Marty Galin’s Big Salad Day

Twenty-eight storeys above Church Street, in the bachelor apartment where he’s lived alone for 29 years, Marty Galin keeps a scale. Sometimes he’ll weigh himself three times a day. Sometimes more. He wants to get himself down to 230 pounds. Or 220.

Last year, at age 53, Galin had a flash pulmonary edema. Water filled his lungs. For a while, he was certain he was going to die. At age 40, as an out-of-work, overweight actor, he used to pray to God that he’d die, everyday. But that was before his food shows, before he invented his unique brand of celebrity and before he set out to make the biggest salad in the world, an event that will, today, kick off Scarborough Taste, the east end’s own version of Summerlicious.

“It’s ironic, because when you want to die, you can’t, but when you don’t want to die, when you have so much to live for, that’s when you get sick,” Galin says. “I always wanted to be somebody. Now I don’t want to be dead, I feel like I have so much to do.”

With his wild shock of copper-toned hair, fluorescent pants and chef’s jacket, Marty Galin is the host of Sun TV cooking shows The Moveable Feast and Beer Buddies and Toronto’s clown prince of cuisine. He’s the ultimate anti-foodie, and along with his business partner and best friend, Avrum Rosensweig, he writes a breathless food column in the commuter paper 24 Hours and hosts a radio show on 94.7 FM. In total, Galin entertains 1.6 million people. His experience in Toronto’s food world makes him the perfect person to quarterback the world’s largest salad, but even Galin is surprised that the day has finally arrived. Whenever he has a moment in the sun, it seems, his past has a way of haunting him.

Galin has battled lifelong depression and weight issues. “That I can feed this many people, when I was on welfare most of my life, is almost overwhelming,” he says. “I’m afraid I’m going to break down and cry.”

Galin’s salad gig began when Scarborough councillor Michael Thompson couldn’t get his ward involved in the city’s Summerlicious program, and decided to create his own food festival. “I wanted someone involved who had contacts in the food industry,” Thompson says. Galin was a natural fit.

The World’s Largest Multicultural Salad, with its eight chefs, 40 volunteers and medley of Arabic, South Asian and Middle Eastern cuisines, is the result of four months of Galin’s toiling. “I called everybody, friends I’ve known for years,” Galin says.

And the results are staggering –more than 7,000 pounds of lettuce will be served in a trough 200 feet long (for a full list of ingredients, turn the page).

From the 15,000 paper plates from Food Basics to the nearly $60,000 donated from Friends of the Greenbelt, Galin has been Thompson’s spark plug. “Marty is a high-energy sort of guy,” Thompson says, “but with the highs, come the lows. You’re never sure when the lows are going to come.”

On a mid-April day, Galin spread the contents of his life out on a table at The Tulip, a restaurant on Queen Street and Coxwell Avenue. “I shouldn’t be eating this, I have to lose 50 pounds,” he said. His blood pressure was over 200. Three of his teeth needed to be removed. He had problems with his kidneys and was a week away from an MRI.

“I don’t have memories of childhood; I was in so much pain,” Galin said. He was raised in the Christie and Dupont area, in a rooming house where prostitutes brought their johns. His father suffered from multiple sclerosis. “My dad passed away when I was 12, and I was violent. I kicked him once, because I felt invisible. I destroyed things. I wasn’t getting any love.”

The household was abusive. On one occasion, his younger sister had to tear his mother from his throat. But there was an escape. “One day a week, my Aunt Ethel would take us to a restaurant,” Galin said. “There was magic in restaurants. You could have what you want and taste different things. Food always was my reward.”

Galin dropped out of high school, and at 16 tried his hand at Summer-stock Theatre in Gravenhurst.

“The hair was the same, but, in the ’60s, it was even more full-blown,” says Gloria Martin, the showbiz editor at AM 680News and a longtime friend of Galin.

Galin and Martin were there to act, but newbies also had to do time on kitchen detail. Martin remembers them being in charge of cooking for the 200-member troupe. The budget was slim. “Marty could walk into a store and talk the owner into giving us free pork chops,” Martin says.

For restaurant critics, it’s sacrosanct never to let the restaurant pay for your meal. Many wear disguises. But Marty hasn’t paid for a meal in years (neither North 44 nor The Tulip brought us a bill). So how did he get the pork chops? “He was an entrepreneur,” Martin says. “He put the shop’s name in our program.”

Soon Galin was trying his hand at acting in Vancouver and Los Angeles, but he cut his teeth in Toronto with the SCTV crowd. “I was friends with John Candy, Catherine O’Hara, Gilda Radner, Marty Short –I knew them all,” Galin says.

He landed a roll in Class of ’44, with John Candy, and later, in Love at First Sight, with Dan Aykroyd. Then the acting gigs grew scarce.

As he watched his friends forge careers in film and television, he toiled as a waiter, first at The Old Spaghetti Factory and later at Meyer’s Deli in Yorkville. When his mother passed away in 1989, Galin hit rock bottom. “I wanted to die so badly, I was 40 and just lost hope,” he says. “I was gaining weight and wanted to know how come I’d never been in love.”

He won’t reveal much about his sexuality, but he will say, “I’m open to anything. I’m not gay, I’m not straight. I’ve never been in love with a man or a woman, the only thing I ever wanted was to be somebody and do something with my life.”

Neither love nor the promise of a job could lift him out of his depression. That job fell to Rosensweig, the son of an orthodox rabbi, whom he met in 1987 at a Passover seder. “He made a beeline for me, and seemed really colourful and larger than life,” says Rosensweig, who, when not playing Marty’s straight man, runs Ve’ahvta, a $2-million Jewish nonprofit that has organized relief missions to Sri Lanka and Darfur.

The duo’s first project together was in the early-’90s, when they recorded restaurant recommendations for a now-defunct local phone line. “We really weren’t food writers,” Galin says, “but they were looking for guys for this phone thing and we did it. Avrum was kosher, we didn’t know from food, but somehow we clicked.”

Galin had always loved restaurants. And now he had a new stage on which to perform. “Marty superimposed his career over his life,” Rosensweig says.

In 1993, the two men began writing food stories for Hot Toronto magazine. They weren’t so much reviews as “tributes” to the people, usually immigrants, opening restaurants. “I don’t ever want to write anything bad about anyone,” Galin says.

Next came a radio show. In 1995, Gloria Martin told Galin that AM640 was looking for hosts. “The technical part scared him, he worried about turning on the microphone, but once he got talking, he was fine,” Martin says. Galin hosted a food show on AM640 for five years, then went to CFRB for another five-year stint.

It still wasn’t easy to raise $1,000 each month for rent, but with his wild hairdo and wacky chef ‘s uniform, Galin became a fixture on the Toronto food scene.

In 2005, television seemed like the next logical step. “I felt like it was a great way to talk to kids,” Galin says. He has filmed improvised segments about vegetables in North York’s Highland Farms, taken The Moveable Feast to New Orleans and dressed as Princess Martina for a segment on eating at Medieval Times. And he’s been to the city’s most fashionable restaurants — Morton’s, Thuet Restaurant, Susur — in his chef’s coat. “When we walk down the street, people turn their eyes,” Rosensweig says, “but if everyone actualized their character the way Marty has, they would be a lot happier.”

Indeed, Galin seems giddy. It’s a couple days before his multicultural salad will be mixed, and there are still details to be confirmed, but he’s just learned that the vegetables used will be exclusively from Ontario farms and that Second Harvest will deliver any leftovers to the poor.

“All the darkness and wanting to die, that never really goes away. But I’m going to feed 15,000 people–me, the fat kid who didn’t graduate high school — and we’ll be sitting around a table and eating. It’s almost like I’m a part of something good.”

-The World’s Largest Multicultural Salad will be made today, July 7, and available for eating at Lawrence Avenue East and Ainsdale Road from 11:30 to 6 p.m. Scarborough Taste runs through July 31. See scarboroughtaste.com for details.