By JK, on April 17th, 2012 This weekend the Green Living Show came to Toronto, assembling over 400 eco exhibitors in the Direct Energy center. It’s a show I’ve looked forward to since my first visit last year, an opportunity to try new products and hunt for deals, a day of aspirational living.
But I am, at times, an ambivalent ecoholic. I am fanatical about recycling and composting and electricity use. I use earth-friendly cleaning products. I reuse and freecycle. I grow as much of my own (organic) food as possible. I try to eat less meat, and “happy” meat. I take public transit, walk a lot, and am working on my two-wheeler relationship. But that said, there are so many things I don’t do. There are so many things that I’m even afraid to acknowledge that I should do, because so often it leads to guilt and anger.
A big part of the reason is that I feel lied to. By my government who I trusted to protect me from hazardous chemicals, but who I shouldn’t have, given all the insidious things that are in everyday products. By the companies who made those products. By advertisers and beauty magazines who told me I need the product, or [...]
By JK, on April 6th, 2012 It seems appropriate to start Gardening, Farming and Food month with a book that not only contains all three, but could be called an essential text of the local food movement. Published in 2007, Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle documents a year in her family’s life after they leave their urban Arizona home to live off the land in Southern Appalachia. Along with her husband, an environmental science professor, and her daughters Camille, 19, and Lily, 8, Kingsolver builds a food network for their family in an attempt to get all their food (or at least most of it) locally.
Kingsolver narrates most of the book by combining the informational and the intensely personal into meditative prose that can be measured or lyrical, as her subject matter requires. Her principal narrative is complemented by informational sidebars from her husband and end of chapter recipes and perspectives from Camille. While at first I had to suppress an eye roll that Kingsolver’s teenage daughter contributed to the project, I came to appreciate her perspective, one I wish I had had at her age. Her recipes (with an emphasis on seasonal ingredients, naturally) are inspiring, and it’s fitting that the book, like the farm, [...]
By JK, on January 16th, 2012 I am, I think, a rather typical middle-class urban dweller. I live not far from the buzzing downtown core, in the leafy, historic Annex, perched like a sparrow on top of the coursing powerline of the Bloor-Danforth subway. I cross the city each day on the TTC. I take advantage of the eclectic smorgasbord of food the city has to offer. I go to the museums and the literary events and the street festivals, take advantage (if not for granted) the wonderful variety of shops. But I think what makes me urban is not so much those things, but a mentality. A sort of frenetic activity, physically and mentally. Perhaps it’s the number of options, perhaps it’s the lights and noise of a city that never sleeps, but I think more likely it’s just my own overachieving nature mixed up with the realities of being a driven twenty-something building a career and taking on more than is advisable. And while I love my life, find it full and engaging and challenging, there is a part of me that worries that in taking on so much I’m missing out. That in engaging with everything I’m actually processing nothing. That in the [...]
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