Dear market friends,
This week there is so much news you might want to make a cup of coffee before you start reading this. Sorry it's so long, but it's good. (Please take note -- the farmers will be outside on the other side of the rink house this week, on the rink surface under the bright hockey lights. So you won't have to bring your flashlight to shop, and your feet won't get muddy.)
From Ute Zell of Stonehenge Farms:
"This week I'm bringing fresh wild boar, fresh lamb, and fresh Pekin Duck, English gamebirds, cornish hens and guinea fowl. I'm also bringing frozen local wild fish -- white fish and trout -- from the Turtle Fish Collective." I asked Ute to read me the information on a brochure they gave her. It turns out these folks are the Saugeen Ojibway from Georgian Bay. Ten years ago they went to court and fought for, and won, the right to resume commercial fishing around the the Bruce Peninsula area. Their brochure mentions that they've been fishing in that area for around a thousand years, so I guess they know what they're doing. Ute says she ate some of the fish and it was delicious. If she finds that people like it, she intends to start bringing their smoked fish too.
From Alvaro of Plan B Organics:
"I'm bringing a freezer-full of Hope's organic strawberries. Those are the Mennonite farmers near me. Their strawberries are really good. Also this week we'll be bringing lots of our handpicked and washed spinach as well as several other greens. We still have lots of local eggplant, peppers, some of our own tomatoes as well as groundcherries. Possibly raspberries! Lots of shiitake mushrooms! Garlic will be with us. There's 6 of us shucking garlic today for next year's garlic. We'll be planting most of it before the end of the week. So, something to whet your appetite with."
Special note from your friends the park bakers: last week we had some of the change-of-season troubles that beset mainly people who bake in wood-fired ovens beside a rink house. There are lots of variables for the park bakers, with a few more added when the temperature starts dropping and the bread rises more slowly. Our loaves have a lovely vista looking out over the park as they rise in their trolleys, but re-jigging the baking schedule every Spring and Fall as the weather turns over, can be trying. So last week's sourdough didn't come together that well, and by mistake it was put out on the bread cart anyway. If you, dear market friend, ended up buying a dense loaf with big annoying air holes in the middle, come and get a free loaf of your choice this week. (You don't have to bring back the holey one, we know, already.) This week the bread is good again, the cinnamon buns too, and all the rest.
From Jesse Archibald and Maria Solakofski:
"we have deep dish organic apple pies baked in the wood fired ovens at Dufferin Grove crust made with spelt flax and oats mmm! appley! delicious! spicey!!"
(Note: for anyone who bought one of these pies at the Parkdale Market before Thanksgiving, and thought after they ate the pie that they really should have bought two -- here they are again, just as good as before.)
From Greenfields: Lorenz didn't have time to write. They must all be out picking until after dark, considering the tremendous variety of things they grow and bring to the market. But the Red Barn Troll wrote, saying she's been working on the farm's web site and so has been too busy to write her own farm report this week. "Our recipe site is, however, public now and can be linked: http://greenfieldsfarm.ca/recipes (the beet dish was delicious! even if the kids wouldn't touch it - I ate most of it!)"
For those market friends who grow a garden, the Canadian Organic Growers are holding a composting workshop at the park on the afternoon of the Night of Dread. To find out more, here's the link on our web site: www.dufferinpark.ca/gardens. They'll talk about the green bin too.
For those market friends who don't grow a garden, this is the time to act as though the whole park was your garden -- pick the flowers! Anyone who loves flowers should raid the park gardens now because soon the frost will kill them. Because of the long dry spell, the park flowers aren't as vivid or as plentiful as in other years, but the sunflowers are lovely, and they want to go home with you and live in your vase.
From Winnie Czulinski, the dulcimer lady who played at the entrance to the market much of the summer (we've attached the cover of her book):
"I must say that being able to come to places like Dufferin Market to play my dulcimer was one of the things that helped me "rejuvenate" myself after five months' "solitary confinement" of book-writing! I hadn't really pursued musical gigs during that time, and the relaxed-yet-inspiring colourful atmosphere of your market allowed me to reconnect with my music, in a lovely, non-intimidating way. I've had so much interest from market-goers and vendors re: my dulcimer (and now my book), and lots of warm memories to carry me through the winter now!"
Last but not least (far from it), two of our market vendors won't be at the market this week because they've gone to Turin, Italy, to attend the Slow Food small food producers' conference that started Wednesday of this week. Rodrigo Venturelli and Colette Murphy will be meeting up there with our park cook Dan DeMatteis -- hopefully they can find each other among the 4000 people attending. Here is an article from the Christian Science Monitor, about this astonishing conference, sent over by market manager Anne Freeman:
Headline: Raisin farmers meet yak herders? Must be the Slow Food fete.
Byline: Peter Ford Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Date: 10/20/2004(BRA, ITALY)Sometimes even the most deeply held principles yield to the needs of the moment.
For nearly two decades, disciples of the Slow Food movement have preached the virtues of taking reflective pleasure in authentic, wholesome food and drink prepared with integrity and environmental sensitivity.
But this week, as they scrambled in this sleepy northern Italian town to pull off their most ambitious week of events ever, Slow Food organizers scarfed down take-out pizza with all the abandon of late-night campaign staffers.
To blame for this alimentary blasphemy is the pressure of hosting both the movement's biennial foodie festival, the Taste Fair, which opens its doors Thursday in nearby Turin to an expected 150,000 visitors, and another gathering of 4,000 small food producers that will run concurrently.
Slow Food welcomed the first students this month to the world's only University of Gastronomy. And movement founder Carlo Petrini is featured in Time magazine's new "European Heroes" edition, which sparked a fresh wave of curious phone calls.
With 80,000 members in 80 countries, Slow Food has hit the international big time.
Not bad for a bunch of Epicurean Italians who initially rallied to protest the opening of a McDonald's at the foot of Rome's Spanish Steps.
Mr. Petrini, who exudes an engaging zeal, "has changed the way we think about food," wrote top French chef Alain Ducasse in the citation for Time magazine's award.
The key to that change, says Petrini, has been his bid to rescue the concept of gastronomy from the gluttonous ghetto of self-indulgence, marry it with environmental responsibility, and put "eco-gastronomy" at the heart of the food chain.
"Television, magazines, and newspapers in the West are full of gastronomy, recipes and chefs. It is almost pornographic," Petrini snorts. "Being a gastronome in a classical way is stupid. You cannot develop food culture without respecting the environment."
Not that Petrini has become a tofu and bean-sprout ascetic. The old hedonism shows through when he insists that "pleasure is a physiological need, not the quasi-sin that Catholics and Puritans have made of it."
But the agro-industrial logic of multinational food companies homogenizes taste and crowds out unusual, interesting, and traditional foods, he argues.
True gastronomes have to stand up in the defense of biodiversity and small farmers if they want to go on finding good things to eat.
Slow Food has taken up that battle, saving traditional skills from extinction with projects to protect rare food and wine breeds, from raw milk farmstead cheeses and Cape May oysters in America to pistachio nuts in Sicily and a threatened variety of rice in Malaysia.
"Terra Madre," a meeting that begins Wednesday of over 4,000 small, traditional food producers, takes this movement in a new direction, putting farmers in touch with each other to exchange ideas and experiences.
Afghan raisin farmers will mingle with American maple syrup producers, and yak herders from Kyrgyzstan will have the chance to bump into Ghanaian fish smokers. "These are people on the front line in the defense of biodiversity" says Petrini. "They will go home saying to themselves 'I may live in a village lost in the forest, but I am part of a planet-wide community.' That will be good for their self-esteem and their pride."
Holistic education is also the goal of Slow Food's most ambitious project: the University of Gastronomic Sciences.
Housed in the neo-Gothic splendor of a former royal palace outside Bra, the University opened two weeks ago to 72 students who will learn about food and drink from every possible angle, subjecting them to intellectual rigor normally associated with traditional academic subjects.
"Food is one of the few things we cannot do without, and it is truly incredible that such an important feature of our lives ... has never acquired academic recognition," says Petrini.
"Using the raw materials, and visiting the places they come from, the university will teach all the stages things go through before they reach the table," explains Vittorio Manganelli, the Chancellor.
The curriculum, approved by the Italian ministry of education, is varied. Students will study subjects ranging from food sanitation to gastronomic tourism; from sensory evaluation to the sociology of consumption; from the semiotics of food iconography to chemistry.
They will also conduct fieldwork, visiting food and wine producers all over the world. Their first trip, for example, which is part of the "cured meats" module, will be to the Italian city of Parma, where students will examine the production of the region's famed ham.
Courses will be taught largely by visiting professors. Among the staff will be Alice Waters, founder of the legendary restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., and Eric Schlosser, author of the best selling "Fast Food Nation."
Mr. Manganelli expects that graduating students will be in wide demand in the food industry as critics, and in government departments setting food policy.
The students, half from Italy and half from the rest of the world, have a broad range of reasons for wanting to spend $23,000 a year to become the world's first professional gastronomes.
Sam Santomauro, from Brooklyn, has a very simple motive: for generations his family has owned a store selling fine Italian produce in Manhattan's Little Italy. He says he intends "to absorb as much information as possible to take my family business to the next level.
"We definitely share the Slow Food way of thinking, and to apply this knowledge to our business is more than I could have hoped for," he adds.
Sarah Clark, who has just finished her first degree in Italian, has a broader goal in mind. "The food situation in America is a little grim right now," she says. "Lots of people have lost contact with food and where it comes from. I want to change the way people look at food, and play an active part in bringing it down to a human scale."
Former philosophy student Michael Opalenski says he is impressed by the philosophical approach to food that his coursework takes (as well as by the four-course lunches the students enjoy each day). "We are all becoming this new profession, the gastronomer," he says. "Quite what that is, we will discover, because we are the first to embark on it."
Whatever a "professional gastronomer" turns out to be, the Petrini model is bound raise students' gazes well beyond the cheese board. "You cannot stand up to the arrogance of multinational power without a broad vision," the Slow Food founder insists. "I'm for concrete utopias: he who harvests utopia reaps reality. But slowly."
(c) Copyright 2004 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.
See you at the market!
