Rat Routes and Reasons to Gather: Culturally Diverse Culinary Journeys in Edmonton’s Wild and Natural Spaces

• Main Author: Sarah DeLano
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: recipes; urban agriculture; foraging; diversity; Edmonton; anishina*
• Online Access: https://era.library.ualberta.ca/items/c709557d-9674-4b20-aa63-e03178eaf0df; https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-77s7-6d03

Simple and humble as a handful of dirt, complex and unexpected as perfectly whipped eggs mixed with flowers and front-yard shrubbery, this is, above all, a storybook. It is an anthology of our everyday journeys in green and wild spaces in Edmonton. The recipes provided here are the culmination of a year (in some ways generations) of urban gardening and foraging in the City; of experiencing and reflecting upon the land that we inhabit and all of the places to which we trace our individual and collective belonging. In this book, we highlight some of the beautiful, healthful, and versatile foods that can be cultivated, as well as those that grow wild, right here in the City. We invite you to engage with our recipes-as-stories, offering a window into who and where we are, and to diverse perspectives on green city spaces where planning, projects, policies and histories do not always include the voices of women, mothers, newcomers, people of colour, and Indigenous people. In the making of this book, we viscerally connected to and reflected on local food systems, land and one another, in ways that are both deeply joyful and at times difficult. We wish to encourage, beyond these pages, the sharing of other stories and recipes that open our minds to the possibilities of belonging, as people who are both similar and different, to the land on which we live; our common ground. The metaphor of a handful of dirt is not fortuitous. We are inspired by the tale of the Muskrat, namesake of the Rat Creek/Kinnaird Ravine that offered us its abundance of berries in the heart of the City. The Muskrat (as is told in some versions of a Nehiyo and Anishinabe creation story), though not the strongest of swimmers, dove deep down in the water after a great flood to clutch in his tiny paw a whisper of soil. In so doing, Muskrat made it possible for the whole world to be created anew atop the shell of a great turtle. Just as this world is said to have begun with a humble gift in unlikely hands, we think that the stories and recipes of our ...