Author connects consumers with food producers

“We have lawyers, accountants and doctors; we really should all have our own farmer," says the author of Apples to Oysters, Margaret Webb. Now some people around here do have Laura Van Hattem-Contant of Woodville growing fresh greens for them through Community Supported Agriculture, but I think Webb would take the premise much farther.

She started her search for passionate farm folk years ago with David Greenberg in Wolfville. At the time, Webb was dining on salad greens at The Tempest restaurant while writing a Globe and Mail article.

She recalls the taste of a salad “that exploded with a deep nutty, tart sweetness.”

Webb went to visit Greenburg at the organic farm at Starr’s Point, which is now operated by Trish and Josh Oulton.

She ate a “humble carrot, still covered in dirt. And yet, the taste was electric, so unlike the dry woody offerings in grocery stores.” That one bite on a Valley farm sent Webb out on a cross-Canada odyssey to discover farmers who are putting taste and nutrition back into the foods we eat.

Webb grew up on a farm just outside Barrie, Ontario, so she knows the reality from the romance. She has also held senior editorial positions and teaches magazine writing at Ryerson University. Her deftly written depiction of 11 Canadian foods and the dedicated farmers who produce them form a fascinating book.

Connecting with groceries

Her quest to connect Canadians with their groceries takes her along with organic cowboys on a roundup, harvesting scallops from an ocean farm near Chester and picking real Yukon potatoes.

Webb also meditates on her late father and the fate of the farm she grew up on.

These stories about farmers fighting to do what’s right for food and the environment are inspiring, poignant, gritty. They made me hungry. They made me appreciate the hard-working farmers at my local market.

Ordinary Canadians are disconnected from the food they eat. If you followed Webb to an Alberta feedlot, you might change your beef-eating practices. Visiting Frédéric Poullin on his dairy farm on Ile-aux-Gures, Quebec, even secondhand, makes you hunger for artisan cheese instead of waxy cheddar.

Webb is an excellent writer, but she also manages to inform. Now I know about the new perfect apple, the Ambrosia, and why I should be eating flax seed. What she accomplishes is a presentation of the human side of agriculture that town folk don’t know about. When she compares the practices of her chosen farmer with the equivalent industrial farm product, there is no doubt which one you’d choose.

Webb cultivates respect for the farming profession in a nation where the public just doesn’t get it. Look at the plight of our strawberry growers trying to up the price of their berries. She shows why responsibly produced, high quality food is worth more time and money.

This author may not change the collective masses who shop at Wal-mart, but our small producers who turn out food sustainably and efficiently now have another spokesperson. From Apples to Oysters was published by Penguin and sells for $34.