“Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell who you are”

This quote from seventeenth-century French food writer Jean Anthelme-Brillat-Savarin has always struck me as profound. Given record levels of both obesity and hunger it can also be a bit sad. It’s also used as a chapter starter in Jennifer Cockrall-King’s call to arms for urban agriculturalists Food and the City.

The Edmonton-based food writer has crafted a convincing case that food can and indeed should, be produced and distributed at a certain scale in our cities.

The first four chapters lay out a familiar theme, especially if you’re familiar with the work of Michael Pollan, Raj Patel or Wendell Berry. The privations of the industrial food system on our health and environment are well known at this point. Subjects like food deserts, climate change, peak oil, food security and the loss of bio-diversity are ticked off at the beginning of the book so as to set up the premise – that it’s time to reorganize our food system.

If we’re going to reorganize something as important as how our food is grown and sold to us we better have some alternatives. With that Cockrall-King takes us on a world tour to the places and the people who are making it work.

Our first stop has us being whisked to Paris, which interestingly enough, is ground zero for urban agriculture. In the latter half of the 19^th century there were more than 8500 urban farmers or maraichers working 1400 hectares of land – roughly sixteen per cent of the area of Paris at the time. The gardens, fed as they were with prodigious amounts of horse dung, were ultra productive. Modern-day Paris is obviously a different story but Cockrall-King is a capable storyteller and finds some truly interesting people and places during her times in France.

We also get introduced to the world of urban beekeeping in Paris. Domesticated city bees are a recurring character in the book popping up all over the world. With a more varied diet and less pesticides urban bees are happier, produce more honey and are much more resilient.

The book also takes us to London and an urban vineyard. We then venture to Los Angeles and learn the heartbreaking story of the South Central Garden, and to Vancouver with its prolific roof top greenery. Cockrall-King also visits Toronto and Chicago and even finds some time for Milwaukee (or Milliwaukee as Alice Cooper prefers to call it).

The books ends in Cuba, an interesting case study of what would happen to a food system if cheap fossil fuels vanished. When the Soviet Union collapsed Cuba stopped getting oil on the cheap. Massive, centralized farms turned into small, decentralized plots. While the Cuban experience is not something any country would engage in willingly it provided a near perfect control case for an alternative food system. However, one could get the idea that Cuba is entirely self-sufficient and that is just not the case as the country spends roughly $2 billion a year on food imports.

As someone who is interested in gardening, permaculture and how our food system is organized this really hit a sweet spot of overlapping interests for me.

This book is recommended for anyone wanting to read a critical take of the current food system and  anyone looking for a blueprint to starting the new food revolution.

Photo by Kevin Lallier

While Matt Sawyer studied for his diploma in agricultural production at Olds College, he worked packing chickens in his spare time and managed to avoid piling up debt.

The hard work put him in a good position, when he graduated in 1993, to take on the large amount of debt necessary to start a farm. Sawyer secured enough money in loans to purchase 56 cows and a quarter of land immediately east of Crossfield, Alberta. Today, his farm has grown into a 2,300 acre operation where he grows hay, malt and feed barley, hard red spring wheat, Canadian Prairie soft wheat and canola.

Starting, he recalls, was the most difficult phase in building his farm. The upfront investment was steep and making payments was difficult. “I remember I sold the cows before the mortgage was due, but I still had to pay the interest,” says Sawyer.

He’s not alone. A 2008 study by the federal department of agriculture showed that young farming enterprises, farms owned by an operator under 40 years old, had higher debt-to-asset ratios, higher interest expenses as a percentage of gross revenues and lower net worth than other farms. The average net worth of farms whose operators are under 40 years old was $861,000 compared to $1.32 million for other farms.

That seems almost par for the course: high land and equipment costs make farming a very expensive enterprise, requiring major investment dollars at the outset. But the same study showed that only eight per cent of farms in the country are operated by young farmers (that is, farmers under 40). A further 12 per cent of farm operations in the country are run by teams of old and young farmers and the balance, the remaining 80 per cent of farms, are run entirely by older farmers. Does the high cost of entry keep young farmers out of the business?

This year, Sawyer is 39 years old and has the distinction of being Alberta’s Outstanding Young Farmer. The recognition comes from a program which highlights leading farmers under 40 from across the county. Sawyer started farming in 1993 after he purchased one quarter of land and started renting another from his grandfather. Then, in 2003, his grandfather died and Sawyer expanded operations again, purchasing land and renting more from his uncle. He says he’s optimistic that his farm will continue to grow. Sawyer is aware the majority of farmers in Canada today are older and preparing for retirement: the Baby Boomer generation still dominates the demographics of Canada’s labour force both in agriculture and other sectors. Still, he sees the opportunity for young farmers to get into the business. “It’s going to be big going forward,” Sawyer says, noting that food prices are rising, that innovations in farming equipment are increasing productivity and that new land is becoming available from retiring farmers.

Despite its emphasis on high debt levels, Agriculture Canada’s report on young farmers seems to paint an equally rosy picture. Profit margins for young farming enterprises were around 20 per cent for grain and oilseed farmers in 2008. By way of contrast, older grain and oilseed farmers’ average profit margins sat around five per cent. Similarly, young beef and cattle farming enterprises posted profit margins above 15 per cent on average, compared to six per cent for older farmers. In fact, the only category where older farming enterprises’ profit margins outclassed those of younger farming enterprises was in poultry and egg farms, and the difference there was around two per cent.

Despite these favourable trends, professor Bill Brown at the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Agriculture and Bioresources still thinks the barriers to entry in farming and agriculture are too high to lure new entrants into the business. He does not see ambitious young people from the cities reversing urbanization trends and starting farms to profit off the land. “You would have to be a very dedicated person to work a farm full-time without having the family with the stake of the family farm in the first place,” Brown says. “On average the farms in Saskatchewan have assets of $1 million and that’s small farms; that’s only a 1,200 acre farm, so when you’re talking 5,000 acres, you’re talking probably $3 or $4 or $5 million in assets.” The debt load young farmers need to incur to enter this business, then, can be a huge impediment to new entrants.

“The biggest traditional way [into farming] is to inherit [the farm] from your parents and to work with the previous generation for a number of years before you take over operations,” Brown says. In Sawyer’s case, his parents, his uncle and his grandfather were all farmers. But that doesn’t tell Sawyer’s entire story. He took the risk himself in 1993, at the age of 21, to go into debt purchasing land, purchasing cattle and renting more land to begin his farm.

The Alberta government, for its part, has taken steps to lower those barriers to entry. The Agricultural Financial Services Corp., a Crown corporation, offers the Alberta Farm Loans Program which lets Albertans access loans up to $5 million to start, develop or grow a farm operation in the province. In addition, the Beginning Farmer Incentive reduces the interest rate on the loan by 1.5 per cent for the first five years. To qualify for the incentives, beginning farmers should have a net worth less than $500,000. That’s not a stretch for young farmers looking to get into the business. Last year, the AFSC loaned out $240 million and 65 per cent of that went to new farmers. The need to draw new and young people into the agricultural sector in Alberta is being recognized by the Alberta government.

While he admits the majority of farmers in his area are older than himself, Sawyer does see the opportunity for new young entrants. “Younger guys are concerned about being known as professional farmers that contribute to the economy,” Sawyer says. “The technology these younger guys use – you don’t need to go home at lunch and phone the local elevator to find out what prices they’re offering,” Sawyer says. “Now, the world is at your fingertips with your BlackBerry and your iPhone.” He adds that many young farmers use GPS-guided systems and yield mapping at variable rates to determine how much fertilizer to use at various parts of their land. He sees these innovations in farming continuing to increase the rate of productivity in agriculture. It’s a technological progress which should translate into profits for the farming industry.

It’s an industry which Sawyer thinks will continue to grow and become more lucrative for future generations, including his three children.

Next time you go grocery shopping, imagine your great-grandmother at your side as you roll your cart down the aisles.

According to journalist-turned-best-selling author Michael Pollan, the food our great-grandmothers would recognize as food is not what most of us consume today. Instead of the products of nature, it is the products of food science that fill our grocery carts.

Pollan asserts that is exactly why real food needs defending, and he takes on that challenge in the 200-page In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.

Writing about what’s on our plates, at our farms and growing in our gardens is not new for Pollan, whose influence in such topics has seen him named to Time Magazine’s list of 100 most influential people. It may seem like he’s delivering elementary advice, but Pollan has built a rock-star status delving into the topic of food culture.

While the book’s thesis question – what should we eat? – is answered by Pollan on the book’s cover and again in the opening sentence (“Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”), there’s still more than enough content to fill the book. Pollan’s ability to tell complex stories in an engaging voice makes a somewhat dense topic both understandable and interesting.

Readers are shown how thirty years of official nutritional advice has only made us sicker and fatter. Though “we are becoming a nation of orthoerxis: people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating,” we’re not becoming any healthier. Pollan explores why this is by documenting the age of nutritionism in the first section of the book. His tone is clever: “The Year of Eating Oat Bran – also known as 1988 – served as a kind of coming-out party for the food scientists,” he writes.

Readers see how through nutritionism, Western society has reduced food to its nutritional components with the belief nothing has been lost along the way. Modern nutritionism has become a constant war between macronutrients: “protein against carbs; carbs against proteins, and then fats; fats again carbs.” In the process of trading common sense, history, culture and tradition for nutrition science, Pollan shows how we’ve gotten really fat on our new low-fat diets.

The second section of the book documents our pattern of eating, the Western diet, along with the diseases that this diet carries.  Pollan dwells on the all-but forgotten ideas ecological thinkers had on the human food chain, including Canadian-born dentist Weston Price’s study of the modern diet’s correlation to increasing dental problems.

Instead of thinking about food strictly in terms of its chemical constituents, as we so often do, Pollan believes we need to create a broader, more ecological, and more cultural view of food. “What would happen if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?” Pollan asks.  He documents five fundamental transformations to our food and ways of eating that have occurred: we’ve moved from whole foods to refined, from complexity to simplicity (a chemically simplified soil produces chemically simplified plants), from quality to quantity, from leaves to seeds and from food culture to food science. “All of them can be reversed,” Pollan believes – a statement that guides readers to the final section of the book.

In Part 3, titled “Getting Over Nutritionism,” Pollan shares practical advice for escaping from the Western diet. He refers back to his original rules (“Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.”) and dissects these in more detail.

Though an “unending stream of food-like substitutes, some seventeen thousand new ones every year” have been taking food’s place on the supermarket shelves, Pollan urges us to eat food once again, and he shows us how to do just that. His suggestions include “don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” “avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, c) more than five in number, or that include d) high-fructose corn syrup,” “don’t look for the magic bullet in the traditional diet,” “pay more, eat less” and “do all your eating at a table” (no, a desk is not a table, Pollan points out).

Although there are times when Pollan’s work seems to miss the urgency of a traditional manifesto, In Defense of Food expertly and interestingly rebukes many of the commonly held beliefs towards food. Pollan’s defence of food is compelling, and it quickly becomes clear why the book’s subject matter – which grew out of an essay Pollan wrote for The New York Times Magazine – is worthy of an entire book.

Readers who are seeking practical advice will likely find the book’s final section to be its strongest, while the other two sections build the case for why we need such seemingly elementary advice. In Defense of Food will have you thinking twice the next time you’re at the grocery store, likely even imagining your great-grandmother at your side.

The G20 in Toronto last year was an unmitigated disaster. The local police chief played fast and loose with the law, over 900 people were arrested and a slew of otherwise regular Torontonians were swept up in a ridiculous and downright threatening piece of law and order theatre.

To be sure, there was a reason the police were out in force. Former G20 meetings have been marred by violence and property damage. The so-called Black Bloc made an appearance – winning over people to their point of view via the always-successful methods of smashing store windows and setting a police vehicle on fire.

But for all the sturm and drang that accompanied the G20, there’s a case to be made that the suburban mom in yoga pants pushing her over-large stroller through the farmer’s market is doing more to smash the global corporate state than any number of black balaclava-clad yobs. Buying direct from a farmer, tending your own garden or even hunting are far more effective tactics at subverting global corporatism than any number of burning cop cars.

With the global food system dominated by an increasingly concentrated number of vertically integrated corporations, you don’t have to read Michael Pollan to see that the way international food system works benefits a select few multinational actors while the rest of the world either goes hungry or piles on the pounds.

While the efficiencies of global shipping are striking, more and more people are finding value in re-localizing their food systems. By going to farmer’s markets, by gardening in your backyards and by foraging for your own food, you engage in one of the most powerful forms of activism.

Just don’t use that word.

Don Ruzicka proudly calls himself a grass farmer. Don and wife Marie run Sunrise Farm, an organic operation near Killam Alberta. With spring coming, Ruzicka has prepared the brooder, getting reading for the arrival of chicken and turkey chicks.

They don’t just raise poultry; they also produce certified organic beef, eggs and natural pork using a free-range pasture model to graze the livestock and poultry. Aside from that, he’s committed to biodiversity in a serious way, planting 50,000 trees since 2003, mounting birdhouses on every fencepost and constructing bat houses. Each spring, he plants three plots of wheat, oats, barley, peas, corn and sunflowers to provide feed for fall migrating birds as well as native birds that spend the winter on the farm.

He takes his responsibilities as a steward of the land seriously, but he realizes that the best way to change the global industrial food system isn’t going to involve showy theatrics.

“I don’t really want to go out and burn my bra or come down from the roof into [Premier] Ed Stelmach’s lap and tell him that we have to change things,” says Ruzicka. “I’d like to come at it from a peaceful perspective. I used to be pretty ignorant standing up in front of people and pointing a finger at industrial agriculture. I had some wise people come and say, ‘Don, just do something that gives people a sustainable choice and you’ll be doing way more than all the finger pointing you can do.’ ”

You can see the reluctance to call himself an activist, the reluctance to hold himself out there as some kind of outlier, but Ruzicka is nothing if not an outlier. The majority of our food doesn’t come from people like Don Ruzicka but it can’t start without Don Ruzicka being there in the first place.

This is how real change happens, the slow methodical life’s work of people who are invested in the success of their idea.

Ruzicka is a family farmer, as he doesn’t bring in outside labour to help with the daily work of the farm. In Canada there is an organization dedicated to advocating for family farmers and combating large-scale agribusiness. Called the National Farmer’s Union, it works toward the development of economic and social policies that will maintain the family farm as the primary food-producing unit in Canada.

The NFU is also the only English-speaking Canadian member of the highly influential farmer’s movement La Via Campesina (The Peasant’s Way). It was La Via Campesina that originally coined and championed the idea of food sovereignty. Food sovereignty is the claimed right of people to define and build their food systems as opposed to having their food systems defined by international actors.

There are seven underlying principles that set up the idea of food sovereignty and you can check them out here.

Kevin Wipf is the executive director of the NFU and is a PhD candidate at the U of A. He’s based in Saskatoon. He’s a fairly regular dude, he follows hockey and he retweets some of Andrew Coyne’s more salient points on the tics of Canada’s political leaders, but he’s also intimately familiar with the problems family farmers are facing in Canada.

Wipf argues that the problems a farmer faces in Canada are the same as those faced by a farmer in Guatemala. With Canadian farmers actually posting negative incomes, it might not be such a stretch. The idea of defining and creating your own food systems becomes a lot more important when the people who choose to produce our food are actually losing money.

“Food sovereignty is about more than economic well-being, it’s about justice. It’s about justice in the food system. Food is a lot more than a commodity,” says Wipf.

“This is about is understanding food in a bigger and different way than our current market system.”

And while the NFU concentrates on the minutiae of global trade agreements, writing policy and doing the spadework so family farms can succeed, they don’t hold themselves up as some revolutionary force. Yet as it stands, the work done by farmers, consumers and advocates in the food space might be the first place that the steady grip of global corporatism is first loosened.

If food and agriculture are the entry points for a truly revolutionary anti-corporate movement, then author/farmer Wendell Berry laid out why in one of his more succinct quotes.

“If you eat, you’re involved with agriculture.”

The food in the picture above? It’s not real. Yes, as millions go hungry throughout the world, there exists an entire industry devoted to the creation of fake food. Used in TV commercials , magazine advertising and even display cases for restaurants, this niche industry is thriving and provides a vital service in making food look “real” on camera.

Food deception doesn’t just concern itself with advertising, however. The vegetarian food industry is obsessed with the idea of disguising food as something that it is not. Ever tried Tofurky? Many may think that this is a recent trend but in reality, imposter foods have been with human civilization for thousands of years. What follows are a few of the more bizarre and creative ways humans have disguised food as one thing or another….

The Romans

The ancient Roman aristocracy loved a good meal. From roasted dormice to marinated eels, no animal was too exotic for their palate. It seems all this gluttony gave Roman chefs ample opportunity to come up with rather morbid dishes, apparently to the delight of their patrician overlords. The ancient Roman writer Petronius wrote of one such dish in his novel Satyricon. In a section entitled “Trimalchio’s Feast,” he describes how guests were treated to what appeared to be a succulent roast pig. When they cut into the beast, they discovered that the flesh was actually made of pastry and it was filled with live birds. The birds, sensing freedom from their pastry prison, then exploded out of the fake pig to the amazement of everyone involved. This wasn’t the only live bird-related dish, either. Petronius also tells of living birds entombed in fake eggs which would be given to unsuspecting guests for casual consumption. Perhaps it’s a good thing that this article didn’t get posted before Easter. An Easter-egg hunt would take on a decidedly morbid air if they included the odd living bird imprisoned in an egg.

Another innovative approach to food-based trickery involved shaping foods in molds. Using a form-fitting substance such as goose paté, Roman cooks could create elaborate sculptures of dolphins or other animals for decoration and consumption at feasts. It’s safe to say that the Romans took their dinner parties a little more seriously than we typically do today.

The Tudors

You’ll remember from history class (or the HBO series) that the English Tudor period included massively significant events such as the Black Death, the English reformation, and the famed queenship of Elizabeth I. It also included a weird culinary fetish for sewing animals together and roasting them for the amusement of the landed gentry.  One such creation, named “the Cockentrice,” was originally assembled by Henry VIII’s cooks in an attempt to impress the then-king of France.  Made from the combination of a capon (a rooster that has been castrated to improve the quality of its meat) and a pig, this fake animal was featured at feasts and festivals throughout England. Think of it as a medieval version of the turducken except about a hundred times more horrific.

In homage to the Romans, perhaps, Tudor cooks also had a thing for baking live birds into pies. Check out this excerpt from an Old English recipe from 1598 entitled “To make pie that the birds may be alive in them, and flie out when it is cut up”:

“…at such time as you send the Pie to the table, and set before the guests: where uncovering or cutting up the lid of the great Pie, all the Birds will flie out. which is to the delight and pleasure shew to the company and because they shall not bee altogether mocked, you shall cut open the small pie and in this sort tart you may make many others, the like you may do with a Tart.”

Do you remember the old nursery rhyme that goes: “Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye, four and twenty blackbirds baked into a pie?” That’s not poetic license, that’s a recipe. Coming to an episode of Master Chef near you….

The Victorians

While it was in the Tudor era when marzipan, an ancient confectionary sculpting paste made from minced almond and sugar, was introduced into England, it wasn’t until Victorian times that it really became popular.  With international trade lowering the price of sugar, confectionery shops sprung up across England featuring all manner of marzipan creations. Marzipan-rendered fruit made up the majority of display offerings, but occasionally they went for more ambitious projects. Imagine shop displays with castles made of sugar paste or animals lovingly reproduced to the delight of children. Because it was so easily coloured and manipulated, it became the 19h century equivalent of Silly Putty with children creating their own imposter foods. In modern times, you can visit gourmet candy shops in London that use marzipan to recreate scenes from pop culture or fantasy.

The Japanese

Fast forward a couple hundred years to Allied-occupied post-World War II Japan. Japanese restaurant owners had a problem: their non-Japanese customers (Allied soldiers) could not read their menus and therefore had trouble deciding what to eat. The Japanese solution to this problem was to create realistic wax models of each dish so that illiterate customers could just point to what they wanted to eat. It was sort of a 3-D approach to the reason why places like Denny’s have menus with pictures on them.  The wax models were vastly superior to cooking actual example dishes because they could be reused multiple times and were often made to be more vibrant and appetizing than the actual dish. This practice also proved incredibly popular with native Japanese speakers and soon restaurants across the country featured wax or plastic food display cases.

Today, Japan is still infatuated with fake food. The industry is to be cornered by a few small companies like Iwasaki Be-I or Maiduru but both sell billions of yen worth of fake food every year. There are even a few books written about the subject such as the aptly named Japanese Who Eat With Their Eyes by Yasunobu Nose.

The Modern-Day Scientists

In recent years, the worlds of science and fine dining have collided to create a new culinary discipline called molecular gastronomy and it takes the bird-filled cake when it comes to deceptive food. Essentially, it’s the study of the physical and chemical processes that occur while cooking and the application of scientific processes to create new culinary experiences.  The practical application is a host of bizarre flavours, techniques and textures designed to shock and delight unsuspecting diners. From apples that are infused with the essence of hay to flavoured foams that need to be cut with a knife, almost anything is possible.  Even bartenders are getting in on the action. Mixologist Spike Marchant , in a interview with New Scientist, said that his cocktail bar in London, 69 Colebrook Row, “made pineapples taste of ginger, apples taste of pineapple, [and] cherries taste of orange” using molecular gastronomy techniques. If you’d like to try your hand at it yourself, pick up the molecular gastronomy bible: the $600-per-copy Modernist Cuisine encyclopedia. Written by scientist and chef Nathan Myhrvold, chef Chris Young and chef Maxime Bilet, this 2400-plus page epic deconstructs the basic tenets of cooking and rebuilds them with new and scientific approaches. It’s the most recent development in the long human history of messing with dinner guests. Hopefully, live birds will remain firmly out of the picture this time.

Follow Andrew on Twitter @Andrew_NVS

To many people, the mention of food crops grown in Canada conjures up images of wheat, barley, flax, rye, oats and canola growing in vast fields. But the bounty produced across our country doesn’t just stop at cereal grains and cooking oils. There’s a whole wide world of weird Canadian crops that you may not have known about, often raised in quantities capable of feeding more than your average farmer’s market crowd. Not only does our home and native land practically sustain international appetites for mustard, determined growers from coast to coast are proving that it’s possible to farm everything from fiddlehead ferns to black Périgord truffles. Read on and discover some the more unusual food crops cultivated across Canada.

Berries

When it comes to berry production, Canada has grown beyond the usual blueberries, strawberries, raspberries and even saskatoons. Haskaps are the wave of the future, according to the Haskap Canada Association, which has over 70 members from Saskatchewan and Alberta. The hardy, elongated purple berries, also known as honeyberries, have enjoyed popularity in Russia since the ‘50s but have been consumed by Japan’s indigenous Ainu people for much longer. Similarly, sea buckthorn has links to Russia and Asia and is showing promise for Canadian producers. The yellow berries, which grow on shrubs, gained a following as the major ingredient of the Chinese Olympic team’s official sports drink during the 1988 games in Seoul, and they’ve lately been pleasing foodie palates in fruit-leather form at renowned restaurant Noma in Denmark.

Local flavour: The Berry Farm, a U-pick farm just outside Edmonton, A.B., grows both haskaps and sea buckthorn.

Canary Seed

It’s not for humans (yet – the Canaryseed Development Commission of Saskatchewan is working to change that), but canary seed is a food crop in the sense that, without it, pet birds all over the planet would be going hungry. Canada is both the largest producer and exporter of canary seed in the world, accounting for 70 per cent of international supply. We ship huge amounts of seed off to Mexico, Belgium, Brazil and other countries where, presumably, it’s gobbled up by domestic avian populations. Native to the Middle East, canary seed is a fairly recent crop to be adopted by Western Canadian farmers and has been grown primarily in Saskatchewan since the late ‘70s.

Local flavour: Armstrong Milling Company in Hagersville, O.N., produces both wild and domestic bird seed varieties using Canadian canary seed.

Fiddleheads

Considered a seasonal delicacy, fiddleheads are the young shoots of the ostrich fern. Indigenous to Canada, they’re so named because their curled forms look somewhat like the headstock of a violin. They grow well in damp and shady areas, and are harvested wild from about mid-April to mid-June each year. Packed with antioxidants and vitamins, fiddleheads have been embraced by both the health food community and the foodie sect.

Local flavour: The country’s first official fiddlehead farm, NorCliff Farms Inc., is Canada’s largest fiddlehead producer and packager, harvesting from millions of wild plants spread over a thousand-acre area.

Hops

Brewers can’t do without the green flower cones from the climbing hops vine. A signature part of the flavor profiles of nearly all beers made today, hops were once a common sight across the countryside in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec, but crops all but disappeared twenty years ago after being hit by pestilence and price drops. Today, Canadian hops are enjoying a small-scale revival, fed mainly by the craft brewing industry.

Local flavour: Crannog Ales, based on a farm near Sorrento, B.C., is the epitome of local: its ales are brewed in small batches using well water from its own land and, yes, they’re made with organic hops grown onsite.

Lavender

This fragrant purple herb is not just for old ladies anymore. Popular in Victorian times for everything from soaps to sachets to shortbread, lavender is finding new life in Canada with a surge in both popularity and production; boutique farms dot the countryside from British Columbia to Prince Edward Island. Culinary lavender varieties are often enjoyed in creations including lavender cakes and lavender lemonade, and as a component of an Americanized version of herbes de Provence.

Local flavour: The Okanagan Lavender Farm in Kelowna, B.C., grows over 60 kinds of lavender and produces its own lavender jelly, lavender loaf mix and lavender sugar, along with a diverse line of non-culinary lavender products.

Mustard

Lovers of hot dogs everywhere would be sans an essential condiment without Canada, which accounts for an astonishing 75 to 80 per cent of worldwide mustard exports. Grown for the most part in Alberta and Saskatchewan, mustard produced in Canada includes brown, yellow and oriental varieties, and is typically shipped off in its dry form for value-added manufacturing elsewhere. The United States is, by and large, the biggest importer of Canadian mustard, followed by Belgium and Germany.

Local flavour: Brassica Mustard in Calgary, A.B., has supplied restaurants and customers with four varieties of gourmet mustard for a decade, using locally-sourced ingredients.

Nuts

Everyone knows about hazelnuts, walnuts, and chestnuts, but what about butternuts and heartnuts? All of these nuts are grown in orchards throughout Canada, though in fairly modest quantities. Some Canadian nut orchards also produce pecans and edible pine nuts. Oh, and butternuts, for the uninitiated, are also known as white walnuts, while the heartnut is a variety of Japanese walnut.

Local flavour: The Gellatly Nut Farm in Westbank, B.C., was Canada’s first commercial nut orchard; it continues to operate as a regional park and working heritage farm. Enjoy its nut harvest from late September to early November.

Pulses

Pulses include beans, peas, lentils and chickpeas, and Canada happens to be a major player in the international pulse market, producing 30 per cent of the world’s peas and 17 per cent of the world’s lentils. Canadian pulses are grown mainly in Saskatchewan and are exported worldwide. Almost half of Canada’s chickpeas are sent to India, while the majority of our lentils go to Algeria and Bangladesh. Green lentils have traditionally dominated Canadian fields, but over the past few years, red lentils have become a significant export crop as well.

Local flavour: Best Cooking Pulses Inc., based in Portage la Prairie, M.B., is a Canadian company producing organic pulse flours, including organic chickpea flour, from domestic crops.

Truffles

Truffles aren’t exactly synonymous with Canada, but a few innovative agriculturalists are on their way to changing that. Black Périgord truffles, one of the most highly prized delicacies in the world, are being successfully cultivated on at least one Vancouver Island farm, the culmination of a decade’s worth of planning and preparation.

Local flavour: A team of trained Lagotto Romagnolo truffle dogs is on hand to sniff out so-called “black diamonds” from under the Garry oak trees at Duckett Truffieres, Canada’s first truffle farm, in Parksville, B.C.

Wild Rice

Not really rice at all, these aromatic black grains come from an aquatic grass that has the distinction of being one of the only cereals native to Canada. It’s not exactly suited to cultivation, growing in shallow water along rivers, streams and lakes with slow and constant currents, so it’s typically harvested wild in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario. Traditionally, Aboriginal peoples paddled their canoes through the tall stalks and beat the tops with canes, causing the falling grains to collect in the bottom of the boats.

Local flavour: Manomin Canadian Wild Rice is an Ojibway co-operative in Dryden, O.N., that buys wild rice grains from local Aboriginal harvesters before roasting them in a roaster designed to simulate traditional processes and packaging them for the market.

Woody Tasch wants people to start putting their money where their mouth is, rethinking finance, culture and the soil. Through a movement called Slow Money, Tasch, alongside a growing number of followers, is connecting food, health and capital by moving the flow of investment capital to small food enterprises and along the way redefining the idea of investment returns. The notion that Tasch, the 59-year-old founder and chairman of Slow Money, might just hold a few tangible answers to the myriad of problems plaguing farmers, consumers and investors alike, is stirring excitement in many.

“What could be more grounding than the idea we need to slow down and focus on the soil?” says Tasch, on the telephone from New Mexico. He is not trying to recreate a romanticized vision of life on the farm, or promote the beauties of being a peasant but Tasch does have a thing or two to say about agrarian life. With an idea that embraces a number of recent leanings, from consumer concern of food provenance to volatility in global financial markets to emerging localization movements, Tasch thinks he’s on to something. “We are essentially talking about building from the ground up some new financial infrastructures that really haven’t existed before to connect local investors to local food businesses,” says Tasch.

While he can’t place an exact figure on the returns investors will see, Tasch notes Slow Money is “clearly something to do with your money for people who are not just trying to maximize their profits.” Redefining the idea of a return on investment, to something beyond a number, is at the core of the Slow Money movement. Tasch believes investing a few percent a year in local food systems could turn out to be a compelling part of someone’s portfolio, considering the localness, tangibility, decreased risk and community benefits of such an investment. Connecting small food enterprises with capital is an equally compelling idea for 23-year-old Ian Stolee, a city kid from southeast suburbia in Calgary, Alberta who wants to one day be a farmer

“There’s something natural about working with the land itself,” says Stolee, “I quite enjoy the process of planting a garden and then harvesting it later on. It’s quite satisfying.” Stolee is in the midst of trying to figure out how – or if – he can one day take over his uncle’s farm in central Alberta. “It’s a family farm that’s been around for 100 years and we’d like to see that continue,” says Stolee, the only one in the family who has expressed an interest in farming.

Stolee has already centered his education on the prospect of farming, or more specifically, an off-farm job.  “My uncle tells the story of a young guy who went to the loan office to talk to them about getting a loan and the first thing they asked him was, ‘what’s your off-farm job?’ There’s that stigma that the farm can’t pay for itself,” says Stolee. He’s hoping a bachelor of science in agriculture with a major in sustainable agriculture systems, alongside summer work experience in crop research and crop scouting, coupled with a land and water resources program diploma, will help him on the farm and off.

But money is still a daunting topic, to say the least, as costs add up quickly in the world of agriculture and the returns don’t always match. Stolee has already put extensive thought in to how he could maintain a financially viable farm. He’s cognizant of the fact a niche market incorporating the sustainability aspects he’s learned about in the classroom would be key for a small-scale farmer. “The input costs are so high and the return isn’t that great. It’s all kind of intimidating. It requires so much capital and you can take out such big loans, but would you ever be able to repay those?” asks Stolee.

The financial challenges of the agricultural industry are acknowledged by Clem Samson, vice-president of western operations of Farm Credit Canada (FCC), a commercial federal crown corporation with a mandate to supply financial solutions to the agriculture and agribusiness sector. FCC offers a variety of resources and courses to help young farmers get started, in addition to various loan products. “To buy a farming operation today, the capital cost is very, very high, especially when you look at the land costs that are involved, the equipment costs that are involved, and then at the end of the day after putting all the money out, the volatility and the unknown of what the market place is going to be,” says Samson.

An off-farm income is common for many first-time farmers. “We see a lot of farmers starting today where they’ll have an outside job and they’ll buy a quarter of land to get started and will basically be a part-time farmer,” says Samson.

Yet despite such challenges, Stolee and others are still drawn to the industry. The knowledge that Slow Money could one day help him finance a small sustainable farm is exciting, as is the underlying notion that someone might place value on local agriculture over simply making money off another project. “As a young guy thinking about getting in to this, it’s encouraging to know there may be others that are backing you up to help make it possible,” says Stolee.

As Stolee wrestles with the financing and form a future farm might take, third generation farmer Tristan Cavers, 29, knows firsthand the challenges – and joys – of the industry. “I did a lot of other jobs… not any of them being super satisfying,” says Cavers, currently in year eight of a ten year succession plan to take over Golden Ears Farm in Chase, B.C. from his father. “Work becomes life more than work,” says Cavers of his draw to farming. “I wake up, I come in, we all eat, and then we go out and do whatever needs to be done. Whether I’m underneath the pickup truck or on the tractor mowing corn, whether we’re butchering chickens or pigs or what have you – it’s just life and some days you work late and other days the skies open up and a torrent falls down and you sit inside and read a book.”

Golden Ears Farm operates as a worker-run cooperative of young individuals, a stark contrast to the image of the aging farmer. Through a fruit and vegetable stand on the side of the Trans-Canada Highway, Golden Ears is working to build a sustainable food system in the region. Yet along the way, each spring marks a stressful time of counting the nickels and dimes.  “It’s often you find yourself doing two months of labour without any kind of return, not even a moral return.  You’re getting nothing and watching the bank balance go down,” says Cavers.

Still, Cavers is hesitant when considering whether he would seek out outside investors to support the farm.  Cavers has thought about starting a Community Shared Agriculture (CSA) model at Golden Ears – a way for members to create a relationship with the farm, receive a weekly basket of produce and in turn share the risk of what the season will bring – and thinks the localness of the CSA model is key. “I would be completely uninterested in someone from Vancouver or Calgary, if there’s even room for discussion to take place,” he says of outside investments, noting a close proximity to the farm would be necessary. Golden Ears would want to share the highs and lows with anyone involved in the farm – “We would want someone who if something terrible happened, they’re right here. And when something exciting is happening they can be a part of that,” says Cavers.

Tasch understands such concern on the part of farmers – that’s why Slow Money’s strategy is built around a national network as well as local networks. Slow Money groups meet regularly in many regions across the United States, while the national Slow Money network holds an annual gathering linking farmers, food entrepreneurs, donors, NGOs and investors from around the world.

On the flipside of the Slow Money equation are investors who recognize the value of connecting sustainable food systems and agriculture-based businesses and have the capital to do so.  This is the side of things Tasch is extremely familiar with, having drawn on his experiences as a venture capitalist, foundation treasurer and entrepreneur when he founded the Slow Money organization in 2008. Tasch had worked for many years with investors who were putting money in early-stage green businesses and with foundations trying to use their investments in ways that were more consistent with their missions. As chairman emeritus of Investors’ Circle, a nonprofit network of investors, Tasch acted as a matchmaker-of-sorts, facilitating the flow of $130 million to 200 sustainability minded, early stage companies and venture funds. Tasch was treasurer of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation for most of the 1990’s, pioneering mission-related investing. Add in meeting the Slow Food folks – a movement that counteracts fast food and fast life and strives to preserve traditional and regional cuisine – and the pieces lined up for Tasch to meld social investing, philanthropy and sustainable agriculture in to something new. A system addressing the flow of capital directly to sustainable agriculture and small food enterprises was needed, and Slow Money was born.

As for his critics who suggest Slow Money investors are better off to put their money in a higher-return investment and use the extra money to give back to farmers or buy local – Tasch doesn’t buy it. “I call that model wealth now, philanthropy later,” he says. “You make your million or billion of dollars so you can give a little bit away.” Tasch believes we’ve operated in the age of wealth now, philanthropy later for far too long. He sees Slow Money in a different economic realm entirely, one that creates jobs and wealth but at the same time heals broken social and environmental relations. “We don’t have time to go through another century of just unfettered economic growth, and then hope we have enough wealth at the end to kind of clean up the mess.”

That sort of thinking is attracting many investors on various scales to Slow Money. Thirty-three-year-old Elizabeth Ü was first spurred to examine investing in the food and agriculture space after repeated frustrations with the investment options available. That initial exploration led to extensive involvement in a professional capacity, including working as a project manager of Slow Money. Ü has been at the forefront of a growing movement of people acknowledging the role farms play in our society and working to better support them. “I want to see these really small family farms that are at the heart of their communities thrive,” says Ü.

Echoing the thoughts of many people who make more than they need to survive but are not considered investors in the conventional sense, Ü looks for ways to invest in local companies that are active participants in the types of communities she wants to live in. “I’d love to be able to invest in the smaller, privately-held companies whose products I buy but whose investment offerings are considered riskier and therefore are only available to investors that have much higher net worth’s than I do,” says Ü, a California resident.

She’s recently left her job in the business to focus on her long-time “passion project”, a ‘capital cookbook’ guide for entrepreneurs looking to navigate the financing options available to them. While Ü is unsure of the project’s final structure, she envisions an interactive, open-sourced website that gets the tools in the hands of people who can use them. “There is not a good understanding of the types of models available so people tend to default back to traditional models,” says Ü, who will instead focus on what she describes as “a really beautiful way of rethinking investment.”

Slow Money is resonating with people across the United States, with examples of big money helping small agricultural producers sprouting up across the country. Tasch has written a book on Slow Money and the movement has been featured in Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and labeled as a ‘big idea for 2010’ by BusinessWeek. But shift the focus up north to Canada, one of the largest agricultural producers in the world, and Slow Money seems relatively unheard of. A formal Canadian Slow Money movement may not yet exist, but innovative projects throughout the country are placing a value on supporting local, sustainable agriculture producers and the wholesome food they produce.

David Van Seters knows firsthand the impact socially conscious investors can have on a business, as he utilized such funding to start his own business. Van Seters founded Small Potatoes Urban Delivery (SPUD) in Vancouver in 1998, an Internet home delivery company delivering local food directly to customers. Van Seters grew the business from just nine customers in the first week to thousands of customers in four Canadian cities.

When it came to financing the business, “my goal was to try to seek out social mission investors who really believed in what we were doing and offered patient capital,” says Van Seters, who received financing from what he describes as “small social mission venture capital sources.” Ever the entrepreneur, Van Seters has recently stepped away from the company he founded in order to pursue new ventures. He notes there is still a huge need for investment in small local food enterprises. “Local food enterprises provide great benefits to the local economy that work to help everyone,” he says. His business is also firsthand proof such investments can be worth it, on many levels. “I really believe it’s because of our social mission and our commitment to buying locally and buying healthy, natural foods that really helped us to survive and grow in this particular industry,” he says.

Not only is Tasch exploring a dramatically different way for money to move around the world but perhaps more striking – people are actually listening.  “We were called a movement at 40 members and at 400 members someone called it a revolution,” says Tasch. “Now we have 1,200 people who’ve sent us between five and $15,000. 12,000 people have signed the Slow Money principles.”

While he admits the notion money is moving too fast and must be brought back down to earth might have seemed crazy two or three years ago, Tasch feels the idea is timely, helped, no doubt, by the global financial crisis. This new version of economic uncertainty has spurred open discussion and created a tremendous underlying momentum for Slow Money. Slow Money’s official goal of one million people investing one per cent of their assets in local food systems within a decade appears attainable. “I think it’s reasonable to project that we’re going to be dealing with hundreds of thousands of people in the not terribly distant future, participating in this in a variety of ways. I think that we are tapping in to something that could be of significant value to a lot of people,” says Tasch, genuine excitement permeating his words.

Though a lack-of-speed is at the core of Slow Money, Tasch believes the movement to be urgent.  “The world is running wild on all these crazy, complicated technologies and all these other things, and floods of information that we can’t even sort through anymore. What could be more grounding than the idea we need to slow down and focus on the soil?” asks Tasch.  He sees returning in some measure to a re-emphasis on the agrarian, on the natural and on being slow as an imperative challenge for society but one that must be met, and he’s confident it will be. “Imagining that [Slow Money] could be a vehicle for millions of people to reconnect to their local community in an economic way doesn’t strike me as far fetched.”

Cameron Smith does not bring home the bacon. In fact, he makes it himself. For up to 100 hours a week, six month per year, Smith and Dana Ewart, his partner in both business and life (they sign emails from their work account “Cam and Dana”), make pretty much everything themselves – from peach galettes with fruit that was just plucked from the tree to elaborate al fresco dinners at wineries sprinkled through the Okanagan.

Originally from Ontario, the pair were kitchen competitors at top restaurants such as Toque! in Montreal and Scaramouche in Toronto before ditching their high-stress jobs to take a semi-sabbatical. After a stretch as tree planters, the 30-something pair set up Joy Road Catering in the basement of their home near Penticton.

Cameron Smith and Dana Ewart of Joy Road Catering

The work is still high-stress, and the challenges these entrepreneurs face is a little unusual. “It’s a lot harder dealing with hippie farmers,” Ewart says. As Smith puts it, “In a restaurant there are multiple deadlines and they can seem life or death at the time, but if a farmer has something more important to do they will bring that lamb tomorrow. Or if the raspberry field is wet, they won’t go out and pick the berries even though we’ll be pulling our hair out because we have a dinner that night with a dessert that needs raspberries.”

The perks of self-employment, however, outweigh the frustrations. “The restaurant industry is very fickle. You get a good review one day and the phone rings off hook. But if you don’t get reviewed for two weeks, your restaurant is dead,” Smith explains. “There was a real opportunity for us here. The ingredients were here, the farms are here, the wine is here and the clientele have educated palates and are excited about what we do. I think we’d still be successful in the city, but people here they get it. They see the vines, see where the wine came from, we see the person who grew the carrots.” Lower start-up costs and overhead make catering a smart business move for a chef. The ability to, as Smith puts it, change a menu on a dime, rather than sticking to a stale two-month old menu, for instance, is another benefit.

Ewart and Smith only operate when they can get fresh local food, which packs a year’s worth of revenue and work into half the time of a traditional catering company. They start up in May when the first wild watercress and peas become available and shut down when frost hits in November.

A typical day goes something like this: Wake up at 7 a.m., answer emails, make phone calls and write up shopping and prep lists. Create a schedule for that night’s event, assign staff tasks for the day, and write lists of what equipment and special ingredients they’ll need. At 10 a.m., the four full-time staff arrives (they also have a bunch of part-timers) and everyone preps food until 1 p.m. The staff takes turns cooking for the daily sit-down lunch – no brown bag lunches here – which is often the only chance they have in a 16-hour day for a proper meal. Later in the afternoon, they pack up the vans, triple-check their checklist and head off to the venue, where Smith and Ewart have 10 minutes to make themselves at home in a foreign space. The day ends sometime around 11 p.m. when they drive home, unload coolers, wash dishes and go to bed. Then they repeat that almost every day for the rest of the season.

“It’s pretty nuts. In summer, we’ll stay up all night Friday baking, go to the farmers’ market on Saturday, have our crew prep all the produce we bring home that afternoon and then it’s show time: two different weddings on Saturday and dinners at wineries on Sunday,” Ewart says. All told, they feed about 500 people on a given weekend, then spend Monday – their busiest day – ordering food and clearing through paperwork. “We crash in November.”

Like their schedules, the Joy Road Catering “office” – actually a basement kitchen retrofitted to accommodate Smith, Ewart, four full-time staff and a bunch of part-timers – is unusual. We counted nine pairs of prongs, for starters. Below, Ewart and Smith describe their space.

Ewart (far right) and Cameron Smith (in chef's white) preside over the Joy Road HQ

Anatomy of  a Kitchen

+ The pair went to an auction sale and, as Ewart puts it, “set ourselves up on quite a dime.” The chopping blocks ($75 each) came from an old butcher shop. “They have a history. They’re made with gorgeous piece of wood and have railway ties going through them,” Ewart says.
+ Big French doors lead to the garden and chicken coop. “We have a rocket launcher out back that we bought from our dear friend Angus An at Maenam restaurant in Vancouver. We use it to sear meats and make huge stocks and batches of steamy jam,” says Ewart. Every piece comes with a story. “There’s a crew who moved west and opened our own businesses at the same time. It was neat going through all those growing pains of opening our own business.”
+ Posters from numerous events Joy Road has worked at decorate the walls. Other art includes an oversized photo of an unlikely source of culinary inspiration: Albert Einstein. “It’s says something like great spirits have always encountered violent opposition,” Smith says. “It’s kind of tongue-in-cheek, but it symbolizes how you need to go your own way, do you own thing, you cannot care what the establishment will say.”
+ The best part of the Joy Road headquarters is the view of the Okanagan – not to mention the outdoor beer tap. “That’s also where we keep our fridge,” says Smith.
+ “We prep in this kitchen, but our office is wherever we’ve been hired to go,” Smith explains. “The challenge is to haul around an entire kitchen of equipment and the food that goes with it.” U

When you opened Vij’s you knew how to cook, of course. How much did you know about business?
Nothing, basically. But my father was a businessman, and through osmosis you learn to become a businessman as well.

My father brought $22,000 cash in a bag from India and I had saved $10,000. If it had gone under, we’d have felt like, “Oh shit, that was a lot of money.”

Vancouver chef and restaurateur Vikram Vij

It was very lean. My break-even point every day was $100. If I did $100 a day, I’d know I would survive. Some days I did $96 or $92. Sometimes I would ring in naan bread or something so that I could feel that I’d done $100 in sales. I cheated myself knowing I was cheating. It was a psychological game that I’d play with myself.

About four months after the restaurant started, a food writer called the Urban Peasant, James Barber, gave me such a raving review that people started coming. Then I was making $130 and $140 a day in sales. And I never looked back.

Was that a turning point?
I was running out of money. I had put the restaurant up for sale. We were all dejected. My father was upset; I was feeling a little bit down. This review came out and people started coming in. Actually, if credit has to be given it’d be to Angela Mills and Robin Mines and all the Vancouver food writers who reviewed the restaurant.

What did you find most challenging about those early days?
People had no idea. The challenge was to show people a more modern style of Indian food – not butter chicken and tikka masala. I made a delicious lamb curry with cinnamon. They still ask for butter chicken, and they’re mad I don’t do it. It’s not their fault; they’re just not educated.

What have you learned about leadership over the years?
I had this old-world way of dealing with the staff by screaming and yelling. I’ve calmed down extremely. But I will still say stuff like, “Don’t you get it? Why don’t you get it?”

The other thing I’ve learned is that we live in North America, and these people are not your servants. They are here to work and help you achieve your goal, so you’d better be nice to them.

If you had to compare your leadership style to one of your dishes, what would it be?
There’s a dish that I’ve just put on the menu called Rajasthan-style goat curry, which is based on my travels to India in April. The meat is slow-cooked for six hours. It’s tender inside, but has very strong flavours. And lots of spices – there’s a conundrum happening with the spices – and a blend of different layers and angles and heat at the back of your palate. I always respect the tradition of a dish, but modernize it by adding blueberries or some acidity. That dish to me is who I am as a human being: Strong, sometimes tender, sometimes spicy, robust and to be enjoyed piping hot.

Today your wife, Meeru Dhalwala, runs the kitchen, while you manage the restaurant. Why did you decide to divide these roles?
Meeru was in Third World development in Washington, D.C., when we met. She didn’t have a working visa. She had no cooking experience. She would just hang out in the kitchen in Vancouver and see what I was doing.

The bigger the restaurant got, the more I was running around. There was payroll to be done, produce to be bought, connections to be made with farmers. And both of us are strong personalities, so we would butt heads on what dishes should taste like. I said, “Look, I can’t work with you and fight with you all day and come home and act like nothing happened.”

She’s the creative force behind the dishes. She will work with me on the menu. She’s also responsible for the emotional well-being of all the women in the kitchen. All these Indian women have some issues at home, family issues and stuff, and they go to Meeru for advice. She’ll say, “This is what you should do: put your foot down; tell your mother-in-law to fuck off.” She’s a force to reckon with.

That’s a very traditional way to develop staff.
Normally when you get accolades and become a big restaurant, you hire executive chefs from outside. But I do it differently: If you stay longer with the company, I will pay you well and you’ll learn how to cook — which builds loyalty, brings consistency to the food and creates harmony within the community. The food shows passion.

You’ve complained that many restaurants are motivated by business concerns instead of passion.
I’m always concerned about restaurants that are driven by concepts. If you don’t love what you do, eventually it will show and you will fail – it doesn’t matter how good a business person you are. I have the passion for food and for wine and for people. I love all these three things.

You make a flatbread from cricket flour. What do crickets taste like?
Exactly like pumpkin seeds. It was my wife who created this dish. She read somewhere that we can eat crickets and bugs, so we made flour and put cricket bread on the menu to see the reaction. The most important thing was the environmental aspect. Crickets are high in protein and low on the food chain.

Do you eat cricket bread at home?
No.

Foodies and critics – of which there are many in Vancouver – consider Vij’s one of the best Indian restaurants not only in Canada, but in the world. If you’re in town, don’t bother making reservations at Vij’s, or its sister restaurant Rangoli. It’s all democratic: show up and wait in line with everyone. Vikram Vij’s newest venture is a series of culinary tours through India. Butter chicken lovers need not apply.

Spend a few minutes watching Henrik and Daniel Sedin play for the Vancouver Canucks and you’ll have no trouble believing that twins possess an extra something the rest of us don’t. They seem to read one another’s minds; one is always ready to capitalize on the other’s play. Darren and Dwayne Gauthier know all about the twin phenomenon. With four friends, the 19-year-old identicals left the Maritimes, moved to Alberta and worked in the oil industry for a few years. Then the two started a landscaping business. Now 29, the Gauthiers have also opened Restaurant 27, a high-end restaurant in Red Deer to introduce the city of big-box restaurant franchises to adventurous menu items such as duck and rabbit. (The name references the age they were when they started the restaurant.) Sure, there have some differences. Dwayne is 15 minutes older; Darren is a more reserved (in their partnership, he handles the numbers). But their approach to business, and life, is remarkably similar.

Dwayne Gauthier presides over the kitchen and brother Darren handles the front of house

O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Dwayne: I didn’t work in the oil industry right away. I went to NAIT’s culinary program. I worked in kitchens in an Edmonton hotel and a restaurant. I was passing through Red Deer en route to a job in Calgary when I decided to stay. I helped manage an East Coast, maritime-themed bar. I was working 70, 80 hours a week for $1,600 a month. I saw all these people around me making good money, so I called it quits and said I wasn’t working in another restaurant till I owned my own.

I worked in the oilfield for the next five years or so. Then my fiancée was pregnant, and I was still spending seven months of the year away from home. When we got into the oil rigs, the idea was always that we would save money to buy a restaurant. It didn’t quite work out. It’s more fun buying toys and motorcycles. But I’ve always been passionate about the restaurant business. Even in the oilfield I would spend days and nights watching the Food Network.

Darren and I are side by side 24/7. If anyone gets jealous, it’s my fiancée and Darren’s girlfriend. Yesterday, for example, I was at the restaurant at 10 a.m. until 11 p.m. Then we picked up our landscaping gear and did snow removal until 3 a.m. We went home, got some sleep and were back at the restaurant first thing in the morning.