The Vinyl Café Notebooks (15 page)

This, as I said, was back in boyhood. But as is the way with these things, behaviour became belief, and eventually I came to believe I hated eggs. And then that eggs were hateful. And avocados too, for that matter. I hated them through my adolescence and into my college years. Just the thought of eggs made me sick.

The point is that I wasn’t eating eggs. And then one morning I woke up and right out of the blue decided fried eggs would be the most perfect breakfast I could imagine. As I recall, someone I admired had mentioned that fried eggs were
their
favourite thing in the world, and that was all it took. It happened to be New Year’s morning.

I fried up some eggs and, surprise, surprise, I liked them. And now I eat eggs. And avocados. Sometimes two a day. Eggs, that is. And always on New Year’s morning.

I was wondering about this the other morning as I made my traditional meal. This is the time of year where everyone
talks about change: a change in diet, a change in routine, a change in resolution. A change in regime. We all, it seems to me, have the desire to change hardwired into our systems. And maybe our capacity is greater than we think. All it takes is a little courage, a little forgiveness and perhaps some buttery toast. Change often seems overwhelming. But it can happen.

Of all the things you can think about as we stumble into a new year, that is probably as good as anything.

13 January 2008

THE TALL GRASS PRAIRIE

BREAD COMPANY

We were going to Manitoba to record a show. Before we left for the airport, my friend and colleague Julie Penner stopped by my desk.

“When you get to Winnipeg,” she said, “I want you to promise me that you will go to the Tall Grass Prairie Bread Company for breakfast. When you are there, say hi to Tabitha. She is one of the owners. I think you’d like her.”

And so it was, a few days later, that I found myself sharing my breakfast with Tabitha Langel, who appeared from the back of the bakery covered in flour and sat at my table, drinking coffee while I ate.

Tabitha is a lapsed Hutterite. She left the Hutterite community where she grew up because she was curious. She moved to Winnipeg, married, settled down and joined an ecumenical church, a church that includes Mennonites, Hutterites, Lutherans, Presbyterians and some Catholics. The bakery was born out of conversations that began at the church.

The church members were wondering how they could be more of a community. Although most of them lived in the same neighbourhood, they were wondering if they could
work
together in some way too.

This was in the late 1980s, a time when grain farmers were getting the lowest grain prices Canada had ever seen—about two cents on a loaf of bread. Farmers were struggling. Farm suicides were at a record high. Another question that arose at church was if there was anything they could do to support farmers. That is when the idea of starting a bread co-op began—an idea they thought could address both concerns.

Tabitha and her church friends wondered that if they went to one farm, bought their grain directly, then milled the grain and baked the bread themselves, they could afford to pay
more
than the two-cent average. They would be supporting one farm family, having fun baking together and maybe even getting some decent bread out of the deal.

So they began. They rented a kitchen at the St. Margaret’s Church and baked bread every Saturday night. Kids delivered the bread around the neighbourhood in little red wagons. And the co-op grew. Neighbourhood people joined. It became a community thing instead of a church thing. Anyone could work in the co-op and get work credits. People who were well off were invited to pay a little more for their bread to carry those who couldn’t. After a few years they
were
actually supporting a family farm
and
having fun. Just as they had planned.

The success provoked
more
discussion. The discussion was wide-ranging.
What
, they wondered,
is good stewardship of land?
And
What does that mean to people who live in the city?
If you believed, as Tabitha and her friends did, that herbicides and pesticides were not God’s best idea,
how should you proceed if you are city folk? How much should those who live in the city pay for grain if they want to behave ethically? What
would things look like if instead of having farmers beg city people for pennies, city people beg farmers for grain?

And
What could they do about any of this? Could they support farmers in some larger way?

They decided to open a bakery. They found one for sale and figured they needed $40,000 to get it going. They went to the bank. They explained they wanted to sell bread at two dollars a loaf, rather than the going rate of fifty cents. The bank said this was absurd. They told the bank manager that if you explained to people that you were charging more so you could pay farmers more, people would be happy to pay the extra. The bank said that wasn’t the way the world worked. They didn’t get any money from the bank.

They got money from friends instead—some low-interest loans, some no-interest loans. They promised to pay the loans back if, and when, they could.

They believed there was a great hunger for connection. They believed that farmers wanted to meet the city people who used their crops and that city people wanted to know where their food came from.

They had no idea if they were right. Everyone told them they weren’t. Everyone told them they would fail. They decided not to do anything in a grandiose way. For opening day they baked thirty loaves of bread, two dozen muffins and twelve cinnamon buns. When they opened their doors at ten in the morning, there were two hundred people lined up at the door.

They had planned to have a bread blessing, but after ten minutes there was no bread left to bless. Someone gave their loaf back and they blessed
it
, broke it and ate it.

They kept growing.

And growing.

They had made all these careful plans for failure. They had worked out how they might exist selling twelve loaves of bread a day. They hadn’t given any thought to what happened if they were wildly successful.

It was a nightmare. They were working so hard. Tabitha remembers the day the timer on the oven went off and she picked up the phone and couldn’t figure out why no one was saying hello.

Today, some fifteen years later, they have opened a second branch of their bakery. They still have the little hole in the wall in Wolseley, where it all began, and now they have added one at the Forks. They support five farm families and employ about fifty people. And they have learned that you can’t get rich when you pay fair wages to both farmers and staff, but you can make a decent living.

“We buy our wild rice from a local native co-op,” said Tabitha. “We could get it way cheaper elsewhere, but we like what these folks are doing. They have a store in the poorest part of the city and they won’t sell cigarettes. They are part of changing
their
community. We want to support them.”

She picked up her coffee and looked around her bakery and smiled. “If something is too cheap, that means someone is paying the cost somewhere. Maybe it is the environment, or maybe it is someone else down the line.

“The average food item in the average grocery store travels two thousand miles,” she said. “Here, in the bakery, the average is two hundred miles.

“The farmers come here and deliver their grain. And they
see the bread. They see where their grain is going. And our customers see where it is coming from. They can have coffee together.”

Tabitha says she has learned that if you’re mindful of what you’re doing, you
can
make a difference to the local economy.

“The questions that we continue to ask,” she said, “are how we can be
more
local,
more
just,
more
environmentally conscious than we were yesterday.

“It has been an unbelievable journey,” she continued. “I am honoured to be part of it. I am a tad tired. But show me a baker who isn’t.”

The Tall Grass Prairie Bread Company started in 1990 with two people on staff. They baked thirty loaves of bread on opening day. The Saturday I visited, they baked about seven hundred loaves of bread, all organic, and many handshaped. Tabitha didn’t know how many cinnamon buns and croissants.

I am a lucky man. I get to travel all across this country and talk to people from coast to coast. Mostly I get to tell
my
stories, but often I get to hear others. This is one of my favourites.

11 June 2006

APPLE PEELING

I own, at last count, twelve kitchen appliances. To wit: a microwave, a toaster, a food processor, a Mixmaster, a coffee maker and, God help me, a George Foreman Grill—which came, like a Cracker Jack premium, packed inside the microwave, $34.50 for the two of them. I thought the
microwave
was a deal at $34.50. And six others.

Twelve appliances that I kept lined up on my kitchen counter, as if I was running a showroom, until the derision heaped upon me by my so-called friends, all of them women, passed a tipping point. Now I have packed up my counter of wonders, and my appliances are stored in various cupboards.

I kept them out on the assumption that I would never use them if I didn’t see them. I finally accepted the fact that I didn’t use them anyway, and I have to admit that I’m not unhappy with the new state of affairs. The clean counter space
is
more relaxing. And there is less chatter in my kitchen about the things that I’m not doing, like chopping or mixing, brewing or juicing. If the chatter is still ongoing, it is, at least, going on behind closed doors. As I do the things I do best in a kitchen, like throwing away food that has gone by, especially pears and bananas, it is at least unwitnessed by the juicer, which was
silent, but you could tell what it was thinking. Or I could.

I did leave one appliance out. When the moment of truth arrived, I was unable to put away my candy-apple, green flecked, apple-peeling machine. The only appliance out of the twelve that doesn’t plug in.

I bought it when I was in university—a suction-based model, which you can use on any flat surface, as opposed to the screw-clamp model that requires a lip.

The apple-peeling machine is made out of cast iron and only has twenty-three parts, including the peeling blade, the thumb screw, the three-prong fork, the peeling arm and the wood handle grip, to name five of them. It does only one thing—peels and slices apples, automatically and perfectly. Actually, it does potatoes too, but although I have, in the years I have owned it, peeled hundreds, maybe even thousands of apples, I have never done a potato. I did try a pear once, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

I don’t know why the peeler pleases me so much. Maybe because I have owned it for nearly thirty years, and you can tell, just by looking at it, that it is good for
another
thirty. Or maybe I like it because all you have to do is stick an apple on the three-prong fork, turn the wooden handle and the apple skin peels off it in a perfect long and continuous ribbon. Then, as I learned when I was a boy, before you eat the apple, you can take the peel, throw it over your shoulder and it will fly through the air and land on the kitchen floor, forming the initial of your one true love. I always do that when I am finished peeling my apple. Over and over again for thirty years now.

23 January 2004

WATERMELON

The Elizabethans, I have read, used to believe in something they called a “world order.” This was a formal and strict hierarchy of the world’s beings and things, a hierarchy that “began with the angels and ended with the ants,” everything carefully sorted from the top to bottom. Elizabethans, who didn’t have Paris Hilton to preoccupy them, spent a lot of time arguing about the sorting, trying to arrive at a consensus of where every little and large thing fit, which might seem like a trivial pursuit to you but was important business to an Elizabethan, given the fact that they believed if anything ever moved
out
of its order—say, for instance, a peasant was to become a king—then the world would tumble into chaos.

In these democratic days we live in, the order of things has become more fluid. Relativism is the password of the era, and the idea there might be a world order we could all agree on has long faded to black. Or, more to the point, from the public to the private. Because, like it or not, we are all at heart Elizabethans. We go to the polling booth when we are called to, but deep in our souls we all carry around our private sense of where things fit in the world. But I would put forward that one
of the true delights of life is those moments when your sense of order and where things fit is turned upside down. Which is why, of course, we all want to bet on the underdog or can’t help watching when some holier-than-thou preacher is hoisted on his own petard.

A few weeks ago, as you have probably guessed by now,
my
sense of order was sent for a loop. I am still reeling. It came, as bad news so often does, or used to anyway, with the morning mail. An item in a magazine I subscribe to, a magazine whose job it is to keep me on the cutting edge of things. And in this issue, on the cutting edge of things nutritional.

The article was simple enough. The editors had developed a scale on which to rank and sort, according to their nutritional value, all the fruits of the world. Something any God-fearing Elizabethan would be happy to read about.

They used six variables, including the amount of vitamin C, fibre, potassium, folacin and those pesky little carotenoids. I settled down to study the results, and I’ll admit it, I settled down a little smugly, thinking to myself, I know the answer to this.
The blueberry
, I thought,
is the most nutritious fruit in the world
.

Not even close. Blueberry ranked number 23 on the list, with a total score of 59, well behind all the gold-medal fruits like the mango, which got a score of 97, or the grapefruit, which came in at 110, or the cantaloupe at 204. Impressive, yes, but in a whole different universe than the winner, which scored 424 on the scale—who guessed guava?