The Conversation Series - Part one - food on the table · Sunday April 20, 2008 by colin newell
In a continuing series on food, at home and abroad, we talk to the food and drink celebrities of Victoria B.C. Canada.
Mark Engels, owner-partner and baker of Bubby Roses Bakery in Victoria is angry and frustrated… but in a good way.
Because when you own one of a handful of good bakeries in a city of over 200,000 hungry souls, every little thing you do can make a big difference.
Like keeping good food on your neighbors table and in their pantry…
And according to Mark… It’s challenging.
“Let’s put it this way… we are often at the mercy of a finicky and misinformed media…” Mark quips.
“Media”, I query? “What does the media have to do with this?”
Judging by Mark’s reaction, I have just tossed a cinder into the black powder box.
“I was on the radio this week…” Mark volunteers…
“And…?”, I cower behind a big bowl of Vegetarian Chili in one very crowded Bubby Rose bakery.
“CFAX… with Joe Easingwood and the gang… with a variety of the cities bakers… and we were talking about the scene, you know… prices, the challenges, inflation… and someone asks me about Butter Tarts… Butter tarts no less. Yea, we make them…” I introject.
“Butter tarts?”, you are losing me quickly Mark.
Mark continued unabated, “And one of the media types in the studio blurts out… Thrifty’s makes Butter Tarts you know!“
Ah. The penny drops. Hard. On my foot. Damn ten pound penny.
Thrifty Foods is one of the many appendages of the Sobey Food empire… and
Thrifty Foods is in many local corporate partnership – strategic alliances… the media behemoth that owns CFAX is one of them.
Hence the cheesy product placement.
What leads to our point. When you are a teeny-weeny independent baker trying to put food on tables and stay in business, the last thing you need are media dork-sticks dropping product placement bombs in the middle of, what was up to that point, a meaningful conversation on being the little guy trying to serve the community while those much bigger players on the block are trying to squash you.
As the bakery continues to hum louder, the stinging irony is not lost on either of us.
According to Mark, we shouldn’t write off the little guy yet. Without small bakeries, like Bubby Roses, Victoria residents could well be unwrapping their goodies just shipped in from Ontario, or worse… the U.S. of A
And right now and as of late, bakeries all over the place are feeling the pinch of higher prices… significantly higher prices on staples like flour, rice and vegetable oils… etc.
And the other scary point is – if we in food rich Canada are feeling the sting of inflation, Mark and I can only imagine what life is like in the developing nations.
Scary thoughts indeed.
In a continuing series on the food scene here and out there, we will talk to the little pieces in the puzzle – the players that keep the food on your table.
Head over to Part Two in this series.
How big is big in the World of Coffee? · Saturday April 19, 2008 by colin newell
So I pop over to Google for a couple of seconds…
and type in the word coffee.
It seems that I am number 4 in a list of 250 million references.
Starbucks is 3rd.
I guess the point is – diligence and tenacity pays off. In some small way.
Funny thing is – Although I have been writing about coffee, online, since the mid-nineties and experimenting with it since the seventies, I still feel that I have just shaved off the tip of the iceberg… with a 99 cent box cutter.
I am sure of it in fact.
And as I cruise through my late-forties (how did I ever get here!?), I think… I am definitely going to need another 40 years to master this bean thing.
Speaking of Starbucks – starbucks has now surpassed McDonalds as the most parent-requested outing from children.
No kidding.
Children, aged 4 and up, are now more likely to ask mommy for a hot chocolate at Starbucks than a happy meal.
Damn.
Canadian Mental Health Report #1 · Thursday April 17, 2008 by colin newell
The CBC and Angus Reid reports that Canadians are more angry than they were a year ago.
No $&#@‘ing kidding?
According to the pollster, almost 50% of Canadians feel their fellow Canucks are angrier than they were last year, and 25% admit to losing their own temper more often now than in the past.
Apparently women and young adults seem especially irritable: 30 per cent of women and 32 per cent of those age 18 to 34 say their fuses are way shorter than they used to be.
Why is that? Kathryn Jennings, a counsellor at Anger Management Counselling Practice in Toronto, suspects the increasing use of computers and technology is shortening our patience.
“With technology, our lives are faster, access is faster, and a lot of our needs are met immediately,” she says. “It has made our expectations higher. We expect that things should work and should work quickly.”
Personally, I feel a corporate culture and mind-set has invaded many employers previously more evenly paced… leading to frazzled worker bees.
Take my employer for instance – I will let you, the readers, figure out who that is.
Not that it really matters.
My work environment has quadrupled in size in 15 years with a net increase in individual responsibilities (within our technical group) by a factor of about 3 to 5. And if that is not entirely clear – My workload has probably tripled and the number of bodies available to deal with this massive increase in responsibility has dropped.
Where we once had 4 or 5 guys handling a large chunk of technical territory, we now have about 1.
Recently my employer approached me about taking on about 50% more work on top of this – with no increase in pay of course.
Another example: A colleague of mine crossed my path on the job site recently reporting how intense things have become. I replied… “We have become members in a culture of intensity…” “running from fire to fire is our way of life every day on the job…” “We start a job and that job is interrupted and that interruption is clobbered by yet another interruption… or a more serious crisis…”
It is bullshit. It gets a little worse each week. And we are willing participants in this ballet of madness. As my colleague and I parted ways, I coined another phrase…
“This trend is like an asteroid within… slowly making its way toward crushing our sanity…” An asteroid within… Damn. That’s witty.
So what else is making Canadians angry? Apparently queue jumpers are at the top of the list. I encountered one at a bank machine once… if you can believe that someone would be silly enough to cut in front of a line-up of busy and aggravated people (myself included…) in a bank machine line-up. I assure you… he will never do that again.
Other irritants include loud cell phone talkers, aggressive drivers and, oddly, people who ignore greetings in the office or have generally bad manners.
My personal favorites include motorists who eat breakfast cereal while at the wheel, cyclists who do their make-up – or hockey fans who talk about their financial portfolios for 3 periods of play.
British Columbians as sheep rant #1 · Wednesday April 16, 2008 by colin newell
When it comes to taking a fleecing, it seems that no one bends over more quickly (for the man with the scissors) than the average British Columbian.
I mean – we love being taken to the cleaners… and I am not entirely sure why? Living on the West Coast in a haze of pot smoke could not possibly account for all of the passive behavior… or could it?
Take the price of gas. It can go up 3 to 5 cents in a day and there is nary a whimper from the general public… alright, maybe there are faint little bleats from the average British Columbian… but nothing sustained.
It is simple. We are all gutless, two stomached, masticating wimps in furry lavender soaked coats.
Now take todays news for a moment. The B.C. Ferries Board (whatever the heck that is…) have just voted themselves a 60% raise… pretty much out of your ruminant pockets. And before ewe get your trotters all a-twitter (as if!) how about a few more details? The board chair, Elizabeth J. Harrison, received a pay raise on April 1, when the pay hike went into effect, from $105,000 to $140,000 a year. Five new members were appointed to the 13-member board on April 11.
On April 1, BC Ferries hiked fares by an average of 7.3 per cent on the three major routes connecting Vancouver Island to the Lower Mainland and an average of four per cent on the remaining routes.
The company said the “fare increases are necessary due to the rising cost of fuel as well as operating and capital expenditures.”
I wonder what this Province of lamb-chops will do about it…
apart from uttering…
Baa
Humbug.
