Food Day Canada – 150 Canadian ingredients
“By shopping Canadian we are creating a brand – and a competitive advantage – that no other nation on earth can emulate.”
– Anita Stewart, founder of Food Day Canada
What are two of the most important elements of cooking? Water and salt. Did you know they both appear on the Food Day Canada list of 150 Canadian ingredients? Tap water may be more obvious, as our numerous fresh-water lakes provide clean drinking water across much of the country. But salt has an equally important Canadian heritage: the Windsor and Sifto salt mines have a long history, while new entries include Vancouver Island Sea Salt, Salt West Solar Sea Salt, and Newfoundland Sea Salt.
Looking for something more exotic than salt and water? Consider Quebec’s Sortilege Maple Liqueur, sturgeon and caviar from New Brunswick’s Acadian Sturgeon, or haskap berries from Saskatchewan.
These are just a handful of the 150 Canadian ingredients listed on the Food Day Canada website, and which you can use to inspire your own menus for Canada 150 and beyond.
I asked Anita Stewart, cookbook writer and founder of Food Day Canada, about the advantages of cooking with Canadian ingredients. Of course, flavour is at the top of the list. “Crops of all sorts at their peak of the harvest are absolutely delicious,” she says. But it’s much bigger than that. Stewart emphasizes the “support this gives our agricultural community who are arguably among the most committed on earth. Without their year-long efforts, we’d be far more dependent on imported foods with agronomic practices over which we, as Canadian eaters, have no control.”
With Food Day Canada being only one day, I asked Stewart how its impact might last through the year. “In an era of so much noise,” she says, “such a collective and inclusive celebration will help Canadians understand and embrace the fact that we can be proud of who we are as a food nation.”
Want to know more about Food Day Canada, happening on August 5, 2017? Check out her website.
And watch this space in July, when we tell you how, with a hashtag and a few Canadian ingredients, you can be part of Food Day Canada too!
