Such a wonderful

I’ve noodled a new food writing project for a while. One specifically about Canadian food—not what’s found in glossy magazines, not fashionable eating hitched to celebrities, fads and marketing schemes—but actual foods prepared in actual kitchens. It’s pretty easy to become myopic and follow herd mentalities around the normalcy of “local eating,” “clean eating,” and CSAs. It's also just as easy to assume faddish foods and ingredients such as coconut oil, slow coffee, and bone broth are the centre of the everyone’s kitchen (or worse, any kitchen that doesn’t tout them is somehow a lesser space than a kitchen that does).

Then, my thoughts meandered to my backyard. Here, in Waterloo Region, we are known as both a German and a Mennonite community—but that’s only part of who we are. Half claim German or British backgrounds, but the balance arrives from the rest of the world: the Caribbean, Central America, China, Eastern Europe, India, Portugal, Southeast Asia, West Africa, (etc.).

Several projects address current food culture or have cooked through historic local cookery books—and they are fabulous. I’m interested in how we got to where we are. How the land influenced people and food. The waves of new and different cultures. The evolution of our food and drink industry. To me, understanding a people’s challenges, time and opportunities are essential to understanding that people’s food.