Written by Anne Kingston; The real reason behind the great Cauliflower Panic of 2016; The crisis in the cauliflower economy was never about taste, or even food fashions: it’s a signal of something much more significant.
When historians review the trumped-up “cauliflower crisis” of
early 2016, sparked by a trebling of the vegetable’s price (from $3.99
to $8.99 in supermarkets) between late November and mid-January, they
will locate its Canadian ground zero at the popular
Toronto restaurant Fat Pasha. News that chef Kevin Gilmore was forced
to remove its signature dish—an $18 whole roasted cauliflower stuffed
with Halloumi cheese and topped with tahini, pine nuts and pomegranate
seeds—was oft-repeated in news stories, becoming a metaphor for some
sort of collective loss. It fed into a larger, unidentified if overblown
panic seen in media and online chatter, reinforced by news trucks
camped outside of supermarkets as if covering a crime scene.
