FoodShare and the work I do in the Food Constellation at the Centre for Social Innovation.
A fellow creature just outside Peterborough.
Alas, there’s a “but”.
At the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of Sustain Ontario, just before the big dinner event, a roster of suggestions for the Advisory Committee was floated, their names thrown up on the bright screen at the front of the packed dark room. It contained many of the names that would be familiar to anyone working in the Food Movement in Toronto. These hard-working, smart, well-educated people fill the seats of many of the city’s food NGO boards. Faced with the list, perhaps frustrated by it, one brave young man from Northern Ontario stood up and introduced himself and said, “I’d like to be on that Advisory Committee. Can I join?” The answer, sadly, was not "yes". The reasons for this may be sound, but politically this was a disappointing result.
The room was filled with such a homogeneous-looking crowd, it was breathtaking. There was so little apparent diversity, whether of age, of skin-colour, and more difficult to assess sexual-orientation, socio-economic status, first language, culture. There was, of course, diversity. But there was not nearly enough. Where were the youth? Why did the complexion of this room have so very little to do with the complexion of this province? When I left the meeting, I noted that I had significantly reduced the visible minority contingent of the room. I headed for the bar, spent my breakfast money on a single malt and sat out the rest of the meeting, wondering what the better response on my part could be.
After the AGM broke up, I approached one of the handful of other visible minorities to ask him whether the lack of diversity bugged him too. He replied, “I’m so tired.”
It was the end of the day, and I said, “No problem. Perhaps we could talk tomorrow.” He clarified his meaning.
“I’m not tired right now. I’m tired after ten years of trying to address this problem.”
It’s too easy to lay the blame at the feet of the conference organizers. The organizers did make bursaries available for those otherwise unable to afford to attend, and the conference has been advertised.
I think now it’s up to those who were not in attendance to step up to the plate
We, the people in the Canadian immigrant community, the Canadians of colour, the young people who are passionate about food, the people on social assistance and with tiny incomes, the underemployed, the owners of Asian, Caribbean, and African foods markets and restaurants, really need to get our acts together. We owe it to ourselves and to the rest of Ontario to get more involved in food advocacy organizations. We need to offer to lead workshops at these events. We need to approach Sustain Ontario and other similar organizations and volunteer to join the Board of Directors. We need to recommend workshop session titles, like “How to afford local organic food when your annual income is less than $14,000”. And we need to keep asking for these opportunities until we get a “yes”, and then we need to invite others.
Next conference, I’d like to see a workshop on sustainable fisheries led by an aboriginal Canadian. I'd like to see a workshop about kimchi production in Ontario led by someone who’s made kimchi in Korea and in Ontario. I’d like to see some brown and black and young faces talking about their successes or frustrations getting their small food ventures up and running. And I’d like to hear from the youth who are crazy full of energy and passion about local sustainable organic food. Some of those voices were at Bring Food Home 2011. But we need more. Many more.
As the super cool Wayne Roberts avows, food is the original social media.
Let’s mix it up. Let's show some leadership. Let’s get involved. Let's not take "no" for an answer.
If you have some insight about how to get more brown, black, yellow, pimply and green faces at these sorts of conferences, I’d love to hear from you. I’d like to see the purple hair contingent and more social class variety. DIVERSITY. And by the way, if you’re a man and you care about food, you should come too, because you were under-represented here.
There were many, many cool people at this conference. In fact, I don't recall meeting anyone with whom I didn't want to have a longer conversation. But perhaps my favourite of all was one of the first people I met. I found him in the Theatre of Dinner workshop. He was an energetic, gangly, ginger-haired young man and was so full of enthusiasm for food, he could not keep still. His energy and beaming smile had a magnet-like effect on me, drawing me to his side where he stood behind a grill, making fresh tortillas. I crossed the crowded room in mid-talk, abandoning my over-full computer bag near the entrance. He bubbled in my ear that he grew the corn for the yellow tortillas right there on the Trent Campus, under the direction of another of the indefatigable Michael Sacco’s Chocosol initiatives. I didn’t even get a chance to come to know this young man's name. He was so groovy and full of beans and lively and young. I would have loved to have listened to him tell his story about this über-local corn, and what his vision for the future of food is, and what turns him on about food. I hope that at the next conference I’ll get the chance.
I’ve reached out to some people at the conference, but if you’d like to join a brainstorm session on how to improve diversity in the food movement, please email me: info@philosopheroffood.com and put the word DIVERSITY in the subject heading.
There's a lot of talk about the 1% and the 99%. And there's a lot of corruption and thievery, no argument here. But I do want to shout out to the good guys downtown and some of them do wear suits and ties and carry briefcases and are well paid. Let me explain.
I know a lot of cooks. Good cooks. Some of them are gobsmackingly fabulous cooks.I know some chocolatiers. I know wild bakers, with crazed looks in their eyes, perpetually gummy shoes and hacking coughs. Most favour organic and local ingredients. Some power their food-making machines with human pedal power. Most use fair trade products when they do rely on imported foods.
Many grow what they can. And can what they dig. And they dig what they cook. And they cook and cook and cook. And they don't actually prefer some junky fast food in a diner where, paraphrasing Mr Waits, the salisbury steak gets right up off the plate to beat up on the cup of coffee which is too weak to defend itself. These are not like the chefs of novels. These are the cooks that people my life. And I am very grateful.
They are, though, with some notable exceptions, not necessarily brilliant in the business department. Well, they may be, but we don't know because they're too busy cooking. And that's a problem because to make a dent in the corporate food wall, we need brilliant business minds and not just genius cooks. We are talking system change and while we will do this one chocolatier at a time we are obliged to figure out how to help them survive and thrive in this or any other business climate. They are at a disadvantage. Running small businesses, they do not have the luxury of departments dedicated to promotion or to marketing or to product development or to marketing research. They are entrepreneurs who are doing it all. Cooking, sourcing, baking, marketing, researching, organizing, managing, designing, testing, packaging, you name it and the sole proprietor chocolatier has had to do it all. But, really, what she wants to do is make her exquisite fair-trade organic chocolates: each truffle a marvel of sensual delight. Or her homemade butter tarts like you've never had butter tarts. Or the best damn rillettes you've ever had the pleasure to have known.
What such culinary genius requires is its own team or department to take care of the business side, but alas required or no, such departments remain the privy of the corporate mega-producers. But it's not all doom and gloom.
There are at least four problems facing the small food entrepreneur and a heap of solutions:
(1) Regulatory hurdles;
(2) Distribution hurdles;
(3) Not knowing which consultants to consult;
(4) Tiny margins, especially at start-up.
Here are some solutions.
(1) Regulatory hurdles:There are two options here, well three actually, but the third is not recommended. They are as follows: bite the bullet and learn the regs and comply. This option is not negotiable. If you're in the food business, you have no choice. It will make business sense in the long run. The second option can be accomplished along side the first: collaborate with colleagues and lobby/work for system change. This has been accomplished as cottage food laws have been relaxed in places like Michigan. But if nobody asks for it, demands it, it won't happen because regulators and legislators are not known for reducing bureaucracy. The third option is to break the rules, but this makes a food business very vulnerable. I wouldn't invest in one and were I to know that someone in the food sector was playing fast and loose with the food laws, I'd pass on the offer to collaborate with them.
(2) Distribution hurdles: Forge new distribution channels. We need them. Farmers markets? Check. Farm stalls in businesses? Check. Community Supported Agriculture? Check. Direct farm to city sales? Check. Farm gate purchases? Check. So that takes care of the .5% of us who are willing to bear a little inconvenience for the sake of our food. But we need some serious creative thinking here to get around the lock-out that is in effect with the supermarkets. Business minds unite or perhaps compete! Figure this one out. If we don't eat our scenery, to borrow a Slow Food slogan, we're going to choke on it. Make no mistake.
(3) Which consultant where? A Lack of Business Expertise: A stunningly tasty ragú? No worries. A social media strategy? Um, later, I'm stirring the sauce. Part of the problem is that there are not enough hours in the day. The margins are so slim that the idea of hiring a consultant seems like a pipe dream. And many food wizards find zero time to even contemplate who might be the right consultant. But the right business consultant can double, triple, or quadruple earnings in fractions of the time it might take without them. Sometimes even just a single consultation can get a genius cook to work smarter and realize a better return on her sweat and tears. But how to find them and how can you tell if they're the right one? We're working on that at the Centre for Social Innovation. I'll let you know how that goes.
(4) Tiny Margins. With tiny margins, it is difficult to rationalize hiring an expert, even if that expert, a tax consultant, say, can save you thousands of dollars. The margins need to grow, and that means incorporating an understanding of the triple bottom line into the price of the product. That's why Slow Food's slogan was so smart: eat your scenery to me means if you don't eat local, if you don't eat organic, you deserve the industrial parks on the outskirts of town instead of the pastures and farm fields. But it also means that the cost of a product is not just the sticker price. It's also the carbon foot print. The slogan also asks us to consider how that product fits into the web of life. Do the ways it was grown, traded and prepared promote health and well-being along its chain of production or did the production processes produce misery, illness, poverty and pollution? Until we understand how to assess the triple bottom line efficiently (and the third party accreditation bodies--another growth industry if ever there was one- go a good distance in this direction), we will continue to marginalize the good food sector entrepreneurs, and we do that at our peril.
What does the good food sector need? Business specialists. The geniuses in this sector do not need to learn how to make their breads, cheese, chocolates and dips. They know that already. What they do need is killer P.R. They do need wickedly good accountants. And the sector needs some business imagination to solve some sector-wide issues: distribution, margins, solutions for perishable stock. Good food needs good cooks. But it also needs good accountants, good designers, good writers, good lawyers, label experts, sloganeers and managers. People who enjoy food and have talents in these and related areas will do well to consider a career in the good food sector. The cooks need you.
I am a philosopher who lectures about food, most recently teaching Sociology of Food at the University of Toronto (Mississauga). Lately, I've been working in the multi-disciplinary environment of the Centre for Social Innovation where I lead the Food Innovation Constellation. I teach cookery classes (food theory applied) as well as host events celebrating food culture. I have also recently founded a company called Alimentary Initiatives. We're working to build capacity in the good food sector through a variety of initiatives designed to help local food entrepreneurs get their fabulous product to markets.
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