Flavourful Saskatoon, July 6, 2020

Local News 
Did you know you can find the Saskatoon Farmers’ Market Co-operative in Stonebridge on Wednesday afternoons throughout the summer? They’re in the lot adjacent to the Spiffy Car Wash at 600 Melville Street from 3-7 pm.

Kevin Wesaquate remembers picking Saskatoon berries with his family as a positive experience, creating kinship and family bonds. He wanted to give today’s kids the same experience and worked with volunteers to plant over 440 saskatoon berry bushes in Victoria Park. An additional 250 bushes were planted last year.

Kevin is a spoken word poet. He imagines a world where “we trade in protein bars for pemmican where we could pick wild berries in our communities. Where diabetes doesn’t exist thanks to the medicine keepers and paleo diets, a place where our children could run free of gangs and crime, a place where young men let their hair out like warriors of the past in suits and ties, where beadwork is valuable and honored over gold and diamonds.”

Cooking 
Yewande Komolafe, chef and recipe developer from Nigeria, explains the difference between red palm oil and refined palm oil and urges us to reconsider who we blame for the ecological damage caused by palm oil plantations. “The focus of the palm oil debate so far has been to make regions on the other side of the globe the first to be implicated for the crimes of an industry that includes all of us. Deforestation and habitat destruction don’t begin on the other side of the planet. These forces originate in your kitchen, bathroom, or pantry, and not, specifically, in the cuisine of West African people.”

The Picky Glutton explains why every household should own a rice cooker: “Rice cookers have achieved what mechanised bread production has not — an alternative to hand-crafted labour that consistently and repeatedly produces a superior result.”

Food for Thought 
I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately about food writing and media. I’m realizing what a big industry it is and how much power it wields. Here are just a couple of the interesting ideas I've come across.

In an interview with In Digestion, Nicola Miller describes popular food writing as aspirational – “what Diana Henry has described as ‘Tuscan picnic writing.’ A genre which demands readers to think that ‘this is the way of being, this is how you should envision relaxation and good company,’ all of those aspirational things. And they are so far from how so, so, so many people actually aspire to spend their time.” This reminded me of architecture and women’s magazines that showcase fancy houses and expensive furnishings that are way beyond the ordinary person’s budget.

This week Alicia Kennedy interviewed Zoe Adjonyoh, author of Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen, who talked about tokenism in the media. Her publisher waited for a year to publish her cookbook so it would come out at the same time as two other West African cookbooks. It created a media moment, but then it was over and they had no interest in republishing her cookbook. Now, in in the wake of Black Lives Matter, they’ve changed their tune and are eager to reprint.

If you want to try your hand at Ghanaian cooking, here is Zoe’s take on a classic West African yam dish.

The Food Tank’s summer reading list includes Diners, Dudes & Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture examining the evolution of dude-friendly marketing of diet products.

Thank You
We have lots of celebrity chefs, but where are the celebrity farmers? Here’s a shout-out to two of my many farming heroes. Dennis Skowordko of Our Farm grew potatoes in a greenhouse so we’d have super-early new potatoes. Pat and Fred Gittings of Grandora Gardens have been supplying Saskatoon with a wide array of chile peppers (and other vegetables) since 1991 – what an achievement. There are many more fabulous farmers, all deserving our gratitude and praise. Why not reach out to one of your favorites and express your gratitude?

If you shop for fruit or vegetables at the supermarket, say a silent thank you to migrant farm workers. They’ve been treated as essential workers during the pandemic but are poorly paid, ineligible for emergency income assistance, and often living in crowded conditions that lend themselves to the rapid spread of infectious diseases. Juan Lopez Chaparro, a 55-year-old father of four, was the third migrant farm worker to die from COVID-19 in Canada this past week.

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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