teabowl

The Beet Organic Café & Market is housed in an old TD Bank building, its entrance behind a still-functional Green Machine ABM terminal. I’m not sure if this is an amazing coincidence or a subtle, “only in the Junction” political statement: on Queen West, the big brands are taking over the mom & pop restaurants and stores. In Toronto’s “up and coming” West End, it’s apparently the other way around.

The Beet is not vegetarian, but very vegetarian and vegan friendly. All of its food is organic and healthily prepared. The fact that it’s co-owned by a certified nutritionist and a homeopathic doctor is evident in everything we tried: the food is tasty, healthy and solid. Unlike the light-and-fluffy salads that pass for vegetarian fare elsewhere, things here are weighty and feel like they’re providing actual nutrition.

It’s all very earnest, but excellent and deserving of a vegan’s/vegetarian’s/locavore’s/eco-aware person’s patronage. The “market” is a thoughtful selection of healthy products, from organic toothpaste to healthy granola bars to tea (the selection could be a little better here, I think…) and coffee. The soundtrack was tasty and chilled roots reggae today, perhaps indicating the preferences of the fabulously friendly blonde dreadlocked server.

We ordered the soup of the day (cream of parsnip with apple), the frittata of the day (kale, broccoli, Emmenthal), a tofu and avocado wrap and a freshly juiced juice. Everything was delicious, the soup a particular standout for me. The sandwich/frittata plates are served with a substantial helping of well-dressed salad (a rare feat, finding a well-dressed salad in any restaurant) and solid multigrain bread with sundried tomato spread.

I ordered jasmine green tea which came in a Bodum coffee plunger - a good idea in principle, but the plunger was a little loose, so I had a few moments of, “Oh boy, I hope it holds up!” :) I did get a free top-up of hot water though (without asking!), which was great.

The bathroom is fabulous (I imagine it used to be the bank manager’s office - worth checking out for its sheer size alone, but also very clean and new, and furnished with non-scented hand soap, which is a rarity again).

Overall, highly recommended. You can tell that intelligent human beings are involved in planning and running this restaurant daily. It felt like a bit of an oasis, and I think I’ll return many times. And I sincerely hope it does well. Toronto needs more restaurants like this.

Closed Mondays, Open Tuesday through Sunday. Hours and location on the website.

The Don Valley Brick Works consists of 16 heritage buildings and an adjacent 16-hectaire public park that includes the Weston Quarry Garden, wetlands, hiking trails, and wildflower meadows. From 1889 to 1984, the site was one of Canada’s pre-eminent brickyards. The Don Valley Pressed Brick Works Company produced a wide variety of bricks and kiln-fired clay products that built much of Toronto’s heritage buildings and many of Canada’s national landmarks including Winnipeg’s T. Eaton Building, Toronto’s Massey Hall and Casa Loma, Montreal’s Acadia Apartments and Moncton’s T. Eaton Building. (From: http://www.evergreen.ca/rethinkspace/)

Pictures from a weekend outing. I had to shoot around all the Japanese tourists and their tripods. Clearly, it’s a hot tip for tourists.

There’s a great article about a speech David Suzuki - environmentalist, scientist, activist - gave at McGill University in The McGill Daily.

He described speaking to children in Toronto who could not explain where water or food came from, only that it was supplied by the economy.

Our deep disconnection from the environment, and increasingly our inability to establish even theoretical connections between the soil, plants and animals in our food chain and ourselves, is maddening and sad. Especially urban children, in the developed and developing world, have no idea where food comes from.

Increasingly - as Michael Pollan elegantly argues - food also isn’t food anymore. Most items we buy from supermarkets are industrially assembled from component ingredients (most of which are based on corn), containing chemical compounds that we wouldn’t recognize as ‘food’ if we were to examine them individually.

So it’s understandable that children don’t understand where food comes from. Adults don’t either. We are deeply confused and uncertain about the world we live in:

Suzuki also underlined the interconnectedness of humans with their natural world – a point not often made by mainstream environment critics. “We are the environment. There is no distinction. What we do to the earth we do to ourselves,” he said.

I was in New York in October and ran into these sculptures in Madison Square Park. They’re quite beautiful: life-sized shiny metal trees that oddly blend into the surroundings. I had no idea they were there… it had been one of those long walking days in the city and I sat down on a bench on the North side of the park to give my tired legs a rest.

Through the trees I saw something shiny, so I decided to check it out. It was an interesting moment - ‘discovering’ these sculptures quite innocently, and being genuinely surprised to find them. I wonder if that was the artist’s intention.

The work is called ‘Conjoined’ (one of three - the others are another, bigger tree, and a pile of rocks) and will be there until the end of December, 2007. Although I can’t imagine that it’s as nice in the middle of winter as it is in my picture. Link to the park’s site here.

I just saw an interesting piece on Deutsche Welle TV. Researchers at the Institute for the Foundations of Architecture at the University of Stuttgart in Germany have successfully built a rudimentary building using live trees and other materials. Dubbed ‘Baubotanik‘ (’Building Botany’), the idea is to exploit the natural characteristics (including growth) of living plants in conjunction with regular building materials in order to create a new kind of building.

So far, the group from Stuttgart has created a free standing bridge in 2005 (’Steg’), and a birding observation tower in 2007 (’Vogelguckhaus’). Pictures can be seen at their home page or on DW TV’s video on demand (German only).

I think this is very evocative and constitutes an interesting type of future construction, especially in areas where a low ecological footprint is required, such as nature reserves, zoos or botanical gardens. I was especially impressed by the idea that these would be ’self-repairing’ constructs - hurt trees can heal themselves, compensating for any harm by growing around it.