The Locavore

My dear friend Craig swears that strawberries from California, purchased at the grocery store in mid-January, taste just as good as an Ontario strawberry in season.
Well, I’m afraid I just don’t agree. I bought a basket of organic strawberries at the Riverdale Farmers’ Market  and there is no comparison. First of all, the Ontario berries [...]

My urban farm is starting to sprout. Oh the exhilaration of watching seeds come to life, giving forth tiny  shoots of green. Corny as it sounds, I think I could plant thousands and thousands of seeds before ever growing tired of the magic of watching them come to life.
This year in my ultra tiny, container [...]

uLast week, I went to a meet-and-greet at local Toronto restaurant chain, Il Fornello. The place has long been known for its pastas and wood fire oven-baked pizzas but is now making a name for itself as a sincere supporter of local food. They serve Ontario tomatoes and arugula, local root vegetables and meats as well as [...]

On CBC Radio’s the Current this morning, there was some discussion about whether or not today’s interest in resurrecting the family farm was merely nostalgia for a romanticized notion of the past or whether ditching the industrial farm was a real and sustainable plan for the future of our food system. Of course, I am [...]

This is a question raised by a recent article in the Financial Times titled “The Global Local Food Market” by Nicholas Lander. The article briefly explores some of the concerns a man named Simon Maxwell, director of the Overseas Development Institute of London, has about the First World trend to buy local produce over food [...]

For father’s day, I went shopping for my aspiring-farmer dad at the 100-mile Market in Meaford. I’d already bought him some heritage seeds (tomatoes, eggplant, melon) but when I saw a nice big big bag of Purple Passion Popcorn, I knew I had the perfect gift.
Grown near Desboro, Ontario by Grassroots Organics, the corn is a [...]

Finally–finally–I made it to Meaford, Ontario’s 100-mile market, a shop showcasing the farmers’ revolution that is currently underway in Grey County. It’s only been open for about 8 months and I hadn’t had a chance to go in and check out what’s on offer–I had a baby around the time it opened its doors. Well, [...]

A note about urbavores from my medievalist aunt who knows her latin:
Lesley writes: “Great word! But get your derivations right! ‘urb’ as in urban, yes (urbs= city), but ‘vore’ as in ‘voro’, Latin for ’swallow whole’, ‘devour’…. (‘omni’ comes from ‘omnium’, meaning ‘everything’, so that’s why omnivore means someone who eats everything. )”
Also: I’m up in [...]

I just paid $4 for approximately 7 spears of asparagus. Ok, they are thick spears. And juicy looking, with pointy tips that haven’t yet started to wither or wilt. Nor are they woody like the ”freshly picked” stems from Blah-blahs. Apparently, they are planted from heritage seeds which make them so slow growing that they end up [...]

This morning, I coined a new word: urbavore.
As I walked to the farmers’ market, I made a mental list of all the various places I go to buy the foods I feed my family. In addition to the seasonal produce I find at the market–this morning it was freshly dug potatoes and baby radishes–I buy my chicken from [...]