TIMMINS - The importance of sustainable food and traditional Indigenous flavours is something Chef Johl Whiteduck Ringuette wants everyone to understand.
During his visit to Timmins High and Vocational School today (Nov. 18), he and the students prepared a meal of field greens salad, three sisters stew, buffalo stew with root vegetables wild rice pudding. Through the preparations, students learned to look at where their food was coming from.
He said sourcing some of the ingredients has been tricky, but that’s part of the lesson.
“Some of the ingredients, I had to bring from where I was coming because they can’t be sourced here, but a lot of people pitched in,” he said.
Ringuette is a member of the Nipissing First Nation and held the largest restaurant opening to date in Toronto with the 2017 opening of NishDish. He co-founded the Red Urban Nations Artist Collective in 2018 and was the founder of the Ojibiikaan Indigenous Cultural Network.
He also runs Miinikaan, a business focused on Indigenous gardens and sustainability.
“I had culinary arts class that was bringing the Indigenous kids back to the land and showing them all of the things that we do to source food, to harvest food, and the teachings of individual plants, which can also be implemented here through container gardens,” he said. “They can be food gardens, they can be herb gardens, they can be traditional medicines gardens. It just really depends on the school or the agency.”
TH&VS culinary teacher Alex Mathieu said it’s another of many lessons the students get about all aspects of the industry.
“It opens the door for anybody who is non-Indigenous, who just enjoys learning about food and culture in general,” he said, “It’s not just sustenance. There’s something much deeper than that.”
Having Ringuette in the kitchen was also an excellent experience for the students, who served the meal to the District School Board Ontario North East (DSB1) Indigenous Peoples Advisory committee.
Timmins High Grade 11 student Cissaly Fisher agreed.
“We learned a lot about how, when he cooks, he uses of the stuff that’s been here,” said Fisher. “I’m looking forward to the rice pudding.”
Mathieu said having an example of someone who has had success in the industry also boosts the students who might want to head in that direction.
“It takes a certain type of person to do this,” he said. “The opportunity is huge.”
The culinary program isn’t just about the food, though, said Mathieu, and learning about things like marketing and the business side of the industry is also part of the course.
“All of those outside of the kitchen things, maybe the cooking isn’t their thing, but maybe the actual administrative part, the business part, the accounting part, the budgeting part, the think tank part is a huge opportunity for them as well,” said Mathieu.
Ringuette said he hopes that the meal gets not just the students but the people enjoying the food thinking about where their meals come from and what they can do to learn more about how their food is connected to the land they’re living on.
“It’s a really important way to honour and represent the culture that is here,” he said. “There are a lot of communities here, so it’s important to bring the knowledge of where the food comes from, how to source it, how to access it, and what we can do as a community to make it more accessible.”
After the meal, he shared much of that knowledge with around 300 students from across DSB1. The audience also got a taste test of some of the dishes.
“When you bring students in, and you engage them with where the actual ingredients come from and how to source them, how to grow them, we begin to feel like a part of the collective consciousness of wanting to understand how this food arrived on my plate,” said
Ringuette said that protecting things like wild rice in the North is everyone’s responsibility.
“The most important thing is to show the connection to all nations,” he said. “There’s a lot of things to celebrate, and that connects us all. Once we have that knowledge, we know that we have to be the caretakers and the stewards of the land together.”
