Alsask has been a place-name in Saskatchewan for 103 years. For most of that period volunteers in Alsask have celebrated the end of summer and the abundance from fields and gardens with fowl suppers. These temporary public events, as they are so designated by provincial health regulations, are - or were - part of the life-blood of community, an annual expression of volunteerism and good will. The will be no fowl supper in Alsask this year because the bureaucrats who protect us from ourselves have decreed food for temporary public events must be prepared in licensed kitchens.
The tradition of the annual fowl supper has also ended in my town. Although there is in this community a kitchen that would rival anything found in a licensed restaurant, our faithful volunteers, to meet the demand, have always depended on some food prepared in private kitchens. This year they gave up.
Fowl suppers were neighbourly events, an important part of the soul of every community. I have direct knowledge of only one person becoming ill by eating at a fowl supper. Both times, I was the victim. When I was a little boy, and truthful, I consumed food in a dingy church basement that had neither kitchen nor plumbing. I said afterward, "My tummy hurts because I ate too much." Decades later in a less primitive place, I ate with a gusto that would have shamed a vulture. When my adult tummy began to hurt, I said, "There must have been something wrong with the food." I had learned the value of protective prevarication, and wanted to avoid being called a glutton.
I never heard of anyone dying from attending a fowl supper. Perhaps there is some record of this happening, but there is no general awareness of it. It seems to me the bureaucrats have devised a solution for a problem which, for over a century or more, has never existed. Now, for community-minded rural dwellers, their solution is the problem.
I can't predict how far these unpopular regulations will expand. Will it be illegal for home-cooked food to be taken to the lunches that follow funerals? Nothing untoward has ever happened to me at such "temporary public events", except when eating egg salad on a an open bun, I sometimes get egg up my nose.
A licence hanging on a restaurant wall is not a disinfectant. The only time I have suffered through a violent, frightening attack of food poisoning was after eating contaminated cream pie in a licensed roadside restaurant.
The pattern of the roles people play is complex. The primary role is played by the cattlemen, farmers, gardeners, orchardists and fishermen who provide us with food.
People in the construction trades provide us with homes. Public sector employees who actually work outdoors with machinery and tools provide the necessary infrastructure that underpins the housing industry. Bureaucrats provide rules. They need to search constantly for new excuses for making new rules or their exorbitant salaries will come to an end.
When thinking of kitchens, I remember the one that was presided over in the past century by my formidable grandmother. It was in a house with no plumbing or electricity where food was cooked and water heated by a massive wood and coal range. There were no bureaucratic rules in Granny's kitchen, but there was a limitless supply of common sense. Whenever she was preparing one of her gastronomic masterpieces, she expelled her grubby grandson from the kitchen by flicking his little behind with a small, limber cane brought home from a long ago carnival. Grandfather, with his smelly pipe and garden-grimed clothes, was also banished. She didn't have to hit with anything. His obedience must have been enforced in a way I knew nothing about until I became an adult male myself.
Out in the boondocks we all love the food and fellowship of fowl suppers. This latest attack on the time-honoured tradition angers me, both day and night. I think I will dream about it. I think I will dream about a bureaucrat from this century going back to my grandmother's time.
She will be preparing an offering of food for people who have lost a loved one. The bureaucrat will tell her she is engaged in an illegal activity. Granny will swell up with indignation at this egregious insult to herself and all the sisterhood of home kitchens.
She will snarl, "You gormless wee git, what do you know about anything?" Then she will clamp her strong arms around him and carry him, wriggling, out to the back lane. There she will deposit him headfirst in the garbage barrel that stands beside the outhouse.
This would be a dream with a happy ending. I wish I could make it come true.
