Flavourful Saskatoon, July 27, 2020


Local News
The Saskatoon Horticultural Society’s annual garden tour has gone online. A different garden will be featured on their website every day from July 27 to August 7. Several of the videos will focus on food security and growing produce locally. Videos are free to watch and if you catch the secret password in all 12, you can enter a draw to win a prize. Count me in!

Kashmere Restaurant is offering individually packaged lunches, either soup and naan or curry bowls, seasoned to your personal preferences. Never fear! Desserts are also available.


Travel Daydreams
It was hard to accept that I wouldn’t be travelling to BC this summer, but I am finding some compensatory options, such as ordering BC wine online. I’m currently enjoying the wine from Stag’s Hollow and Okanagan Crush Pad. Next up will be 6 different wines from Mt. Boucherie. Mt. Boucherie is in transition to organic, while Stag’s Hollow farms sustainably, taking into account energy, water, and pest management.

When we can travel again, it will be fun to visit the District Wine Village being constructed near Oliver, BC. The initial phase will include 16 stand-alone structures featuring artisan wine, cider, beer, or distilling. There will also be a restaurant, store, and vineyard.

The Economics of Food
“If you’re paying $1 for lettuce, somebody’s being exploited. And so is the environment. . . . Hold up that inexpensive head of lettuce in your mind’s eye and consider the cost of the seed, the price of the hoops under which it is grown, the chemicals used to feed it and kill pests, the electrical expense of heating and cooling its environment, the extractive cost of watering it, the cost of finding, transporting, housing, and paying the seasonal worker who tends and harvests it, and the fuel and other transport expenses of trucking it from the south to a food terminal in Canada. Consider the environmental damage the runoff from these fertilizers and pesticides causes. Consider that the seasonal workers are doing skilled and exhausting labour for little pay, often far from home. Then consider that the grocery chain has also marked up that produce.”


The Culture of Food
I’ve been a vegetarian for over 36 years, and the smell of meat cooking can turn my stomach. If you’re a carnivore, it might well have the reverse effect and set your taste buds to tingling. The same logic should apply when we discuss durian, which gets very bad press in the Western media because of its strong smell. Millions of people in Southeast Asia love durian and can’t get enough of it. There are durian festivals, buffets, and tastings.

Parmesan cheese, black truffles, asparagus, artichokes, roses, and violets – just a few of the options if you were making ice cream in the 18th century.

Food for Thought
“I don’t trust the opinion of anyone who says they don’t like the McDonald’s Double Cheeseburger. . . . The most devious minds in food development, aided by a limitless arsenal of capital, have spent years tweaking and whittling this burger so it hits every sensory pleasure point you can think of. . . . Trying to fight McDonald’s on issues of consumer harm ─ whether that’s health or taste ─ was and is a tactical error. It ties into a wider trend of trying to frame food issues around the negligible impact on the consumer and not the tangible impact on the workers who make them. It’s the same framing that advocates for no pesticide use in case we ingest a trivial amount, and not because of the health impact on those who spray them; or the idea chlorinated chicken will make us ill and not the factory workers and animals who will be exposed to more unsanitary conditions.”

Thank you for reading Flavourful Saskatoon. If you enjoyed it, please share it with someone – or many someones! It can never be too many!

 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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