Calgary Food & Wine Article

Food Politics Friday: The New Farm
Toronto-based food journalist Margaret Webb’s book Apples to Oysters is now out in paperback. We haven’t had time to read it yet — with this rising tide of excellent Canadian food journalism, we’re having to make “must read” lists to keep up — but it’s next on our list. (Do you need a summer culinary-based reading [...]

Toronto-based food journalist Margaret Webb’s book Apples to Oysters is now out in paperback. We haven’t had time to read it yet — with this rising tide of excellent Canadian food journalism, we’re having to make “must read” lists to keep up — but it’s next on our list.

(Do you need a summer culinary-based reading list…check out the shortlist for the 2009 Canadian Culinary Book Awards. We’ll blog more about this soon because a number of great prairie-based writers are shortlisted: Brad Smoliak, dee Hobsbawn-Smith, Jennifer Sayers Bagjer, Denise Roig…)

In the meantime, we thought we’d post mini-doc made by Webb and Andrew Spearin about one family’s organic, mixed farm,  The New Farm, located in Ontario. OK, so organic mixed farming is about as old as it gets, but everything old is new again and thank god for that! The video is  3:43 long.

For more videos and interviews with Canadian farmers from her book, click on her postcards page of her Website.

In lieu of our review (because we have yet to read the book), we’ve taken an excerpt from her Website to give you a taste of what lies inside the covers of Apples to Oysters:

It was a humble carrot, still covered in dirt. And yet, the taste was electric, so unlike the dry woody offerings in grocery stores. That wondrous bite on an Annapolis Valley farm prompted Margaret Webb to do two things. The first was to finish eating the carrot. The second was to set off on a passionate, cross-Canada odyssey to discover a new wave of farmers who are putting taste and nutrition back into the foods we eat.

In this engaging and entertaining book, Margaret Webb introduces us to 11 quintessential Canadian foods and outstanding farmers who produce them — or, as she calls them, chefs of the soil and the sea, tractor-seat philosophers, poet biologists, thingamajig inventors, and zealous educators. –from www.margaretwebb.com