The Diversion

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.
-George Bernard Shaw

You have to believe me when I tell you, I’m incredibly dull.  Thick skulled.  Dimwitted.

For the last decade, I have tried to find direction in life.  I looked for a job that would bring me fame, or fortune, or some sort of respect from family and friends.  All I found, alas, were headaches.  Bartending was fun, but was never going to be challenging enough, or interesting enough to keep  me.  Working for the government was a torment.  How municipalities can look forward while confidently  striding backwards will always perplex me.  Teaching, personally, was worse.  I tried to take joy from the kids.  I tried ignoring ignorami.  I tried wrapping myself in the subject matter and the hefty holidays.  None of it worked.  At the end of the day I was empty and stressed.

How did I relieve this stress and fill that emptiness?  Food.  Not in a binge eating manner, either.  I mean I surrounded myself with food.  I talked food, I read about food, I cooked, I shopped in exotic markets, I went to restaurants that were far out of my price range.  I used food to distract me from my unhappiness.

Despite all this, it was quite a shock to me when I realized that food is where it’s at.  If I were to find true happiness, it had to be in food.  The preparing of it, the growing of it, the writing about it. Somehow, I needed to surround myself with it.  Over the last few months, I’ve shared this realization with different people.  When I have, I’ve been met with two distinct reactions.  The first is akin to a new parent realizing that their child has just gone potty without having to be told, or held by the hand. Their faces light up, they clasp their hands together, and everything in their being shouts “Finally! He’s got it!”  The second reaction is less entertaining, but no less enlightening.  People purse their brow,
narrow their eyes, shake their heads and say, “I’m sorry, you’re just figuring this out now?”  As I’ve said before, I’m pretty slow on the draw.

And so it is that I head out in a direction.  I will work with food, constantly learning and expanding my horizons.  I want to pickle and poach and ponder.  I want to grow and grind and grill.  I need to start at the bottom of an industry, and learn my way up, taking in all I can, following where it leads me.  And where will it lead me?  Perhaps not to fame, or fortune, but certainly to happiness.  What more can a man desire?

Where did it all start?

As I am wont to do, I’ve been thinking a lot about food lately. Nearly obsessively, I’ve been reflecting on my relationship with it, my passion for it, and been wondering where it all came from. I grew up in a pleasant, middle class family. Everyone else in the family likes food, but I seem different. I obsess about it. I’ve been trying to find a starting point, when it all began. After much searching, I’ve decided to blame (or thank) Pete Luckett.

Though I find it hard to believe, some of you may be unfamiliar with Pete. Pete was transplanted from Sherwood Forest to southern New Brunswick shortly after I was born (circa 1979.) Sometime in the 80’s, he bought himself a vegetable pushcart, and started walking the streets of Saint John selling apples and oranges, chatting folks up, charming them with his accent, his odd-to-us expressions, and his characteristic flat cap. At some point, he opened Pete’s Frootique in the Saint John City Market. It quickly became the place to buy fruits and vegetables in the Saint John area. At a time when many New Brunswickers thought of eggplant as wildly exotic, Pete was selling people litchis, star fruit, and rambutan.

Pete was soon picked up by CBC News for New Brunswick for a once a week segment on a fruit or vegetable of his choice. In his short piece Pete would introduce us to something curious, talk about its origins, tell us how to prepare it, and then “toodle-ee-do” us into our weekend. He introduced hewers of wood and drawers of water (or more appropriately “eaters of potatoes and drinkers of Alpine”) to the wide, wonderful, remarkable world of fruit and veg. He introduced our house to kiwi. He showed me my first celeriac. He explained the differences between yams and sweet potatoes. My family rarely missed a segment.

When Pete moved to Halifax in the early 90s, CBC NB lost their Friday night fruit monger, and my house lost a tradition. ATV tried to recreate what CBC had, but couldn’t pull it off. They added a hostess to the act and instead of adding to the segment, she merely distracted from the true star of the show; the eat to which Pete was introducing us. They never gained my viewership.

Pete never lost my respect, though. He built an empire in Halifax by finding a loophole to the Province’s outdated Day-of-Rest Act, and became the place to shop on Sundays in the HRM. I believe that people initially went to him because he was the only thing opened, but what they found when they got there was a thing to praise. They found great products, happy workers, wonderful customer service, and if you were really lucky, a live pianist at a baby grand. In short, they went for the convenience, but they stayed for the awesome.

I’ve never actually met Pete, though I did make juice for one of his business for a spell in Ottawa. While I squeezed juices for the masses in the Byward Market, a video of Pete’s clips played on a loop beside me. I never got bored of them. To this day, I stop at his Frootiques whenever I can in the hopes of catching a glimpse of him, brushing elbows, so to speak. You see, I owe him a debt of gratitude. Without him, I may have never moved beyond broccoli and neeps, never discovered the joy of bok choy. Never found my true passion.