It is difficult to say if Anita Stewart is more passionate about food or people – but it is easy to suggest she is very focused on her country.
The recent Order of Canada recipient, only weeks past that announcement to honour Stewart for her contributions to Canadian culture and the food industry, is currently focused on promoting the country and its food.
She is working with the Canadian Tourism Commission to promote a new award for United States writers and photographers who visited last year and promoted Canadian food and culture by publishing about it.
The deadline for entries was the end of the month, and she already has good ones from New York magazine and the Huffington Post, among others. There is a possibility of expanding those awards to Great Britain and Australia.
Stewart’s world is one of food and friends – and she is deeply steeped in Canadian culture. She can talk about the latest developments in food television or muse about the early days in New France with equal aplomb. She said when Quebec fell to the British, all the nobles living there headed back to France – leaving their peasant countrymen on their own. She smiles at the idea because the peasants did well and “ate far better than the ruined nobles in France.”
Stewart knows about Quebec peasants, Canadian history and eating habits. She has an undergrad degree in psychology from Waterloo Lutheran University (now Wilfrid Laurier University) and a masters degree in gastronomy from the University of Adelaide in southern Australia. That includes a dissertation on The Evolution, Development and Promotion of Quebec as a Culinary Region.
The peasants survived without their overlords. And, she said, “That is what our foodways are all about – survival.”
Stewart knows it first hand. She has roots in Wellington County, with her parents running a Home Hardware in Mount Forest.
She lived in the small village of Milliken, now swallowed by Toronto sprawl, and came to Elora in 1973. Her family ran a store on Geddes Street and she admits that through the years money was not plentiful. One way to save cash was to learn to cook simply and cheaply, something her rural background prepared her to do. Discovering that simple and cheap cooking could also be delicious was the beginning of a journey into the world of food.
One of the founders of the Elora Co-op Preschool, she edited Cookies and Juice, a handmade cookbook of recipes that sold for $5 and had a press run of about 500. It sold out and she never looked back. She is proud the pre-school, still operating today, never needed government funding.
Stewart remembers fondly she started her career “backwards” as a food writer. Most cookbook authors begin by writing a recipe column and turning them into a book. She began with books and later wrote a syndicated food column.
Since those early days, Stewart’s many food credits include being president of Flavours Canada, being the culinary awards advisor to the Governor General’s awards in Celebration of the Nation’s Table, a Doctor of Laws honorary degree from the University of Guelph, being the food ambassador last year for the Ontario Farm Fresh Marketing Association, a recipient of Cuisine Canada and the University of Guelph Food Culture award in 2009, induction as a lifetime member into the Canadian Culinary Federation of Chefs and Cooks and so many other honours they could fill a kitchen table.
Her speaking engagements have taken her all over, from emcee and host of Canada Brand Breakfast at the Calgary Stampede in 2010 to emcee and host of the same breakfast at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, as well as the Canada Media Marketplace in New York City – among a list longer than one for groceries for a big family.
If all that is too academic, Stewart has been over the side of icebreakers into work boats in the North Pacific and visited every manned lighthouse on that coast and met their keepers. She travelled by dog sled and snowmobile to Cree hunting camps in northern Quebec and has been to Hibernia, the most easterly bastion of Canadian cuisine in North America. Among her adventures are scuba diving for sea cucumbers and urchin in the Straits of Juan de Fuca and bucktail flyfishing for salmon in the Discover Passage.
Despite those adventures, Stewart gives the appearance of a homebody in a cozy house replete with gas range and a wood fireplace. She said flatly that living in Elora is a key to her success and the people around her are responsible for all of that.
She lives what she talks, too. She mentions Elora chefs such as Roger Dufau, of Drew House, and Resa Lent, of the Desert Rose vegetarian restaurant, among those who helped her along the way – and she misses greatly Alex Sgroi, who ran a restaurant in Elora.
Her coffee mugs come from local potters, and her glass plates are made locally. One of her many cookbooks features a brioche by Elora resident Peter Skoggard on the cover.
“These are people who have been a part of my life,” Stewart said. “The Farmers Market Cookbook came out of friendships. The community aspect of how I evolved is extremely important. I couldn’t have done it otherwise.”
Drop by Stewart’s home in Elora at the right time and one might find her taking a cake (using her mom’s recipe) from the oven, and icing it with, what else, a maple syrup icing. Her mom, Anne MacDonald, announces that Stewart got it exactly right.
Stewart sees nothing wrong with the turning of chefs into celebrities. She credits food television for promoting what the stars prepare. “The Food Network did a huge service to the industry. It made food sexy. It made food interesting.”
She noted Canadian Living magazine, with myriad recipes from across the country, also had a big influence on Canadian food and cooking habits. One reason she likes the idea of celebrity is the way it can be used to promote food.
“For example, when people like Chris Jess [chef and teacher at Centre Wellington District High School] said, ‘I’d really like to teach cooking at high school’ – he had a lineup, of students eager to learn.”
Her three sons are involved in some way with the food industry.
Her favourite food memories include “Eating – and surviving – scorpion pizza that my son Jeff made in his home-built clay oven. In addition to his teaching and administrative duties at Niagara College, he’s a specialist in insect cookery. His kids particularly enjoy cricket candy.”
She remembers “having my son Paul barbecue his twin brother Mark’s freshly caught Chinook salmon with a thick smear of pesto before serving it with grilled peppers and a bottle of Gray Monk Pinot Gris at a table surrounded by grandchildren.” Mark is a fishing guide and also cooks.
Stewart herself started the Worlds Longest Barbecue in 2003 to promote Canadian beef during the mad cow disease industry crisis. It is still running, as Canada Food Day, on the August long weekend.
She said Canada does not have a specific “cuisine” like France or Italy. “It couldn’t possibly. To explain the culinary reality of our great northern nation, I would have to use words such as regionality, seasonality, ethnicity, tenacity and vision. It’s an incredible smorgasbord. Nine Italys fit into Ontario alone, so how could anyone think of one particular cuisine representing such an enormous nation?”
She said, “Above and beyond all else, Canadian cuisine is about celebrating our magnificent differences, our roots and our ethnicity. It’s about possibilities, and how we as a people continue to welcome immigrants from all over the planet … It’s about branding ourselves ‘Canadian’ and giving our producers an unmistakable edge that no other nation can emulate.”
She eats just about everything, but said exercise is key to keeping her trim figure.
“I’m an omnivore, but having said that, the move towards less meat, more veggies is one that I embrace. I love Michael Pollan’s dictum: ‘Eat food, not too much, mainly plants.’
“And now such an ideal is entirely possible to achieve. The array of flavours, courtesy of the countless great immigrant cooks and a plethora of young chefs who are currently re-writing Canadian cuisine, is magnificent.
“Twenty years ago, garam masala, Thai chilis, white asparagus, purple carrots, heritage pork, heirloom tomatoes and artisan cheeses were virtually unknown. Today, the palate has broadened; it no longer has to be ‘meat and potatoes.’”
On being Canadian
“There’s a quote that I can’t attribute to any particular author, but it goes like this: ‘When the forms of the old culture die, the new culture is created by a few who are unafraid to feel insecure.’
“I am proud of Canada. But the word ‘Canadian’ has another inherent meaning; it’s one of very hard work. This nation wasn’t built by a bunch of wusses, and it behooves us to remember that our ancestors were among the most courageous men and women in global history. Whether they were black Loyalists escaping slavery, or starving Irish peasants, or Scots swept away in the Clearances, there was only a frozen, often danger-filled mystery ahead of them.
“The roads we now travel so easily were once deer trails into a forest, or buffalo runs across the Prairies, or First Nations’ trading routes that wove their way through the continent in one large culinary spider web that we have yet to emulate.
“Like taking an ox cart over the rutted mud on the Garafraxa Road into the Queen’s Bush, Canada continues to be built by strong men and women who are aren’t afraid to face an unknown – but guaranteed exciting – future.”
