This summer has seen a huge rise in home gardening and preserving, in large part due to all of us being stuck at home, but also because we’ve been forced to think about our food systems and how we source what we eat. It feels like we’re more connected to what we eat than ever before. To that end we wanted to send a shout out to one of our favourite suppliers of foraged wild Canadian ingredients.
Jellied Cedar
In this Your Morning interview, Dyson Forbes talks about the family business that grew out of his father’s love of foraging and preserving wild foods. Forbes Wild Foods has been around for twenty years and, as Dyson says, they are committed to “reconnecting people with foods that grow wild all around us but that we don’t necessarily have access to.”
Foraging not only helps people to reconnect to the land, but it also offers an economic incentive for people in far flung communities to forage as a source of income.
“We’re able to facilitate the harvest of many of these foods that weren’t being harvested before and being able to sell them into cities, into restaurants.” Explains Dyson, saying that working with Northern communities, and with products that are considered abundant, they are able to economically help those communities but also ensure harvests for years to come.
Their products include everything from sea asparagus and wild rosehips to chanterelles, pawpaws, spruce tips and birch syrup. All sustainable and guaranteed straight from the Canadian wild.
“In the last ten years there’s been a big push into incorporating wild foods into our diets.” Dyson says. He should know, he’s been supplying these ingredients to stores and restaurants for his entire career.
Thanks to the Forbes family we are able to access those wild Canadian ingredients, and show support for foragers across the country. And now is the perfect time of year to try some of these foods, they’re all being harvested now and into the fall.
Your new PB&J could include jellied cedar – what are you waiting for?