Flat Out Food

The Passion of Jenn Sharp

By Aidan Morgan

Jenn Sharp would like to tell you a story. It’s all about Saskatchewan’s food and the complex web of relationships between producers and consumers. It’s about apiarists and agriculturalists, Indigenous food sovereigntists and intercroppers, brewers and chefs, restaurateurs and the people who sit at the table to share a meal.

Above all, Sharp wants to tell a story that’s quietly utopian, demonstrating that there is a better and more mindful (and much tastier) way to regard the food on our plate. And it’s all told through the lens of individual ingredients. 

Flat Out Food is a six-episode documentary series on Citytv Saskatchewan, hosted by Sharp and co-written with series director Adrian Halter. Each episode focuses on a single ingredient — wheat, lentils, honey, beef, and chanterelle mushrooms. Throughout, Sharp features farmers and food processors who have veered away from modern agricultural practices and embraced traditions that put consumers into closer contact with their food. The sole exception to the formula, ohtâpamihowin, focuses on Indigenous foodways and the fraught politics of how commodity farming and supply chains have damaged the health and culture of Saskatchewan’s Indigenous people.

The opening episode, titled Wheat, is almost a provocation. After all, what could be less enticing a subject than wheat? In Sharp’s hands, though, wheat becomes a contested ground where modernity clashes with tradition. She visits a farm where heritage grains are grown and sold directly to consumers within the province, leading to Black Fox Distillery and Saskatoon’s Night Oven Bakery. As she traces the course of Red Fife grain, from its 19th century origins to its revival by Saskatchewan farmers and its uses in value-added products, Sharp paints a picture of the modern agricultural industry and the food producers who have chosen a different path. 

“Adrian and I talked quite a lot about the order of the episodes,” Sharp explains. “People living here, myself included, didn’t realize what we were doing with wheat in this province. So we thought it would be really cool to lead with that wheat episode and flip on its head that notion that all we do here is big commodity crops and we ship it out. And a big part of that episode is people like John Cote from Black Fox Distillery getting into value-added agriculture. It’s like, let's keep some of that profit in our economy in Saskatchewan instead of making everybody else rich with our raw products”.

Sharp comes by her interest in food naturally. She grew up on a grain farm near Craik, Saskatchewan, where she learned first-hand about growing food. “A lot of my formative years were spent in the garden, learning how to grow food and getting my hands in the dirt,” she recalls. She also displayed an early aptitude for journalism, winning an award for writing from the Saskatoon Star Phoenix at seven years old.

In Saskatoon she worked in small, independently owned restaurants where chefs had plenty of creative license and access to seasonal ingredients. “It captured my imagination,” Sharp says.

Sharp was hired by the Saskatoon StarPhoenix soon after she got her B.A. in English at the University of Saskatchewan. Editor Heather Perrson noted her interest in food and assigned her a column on the topic. According to Sharp, her early attempts at critiquing restaurants didn’t really fulfill her interests (she has some salty opinions on the utility of restaurant reviews). Instead she was drawn to more fundamental questions: where is our food coming from? What difference does it make to buy a local sourdough instead of a loaf of Wonder Bread? Why does it matter?

Sharp moved to Spain in 2015 to pursue a career in training horses. After a two-year stretch she returned to Saskatchewan and focused on her abiding passion for food. She began a project under the Flat Out Food banner, traveling around the province with photographer Richard Marjan to profile people she termed “food artisans”: growers and vendors who eschewed corporate agriculture for more mindful and smaller scale business models. In 2020 Touchwood Editions published Flat Out Delicious: Your Definitive Guide to Saskatchewan’s Food Artisans.

Despite the success of the Flat Out Food project, Sharp had no plans to adapt her work into a television series until she met Adrian Halter in 2018. Halter, who founded HalterMedia Inc. in 2011, had developed a pitch for an ingredient-based culinary show in the style of Netflix’s Chef’s Table. His focus at the time was largely corporate work with some short documentary productions. With Sharp, he discovered someone with a similar enthusiasm for storytelling and the necessary connections with Saskatchewan’s agricultural and culinary world.

They shot a demo in 2019 with funding from Citytv, Creative Saskatchewan, and the Canada Media Fund. Principal photography began in early 2020. The resulting series is a pleasing mix of modern culinary entertainment, with its obsessive images of beautifully prepared dishes, and more traditional educational programming. 

Flat Out Food blends two distinct styles to produce its particular flavour. The first consists of slickly produced interview segments featuring montages of farmers with their crops or chefs carefully plating their signature dishes. The second features more relaxed, almost folksy scenes of Sharp learning techniques for cooking fiddleheads or preparing sourdough for the oven.

Each episode culminates in a meal featuring the titular ingredient, with plenty of wine (or mead, or beer) flowing. Watching plates being passed around and liquid filing glasses, viewers are prompted to wonder: wouldn’t it be nice if all meals could be so communal and joyful?

The cinematography captures the distinct tones of each episode. Director of photography Adam Burwell and camera operator Preston Kanak frame their subjects in striking symmetrical compositions. The signature camera movement of Flat Out Food is what Halter and the crew refer to as the “hero shot,” a push in that glides towards its subject (similar shots that swoop through a freshly cut loaf of bread or into a vat of honey are jokingly called a “probe shot”). Scenes of cooking and food prep adopt a more handheld style, allowing conversations between Sharp and her subjects to unfold. The invisibility of the transition between these modes is a testament to Halter’s direction and Tim Thurmeier’s editing. 

One of the great pleasures of Flat Out Food is Sharp’s generous hosting style. Her interactions with farmers and chefs are peppered with exhortations: Teach me. Show me. What am I learning next? At some points she all but disappears from her own show for lengthy stretches to follow her subjects as they transform wheat into whisky or uncover chanterelle mushrooms from a bed of moss in a northern forest.

Sharp laughs at the mention of her habit of stepping back from the spotlight in her own show. “We got a lot of feedback from Citytv saying ‘Jen needs to be in it more. She's the host and she's not really in it at all’ so we added a lot of voice-over. In season two, the idea is that I actually have a lot of knowledge about agriculture and food… So, I'm inserting myself more… it was a bit of a conscious choice that I was the conduit for these stories to be told and to open up this platform for people to talk about what they're passionate about.”

For Halter, the first season of Flat Out Food was unlike any project he had attempted before, especially as both producer and director. “I’d never done anything of this size and scope,” Halter recalls. “I’d made a couple of half-hour docs and corporate stuff, and I’d think… I can’t believe I get to do this”. The second season promises to be even more robust and refined.

Aidan Morgan is a freelance writer, photographer, and communications professional based in Regina. He is the co-host of the Queen City Improvement Bureau on CJTR. On a good day you can see his hat from here.