La Binerie du Quebec

My wife brought back a container of delicious baked beans from her weekend trip to a remote Quebec village and lake, 1 hour and 45 minutes north of Ottawa.

These beans are slow cooked underground in vast cast iron pots over embers. 

You can freeze them if you like; that way, they’ll keep practically forever, but as you can see above, our beans aren’t going to need freezing since they’ll be eaten by the end of the day…

The Haitian couple who’ve run the place for nearly 30 years do no advertising, but their tiny store is always jammed: in winter with snowmobilers, in summer with campers and cottagers. It’s all word-of-mouth.  

They sell beans; that’s all that is on the menu.

Which reminds me, if it were two cool surfer dudes from Nocal or Socal, they’d have an “authentic” Quebecois website selling a worldwide audience on the benefits of a long life and over-the-top sex attributed by attractive indigenous Quebecers to their daily consumption of the product.

So instead of selling a few tens of thousands of dollars of beans, they’d be selling $100 million annually.

You see what Canadians, Euros and others do well is design and build stuff.

What Americans do better than anyone else is design, build and sell the crap out of their stuff.

@ profbruce @ quantum_entity

postscript: here are some photos I took in the summer of 2016. Note that the owner, Sophinie, lives next door.

It’s frustrating. I show countless planners photos like this–where people live and work on the same or adjacent property. They say, “Interesting, but we couldn’t have such things here!”

“Why not?” I ask.

“Well, our business park isn’t zoned for residential and commercial uses. We only allow industrial users…”

“Yeah, and how many lots have been built on in the last 25 years?”

“None,” is often the answer.