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Biography

This website represents the passions and work of J.Sushil Saini. To view a CV including Education, Professional Experience, Publications and Presentations please click the link below.

>> J. Sushil Saini CV

Biography

J. Sushil Saini's conscious life of food began as an academic doing participatory research on the Clayoquot Campaign in 1993 and 1994. After starting the Peace Camp kitchen and working on the blockades as peacekeeper and peacekeeping trainer she was hired as a campaigner for the Friends of Clayoquot Sound. Her Masters thesis, Rebels without a Pause (1995), explored the critical and dynamic role of passion and creativity in environmental movement organizing. To cover the costs of writing her thesis Sushil started an underground curry restaurant in Tofino in 1994, whose popularity translated into a four year career as a chef.

Specializing in Asian cuisine, she worked the high season in Tofino and studied cooking in Thailand during the winter. Her adventures became fodder for a series of articles in Sound Magazine published between 1997 and 1998. Inspired by her return to her fist love – writing – she published her first book Consuming Passions (Fine Words Chapbooks, 1999) which explored the connections between food, sex and death. For the next six years she worked as an internationally published food and culture writer with a three year run as a regular food and culture columnist in Monday Magazine.

While researching her food articles Sushil became more and more concerned with the integrity of the food supply locally and globally. She volunteered with Slow Food Canada, researching the first food products nominated to the Canadian Slow Food Ark of Taste in 2003. She was then hired as the coordinator of the first Slow Food Presidium in Canada to save red fife wheat from extinction by developing niche markets in the artisan bread industry. The subsequent revival of red fife wheat illuminated for Sushil the challenges and opportunities in developing sustainable food systems.

While taking a sabbatical from writing to teach at the Victoria School of Writing and the Professional Writing Department at University of Victoria, Sushil integrated her work experience and investigative food journalism into a Doctorate research proposal to explore and develop her theory of Sustainable Gastronomy. She continues to write and organize sustainable gastronomy events while completing this doctorate through the Environmental Studies Department at the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island, Canada.