Food Mail

I came to Qikiqtarjuaq prepared to eat poorly for five months because I was well aware of the inflated food prices and lack of selection. I figured I could live on canned beans and minute rice. I have now discovered that this is not my five month fate!! There is a little gem called food mail up here. It is an online service for IGA out of northern Quebec. The order has to be in by Saturday at 5pm and our food arrives on the evening plane on Thursday. The selection is super! Not only can we select from the entire M&M meats catalogue BUT we can get fresh produce, fruits, specialty soups, cheese, and pretty much anything else that you can think of. They even have incentives like a free box of tomatoes if you spend enough much money.

The food comes packed in boxes and wrapped in newspaper. You even get personal notes from the shoppers in Quebec that explain why they couldn't send the grapes or why we didn't get a certain type of soup that we asked for. It was like Christmas time in our kitchen on Thursday night. Kathleen (my housemate) said that she had ordered a "few" things and literally 20 boxes showed up hahahaha. The computers teacher, Stewart, brought his kometic (it's a dog sled that you pull behind a snowmobiel) to the airport and did us a huge favour by picking the boxes up.

If you had of asked me previously I would have told you that our kitchen was very well stocked. Kathleen did some incredible planning and packing when she came up here. She basically used her entire moving allowance to ship food and other household goods. BUT now that we've recieved our foodmail order I would have to say we are VERY well stocked!! We even have some really random fruit that is a cross between a grapefruit and an orange... it's called a pomplamo or something... all I can be certain of is that it's delicious!! hahaha

Foodmail means that we are not completely reliant on the two stores here and thank God for that!! There have been two incedents that I have experienced first hand regarding due dates and several others that I have heard of. I went shopping for some cambells canned tomato soup at the Coop. While the cashier was ringing through some of my other things I noticed that the canned soup had expired last April... now ask yourself this: how long is the shelf life of canned soup? hahahah I got a bit of grief when I asked for nonexpired soup but I did manage to get some. The second expiry date fiasco involved a bag of chips. I now know what rotted chip oil smells like and it's quite possibly equal to the smell of rotting meat. After those two incidents I asked around for tips regarding the food here. One of the teachers said not to buy anything that didn't have a due date because often the stores will rub off the actual due date. There was also the suggestion not to buy anything on sale because that means that it is expired. It's funny the Northern (the better of the two stores as far as selection and overall atmosphere) puts their BLACK bananas on sale for 50% off... so that they're only $10.00/ibs rather than the regular $20.00/ibs. It's funny to me (and my immediate family can testify to this) because I have a hard time even thinking about black bananas. I know that they're good for cooking and I LOVE banana bread but BLA!!!

It seems silly that I would have dedicated an entire blog entry to food BUT if you know me well you know that food is probably one of my greatest motivators and therefore an incredibly important aspect of my life.