First Person is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.
Illustration by Jaimie Shelton
Food – the foraging, gathering, saving and consumption of – has always been a THING in my family.
Growing up, I thought all normal people had a food bunker in their basement. After all, we certainly did. Our bunker was known as the “Cold Room”, and it had been constructed with the thoroughness and attention to detail that my dad applied to every project that he ever took on.
The Cold Room was a kind of mini masterpiece. It housed one of those giant chest freezers and shelving precisely measured to fit pint- and quart-sized mason jars, with their sturdy glass lids and red rubber seals. The ginormous freezer was usually filled with a side of beef, a whole pig, occasional roasting chickens and well-priced turkeys. The Christmas baking, too, of course.
But the pièce de résistance in the Cold Room was the bespoke vegetable bins used to store root vegetables (potatoes, carrots, beets, onions) for the long, long winter. In a less-than-enlightened moment, my dad chose to store his fall stash in bulk dry Zonolite, a toxic precursor to today’s benign vermiculite. Although I’m still a citizen of this planet, I often wonder how much asbestos dust I inhaled when I was forced to dumpster-dive for the last veggie stragglers found at the bottom of the bins in the spring.
August was typically the pinnacle of the year, when the garden produced its annual bounty. Seeds were maintained year to year for radishes, scallions, peas, carrots, beets, green beans, wax beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce (two crops). As the oldest child, I despised and hated August as it was predetermined that not one item from the garden would be left to compost. I was always dreaming up ways to escape from the endless picking and prepping. There was always something to blanch, scrub or shuck. It was totally relentless and didn’t stop with the vegetables. Somebody was always going to the Okanagan on vacation and would be contracted to bring back cases of peaches, pears and plums to fill those vintage mason jars.
Travelling 30 times a year, I’ve learned how to buy healthy groceries at home and abroad
Then there were the endless savories. Another job to avoid – dill pickles. First you had to brush-scrub all those prickly pickling cucumbers and then stuff quart jars with fresh dill and as many cucumbers as possible. Fortunately, we were then a no-garlic family, or there would have been endless garlic to peel, too. Other pickles included mustard beans, sweet mixed as well as “bread and butter” pickles. Lotta, lotta!
As a child and teenager, I just assumed everybody lived like this. Didn’t everyone take their children potato-picking after the first frost? Or into the prairie bush for Saskatoons? In hindsight, I have finally been able to realize that this whole “food” obsession was really about food insecurity. My dad had known childhood hunger. He’d been raised in utter poverty. Children were sent to the butcher to beg for bones. Supper was too frequently pancakes. My dad was determined that his own family would never face the hunger he had experienced. It must have been his worst fear.
A few summers ago, while I was preparing a prawn fry for prairie guests, a visitor asked me, “Do you always have that much food in your fridge?” I was somewhat taken aback at the question. But there was no doubt about my answer – “Yes, always!”
It’s August and (as usual) my fridge and freezer are full of fresh local produce. I’m collecting the first of my grape tomatoes. We were able to purchase early peaches-and-cream corn at a favourite farmstand. The Red Russian garlic is gorgeous and plump. There were sweet yellow plums for breakfast and the local raspberries and strawberries are mouthwatering. Blueberries are for sale at $2/lb. A big bag of gift apples was turned into two pies for the freezer and there’s rhubarb for compote. The blackberries are almost ready for jam. I will be daydreaming about all these fruits and vegetables come the bleak days of January.
In reflecting on the state of my fridge and pantry I have to conclude I’ve obviously absorbed a lot of life lessons – and that the acorn has indeed not fallen far from the family tree. In fact, it has probably sprouted a few roots.
Anne Letain lives in Ladysmith, B.C.