The Tastemakers by David Sax

Author:David Sax [Sax, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7710-7941-2
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2014-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

Thornbury, Ontario, is a small, pretty town two hours northwest of Toronto, where the Beaver River flows into Georgian Bay, the giant backside of Lake Huron. The water in Georgian Bay is cold, clear, and remarkably clean, making it a coveted spot for weekend cottages and beachfront vacation homes. Just a few miles away from Thornbury are some of Ontario’s best ski hills—a bit of an oxymoron, sadly—that drop down from the top of the Niagara Escarpment to the shore of the lake. My family has had a house five minutes outside Thornbury since I was a teenager, and we spend most weekends and holidays there.

In the summers my dad does a lot of bicycling and occasionally drags me out first thing on a Saturday morning to cycle thirty or forty miles with other baby boomers on their $9,000 carbon fiber stallions. A few years ago we left our house in the morning and rode up into the farmland beyond the vacation houses and golf courses along the shore. Within a few minutes the landscape opened up to rolling fields of canola, wheat, grazing sheep, and apple orchards. Thornbury is apple country and has been for well over a century. Lake air is held over the orchards by the heights of the nearby hills, creating a microclimate that’s temperate and ideally suited for apple growing, with plenty of moisture and good frost protection. Thick-trunked apple trees with drooping, snarled limbs are everywhere, and you can’t drive three minutes in the fall without coming across a stand selling bushels of apples or a bakery selling apple pies. There are apple vinegars and jams for sale at the supermarket and apple cider on tap in Thornbury’s bars. On the back roads, giant trucks roll by carrying presliced and packaged apples for Walmart and McDonald’s as well as tankers of apple juice destined for Tropicana.

Five minutes into the ride that day we rode past a farm that looked completely different from all the others. Instead of knotty old trees around high grasses, there were tight, precise rows of wires affixed to wooden posts. The trees were growing vertically through these, kept in place by the wires, the same way that high-end vineyards grow their grapes. Along the fence were prominent signs aimed at drivers, so they’d know exactly what was there:

GLOBAL FRUIT

HOME OF THE RED PRINCE

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