Things are not going to plan this winter. In January I was suffering arctic temperatures in New York, and now I am heading for Toronto in February. This is not what is supposed to happen. February should be meetings with food companies in the southern hemisphere sun – Cape Town, Sydney, or Rio. But no, this winter it’s Toronto!

My flight is confirmed, but half the flights to North America show as red cancellations on the monitors at Heathrow, snowstorms having closed most of the eastern seaboard airports. I find out later that 200,000 Canadian farmed Atlantic salmon have frozen to death and lobster fishing has been brought to a standstill in Nova Scotia. But the most unlucky town is a place called Badger in Newfoundland which was hit by a devastating ‘ice flood’. Temperatures down to -30C turned floodwater into ice that buckled walls, cracked foundations, and encased whole cars in the massive ice cubes that invaded the town.

I arrive in Toronto to chaos. Transport is grid-locked and I wait for a taxi in the freezing cold for more than an hour. An airport official dressed for an Antarctic expedition explains that there has been a fall of snow today. Now this is interesting. I hear plenty of criticism about how London is never prepared for snow. In fact the previous week thousands of London commuters had spent the night in their cars on snow-bound motorways. But lets be honest, we get a fall of snow about once every four years in London. But surely this is an every day occurrence for a Canadian winter?

But the great thing about the Toronto winter is that you don’t have to take part – you can simply hibernate into the underground network of shopping malls and pop back up when the snow has gone. You can get around the whole of downtown Toronto in this way. Like a subterranean Oxford Street full of shoppers and hurrying commuters. You think you have come to the end and will have to continue at street level, but then an unexpected door gains access to a whole new downtown region. Sometimes you are taken through a subway station, and then through the basement of a department store where the merchandise has been roped off because it hasn’t yet opened for the day. You feel that the next door could take you through the lounge of someone’s private condominium, and after you have been going for a few hours, it seems like you could resurface somewhere in Montreal or Vancouver perhaps.

I have some enjoyable meetings with enthusiastic users and some soon-to-be-users of our software and see some real Canadian food creativity at first hand. Later I learn more about general developments in the food industry in this part of the world:

• Scientists have identified and altered sections of the protein that provokes the vast majority of seafood allergies. So the first genetically modified, allergen-free prawns, crabs, and lobsters should be in the restaurants within five years.

• Software is now available to enable fish stocks to be estimated by taking sonar soundings rather than measuring the size of sample catches. Although there is nothing new in the sonar sounding technique, the new software can tell the difference between a cod and a haddock.

• A North Carolina restaurant owner, indignant at France’s opposition to war in Iraq, has taken “french fries” off the menu and replaced them with “freedom fries”!

I have to leave Toronto in the early morning and head north towards the land of frozen rivers, so it’s back to the airport. Now remember this, because it’s just the kind of thing that could come up in a Christmas quiz: Toronto airport has the largest anti-freezing facility in the world. At this time of year virtually all aircraft have to be de-iced before each flight. But the antifreeze that runs off each plane is not just abandoned to pollute the environment, it is collected into massive underground vats and recycled for use on cars. So the anti-freeze you are using on the Toyota today might have primed a Jumbo jet for take-off last week.

After the short flight, and collecting my hire car I stop at a small town for lunch at the local hotel. It’s the kind of town where there is still an attendant at the gas station who fills your tank and checks your car without you leaving the driving seat. The kind of town where lunch at the hotel starts at 11.00am, dinner at 4.00pm, and ‘Three coins in a fountain’ is playing in the restaurant. I ask for a beer with my lunch. The waitress stops in her tracks and fixes a look at me, on the point of panic. “A what?” she says. “A small beer?” I suggest. She turns and disappears out the back, ostensibly to get my beer, but I think she has gone to tip off the cops that an alcoholic Englishman is in town. I look around at the other diners. Everyone is on water or coke except for the earnest young man at the next table who I had already marked down as a Business Analyst. He is having a glass of milk.

Another day, another meeting, and then it’s back to Toronto for my flight home. The weather has turned to rain, but a kind of rain that’s new to me. This is not the English rain that dampens you inside and out. This is Ontario rain – rain frozen into ice pellets so tiny that you don’t see or feel it, you just hear it, dancing against your clothes. This I can cope with, in fact it’s a rather friendly kind of rain.

I take one last stroll through downtown Toronto. There are quite a lot of people sleeping rough on the streets, and like in most cities, you develop immunity and accept it passively, perhaps giving a donation here and there but wiping the memory banks once you have turned the corner. But in this city I encounter a being that seems not of this world. Physically he is much like anyone you see in a take-away home on the street corner, but there is something about his body-language, his look, and his passion, as if he had been placed there for a purpose. He doesn’t want my money, he doesn’t want anything from me, in fact he has something for me. He has a message. He looks me in the eye as I pass, and says, with absolute conviction: “Today the white man dies”. He repeats it to make sure I get it.

Erie. I have half a mind to stop and ask for more details, like is it specifically me, and is he sure he has the right person. But I decide to waste no more time in getting to the airport and flying home!

Well, that was a few days ago now, and I am still here. It worries me though that he could easily have been slightly out in his calculations.