I got a chance to put my reading hat back on - thus I now bring you my summaries/thoughts on the current Toronto food book I'm reading called "The Edible City."
If you want to catch up and read about the book's launch + part I and part II of my "The Edible City" reviews, click here. Also note I've had to stop tagging every authour 'cause my blog engine doesn't like over 200-characters worth of tags! LOL
The next section of the book kicks off with John Lorinc describing his family's walks around town, mostly in pursuit of Hungarian food given his background. He helps in part to document which Hungarian restaurants in which parts of the city were best, which are gone, and which are still around (
Country Style at Bloor/Bathurst being the most notable). He also says something about the urban experience that I fully agree with: "The only way to properly experience a city is to walk its streets, because only the pace and perspective of pedestrian movement allows one to absorb the tastes and smells of an urban neighbourhood, with its workaday shops, the easily overlooked quirks of its architecture and what Jane Jacobs describes as the 'ballet' that occurs on the sidewalks."
Gary Wilkins looks at how the
Toronto and Region Conservation Authority has had to change its mandate to stay relevant - no longer can it do short-term leases of land plots to traditional farmers. It is being revamped to find a way to relate to the near-urban landscape it serves (i.e. community gardens, summer employment for students, and more). What I found particularly interesting is how TRCA looks at community gardens from a multicultural perspective - so rather than planting "traditional" cash crops like corn, soybean, etc., their urban agriculture project in Brampton is growing okra and chilies to serve the South Asian community that lives there. Very cool in my opinion!
In a piece on Colony Collapse Disorder and what a decline in bees means for the way we eat, Stéphanie Verge says Canadian hive losses have nearly doubled over the past few years. Why is this a problem? Well, honeybees represent $1.7 billion to the Canadian fruit/veggie industry. If their populations continue to decline, pollination will decline, and thus fruit/veggie production will decline. Stéphanie also discusses "urban beekeeping" - though banned for any areas in Toronto that are within 30m of a residence, some Torontonians are still giving it a shot, like
The Royal York's executive chef David Garcelon. His garden/apiary is on the rooftop of the hotel, so it satisfies the 30m rule.
Mark Fram looks at greenhouses and market gardens past in Toronto and says nowadays it's not just real-estate values that doom the local veggie patch - market gardens/orchards and greenhouses are classified as industries (and/or environmental hazards) and as such are not allowed near where people live. His piece includes a comprehensive business directory map of where these "market gardens" were once located and he makes the point that some adaptation of the market garden concept would make it relevant to folks today.
Iara Lessa and
Cecilia Rocha, both immigrants from Brazil, assess the role food plays in the lives of new immigrants to Toronto. Their lens is particularly interesting (click their names for more info on them): they look at food's role in narratives of loss and longing, and in the practices by the diaspora to re-root. They also mention food (w)as something that singles new immigrants out (ridicule in the workplace over lunches, etc.) Luckily nowadays, given Toronto's multicultural make-up, I'd say most ethnic ingredients are easy to find in the city and people in Toronto are actually interested in these foods and actively seeking them out, no matter what their background. So was it tougher 50 years ago for immigrants to re-root? I'd guess yes - they had less of their key ingredients available to them and were certainly "singled out" more for their food choices, to use terminology Iara and Cecilia might use.
Kate Carraway and Peter Maynard write about Toronto's generally poor front-of-the-house staff doing a disservice to our talented kitchen staff and points to this as one of the reasons Toronto feels insecure and is unable to compete as a world-class restaurant city. It's also difficult to get a service standard when there is no rating system to guide good service, and when restaurants and cultures vary so much that service is all relative.
Hamutal Dotan was a vegetarian for 3 months until a good burger came along and turned him into a carnivore again. But he developed a set of rules for the meat he ate: it had to be local, free-range, and void of antibiotics. So rather than thinking the only way to be "moral" about meat was to not eat it at all, Hamutal applied a set of rules to meat that made it an ethical alternative to vegetarianism. He also takes a look at abbatoirs in the Toronto area and the pressures they are under to produce.
Jason McBride talks about the end of the "food bank" as we know it using
The Stop Community Food Centre as a primary example - though it started as one of the first food banks in Canada, it is now much more. Essentially it is a non-profit that has programs to fight poverty through food and believes access to healthy, tasty food is a basic human right. In fact, just last year The Stop opened The Green Barn, a sustainable food production and education centre with a 10,000-square-foot greenhouse, commercial kitchen, classroom, sheltered garden and composting facility.
Shawn Micallef declares that eating out is as much about the experience as it is about the food. Through analyzing the way restaurant architecture in Toronto has evolved over the years, Shawn is able to explain how architecture and interiors influence a diner's experience. His story particularly focuses in on how restaurants like
The Keg Mansion on Jarvis St. and the many
Spring Rolls restaurants are meant to look "high end" but ultimately offer the common diner relatively affordable access to a higher-end experience. One fun fact I learned from his story:
Bangkok Garden on Elm St., a restaurant I enjoyed the two times I've been and am itching to go back to, was blessed by actual monks when it was opened!
The chapter ends with RM Vaughan's "I, Rat" - a quirky and playful narrative from a local rat's perspective. Ultimately it aims to, ummm, build better relations between people and rats? Jokes, jokes - Essentially I *think* the authour is getting at humans making a truce with nature - we'll all be in trouble "when the very dirt stops making grain" as RM says, and are going to need to set some kind of "truce" with all living things, which the rat in the story offers up. Whether or not I interpreted the message of "we're all in this together" correctly, the rat becomes a character to me, with a funny language that's actually kind of cute, and the eclectic tone and illustrations are a refreshing way to end the chapter.
Click here to read our reviews of the other (antipasti, primo, contorno, and dolce) of the book!
And the book comes to a close! To see all chapter reviews of The Edible City, click here.
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