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January/February 2002 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Inside Story Feature: Harvest of goodwill À la carte Reverberations

Is there a root, berry, bird or beast that someone, at some time, hasn’t attempted to boil, bake or fry for dinner in this country? Hunger is a recurring theme in our collective past. From the Plains hunters who went hungry when the buffalo disappeared and the Klondikers who boiled their boots to survive a Yukon winter to the farmers who lost crops in the great drought of the 1930s and the immigrants arriving on the heels of natural or man-made disasters in their own countries, starvation is the subtext to many of the most dramatic moments in Canadian history.

As people who have known the ravages of hunger, our appetites have been shaped by ingenuity, experimentation and, sometimes, necessity. Thankfully, boiled leather hasn’t survived as a Canadian delicacy. Pretty much everything else

has. Cod lips. Seaweed. Dandelions. Beaver tails. Tree sap. Fermented cabbage. Bull testicles. Shall I go on?

Our appetites are as large as the great outdoors itself. We may not be the subsistence foragers we once were, but judging by the exotic range of goods in our grocery stores, we’ll eat pretty much anything from anywhere in the world.

Ah, Canadians. If we are what we eat, then it is really no wonder we have such difficulty defining ourselves as a people. Every newcomer brings along another tasty treat, and pretty soon, we’re all eating empanadas or nan bread or some new noodle dish and serving it to neighbours and friends as if we’ve been eating it all our lives.

And what a peculiar thing appetite is. "It’s an acquired taste," someone once told me — rather lamely — after I’d experienced the odour and flavour of dulse, or dried seaweed, which had about the same appeal as the rockweed Anthony Keefe of Back Bay, N.B., is harvesting in the photo above. (Unlike dulse, rockweed isn’t eaten raw — thank goodness. It is an ingredient in health and beauty products and is used in animal supplements and as a fertilizer.) Unfortunately, dulse never became an acquired taste for me. But as someone who craves sauerkraut — that tangy concoction of fermented cabbage and salt — who am I to be pointing fingers at those who think dulse is about as tasty as apple pie?

In this special issue on food, our contributors have cooked up a banquet. Jennifer Wells traces the story of wheat and our changing tastes in bread. Katharine Vansittart reports on her labours on three organic farms. Brian Atkinson photographs the fisherfolk of Deer Island, N.B. We offer a visual smorgasbord on the history of food in Canada. Ray Guy spins a tale of that great Newfoundland delicacy, the bakeapple. We map the origins of lunch from a restaurant in Toronto. In our “Discovery” department, we visit a First Nations vineyard and locate the root-cellar capital of Canada. And Denise Chong, Miriam Toews, Alison Blackduck, Joel Yanofsky and Sabah Tahir tell us about feasts in their families. After you’ve digested all of this, we’d like you to tell us about a dish that is featured at feasts in your family. Bon appétit.

— Rick Boychuk

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