I was at a talk the other night by an investment company in which the head of research spent a lot of time extolling the virtues of ‘high quality companies’ and suggesting in the strongest possible terms (by naming it at least three times, for its steady growth, its popularity in times of recession, and its admirable gifts in job creation) that we should buy into one in particular. And the name of this wonderful opportunity was Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart??

Quite rightly, the first question he got after finishing was whether he ever looked at the social record of companies he recommended. After some shuffling of his papers he admitted that no, he didn’t look at that at all. You folks, he said, pay me to find you companies that will give you good returns, not to examine how they behave. Shades of Gordon Gekko.

This chap had also spent some time explaining how lessons had been learned from the Depression so we couldn’t possibly end up back there.

But what have we learned really, if we’re being encouraged to put our money down into the same environment of amorality that caused the collapse of companies like Lehman and Bernard Madoff? If we are told it’s ok to overlook how companies behave, and never mind how they earn their profits, as long as they continue to pay us our investment income, then are we not responsible for kicking morality further into the gutter?

And holding Wal-Mart up as an investor’s paradigm? A company that can create all those McJobs precisely because it’s beaten its competitors into the dirt through use of sweatshops, tax dodges and keeping its pay scale right along the poverty line. And whose business strategy is to kill off small, independent and family-owned stores; the very stores that hire people who know their products and can provide intelligent advice when selling them. A company that wants to bite off the biggest chunk of our shopping dollar by driving down quality standards – nurturing public hunger for cheap, disposable goods; exporting our manufacturing industries to the cheapest supplier – and through opportunistic expansion into areas like organic foods.

We will surely get the kind of world we deserve, if this is the kind of company we choose to support with our investment money. And, it goes without saying, with our shopping dollar.

I had opened a jar of sauerkraut the other day and was pondering what to do with it. I still have some beets from my bumper Christmas organic box, and I started thinking about some borscht I once had that included both beets and sauerkraut.

But in looking for this recipe I stumbled upon several others for sauerkraut borscht which call for smoked sausages (like those St Gregor ones I have stashed in my freezer).

Which reminded me that borscht, to many of us, means a kind of beet soup, but that is a woefully limited view of a term that, like paella, can mean an almost infinite range of dishes under a common culinary umbrella.

Which led me to look further at the page I’d happened upon, which was a collection of Mennonite recipes. Last summer I made sorrel soup (here called Zummahborscht) out of some weeds I’d pulled at Haliburton Farm. The soup was delicious and lemony; the labour involved was a bit tedious, as I had to rinse and sort the leaves rather more than I would a grocery store bag of greens, but I think it was worth it and I’ll be volunteering for weeding duties again this year.

Nancy gave me the most wonderful book: Table Talk, by the overwhelmingly acerbic AA Gill. The chapter on rice starts seriously enough, though:

The grass family (Gramineae) is extraordinary. From its largest member, maize, to one of its smallest, teff, grass provides the staple diet of humans. If you believe that you are what you eat… you can divide the world neatly — indeed, almost exactly — in half between two Gramineae–philes: wheat-eaters and rice-eaters.
…
The wheat world and the rice world are better definitions of our most fundamental division than the myopically geo-political ‘first’ and ‘third’, the mealy-mouthed ‘developed’ and ‘developing’, or the plainly geographical north/south.

He makes some interesting points about the two halves:

In terms of wholesomeness, rice and wheat are remarkably similar. Wheat has slightly more protein, rice more carbohydrate. For labourers, rice alone is just enough for sustenance… you can feed more people with an acre of rice than an acre of wheat.
…
…rice will sustain a dense population, but it is also more intensive to grow than wheat. Look at how many people are needed to plant a paddy field compared with a wheat field. It needs elaborate water management; it’s high maintenance. Rice may keep a large population just above starvation, but it also needs that population to grow it. Paddy fields become a closed circle of work producing the energy to work.

Wheat, on the other hand, feeds a smaller population, but allows them more space and time to do other things, such as develop a social system and technology that ends up colonising rice-eaters. After breakfast, space and time are everything.

By coincidence, a day or two after reading this, I heard the first part of a week-long dramatisation of a rather grim radio play called The Death of Grass, part of a Science Fiction series. It’s only available online for a week. Worth a listen.

With apologies to the mutton campaign, I’d like to share a more characteristic moment from AA Gill:

The ingénue vegetables were midgets and dwarves, boiled so that they held their natural shape only by a collective act of nostalgia. But they were ambrosia compared with the mutton. The colour of a gravedigger’s fingernail, it was a mortified curl of muscle form some unknown extremity of ancient ovine. It resisted knife and fork, being mostly translucent, sweaty gristle and greasy fat. It was inedibly disgusting, without question the nastiest ingredient I’ve been served this year.

I do not, so far as I know, have a drop of Welsh blood in me, but I wish those of you who do a happy St David’s Day. I read that Welsh recipes have something in common with poetry (not surprisingly I suppose!) in that they were saved from dying out during the Industrial Revolution, when farmers turned from the land to the factories and mines, by oral tradition, one generation passing them to the next, until they were written down. As food does get caught up in class struggles too, I guess these more humble dishes would also have risked loss by having given way to more ‘elevated’ fare cooked in French-influenced English kitchens of the time.

If you want to celebrate today with a particularly good dish, I recommend Glamorgan Sausages, which you can probably make well enough with Feta or Lancashire if you are in a Caerphilly-deprived area.

Speaking of sausages, before I left Saskatchewan, I was directed by two independent and reliable gastrophiles (Dee and Glen) to the town of St Gregor

and the red and white striped home of Prime Meats.

Glen has been a loyal customer for at least 30 of the 31 years the company has been offering local employment and high quality smoked locally-reared meats to smoked German sausage fans far and wide, and so I accepted his judgement. The odour of woodsmoke, which Dee commented on, was most appetising, and you can peek behind the counter to see men in action on sawdust floors. Long may they continue!.

And for those who wish to celebrate Welsh heritage in poetry, why not try your hand at three classic Welsh poetry forms? (Though I am a bit dubious about the Welshness of Terza Rima… was Dante a Welshman?)

And now, a musical interlude, from Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, because he will soon (March 22) be appearing in Saskatoon at the Broadway Theatre. We are not to be graced in Victoria, alas. I must have invoked him because I was looking through some of his Youtube appearances a few days before I happened upon the notice for his show when I was in Saskatoon last weekend. Andrew put me onto him when I was in London a couple of years ago.

… or as they quipped during the Saturday night entertainment, that’s terroir as opposed to terre noire as opposed to terreur. It’s a term that began in the realm of winemaking, to describe the many elements that go into building a wine’s character: the mineral content of the soil, sun exposure, moisture and drainage, altitude and so forth.

Marc Loiselle and the Rural Development Alternatives panel.

The word has been picked up by other food producers who find it a good all-encompassing way to describe the qualities that go into making a food product unique. If it’s an animal product, you look at the breed as well as the climate, topography and flora that affect the flavour, fat and texture of its meat or milk, which will in turn provide unique characteristics to its products – cheese, for example – made from it.

So last weekend I spent a day at a conference with the enticing title of Terroir, Identity and Seduction which gave the francophones of Saskatchewan (and a few of us anglophones) a chance to take a close look at local issues of terroir, through presentations, networking and even a bit of eating and drinking.

Kicking things off with a plenary on Regional Development in Saskatchewan and Beyond

There was a small but diverse and surprising selection of producers offering tastes and consumables of all shapes and sizes; howdja like them apples, from Petrofka Bridge Orchard

or that lovely flour from Marc Loiselle’s Red Fife Wheat

rising to life in Trent Loewen’s excellent Earthbound Bakery bread…

and who could have imagined Bedard Creek Acres’ Red Clover Syrup

plus beaucoup de bison (including an awesome bison pâté) from the Meridian Bison Company; marvellous moutarde de Gravelbourg from Gravelbourg Mustard (the one with cranberry made me swoon, and yearn for a nice bit of roast goose to eat it with).

André Simard told us about Charlevoix’s Local Development Centre and the state of gastrotourism and food production in Charlevoix, where they’ve made good progress in establishing unique products and viable markets for them, including La Route des Saveurs de Charlevoix, which was set up nearly 15 years ago and continues as a model of gastrotourism to the rest of the country.

Jean-Pierre Lemasson offered some gritty truths about terroir, identity and commerce, touching on some interesting dilemmas, like: is it possible to recreate a historical dish when the ingredients no longer resemble their origins? And talked about the industrialization and globalization of production and taste since World War 2, and the sticky issues those things raise for contemporary notions of authenticity and terroir. At lunchtime he offered an impromptu historical view of Tourtière, maintaining – to enthusiastic acclaim – that it is an ancient food, on the grounds that a recipe for a meat pie encompassed in pastry was found on cuneiform tablets, proving it’s been on the table for around 4,000 years. Hotly debated, tourtière’s origins according to folklore are that it was named for passenger pigeons – tourtes – that were used as ingredients a couple of centuries ago; but others maintain that, like paella, the food is named after the dish it’s cooked in. Here’s a recipe for it from Charlevoix.

We heard from Claude Dubé about Economuseums (économusées)

which are part museum, part workshop, part commercial enterprise, or as they define themselves:

a craft or agri-foods business whose products are the fruit of an authentic technique or know-how. The business showcases artisans and craft trades by offering an area for interpreting its production and by opening its doors to the public.

André Simard and Sylvain Charlebois ponder Saskatchewan issues.

We even had a participant who knocked a few socks off – even when they were sat the other side of the wall in the next room – by ending his presentation a capella. Here he is singing for CBC/Radio-Canada, the one and only Zachary Richard, Acadian advocate from Louisiana:

For me the grand finale was the Iron Chef competition, featuring three talented locals preparing hors d’oeuvres we could vote on:

Jean-François Dionne

Pascal Lafond

and Trent Loewen prep it up.

Pascal Lafond’s spectacular and surprising cherry salsa, mustard tile and liver pâté bison glacé

Jean-François Dionne’s Diefenbaker Lake trout tartare with greens served on a wild rice flour cracker was elegant and understated:

but the winner was Trent Loewen’s silky chicken liver mousse on Éphémère flax bread.