Mara Jernigan

Mara and her son Julian both broke their legs in the winter of 2006/07!

Mara Jernigan is a chef who left a fifteen year career in the restaurant industry to start farming, educating and developing local food systems. She has worked in many fine establishments in Toronto, B.C. and Europe and taught cooking classes for over ten years at both the professional and amateur level.

From Engeler Farm, a small farm and cooking school in Vancouver Island's Cowichan Valley, Mara has worked since 1996 to promote local farmers, restaurants and wineries with her Sunday Farm Tours, cooking classes and special events.

Her work continues at Fairburn Farm, where she has added guestrooms and culinary retreats. Mara founded the Vancouver Island Feast of Fields, a much-celebrated gastronomic picnic and fundraiser held each September, which she has been organizing on behalf of the FarmFolk/CityFolk Society since 1998. Mara's upbringing in the mundane Canadian suburbs of the seventies left her longing for a closer connection to land and cultural traditions. This led her to Europe where she learned languages, worked in Switzerland, and lived in Austria on a high mountain alpine dairy farm, where her son Julian was born.

Since 2000, Mara has worked to promote the goals of the International Slow Food Movement, serving Internationally as the Canadian Representative for the Slow Food Ark Project, and locally where she founded the Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands Convivium with Sooke Harbour House owner Dr. Sinclair Philip. In 2003 spent four months in Italy where she learned to speak Italian and attended the Slow Food Master of Italian Regional Cooking Program in the Marches region. Mara is currently the president of Slow Food Canada.

Much of 2004 was spent traveling extensively in Italy, studying regional specialties from the fresh mozzarella and Cacciacavallo cheeses and artisanal breads of Puglia to the underground rabbits of Ischia. She now uses her extensive contacts with Slow Food and Ital Cook to lead off the beaten track culinary tours to Italy for a small group each October.
Mara believes food can be an instrument of social change, used to transform communities by encouraging the preservation of traditional knowledge, respect for quality of life and the environment, and creating local traditions and celebrations based on seasonality.