So what happened was this: someone, somewhere, in some meeting, when I wasn't really paying total attention, said: why don't you eat your way across the country? Why don't you get in a car and set out from coast to coast, chewing all the way?
It seemed like a good idea at the time, and I casually said so. And then suddenly someone somewhere said: when are you leaving?
It was only then that I began to realize how daunting this little jaunt might be. I'm not saying eating my way across Canada won't be a pleasure. I'm just saying it will be harder than it sounds.
The sheer amount of food I will have to consume is terrifying enough. I'm already clocking in at 196 pounds, my friend.
Ian Brown eats Canada
But what to eat?
It won't be possible to be comprehensive or inclusive, because it simply isn't possible in the course of two months to taste every fine piece of eating there is in Canada. It might be possible to be regionally representative, but even that's a serious task, because a) this is a big place, and b) representative of what? Ethnicity? Geography? History? Technique? For every raisin butter tart I taste, there is bound to be a coconut version I should've tasted.
Imagine the cook's fury. Imagine my disappointment.
So my decision is this: I am going to let the road take me to food, more often than I let the food take me to a road.
I want the trip to be as genuine as the food I eat.
I want occasionally to hit the country's best restaurants (and even some of its most expensive ones), but I insist on experiencing its least known treasures, too. I am as interested in a $2 popsicle as I am in a $40 ribeye. It isn't just what we eat that can be delicious, but where we eat it, and how we eat it, with whom we cook and eat it.
I want to eat everywhere, at every level: at a great food stand on a corner, and over a fire in the woods in Kenora. I want to eat ice cream, home made and otherwise, pickled beets (ditto), bread of all twists, tomato sauces of all competing (and especially homemade) variety, strawberry jam (with and without pimento, pectin, pepper, peppers), and anything else people make for themselves and others. I wouldn't mind doing a bit of communal cooking. I like to talk to chefs and line cooks, servers and eaters (alone and in clubs), makers and sellers. I admit I have a thing for pastry chefs.
In other words, instead of just cramming whatever I can find into my eager pie hole, I'd like to look at what it is I'm about to eat, find out everything I can about it, and then stuff it in my pie hole--and then write about all of it. If it flies or swims or walks or sits or runs through a forest or merely grows, I'd like to taste it, and maybe see it uncooked first.
Grass fed or corn fed, organic and not. I'd like to know what people think about when they taste something, what they talk about, how food changed their lives.
What I find most interesting - apart from my own eagerness to eat great stuff everywhere- is how much food matters to most of us: how much we care about what we eat and how we eat it, whether it is from ten miles down the road or 10,000 miles away on another continent, whether it is cooked fast or thoughtfully. We live in a time of plenty when most of us have no idea what real hunger feels like.
But we seem to have a great hunger for the experience of eating, a hunger for the experience of taste, a need to fill some hard-to-define emptiness.
What is that hunger, and how does satisfying it come to take so many forms? The meals we remember, that stand out in our memories for years, are seldom the ones that are supposed to be memorable. Why is that? How does that happen? What makes a meal unforgettable? The food? The cook? The setting? The people at the table? The conversation? The region where the food was grown? (Is there a Canadian cuisine? Do we care?) Or are we trying to find something more mysterious--something we can put into our heads, and chew on?
I would be honored to have you help me find answers to these questions, if there are any.
I'll use Twitter and Foursquare to steadily announce my whereabouts. I'll harvest any and all suggestions and recommendations you might have, for restaurants or any other eating experience you can think of, whether it's the best place in town or your ma's best steak-and-kidney pudding.
You might have a new kind of fork to recommend; I'll do my best to take a look at it.
Leave a comment below, or send your suggestions through email here.
I look forward to sharing a meal, however we do it.
Ian Brown