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Camp has a nice ring to it. Sounds like a fun, folksy vacation. A food camp even more so. And a culinary boot camp? Would we have to rise early to brew coffee and make brioche? Be drilled on the finer points of picking herbs? How difficult could that be, especially when it’s held in B.C.’s bucolic Cowichan Valley on the idyllic-sounding Fairburn Farm?

Chef Mara Jernigan’s approach to food looked like the ultimate how-to guide on taking control of your food life. A whole chicken and vegetables with dirt on them would no longer be regarded as alien artifacts in the kitchen. The boot camp would act as a restorative, reconnecting us to food that doesn’t come bundled in excessive packaging. At least, that was the hope.

After our first meal, we were told to harvest “whatever looks good” in the kitchen garden. To me this wasn’t work. Not even close.

Jernigan, a no-nonsense chef who gave up life in the hectic Toronto restaurant scene in the early 1990s, began the first lesson by rolling out dough and producing pizzas – loaded with fresh ingredients – from her wood-burning oven just outside the back door of the farmhouse. After the pizza, we were told to harvest “whatever looked good” in her kitchen garden. To me this wasn’t work. Not even close. Wandering from bean patch to lettuce patch and then rustling through the zucchini vines, I munched on crisp green lettuce leaves, crunchy purple and green string beans, even tiny raw zucchini and a variety of herbs. Their fresh green flavours didn’t need salt, pepper or even a kiss of heat. But we were going to cook them anyway.

That first night’s meal: tempura zucchini flowers stuffed with goat cheese and lemon thyme, placed on a bed of mixed greens and drizzled with vin cotto, a cooked grape must; roast chicken topped with mustard and herbed breadcrumbs; wilted kale, potato rösti and wild cauliflower mushrooms sautéed with leeks. Dessert was pears poached in apple juice and served with a honey and crème fraîche semifreddo. Many of the ingredients came from the farm or surrounding producers. So far so good.

We gathered eggs from chickens that ate veggies from the kitchen scrap bucket. We had more lessons in bread making. We took a hike with Jernigan’s neighbour, chef and mushroom hunter Bill Jones, who cooked up a dish he called Farmhouse Japanese: buckwheat noodles with sautéed pine mushrooms, dashi and tamari sprinkled with a sesame rice topping. The mushroom slices were meaty with hints of cinnamon and earthy tree sap.

And then we had to, um, kill things. That mostly vegetarian meal was perhaps meant to ease us into our next visit, to the local poultry processing plant. I had never seen an animal other than a fish being slaughtered. At the plant, we saw large turkeys grabbed from a cage and hung upside down. Dragging their heads through an electrified water trough stunned them before their necks were slit. Crimson droplets of blood stained my white “lab coat.” (We were all required to wear one during our tour.) While the blood and guts were disturbing at first, seeing the birds transformed into oven-ready roasters confirmed that I’m an unabashed carnivore, quite happy to eat an animal I saw alive and kicking before it was slaughtered, even happier to know where and how the animal was raised and, ultimately, to witness its dispatch. But I’m not saying I can slit a turkey’s throat. Not yet.

Many of us have lost the skills we need to avoid eating industrial food. And if you can’t cook, how do you survive in the long run?

 

My need to cook actual food, however, is very real. I was horrified the other day by a commercial I saw on TV. It was for some sort of meat product that came in a box. All you had to do was cut open the pouches of precooked sauces and veggies, pour them over and around the meat in the handy plastic tray and pop it into the microwave. Ugh. Clearly, many of us have lost the skills we need to avoid eating this industrial food. And if you can’t cook, how do you survive – I mean, in the long run, not on the drive home from work?

Eating eggs from the farm’s chickens and bacon cut from local pig bellies is very rewarding. But something remained unspoken at the farm: There’s a problem with too much local. I’m not willing to give up my bananas, oranges, vanilla and coffee. And many times, I have to choose with my wallet in mind, not my social conscience; eating local or organic can be quite pricey. Also, my bank of time to shop the “right way” often runs a deficit. I want to do good, but I don’t want the guilt of not being good all the time. So I’ll never become a pure, so-called locavore. Does that make me a failed foodie?

I don’t think so. If we all suddenly wanted to eat local, the demand would far exceed the supply. Most of Canada doesn’t even have the infrastructure necessary to support self-sustaining local food production. Jernigan and others of her “church” promise gastronomic salvation in practising a local-foods lifestyle, but if we actually had to do it, chances are many of us would starve. After all, there’s only so much room at the culinary inn.

Boot camp taught me that it’s dirty, hard work to hunt for mushrooms and grow and harvest your own veggies. It’s also very time-consuming to make your own bread, jam, pickles, chicken stock and pumpkin ravioli. There is a payoff. You do get a kind of joy from sourcing local foods and cooking them yourself. Meals somehow taste more real and more satisfying because you made them and you know the ingredients. Just as long as I can have my oranges and eat them too.

To find out more about Fairburn Farm, visit fairburnfarm.bc.ca. Bill Jones, of Magnetic North Cuisine, can be found at magnorth.bc.ca.

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