Food in Context

I have been interested in food my whole life.

I was a nightime sugar thief. I had a mouthful of fillings before I had even lost my baby teeth. I thoroughly enjoyed the candy that Streetsville's Red's smoke shop offered - that sorbet and licorice stuff, sweethearts, sweet tarts, double bubble, wax lips with liquid inside (!), Mackintosh's Toffee, chocolate everything and so on. In those days, kids could run wild and my posse of little friends from our street would play all day and walk to Red's occasionally. I was caught shoplifting with my fellow lawbreakers and there was hell to pay. My siblings (much older) wanted to keep the loot, but I was punished to teach me a lesson about being a law-abiding 5 year old.

When I was 7 years old, my family moved to 3/4 of an acre that had been severed from our neighbour's 100 acre farm in rural Milton. We were promised a dog and a cat if we moved from our 50's bungalow in Streetsville to the country. I attended a tiny rural school called Percy W. Merry and was bused daily, except when the winter wind howelled across the fields and drifted snow onto Derry Road. When the power went out and the roads were treacherous  - a snowday. On those days, we would fire up the woodburning stoves and cook French Toast and make hot chocolate. I loved the adventure of "surviving".

Anywho, eventually, my parents established an apiary, then other ventures crept in - firewood, wood burning stoves, water distillers, maple syrup, maple sugar, bags of loam, sandy loam and ultimately the honey business prevailed while the rest fell away. I was a willing taste-tester for all of the interesting and delicious honey and maple products. It really is a wonder that I did not develop diabetes when I think about the fine food shows that I visited and sampled joyfully in addition to my daily honey consumption.

We had raspberry canes, grapes, a greenhouse with strawberries and asparagus, and all available land planted with peppers, tomatoes, carrots, peas, beans, herbs and I cannot remember what else, but all organic and available to this food thief. My best friend's family had a greenhouse business on 8th Line and a Pippy Longstcking-esque treehouse that overlooked their neighbour's garden... We loaded up a 6 quart basket raiding the garden and dragged it up to our tree lair and ate the bounty unwashed. My garden criminality was rewarded with a fascinating case of worms.  I was later informed that the neighbours were well aware of our marauding and that they were not worried at all - thankfully this pretty much ended my life of food crime (except for some later kitchen creation disasters).

I worked at various jobs in the summer and on the weekends - in the kitchen of a local country club/golf course and for my parents' business of course. It was when I worked with the many Scottish golfers that I discovered my embarrassing habit of picking up accents. I have no idea what people thought when they asked me how long I had lived in Canada and after this had happened quite a few times, I realized that I had unconsciously assumed the accent of the person with whom I was speaking. This was very apparent when I lived in England for a year and upon returning to Canada, was uncharitably accused of putting on an English accent. It's a mimicry affliction, nothing more!

When I was in high school I began a summer job at the Ontario Agricultural Museum as a costumed historical interpreter that I returned to every summer until I finished university. I demonstrated 19th century domestic skills, including cooking and baking over an open hearth and baking in a brick oven. I acquired my favourite cookbooks around that time - Food That Really Schmecks: Mennonite Country Cooking by Edna Staebler, and The Harrowsmith Cookbook: Volume Number 1. Oddly, just lately I covered an historical interpreter's very short maternity leave at Joseph Schneider Haus in Kitchener-Waterloo and found myself on hallowed Edna Staebler ground - a Mennonite home built in 1816 and affiliated with the community Edna Staebler cherished in K-W. The annual Edna Staebler Fellowship is awarded to a researcher through the Museum. I am so sorry that I did not make an effort to meet Edna before she died a the age of 100 in 2006. The Mennonite thread in my life connects me to my grandmother, raised by her Mennonite mother and my mother feels that I am just like my grandmother who constantly cooked and baked (not suprising as she had 8 children) and had a reputation during the Depression for never letting anybody go away hungry if they came to her door looking for a meal. I wish I had known her too.

Well, when research positions were thin on the ground, I began a baking business that did not take off at that time. I wrote and illustrated children's stories and submitted them to a number of Canadian publishers without success. Over the years, I have worked as a field archaeologist in cultural resource management and from 2008-10, taught English in South Korea with my partner and two children for two years. South Korea is beautiful, the people were warm and kind to us, and the food was amazing. We lived in the bread basket of South Korea, Jeollanam-do, for the second year and were surrounded by stepped rice paddies, red dotted pepper fields, sweet potatoes, cabbages, persimmons and seafood from the nearby Yellow Sea coast at Beopsong-po. Mountains and sea - absolutely gorgeous and difficult to leave. It is a feast for the senses.