Eating Local: Interview with dee Hobsbawn-Smith
Dee Hobbsbawn Smith is a poet, chef, educator, author, award-winning gastronomic writer and president of Slow Food Calgary. She has written three best-selling cookbooks, co-authored two, and contributed to eight others, plus three Canadian textbooks. Her most recent book, Shop Talk, a resource guide for cooks, was published in April 2008. A staunch advocate of local terroir, dee is currently working on a book about Western Canadian growers. A fifth-generation prairie dweller, dee resides in Calgary with her youngest son and her miniature Schnauzer. She is converting her small yard into an edible landscape.
You have been a great promoter of eating and buying locally. Are there enough sources of fresh locally grown food to sustain a healthy, diverse diet throughout the winter months in Calgary?
Eating locally in winter is a challenge. We have a plethora of meats, dairy products and grain, all locally raised, all available year-round. The weakest link is produce. As close kin to rabbits, I find myself missing the array of vegetables that make summer and autumn so rewarding, when by mid-March all that is left on local cupboard shelves is cabbage and carrots. Don’t get me wrong, I love both, and have a gazillion ways to enjoy them, but I like variety too. So each cook must decide if she wants to be hard-nosed or pragmatic. Me, I opt for pragmatic, so my diet in winter is only about 75% local, as opposed to 85-95% local the rest of the year. The other thing to consider as a locavore is the idea of concentric rings of availability based on geography-- progressing outward from my garden in my yard to my immediate locale, to the region, to the greater foodshed of my geographic district. For me, regional eating includes fruit and wine from the Okanagan and Similkameen valleys in southern BC, both within a day’s drive. It used to be that local meant as far as you could ride on your horse. Now, that horsepower eats gas, not hay, and the region has grown somewhat, from strictly local to something considerably closer than the outer rings of Saturn! Now I’m joking, but too much absolutism can poison the well and make us bitter and dogmatic, neither of which are apt seasonings for life or for the food that inspires our actions.
What has been the greatest challenge and greatest reward of eating local?
The greatest challenge is the vegetable scarcity dictated by living north of the 49th. Our lives are still so influenced by our climate and geography, despite the myriad ways we have found to supersede and overwrite mother nature.
The greatest reward of local eating is the joy of my own garden. Treviso in October! harvested at suppertime! And in another two years, I can realize the promise of asparagus from my own garden, grown from asparagus crowns that were a gift from Elna Edgar, our own asparagus queen. Now that’s right living. Also, it is a huge blessing to me to have the closeness and deep connection that comes of knowing the people who feed me and my family. I am blessed with friendships with many of Alberta’s best gardeners and growers, and that feeds me too.
Beyond that, the quality of food that I enjoy as a locavore is impeccable, often old heirloom varieties with deep flavour and history. To preserve a food, we must eat it. That’s rich.
What is the one book you wish more people would read?
The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry.
Berry is an articulate and passionate defender of the need and urgency to realign our values with the culture inherent in nature, to realize – again!—that a good life is comprised equally of the health of the planet and our own. Berry doesn’t mean that we should all return to farming, merely that we adopt the mindset of oneness. He believes, as do I, that the one functional way to live a life is by attention to the small details, by focus on one small piece of land, not by trying to adopt the entire tribe around the globe. This belief echoes that of Vandana Shiva, whom I heard speak in Turino at Terra Madre in October 2008: It is absolutely urgent that we repopulate the rural