I grew up with an Italian Mama, whose hobby it was to read recipe books and collect recipes from magazines and newspapers. For her hobby, my Mother sits in her chair, a pile of magazines to

her right of her, clippings to the left, the rejected carelessly tossed straight ahead, and all-the-while, her hands constantly flicking pages and wielding scissors. She has done this for as long as I

can remember, and if I were to show up for dinner tonight, chances are, I would find her doing the same.

Her meals were always from scratch, her garden produced a bounty. Of course, it would never measure up to her parents’ garden; they had an orchard and better growing conditions that came with living in the East Kootneys. There, I would spend my summers helping to pick raspberries, peel apples, collect walnuts, but mostly watch the production of food without realizing what paradise I was in.

My Father gave me my political/activist interests. He was an union member in Vancouver during the 1970s, I remember him telling me his story of the California grape growers, how the workers were been treated unfairly, and that in solidarity and through a non-violent boycott, the grape growers were forced to capitulate to demands for improved working conditions because we were not buying California grapes or wine. That story had a profound effect on me, and would inform my eating practices twenty years later.

You can see that my love of food, and its origins, is almost biological and most definitely cultural. Here, I hope to make sense of it one morsel at a time.