Here we will pro­file peo­ple in this province who help shape the way we eat, cook and think about food.

Canada’s youngest baker, Sheryl Kirby. Check out that rolling pin!

Greg Clow and Sheryl Kirby, writers

In the more than 15 years that they’ve been together, the hus­band and wife
team of Greg Clow and Sheryl Kirby have under­taken many dif­fer­ent
projects. From run­ning a record label to pub­lish­ing a fanzine to orga­niz­ing music events.

Sheryl ran one of the first web direc­to­ries for inde­pen­dent shops and busi­nesses in the city, while Greg hosted a long-running elec­tronic music show on CIUT Radio. Parallel to all of this, they’ve both writ­ten for an array of local, national and inter­na­tional pub­li­ca­tions and websites.

The couple’s best-known ven­ture is Taste T.O., a web­site cov­er­ing all aspects of Toronto’s food and drink scene that is cel­e­brat­ing its third anniver­sary this month. Sheryl also has a per­sonal food blog, Save Your Fork… There’s Pie!, where she often writes about the more polit­i­cal side of food, and Greg is the pub­lisher of the self-explanatorily named web­site Canadian Beer News, as well as an oft-neglected blog called Beer Beats & Bites.

They live in Parkdale with two dogs, one cat, and a well-stocked pantry.

young Greg hams it up at the din­ner table

Where did you start out in the food world?

Sheryl: As a kid, I spent my days with my Grandmother, who had a house full of peo­ple all the time and had to cook three meals a day on a big old kerosene stove, in a house that had no run­ning water until 1973. She actu­ally hated cook­ing, so she had all of these tricks and tech­niques to make it fun. As a kid I thought this was for the ben­e­fit of my cousins and me, but more than likely it was to keep her­self from going mad. I picked up on bak­ing early on as kid and did pretty much all the bak­ing for my fam­ily by the time I was 10 or so, includ­ing bread. And I was pretty inde­pen­dent, so it didn’t seem at all weird to come home for lunch at the age of 12 and whip up crepes for my friends.

Greg: Like Sheryl, most of my child­hood food mem­o­ries revolve around my grand­mother, who worked in a hotel restau­rant kitchen, and who still cooks up a storm even though she’s in her 90s. There’s only a few of those mem­o­ries, though, as my par­ents, brother and I moved away from PEI and up here to Ontario when I was quite young. But when we went back for vis­its, the first thing that Grandma would say when we arrived was “Would you like a lit­tle lunch?” Even if it was the mid­dle of the night, it was always a “lunch”.

Aside from that, food really didn’t play a big role in my life until I met Sheryl. While I cer­tainly appre­ci­ated food that tasted good, I didn’t give a lot of thought to what I ate until she made me see the light. What I drank, how­ever, was another story. Right around the time I was legal to drink, I dis­cov­ered early micro­brews like Brick and Upper Canada, and while I still threw back a fair amount of Black Label and Molson Dry, I’ve always had an inter­est in try­ing new beers when­ever possible.

What changes have you seen over the years in how the peo­ple you meet feel about local farm­ers and food?

Sheryl: I guess I’ve been lucky to always be sur­rounded by peo­ple who appre­ci­ated food. My Dad hunts and fishes, and we spent our sum­mers in the woods or on farms pick­ing berries or apples. I’ve eaten moose, bear, seal, squid, sea urchin, peri­win­kles… you name it. There was always pre­serv­ing done, always a deep freezer full of stuff, always a veg­etable gar­den. We didn’t eat fancy, mind you, it was Nova Scotia in the 70s and 80s, we weren’t very sophis­ti­cated, but maybe because we were occa­sion­ally poor like Kenny, there was a real appre­ci­a­tion for food that was caught or foraged.

I also grew up going to the weekly farm­ers’ mar­ket in Halifax. It would be bizarre to me to NOT go to mar­ket. Moving to Toronto, I lived right in Kensington, with a whole world of tastes and smells and flavour expe­ri­ences lit­er­ally on my doorstep. I think that had the most influ­ence on me out of every­thing — com­ing from Halifax in the 80s (where there wasn’t even a Thai restau­rant) to this cor­nu­copia of exotic stuff.

So while it’s obvi­ous that food is more gen­er­ally pop­u­lar, I’ve been kind of insu­lated. I’ve always either been around peo­ple who loved food and cook­ing as much as I did (had a room­mate who was a chef, trained as a chef myself), or peo­ple close to me latched on to my enthu­si­asm for real food and aban­doned eat­ing junk food because they were learn­ing more about the good stuff.

Greg: Again, my expe­ri­ence has been a fair bit dif­fer­ent than Sheryl’s. While my dad fished and did a lit­tle bit of hunt­ing, my fam­ily real­ly didn’t do much in the way of “liv­ing off the land” or buy­ing from local pro­duc­ers. Pretty much every­thing we ate came from the IGA where I worked after school, and the same could be said of most of the peo­ple we knew.

I took the same approach to food myself for many years, but that changed due to Sheryl’s influ­ence. Even before “local” and “organ­ic” were buzz­words, she had us shop­ping at farm­ers mar­kets and look­ing for more nat­ural and sus­tain­able food options. It’s obvi­ously been grat­i­fy­ing see­ing more peo­ple mak­ing sim­i­lar choices.

But those of us who are con­stantly immersed in the world of food that is slow, local, sus­tain­able, etc. need to remem­ber while it might be an every­day thing for us, we’re still some­what out­side of the mainstream. Sure, there are a lot more peo­ple mak­ing bet­ter food choices thanks to the efforts of folks like Michael Pollan and Jamie Oliver. But peo­ple are also still buy­ing a hell of a lot of McDonald’s burg­ers and Wonder Bread, and I’m not enough of a Pollyanna to expect that to com­pletely change any time soon, if ever.

what is your favourite vegetable?

Sheryl: Sweet pota­toes and fen­nel.
Greg: Fiddleheads, Brussels sprouts and green peas.

farm ani­mal?

Sheryl: If not for the fact that we rent (and cur­rently live in a high rise) I’d have been a long-term early adopter of the back­yard chicken. I’ve always been fas­ci­nated by the rare breeds, and hav­ing kept var­i­ous types of birds as pets for years, the idea of keep­ing chick­ens seems really reasonable.

Greg: Sadly, your pre­vi­ous sub­ject in this col­umn used my (admit­tedly uno­rig­i­nal) idea of quot­ing the famous “mag­i­cal ani­mal” exchange from The Simpsons to declare my love for pigs. So instead, I’ll have to give a top 3, in no par­tic­u­lar order: lambs (for their cute­ness); chick­ens (for their per­son­al­i­ties); and pigs (for their tastiness)

sea­son?

Sheryl: Autumn — good eats with­out the stanky hot weather.
Greg: Late spring – not too hot, not too cold, and the antic­i­pa­tion is build­ing for the bounty to come.

Where are some of your favourite places in Ontario for food and drink?

Sheryl: Aw, dude, I hate list­ing favourites or giv­ing rec­om­men­da­tions. A per­fect restau­rant for me might not be the same for any­body else. In terms of mar­kets though, I am a big fan of Nathan Phillips Square. They get flack for the occa­sional re-seller, but I love that I can go first thing on Wednesday morn­ing when it’s not busy and get my stuff and get home. There’s no crafts or stuff to keep kids busy — it’s just an old-fashioned city hall mar­ket. Everything is nicely spread out, there’s a decent amount of com­pe­ti­tion to keep prices rea­son­able, and the lit­tle mixed bas­kets of fruit dur­ing stone fruit sea­son are per­fect for Greg and I to eat out of hand with­out get­ting bored or overwhelmed.

Greg: Since I haven’t vis­ited as many of them as I’d like, I can’t real­ly call them all my “favourites”, but I would encour­age every­one in Ontario (or any­where else, for that mat­ter) to visit and sup­port their local brew­ery. While they rarely have the same sense of romance (or the same mar­ket­ing bud­get) as winer­ies, small brew­eries have a much stronger con­nec­tion to the his­tory of our province. Prohibition and con­sol­i­da­tion wiped out almost all of Ontario’s local brew­eries in the early– and mid-20th cen­tury, but thanks to the explo­sion of craft brew­ing in the last few years, there are now dozens of brew­eries located in cities and towns through­out the province, with more on the way. Get out and show ‘em some love! The web­site of the Ontario Craft Brewers has a lot of info to help you get started.

the cou­ple today, all grown up.