Flavourful Saskatoon, July 20, 2020

Local News 
You can enjoy cider and yoga on Wednesdays from 7-8 pm from now until the middle of September at the Crossmount Cider Company.

Farmers’ Markets
A first-year farmer says farmers' markets can be key for beginning farmers. “That farmers’ market already is doing a lot of the marketing for you, [and] already has a customer base that is coming regularly. So it’s a lot easier.”

Podcasts
Food Tank lists quotes from 15 recent podcasts/articles that highlight the challenges of building a sustainable, equitable food system. They range from How can we understand and prepare for the connections between COVID-19 and diet health? to What is the importance of middle-man food processors in supporting local farm-based food systems?

In a recent episode of Telus Talks, the host sits down with two restaurant owners to talk through the challenges they’ve faced with nation-wide shutdowns and gradual re-openings.

The Economics of Food
In a recent interview with In Digestion, Alicia Kennedy discusses tech meat:

“I think they can’t conceive of a world where they stop profiting; where anyone stops profiting; where there is a localised agro-ecological food system creating sufficiency for the community it needs to feed, and focusses on putting surplus back into that community. 

“They want — need — endless growth for their products, for them to be in more fast food restaurants, more supermarkets, more recipes… Seeing Beyond Meat in a New York Times cooking recipe was horrifying to me. To be an ingredient, with a trademark… That is so scary for the food system and for plant-based food. So many vegans and plant-based cooks have found so many ways to get beyond products that seek only to mimic animal products, to make things with nuts and grains and vegetables and fruits, using techniques traditionally used by meat cookery — smoking, say. All those adaptations have happened, have been done, have been proven, and don’t need things like GMO soy, which Impossible switched to when it went into Burger King. And Beyond Meat uses pea protein, which means farmers switch to growing peas, which creates an unstable monoculture — what happens if Beyond Meat switches? What happens if it stops being lucrative? It continues a vision of the future which has already proven to be unsustainable, in which growth and profit govern the food system. Impossible is responding to climate change as a catastrophe with the principle of growth that got us into the problem in the first place.” 

Food for Thought
My personal interest in food has always stemmed from a belief that everyone should have access to good, clean local food and that farmers and other food producers deserve support and recognition. A lot of the food media, however, focuses on celebrity chefs and expensive restaurants. But at what price when those very same chefs and restaurants abuse their staff and pay miserably low wages? A recent article questions the role the media has played in both supporting and hiding what was going on behind the scenes:

“Celebrity chefs and food writers need each other—to build their brands and ‘do numbers,’ whether online (for the writers) or at the point of sale (for restaurants). The food media is complicit in the creation of kitchen tyrants, building their profiles, massaging their egos, exploiting their personalities for clicks—and chefs, in turn, help elevate the careers of food writers with access and exposure. In this sense the food world represents the marriage of two uniquely flawed industries: restaurants and the media. There are, of course, important exceptions, but the restaurant media, not unlike technology media in the breathless days of the big new iPhone reveal, is for the most part an uncritical hype machine. It still views its function as handing out recommendations and instructing people where and what to eat. But a restaurant is more than just its food: It’s a workplace, a repository of labor practices, a kitchen with its own particular culture and approach to the management of people and creativity.” 

Thank you for reading Flavourful Saskatoon. If you enjoyed it, please share it with someone – or many someones! 

Flavourful Saskatoon is a weekly Monday feature. I also post articles about food that is good, clean and fair; travel; and books. You may also enjoy EcoFriendly Sask profiling Saskatchewan nature/environmental initiatives and events. 

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