Dear market friends,

Another long market news -- sorry. You'll see why -- good news and bad news and good news to finish.

First: this market will be entirely on the rink pad, all vendors in one big friendly section, with no bottleneck by the garage doors. All the farmers will be wearing their long johns so they won't look as shivery as last week.

From market manager Anne Freeman:

"To make this pre-Hallowe'en market festive, Ted Thorpe will be bringing in some pumpkins for carving at the market. We'll set up a table where parents and kids can carve together. (We have some of the little, relatively safe carving tools to share.) If it's chilly, we'll light a fire, too! Also, Lindsay has finished making rotis at the market for the season, but if you'd like to be in touch with her to arrange home delivery of your favourites, you can give me your name and number and I'll pass it along."

Ute of Stonehenge Farms called to say she's bringing fresh Peking ducks, guinea fowl, cornish soup/stew chickens, lamb, frozen whitefish and trout fillets from Georgian Bay again (she's bringing twice as much so it won't sell out instantly as it did last week, plus smoked fish from the same Turtle Fish Collective). Ute's also bringing some dairy, at Anne Freeman's request: Mornington's goat milk, Harmonry 2% cow's milk, various cheeses including goat cheeses and Gouda, and an alternative rice milk for lactose-intolerant people.

Ute said that Peking ducks and Muskovy ducks are totally different creatures. Peking ducks talk like ducks, she says, but Muskovy ducks chirp like birds.

From the Dufferin Park Oven: really good sourdough (to partly make up for the sad loss of Heather and Lenny Karmiol's bread, see below) and all the other usual breads, cinnamon buns etc. PLUS -- by popular demand -- fresh duck pies. The pies have some sweet potato, carrots, and herbs in them, but mostly meat and the rich but not fatty stock of Ute's Muskovy ducks, with a herbed scone crust. There will be samples to try.

From Jessie Sosnocki:

"We've got some decent weather lately, so any spare time is utilized by doing fall cleaning (fields and flowerbeds etc.) and planting monster garlic for next years seed crop. Ben, his mother and I are out digging and pulling carrots and beets and washing them up nice for Dufferin. The beets still have amazing tops on them! Lots and lots of onions still as well and potatoes of course! (I graded out a few boxes of Kennebec 'whites'. Alot of people really like the flavour to this potato. Lots of Golds and Reds too!) And YES, in a few weeks perogies are coming!! Now that 2 of our other markets are finished, I have time to research and make some calls. As soon as I get in touch with the certified kitchen I have my eye on, health inspectors can come to my table weekly if they want and dig around. (I'm talking brave right now....but will be armed with paper work when I do bring the prepared goods.) Feeling sad for Heather, as her bread is awesome and I want her back at the market! I don't think I can live without her olive bread!"

And here's the bad news:

Last Tuesday a group of at least four public health inspectors came to Riverdale Market and checked people out. They told Heather Karmiol, the sourdough baker who comes to our market as well, to take her (commercial plastic) bread bins off the grass, which she did, and then they asked her to produce her inspected kitchen certificate. When she told them their Vineland bakery kitchen had not been inspected, they told her to have the kitchen inspected by next week, and she said, no problem. A short time later, after conferring (I guess) they ordered her off the property with all her bread unsold. There was an outcry among the customers there but Heather did not argue and left. There's been quite a bit of buzz about it since then.

I spoke to Mr.Angus Tsang of Toronto Public Health yesterday and he said rules are rules, and just because Heather has been selling her bread for two years is no reason not remove her from the market as soon as Public Health has time to come there. He also said that the bread might have been touched by some blades of grass that poked up through the bottom of the commercial bread racks, that there was wind and so dust might have got on it (not bagged), and that people were very lucky that there had not been some bad effects on their health prior to this timely public health intervention.

The upshot of Heather's rather shocking experience at Riverdale is that Vinehaven Bakery will not be returning to either market. They are very occupied with their catering and their young children, and although it will be easy for them to get the paperwork done for their large and beautiful commercial baking kitchen, that experience with public health has made them lose their taste for going to markets, at least for now. (36 hours of work was wasted -- and all that beautiful bread.)

We're waiting for some more phone calls to be returned, because such an ambush is not a good sign for markets. If anyone wants to pass along their thoughts on how they feel about being so vigorously protected from blades of grass, wind, and Vinehaven bread, perhaps Wayne Roberts of the Toronto Food Policy Council would pass the message along to the right person: wrobert@toronto.ca

But now to finish up on a brighter note, there are two reports from market people about their time in Turin at the SlowFood event last week:

From Dan DeMatties:

About Terra Madre, the big meeting of all the food producers: in a discussion with Pamela and Paul (from Toronto, and the park) and a journalist friend of theirs, one interesting thing came up. The big issue for the North American contingent was buy local and seasonal etc. -- what you would expect. But, the people who came from Africa or Latin America and other places farther from centers of gluttony, were more interested in finding markets for their products, ie, the Africa producers wanted to get the Europeans to import their products. Not exactly buying local. But it made me wonder a bit about what exactly Slow Food's attitude toward this would be. Or mine. Because obviously the Slowfood people are interested in protecting and encouraging small producers in remote corners of the world, but this cannot necessarily be reconciled with 'buying local' and I don't know how to 'slowly' ship something across the globe. Also, if you 'save' a rare kind of rice or something from Thailand, and turn it into a speciality product, presumably the market you find for it will be high-end restaurants on the other side of the globe. And then it becomes the sole domain of the wealthy.

A well-known chef I met there from Toronto was thrilled by the whole thing. He said that it was an amazing experience and it reinforced all of his ideas about food or food communities (whatever those are...his ideals, not the food communities.)

The part where I was, was basically a big food fair, like I imagine an industry fair would be. There were lots of producers, 90% or so Italian, all no doubt carefully selected by Slow Food for their Slowness, who had a stand where they displayed their products and often offered samples. I ate lots of Italian meats and cheeses, tasted olive oils, cookies, breads, etc. I had English and French oysters, American raw milk cheeses, Artisanal Cheddar from Sommerset, Polish honey mead, rare french turnips, black french pigs, Brazilian fruit, and on and on. Also, Canadian bread. There was a Canadian contingent representing Red Fife Grain. A heritage grain from the prairies now almost disappeared but in our grandparents day the grain they grew would have been Red Fife. The baker of the bread was from Victoria, and he had brought the flour, his starter, and water from Canada and was baking his bread at a bakery in Turin each day. The bread was fabulous and I think we should see if we can find a farmer to provide the grain for park bread. I have some contact info to pursue this when I get back.

Dan

From Colette Murphy:

We were all spread around the Region of Piemonte (foot of the mountains). Some of us were lucky to be in an AgroTurismo. I was one of those and think we had one of the best chefs in Italy cooking for us. Franca was the shy sweet smiling mother keeping the kitchen warm and inviting; Elisio was the father chauffering us around at night to other AgroTurismos, along with their 2 daughters Christina and Chiara. My room mates were Mariana a journalist from Chicago, writing about food issues and Susan a farmer from Iowa and president of the Practical Farmers of Iowa. We laughed and we ate and we made new wonderful friends. I felt like I was in an agricultural heaven where everyone wanted to do everything they could to support our work. Vandana Shiva, Prince Charles, Alice Waters and Carlo Petrini (Pesident of Slow Food) were some of the wonderful people who spoke to us so passionately about the world we envision. Even Gianni Alemanno, the Minister of Agriculture and Forestries gave an inspiring and passionate and revolutionary speech at the closing ceremony. I have brought back recipes and menus to share, perhaps we can do something for a Fri. night dinner at the park. We were also given a book with a paragraph for each of the 1200 communities and what they do, what they are trying to preserve. I will bring it to the park market for people to look at.

Ciao bellas

Colette

See you at the market!

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Dear park friends,

Three food-related items, as a p.s. to yesterday's market news (all good, no bad news):

1. Two years ago on the Night of Dread, one of the organic farmers set up a little display cart of vegetables as a show-and-tell for a new thing we were about to try, at Anne Freeman's suggestion -- a farmers' market, beginning the week following the parade, on November 7. So here we are two years later and the market is so much bigger and so much nicer than we even imagined.

Fittingly, there will be a lot of farmers' market food at this Night of Dread. (Saturday Oct.30; bonfire and general hubbub start around 4.30 p.m., parade leaves the park at 6 p.m., returns around 7.30 for performances, ceremony, and music). Jesse Archibald, Amy Withers, and Matt Leitold are the main cooks. The food-serving will begin at 5 and go right through to the end of the evening, after the parade returns to the park. There will be lots of:

• -- spinach and roasted squash soup with ginger (spinach donated by Plan B Organics, squash from Ted Thorpe, with rosemary bread
• -- market-style pizzas with thin-sliced potato/ greens/herb toppings (greens from Ted Thorpe, potatoes from Sosnicki's, herbs from the park gardens -- and even some sliced cherry tomatoes, STILL growing in the park gardens)
• -- very fruity bread pudding made with challah and cinnamon bread from the park ovens; fruit filling made with apples from Plan B Organics and elderberries from our park native species gardens; with ice cream....

...and, ceremonially, two barbecued pigs (from Churrasqueira Barreida) and chunks of "pan de muerto" at the end of the dance of the skeletons around the bonfire.

2. Lenny and Heather Karmiol have sent word to remind me that they never meant to stop coming to the market altogether. They want to return next spring, after the new baby's born and the holiday catering pressure is off.

The scene of the public health inspectors making Heather leave Riverdale market with all her bread unsold on October 19 was awful, but it may still have a good consequence. Many people e-mailed Wayne Roberts, head of Toronto's Food Policy Council. Wayne connected us with Public Health manager Gerry Lawrence. Gerry explained that normally the Healthy Environments staff (a.k.a. public health inspectors) try to ensure "progressive compliance" when they find someone not following a rule. That is, they would ask a vendor like Heather to come back the following week with the required documentation, but not ban the bread on the same day the paperwork was first requested. Gerry agrees that a meeting, about the nature of farmers' markets, between Public Health managers and farmers' market people would be good, and hopefully Public Health can fit that in, in about four months. We'll keep you posted.

3. For your information, a Sunday Night "guerilla gourmet" supper, in a beautiful old house at an undisclosed location. They may be sold out for this week, but if you want to try, the poster is attached.

See you at the Night of Dread bonfire, with soup!