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.

That is all.

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

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 animals are, indeed, true characters in Brett’s book. As any of us would describe a beloved pet, he offers up humorous, heartwarming and heartbreaking stories about his dogs, a beloved horse that had a heart attack in his arms, a goose that spent many years terrorizing that same horse, peahens that coveted a jaunt around the inside of his house, and the story of a blind and deaf dog named Bonnie, who became lost in the woods at night and then was relieved from her terror when Brett managed to catch her, only to die of a brain tumour a week later.

For all of his descriptive stylings, Brett doesn’t romanticize farm life in the least. He’s open and honest with his readers on all the gory bits (slaughtering animals), the frustrating bits (dealing with government officials whose regulations are skewed in favour of factory farm operations), and the stupid bits (like slipping in goose crap and breaking his leg).

But much of Trauma Farm revels in the beauty of Brett’s world; of the terroir of his land, or the joy of a cob of fresh corn. In the chapter about lunch, he works his way through the elements of the meal, revelling in the bread or the greens of a salad. Brett uses these chapters to segue into sections – they’re not quite rants, and not exactly editorials – on issues such as GM seeds, quota systems, factory farms, or the health and safety regulations that force food producers to actually make our food less safe than it would be from the farm gate. These bits seldom get ranty, and they’re all factual, but they’re also not heavy on statistics. Not that I’m questioning Brett’s knowledge or expertise on the matter – in fact, I like his style in these sections immensely; having read the full syllabus required of the average SOLE food fan, it’s refreshing to not be inundated with numbers and percentages, to hear a farmer’s account of the situation as he would tell it if you were, well, sitting on his back porch.

Trauma Farm also touches on the farming community in Salt Spring Island. From the sharing of tools to the local farmers market or the fall fair, Brett covers all of it, usually with an amusing anecdote – for instance, a neighbour with a trailer often got called to help round up escaped animals, and once in a rush, after catching a pair of pigs he left them in a pen at the fair until he could figure out who they belonged to. When he returned, he discovered the pigs had won 2nd prize.

In the end I’m glad I stuck it out past the initial chapters, as it turns out, Brett’s Trauma Farm was an inspiring, informative, and really enjoyable read. The poetic writing style didn’t always work for me, and Brett seemed to move between three or four styles depending on the topic at hand, but I always felt as if I was right there beside him as the stories unfolded.

The Food Of A Younger Land

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.

Divided into geographic regions, the articles range from long essays to recipes or even short paragraphs on various topics. No work had been done to compile or edit the pieces, so Kurlansky chose the ones he felt best represented the region, and that were the most coherent (not all of the contributors were necessarily good writers).

In the northeast, there are many pieces about seafood; the proper way to do a clambake, which state makes the best clam chowder. Vermont maple syrup production is also an important topic in this chapter. There’s a great piece listing New York soda shop and luncheonette slang and jargon (“burn the British” = toasted English muffins), only small snippets of which remain with us today.

The south is typified by the “best mint julep” argument, best BBQ debate and an account of a chitlin party. Since it was the 1930s, well before the civil rights movement, the standard pattern for any dialogue spoken by African-Americans seems to have been a direct translation in the regional patois.

Chil, you knows I’s gonna have hoe cake. I wouldn’t give dese w’ite folks no seafood widout a hoe cake.

This is, without a doubt, utterly disconcerting, and Kurlansky does warn his readers about this beforehand, along with warnings of the use of non-PC terminology and references that would be wholly inappropriate and out of place today.

The mid-west continues the south’s theme of many kinds of bread made with corn, and we see references to plenty of meat, especially beef. Of particular interest is the piece on lutefisk out of Wisconsin – a Norwegian dish made with cod and lye, popular at church suppers.

What we now refer to as the Pacific Northwest is referred to as the far west, and includes northern California. Geoduck, fried beaver tail from Montana (not the Canadian pastry) and smelts all get included, along with a list of kitchen superstitions from Colorado that mentions things like making vinegar only during a full moon. We can also see the beginning of the mess that is the US school lunch program with a piece on school lunches in Washington State (remember, these pieces were written during the depression).

Finally, the south west includes the grunion run along the southern Californian coast, along with traditional dishes of the Choctaws, Hopis, “Spanish-Americans” and Mexicans, including that hot new California treat, the taco. A very genteel piece on Oklahoma prairie oysters – that never specifically states what a prairie oyster actually is – rounds out the section and the book.

We talk a lot, in the SOLE food movement, of preserving traditional foodways, of getting back to what our great-grandparents ate. Food of a Younger Land definitely shows us the differences that have come about in the past 70+ years. That New York soda fountain is long gone. Possum and taters probably still gets eaten somewhere in the south, but it’s unlikely to be a regular dinner item adored by the whole family. Chitlins, oddly, have come back into favour with the nose-to-tail crowd, but they’re not the delicacy they once were. And I’m still trying to sort out the difference between corn pone, hush puppies and hoe cakes, along with the dozens of other kinds of corn-based bread.

Most people won’t care much about cooking some of the recipes included here. There won’t be a big run on burgoo, or tortillas made without a press. But knowing where you came from is never a bad thing, and Food of a Younger Land is definitely a snapshot in time that captures the regional eats of a simpler place and time.

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!

• 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?

• 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?

• 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.