Sarah Elton
Jamie Kennedy may be the best and worst thing to happen to the local food movement in Canada. He's the best because the celebrated Toronto chef has championed local flavours and ingredients for decades. He has encouraged farmers and producers to grow their food sustainably and organically. He has trained and inspired a generation of chefs to cook seasonally and regionally.
But when his flagship restaurant nearly went bankrupt last summer, it made the front page of this newspaper and spawned dozens of stories and lots of chatter. Could this mean the end of the local-food movement? Naysayers pointed their fingers at Kennedy. Here was living proof that the local movement was unsustainable, at least from an economic point of view.
Reports of the death of the local-food movement may have been greatly exaggerated, as is made evident by the publication of an optimistic new book, Locavore, by CBC Radio's Here and Now food columnist Sarah Elton. It takes its title from the Oxford American Dictionary's 2007 word of the year, and describes a collection of farmers, chefs and city gardeners who are trying to rebuild a local food system in Canada.
Elton, like many of the locavores she chronicles in her book, is steeped in the writings of Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma and also The 100 Mile Diet, by James MacKinnon and Alisa Smith. She begins her story with a cookie her daughter brings home from a birthday party. To Elton's horror, it was made in China. So Elton becomes "a 21st-century urban hunter-gatherer." She crisscrosses the country, beginning on an Acadian farm in New Brunswick and ending at the Island Chefs' Collaborative on Vancouver Island.
Our farmers' markets are hopping. We have more than 500 in Canada now and, according to Elton, we spend about $1-billion at them each year. Though the number of farmers has been on the decline for decades, an idealistic younger generation - often schooled in environmental science or trained as chefs rather than agronomists - is moving out of the city and into the country to take up organic farming.
And in early January, Jamie Kennedy launched a new bistro concept at his Gilead Café in Toronto. (I figure we reached the tipping point when I stumbled across a classical garden in front of a tidy Victorian in Toronto's tony Yorkville. Each row or square was a different colour of Swiss chard.)
Locavore is a book about idealists, people who are planting beans or butchering cows because they believe it is the right thing to do. That's all very lovely, but the local movement won't ever gain real momentum unless people can also figure out a way to earn a living from their ideals. Elton herself seems a little bewildered about the next chapter in the movement: How do you bring the movement into the mainstream? How do you translate all that optimism into a healthy bottom line? What's required, as Elton herself notes, is a cultural shift, a "gastronomy of place."
But eating locally is really just one part of the gastronomic puzzle. We need to place more value on the food we buy and eat. We need to rediscover the joy of cooking. We need to spend more money on our food and to waste less of it. Most important, we need to find a way to eat sustainably, not just in environmental terms, but also in economic terms.
We need some hard-headed business types who can figure out a way to profit from the current interest in local food, to get our farmers back into grocery stores and onto the menus of fast-food joints. (Canadians may spend $1-billion at farmers' markets, but we spend $45-billion eating out.) We need policy-makers who will protect our farmers' interests and encourage artisanal production - of cheese, of chickens, etc. - instead of stifling it with one-size-fits-all regulations.
The artisanal cheese industry may be the locavores' greatest success story. Cheese shops across the country are selling more domestic rounds than ever before. Grocery stores have expanded their domestic offerings significantly. Best of all, we aren't buying Quebec's wonderfully creamy Elizabeth Bleu or Ontario's deliciously runny Niagara Comfort Cream because we think we should; we are buying them because they are delicious and unique; there are no other cheeses like them in the world. They taste like the soil and the grass the cows grazed on. They taste like Canada.
Sasha Chapman is a food columnist for both The Globe and Mail and Toronto Life.