The Locavore

Food is extremely important to Toronto’s economy – it employs tens of thousands more people here than the automotive sector, for example. In fact, our city’s food hub is bigger than those of large American cities like Los Angeles and Chicago. For my CBC column this week, I was asked to talk about how we can eat locally in Toronto, even in the winter. Here’s a resource list to help you find the good food that is made in and around our city.

What to look for at this time of year:

Choose the long lasters: Roots vegetables grown in Ontario like potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, parsnips, rutabagas, garlic, onions as well as cold seller vegetables such as winter squashes, cabbages, leeks and fruit like apples and pears are plentiful at this time of year. If your supermarket sells American-grown carrots, tell them you want to buy carrots grown in the Holland Marsh instead.
Greenhouses grow all year round: There are greenhouses that produce vegetables all year round including lettuces, greens, sprouts, and cucumbers. Ontario greenhouse tomatoes and peppers will start growing in March and then after that, St. David’s greenhouses grow lovely greenhouse eggplants!
Mushrooms don’t care about low sun levels: Ontario is home to half of Canada’s mushroom farms that produce more than 200 million pounds of mushrooms a year. You can find the standard button mushrooms grown here but also King, Shiitake and Enokis too. But don’t forget to read the label because many mushrooms are imported, including from as far away as Korea.
That’s grown in Ontario?: You can find Ontario peanuts from Kernal  and Picard’s , Ying Ying’s organic tofu made from locally grown soy beans, as well as Ontario greenhouse bitter melon. Most of the world’s honey comes from China, but we produce a lot here too so again, read the label.
The Taste of Place: If you are looking for a taste of place in your dairy products, watch out for yoghurt, ice cream and cheese made with modified milk ingredients. This is a processed milk product that likely comes from far away.
Prepare ahead: Take the time to stock your freezer in the summer with produce such as peaches, tomatoes, rhubarb and green beans. If you have a cold corner, onions store really well too and you’ll save a lot of money if you buy all the onions you need for the year for around $10.
Menu planning: Skip the long distance lettuce from California and choose to make a salad from what we have here. Grate some parsnips raw, beets, carrots and dress with either a creamy salad dressing or a vinegary one or chop add some cabbage and make a great slaw. Sarah’s favourite salad these days is thinly sliced raw cabbage with Ontario peanuts and a fish sauce and lemon (don’t forget to add sugar and a little water to taste) salad dressing.
Visit a Farmers’ Market: There are nine indoor farmers markets open all year round.

They are:
Appletree Market
Indoors in winter at the North Toronto Community Centre, 200 Eglinton West, 2nd Floor
Thursdays, 11-7 pm, Winter markets 3-7 pm Nov.10, 24, Dec. 8, 22, Jan.5, 19, Feb. 2, 16, Mar. 1, 15, 29, Apr.12, 26
www.appletreemarkets.ca

Dufferin Grove Organic Farmers’ Market
873 Dufferin St. (in Dufferin Grove Park)
Thursdays, 3 – 7 pm, In the rink house during winter
www.dufferinpark.ca/market/wiki/wiki.php

Evergreen Brick Works Farmers’ Market
550 Bayview Ave (between Prince Edward Viaduct (Bloor/Danforth) & Pottery Road)
Winter markets, Saturdays, 9 am – 1 pm
www.evergreen.ca/rethinkspace/?p=148

Montgomery’s Inn Farmers’ Market
4709 Dundas West, Etobicoke
Winter markets 3-6 pm
www.montgomerysinn.com

St. Lawrence North Farmers’ Market
92 Front Street East (at Jarvis)
Saturdays, 5 am – 5 pm, Open all year!
www.stlawrencemarket.com

Sick Kids Hospital Farmers’ Market
555 University Avenue
Tuesdays, 9 am – 2 pm, June 7 to October 25, 2011, some vendors indoors for the winter
http://www.my-market.ca/

Sorauren Farmers’ Market
40 Wabash Ave. at Sorauren
Mondays, 3-7 pm, in the Field house all winter long
http://www.westendfood.coop/

The Stop’s Green Barn Farmers’ Market
The Green Arts Barn, 601 Christie Ave. (entrance from Wychwood)
In the barns November-April
www.thestop.org/green-barn-market

University of Toronto Scarborough Farmers’ Market
Parking Lot 4, 1265 Military Trail (Morningside and Ellesmere)
Winter markets first Wednesday of the month November to April, 11-3

Order a Food Box:
FoodShare offers The Good Food Box

 Mama Earth Organics
Front Door Organics
Fresh City Farms

Winter Share CSAs and Food Co-ops:
Kwartha Ecological Growers
Plan B Organics
Karma Food Coop
West End Food Coop (opening a storefront soon)

Check out your local food stores: There are a number of stores in the city that specialize in local food, including butcher shops and cheese shops. This is only an arbitrary sampling of what’s out there. Explore your neighbourhood and you will be sure to find more!
Provenance Regional Cuisine
Fresh From the Farm
Culinarium
Fiesta Farms
Sanagan’s Meat Locker in Kensington Market
The Healthy Butcher
Cumbrae’s
Rowe Farms
Meating on Queen
The Friendly Butcher
Leslieville Cheese shop

At the supermarket: There’s a lot of Ontario grown food at the supermarket. If you can’t find it, just ask. If it’s not there, then ask for the store to stock what you are looking for!

And do look for the Local Food Plus label on products to help you select local and sustainable foods.
The government organization, Foodland Ontario,  has all sorts of information including about what’s in season

Bon Appetit!

This article was first published in TheAtlantic.com

When I told people I was planning to eat a Canada Goose, they looked at me as if I’d said I was roasting a rat for dinner. The wild Branta canadensis is ranked down there with the pigeon and the seagull as one of North America’s most loathed birds. And for good enough reason. A flock of geese flying in formation might look beautiful from a distance, but these birds cause problems, crowding parks and public space and polluting waterfronts with their waste. Many farmers hate them too. A group of hungry geese searching for seed can trample a newly-planted field in mere minutes, wasting the crop. Their reputation both city-side and in the country is so bad that, when, over the years, officials have suggested culling the flocks and then offering the meat at homeless shelters, the response often has been outrage at the idea of forcing on the poor the indignity of eating a Canada Goose.

Because of their flanneur-like loitering, a goose might seem an easy snatch, but it takes skill to nab one.
But ask a hunter and it’s a different story: Those in the know call the Canada Goose the roast beef of the skies. There are people who prefer to hunt geese over other game, and, on both sides of the border, paid hunting tours are organized to stake out the birds. In an excellent short story set in Toronto, three struggling newcomers to Canada salivate at the sight of the food wandering around the city’s parks. The punch line comes when they catch a few geese one dark night and cook them up. As the narrator says after dinner: “Well them geese taste good.”

These divergent opinions have led to a debate: Should we eat the Canada Goose?

I recently jumped into the discussion when my dad called to say that a hunter friend had pulled up with the carcass of a freshly-killed goose — blood, feathers, guts, and all. He said we would be cooking it for the next family dinner. To be honest, I was hesitant. I am locavore-inclined and eat domesticated fowl of all sorts — I adore duck and am particularly fond of a lightly poached duck egg — but there was something about eating a wild goose that made me stop. Was it that I had seen too many of them paddling around polluted lakefronts? Or maybe it was their predilection for foraging on the pesticide-saturated lawns of golf courses? It was as if the Canada Goose’s close association with human activity meant there was something unclean about them. Sure, on the one hand they were wild, but because they like to wander in all sorts of icky places, eating one of the birds sounded just as appetizing as eating a back-alley pigeon.

So I called up a goose hunter.

Drake Larsen is a researcher in sustainable agriculture at Iowa State University who happens to be an avid hunter and who bags well over a dozen Canada Geese a year. He learned his passion for waterfowl hunting from his dad, who called his kids after the birds: Drake is named after the male duck, and his siblings Teal and Woodie after two different species. Canada Goose and venison are the main protein sources for Larsen and his wife. The day I called, he had been out on a goose hunt. “They’re so yummy,” he said. “It’s good, lean, rich meat. I find they are similar to a good cut of beef.”

It turns out that goose meat is just as versatile as beef, and the best way to cook it depends on the season. In the fall, the geese have not yet fattened up for winter. Their meat is lean and does not lend itself to roasting. Larsen slices open these fall birds and pops out their breast meat. They he cooks the breasts like steaks, stir fries them, or even grinds them to fill casings and make Canada Goose sausage. A winter bird, however, is fatter and is ideal for roasting. Larsen said his colleagues at work really enjoy a pulled-goose sandwich that he prepares in a slow cooker at the office.

And not only are the birds good to eat — they are also fun to hunt. Because of their flanneur-like loitering, a Canada Goose might seem an easy snatch, but it takes skill to nab one. To catch a goose, Larsen will set up a flock of decoys designed to attract the attention of his prey in an area near to where the geese congregate. Then he lies down amid the faux geese, waves a black flag to get their attention, and practices his goose calls. “Ducks have a simple language. Geese have more of a vocabulary,” he said. “If [the geese] were coming toward me, I’d do a soft, slow, rhythmic honking. But if they were sideways, I would do a more distinctive pleading like ‘Turn here! Turn here!’ I find the calling is the invigorating part.”

While my dad isn’t a hunter, he is a pretty handy guy, so he was able to pluck, skin, and gut the goose himself. It did take him five hours and, when he was done, the lawn was covered with a fine layer of goose down. My mom decided to slow-roast the goose upside down in red wine. The smell of the cooking meat was rich and fragrant, but when she pulled the bird from the oven, it had a dark, shriveled quality and I still wasn’t convinced that eating the goose was a good idea.

Then I took a bite. The meat was dark as liver, and earthy too, but not greasy or gamey. It was delicious. Aside from the lead shot my husband found embedded in his dinner, the Canada Goose made for a delicious meal and even our kids loved it. As for the debate about whether or not to eat the birds, I now wholeheartedly fall into the eat’em camp. This summer, Canada Geese that strayed too close to New York City’s airport were culled and shipped to Pennsylvania to be offered in food banks there. But if Manhattan’s chefs knew how scrumptious those birds were, there’s no way they would have left the island.

Canada Reads is asking Canadians to submit their favourite non-fiction read to this year’s competition. Might I suggest that you consider voting for Locavore? They want books with stories and characters and that is exactly what I hoped to do with the book: tell the story of food and sustainability in Canada through the stories of real people making a difference. While this is an act of shameless self promotion, imagine the impact it would have if more and more people read about the amazing things that the sustainable food movement is doing here in Canada. Vote here!

My piece published August 9th, in Maclean’s

There’s a joke in Hong Kong that pokes fun at the cultural gulf between those who eat snake and those who don’t: “How do you know that Adam and Eve were not Chinese? Because they ate the apple and not the snake.” Snake as a meal hasn’t travelled well, unlike other Cantonese dishes that are staples at Chinese restaurants in Canada. And to the North American palate, snake soup especially is unappetizing. While one can find the dish, made from frozen imported snake meat, in upscale restaurants catering to Chinese-Canadians, it doesn’t have the ubiquity of chow mein or sweet and sour pork.

My own association with snakes was something different. When I asked for a kitten as a child, my dad gave me a pet snake. (My mother was allergic to fur.) He popped over to a ravine at lunch and came home from work with a baby garter snake in his breast pocket. Before dinner, we put a rock, a water bowl and some newspaper in a terrarium and welcomed Corey to her new home.

So on a recent trip to Hong Kong, a city known for its cuisine, I tried to hide my alarm when my cousin, who lives there, informed me we were heading out for snake soup. In Hong Kong, as in many parts of China, snake is considered as delicious as its ocean-bound cousin, the eel. It’s also said to be healthy. According to traditional beliefs, snake has heating properties. You eat it during the winter to warm your blood and encourage your qi, your energy, to move around. It’s also purportedly an aphrodisiac and increases male “potency.” There are little shops that open only in the colder months to serve snake soup to those who still believe in the old ways.

But these days, fewer snake soup shops open each winter. There are reportedly bureaucratic hurdles to importing snakes from mainland China; after the SARS crisis, the Chinese halted all snake exports. Another theory is that winters aren’t as cold thanks to climate change and the “urban heat island” effect; people no longer feel the need to warm up.

More significantly, food culture is changing. Just as we’ve become used to the seasonless supermarket where you can buy asparagus at Christmas, the Hong Kongese are losing touch with seasonal eating. According to Alan Smart, an anthropology professor at the University of Calgary who studies Hong Kong, the old street markets where people shopped every day are being replaced by supermarkets. If you can’t get snake soup in July, who wants it in November?

Lucky for us, my cousin knew of one hole-in-the-wall in Kowloon that stayed open six months of the year. The snake soup shop was on a busy street, down from the Top Fight Thai Boxing and Health Therapy Club. A sign above the door featured a viper, and inside there were four small tables. The place had been open for 40 years and was run down, the tile floor chipped and grey. At the back was a handsome wooden chest of drawers reminiscent of the antique Chinese furniture sold in high-end shops in Canada. Inside these drawers, however, were live snakes waiting to be cooked.

A customer at the next table, a regular who appeared to be in his 50s, leaned over to explain that the snakes they served were brought here by the shop’s boss, live, from Guangdong. They kill them swiftly in the kitchen, chopping off their heads, before making the soup. “We prefer wild snakes,” he said. “Because they eat a lot of things. If you eat snake from a farm, they only eat one thing.” Then he puffed out his chest and said the soup made him strong.

Smart isn’t fearful these old food ways will be lost to this generation. “Some of the things you are seeing elsewhere, like the revitalization of local food, are happening there,” he said. The ebb of snake soup is nothing more than a dip in the trend cycle. Our soup arrived and it was good—thick with meat, and flavoured with thinly shredded lime leaf. They say snake tastes like chicken, but really it has a richer, deeper flavour and the cooked meat looks just like snake flesh. To be honest, I didn’t eat much. I lost my appetite when I turned to my right and saw they had a live snake on display in a terrarium with a rock, a water bowl and some newspaper.

It’s a strange world we live in. Here in Canada, we’re in full harvest mode, enjoying corn and zucchini and fresh tomatoes (sun ripened!) and beans and and and… We have so much food that we in North America throw almost half of it in the garbage. Then, on the other side of the planet, hunger is the theme. Food prices are rising quickly. Already the cost o f staple foods are up 15 percent this year. Oxfam is trying to bring attention to the one billion people who don’t get enough to eat every day. Check out this interactive map that highlights global hunger.

It is still not too late to sign up with a CSA this summer. Here are three in the Toronto area that I have written about:
www.thefreshveggies.com has pick up locations in both the city and the suburbs. Highlights are okra and other South Asian vegetables.

www.thecuttingveg.com I wrote about Daniel Hoffman’s new farm in Locavore, when he was just starting out. He has put a whole lot of work into building his business since then–and had lots of help from volunteers too–and now his farm and CSA are growing. Look for his global garlic–delicious varieties from around the world! If you join the CSA, you get to try them too.

When I met Brenda Hsueh she was about to buy a farm, leaving behind her old life on Bay Street. She now runs Black Sheep Farm south of Owen Sound and delivers her organic veg to Toronto.

All three of these farmers are the new face of sustainable agriculture here.

My uncle and aunt who live in Ottawa are dedicated environmentalists. They’ve been thinking about local food and sustainability longer than most of us. Hugh, my uncle, writes for the community paper and I always enjoy reading his pieces urging people to reduce their demand on the earth’s resources. I appreciated his last article about air conditioning so much, I thought it would be nice to share it.

The inevitable smog days of summer with their high humidex levels will soon descend
on us. But before hiking up the air conditioning, there are some alternatives that will help both your bank account and the environment.

Although the coal generating plants in Ontario are gradually being phased out, they are frequently still cranked up to full power to meet the demand for air conditioning on hot summer days.

If there is insufficient generating capacity in Ontario, our power authority has to import expensive electricity from the US. The imported power usually comes from the coal fired plants in the Ohio Valley.

Coal fired electricity increases ground level smog and ozone and exacerbates global warming in the upper atmosphere. Because of the prevailing winds, most of the air pollution created in Ohio blows into Ontario. So we are importing both health problems and global warming in addition to electricity.

Fossil fuel use for air conditioning triggers what scientists call a feedback loop. The more air conditioning we use, the more fossil fuel electricity is generated, creating increased emissions of greenhouse gases which increases summer warming and that in turn increases the demand for air conditioning. And so the cycle continues, poisoning our air and heating up the atmosphere.

To cool the interior of our homes, heat must be transferred outside: this is the basic principle of air conditioning. The transfer of heat further warms the outdoor air. It is estimated that air conditioning probably increases the ambient temperature of Toronto in the summer by 2 degrees. This phenomenon is another example of a feedback loop.

Unless we break this cycle, Tim Flannery, author of The Weather Makers and other important environmental books, warns that indiscriminate air conditioning will cook the planet.

Let us not look to nuclear energy to fuel our air conditioners. The tragedy of Fukushima is sufficient evidence that the health, environmental and financial costs of nuclear power are too frightening to contemplate.

We can only break the air conditioning feedback cycle by reducing our summer demands through conservation measures. More efficient air conditioning units are not a solution because research shows that more efficient machines, such as automobiles for example, simply increase our consumption of energy through greater use. It is behavioural change not technological innovation that will mitigate the health, environmental and financial costs of air conditioning.

Another reason to cut back on air conditioning is that “time of use pricing” for electricity will be introduced later this year in Ottawa and excessive use of your air conditioner will send both your hydro bill and greenhouse gases soaring.

Instead of purchasing an air conditioning system or replacing your present unit, consider installing awnings over south facing windows and patio doors.

Close blinds and curtains during the day to keep the sun’s rays out.

Use overhead, oscillating or box fans to move the air around.

You can keep cool outdoors in the evenings under an awning in a screened porch by using a portable fan.

Open windows at night to allow cool air to flow through the house.

Suck night air through the house by installing a box fan at one end of the house blowing air out while leaving only one window open at the opposite end.

If your roof needs reshingling, consider light coloured shingles that will reflect the heat of the summer sun.

If you have to replace your driveway, consider a light coloured surface to reduce ambient temperatures around the house.

Inadequate ventilation and insulation in your attic space will increase
temperatures in the house.

A well insulated house will hold cool air better.

Minimize the indoor use of any appliance that generates heat in summer.

Turn lights off during the day, especially incandescent bulbs.

Don’t use an extractor fan because it will draw hot outdoor air into the house.

Cook in the garage on a hot day using a slow cooker or an electrical element.

Alternatively, cook outdoors on a solar cooker or a barbecue.

Avoid using barbecues on smoggy days because of their particulate emissions.

Serve cold buffets in warm weather or prepare a picnic meal.

Some foods, such as cold soups and granola, can be cooked in winter and stored in the freezer for summer use.

If you must cook indoors, use a microwave.

Wait until the evening and open the windows before turning the dishwasher on.

Bathe or shower in the evenings when the windows are open.

Use an outdoor line or an “umbrella” to dry clothes.

Iron clothes on a cool evening with the windows open.

Sleep in the basement on hot nights with the windows open and secured.

Set your air conditioning thermostat no lower than 26 degrees.

Join Hydro Ottawa’s peaksaver! program to reduce your electricity bills and to ease pressure on the environment. Visit www.hydroottawa.com for details.

If you need to replace your air conditioner or purchase a new system, consider buying a small unit and only cool one room.

If you have to use your air conditioner, use it sparingly. There are probably only10 days in a summer that are excessively hot.

Be considerate of your neighbours before turning on your air conditioner, especially at night, because some units are noisy.

There are health concerns about the quality of indoor house air and because we spend so much of the winter closed in, summer provides an opportunity to reconnect with nature and enjoy the fresh air flowing through our houses. It also provides an opportunity to reconnect with our neighbours instead of being isolated in our summer igloos. – Hugh Robertson

Here’s my latest piece from Maclean’s about Canadian farmers who are starting to grow tropical crops in our Nordic climate. -SE

Jason Verkaik’s family has been pulling carrots from the same brown earth in Ontario’s Holland Marsh for three generations. However, these days the carrots are changing. Some of the thick, orange spears of his youth have been replaced with a red version that is wide at the top and narrows quickly into a spindly tail, not unlike a parsnip. Bred on the subcontinent, it’s called the East Indian Red and is coveted by Indian-cuisine purists who will pay more than double the price of conventional carrots for it.

“It has got a crispiness similar to a radish and it is almost sweet,” said Preena Chauhan, an Oakville, Ont.-based Indian cooking school instructor and owner of Arvinda’s Indian Spice Blends, a company that makes masala mixes for retail. Demand for these carrots, as well as other “ethno-cultural” vegetables typical to Chinese and Afro-Caribbean cuisine, has been met over the last decade or so by imports. And what a market it is. Canadian demand for South Asian vegetables is estimated to be $33 million a month; for Chinese vegetables it’s $21 million. Now farmers like Verkaik are figuring out which ones grow best here in the hope of capturing that niche.

At the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre, an independent research institution in Ontario, a team of scientists, plant breeders, and economists is working to fast-track the establishment of these global crops on Canadian farms. They’ve conducted consumer surveys, studied market economics, and made connections with the grocery industry as well as farmers who are participating in trial crops of an array of vegetables: yard-long beans, the zucchini-like kaddhu and fuzzy melon. “At the end of the day, we want the farmer to grow a crop that is selling,” said the organization’s CEO, Jim Brandle.

Growing tropical vegetables in our northern climate is not straightforward. Bob Baloch, who grew up on a farm in Pakistan and left the corporate world to start a farm in Brampton, Ont., specializing in organic world crops, recently purchased four new “hoop houses”—plastic tunnels to keep his okra warm on summer nights because the plants don’t flower if the temperature drops below 20° C. If it seems a lot of effort to bring distant vegetables here, it’s just the latest step in a journey that’s centuries old. The carrot, for example, was domesticated from wild plants in Afghanistan in the 10th century. It showed up in Spain 200 years later and had moved to northwestern Europe and China by the 14th century. Farmers in each area developed their own varieties, the plants adapting to the climate and soils, taking on their own taste. This is why a conventional orange carrot is so different from an East Indian Red.

It’s also why Verkaik has found it difficult to find a variety that both grows well on his farm and tastes right. While he’d sold the East Indian Reds for a few years, last year he thought he’d found seeds better adapted to the climate, and planted eight acres of a North American red. But he couldn’t sell them. “It has to look and taste how they want it,” he said. This year, he’s trying another variety.

But competing against cheaper imports can be tough, said William Stephens, CEO of Mushrooms Canada. Over the last 10 years, more growers began producing Asian mushrooms such as oyster. Then, between 2007 and 2010, South Korean shipments grew more than tenfold, and prices dropped to $1.01 a pound, compared to more than $2 for local versions. Still, he’s hopeful growing consumer desire, and retailers pushing for a traceable food safety history, will drive sales. “I had a call last week from one of our big growers saying his retailer was pushing him hard for a local source of shiitake and oyster,” he said. Growers are banking on it too. Mushrooms such as the tendril-like enoki and king are now grown in Canada, and at least one more variety is in development.

Chauhan tries to use as many locally sourced ingredients in her business as she can. She buys all her garlic from a co-op in Stratford, Ont., and is looking for Canadian growers of curry leaf and fenugreek. She said buying locally she can save money. It also makes tastier food. “The flavour is fantastic when you get it straight from the farm.”

After the final installment in the CBC Radio Here&Now comfort food series, I didn’t post Latifa’s Afghan turnip soup recipe. Well, the delay has caused chaos. In case you are one of the many looking to make this soup, here’s the recipe, in Latifa’s own words. Apologies for making you wait!

Turnip Soup

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 large onion, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 small carrots, thinly sliced
2 Medium size turnips cubed
1/4 cup snipped fresh cilantro
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon red chili pepper
1/2 teaspoon turmeric

Directions

1. Heat olive oil in a medium size cooking pot. Add onion and garlic, ginger, turmeric and sauté 4 minutes. Add turnips, carrots, salt and chili powder, sauté 5 minutes or until crisp-tender.
2. Add 2 cups of water, Cover and Cook for 3 minutes.
3. Serve soup hot with a garnish snipped fresh cilantro

Note: This is my most recent contribution to Maclean’s, published December 2010

Tiffin arrived just before lunch time in a Honda Fit. The three containers, packed in a thermal bag, were still warm to the touch. There was hot aloo gobi (a potato and cauliflower curry sprinkled with fresh coriander), a flatbread called paratha, and two cardamom-coconut pancakes. All the dishes looked homemade, but the food came from Tiffinday, a business serving hot prepared lunches in those distinctive tiffin boxes to hungry people in Toronto’s downtown.

The tiffin carrier, a stainless-steel stackable lunch container that is used all over India, has made the trip around the globe and is now growing in popularity in this country—though with a Canadian twist. “It’s a vertical version of a horizontal meal,” said Krishnendu Ray, an assistant professor of food studies at New York University, who grew up in India. In high school, he recalls, he’d trade his egg salad sandwich for his friend’s tiffin. “You have the dahl, the rice and the curry all served simultaneously,” he said. These days in Vancouver, you can pick up a two-tier stainless-steel tiffin, full with curry, for $12 at the Granville Island food court take-away Curry 2U, and bring it back another day for a $5.99 refill. In Calgary, Tiffin Curry and Roti House offers a thermal insulated tiffin box (it can get cold in Calgary) that they fill with two curries and two rice pulaos. They will even deliver them to boardroom lunches. In addition to Tiffinday’s new venture in Toronto, there are plenty of home-based businesses in that city’s suburbs, such as Komal Shah’s home-cooked Gujarati-style food that her customer base of about 100 picks up in one of the stainless steel containers. “Some people have no time for cooking,” she said, explaining the popularity of her service.

While Shah often caters to homesick students who are far away from the Indian cooking they grew up with, the tiffin lunches appeal to urbanites used to all sorts of cuisines, said Seema Pabari, president of Tiffinday, who delivers the lunches herself. “It’s the corporate crowd,” she said. “Most of my clients are young, white males in the finance industry and the IT industry, and they want a good meal.” She has one client to whom she delivers every single day. He prefers that she select his meals for him, and he’s so busy when she arrives with lunch that all he does is sign the receipt, and off she goes. (While she has some South Asian clients, she thinks those who eat Indian food at home don’t need the treats she brings.)

The word tiffin, as used to describe the midday meal, dates back to colonial times in India—there is debate about whether it originates with the English “tiffing,” meaning eating out of meal times. However, the practice of sending noon-hour fare to office workers arose post-independence. The growth of the national metal-processing industry in the 1950s, which helped to proliferate the vessel, and the expanding urban middle class that saw men work in city offices, made the tiffin lunch part of the culture, said Ray.

Tiffin lunches are practically synonymous with a hot meal—no microwaving, with all that metal, so the food must come fresh and hot. Indeed, every day in Mumbai, hundreds of thousands of lunches are still prepared at home and packed in these boxes. They are picked up by a fleet of dhabawallas who ride motor scooters and rickshaws through traffic and deliver the food, ready for office workers to eat. The tiffins are then returned to their respective homes by the same delivery men in time to be cleaned and repacked with the next day’s lunch.

Shaffeen Jamal, owner of Vancouver’s Curry 2U, believes he introduced the commercial version of tiffin to Canada nine years ago. He said the idea came to him when he saw his daughter’s lunch packed in one of the tins. He’d been struggling to attract customers to his new stand in the food court, where a Chinese joint was the big draw. “People would walk by and not stop. Yet they’d eat broccoli steamed,” he said with indignation. Once he started offering his tiffin deal, business picked up. Since then, he has sold more than 45,000 tiffin carriers, often filled with dishes like mango black pepper broccoli and butter chicken.

While the tiffin box was a marketing ploy at first, now he sees the environmental benefits of not using countless Styrofoam takeout containers. “We do 80 to 100 tiffin refills a day. You can imagine what that comes out to,” he said. (He’s also switched to stainless-steel cutlery and thalis, or platters, for eat-in customers.)

Ray expects this trend to spread because eating your lunch from a tiffin box is suddenly a sign of being cosmopolitan, worldly. Caz Ramji, owner of Calgary’s Tiffin and Roti House, agrees. “People have seen it once and they’ve got to have it,” he said. So far, the experience of Tiffinday’s Pabari also follows the theory, since her main customers are in Toronto’s office towers. “It’s a novelty right now,” she said. “But I want to make it a normal thing.”