Mad Maple Country Inn, a bed & breakfast and “agritourismo” located on County Road 124 just south of Maple Valley, has been upping the ante on local food advocacy since it opened last summer. Miriam Streiman, who owns the establishment with her husband Neil Epstein, was an instrumental part of the team that organized Foodstock two years ago, and Mad Maple has already hosted several big-name chefs and food activists.
On Friday, April 12 from 7 to 9 pm, one of the movement’s international leaders will pay a visit to Mad Maple for a talk and a tasting. Danish chef Trine Hahnemann is a restaurateur, a best-selling cookbook author and a globe-trotting proponent of healthy, local eating. She believes that through cooking, eating, and exchanging stories and beliefs we can create a better world, and she focuses her work on one goal: that everybody in the world should have access to a decent, daily meal.
Hahnemann will spend the days before her visit to Mad Maple Country Inn at Toronto’s seventh annual Terroir Symposium, where she will speak about “food memory” and the importance of carrying culinary traditions through generations.
At the Mad Maple, Hahnemann will focus on the makeup of our diets, and the need for keeping biodiversity on our plates instead of in gene banks. Long an advocate of a diet that’s 80 per cent local, in-season vegetables, fruits and grains and 20 per cent meat, Hahnemann also believes that eating is a political act. At the Mad Maple, she will explain why.
She’ll also talk about the Rye Bread Project, a partnership between herself and the New Amsterdam Market in New York City. Rye bread, and especially the Scandinavian open-faced rye sandwich known as the “smørrebrød,” is a healthy, traditional food that can easily be transferred around the world by introducing farmers to good rye seeds and bakers to old recipes. At the New Amsterdam Market, events have been held challenging dozens of high-end chefs to come up with the most original smørrebrød lunches, using bread made from rye grown organically in upstate New York. The project is a great example of Hahnemann’s various passions coming together in the real world – traditional food, healthy meals and agricultural diversity.
“I have cooked more than a hundred thousand meals in my career,” Hannehman said during a recent speech at the United Nations. “For me the produce that enters my kitchen has to be manifold. My cooking can only be as diverse and tasty as the produce that the farmers grow. I need diversity to choose from.”
For more information about Hanneheman, visit trinehahnemann.com or ryebreadproject.org. To reserve a spot for the event (tickets are $40 each), email miriam@madmaple.ca or call 705-466-6753.