I’m on the verge of heartbreak when it’s clear that companies like WalMart have discovered a way to make themselves look virtuous and green for Earth Day. Driving home from the GO Station this morning (Ontario’s own version of Lip Service on the issue of the Stewardship of Nature), I managed to catch almost the entire radio spot (they’re running one on TV, too), featuring WalMart’s “healthy” snack options. There aren’t many of them, just your usual Sun Chip corn/wheat chips, flavoured with an MSG chemical manufacturers can legally call “cheese” because of the political and economic clout companies like WalMart command, selling for “the famous WalMart low price”. The big selling point of the commercial is its message: for every package of such “healthy” foods you buy, WalMart will donate a portion of the proceeds to purchase “green points”, which then go to support and promote the use of “alternative” (and yet unspecified) forms of energy. No word yet on exactly what “green points” we’re talking about–Kyoto Accord green points? The kind of Green “credits” discussed in Brazil’s last biodiversity conference, way back in the last century? What? It’s mystifying in that familiar sloganeering way: you know the phrase would have a little disclaimer star right above it if it appeared in a print ad. In a TV or radio spot, however, it sounds right only until you ask, “what do they mean by that?”

And that’s all WalMart has to do to be absolved of its myriad transgressions against life, people, food, labour, and the planet: feature a pretty, smiling hippie girl on television holding a bag of junk food, telling the world what a good corporate citizen it’s become. That, and perhaps hire Renzo Piano to design them an Optic Green head office somewhere in the South, full of light, and air, with a token nod to solar energy in a glistening panel installation on site. Something more like a sculpture than an actual working fuel source. Just to, you know, say that they did it. So they have a place where they can consult with other “green” experts, who’ve found a way to cross that line between activism and corporate resistance.

In a way the rash of suddenly green corporate citizens is part of a timely lapse in “holidays” — and I have heard an advertising executive interview that Easter and St. Patrick’s day came so close together this year, which left a kind of gap that Earth Day filled perfectly–just in time for “green” marketing, exceedingly lucrative and new. It’s not really that new, however, and definitely not new where food is concerned. What’s interesting is its coincidental presence in a world where so much is happening around food and its distribution right now, so much is affecting its price and accessibility. So much is happening around the kind of food that’s being produced, what’s being wasted, what’s being hijacked for use in non-food product, and what’s being misrepresented to us as “real” and “healthy”.

WalMart’s just another big box store in Canada, most recently a big box food store to rival the 5 other massive big box food corporations currently running the show here–Loblaws, Sobey’s, A&P/Dominion, to name a few. Ever since Loblaws came into the “green” food business, however, nothing in the typical supermarket has actually lived up to the European standard of “organic” food; and the resulting legal definition of “organic” in Canada has become as believable as the legal definition of a “trans fat”. Plenty of the food being sold in these major chains are billed as organic, despite the fact that the only difference between these foods and the store’s regular brand items seem to be packaging. In these grocery stores, “organic” foods contain as much genetically modified grain and soy, as many refined and “enriched” foods, as many soy-derived glutamates and hydrolyzed proteins, and as many artificial colorants, hydrogenated rancid fats, and perfumes as their non-organic counterparts. It’s all about labelling now, as opposed to content–labelling and definition: WalMart is perfectly suited to walk in to a market that’s already been hoodwinked to buy less-than-what’s-stated foods made by other large corporations, usually from food sources far, far away from home. China, mostly; or in countries recently forced to allow grain materials formulated by companies such as Monsanto and Cargil to be grown in large quantities, despite their farmers’ and consumers’ resistance (places like Brazil).

That sounds like the antithesis of “green”, doesn’t it? No matter: sell the consumer a plastic weave bag they’ll think is made out of cloth for a dollar extra, and you can make him or her believe even more strongly in their virtue as protectors of this planet for the coming seven generations. It all looks good and real, just like Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth–but everyone remembers the end of that brilliantly produced film, with its well articulated but terrifying argument: the one suggestion made to “make the effort” to stop Global Warming came in the form of asking people to buy fluorescent light bulbs, instead of incandescent ones.

So the problem of sustainability, which is perfectly attainable, just gets worse. WalMart is moving in very quickly, even where the company faces a great deal of resistance from citizens who are targeted as its market (WalMart inevitably just overrides public concern, decision making power, and law to open up anyway, putting competitors out of business easily). It’s well known for its questionable business practices, its legal transgressions in terms of pay and working conditions and labour practices. It’s known, in Canada, for union busting (since so many WalMart stores have been unionized by their workers–WalMart simply appeals to the local or provincial governments and the unions are dismissed outright and dissolved in those stores, or WalMart just closes up shop until such time as it can reopen as a non-union store). There’s no doubt WalMart needs to account for a great deal of what it does to generate profit, and people need to rethink shopping at WalMart all together: it’s unfortunate a bunch of Earth Day ads demonstrating a commitment that’s as small as possible is the best the corporation is willing to do.

It’s dispiriting, I know. So is the fact that the last canning factory east of the Rocky Mountains, CanGro, is closing, here in St. Davids Ontario. The countless farmers who continue to grow fruit like peaches, plums, apricots, cherries, apples, pears, and berries of all kinds will no longer be able to sell their produce to companies who would put the stuff on the market. We’re talking about arable land in Ontario that’s been used to grow fruit for the last 400 years: no longer marketable because the large food distribution corporations like Loblaws and WalMart prefer to buy food products and produce from China or South America or Chile or California instead. It’s a lot of good Niagara land producing a harvest that is simply ignored here, no longer valued; and, it’s another massive aspect of the Ontario economy (it’s largest sector, actually) that is just shutting down. A lot of people will be forced to pull out fruit trees for a subsidy, and replace them with…what? Corn for ethanol? Or, worse, corn for…the refined processed food industry? More grapes for more agribusiness wineries, fruit which costs tens of thousands of dollars per acre to plant and won’t yield for at least 5 years? And if there is no subsidy, or the subsidy for these changes aren’t enough? What then? More newly constructed Niagara bedroom communities?

The more I learn about this, the more I realize something really sinister seems to be at work here in Niagara. In the CanGro case in particular, the 100 plus staff members were ready and willing to negotiate purchasing the plant themselves, and creating a fruit farmers’ cooperative: but the local Member of Provincial Parliament, Tim Hudak, was once again ineffective at bringing the parties involved together (he also let Cadbury Schweppes close last year–another very important canning/fruit processing plant Niagara farmers depended on, another large employer in the Niagara region). The first and only grape farmers’ cooperative in Canada, 20Bees, was also allowed to fall into receivership despite the fact that so many farmers and wineries in the area need a co-op and the ensured supply of the best quality fruit in order to sustain the Niagara wine industry–but again, no “bail out” could be arranged. Seems very clear that ever since Hudak’s been around, Niagara’s industries have been shutting down quickly and without obstacle, no matter what attempts people have made to save them, and themselves, in the process. Like dominoes, we’ve lost a huge chunk of Ontario’s (and Canada’s, let’s not be simple about this) agricultural industry–this was the biggest industry in the province not 20 years ago. Following that, we’re watching the auto industry close, massive layoff after massive layoff, while Hudak and his party’s federal counterpart, Harper, throw billions of dollars to GM, Chrysler, and Ford just to watch them keep the money and fire everyone anyway, because it’s always given with no strings attached. The Auto industry was the province’s second largest industry–in particular, the second largest industry in Niagara after food–so Niagara is really in trouble. With so much money and effort invested already in an industry as vital as food, I can’t help but wonder why it is we let such astounding opportunities for real “green” business to flourish go, while people we elect continue to prop up businesses which simply aren’t “green” in any way, and simply aren’t interested in giving anything back to the communities which provide them with tax free business operation, a market, and lots of underpaid labour so their profits can soar.

We aren’t manufacturing anything much in Canada anymore as the largest employers started to leave Canada in droves way back when Free Trade was forced on us. That was Niagara’s first blow: produce grown here would no longer make it into Canadian food stores as Loblaws et al contracted to do business with American agribusinesses first. The wine industry grew as a response to that death: people were paid about $4000 per acre to pull out their trees and replace them with vineyards. Now that that industry’s been taken over by multinationals trying to look like small boutique wineries (while putting all the small wineries out of business as quickly as possible), those vineyards are also being pulled up (the 20Bees Co-op represented at least 20 individual vineyard owners, independent farmers–now all out of business as well as out of their vineyards, as some lost everything when that co-op failed). What we have now is more Escarpment land that can serve no purpose for the production of food. We could turn this into a real opportunity to put food from this area on the map, so to speak, as one of the world’s best high quality food sources, particularly to consumers who want to buy from local producers, and want to buy food raised sustainably: but the sad reality is that developers end up buying the land from exhausted farmers. When the Niagara on the Lake farmers who’ve been farming peaches and pears bulldoze their trees this week (that’s Niagara farmer Bill Duffin’s doomed peach orchard being pushed over in the photo above, one healthy tree at a time), they won’t be given enough subsidy to plant anything new–and even if they were, what could they plant that they could actually sell? Agriculturally, the land is worth nothing–unless alternative means of farming can be explored, and implemented–and lets face it, these could just as easily be subsidized as any “replanting” project, and they’d continue to keep producers here, and people working. As a site for a new subdivision development, because of that other bastion of Lip Service in Niagara known as “The Greenbelt Law”, a lot of farmers will be selling their land to builders in exchange for anything they can get to move somewhere where they can actually make a living doing something. Or, the other option: sell the land to developers who put in “Power Centres”: strip malls featuring big box stores in predictable combinations. Invariably, WalMart and Loblaws’ defense strategy to WalMart, the Loblaw’s SuperCentre, come in with these Power Centres to take over where the farmers used to be.

So, finally, even small business owners like farmers are being lost by the thousands in Niagara, all so that big box stores can stomp on in. The foundation of the Canadian economy is still individually owned, small businesses–entrepreneurs, even on a small scale, have always been the most resilient, the biggest form of financial stability and employment possible to the country’s economy. What does it say about us if that’s dying here, so rapidly? It says we have a strange idea about exactly what “Green” entails, for one thing. My secret wish is to see some backbone and fury here: I’d love it if every farmer could take every penny of those subsidies to plant whatever nonsense they’ll be told to plant–genetically modified soy, or Round-Up Ready corn (whatever version of that seed they’re in now), or even the deadly genetically modified rapeseed they use to make Canola oil–and leave their peach trees exactly where they stand. They could use the money to buy the CanGro operation outright and run it themselves anyway, just like the co-op they wanted to create. Grow the fruit sustainably, without deadly chemicals and crazy biotech seeds or caustic fertilizers and market it directly to Canadian consumers who want to buy local, fresh, native, “organic” produce, as that market is growing. Happy Earth Day, yeah.

I have to look for any kind of hope I can find, any sign that people have the means to figure out a way of taking back some of this lost access, the loss of control over something as basic and as fundamentally required as real, nourishing food. And it does exist.

There are still farmers out there who are actually growing produce organically–careful about using heirloom seeds, careful about saving and storing those seeds particularly for foods that have become so heavily modified by the biotech industries. Some people are doing this on a small scale, others are stepping out of that small model and setting up community supported agricultural schemes where local people subscribe to the harvest in advance. All of these farmers have carved out their own markets–educated consumers who will buy from farmers’ market stalls in city centres, or restaurateurs and chefs who insist on sourcing the best and freshest foods available in what is becoming quite a culinary hot spot. Many of these farmers are proudly “uncertified” organic, since “certified organic” has come to be an empty marketing strategy in these parts–and all encourage you to get to know what they do on their farms, get to know what all local producers do with integrity. The vegetables pictured here come from local organic producer whose work in the area has made her something of a leader among foodies and people in the know Linda Crago’s Tree and Twig Gardens Heirloom Vegetable Farm, a CSA she started in my area about 5 years ago that’s grown so large she’s supplying restaurants all over Ontario, as well as customers who can now order as needed every week instead of “buying in” every season.

The produce is not about shipping possibilities or storage ease or even marketability: it’s all about taste, fragrance, variety, the sensuous reality of food we all miss when we consume processed foods or junk foods we’re told are “healthy-er” than plain old Doritos or potato chips. We’re always jumping off from that point of comparison because we’re led to do so: we assume nothing like the assortment of texture and hue and flavour exists for us to choose from, and that our frame of reference begins and ends at what we can buy in a big crinkly package, in a supermarket. But that diversity does exist. The minute I look at those purple and green tomatoes I think of panzanella salads, or simple tomato sandwiches, or even rich homemade sauces or soups that burst with their sweet, intense flavour, and how each variety I choose to work with will create something far less predictable in its quality than the hothouse varieties we can get anywhere. Heirloom plant varieties always surprise with their appearance, texture, and flavour, and they can’t be had in local supermarkets doomed by contractual obligations to buy from large agribusiness producers thousands of miles away. They mature in the garden, their flavours develop from sunlight — not from food additives which coax our bodies to respond so that the lack of real flavour in our food doesn’t seem so apparent.

In my area alone there is a massive potential for a grass-roots-up food regeneration movement: many farm owners are growing older and large farms are too pricey to operate; fruit farmers can opt to find a new market for their produce by targeting consumers directly, or creating “value added” small scale industry to go along with selling the produce directly. If fruit farms are now becoming useless, and so many once-active acres become fallow land, there’s a perfect opportunity for new farmers who wish to court and nurture a more informed consumer base for real organic produce. Since so many fruit farmers will no doubt be asked to rip out their orchards for a subsidy to plant grapes or corn, why couldn’t they be subsidized to farm organically anyway–or even to designate their land for organic farming use, so that agricultural schools could set them up to create community initiatives? The fact is there are thousands of the really “green” agricultural scientists who are emerging from graduate schools already well trained and well versed in the many ways we could produce foods more sustainably in this country–we could actually employ them here, instead of watch them move away to places like Norway or Italy or Sweden, where people see real value in what they know and corporations have far less power over the way food is produced. If we want to think about killing a few birds with one stone, we can even think in terms of economic problem solving–supplying a learning environment/food source/nutritious lunch program for kids in schools, as Alice Waters does in the US with the Edible Schoolyard (or as Jamie Oliver and his friends tried to do in the UK–but we can plan against the outcome he got there); or, we can supplement already overrun food bank programs all over North America with community garden schemes, community canning efforts (especially for those forgotten fruit farmers whose orchard’s produce won’t be canned any other way), and opportunities to help those “in need” produce their own food, even if they haven’t got the land to do so. The possibilities for community and cooperation with each other seem to explode whenever gardening comes up, don’t they?

There’s a real need for foods that are rich in nutrient content, whether those foods be grains or fruit or meats and dairy–and there’s a growing awareness that real foods, in particular the traditional foods, are vital to creating and maintaining human health. What we think of as cultural food traditions are actually stores of nutritional knowledge gleaned over long periods of time by trial and error, and long term observation. Many of the foods we’ve now been led to believe are “deadly” or “unhealthy” simply are not so, nor have they ever been–and ironically, many of the foods we’re now told to believe are healthy (particularly the ones sold to diabetics or those who suffer from cardiac diseases of all kinds) are simply marketing opportunities for various processed food producers. Even mainstream media have begun to expose some of these marketing scams–a recent CBC Marketplace feature focused on the Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation’s mandate to sell “Health Check” labels to producers of foods like Becel margarine (100% pure, rancid, hexane-laced hydrogenated soy oil, which we know exacerbates heart disease as well as diabetes). Many Canadians have become outraged to learn that these “labels” are still allowed by the Canada Food guide nutritionists, despite scientific research which warns against ingesting these foods. On the plus side, however, many of the newly outraged Canadians who used to believe the marketing (and in the Canada Food Guide, which has been exposed as yet another big corporate marketing tool) have become even more determined to learn how to make better food choices. And that’s a start, if not a focal point, in creating a demand for real food.

Real food will certainly continue to be a focal point for alternative medical practitioners who specialize in treating and reversing chronic disease, and in averting the long term effects of chronic disease on populations in general. After all, we know that chronic diseases don’t just affect us individually, they have an impact on a generational level, and on a community level as well. Human health in the developed world has actually become significantly compromised over the last 2 generations, despite what modern medicine would like us to believe. People now become chronically ill sooner in their lives, chronic disease is much more commonplace among the population, and overall quality of life declines much sooner for people in our generation and the one preceding ours. What I’m seeing in the latest generation doesn’t bode well for the future, either: we’re at a stage now where prosperous societies produce children with chronic illness that begins very early: from autism and other neurological disorders, to severe allergies to food which start in infancy (or before that), to severe allergies to the environment in general (“environmental” allergies are so prevalent now that various foods and all perfumes are now banned in places like schools as a policy, throughout North America). How did we get so sickly we can’t even live in the world, which is no more polluted now than it’s ever been?

I’m also seeing a universal weakness in an extremely important area, and that is skeletal development. Children with poor dentition are so commonplace now, where once (I’d say even thirty years ago, just over a generation ago) this was very rare. What we’re also seeing quite frequently now is the shocking occurrence of heart disease in even the more physically “fit” athletes, at very early ages. Heart attacks that kill at 13, for example; heart attacks that take place right on the basketball court, or at the track meet. In children who are supposedly supremely physically fit, at ages closer to childhood than adulthood. At some point, we have to begin to acknowledge how much of these deteriorations have taken place not as a result of genetics but of the supposed “better living through chemistry” diet we’ve all subsisted on for decades now. And we have to begin to seek out the real “green” alternatives our ancestors depended on for full, sustained health. In our own era, right now, that means the work that small scale local producers are trying to get done in the communities around them, with community support and cooperation.

So, yes, it does look bleak when it looks like all the Big Food Boys are muscling their way in to take over what it is we’d really like to see happen with our food, what it is we’d really like to (need to) buy and use: but the fact is that things can definitely be made to change in our favour. Organizations conducting privately funded, independent research on nutrition aren’t the standard yet, not by a long shot– but they do exist. The largest one and the most comprehensive in its scope is the Weston A. Price Foundation, which creates a wealth of information on nutritional science based not only on traditional cultural food knowledge but also on pure scientific inquiry, funded by nothing except individual participant donations (in other words, they aren’t working for Big Pharma, or government food marketing boards, or bio-tech firms and chemical farming companies in any way). This foundation also does advocacy work–with its foremost scientists often speaking out to demand access to real foods such as raw milk and dairy. As a resource for people who need access to these foods to treat health concerns such as autism and environmental sensitivities, WAP has brought many people together. From there, people seem to be naturally creative when they work cooperatively. They can work together to lower the cost of access to various foods or supplements or even medical care, just because they create solutions to their existing common problems. It’s quite a revolutionary thing, community. Right now, in the Niagara region, it’s our only hope if agriculture as its been done in this area of the country is to continue.

Even if all we have the strength or energy or inclination to do is plant our own garden, no matter what size it is, that’s a significant contribution to ourselves as well as to the world’s ecological health–quite an impressive point for “green” living against the efforts of big box retailers intent on making themselves look good despite their long and ongoing records for exploitation and abuse. As small as that seems, it would have a great deal more impact than switching out your incandescents for some twisty neon bulbs you’d probably only be able to find at WalMart.

When I think of the foods my mother used to make, it occurs to me that almost no one takes that amount of time to prepare anything anymore. It was a long time before I realized that foods most people think of as “Italian” were foods my mother rarely made–hers was a cuisine that involved a great deal of preparation that started outside of the kitchen, a discriminating taste for the very best ingredients, no matter how rare. I took a lot of this for granted when I was a child, it often made me impatient when she would scour the city’s live markets, or forests in parkgrounds, looking for exactly the right herb, or mushroom, or animal or vegetable for a dish my mother had decided she would make. I wondered how it was my mother seemed fixated on these ingredients, when everyone else’s mothers around me seemed far less concerned, and never seemed to make the same foods as she did, even if they too were Italian women from Italy. To me she seemed like a witch: particularly in an age where everyone’s children were fixated on “astronaut” foods, stuff that was packed up and created in labs and sent off to the moon with the spacemen. She’d buy us the peanut butter in tubes and the Tang so we’d leave her alone when she gathered malva blossoms on the neighbour’s lawn to make tea only she would end up drinking. But she’d shake her head at us. Rightly so.

My mother’s village was quite small. There were a limited number of families there, and she grew up on a property in the hills outside of Teramo, a place settled by what I’m told were seven families, formerly named after their seven homes–Le Sette Case. Seven is a big number in Abbruzzi, I’ve learned: there are entire feasts prepared on the first of May based entirely on that number’s prominence in the mythos of these people. Up to 30 courses can be served on that day’s celebration meal, and every course’s primary ingredients are also arranged in terms of sevens. So I don’t know how much of my mother’s retelling is the truth, or a simple example of local mythology, passed down even to her from its ancient source. What I remember of her land is that it’s surrounded by mountains, green fields, rows of corn leading up into the sky and vineyards throughout the lands closest to the house. It was a large stone farmhouse, like nothing I’ve seen here. An elevated main floor built above what used to be the stables and barns, presumably for heat. What I remember of the place was its massive elements: a tall staircase leading up to the main great doors; polished stone floors throughout the first floor, and marble on what we’d call a veranda here, exposed to the elements (and therefore very surprising); a focolare, that thing we might call its hearth, so large it could be entered standing, surrounded by stone. It was oven, fireplace, central heat, the preferred seat, the focus of the household (and the origin of the very word itself). It was never left to go out; it was never left alone.

My mother had her own house on the property too: a little stucco farm house with a couple of rooms and some land. She’d bought it from her uncle when he decided to stay in the States. It was her intention to go back to that house at some point, it was never her intention to marry my father and live in a city like Toronto. From her family home’s entrance, you could see the Gran Sasso and the Miale mountains, the lights of the city below us, and the family’s own contributions to the little town they built: a small church, a school house, a very large retail store (what they called the “Sale e Tabacchi”, “salt and tobacco”; a place where they sold food, wine, supplies of all kinds, dry goods, milled grain and other produce they’d grown, and animal feed), and their relatives’ houses. Remote and seemingly isolated, as cold as hell at night and as hot as hell during the day.

My mother had a knowledge about plants that made her seem almost magical–the doctor, lovely as he was, was never called on at our house unless my mother couldn’t get the plant she needed to get us out of our illness. We were careful not to tell the doctor anything about my mother’s doings, but on the occasions she offered her information, he listened very carefully in a way you never see MDs do now, they seem so intimately defensive, even around chamomile tea. She was uncompromising about what she gave for our pains and we often seemed powerless to do anything about it unless our strength returned. By then we’d be feeling better and we’d let her off the hook, anyway: no big thing. It wasn’t until I ran into the character of the friar in Romeo and Juliet that I recognized what she’d actually been doing in nurturing and gathering the odd herb, the strange root, the full bloom at the precise hour. It wasn’t until I’d invested the time in the lure of this kind of medicine myself that I “got” my mother’s fixation, and understood why she was like no one else I knew. For the longest time I didn’t even realize where my own interest came from, even though it seemed limited to an interest in scent and its sources. But even there, it was my mother’s fixation before it was mine. One of my earliest memories with her is a streetcar trip to the Simpson’s department store for an engraved gold atomizer of Miss Balmain; another is her “finishing touch” of Le Galion’s Sortilège whenever she got “dressed”. I still remember her favourite perfumes and their presence in our home, I now know my own choices lead directly back to those mixtures, though the specific bottles and labels will never be sold here again. I wear their “offspring”; the same themes, reinterpreted.

I remember the day when I learned the meaning of her name: Palmarosa. Not its literal meaning, that was always obvious. It has a significance and a significative form that is unique to my mother, unique to us. I’ve always thought of it as a strange name, it still is, I’ve only met one or two other women with it and all of them seem to be related to me. It’s always been very pretty, in my opinion, but for some strange reason I missed (again!) it’s connection with the plant world. It is a grass, a palm, after all: one used in the creation of perfume because of its proximity to the scent of rose oil. It grows in South America, Argentina and Peru. My grandfather travelled there as a young man and very possibly came across the plant while he was there, as it doesn’t grow in Italy where he lived as a child, and returned to live as an adult. I’d never seen the plant mentioned before, and my interest with plants and medicine was there, but untapped. I’d found a bottle of the oil in Michigan, at a vendor’s stall in a market, and asked if a sample vial was available…then asked where it came from, what it was used for, how it was gathered, what it looked like…as if the curiosity flooded from me all of sudden. South America resonated with me and I remembered my grandfather; images of my mother in the garden, in the forests, in the markets all flashed back to me. I lost my grandparents early, one of them even before I was born: all I remembered about her father was his extreme height, his very gentle voice, and his brilliant blue eyes, his elegant face. I could imagine him sailing across the ocean, and wandering through the jungles as a young man. It was part of the story of him I’d been told–the part that was so much less my mother’s experience of him than her own myth about him, something less terrifying about him than the man he actually was to her, and to the rest of her siblings. Suddenly it was as if all those experiences linked us together, across time and space and even life and death. I remember the hair at the back of my neck standing, the gooseflesh. So out of nowhere, out of the ordinary, out of the extraordinary.

I knew where the wild thyme grew, where bolete mushrooms could be found (not the false ones, though, that grow under spruce trees–leave those ones there), when to pick dandelion leaves for salad (and where) and why basil has to be grown near tomatoes. Carnation petals have a thin end–pull them out of the cluster and that part of the carnation tastes sweet and peppery. Lilac flowers taste of honey; violets and pansies as well. Nettles and black malva and chamomile are everywhere around us–though the leaves of sunny chrome yellow coltsfoot blooms, everywhere around us too, contain enough cyanide to kill. Tiny artichokes small enough to fit into your fist are a staple in my mother’s cuisine, as are crêpes, made by the hundreds and combined or wrapped or filled in thousands of dishes; chestnuts as well, for the flour, paste, and roasted nutmeat they yield; peppers with an intensity to rival the hottest Indian cuisine. Before I was five she’d made me notice the difference between the saffron that came from Spain, and the saffron that came from Aquila, not that far away from where my mother was born. It was slight, but it was there in colour and fragrance, in the intensity of the finished flavour. She had a fixation for Bertolini essences, glass bottles with little metal covered stoppers, sold in tiny boxes bearing the turn-of-the-century typography and the depiction of an aquiline-nosed crone. She made liquers with these: Millefiori, Vermouth, Rhum, Caffe Sport, Triple Sec, Amaretto, Banane, and the essence that defied description, Alkermes. As deep blue-red as garnets and beets, it stained everything magenta and tasted of red currants, rose, pomegranates, heat, and spun sugar. Actually, nothing really tastes like it; nothing has its perfume. It’s unmistakable, and it went in every one of our birthday cakes, soaked through the Pan di Spagna until every golden inch was as pink as rubellite tourmaline. Colour, texture, aroma, and the ability to chemically alter your state: my mother’s birthday cakes took longer than a day to make, a labour of several steps, an assembly of various flavourings and extracts and techniques. Clouds of egg whites, their “reds” (my mother’s word for yolks) beaten to the ribbon stage; a baking powder drenched with the essence of vanilla; lemons juiced, peeled, zested. Then, as filling, a thick, cooked cream, flavoured with the tart lemon peel, its quantity halved, and that half flavoured again with cocoa as black as coffee. There was nothing juvenile about these sweets–each thin slice we were allowed on our special day was its own allure of layered sensations, until finally it wasn’t just the alcohol content that made our heads spin. It was as if she wanted us to use every part of our ability to sense as we grew older, not just the dessert but everything else; like her intention for us was that we be perceptive enough to know where we came from, know who made us. Know what was involved in the effort. And since there was a lot of effort involved, she seemed determined that we begin to figure this out early.

It didn’t register quite so easily, of course. What we loved about her traditions, our traditions, we often gave up in the name of being like the other children around us. It made it easier for us to be the “translators” we were, the facilitators between her and the outside, foreign world–because we had to fit into both in order for us all to thrive. My mother was frustrated with us, but patient. We would recognize it one day, we would be made to understand her point, she’d worked hard enough, she knew.

It was decades later, in a remote trattoria in Reggio Emilia, that I was offered a dessert that instantly brought me back to my third birthday, the first time I realized what she’d made especially for me, the memory of the flavour of the brilliant liqueur flooding back so quickly I could barely name it. I knew it right away as my mother’s birthday cake. When I asked the waiter for the name of what I was given, he answered, “Zuppa Inglese“–what translates literally into “English soup”–an Italian metaphor that teases the English for their supposed and lingering affection for cakes in general (Victorians and their “tea time”), and their savvy predilection for making use of dry cake in trifles. The Alkermes, the waiter told me, was really the most English thing about the dessert, since it could only be obtained, for the longest time, from the English herbalists who’d retained all the secrets of its creation.

My friend Geoff is turning 40 next week.

(It only looks like I’m obsessing about age, but I’m not, I’m just thinking about the occasion).

When Geoff and I were students, I made Geoff an involuntary friend. The details are convoluted and odyssean, but it’s the truth. I was in a moment of crisis I don’t think I’d ever encountered before, busy constructing a plan of rebuttal and attack but really kind of clueless about what I’d have to negotiate, and Geoff was a sudden, familiar face. He happened to be around at just that moment, the first I recognized when I scanned the great room in the Steadman Lecture Halls. He seemed poised, serene, and relaxed behind a paper cup of Tim Horton’s, smoking a cigarette by his books and surrounded, as usual, by a group of really beautiful girls. Maybe he was waiting for a lecture to begin. I don’t know if that’s the case, all these years later, because in my state of complete dumbfoundedness I never thought to ask. I just remember reaching my hand out to him and pulling him along with me, as if he’d just been waiting for me to extract him from his group. Good thing I didn’t ask, now that I think back: I have a feeling we’d have passed the rest of our education in separate spheres of study and influence. Then I’d never have acquired the many gifts which came from Geoff, directly.

Here are some:

1. A tape made while Geoff was away, working in the mountains of Lake Louise at a teahouse so high in the Rockies trips to the nearest town happened only once a week. They involved lugging all of the restaurant’s garbage down to the town’s landfill, since vehicles could never make the climb. The tape included the Two Nice Girls’ “Spent My Last $10 on Birth Control and Beer” (an anthem like no other); Dick Siegel’s “Jesus, John, and Elvis” (still relevant, Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton); and Louden Wainright’s “Don’t Leave Your Records in the Sun”, my introduction to Blue Grass music. He named the collection “Songs Like (my) Driving”, as he’d spend every trip in my car with his eyes fixed on a point under the dash whenever we went anywhere, as if they were held open with fear and those tiny braces on Malcolm McDowell’s eyelids in Clockwork Orange. “Any time you change lanes,” he’d say, “you’re asking for trouble”.

2. Divine, John Waters, and the magical, incantatory force of Cha Cha Heels they created.

(I bet Geoff and Nicky were the first to put John Waters on a syllabus in an institution of higher learning).

3. When Geoff came back from living in Prague for over a year, he showed up on our doorstep in Parkdale. Our landlord couple, who lived on the bottom floor, were not getting along well with us because I’d recently insisted on having the rooms painted and they were resisting. Geoff was early, many hours early. When we finally got home, Geoff’s luggage was outside their front door, which slid open as we came in. Geoff stood in our landlord couple’s entrance holding a glass of wine, surrounded by our suddenly besotted and very friendly landlord couple, who absolutely loved meeting Geoff and concluded that we couldn’t be so bad if we had such a friend. The landlords were amazing after that, talking with us for hours and inviting us out for coffee and dessert. When the house was successfully sold and we all packed on moving day, they ended up giving us a goodbye card stuffed with $50 dollar bills plus the interest on our rent deposit, and they cried as they wished us well. They were really great! And we’d never have known if it weren’t for Geoff.

4. Food. Geoff was always a fantastic cook, able to take almost nothing and transform it into something great. His mom tells me he’s been cooking since he was 7, when he took his first cooking class.

So it’s no surprise then that we’ll be having a birthday meal for him at Colborne Lane, an eclectic modern restaurant in the St. Lawrence Market district in Toronto, where the cuisine is influenced by Ferran Adria’s molecular gastronomy. The Chef’s done his time at El Bulli with Adria, but he’s clearly going for a kind of asian fusion molecular menu, something much more personally relevant. So it should be interesting (though I have to say, supplying these people with the chemical ingredients they use was always a little frightening, back when I was “doing my own time” at a compounding pharmacy in the city–you’d always wonder what the hell they were using some of these lab compounds for when they made those “foams”, “jellies”, “freeze-dried powders’”, and exactly how what they were doing differed from General Mills, or Monsanto). Hidden among the usual menu items (salmon, tuna, duck, chicken) in their alien incarnations, I notice this offering:

Beef tenderloin + slow & soft poached

egg + chorizo+fondant potato + smoked salt +

steak sauce jelly + Yukon gold potato puree

And realized that that’s the part that’s all Toronto: the Meat and Potatoes, adorned mostly with adjectives and few chemical reactions. Toronto’s a fantastic city for food and restaurants, and it’s big enough to keep a place like Colborne going for years, even though it’s got competition in the cuisine on the western end of the city; but you know it couldn’t be much of a repeat draw without conceding to that enduring protestant desire for steak and mashed taters.

(I’ll be sure to avoid that selection on the menu).

I haven’t a clue what wines you’d pair with such super-accentuated flavours, in their unexpected textural transformations, but I’m looking forward to finding out.

The baking is done. Well, except for some cookies I really should whip up. And I will, as soon as I get a free moment.

I’ve been wondering how it is I’ve spent so long avoiding every possible means to get out of where I am. Oh, sure, I could have sought out ways to learn how to write, years ago, so that I could be published somewhere (anywhere) until I had some body of work to show for my efforts. I’m wondering how it is that I kept hearing the critical voices in my head, when I have other voices–encouraging ones!–coming from all angles around me as well. I wish I’d found a way to ask someone to help me to do this, instead of let myself be convinced that I’d never be able…that what I could do was irrelevant in some way, worth nothing to anyone. It’s not. I’ve been led to see how wrong that is. And I feel so angry about everything that’s brought me to this stagnant and deadly place. But mostly I feel so angry that I never believed I could do something to escape it.

Until now.

I hate resolutions. They are doomed, by nature. But the New Year is coming and this is the time to turn this around and re-imagine myself as whatever it is that lost girl wanted to become. Why is it I’ve never been to places I’ve made myself stop wanting to see? What have I put into place to paralyze me?

I feel like I’m on the verge of pulling that whole construct down. It’s such a happy possibility to contemplate over sliced finocchio as the year ends.

In anticipation, and in celebration, of all the revolutions to come, here’s my recipe for stuffed figs for Christmas:

You’ll need:

1 package of dried figs (I like to use the ones from Cosenza–since they’re from the place where this Christmas sweet originates).

1 package of fresh walnut halves or pecan halves (your choice. If you use pecan, roast them slightly first).

100 grams high cocoa content chocolate (I’m going to use one with lots of cocoa, lots of cinnamon and cardamom, and lots of chili pepper).

(chocolate chips are optional)

1. Flatten and then slice open the dried figs, cutting from the base of each fig to the fig’s “stem”. Don’t cut through that, but open the cut figs up like butterflies.

2. Place a nut half on one side of the sliced fig, and, if you like, put some chocolate chips into the dried fruit as well. Other ideas for stuffings include using real chocolate nibs that you’ve chopped up.

3. Fold the fig together again, so that the nutmeats are sandwiched inside the fig’s halves. Arrange them in one layer on a plate or tray lined with parchment paper; cover the layer with more parchment, then use a weight on top of the paper to “press” the figs flat for an hour or so.

4. Melt the chocolate in a double boiler. According to your preference, hand dip each fig in the chocolate to coat it thoroughly or in part; if you prefer that the chocolate just serves as a bitter counterpoint to the sweetness of the dried fruit, drizzle the melted chocolate over the figs until they’re coated to your preference. Place them on parchment and allow the chocolate to set.

You can vary the kind of chocolate you use: black and white chocolate swirled together looks pretty; or you can use a spiced dark chocolate (such as the one with cinnamon and chili pepper) to add extra nuances of flavour to the dried fruit and nut mixture.

A little prosecco, a late harvest wine or an icewine made from Cabernet Franc would make a perfect cold weather ending to a long, long year.

It’s been a while since I’ve driven into the city closest to me. It always surprises me to see just how it perseveres despite the business closures, the continuing onslaughts of WalMart, the persistence of what one can only conclude to be deliberate neglect and decline in the area when so much begs to be done with it. I know others feel the same potential there, too, because each time I visit, someone has found another way to try to keep the area alive.

St. Paul Street, the core’s main strip, is still littered with empty store fronts, deteriorating sidewalks, and building crumble. Poor parking (complete with ticket givers who’ve been contracted out of Hamilton, and don’t care a whit for the businesses affected by their actions) and the general weekly blight of vomiting university kids who come up from Brock and Niagara have kept people from coming, unless it’s to drink with the school kids on weekend nights. So it’s seemingly unchanging. But the streets looming up from St. Paul, like James Street, have become slowly transformed, with a flurry of small boutiques carrying specialty items (granted, they are items the wealthy are more likely to afford) and a few very good restaurants. So many of the area’s old buildings need preservation and it’s clear the only way this will take place is if people with a lot of money and some good ideas for some kind of viable business dreams will act on their desire to restore the area’s charm no matter how little help they get from the city itself. Or, rather, despite the city’s efforts to stifle all they’re up to.

Stella’s Restaurant, for example, seems to have that sleek art deco feel about its exteriors, and the interiors of gleaming polished walnut, bakelight bars and surfaces, and spacious towering ceilings makes the restaurant seem glamourously implausible in this small city. And yet, there it is, lustrous and spared from decay after the fabric store that once operated within shut its doors 10 years ago. From the street you can peek in and see the very tall Christmas tree, and yes, it’s real and decorated to a crisp, chic understatement. The thing is, the space is vast and empty. At five p.m. on a Thursday afternoon a bustling downtown supper hour doesn’t seem likely. But it’s early in the day yet, and I hope I’m wrong. I hope they’re teeming with customers, as long as dinner is served.

I go into the Watering Can’s flower store (not its Wedding store, or its market which is closer to where I live anyway, away from the downtown core) and try to find some cut flowers which remind me of poetry and a place in the UK. There are anthuriums: small and large, in reds, pale greens, and pinks; orchids on stems so long and full and rich they reach up like trees; and roses in colours of apple green, gold and persimmon, and copper. The store is filled with all manner of boxwoods and poinsettia and paperwhites for the Christmas season, but I want the roses. I choose half a dozen of the pale green, and another six of the persimmon tinged gold. They are extravagant, and wasteful; I know rose growers who could sell these roses to me at a fraction of what I will pay in this airy and pale downtown shop (but I’d have to wait till market day, or drive to the lakeside and pick through a greenhouse; or arrive at sunrise to pull from the day’s best rejects). Today I want the luxury of their rare hues, their full cost. I buy them as if I were presenting them to my lover, and for this they must be perfect. Despite the impossibility of my intentions.

At home, I pull my failing car into the gravel drive, and face the same old rooms and reality of who I am, and where I am here in the country. It’s not until much later that I realize I’ve left the russet paper cone holding the blooms on the back seat of my car, chilling silently until four in the morning. When I rush outside before dawn, answering their power to pull me from my sleep and my bed, they are still perfect.

I wonder how that small, dying, quiet city will fare.