P.E.I. chef shares passion for plant-based meals through cooking lessons
CBC
Brittany Boothroyd couldn't have foreseen she'd be quitting meat when she joined the Culinary Institute of Canada in 2012.
"I was passionate about cooking meat and cooking it well, and I actually would get a bit defensive against vegetarians and vegans because I didn't understand where they were coming from," she said.
"I was like, this is natural. This is what we're raised to do. This is my industry."
But after she had to cut off beef from her diet because she found it was upsetting her stomach, the Red Seal-certified chef slowly began to realize the benefits of a plant-based diet, and went full vegetarian in 2016.
"My dad passed away from a heart attack ... they found out that his heart was almost completely clogged," she said. "I do believe that a plant-based diet can almost act as like a preventative medicine to keep our bodies happy and healthy.
"When it's added with the ethical and the environmental reasons, all of a sudden I just completely ran out of reasons to eat meat."
After spending over 10 years working in restaurants such as the now-closed vegan My Plum My Duck and Nimrod's, Boothroyd recently decided to leave the industry to share her love for plant-based cooking in a different way.
"I just started realizing that the way the restaurant industry is just isn't really sustainable anymore, you know, for the staff for the owners. With the rising food costs and rising labour costs, you know, food is going to have to cost so much for anyone to make any money. So what I really want to do is I want to teach people how to cook for themselves again," she said.
"People my age, they don't know how to cook. They know how to cook basic things; they don't know how to cook healthy meals, they don't know how to cook with confidence, they especially [don't know how] to feed their family and friends."
Boothroyd has started teaching classes for Islanders looking to incorporate more plant-based foods into their meals, but don't know where to start.
At Wild Kitchen, her new business, she offers students in-person lessons on plant-based cooking and meal-prepping.
And she said her classes are completely judgment-free. In fact, most of her students eat meat.
"I'm just here to show them that eating vegetables can also be awesome."
Shortly after finishing school, Boothroyd expanded her culinary horizons through travel. She said she realized plant-based eating was not just a trend when she worked for seven months at Vegilicious, a vegan soul food restaurant located in Melbourne, Australia.
More than 100 workers at a steel plant in eastern Ontario are being laid off either temporarily or permanently, as a company with facilities in Quebec and Ontario cuts its workforce due to challenging market conditions — including U.S. tariffs.
A small town northwest of Thunder Bay, Ont., has become the unlikely home for hundreds of foreign workers, but many may have to leave the community they've embraced after the end of a federal program put in place to fill gaps in Canada's labour market.
There's mixed reaction in Waterloo to an injuction allowing police to detain, arrest and charge anyone who is participating in unsanctioned street parties in that city this weekend.
Diabetes Canada is excited about Prince Edward Island's new pharmacare deal with the federal government, but hopes the province will reevaluate copays on diabetes supplies, says a senior manager with the organization.
After 26 years of accommodating guests from across the world, Faith Embleton says she and her husband Ken are ready to sell their bed and breakfast.
A group of big-name companies including Google, Meta and Dow have signed a pledge to support tripling the world's nuclear energy capacity by 2050, a signal of the technology's growing resurgence in popularity.
Five years on, Toronto-area doctors and public health officials are looking back at what they've learned since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — and most agree the early experience will prove useful if the city faces another infectious disease crisis.
City staff would like Londoners to take a good look around their home and ask themselves a direct and possibly difficult question: Could everyone in your family survive at home, without leaving and with no other help, for a full 72 hours?
Liberal Leader Mark Carney will officially become Canada's next prime minister within a few hours, taking the reins as the country barrels toward a general election and continues to fend off verbal and economic attacks from U.S. President Donald Trump.
Recent cyberattacks in Newfoundland and Labrador should have been a wake up call for the federal government about the reality of an increasingly hostile world, says one cybersecurity expert.
A recent CBC News analysis found that Nova Scotia is rapidly losing some of its most affordable apartments, but housing experts say there are ways to prevent that.
Premier Susan Holt is defending her decision to not use electricity exports to Maine as leverage against U.S. tariffs, arguing the move might cause long-term pain for New Brunswickers.
Montreal's St. Patrick's Day parade first started on Saint-Paul Street in 1824, and a couple centuries later, this annual tradition is still going strong.