The Sleuthing Begins in my Brand New Digs at the Centre for Social Innovation

It took me a while to fig­ure out an answer to the ques­tion: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” (By the way, I’m not sure if I have grown up in spite of being what is politely called “middle-aged.” When peo­ple claim I don’t look — or act — my age, I have this answer: “Hair dye and imma­tu­rity keep me young.”)

With a tal­ent for lan­guages, I obtained a degree in Russ­ian and French straight out of high school. Real­iz­ing that being an inter­preter at the U.N. was not going to hap­pen, I explored var­i­ous other job options: social worker with the Province of Alberta; assis­tant direc­tor of a teen cen­tre in down­town Edmon­ton; owner of a cloth­ing store in North Bay; baker of apple pies in Toronto; being a wait­ress (okay, a server to be polit­i­cally cor­rect) in var­i­ous restau­rants, and teacher of ESL to adult New Cana­di­ans in the Jane-Finch area — and yes, I obtained the B.Ed required.

I man­aged to squeeze this eclec­tic career path into a space of a dozen or so years. This includes hav­ing my first child, Esther, at the age of 24. At that ten­der age, I was as clue­less at being a mother as I was about find­ing my vocation.

And then it hap­pened. In the mid-70s, a friend was leav­ing her posi­tion at Toronto Life mag­a­zine where she was a con­tribut­ing edi­tor for what was then called The Gourmet Guide. I had been writ­ing restau­rant reviews for her on an infre­quent basis when I got her job. A bud­ding foodie who loved to cook, I also began writ­ing free­lance pieces for var­i­ous pub­li­ca­tions includ­ing travel sto­ries for the Toronto Star about food-focused trips to Rus­sia, Ire­land and the south of France.

In 1983, a friend called to say they needed a food writer at the Toronto Sun. Pat McCormick, a lanky fel­low with curly hair and a good sense of humour who was the Lifestyle edi­tor at that time, rec­om­mended they hire me. Although I had never used a com­puter (the Sun news­room had huge, clunky word proces­sors in those days), I took the job, mostly because of the den­tal plan.

In 1989, I moved to the Toronto Star as food edi­tor after they wooed me for sev­eral months. I stayed there for 18 years. I had found my pas­sion, my tal­ent — and, career-wise, I was grow­ing up.

I became friends with Julia Child (see the rest of my web site and my book “Dish”), I inter­viewed Joe “Dogs” Ian­nuzzi, author of “The Mafia Cook­book,” by phone from parts unknown while he was under the wit­ness pro­tec­tion plan, I dis­cov­ered and penned a fea­ture piece on a fledg­ling Jamie Oliver when he first appeared in Canada on TVO, and joined fire­fight­ers in their down­town fire­hall to cook din­ner. I also made it my mis­sion to write about the pol­i­tics of food, hunger and poverty. In other words, to share with my roughly 1 mil­lion read­ers sto­ries about those who don’t have enough food.

I have been free­lanc­ing for a few years now after resign­ing from the Star in 2007. That has included a stint as res­i­dent food sleuth on CBC radio’s flag­ship show Q, a cook­book called “A Pinch of This” pro­duced with res­i­dents of the down­town Toronto com­mu­nity Alexan­dra Park, much travel always with a culi­nary mis­sion, reg­u­lar food blog­ging and my most recent pur­suit: cre­at­ing audio pod­casts about food with my won­der­ful pro­ducer Mea­gan Perry. A state-of-the-art Flash­Mic is my new indis­pens­able tool.

After five years liv­ing in the rural Ontario city of Strat­ford dur­ing which time I found out that small town life is not for me, I returned my favourite, feisty and for­mer Toronto neigh­bour­hood: Kens­ing­ton Mar­ket. Here, I live in a com­pact house with my soul-mate and man-friend Ross Whitney.

Which brings me to the theme of this blog: my new office.

I get cabin fever when I’m at home dur­ing the day for more than a few hours. I’m used to the hus­tle, bus­tle and col­le­gial spirit of a news­room (okay, so it wasn’t always that col­le­gial but never mind). So after try­ing to work at home for sev­eral months, I’ve rented a space at the amaz­ing Cen­tre for Social Inno­va­tion on Spad­ina Ave. near Queen not far from my home.

The name is self-explanatory and there are all kinds of inter­est­ing projects ger­mi­nat­ing and flour­ish­ing in this amaz­ing space. I’m part of a net­work of peo­ple work­ing at cre­ative solu­tions to make our world a bet­ter place.

My office is small — not nearly as big as it looks in the photo above — but cozily fur­nished with the manda­tory bur­gundy and leopard.

Keep in touch with my blog for more food sleuthing news!