The more folks who avoid wheat and gluten-based products that surface on this West Coast, the more wheat prices seem to rise. I have questions, I have stories, and I even have first-hand experiences.
The truth is that wheat in Canada is a heavily subsidized cash crop. We sell a vast portion of our wheat grain to the Americas in replacement of precious water, meanwhile the little creative entrepreneurs like us, running a small-scale handmade pie shop, graciously swallow then gag on the cost of superior organic Canadian wheat.
After 15 years of baking professionally and almost 29 years of baking in my mama's kitchen (yes I started young), I have witnessed the rising cost of wheat flour skyrocket to almost unfathomable heights. Our little shop in Vancouver sifts through thousands of pounds of organic wheat flour a year to make our simple BC-celebrated fruit pies. With a little pat of butter and sugar, we sell whole and sliced up pies to our favorite city.
My talented sister Andrea and I opened up shop in December of 2012, only a few weeks before the Christmas holidays. In that time, we have grown elegantly toward supplying a handmade, locally supported, farmer-induced sustainable product.
We wake up in the morning, ride our bikes to the shop and begin our daily routine. We turn on the ovens and work with flour from Anita's or Roger's, two local flour mills that make some of the world's most flavorful unbleached, non-chlorinated, organic freshly milled flour. We hand mix in sweet butter and take turns rolling out the dough as the other prepares the fillings, whether that means peeling Okanagan peaches, slicing perfectly tart apples, or picking through little blueberry gems. The pies are made fresh each morning for our friends, neighbors and customers who stroll in through the day for a slice of pie and coffee.
My first experience with rising flour costs was when I worked at a little bakery in Ottawa and witnessed organic flour shooting up in price almost 300 percent overnight. This was in the early 2000s when sugar was cheap and less folks knew about the health impacts of refined flour.
The second experience was in 2008 while in university. I worked at a medium-scale bread-focused bakery in Vancouver and witnessed the same pattern overnight. The difference was that this time I was working in a company with hundreds of others in a much larger city. They had an HR department and a solution to the rising cost: they created loaves of bread at two-thirds the weight and raised the retail cost by 25 percent.
When you live in a really large country, it is difficult to imagine there ever being a shortage of water, clean soil, or devastating crop loss. We have dedicated four very large provinces toward growing wheat, and almost one whole province, Manitoba, strictly to that task.
I have always believed in entrepreneurialism as a means of creating solutions to securing a stronger future. You are familiar with the saying "Leave something you're proud of for your children." Well, the longer I live, the more disenchanted I become with the belief that this will ever be viable in my own foreseeable future.
My home is Canada, and it probably always will be. I love this place. British Columbia has boldly written "Best Place on Earth" on our license plates. That must mean something.
I am embracing the idea that chefs are activists whose job is to address the end result, in my case, pie. How can I not care about the beginning? The way we eat, how we think about food, and how food is actually intrinsically connected is truthfully chaotic. Food is most often misunderstood, undervalued, and thrown away in the trash.
The farm-to-table style business model, I believe, is viable. Now the tricky bit is to take it further by maintaining quality and still supporting the little guys.