Food Mayors Like

I’ve started reading the National Post with some regularity because we get copies of the paper at work. I’m a sucker for their design, use of illustration and even a decent dose of humour.

There is, however, a little twinge of smug superiority whenever I open the paper. That’s because last fall, a few of my friends and I applied for internship positions at the Post. They had reporter positions through the different sections, and copy editing spots. Time passed and they emailed our internship coordinator to tell him that they weren’t interested in hiring any of us because (I’m paraphrasing here) we didn’t have daily experience and we didn’t want to write about business.

So besides the fact that internships are generally important for getting such experience, and that at least one of us had worked at a large daily, the smug superiority comes from the copy editing errors that I keep finding (Come on: “slinger” instead of “singer” on the Arts front?). But enough about work!

Here comes the (just barely) food part of this mashup!

The Post interviewed a few mayors at the Federation of Municipalities conference in Toronto. The brief Q&As are pretty similar in their queries: What do you envy about Toronto? If you had to, where would you move? What food best represents your city? How do you spell South Dildo?

Bronco wasn’t included in the article, but I just imagine his answers were the same as Edmonton mayor Stephen Mandel’s answer; that is, he doesn’t envy anything about Toronto, and has challenges with the oil industry. Probably would say beef is more iconic than perogies though.

The worst response was Pat Fiacco in Regina. He said they have the best pizza in the country (that’s certainly debatable). And then he said that Regina is like a panda bear: “They’re adorable and charming.” Hey, Pat! They’re also ridiculously poorly evolved animals: the stomach of a carnivore, but they eat undigestible bamboo; they have to eat all day because they can’t process the bamboo properly; they can’t live together because they can’t afford to share food; the females are only able to conceive three days a year; if they miraculously find a mate on one of those three days AND they conceive, they have twins, but only raise the least-runty one, and leave the other one to die.

I’m not sure what the Saskatchewan metaphor should be with those facts in mind, but I just thought it was important to put that information out there.

Gregor Robertson in Vancouver said that the city’s most iconic food is wild sock-eye salmon. He then went on to say that if Vancouver was an animal, it would be a wild sock-eye salmon: “it serves a lot of roles in our city.”

OK, it made me laugh heartily inside my head.