The dump, and other culinary delights

I'm recently back from a 10-day trip to Yellowknife, NWT. I was happily sent there by work to attend the International Congress of Circumpolar Health, and stayed on an extra few days to see the sights and visit with my friend Shannon. If you haven't been to Yellowknife, I highly recommend it. It's a kooky little place with about 18,000 people who are tough enough to brave the cold winters and summer mosquitoes. Me being me, I was excited to check out the food situation there and try some of the wild northern delicacies. I'm happy to report that I managed to eat Arctic char every single day.

There are 3 major grocery stores in Yellowknife, the smallest being right downtown. On first glance, I was struck to see some empty space on the shelves, but noticed that the produce coolers were well stocked, and the quality and price of the fresh produce was far superior to what I saw in St. John's in March. The two larger shops, and particularly the Coop, were full of fresh food and lots of variety, all at prices only slightly higher than I would pay here in Vancouver. Restaurant food, on the other hand, was another story. Good, yes, but cheap it was not. I had a fantastic meal at the famous Wildcat Cafe, dinner in a northern French bistro bar, mooseburgers and pike tacos at the Folk on the Rocks fest, fine scotch at the local pub, and a fantastic meal of fried Arctic char and chips at Bullock's Bistro, where there's no menu – you just choose which fish you like (so good that it felt like a bargain at $50 for fish and chips and a bottle of beer).

This was all well and good, but left me ill prepared for my visit to the city dump. Now, anyone who knows Yellowknife will know that the local dump is THE place to go to find treasures and salvage the perfectly good things people throw away (they even have a blog!). So, we cycled a short distance out the highway en route to the folk festival to see what we could find. I was actually looking for a birthday gift for my dad (sorry Dad – almost had you a nice set of "learn to speak French" CDs, but the box was missing the beginner levels so I thought better of it). We were just about to leave with a prize stash of glitter glue and perfectly good mason jars when we saw a woman pull up in a truck and start heaving bags of fresh produce onto the garbage heap. I couldn't hide my shock and dismay so we pulled up on our bikes to see what was happening.

She looked at us a little dumbfounded at being caught wasting food. She explained that the vegetables were left over from a summer camp, and must not be good anymore since they had been in a cooler for a week. She had huge bags of organic carrots and sweet peppers in perfect condition, whole melons, loaves of bread, and who knows what else. Since there wasn't another camp for a few weeks, she decided to throw it all away. We suggested she donate the food to a shelter or pantry, but she apparently didn't know of any. Shannon explained that the Salvation Army was just down the road, but she wasn't going that way. So, examined the unopened bags still in her cooler, found them to be perfect, and strapped about 20lbs of carrots and a couple dozen peppers onto our bikes and backpacks and rode back into town to store them in the fridge before heading back out to the folk festival.

What was most disturbing about this whole situation certainly wasn't that we picked up vegetables at the dump (we took them straight from the cooler in the truck). Partly we were stunned that someone from a summer camp for kids didn't have a good enough sense of her community to know about (or have interest in) the social services available. Mostly though, it was the complete lack of knowledge about the food itself. Being fresh produce, this stuff didn't have expiry dates on it. You just have to look, touch, and smell to figure out if it's good. They had assumed that simply because it was in a cooler (not out in the open — in a cooler!) it MUST have gone off. The fact that the skins were shiny and taught, with no signs of blemishes and no softness or shriveling or mould, was no indication that this food was perfectly good to eat. It was in better shape than a lot of what I've seen in grocery stores! We were all quite stunned, and saddened, to realize once again that this kind of basic food knowledge is just not commonly shared by a lot of people. And really, if people aren't cooking with basic ingredients on a regular basis, they can't be blamed for not knowing anything about them!

(More pictures of Yellownife glory here.)