Village Squire, 1975-04, Page 11The Bay Leaf
Food like grandmother used to have
Concern over what goes into the food eaten
seems to rest mostly with the young and the
old in the Goderich area, or at least Marj
Smith thinks so.
She should be a fair commentator because
:for nearly a year she's been associated with
Goderich's first natural food store, The
Bay Leat on Hamilton' Street.
Mrs. Smith opened the little shop in
mid-April of last year and still works there
two days a week although she recently sold
the store to Richard Prest.
She prefers the term natural food to health
food because, she says, health food is a little
misleading. The food in the store, she says, is
just plain food without additives: the kind of
thing grandmother used to have.
And it is the grandmothers and the younger
set that seem most interested, she says. The
clientele for the store is predominated by the
late teens and early twenties and those over
40. The people in the middle years, she says,
don't seem to be nearly as concerned about
natural foods.
Mrs. Smith says she became interested in
opening the store when she was looking for
something different to do. She's a nurse and
works at the Goderich Hospital in the
evenings. She'd developed an interest in
natural foods a year or so earlier and so
decided to open a shop featuring food. She
rented a little vacant store just off the Square.
She soon found running a shop in the daytime
and working at the hospital in the evenings
was a little hard on family life, however, and
so recently she decided to sell.
She found a buyer conveniently close. Mr.
Prest's parents lived just next door so he
knew of her interest in selling and he was
looking for a shop to own so he bought the
Bay Leaf. Now the young Goderich native
works three days a week in his father's law
office and the other three days in the shop.
Mrs. Smith fills in for him on the days he
can't be there. She finds she can still enjoy
the shop and her home life both now..
Those who do like natural foods, she says,
are very dedicated. Many people came to the
store last summer, she says who remarked
Marjorie Smith, founder of The Bay Leaf packages
a piece of bread from stone -ground flour.
VILLAGE SQUIRE/APRIL 19/5,