CANMORE – Providence pointed pirate preservers to Palliser, where they picked up parkway-peppered produce and piled peppers prodigiously for the prosperity of pickling promoters, on Saturday (Aug. 25).
After an eastbound tractor-trailer filled to the brim with peppers and tomatoes overturned on an exit ramp between Mountain Avenue and the Trans-Canada Highway in the morning, a valley-wide operation was mounted to save the produce.
“ ‘There’s been a truck overturned on the Trans-Canada; we’re going to pick up peppers and tomatoes,’ and I said ‘great,’ ” purported Carol Picard on being told by friends about the produce bounty.
“I didn’t realize the scope.”
Although salvage is more often something referred to in the context of the high seas, the inability for a replacement refrigerator trailer to be brought in time for the vegetables to be saved meant the entire load was open for picking.
Health Canada guidelines to prevent food contamination requires the transport of food to be free from physical, chemical and microbiological contamination, which has a safety timeframe needing to be met to transfer loads between trailers.
From Three Sisters Mountain Village to Exshaw, garages were “stuffed to the rafters” with hundreds of flats of peppers and tomatoes, said Picard after the call went out on social media.
“A lot of young families with kids –money is always tight – and these are women who love to do things like canning and pickling, so they came out in droves,” she said.
And not a single pepper went to waste.
“Our worst fear was this stuff rotting in someone’s garage other than being used.”
Monday’s Food and Friend night at St. Micheal’s Anglican Church used the peppers for soup.
Others salvagers made years’ worth of spaghetti sauce and pickling.
Still more peppers and tomatoes have been dispersed across the Bow Valley to families looking to stretch food budgets.
Picard said the produce flats, which would normally retail for at least $35 each, allowed for more experimentation in recipes.
“This is exactly the time of year where peppers and tomatoes are in abundance, and people saved a lot of money by just coming and taking the free stuff off the bounty.”
Peppers will be available at the next Food and Friends night on Sept. 3.
