Company's Coming for the Holidays

Do you know Jean Paré?

I feel certain that you do - if not by name, then in your subconscious, the primal palate that has been shaped by your earliest holiday dinner experiences, your first taste of sugar, and the vegetable you had to sit at the table until you finished. Purple cabbage with sesame seeds and soya sauce, in my case.

Jean's recipes have been shaped by generations of prairie cooks, and have in turn influenced another generation through the publication of her "Company's Coming" line of cookbooks. She is one of the main reasons that, in this era of rural population decline, we are still served Those Squares at potlucks, funerals, and weddings:

Yes, those squares. In 1981, Jean published her first cookbook: "150 Delicious Squares". Now, her books have sold in the tens of millions.

One of the appeals of the cookbooks is Jean's principle that recipes should only include ingredients you could easily get at a local supermarket. Unfortunately, I was raised by a hippie mother, so it goes against the grain to keep ingredients like coloured marshmallows and graham cracker crumbs in my pantry. However, they soon will appear. I am going to begin my holiday baking, and it must include squares.

I inherited "150 Delicious Squares" from my husband's great-aunt. Last year, I tried "Flat Truffles". After I'd made them, I realized that the ingredients - icing sugar, cocoa, butter - were the same as those in the recipe for icing on the Roger's sugar bag. Basically, I made a log of icing and rolled it in nuts and sliced it. My husband loved it. I think Jean went a little too far with that one. However, the Lemon Bars and Apricot Chews quickly became a favourite.

This holiday season, stop by my place and I'll feed you up. And remember Jean's homespun wisdom: "The horse is such a respected, noble animal. So if you eat like one, why would you be any different?"

P.S. The squash recipe contest has closed. I am busy testing and will announce the winner soon!

You can't go home again.

My hometown's centennial is this summer, and there's a big reunion planned. I was a farm kid living half a mile from town during the 75th reunion. Hundreds of people attended. I remember a floor-shaking country dance, driving a John Deere 3020 in the parade down main street, and christening the pioneer memorial (mostly, I remember ringing the giant bell).

Today, the town has twelve residents. Those of you from rural areas probably know what happened.

Last weekend, I saw a presentation by geographer Christiane von Reichert at a conference in Missoula, Montana. She studied rural depopulation. Every area sees out-migration, she said, but rural areas don't see any in-migration in return. The people who are most likely to move to and stay in rural areas are returnees who grew up in that area.

Von Reichert and her team attended high school reunions in 21 counties and conducted 400 interviews with people who stayed, left, and came back to their town to find out what attracted people back to rural areas and what made them stay. She then made recommendations for rural areas attempting to maintain or increase their population.

The number one reason people returned was for their children. They wanted their kids to be close to nature, be safe, be close to their family and roots, and have personalized educational experiences in smaller schools. So the biggest attraction in small towns was child-friendly infrastructure - quality child care, education, activities, parks, libraries, etc.  A related point was to have senior-friendly infrastructure: often, families moved back so children could get to know their grandparents.

The biggest barrier, of course, was economic. There tends to be few job opportunities in small towns. To that end, the geographer recommended that towns stay connected with former residents, point out employment opportunities, and most importantly, rather than "chasing smokestacks" - enticing big footloose factories to locate only to have them pull up roots for more attractive places later - help returnees with local business start-ups.


I don't think I'll ever be able to go home again, but I hope that some small towns will be able to entice people back. Agroecologist John Vandermeer believes that re-ruralization is necessary for a sustainable food system. For my part, I just think a child-friendly, community-minded, vibrant small town sounds like a really nice place to live.

Romanticism

Yesterday, I made the mistake of using the term "small farmers" in a discussion.

Immediately, I was accused of longing for the days of Old MacDonald's little farm, with the unspoken implication that those hardscrabble, parochial, stultifying days were well left in the past (the appealing part of that life is just a fairy tale for children). Small farms are perceived as inefficient, unreasonably labour-intensive, technologically backwards, and soon swept away by progress.

Accusations of romanticism also dog those who are involved in peasant movements - or even use the term 'peasant' to refer to anyone living today - despite the fact that peasants often self-identify as such, with pride. The problem, however, is in the critics' view of the peasant or small farmer, as static, backwards, a relic of the past. I recently met two young members of a five-farmer cooperative that produces vegetables on five acres. They are educated and active. They choose the technology that best suits their practices and utilize leading-edge techniques for data collection and analysis of their production and markets. Each of the members makes a good living, both income-wise and in doing something they love. This is an anecdote, but it is by no means an isolated example. If small farmers were truly anachronistic, they would not still persist in the face of overwhelming odds.

My late father had a response to the accusation of romanticism.

I wouldn't worry about the romanticizing of small farms. If you want a romantic notion to banish, how about the romantic idea that companies can self-regulate. Or the notion that the unrestricted, unencumbered marketplace will bring prosperity to all. Or the idea that people who run big companies (into the ground) are such geniuses they deserve to become billionaires. What those romantic notions and the policies they drove brought us was Enron, WorldCom, AIG, the Ponzi schemes of Bernie Madoff and ultimately near economic collapse.

Worry too about the romantic notion that we will cure this recession with more of the same – the "hair of the dog that bit you" school of economic theory.

But leave the small farm alone.  Is it so bad to be romantic for a time when the country was full of people, when small towns were the cultural, social and business hubs of the prairies? Do we celebrate the fact that national and global economics has forced us to the point where we need to farm half the country to be viable? Or should we try instead to romanticize the notion of serfdom, since that is increasingly where agriculture is headed. If you doubt that, ask the contract growers of turkeys, chickens and hogs in the U.S. 

The present state of rural Canada is surely not one to celebrate unreservedly. At least not for this romantic…

My biggest problem with the accusation of romanticism is that the accuser gets to decide what is possible and what is rational. Why is the desire for social justice a romantic dream, while the desire for more money is not? Are moral values unrealistic?

You kids get off my lawn!

I ate some ice cream tonight and didn't really enjoy it. This isn't because my palate has matured. It's because they just don't make it like they used to.

Growing up, we ate what I later realized, dining at friends', were giant bowls of ice cream. We bought the gallon bucket of Lucerne vanilla and dressed it up with raspberries or granola or apple butter or chokecherry syrup. It was creamy, smooth, and rich.

The Lucerne ice cream I ate tonight was slightly grainy and full of air. Okay, it's a cheap brand. But it's not the cheapest. Should I have to pay $8 a pint to get decent ice cream?

In The End of Food, Paul Roberts describes a visit to Nestle's headquarters, where scientists were experimenting to create ice cream with the perfect "mouthfeel". You know the mouthfeel I mean. That mouthfeel I was missing when I ate ice cream tonight.

Are they keeping all the good ice cream for the Swiss? "Those North Americans and their plebeian tastes. Let them eat junk."