Stepping up to the plate: a taste of Canadian food history

 

Between Alice Waters, the Slow Food Movement, the 100 Mile Diet, Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan, and a lot of farmers and their friends, food is back on the agenda — and rightfully so.

The line goes something like this: obesity, swine flu, avian flu, salmonella, and mad cow disease have all made it into the category of “major health scares” in recent years. The average age of farmers is, well, not very young, rural populations are dwindling, the archetypal Canadian farm is being handed over to massive agribusiness and those wooden wheat silos are now made of concrete. The variety of foods we eat has dropped drastically, but the number of processed, derived products has shot upwards. Some foods are — to use terminology no longer restricted to dinosaurs— going extinct. In this context, taking another look at what we eat and where it comes from doesn’t sound like a bad idea.

In Grain Elevated: The Rise and Fall of Red Fife Wheat, Sarah Musgrave points to the Red Fife wheat as a good example of some bigger problems. One of the first varieties of wheat grown in the country after colonization, Red Fife wheat could in large part be responsible for extending cultivated farmland across the Prairies and giving Canada the reputation of a breadbasket to the world. But with the massive industrialization of food production, Red Fife was replaced by higher yield, disease resistant, and more uniform strains of wheat, meaning that by mid-twentieth century, Red Fife had almost disappeared altogether. It was only after a bag of seed was found, kept and cultivated by people dedicated to preserving heritage foods, and then most recently brought to a wider audience by the Wild Fire Bakery in Victoria, BC, that Red Fife has made its way back onto the scene.

The problems faced by the Red Fife variety are representative of much larger issues in the food industry. The regulations imposed by Food Agencies in North America (the CFIA in Canada and FSIS in the US) are built to favour mass production: they approve products based on yield and uniformity, leaving taste, health value, and sustainability somewhere on the side of the road. Farmers in British Columbia tell a similar story: in 2004, the provincial government – partially in response to the BSE scare in Alberta – imposed new regulations on meat producers and processors. The result was that small farmers and processors, who feed their cattle less antibiotics, better food and give them more space, were completely unable to compete with mass producers, the ones whose food production system has caused the BSE scare in the first place. It is for reasons like this that Red Fife will most likely never actually be approved for human consumption: it doesn’t make sense for big business, even if it does for everyone else.

Musgrave argues that when we favour this kind of food production, we lose our sense of place: this bread or this syrup or these vegetables could be from anywhere, and we wouldn’t know better. She promotes a stronger sense of terroir: the idea that “a particular interplay of geography, history and human factors imbues food with a particular taste that cannot be recreated elsewhere”. Here, the personal is the political: Canadians need to make sense of agricultural policy so that it makes sense for us.

Musgrave’s chapter appears in What’s To Eat?, a volume edited by Nathalie Cooke which helps tell the story of how Canadians procure, produce, cook, consume and think about food. It will be published in September.

Comments

[Sharon Rempel]

Having just read the Red Fife chapter in the book I have to caution readers that the research done for the chapter is at best scanty and is full of inaccuracies. You can read the posted history of Red Fife on Wikipedia and on the Canadian Encyclopedia.
The author of the chapter didn't read this before becoming the expert for the book.
For the record to correct the book. The first pound of Red Fife was sent to me in 1986 from a wheat breeder in Saskatchewan. Cliff Leir (and his wonderful wife Erica, never mentioned in Slow Food literature or the book) were not the first to bake with it in Canada; Jennifer Scott and the Maritimes Heritage Wheat project were using it in the late 1990s. Marc Loisele is just one of the hundreds of farmers growing Red Fife coast to coast and he was not the first to grow it. We grew a large field in Keremeos in 1991; this is the foundation seed from which the heritage wheat Red Fife movement has sprung.
Walter Walchuck in AB grew Red Fife years before Marc.
If I hadn't taken the energy to keep the variety alive for years and be crazy enough to say 'hey, let's get this back into circulation again' it would still be lying around in a breeder collection.
Red Fife wheat is Canada's first variety preserved wheat in the marketplace. Each time Red Fife grows in a new field the 'terroir' of the genetics and that land gives the wheat a slightly different baking quality and taste. That's the miracle of growing a landrace variety.
And Red Fife, sadly is not going to grow well in all regions of Canada.
Red Fife was in the marketplace before the early 1900s variety registration system was in place so in theory it's grandfathered into the system. It has been used as a breeding parent for modern varieties in Canada and globally.
Learn more about growing wheat; buy 'Demeter's Wheats'. www.grassrootsolutions.com
Sharon Rempel

[sharon rempel]

By the way, the quality of wheat, which determines if it is for human consumption can be affected by how the wheat is stored. Red Fife grows like all other varieties of wheat and it's grade #1, #2 etc is determined by the genetic interaction with soil and climate. It can vary year to year, field to field. Same as with any other variety, heritage or hybrid.

Ideally the farmer finds a variety that thrives in his or her soil and environment and ideally grows organically. Red Fife and other heritage varieties have been tested by Gary Martens and others to be found to be disease and pest resistant in certain growing conditions. Red Fife is not ideal for all growing conditions BUT it did bring attention to the fact commoditizing food, like calling wheat 'wheat' in the market place doesn't give a farmer opportunity to capitalize on 'terroir' of taste, quality and other values not seen as 'valuable' in our Canadian grading and variety registration systems.

Red Fife is being consumed by humans every day coast to coast in breads and in artisan bakeries, pancakes and in a diversity of food products.

Variety registration issues are another matter and when 'heritage' varieties show a high profit margin and is of 'value' to big bakeries like Weston then we will likely see it added to the 'variety' list approved for sale in Canada. When Red Fife sells for $10/pound then that makes alot more business sense for a farmer than wheat selling for 20 cents a pound.

Otherwise I think mixing up BSE with grain quality in one paragraph is not logical.

When bread is flown in from France and sold in Holt Renfrew at $50/loaf why can't we be using Canadian grown heritage Red Fife in artisan bread and selling it for $10/loaf or more? That's good business sense too.

Sharon Rempel

[sharon rempel]

Hi: As the godmother of Red Fife wheat I'm elated to see it making it's way into academic papers. Variety and farmer preservation will help us bring 'terroir' to wheat and bread. Terroir helps us define local food varieties that thrive in a bioregion. Please visit www.tgibc.org and www.grassrootsolutions.com the two websites about heritage seeds. We will be at Seedy Saturday events (www.seeds.ca) helping people design community seed banks. Please feel free to contact me about this and our database that will combine variety adaptation, soil and climate. Sharon Rempel

[Matt]

You have done plenty of research before writing this, and this article gives a very informative insight into the history of Canadian platter.