In today’s Globe and Mail, Mark Schatzker writes about Canada’s supply management system for eggs, chickens and cows, which he describes as “the enemy of deliciousness.” The article opens with scenes of inspectors from the Chicken Farmers of Ontario bursting upon the scene of unauthorized poultry operations and leaving crying Amish farm wives in their wake (along with fines of up to $10,000 a day). Schatzker argues that the high cost of quotas—$27,000 for one cow’s worth of dairy or $200 per laying hen—means that only high-volume, low-margin businesses can survive. As a result, the kind of specialty pastured poultry that’s raised in the U.S., like silver-laced Wyandottes, Jersey giants and barred Plymouth rocks, just makes no economic sense north of the border. Luckily, a loophole allows cheese makers to get around the quota system—as long as they can prove their product doesn’t taste like any existing Canadian product (apparently a team of bureaucrats in Ottawa gets to make that delicious call). There is hope on the horizon, however; Schatzker reports that Stephen Harper is looking at scrapping the whole system so that Canada can sign onto a new international trade deal. With any luck, local restaurants will soon be able to proudly host discerning diners like Peter and Nance. Read the entire story [Globe and Mail] »
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Jan Wong: how the rise of horticultural training at Toronto schools is bad for students
While we’re busy teaching our kids to tend school gardens, they’re failing provincial tests in reading, writing and math. The folly of the new enviro-propaganda
(Illustration: Tavis Coburn)
This fall, hundreds of Toronto students are harvesting beets and zucchini from their school gardens. I say: nice photo op, bad idea. The argument for school gardens assumes that by grubbing in the dirt, kids will learn to love eating vegetables. They won’t think chickens hatch into this world as deep-fried nuggets. And they’ll develop a respect for nature.
Here’s the counter-argument: our students shouldn’t be out scrabbling in the hot sun when one in five can’t pass the Grade 10 literacy test administered by the provincially funded Education Quality and Accountability Office. And while Canadian students score high internationally in reading, mathematics and the sciences, Statistics Canada says our relative ranking is declining due to improved performance by other countries. In this era of global competition, we can’t afford to let other nations nip at our heels.
Half of Toronto’s population was born outside Canada, and it’s a safe bet many of them came here for a better life, including a good education for their offspring. A lot of immigrants originate from agrarian regions of countries such as India, Pakistan, China and the Philippines. The last thing these newcomers need is a morality crusade about carrots. Yet more than 200 of Toronto’s nearly 600 public schools now have gardens, and an army of well-meaning parents, volunteers, activists and advocacy organizations with a social agenda is successfully lobbying for more.
Farmers’ markets brace for a potential fee hike that could put them out of business
(Image: Suzanne Long)
Fears are spreading throughout the Toronto Farmers’ Market Network that participants at city markets might soon be on the receiving end of a large user fee increase from the city. Anne Freeman of the Dufferin Grove market and Carolyn Wong of Trinity Bellwoods are just two of the market organizers who have been circulating a petition in an attempt to head off the hike. “You don’t attack your food source,” a frustrated Wong told The Dish.
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DIY BBQ Guide: three meat delivery services for locavores who can’t fit a side of beef in their freezer
(Image: Joel Kimmel)
Being a locavore doesn’t come cheap. While buying in bulk can help, not everyone has a minivan and a deep-freeze big enough for a side of beef. The solution? Meat boxes, delivered monthly from the farm.
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With Sausage Partners, Kyle Deming plans to contribute yet another chef-run fine food shop to the Leslieville strip
The Sausage Partners: Lorraine, Lilly and Kyle Deming (Image: Signe Langford)
First there was the Leslieville Cheese Market, then the Foodist Market, then Hooked, and now Sausage Partners. Leslieville is rapidly becoming the east end’s go-to ’hood for gourmet food shopping, and with many of these places being run by pro chefs, it’s easy to see why. This new meat shop will open in June in the former Inspired Cook space, with Kyle Deming (head chef at Starfish and Ceili Cottage) and his wife Lorraine at the helm. “We’ve been thinking about doing this for a long time,” explains Lorraine, “but we really got the push about two years ago when we made sausages for Patrick [McMurray]’s 40th birthday. Everyone was asking, ‘Where can we buy these?’ So we just kept thinking about it and it feels like the right time now.”
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Gone to pot: the story behind Toronto’s $100-million marijuana economy
Vietnamese gangs recruit teams of immigrants, install elaborate hydroponic equipment in their basements, and train them to raise potent plants. When the grow ops get raided by police—and they inevitably do—it’s the lowly growers who take the fall. The sinister figures at the top continue to operate with impunity
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Tam Ngoc Tran had a comfortable life in his native Vietnam. He was an electrical engineer with a decent income, enough to support his wife and three kids. But, like so many immigrants, he was seduced by the promise of a better future in Canada, and in 1989, at age 41, he moved his family to Toronto. Once here, the best job Tran could find was as a labourer with a company that made marble tabletops. His wife, Lien Thi Pham, worked double shifts in a factory. After several years, they managed to scrape together enough money and cashed in an RRSP to make a down payment on a house—a $220,000 semi at 96 Driftwood Avenue, in the Jane and Finch neighbourhood. Tran, Pham and the children, who were then 20, 15 and 10, moved in in 1997.
Holiday Gift Guide: 13 edible present ideas
We prefer to pass the holiday season by eating our way through it and forcing loved ones to do the same. So we’ve come up with 13 inventive edible gifts (and not a mini-muffin basket in sight).
See our foodie gift guide now >>
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Chocolate is becoming ever more rare. Will it be tomorrow’s caviar?
We know that the future isn’t how it was supposed to be—it’s 2010, and we have neither jet packs nor flying cars (iPads don’t make up for their absence)—but today we learned that the future might be bleaker still, as the maw of humanity gobbles down the last of the world’s chocolate. According to a piece in the U.K.’s Independent, chocolate’s days are numbered:
In the future, chocoholics might have to work quite a bit harder to pay for their fix. The world could run out of affordable chocolate within 20 years as farmers abandon their crops in the global cocoa basket of West Africa, industry experts claim.
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Sixteen things to do in Toronto before summer’s over
(Image: Benson Kua)
The leaves may be changing and drunken freshmen may be stumbling around the streets again, but summer isn’t officially over until September 22. Instead of whinging about the inevitable end of the warm weather, make full use of the remaining lazy, hazy days with our list of 16 things to watch, eat, do, see and buy before it’s time to break out the scarves and jackets.
1. Go to Sugar Beach. The Claude Cormier–designed park is the newest addition to Toronto’s ongoing waterfront rejuvenation project, with quartz-speckled sand, pink umbrellas and grassy knolls. The beach is nestled between the slick Corus Entertainment building and the Redpath Sugar Factory, and the Muskoka chairs are a good vantage point from which to contemplate Toronto’s past and present or work on a late-summer tan. Jarvis slip, lower Jarvis St. and Queens Quay E.
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Wild Thing: the story behind the Brick Works
The bucolic eco-paradise between Rosedale and the DVP almost never was. How big money and one ambitious entrepreneur remade the Brick Works
On May 29, the opening day of the Brick Works farmers’ market, I pedalled past the savvy people who had parked their cars illegally outside the Mount Pleasant Cemetery’s southern gate, knowing there would be no parking spots below, and through the Moore Park ravine. The air was cool and moist, the trees still. Then, the vista of the Don Valley opened up: the sun was shining on the pretty quarry garden, burning away the morning clouds and reflecting off the wetland ponds. I couldn’t yet see the market, but I could hear it: at 8 a.m., the site was already alive with happy chatter and the slow strum of “You Are My Sunshine” on guitar.
(Image: Jeremy R. Jansen)
Best of the City 2010: 14 picks for the top food in Toronto
Leaf fan: Matchbox Gardens grows rare and wonderful lettuces (Image: Jay Shuster)
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Buddha Dog gets put down
Auf Wiedersehen, weird weiners: Roncey loses its Dog (Image: Joey DeVilla)
Amidst all the G20 brouhaha, it was easy to forget that one Roncesvalles’s more creative fooderies, Buddha Dog, is calling it quits after three years. Fans of the tiny hot dog shop, which was recommended in our Roncesvalles Guide, can still get their fill at the Evergreen Brick Works farmers’ market on Saturdays or up at the Picton location. A post from the owners on their Web site says that they’re focusing on “building more rural locations and developing our Buddha Foodha at Home line of products.” We’re not sure what to make of the rural locations part, but selling bottles of their Indian butter and red pepper jelly sounds like a good business plan to us.
Hope for the Cottageless: an insider’s guide to vacationing in cottage country
So you didn’t listen when everyone told you to book a rental back in January, and you haven’t yet managed to finagle an invite from cottage-owning friends. We offer hope: an insider’s guide to vacationing in cottage country—where to stay, what not to miss, and how to find urban luxuries in the boonies
The all-new, futuristic St. Lawrence Market unveiled at last
See into the future: Church and Front Streets, c. 2014
St. Lawrence Market’s historic north building is getting a not-so-historic-looking facelift. Yesterday, David Miller and Councillor Pam McConnell announced that a winning design for the St. Lawrence Market North Building Design Competition has been chosen from the short list of five. By 2014, the building will be transformed into a hulking four-storey structure that will house market space on the ground floor, with courtrooms and administrative offices for Toronto Court Services occupying the upper floors. It will also feature a green roof and parking garage.
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