Moving Day

Save Your Fork has been migrated off of WordPress.com to a self-hosted website. We’ve got a snazzy new look – with lots more pie!

While all requests to saveyourfork.wordpress.com will redirect to the applicable page at www.saveyourfork.com, this may not be the case indefinitely, so please update your bookmarks to point to the new location.

Also, please excuse any glitches as we finish work on the new site.

Ethical Shopping and Hail Brittania!

This piece in the New Statesman is absolutely, astoundingly brilliant.

That is all.

More About Food Photography in Restaurants

Further to the piece I wrote on my writing blog last week about bloggers taking photographs in restaurants, this article from the L.A. Times speaks to the truly obnoxious behaviour of some people who show up at restaurants with not just cameras but tripods and a whole pile of gear. It’s not just Claudio Aprile who is getting pissed off, folks. We’ve all got to learn to have a lot more discretion and respect – for the chef, the restaurant staff and for the other diners.

Canadian Food Bloggers Unite!

If you’ve been curious about what Greg and I have been doing on our hiatus, I can finally tell you a little bit. One of the 3 projects we’ve been working on is ready to launch.

In July of 2009, we created a website called Beer and Butter Tarts. The original intent was for the site to be a cross between TasteTO and a Canadian version of Serious Eats; with people from across the country writing about food in Canada. But it was a lot more work than we had expected and we really couldn’t keep up both the quantity and quality. But we’ve always wanted to do something that celebrated food in Canada, and we loved the name…

So we’ve turned Beer and Butter Tarts into a food blog aggregator, where Canadian food bloggers can join and have their blog posts included on the home page. Since Beer and Butter Tarts only publishes an excerpt from each post, readers must go to the blogger’s own site to continue reading, which will build traffic and possibly ad revenue for that blogger.

To join Beer and Butter Tarts, bloggers must:

• be based in Canada
• have a food-exclusive blog (all posts must be food-related)
• update their blog on a regular basis
• agree to help promote the site on their own blog

For more information about Beer and Butter Tarts, or to join, please visit the website.

Trauma Farm

Trauma Farm
Brian Brett
Greystone Books, 320 pages, $21.95

I almost didn’t give Trauma Farm a chance. Salt Springs Island farmer Brian Brett is also a poet (it’s his main source of income, in fact, and he jokes throughout the book that it supports his farming habit), and the first couple of chapters came off as overly-flowery. After stacks of tomes on farming and sustainable food that are dry and full of statistics, Brett’s descriptive, poetic style seemed too disconcerting.

Likewise, the style of arranging the book – stories that comprise the “18-year-long day” of life on a B.C. farm, can be confusing at first, as Brett bounces back and forth to different points in the farm’s history, while loosely arranging the chapters along the lines of a typical day at the farm. A story about the death of a cherished pet or animal will be followed by another story on a different theme where the same animal plays a role. Until the readers gets all the characters straight, and accepts the non-linear train-of-thought style, the whole thing can be hard to follow. Settling in and pretending that you’re sitting on Brett’s back porch while he sips tea and shares stories of the farm seems to be the best way to approach the book.

The Food of a Younger Land

The Food Of A Younger Land
Edited and illustrated by Mark Kurlansky
Riverhead Books; 397 pages; $27.95

Seasonal, local, traditional. Before a certain period in time, these were the only options. There were no cross-country distribution networks, no fast food chains. And vast countries like the US had true regional cuisine.

Author Mark Kurlansky came across the archives for a book that was never published. Meant to be entitled America Eats, the book was to be an anthology of works produced by the regional offices of the Federal Writers Project. Created in the mid-30s during the depression, the FWP was part of a make-work project to help provide some semblance of an income to people in the arts (imagine that happening today!). The FWP created a variety of regional guidebooks during its run, some are still in use today, and included notable authors such as Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston and Nelson Algren.

America Eats was abandoned as the FWP wound down after the US joined the second world war. Submissions and files were gathered up – some, sadly, are lost, and nothing was ever done with them until Kurlansky stumbled upon them.

On Hiatus

We’re taking a short hiatus over on TasteTO for the month of April – we need a break to rewind, relax and rejig some things.

In the spirit of actually experiencing some real R&R during this period, I will also be taking a break from the weekday Food For Thought column here on Save Your Fork. I may still be around with some original content posts during the coming month, but the round-ups will be suspended until early May.

Apologies for the inconvenience – I know some of you really dig the news round-ups – but I promise to be back with a better basket of fish once I’ve had some “Me time”.

See you in a month!

Food For Thought – Wednesday, March 31st

Here’s some food for thought for today…

• Ramp season – now officially imminent because someone has started an argument on Twitter about it.
• I don’t care if the kids will go crazy for it, bubblegum flavoured cheese is just wrong.
• And speaking of what kids like, even though the show is not yet over, an evaluation has been done on the success of the school food in Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution series. It doesn’t appear to have been a success. At the same time, back in the UK, kids who are eating healthier food as a result of Oliver’s school dinners programme there are seeing better academic results in school. So despite the objections in West Virginia, the man just might be on to something.
• If you never eat at home, why NOT use your kitchen to store clothes?
• Love the wafting smell of char-grilled burgers as you walk past a burger joint? It’s probably air pollution.
• Bowing to pressure from groups like Greenpeace, US grocery chain Trader Joe’s will source only sustainable seafood by 2012.
• Why your camera (still and video) might soon be banned from top restaurants.
• Bet you’ve got a bottle in the fridge – Worcestershire sauce.
• The idea of terroir is that different soils and growing conditions change the flavour of foods. But what of the soil itself – how does it taste?

Food For Thought – Tuesday, March 30th

Here’s some food for thought for today…

• Could junk food be as addictive as junk?
• A few months ago there was a news bit making the rounds about a family who had found the head of a snake in their frozen green beans. Someone else recently found the rest of it.
• Oh my god. Someone else writing about food and the environment has figured out that we need to do the math and calculate impact per unit (gallon of milk, dozen eggs, or individual apple) rather than just attributing the total number of food miles to an individual item as if that orange rolled around the back of a transport trailer by itself.
• Is being a picky eater a moral failing?
• Extra zebra, hold the cheese. A pizza restaurant in the UK is serving up pies made from “alternative meats” such a zebra, kangaroo and crocodile. All are farmed, and none are endangered, but animal rights activists claim it encourages “the destruction of rare wildlife”.
• Would it even be Easter without a chocolate Easter bunny? And what’s up with the creepy, too life-like chocolate puppies and kittens?
• Speaking of Easter chocolate – isn’t it weird when you get more packaging than candy?
• Celebrating the classic design of the sugar shaker.
• All the stuff they don’t tell you before you set up chickens in the backyard.
• Stemless cherries – modern technology working for the benefit of farmers and consumers or do we not have better things to fix in our world?

Food For Thought – Monday, March 29th

Here’s some food for thought for today…

• Strawberry fields for… ever? THIS is what happens when people demand strawberries in January. The cold winter temperatures in Florida mean that so many strawberries are currently on the market that farmers are only getting 25% of what they’d normally be able to sell them for. Which means many farmers are just destroying their crops, even though there are food banks and poor people that would be happy to show up and pick the things for free.
• “This is a war zone, not an amusement park.” The US military shuts down a slew of fast food outlets on the Kandahar air force base. Tim Horton’s, however, gets to stay.
• Moby, who wants you all to know that he is not a militant, didactic vegan, has a book coming out about factory farming and food safety.
• Keeping old cheeses alive – every year, France loses an average of 3 varieties of raw milk cheeses.
• More than any other industry, cheffing is a career where you’re expected to push yourself far beyond reasonable physical limits. But it just might be killing young chefs before their time.
• Better ways to help the public lose weight – various experts chime in on this issue but the most poignant statement comes from the public comment section where the first commenter points out the irony of governments subsidizing cheap beef and cheap corn, and then taxing those same foods to help treat the obesity caused by people actually eating them.
• Sharing “violates the spirit of restaurant going”. Even the servers and wait staff in the comments section disagree.
• There’s always been a struggle to get young people to take up farming, but at least there are subsidies and rewards for doing so. There is almost no incentive for African-American youth to get back to the land.
• With so many small farms starting up, access to slaughterhouse facilities is almost non-existent.
• Dudes… doner kebab robot. And after you get to the part about the reason for creating the thing being that the guys who slice the meat get too sweaty, you’ll want one in every doner/donair/falafel shop in the land.