‘Odd couple’ explores diverse food cultures
TORONTO — Art Napoleon and Dan Hayes appear to be an unlikely pair, but they both bring passion and knowledge from their diverse backgrounds as they explore food cultures and traditions in the TV show Moosemeat and Marmalade.
Napoleon is a wild-game foodie and bush cook who grew up living off the land in northeastern British Columbia. Hayes is a classically trained chef who has worked in England, Spain and the Canary Islands. He owns The London Chef, a cooking school, pantry and catering company in Victoria.
Both share a zeal for investigating what sustainability and food production look like in the modern world, and use their expertise to hunt, forage or ice fish in various locations.
In season 2 of Moosemeat and Marmalade, airing on APTN, the pair continue to explore their different cultures and venture out of B.C., travelling to Ontario, England and Scotland.
In each of the 13 episodes, one of them chooses an ingredient — examples include moose, porcupine, squirrel, beaver, caviar and urchin — and leads the journey.
They then create unique dishes from the ingredients they’ve found.
“When he’s leading, basically we’re going into regular kind of chef-y establishments where real chefs would hang out, not bush men like me, and I’m the fish out of water,” explains Napoleon, who also writes, produces, transcribes and voices the show into Cree.
“And then when I’m leading an episode, we usually head to the woods, hunt, we forage and then he’s the fish out of water and we’re kind of like the odd couple. Any chance to educate, we throw that in too.”
Napoleon, who makes Victoria his home and is from Moberly Lake, B.C., said he grew up “eating a lot of game from the land.”
“I was raised by grandparents who didn’t speak English, so they were still basically following the cycles of the land,” Napoleon said. “We still had hunting seasons for different game and we had a garden for our veggies and we foraged a lot, picked a lot of berries as a kid.
“We were basically still living off the land. That’s where I picked up some of these skills, cooking with fire, learning all the stuff that goes with outdoor cookery.”
Napoleon, whose résumé includes the CBC Winnipeg Comedy Festival, Down 2 Earth, Dead Dog Cafe Comedy Hour and The New Canoe, which earned him a Leo Award nomination for hosting, met Hayes on the set of the children’s TV series Tiga Talk, where the chef was catering lunches. He learned Hayes liked to hunt. “He was quite fascinated by my ability to hunt whenever I want to and that I grew up on the land, so he agreed to a screen test and there was chemistry right from the beginning,” Napoleon said.