Just another Day on the Farm

Farmgal remains under the weather, so she asked if I (…Dear Husband, of course) would write up a guest post. We agreed that talking about my time up North might be of interest, and I’ll focus it a bit on food, since that is at least somewhat relevant to farms, right?

Prior to actually moving to the North, I spent a couple of summers working there. This was my introduction to camp and minesite cuisine.

The camp had a single full-time cook, and a pretty good one at that. She had a good variety of stuff at breakfast and supper, and adequate amounts of “do-it-yourself” ingredients for lunch assembly. There were always new baked goods of some variety each evening, too. If we got bored of what was ordered in, we could also use the camp’s fax machine to send an order to the expeditor in Yellowknife, and when the next Twin Otter landed on the lake, it’d have your goods. At that time, camps were still “wet” so most of these orders consisted of beer; I ordered in a flat of cream soda and some M&Ms.

The mine had a cafeteria and a number of staff, given that there were around three hundred people on site. Breakfast was pretty much all pre-cooked and under lights, with cereal and toast available. Lunch consisted of several kinds of sandwiches, pre-made and kept in fridges all day long so people on the night shift could access them, too. Dinner was a choice of two meals, with several staples (pasta, mashed potatoes, gravy) essentially always available; as a young’un, I rather fancied the idea of mash’n’gravy daily, and actually had to consciously not order it from time to time. At least I was burning off all those calories while walking the property and mapping the geology.

Of course, that only gave me the barest sense of the logistics of northern food supply, and no sense of price whatsoever. My first real taste of this came as I was moving up to Yellowknife. Driving up from Edmonton, I (and my mother, riding shotgun for the roadtrip) arrived at Fort Providence, NWT, and found that ferry service across the Mackenzie River was sporadic on account of spring break-up. Vehicles in front of us had been there for hours, and in some cases, days. As it turned out, both the annual break-up and the fall freeze-in presented a period of weeks in which Yellowknife lost its land access to the outside world – causing a mild frenzy of grocery buying and a period of elevated prices, low selection, and poor quality.

Of course, these were all realities to some degree at the best of times already. It was quite common for people travelling down to Edmonton or beyond to bring back coolers full of meat or fresh food; on one road trip home, Farmgal and I picked up a small chest freezer, then stuffed it full of meat and ice for the sixteen hour drive home again.

If you had a yard, it was possible to garden in parts of Yellowknife – the sun and warmth were good for about three months. Since I, and then we, lived in an apartment, this was not an option for us.

Moving to Iqaluit, the northern food realities were only made more stark. There, there was no land access, ever; everything came in from air or, during the summer, by ship. While the government subsidized food prices through its Food Mail program (as it had, to a lesser degree, in Yellowknife), the problems of price and quality were amplified. It was quite easy to walk out of a grocery store with two hundred dollars of stuff in your hands, while a craving for chips and pop would set you back ten bucks a person, easy. We could order our own food from the south through Food Mail, and the quality was better (though not great), except that the politically-motivated rules of the program required that all the groceries be trucked up to Val D’or, Quebec before it was put on the plane.

Obviously, it was to our advantage to make use of the summer sealift if possible. We’d put together an order of staples and non-perishable items and give it to the store. They’d apply some handling and freight charges, and then we’d make sure we had thousand of dollars free on our credit card, as it all came off at once. Come September or October, a forklift would show up at our place with pallets full of stuff, and we’d spend a day or two moving tonnes of food into the house – which, like many northern housing units, had been designed specifically for long-term storage of lots of stuff. One just had to be careful how one arranged it all: You didn’t want to get a hankering for a jar of Pringles and find out you’d have to shift thirty boxes of pasta, sauce, and canned goods in order to satisfy the craving.

That all ended when we moved down south. With all the big grocery stores, the farmer’s markets, and our own gardens, it’s easy to forget what it was like up North. Heck, it’s easy to get riled up over the quality and prices offered to us here. Fortunately, I get a little reminder on those rare occasions where work takes me back up north for a few days. I always stop at the grocery stores and wander the aisles, just looking. Last week, in Iqaluit, the price of a dozen eggs was only $4, and a liter of milk about $5.

Not bad? Well, if you moved away from the most basic staples, that changed. The bundle of asparagus was okay for price, but looked like it’d been trampled a few times. A box of two Tenderflake pre-made pie crusts: $8. Frozen pizza: $14. Single red pepper: $15. Family pack of Cheerios: $17. Ten kilo bag of flour: $40. Whole frozen turkey…no point in looking.

Farmgal and I have it pretty good here on the Farm. It’s good to be reminded of that once in a while.