As the former farmer’s market manager for Covent garden Market in London, Paige wrote for the blog, working with vendors and wonderful customers. She is also the founder of Old South Farmer's Market and the co-owner of Sungold Organics, a small organic vegetable and herbs farm.

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Amelia: Have you lived in London? For how long did you live there?

 

Paige: I was living in London for the past few years; I just moved to Guelph in January. 

 

What is your current occupation?

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I’m working as a baker right now at an organic sourdough bakery. In the past I’ve been farming, managing farmers’ markets, and working in the food industry. I was a cook at Rebel Remedy. And then on the side of that, I write a food blog and I’ve been doing talks and stuff as well. It all surrounds talking, writing, and researching local food. But my paid, everyday work is a baker.

 

Can you speak a little bit about your experience with farming?

 

I actually moved to London because I wanted to start a farm there with somebody from the area, my partner Andrew. He had a family friend who essentially offered the land to us to use for free, which was huge. Our farm, Sungold Organics, is an intensive vegetable production, so we grow salad green, fruits, peppers, root veg -- but all on a very small scale. We sold to restaurants like Rebel Remedy, Abruzzi and The Church Key, and had a stall at Covent Garden Market. I later began to teach cooking classes. I enjoyed showing people how to eat seasonally and locally.

 

Before moving to London, I was farming in eastern Ontario, on the Canadian Shield, which is very rocky; it’s not conducive to the same kind of large-scale farming that southern Ontario is. London is still very much this large-scale agriculture because that’s just the nature of the land. And so the land is more expensive, it’s more sprawling, it’s flat; there’s urban sprawl like crazy in London, so that is really different. Working at the Covent Garden Market was really neat though because it did introduce me to this other world that I wouldn’t have seen necessarily. There’s this super intense community in London surrounding community gardens and urban agriculture.

 

Can you speak a little bit about your knowledge of the farmers markets in London?

 

There’s a class element to the markets in London. So, like Old East, like Western Fair Market are very much like a family event for people to go to. And then there's the Trails End Farmers Market where there's huge amounts of produce for really low cost and a lot of it is like resold. So, Covent Garden has very much this kind of bougie reputation, but the underlying reason is the outdoor farmers market. The indoor part is like a mall sort of situation, in the way it’s set up. The outdoor farmers market is very much a true farmers market. It’s the only market in London that doesn't permit any reselling--so all the food must be from within a local radius and it must be made, grown, raised, baked, whatever by the vendor--so that was really interesting to see. It seems to be not well known in London that that's the situation with the farmer's markets. 

 

For a lot of Londoners, they just look at the price point or the activity kind of factor and Covent Garden Market kind of fails on both of those fronts. But, in terms of a market that's offering truly local and really working with a lot of local, small scale farmers, it excels. And so, people who are interested in that or see that or know about that, really seek that market out.

 

I was at a farmer's market conference a couple of years ago and they said something that really stuck with me. It was like, “Grocery stores are a competition, not other markets.” And I think that's really important to remember because honestly, if everybody shopped at farmer's markets, if everybody shopped from their local farmers, there wouldn't be enough farmers markets. And so, there's no point in having this kind of animosity between markets.

 

What is the customer like at these farmers markets?

 

Farmers’ markets are geared towards an older generation in general. To be honest, they’re super inconvenient; they only happen once a week in a certain time slot, and for a lot of young people who are working on the weekends, they're not going to come to a Saturday farmer's market to buy local produce. That said, I think it's becoming more and more of a mixed bag. Even within the three years I was in London, there's this huge movement to shop locally.

 

Is that what inspired you to found the Old South Farmers Market?

 

That was a big motivation for me to start the Old South Farmers Market before I moved to Covent Garden Market. It was a Thursday evening market, so to me it's like an after-work market. It's like, hey, you have this alternate opportunity. It might not actually fit into your schedule. But I was also really excited when Western Fair started to be open on Sundays ‘cause I was like, okay, now we have a Sunday market, we have a Thursday evening market, we have a Saturday market, that’s like so many more options to go buy from your local farmers than we ever had before.

 

I just wanted people to have an opportunity to support their local food producers. I was like, this community already exists, but they're leaving the community to go to Costco or to go to the Loblaws like, and there's farmers that are from this community, so there was a void. People support local business because they want their local community to thrive. And so that’s important to people for sure.

 

Could you speak more to this community aspect surrounding farmers markets? Who attends? Who doesn’t?

 

The older generation is very much loyal. When I took over the Market, I really learned that; they feel like they're a part of it, you know? Like, customers really feel like they have an element of ownership in their community market, which is cool. It's just so great to see that community engagement. But it was also really shocking. I was like, whoa! 

 

I also feel like there's a lot of people from the younger generation that are intimidated by that community aspect because when you go to the grocery store, you go down your aisle, you go to your self checkout, you don't talk to anybody. Whereas at the market, you have to be like, “Oh, what do you have back there? What’s this? What price is this? When is this in season?” You know? So it definitely forces a lot more interaction. And so the Covent Garden Market, because it is city-run, it’s very much involved in a lot of community groups. So, we have free cooking classes every Saturday at 11:00 AM, and that was a really neat way to engage different people. While I was running it, and the new woman who's running it, Patricia, is still trying to bring in a huge variety of different people.

 

Who is driving the farm-to-fork movement in London? Is it the farmers? Is it the markets? Is it the restaurants?

 

From my perspective as a farmer and a market manager, our financial motivation is to get people to shop from us and to shop locally. But I think that community, again; to have the restaurant be like, “oh, these are the farmers we purchased from,” and the farmers can then cross-promote and be like, “these are the restaurants that we sell to,” and the restaurants are like, “look we went to the farmer's market today to pick up strawberries for our strawberry pop up dinner tonight.” That ability to cross promote within your community is so cool. 

 

People having ownership in the things that they're doing and the things that they're interacting with adds value to the experience. People think that when you talk about buying local, there's this feeling that I'm doing something good. Sometimes it annoyed me as the person selling the food ‘cause they'd be like, “Oh yeah, I'll buy this pint of tomatoes, that'll be my good deed for the week.” And I'm like, no, these are your groceries! This is supposed to be a lifestyle, we're supposed to support each other and support the local economy; this is not a good deed, it's our philosophy. We want the money to stay within our communities and to support something that's sustainable long-term. But it's a perfect example as well that highlights people thinking, “Oh, I'm doing something good.” And when people feel like they're doing something good, they're more invested in the experience and they feel like it's more valuable. So it's a win for everybody. 

 

What is your impression of the farm-to-fork movement within the London food scene?

 

I think it's growing, I think it's moving in that direction for sure. I mean, it's kind of a joke that London's 10 years behind everybody else. So, the fact that London's just getting excited about it now, it's a little bit funny because it's been going for so long all over Ontario. A big problem I think is the way people dine out: they like to go to restaurants where the menu is always the same. And so, the diner also has to change their approach to be like, “Oh, the menu might change based on the season or based on the week or based on what's available that week” kind of thing. And that's really fun for restaurants to do that and work with that, but it requires their customer to be flexible as well. So it all has to be connected. 

 

It's a kind of a growing and learning process for everybody. Grace restaurant has just opened up in downtown London, and they're really trying to move in that direction and do those sorts of things. They were doing a Sunday feature dinner last summer and they would do different seasonal themes or highlight different farmers, and it was really fun. The menu is always different, it was super innovative and really cool. So, that was interesting to see a new restaurant moving in that direction. But, it also requires conversations between the farmers and the restaurant owners, and I think if both parties are open to that, amazing things can happen.

 

I don't think restaurants are seeking it necessarily. I think Grace was definitely seeking it, I think the root cellars very much like an advocate and that's part of their branding. So restaurants where it's part of their brand for sure they're seeking it out. But restaurants where that's not necessarily part of their brand, they just want to make delicious food, so that ends up being more of a conversation of collaboration. They have to be realistic about, what is their ordering process? How consistent can this be? How does this work into our systems that we have here? It depends on the restaurant’s brand I guess.

 

So yeah, it's totally happening, but it's, it's growing pains. I mean, you really have to rethink your way of running a restaurant and customers really have to rethink their way of dining out. And now that nobody's allowed to go out to restaurant, we’ll have to see what happens with that.  

 

What does the layout of the city say about the food culture? How does one influence the other?

 

My perspective of London is that it is very open, widespread land, and so it is these huge sprawling neighborhoods, and people love to drive. We're really trying to push for this bike movement; the bike lane was such a controversy in London. London is still a small town, right? So there isn't really space for there to be like a little Italy or a Chinatown because it's a few old neighborhoods and then suburbs everywhere else. Wortley village is definitely an interesting one. The Wolfe brothers are doing some interesting things, starting restaurants. 

 

I'm not a Londoner, I was just working in the food scene in London and writing about local food. So for me, it was more about grocery shopping and what is your daily intake of food and where do you get it from? Farming is very much reflective of the settlers who are growing food and selling it here, when that's not the only thing that our climate offers. Something that I'm really interested in is seeing, as we make space for new farmers and people to reclaim land, how can we introduce more diversity in the food that we grow here and how does that increase our resiliency as well? Because Ontario doesn't  have to be growing just carrots and potatoes. Things grow well here, there's a lot of crops that would do well here. It's just that our farmland is run and held by a small amount of people--and buying local I think would allow us to introduce that diversity and resiliency as well. So that's my thoughts on that. In terms of the food scene, in terms of London specifically, I definitely think it's a challenge for land access. 

 

What do you think of the farm-to-fork movement and the push to buy locally going forward? Do you think it’s pressing that we adopt this model, in this climate crisis state?

 

Something that's really interesting right now, given COVID-19 and everything, is the grocery stores are running out of food. And so the bakery I work at, it's slammed every day ‘cause there's no bread at the grocery stores. The farms I know that have done pop-ups or have offered door-to-door delivery are doing really well. 

 

When you look at where all of our food comes from and the supply chain, it's so scattered. One of our big things for doing greens with Sungolds was because if you look at where all the salad greens come from in the grocery store, they're mostly from California and Mexico, which are two places that are so politically fraught, they suffer from drought all the time--and we're depending on them for like 80-90% of our food. That is insane to me. So, I think like farm-to-fork is the only way forward. 

 

It's not even just about food. It's like, if we are so interconnected in this production system, our food and the things we need to live on a daily basis, our medicine, to me that's really scary and I think it's very apparent right now. If you could just get your food from your neighbor or from your local farmer, that to me feels so much safer and so much more sustainable and so much more secure than being like, “well I hope the shipment of sweet potatoes from South Africa comes in today.” That does not seem sustainable. 

 

So yeah, I do think that local communities and small businesses are so important--and allowing for diversity in that, allowing for those global connections in that. Thinking about, if we lost all connection with everybody tomorrow, would we be able to feed ourselves? Frankly, I don't think we would be able to at the moment, which is really scary. I think the restaurant movement is happening and that's really exciting. Like people doing their groceries, it's really exciting. And all of that is like part of the connection that allows young farmers or even older farmers or family farms to continue what they're doing or to like shift in what they're doing to figure out how to continue down this path. 

 

Is there anything that you wish students knew about what London’s food scene has to offer?

 

I love local food because I believe in its power to do good in the world, but honestly it's just delicious and it's a fun thing, to go and meet a farmer and sit down to your meal and enjoy this amazing food. I think when I was a student, money was on my mind all the time, so I think I would say, it may seem daunting and it may seem more expensive, but I really believe that it's not as expensive as people think it is, and especially when you're buying in season. I would like students to know this is a super fun, healthy, easy way to do something in the city. Like, get to know your city. 

 

I think Western university is a very interesting campus in the fact that it's so removed from everything; it is its own little world. If you're looking for something to do, don't feel like you have to buy a tomato, it's also just an interesting activity if you want to boost your food literacy skills, and the food is delicious.

I think the price point is probably a fear point for a lot of students, and I think that that is not true. There's often times where it's cheaper than the grocery store, and it's better and it lasts longer too. So, if you're the kind of student that buys food with good intentions and then to throw it out all the time, the farmer's market is your place to go; it will last longer. It's the same price if not cheaper. So for students I would just say, don't be afraid.

 

How do you think small food businesses can compete with larger restaurant chains (Jack Astor's, Moxie's) in London? 

 

I think that more so, a message from me to farmers is, don't be afraid to approach the chain restaurants. Like, your lettuce lasts longer, and that it could be a huge benefit. I don't know if we should be excluding certain types of businesses from the local food movement, I don't know if that's helpful at all. And I think making that divide is kind of a weird thing that's maybe hurting farmers, and hurting the whole philosophy behind it. I think it's just an accessibility factor. Again, if you live in a suburb and Dolcetto is right down the street, and you can drive your family of however many and park your car and go in, I mean it's delicious, why wouldn't you? Why would you drive downtown?

 

What do you think the impact of this COVID-19 pandemic will be on London’s food scene and small businesses, both in the immediate and distant future?

 

I think it's positive. I don't know how it's going to pan out for restaurants in general, especially the farm-to-fork ones because they tend to be smaller, they tend not to have huge financial groups backing them, so they are running on a pretty slim budget as is. I hope that they survive but I don't know, I have no idea how it's going to pan out. I think that's what's so scary about this whole pandemic, is that nobody knows what's going to happen. But I do think that they are at a bigger risk than corporate restaurants because they don't have investors to the same extent, and so there isn't that financial security. 

 

I think farms and independent grocers will do really well because they're connected to the local supply chain. I mean, if this happened in the dead of winter, I think people would really realize how important it is to have farmers that grow storage crops and a tomato sauce-producing factory in London or something, you know? Just, places that produce staples--and we don't produce those winter staples, we import a lot of them. And so, I think it's interesting that it's happening in spring because people are like, “oh, farmers are saving the day. Oh, the local bakery has bread and the grocery store doesn't.” So, I'm grateful that it's happened in this time. I think they'll be fine. And, I think it is a huge wake-up call to the fact that we are so fragile as a society in terms of our dependency on international trade for everything that we have. 

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To find out more about Paige, check out the following articles:

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https://www.thelondoner.ca/news/local-news/covent-garden-opens-outdoor-market-for-easter

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/london-ontario-farmers-market-old-south-1.4778577

https://www.stratfordbeaconherald.com/news/local-news/fresh-produce-and-craft-beer-take-over-londons-old-south/wcm/58d2bc9d-db79-4c6f-b01e-d19c7f57196e

https://coventmarket.com/market-updates/

https://coventmarket.com/what-a-success-thank-you/

https://practicallyemptypantry.ca/