Lockdowns, food shortages, food delivery going from luxury to necessity, restaurant closures, facemasks, outdoor dining - saying the past year was unlike any other is an understatement. In a year where COVID-19 dominated everyone's life, some things in the world of food may have escaped your attention. Now is as good a time as any to comment on those stories as part of the process of putting some closure to the year 2020.
The end of racist food marketing
Aunt Jemina, Uncle Ben, and the Land O Lakes woman all got their walking papers in 2020 after food companies decided that racism was no longer necessary to sell their products. Inspired (or shamed) by the Black Lives Matter protests of George Floyd’s death, PepsiCo decided to change the name and brand image of its Aunt Jemima pancake mix and syrup, and other food companies soon followed. The usual suspects bemoaned these changes as cancel culture, which is ironic because whining that you can't enjoy your meals without seeing a racial stereotype on the packaging sounds like the snowflake behaviour they normally don't condone.
Sourdough
Back during the early days of the pandemic when being forced to stay in your home for long periods was still new and unfamiliar, many people tried their hand at baking. With so much time on their hands, a lot of those bakers channeled their anxiety about not being able to find toilet paper into perfecting the sourdough starter needed for the popular bread. As one of the few food bloggers to have not made or eaten sourdough in 2020, I had no idea it took about seven days to
make a starter, and then another two weeks for it to become active. It also explains why this trend died out as people adapted to pandemic living over the year. There's no waiting for three weeks for a loaf of good bread when you have Zoom meetings to attend in between troubleshooting your kid's online schooling issues.
Popeyes' Chicken Sandwich Launched In CanadaA year where restaurants were either temporarily shut down or closed outright for various COVID-related reasons may not be the ideal time to debut a new sandwich but the demand for
the Popeyes fried chicken sandwich was just that high. With no reports of the chaos that happened in the United States when the sandwich debuted there, the launch went better than the current COVID vaccine rollout. When I finally got the chance to try the sandwich, I didn't have the religious experience I was promised in the commercials but instead had the pleasure of eating something that lived up to the hype surrounding it. It's a damn good fast-food sandwich, definitely give it a try if don't want to
make your own. Popeyes' competitors have a lot of catching up to do.
Dangerous criminal portrayed as friendly sausage maker
Normally when someone drives a truck filled with weaponry through the front gate of Rideau Hall, they are described as a terrorist, or at the very least, a threat to the safety of the people around them. But in July 2020, the media chose to play up the sausage-making abilities of
the person who did that very act. Described as a "good community member" known for his friendly demeanour and for the garlic sausage he made for his customers at his meat-producing business in northern Manitoba, the Royal Canadian Artillery veteran is currently facing 22 criminal charges, including uttering threats and possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose. If found guilty, maybe he will be allowed to work in the prison mess hall so his culinary skills don't go to waste. I won't be crying any tears if they do.
Adamson BBQWhen the yahoos who make up FordNation turned on Premier Dad, it wasn't pretty. Owner Adam Skelly decided that
the rules everyone else had to follow didn't apply to him, forcing police to arrest him after he continued to allow indoor dining on the premises of one of his restaurants. What makes this story even more absurd is that Skelly's restaurant never should have been allowed to operate in the first place, as this businessman
never bothered to get a business licence for his business. Claiming he defied the law to challenge the government's
Reopening Ontario Act, Skelly will have his day in court in March of this year. I'm sure being a cause célèbre and a poster boy for the anti-mask crowd won't help his cause, but Skelly seems to believe any publicity is good publicity. I believe hearing more about a restaurant owner's shenanigans than about his restaurant's food isn't a good sign, so I'll spend my money at some other BBQ joint the next time I'm in Hogtown. I don't know much about the Toronto barbeque scene but this was not a good introduction to it.
Wu-Tang helps Ottawa FoodbankIt's always good to hear positive stories about hip-hop artists, as the media usually tends to focus on the who-got-shot, who-got-arrested, who-got-who pregnant type of stories; sex and drugs are only cool when it involves rock n roll and white guys playing the guitar. Reminding everybody that they ain't nothing to fuck with, the
Wu-Tang Clan helped raise over $170,000 for the Ottawa Food Bank last April. It all started with
Shopify COO Harley Finkelstein agreeing to donate $1 to the Ottawa Food Bank for every retweet of one of his tweets, up to $10,000. Adam Miron, an Ottawa entrepreneur and the co-founder and director of
HEXO put in for $10K as well and asked others to spread the word on Twitter. One of those others was the American rap group, or at least whoever runs their Twitter account. They spread the word and sent a donation as well, and soon enough money was raised to provide one week of meals for 24,300 people. The collaboration with the Wu and the Ottawa Food Bank led to the "
A Better Tomorrow" campaign in May that raised money for the
Ottawa Food Bank, the
Ottawa Mission, and
CHEO. I probably have as many black T-shirts as George Stroumboulopoulos, so I passed on getting the sold-out
OttaWu tee, but I did get a chuckle seeing Mayor Watson wearing one. Even though cash rules everything around him, Jim doesn't look like much of a Wu-Tang fan.
What does 2021 have in store for us? Stay tuned...
