Happy Pride!

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Protest against Iranian election

On June 21st there was a protest here in Toronto against fraud in the recent Iranian elections. Alan and I went to show our solidarity to the people of Iran, whose protests in their home country has been met with increasing violence. The protest here in Toronto was peaceful, and it was moving to see so many women, children, and older people, showing their outrage.

See a slideshow of a few pictures I took below:

Cycling through the core of Toronto

The Toronto Bicycling Network is a volunteer run cycling club that organizes hundreds of events throughout the year. Among their many activities are sociable, evening rides, in which people simply meet and a designated spot and head off for a 1-2 hour cycle eventually ending up at a patio or restaurant somewhere for dinner. We went for a Friday night ride a couple of weeks ago and enjoyed it so much that we joined the club this past week. So yesterday we set out for another Friday night ride. This one took us through the core of Toronto – most of the path was through bike paths or quiet streets but there were enough of us (at least 20 cyclists) that we felt safe even on the busy streets. Here’s the map (I missed a bit by the lake, but you get the idea):

We started at Riverdale Park, passed through Cabbagetown, the Gay Village (which was in the midst of celebrating Pride weekend!), U of T, Harbord St, then up to the Junction, down through High Park, to the lake, then it was on the Martin Goodman Trail (lovely at dusk!) all the way to Jarvis and then up Church st to our place. We separated from the group at Jarvis (they continued on to the Danforth to have dinner) but thoroughly enjoyed the evening. We did about 32 km in perhaps one and a half hours and the night was simply magical – warm but with a nice breeze. Cycling through some really nice neighbourhoods made me once more aware of how nice this city really is.

New blog

As many of you may already know, this blog started more than three years ago as a chronicle of our year in Spain. Looking for a way of keeping in touch with friends and family in the era pre-Facebook, a blog seemed like an ideal tool. I could report on what my husband and I were doing without spamming the mailboxes of friends and family. I had no aspirations in writing about anything more meaningful than what was life like in Barcelona and what we did last weekend. I didn’t really expect anybody else but friends and family would come across this blog.

My old blog banner

But part of writing a blog involves reading other blogs. Before I knew it I started leaving comments on other people’s blogs, they started coming here and linking to my blog and I soon began to meet new people with whom I had interests in common. I soon began writing about issues other than life in Spain, things that interested me or concepts or ideas with which I struggled. By the time I came back to Canada there was no question about whether I should continue writing here.

But in time the blog lost its initial focus and became very generic. As I started teaching and working on my dissertation and that was more predominant in my mind, I started writing about issues related to teaching and researching that I felt were less interesting to readers of this blog. So I moved them to another wordpress blog, before moving it to my own academic site. Since last summer, I’ve began to read more (and blog more or perhaps facebook more) about issues related to food, the environment, sustainability, health, and so on. I’ve also began to experiment more and more in the kitchen. And take more and more photos of food (check my flickr site). As a result, some of my friends began to suggest I should create a food blog. I could see the use of that. For one thing, a more focused blog would allow me to have more specific categories and tags, allowing for better searching of food-related posts.

I often use my blog as a fancy bookmarker or a place to organize notes. I’ve never been very good about using the bookmarks feature on my web browsers and ever since I created this blog, it’s been even worse. I blog about things that interest me and often share links to sites I come across, news articles, and so on and more than once I’ve simply searched the blog when I wanted to find a reference to a site that I knew I had talked about. But it started getting difficult to find posts about a specific dish I had cooked or that had a particular photograph. So, combined with my interest in moving my blog(s) to my own domain(s), I’ve created a new blog: Mató & Maple Syrup. Mató is a fresh cheese from Catalonia that is usually served with honey as a dessert and maple syrup, well, it’s the Canadian sweetner par excelence. Since it was in Canada and Catalonia where my cooking really florished, the name seemed appropriate enough.

However, the migration was not without pain. I decided to import only a few of my posts that dealt directly with food or food-related issues. Since I could export only a few posts to import in the new blog, I used MacJournal to select the posts I wanted and then post them to the new blog. That meant I lost all the comments, which was too bad since some of the posts generated interesting discussions. It also meant that I lost most of the categories and tags. I’ve slowly started editing the older posts to include tags/categories that will help keep the new blog organized. So, if you are interested in food and the like, check out the new blog!

I’ll eventually move this blog too to a new server but probably not before the end of the summer, when I get some time off.

Food Inc. opening in Canada

I was at our favourite fruit & veggie stand at Kensington Market last weekend, when I heard a woman asking one of the regulars at the store what he was doing the following monday evening. She happened to have a pass for two for a preview screening of Food Inc. at the Varsity Cinema (close to where we live) and couldn’t go. The guy said he couldn’t go and I quickly said “has the movie opened yet? I’m dying to watch it!” I had just written  a post about it the previous day and I wanted to watch it so badly that my initial shyness fell to the way side. She turned to me and said “would you be interested in going?” Oh yeah! “Pass by my store in 15 mins and I’ll have the pass for you.”

The movie opened the last edition of Toronto’s International Film Festival and was released in threatres across the US last Friday to much media attention, leading to some interesting discussions. The screening we attended this past Monday was followed by a Q&A session with local activists as well as Gary Hirshberg, founder and CEO of Stonyfield Farm and one of the people interviewed in the film. There were no surprises for me in the movie. It felt like a film version of the Omnivore’s Dilemma and dealt with the dark side of the American food industry (whose model is exported all over the world, so don’t think you are off the hook for living in Canada or other countries), and deals with everything from the rise of food-born illnesses, the development of deadly strands of e-coli or salmonella, factory farm workers, the powerlessness of farmers who refuse to play the game according to the big industry’s rules, and the presumed powerlessness of consumers. It’s dark and it leaves you stuck between disgust, anger, and frustration.

The basic message sent by Gary and all the others is that although we have known that there are serious problems with the food industry for years, nothing will be done until we are able to make it a mainstream issue rather than a concern of activists only. And to get there, people need to know where their food come from and what is hidden in it. It’s all about transparency and education really. You can’t just pretend it doesn’t affect you. That people are over-reacting. I mean, we are all under the illusion we know what we eat. But that can often be an illusion. Take hamburguers, for example, the quintessential North American food. We all know that eating too many burguers is not really good for us but we assume that’s because too much meat is bad and that’s what burguers are, right? Ground beef. With perhaps a bit of preservative. But do you know that the entire meat industry in the US is controlled by four companies? And that 80% of the hamburguer meat available in the market is washed with ammonia? And that it is washed with ammonia because that meat originally had a much higher content of e-coli bacteria than meat ever had before. You know why? Because cows are fed corn, which their bodies have not evolved to be able to digest. So either you eat hamburguer laced with ammonia or you may share Kevin’s fate.

I have written before on this blog about the importance of knowing what you eat. Some people tell me it is too difficult to eat healthy, that they don’t have the time or the knowledge, or that organic food is too expensive. That’s not necessarily true. Good food can be deceavingly simple. If you are not sure where to start in the kitchen, I highly recommend any of Mark Bittman’s books (or even his site) since they are very didactic and based on principles of cooking rather than holding on to steadfast recipes. As for organic food being more expensive than “conventional” food, yes, that’s true, but only if you don’t consider the hidden societal, health, and environmental costs of this so-called conventional food or the real reason fast food is so cheap. The real reason is that since the entire American food industry is controlled by four or five companies, these multibillion-dollar players have enough power and influence to bend food safety rules and guarantee massive subsidies, allowing them to sell food at well below the cost of production (incidentally, conditions in these factories are so dire that these business have to rely on hiring the powerless – such as illegal immigrants – to work in them) . If sustainable farms could get half of the same subsidies, you wouldn’t have to choose based on price. Also, if there was more demand for organic products, more organic products would be produced. We see that beginning to happen. During the Q&A Gary Hirshberg mentioned how his company’s decision to go for organic sugar made a huge impact on its price and availability. When they made their first orders, organic sugar cost nearly five times the price or regular sugar. With the higher demand, more farmers turned to organic farming methods (which achieve the same yields as “conventional” methods) and began to produce more sugar. Now Stonyfield is able to buy sugar for the same price, if not cheaper, than regular sugar.

There is certainly a segment of the population than cannot afford a 50-cent difference on a particular produce. That is a shame and I’m glad there are organizations dedicated to making organic food more accessible. But many of us can afford to pay a little more to ensure not only optimal health but also encourage the organic food industry. It’s all a matter of priorities. And my health has priority over any other luxury in my life because without it, let’s face it, nothing else really matters.

So do yourself and the planet a favour. Learn about the issues. Watch the movie.

If you have trouble playing the video above, watch it on the official site.

The power of blogs & web 2.0 technology

With the advent of the web 2.0,  the tech-savvy were not the only ones out there pumping content – everybody could share their lives on a blog such as this one, pontificate on wikipedia, and imagine themselves a wannabe Spielberg. Although it is easy dismiss the content of much that is created using web 2.0 technology, the current crisis in Iran has shown the full potential of such tools. Iranians have been using Facebook and Twitter to coordinate protests and students at a Vancouver Film School created the following video about the way young Iranians have used blogs to share opinions and information with the rest of the world.

When I first accessed the internet in 1996, it blew my mind away for its potential – clear to me even back then – to break barriers and democratize access to information. Governments have tried to limit access everywhere, with only limited success. Watch the video above; it’s worth it. Read also this great article about Twitter & the protests in Iran. And as the Landismom put it:

It’s a little humbling, to watch in real time as a father in Iran worries about his daughter, and tweets that he’s just heard that there are military police in the park that she was last in. And it can feel so far away, that park, and that girl—so far away that there’s nothing we can do to help. But every person reading this can do something to help that girl, right now. You can pick up the phone, and call your congressman, and tell him or her to ask the US to intervene. You can wear green to work tomorrow, even though it’s not St. Patty’s Day. In most big cities, you can find a peaceful demonstration in solidarity with the Iranians, and you can attend it.

I couldn’t have said it better. And that’s what all this new media does. It forces us to care, to be engaged.

Clay Shirky, a NYU professor who recently gave a TED talk on the power of new media, gave an interview recently on the Iranian case. He calls it the first revolution catapulted to the world stage by social media. As he puts it,

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted “the whole world is watching.” Really, that wasn’t true then. But this time it’s true … and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They’re engaging with individual participants, they’re passing on their messages to their friends, and they’re even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can’t immediately censor. That kind of participation is reallly extraordinary.

According to Shirky, of all the new technologies out there Twitter has had the biggest impact in this particular case. It is so simple and so open that although they’ve been trying really hard, authorities have failed to control it or shut it down.

But more than provide an outlet for those in Iran. Twitter has allowed people outside to feel engaged to what happens there:

When I see John Perry Barlow setting himself up as a router, he’s not performing these services as a journalist. He’s engaged. Traditional media operates as source of inofrmation not as a means of coordination. It can’t do more than make us sympathize. Twitter makes us empathize. It makes us part of it. Even if it’s just retweeting, you’re aiding the goal that dissidents have always sought: the awareness that the ouside world is paying attention is really valuable.

But perhaps more importantly, Twitter allowed people to connect without the veil set by governments and ideologies.

But whatever happens from here, the dissidents have seen that large numbers of American people, supposedly part of “the great Satan,” are actually supporters. Someone tweeted from Tehran today that “the American media may not care, but the American people do.” That’s a sea-change.

Indeed.

Food Inc.

Today is the release date of Food Inc, a new documentary looking at the food industry that has industry officials up in arms. It looks like it touches upon many of the topics explored in detail in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma but will probably have even more of an impact because of the power of images. Watch the trailer below:

Read the review in the NYT.

Day 3

Following up on the challenge of the week – I felt a bit more inspired today, and tried Syrian rice, homemade Babaganoush, and a spinach & chickpea stew. The red/orange bits in the middle is some left over tofu with tomato sauce. It was so good that I’m seriously ready to explode any minute…

Dark Horse Espresso Bar

I had heard much about Dark Horse Espresso Bar, so when Alan and I found ourselves with a little over an hour to kill last Saturday and with a transit pass on hand, I suggested we hop on the Queen St Streetcar and make our way for a quick coffee at this Riverside cafe. I had a capuccino and a lemon-ginger scone and I have to say it was quite nice.

The place itself was pretty nice and we weren’t disappointed.

I even had time to read some newspapers while we drank our coffee.

Next time we’re in the area, I want to try this other place we walked by…

Home

Home is a HD film shot in 54 countries and produced by Luc Besson. Its English version is narrated by Glen Close. The full length film (90 mins) is being hosted free on YouTube until June 14th in honour of World Environment Day. It’s worth watching. As the friend who passed it on to me said, it’s a powerful reminder of environmental (and social) justice.

You can access the video through this link. There are versions in many languages.