Kathleen Macintosh has always frozen fresh, sustainable, Ontario fruit. Recently, she’s been freezing enough to provide the masses with local fruit in the dead of winter.
Kathleen is the founder of Culinarium,“Toronto’s Locavore Store!”. Culinarium “showcases exceptional Ontario products and the passionate people behind them.” If you haven’t ventured in, you should. It’s a beautiful boutique shop on Mount Pleasant featuring all that Ontario sustainable food suppliers have to offer.
One of the ways the store highlights Ontario food is by offering an Ontario Artisan Share box. The box program incorporates everything from veggies and fruit to cheese, meat, and fish. Our box is where I first came across local frozen berries.
Kathleen freezes fruit as a way of prolonging access to local fruit after the harvest, and making use of fruit that may not sell. Last year it occurred to her that in addition to freezing for home consumption she could offer the service to her customers.
In order to make it work she bought 30 flats of strawberries– enough to fill 360 one-pint bags. Kathleen assumed this would be enough to last until February and maybe even March. To her surprise she was sold out by the end of November.
Wondering why they had sold so quickly, she started to investigate options for consumers to purchase local Ontario frozen fruits. She stumbled upon a huge gap in our ‘local, sustainable’ food industry – there are no suppliers of frozen local fruit.
Kathleen explained to me there is no infrastructure in Ontario to process fruit. In fact there aren’t many facilities for processing most of our food. So excess, for the most part (there are a couple of exceptions) gets shipped to the U.S., processed, and then sent back to Canada. Our winter food is local via the U.S. border.
Kathleen’s dream for rectifying the issue is to one day collaborate with like-minded folk and build a sustainable processing industry; an industry that gives each community access to a processing station. Farmers can take their excess to a local station and have it affordably frozen and preserved.
In the meantime, Kathleen will continue to do her part to provide this service. This year she plans to hire two summer interns – up from one last year – and continue to freeze.
Note about Freezing:
Freezing down berries is much easier than tree bearing fruit. Fruit grown on trees needs to be pealed, soaked/sprayed in a preserving solution (i.e. sugar, lemon juice). The work involved is much more costly and timely than berries.
**NB: Not Far From the Tree is excited to continue our own preserving and canning workshops this summer in order to do our part to reconnect people with the lost art of preserving the local harvest for the winter to come! We hope to tackle skills such as freezing, dehydrating, canning, pickling, and preserving.
