Posts tagged ‘green’
Why you should shop at Almost Perfect
Posted on | August 3, 2009 | 2 Comments
All over Toronto, “Urban Fresh” Sobeys have sprung up in the last two years. For those not from Toronto, Sobeys is a large Canadian grocery store chain. The “Urban Fresh” stores are unholy, small ’boutique’ grocery stores aimed squarely at cooking-challenged young urbanites. They present themselves as filled with ‘healthy’ fast food options (there’s lots of prepared food, expensive luxury brands, frequently to the exclusion of regular budget brands, an olive bar, a whole display case of individual cake slices, etc.) but ultimately, they’re the worst of the industrial food compex: limited, expensive, unhealthy and wasteful. Sobeys “Urban Fresh” is where self-respecting, right-thinking people who care about their bodies and our world shouldn’t buy groceries. It’s the sort of place you should only go to when you’re in a pickle.
Almost Perfect is the anti-Sobeys. Located near Sheppard and Keele, it offers brand name food at dramatically reduced prices. The food got there because of damaged packaging, manufacturer closeouts, overstocks or changes of packaging. Almost Perfect is clean, reasonably well presented and looks like a grocery store. Most brands are recognizable, and in 95% of cases, it’s clear why the food is there: cans are dented, outer cardboard packages may be slightly torn (but the inside vacuum packages are perfectly intact), outer wrappers may be missing. Some items are past their manufacturer’s expiry date but have been frozen before that date was reached; the store has a helpful sign that assists with decoding the various “sell by” and “use by” dates on packages, and what they mean here.
It’s the sort of place that does well on the fringes of suburbia, and there’s only one in Toronto proper; the others are in Ajax, Oshawa, Whitby or Peterborough. The typical clientele, I imagine, consists of young penny-pinching families, those living just above the poverty line, and older, retired folks who are on a fixed income, and whose dollars go much further at Almost Perfect.
Unfortunately, Almost Perfect is also the sort of place that hip ecologically conscious urbanites wouldn’t be seen dead in. You don’t see any Zip Cars in the parking lot on Saturday mornings. No urban warriors cycle here to fill their baskets with fabulously cheap foods.
If saying no to industrially produced imported food is one side of the personal activism coin, surely Almost Perfect is the other side. In the same way that we think Second Harvest is a great idea (collecting unused food from fast food outlets and delivering it to social service programs), we should also rally around Almost Perfect. Not primarily because of the savings (though these can be considerable in these recessionary times; we bought about $80-$100 worth of various soy meats, sweet potato chips, loose leaf tea and other veggie-friendly stuff for around $30), but because things shouldn’t be thrown away when they’re slightly damaged or don’t look perfect. And as anyone who’s ever opened a can or frozen package well after its expiry date and found the food inside perfectly fresh can attest, those dates mean very little when things are stored properly.
Buying frozen food at Almost Perfect should be cool in the same way as buying a “pre-loved” pair of recycled jeans at Value Village, or getting a weekly organic produce box directly from a local farm. These may be small things in the greater scheme, but the greater scheme will benefit tremendously from them, as will your savings account.
Tags: food > green > politics > toronto > vegetarian
Ravine
Posted on | April 28, 2008 | No Comments
There’s an incredible feature of Toronto that I’m only discovering now: ravines. Before I moved to Toronto, this wasn’t even part of my vocabulary. A ravine is a small valley, often with an active stream, found in urban areas. Turns out the Toronto ravine system is quite extensive and provides beautiful pockets of green woodland in the middle of the city.
This weekend, a brisk, restorative walk through David A. Balfour Park and the “Vale of Avoca” ravine (who names these things? :) yielded these pictures. Sadly, I didn’t have my regular camera with me, so the contrast is pretty bad in these over-exposed phonecam pics. I want to go back and take detailed pictures of the graffiti everywhere.
As you can see, it’s a strange, almost mystical place, unexpected in the middle of the city bustle. On a misty day, you half expect to encounter fairies dressed in camo pants, or a group of trolls smoking weed near the riverbed.
There are multiple undocumented but reasonably well-maintained paths, some further up the slopes, some right down in the middle near the stream. What’s particularly delightful about this ravine is that it’s mostly empty, even on a beautiful, warm spring Sunday like yesterday. I think the ‘urban grit’ puts off many of the more middle class leisure walkers (who might prefer the Kay Gardner Beltline Park, a long linear trail of about 5km that occupies an old commuter train track from the 1890s). But it’s quiet (the city’s hum seems far away) and the air is good.
When I left the park, a bicycle cop was writing up two young men at the exit. One, a twenty-something with a red nose, bike messenger clothes, a bike and slurred speech advised me not to drink “down there” because he just got a ticket. I didn’t quite know what to say and mumbled something about “just walking.”
I think this blend of trees, trails, graffiti, concrete and urban decay is fantastic. Wear solid shoes.
Zerofootprint Toronto
Posted on | March 21, 2008 | No Comments
The City of Toronto has launched a Zerofootprint co-branded CO2 calculator. Zerofootprint is a Canadian not-for-profit aiming to calculate and offset our individual and collective impact on the environment. Above is my own “quick calculator.” I don’t know if I’m supposed to be appalled or elated: being a vegetarian in a small apartment is obviously a good thing; flying around in air planes and driving a car are not.
Try it out at http://www.toronto.zerofootprint.net. Or read about Zerofootprint the organization here.
Where food and water come from
Posted on | February 10, 2008 | No Comments
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.
A new kind of tree house
Posted on | December 17, 2007 | No Comments
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.
Recent Posts on Changebowl, Carsten’s other blog- Playing around with Ontario electoral geography August 11, 2010
- HelTweetica for iPad July 20, 2010
- Facebook privacy & digital NIMBY July 19, 2010
- What we can learn from gear porn May 31, 2010
- Are creativity and intellectual property rights inversely proportional? May 27, 2010
- Comparing the tech giants May 2, 2010
- Corporate applications and content on smartphones March 21, 2010
About
Carsten Knoch
Attentive music listener, reader, vegetarian, affordable audio hobbyist, software and services professional, vision enabler, instigator, product manager, marketer, thinker, writer, blogger, tinkerer, Internet dweller since 1992
Teabowl is my blog about music, vegetarian food, books, art and life.
Teabowl's sister blog Changebowl discusses technology, community, design and business.
