The nation is feasting on Lindsay Anderson's book. The local meal maestro co-authored the book Feast: Recipes & Stories From A Canadian Road Trip with close friend Dana VanVeller as a love letter to the food of Canada.
Canada has now reciprocated.
The book has been tapped as the winner of the Taste Canada Award in the Regional/Cultural (English language) category for 2018.
Anderson told The Citizen that it was hardly a slam-dunk victory but she and VanVeller took the chance on attending the gastronomic gala in Toronto, if only for the spectacle and networking opportunity of the nation's most prestigious awards event for food-lit.
As the event unfolded, she said, her usual calm-cool-collected demeanor started to falter.
"I was a lot less chill than I expected I'd be," she said. "I'm not afraid of public speaking, it wasn't that, but as our category came along my heart was pounding in my chest."
The two authors had earned a following and many friendships in their travels. When their name was declared the winner, a loud cheer erupted across the Fairmont Royal York event centre.
"I looked and sounded much more calm than I felt inside. I felt like a shaky disaster," Anderson said, after later viewing video of their acceptance.
She admitted there was also a tinge of melancholy to winning the award.
The trophy was an enormous national affirmation for the Appetite (Penguin Random House)-published bestseller, but it was also like the closing of their personal story with the book. It will go on as a living monument to this vast country's local foods and regional preparation techniques, but their part as authors is now complete. Like chefs watching from the kitchen as the guests dine, or like a theatre director watching from the wings as the actors perform, their work between these pages is finished.
Anderson said it would be viable to simply do the book all over again, travelling instead to all the parts of Canada she and VanVeller weren't able to reach in their first Feast journeys.
They could even go back to their original notes, subtract the food elements they've already covered, and write a book about Canada's culture.
"I'd say this project is not something Dana and I are ready to completely say goodbye to, but what happens for it in the future is definitely something we will carefully consider," she said. "It takes a lot of time, resources, tears, energy to write a book. We are not leaping at doing it again, but we are still very close friends, we still believe in all the adventures and efforts that made Feast, so we will look ahead at what might come next."
Anderson did hint that something was already in the works. Book projects are, by the mechanics of their nature, already done for the writers by the time they arrive on bookstore shelves, so in the space of time between them finishing Feast and the nation celebrating with big sales numbers and trophies, the two gastronauts had already done another project together.
It, too, is finished but not yet through the design process for mass marketing. The two are excited and proud of what is about to come.
"We were not the authors of this book, per se, we were more like consultants in putting it all together," Anderson said. "This book is specifically focused on Nunavut. We were brought in by the territorial government to produce this in-depth look at very traditional food from the land."
It is both a look back at Indigenous nutrition that dates from time immemorial yet also a modern view of Artcic cuisine for today's Nunavut culture.
"It's just a dream project. We were so lucky to get to get to work on this," she said.
"This is something all of Canada can learn from. I know I learned a bit about the creation of the Nunavut territory in school, but I didn't learn much about the overall history, the true ways of life in the far north, the effects of colonization. There is so much this part of Canada can teach us. It was very eye-opening and very humbling for me."
That project will be translated into a number of Canadian languages, and provided free of charge to residents of Nunavut. Anderson hopes it might also be made available for purchase in the rest of Canada.
She will now take a bit of a break from foodie digests. She has hopes of returning from her current base in the Lower Mainland back to her Prince George hometown in the leadup to Christmas. She can't stomach being gone from this area for long.
