New book offers trail guide to local eats and experiences
There’s a tremendous amount of buzz about the importance of local food. But unless you’ve got a tight relationship with the vendors at your local farmers market, you may not know a lot about the purveyors and producers who bring Alberta food to your table.
Karen Anderson set out to change that. Together with coauthor, Matilde Sanchez-Turri, the food writer and passionate advocate for farmers and ranchers has just published Food Artisans of Alberta (Touchwood Editions). Subtitled “your trail guide to the best of our locally crafted fare,” the book shares stories of 200 food producers, from those who grow or raise, to chefs and bakers who turn local ingredients into delicious, nutritious foodstuffs.
The book maps out six food regions to explore. The authors also created a Quintessential Alberta Menu, complete with recipes that use some of the province’s signature foods.
Food Artisans of Alberta lists excellent farmers markets and outstanding watering holes, and gives a glimpse into some of the best restaurants in the province through the eyes of a few, carefully chosen chefs.
Anderson, an award-winning cookbook author, has been an fixture on the Alberta food scene for more than a dozen years. Part of her expertise comes through owning a culinary tour company, Alberta Food Tours (which runs walking food tours in Edmonton, Calgary, Banff and Canmore). But Anderson also brings a powerful passion to her exploration of the Alberta food scene, a commitment only deepened by the connections she and Sanchez-Turri developed while they drove around provincial highways for a year to research material for the book.
“We dedicated the book to the farmers and ranchers, and other people in the food community, intelligent, value-driven people who are selfless,” said Anderson in a phone interview from her home in Calgary. “But the other huge message from the book is how close we are to losing it all. The average age of a farmer is 60. Only 10 per cent of our farmers are under 30.
“You could look at this book as a nice little directory. But it’s a wakeup call. Precious potential could be lost, the human know-how of how to grow nutritious food.”
Q How did you pick the subjects for your book?
A They had to grow something or import something that can be used to make great things. If they were a farmer, we were looking for regenerative practices that build the health of the soil, or (producers) that had great models of success for young farmers to look at.
For chefs, we profiled those who are really committed to supporting local producers. There are a few exotic things like chocolate or coffee in the book, but we wanted people who took that bean and did something with it in Alberta.
Coffee people like Transcend in Edmonton, and Phil and Sebastian in Calgary are exceptional in their commitment to the welfare of the coffee farmers. And as for cheese-makers and sausagemakers, they are preserving heritage food skills we might otherwise lose.
Q There are artisans, and there are folks who make doughnuts. How do you tell one from the other?
A The artisans are generally small-batch producers, making things by hand, and the locality of the ingredients is important, too. If you’re a sausage-maker in this book, you know exactly whose beef, pork or chicken you’re putting in the sausage and you carefully source it so it offers a taste of place.
Hilton Dinner of Bon Ton Bakery in Edmonton is an excellent example of an artisan. He tasted the organic, heritage grains that John and Cindy Schneider of Gold Forest Grains in Sturgeon County were growing and he wanted more, but their mill couldn’t keep up with his capacity. So he struck a financing scheme in which he bought a mill upfront for them and then let them pay it off over time. So the Schneiders care about heritage grains, and that shows up in the bread at Bon Ton.
Q What don’t people know about farmers and ranchers in Alberta?
A Within Alberta, there are distinct cultures. Around Lethbridge, you have a large group of Dutch Reform farmers so they have huge families and have lots of people to help on the farm.
Most people don’t realize we have 600 Hutterite colonies in the province. And they don’t know that in the north it’s very hard for young farmers to buy land. That’s because canola is such a cash crop that a quarter section of land can cost between $200,000 and $500,000.
And the farmers in central Alberta along the Queen Elizabeth 2 corridor, they have the most fertile land, but they are faced with the most development pressure. And they rely on temporary foreign workers to help make our food.
Some have the same 10 people coming for a dozen years, six months a year, and they contribute a great deal of knowledge. People like Sheila and Ron Hamilton (of Sunworks farm in Armena) have sponsored workers, and made them business partners.