THE FIRST SIGN OF SPRING IN A NEW FOOD
SYSTEM
By Wayne Roberts
Early April seems a cruel time to hold a fundraising
banquet at an historic inn that aims to remain authentic to its glory days in
the mid-1800s. Oh boy, root vegetables with dried fruit and sauerkraut, I said
when the mailed invitation from west-end
Toronto's Montgomery Inn
arrived.
The theme of the evening, hosted by the Inn and
co-psonsored by Slow Food Toronto and others, was "putting by," a reference to
the once-standard family and folk tradition of making jams, jellies, pickles,
pie-filling and so on to preserve foods picked at harvest time to last through
the long cold winter.
But some 20 local artisan cheese makers, butchers,
brewers, vintners and syrup and mustard makers stole the show. They
supplied the prosciutto, pork rillettes, smoked fishcake, cranberry and
rosemary compote and ox-eye daisy capers on the appetizer plate as well as the
sparkling cider and pilsner beer that went with that course. Artisans did the
salted herbs that went with the pea soup and the dark ale that followed. They
brought the makings for the main course of pork sausages with fennel seed and
orange zest (saved from Christmas stockings, no doubt) that went with the red
wine. And artisans came through with dessert, a cheese plate with hickory nuts
and wild mint honey, as well as the ice cream and birch bark tree syrup, all
digested with spoonfuls of ice wine and cherry aceto.
All this was devoured in the tea room of the
Inn, a City-run museum the features culinary history. The
banquet was a fund-raiser for the restoration of the
Inn's old bake oven.
A little craft goes a long way in turning relatively
plain and plentiful local foods into a feast. As someone who grew up on canned
peas and frozen beans, it takes me a while to grasp that the artistry of
putting by with smoking, curing, drying and fermenting can actually add subtle
and complex tastes as well as nutrients to food, not just preserve them beyond
their best-before date.
"Slow food creates a culture where we can rediscover
this artisanship," says Jonathon Forbes of Forbes Wild Foods during one of
many toasts that some 65 diners made to the meal's creators. For slow
food advocate Julia Rogers of Cheese Culture, one of the evening's sponsors,
it's "the little guy versus big guy kind of thing" that makes food artisanship
so appealing, which may come as a surprise for those who think Slow Food is
about the rich taste of "gourmet" and rare foods.
Food artisans are now joining craft workers in pottery
and textiles as respected artists who just happen to work on practical and
everyday products, instead of marginalizing art to decorations that hang on
the wall or rest on a coffee table. The comeback of these folk professionals
in the dining world is like the first sign of spring in an authentic and
emerging food system.
Chefs are the superstars of this artisan world,
including our chef, Tonia Wilson, who learned her craft in
Ottawa before chefing for the Canadian
embassy in Italy,
where Slow Food, co-sponsor of the Montgomery Inn event, was born. But behind
the chef is a galaxy of artisans, some of them farmers who add value to their
crops or milk by processing them on their farm, and some of them fulltime
processors who live in small towns and cities. They are the large-scale job
creation project of a new local, high-taste food culture, the fast crowd of a
slow food system.
To call them entrepreneurs is to miss the point. It
assumes that the only people who show economic initiative and practice
economic innovation in a society are members of the business class. The extent
to which entrepreneurship is equated with business, while farmers, NGO staff,
and government workers are excluded, is a measure of the power that
industrialized methods and models hold over our sense of what's possible in an
economy. Artisans are folk entrepreneurs, rooted in a tradition that
identified work as a calling and vocation that expressed a person's inner
character and was therefore a suitable vehicle for a person's passion for
excellence and commitment to seeing the work through from beginning to end.
They were the keystones of early industrial economies until about 1914.
Artisans built machines and homes, printed newspapers, completed everyday
goods from cigars to shoes to clothes, and generally made the first phase of
the industrial revolution go round.
Artisans had character shaped by "agency" and
"resilience," traits highly-valued by today's social policy analysts. The
Canadian Centre for Studies in Food Security describes agency, the skills and
psychology of being engaged and not just a passive consumer, as one of five
key elements of food security. Social workers in schools say resilience is
what allows young people to overcome tough times, peer pressure and ads to
find their own compass for safe and sound life decisions. Agency and
resilience were bred in the bones of artisans, a group that old-time social
historians (including me) rediscovered as a historical force some 40 years
ago, long before I ever thought I'd be meeting them at dinner.
Though they did beautiful work - anyone who marvels at
the homes and public buildings built from these craft traditions knows
something of the combined artistry and skill that was the artisan trademark -
they couldn't get no respect from the established order. Confident in their
mastery of skills and proud of their craft traditions, they were fiercely
independent about the right and only way of doing things at work. The prima
donnas of the proletariat, artisans weren't much admired by bosses, who just
wanted workers to do what they were told. Their feisty ways outside the
workplace also made them seem uncontrollable - a cardinal sin in a society
hell-bent on imposing discipline, order, uniformity and predictability. That
was the basis of the famous complaint of longtime French president Charles de
Gaulle. "How can anyone be expected to govern a country with 246 cheeses?" he
once complained. Respectfully and carefully, Monsieur de Gaulle, which is not
the way of a mass and homogenized - note how this metaphor for sameness comes
from a key process of industrialized and undifferentiated food systems --
society.
Artisans and home-based preservers were expelled from
the mainstream food system as fossil fuel energy moved onto the fast track of
economic growth during the last hundred years. Coal and oil - low in
production costs but high in costs to workers' health, air quality and the
environment - cheapened the high energy costs of canning and freezing foods,
and thereby made curing, smoking, air drying and fermenting of local foods
uncompetitive. The full price of foods preserved by canning and freezing is
suggested by the common estimate that there are seven times more calories of
fossil fuel energy than food energy in standard store-bought foods. As
long as quick and dirty government subsidies and regulations mean there are no
charges for the disease and pollution that comes from such preserving methods,
the sticker price on canned and frozen foods will always be lower than on
artisanal foods which, almost by definition, spend little on energy but lots
on labor and knowledge.
Adapted from NOW Magazine, April 6-12, 2006