Shopping Carts in Ravines

Nutrition consultant & educator Karen Hanrahan has kept a plain McDonald’s hamburger from 1996 without doing anything in particular to preserve it and it is in nearly the exact same shape as when it was sold 12 years ago:

That’s 1996 on the left, 2008 on the right.

She writes, “Ladies, Gentleman, and children alike - this is a chemical food. There is absolutely no nutrition here. Not one ounce of food value… McDonalds fills an empty space in your belly. It does nothing to nourish the cell, it is not a nutritious food.”

I haven’t posted anything to the ‘Vegan Food’ category in a while so I thought I’d throw up, emetic pun not intended, a couple of the more interesting things I’ve eaten in recent times.

Last weekend in the Kawarthas me and Sa went mushroom hunting. We found a variety of different mushrooms and fungi, but only one stood out as identifiably edible - Aleuria aurantia, the “orange peel” fungus. I collected a patch of these, steamed them and added them to a dish of store-bought morels, organic wild rice and Tofurkey sausages, with a cream sauce made from soy milk, onion & herb hummus and a little Bisto and parsley.

A good deal less recently - more like this past April - I put together the best salad I’ve ever eaten. It’s sort of a problem, because every salad I’ve had since has paled in comparison, no matter how much more work may have gone into it.

That’s organic lettuce, organic spinach, organic tomatoes, grilled Yves veggie chicken strips and the reason every other salad has seemed like “just salad,” organic edible flowers(!)

I’ve ridiculed the recent product trend of “fruit-flavoured vitamin-enhanced bottled water” in the past by saying “Yeah, we had that when I was a kid, WE CALLED IT JUICE!” (I’m not the only one) but regardless and against my better judgment (or rather, thirsty and dealing with York U’s painful Pepsi contract beverage selections) I bought a bottle of Aquafina Plus+ Pomegranate Cherry.

While drinking it, I found it had a weird aftertaste as though it contained aspartame. It didn’t, but while reading the ingredients “cochineal” caught my eye. I looked it up in this animal ingredients list when I got home, feeling suspicious, and my suspicions were confirmed:

Carmine. Cochineal. Carminic Acid.

Red pigment from the crushed female cochineal insect. It takes a million corpses to make a kilogram of carminic acid, the more purified form of cochineal extract. Used in cosmetics, shampoos, red apple sauce, and other foods (including red lollipops and food coloring). May cause allergic reaction. Alternatives: beet juice (used in powders, rouges, and shampoos; no known toxicity) and alkanet root (from the root of an herb-like tree; used as a red dye for inks, wines, lip balms, etc.; no known toxicity; can also be combined to make a copper or blue coloring).

Aquafina has no interest in explaining what cochineal is, means or does, not on the bottle and certainly not on the website. The website, instead of having proper nutritional information, has a Flash site with a little marching band that comes out to congratulate you on your brilliant choice of bug juice and the accompanying text lists a few vitamins and then tells you to give yourself a standing ovation.

If you still really want to buy this product and want a bug-free and better-made alternative, I’d recommend Glaceau’s VitaminWater which I drank quite a bit of while working at the Pemberton Festival (and getting free drinks). It uses vegetable juice for colour. I doubt I’ll be buying all that much of it, though - I can water down my juice myself thankyouverymuch.

Alright, so, after that bug juice incident, I convinced myself nothing that gross would happen to my food again.

I was wrong. Team Coke managed to beat Pepsi’s bug juice with a new addition to the Minute Maid Fruit Solutions line.

I was standing in a gas station convenience store, searching through the drink fridges trying to find a bottle of anything that looked like it might be a beverage intended for human consumption. I was considering giving up, but decided to go for an overpriced and undersized bottle of a Mango Orange Passionfruit juice made from concentrate.

I didn’t think to read the ingredients on a bottle of mango juice, even though I checked what was in the chips I bought at the same time.

The chips were terrible. The juice was also terrible and had a weird aftertaste and seemed to leave my tongue feeling sort of weird. I read the empty bottle while waiting for my bus to show up, and…

Minute Maid Fruit Solutions Omega-3 Mango Orange Passion ingredients:
Fruit juices from concentrate (orange, grape and passionfruit), mango puree, natural flavour, encapsulated fish oil (refined fish oil (anchovy, sardine), fish gelatin, sodium phosphate, sodium ascorbate, canola and sunflower oils, natural flavour, soy tocopherols, citric acid), potassium citrate (potassium), ascorbic acid (vitamin C), ferric pyrophosphate (iron), hydrolyzed soy lecithin, folic acid (folate), thiamine mononitrate (thiamine)

I’m not sure what televised robot parents these juice manufacturers were raised by, but those robots obviously did a poor job because any four year old can tell you that the only ingredients needed to make juice are the first four listed there - orange, grape, passionfruit and mango juice. Sardines?? *BZZZZZZZ!* Wrong answer!

The Minute Maid bottle loudly and visibly proclaims that it is “made with 100% juice*”, a claim which is so deceptive it ought to be illegal when compared to the actual ingredients list. (*The asterisk only has a footnote saying that the juices are a blend from concentrates.)

However, their website is at least pretty upfront about the source of Omega-3 in the drink:

“Using innovative encapsulated fish oil as its Omega-3 source, … Minute Maid® Fruit Solutions® Omega-3 Mango Orange Passion contains ingredients derived from fish sources. While these fish sources have been highly refined, for precautionary reasons, individuals that are allergic to fish should not consume this product.”

I’m not sure why adding gelatin capsules (which dissolve) to the fish oil qualifies as “innovative.” And beyond the anchovy oil, sardine oil and fish gelatin included in their “100% juice”, there’s one final animal additive… cochineal. (They mention that it’s for colour, but that’s about it.)

Unfortunately, this is actually a fair indication of how common these crushed bugs are when it comes to the shockingly bright red colour of many contemporary synthetic artifoods. While I certainly won’t be buying either of these products and would advise people against it, these specific products are just two examples of what’s wrong with the food most people eat today - even the “good” processed food items like these that people are told they actually have to struggle to find the will power to choose!

Choosing to ingest things like crushed bugs in place of food on the basis that they’re technically edible isn’t anything to pat yourself on the back about. Listen to your body and your planet (AND YOUR DOCTOR!) for information on what you should be eating, not television sets or billboard advertisements.

And read ingredient labels, trust me, because it’s like the freakin’ Wild West when it comes to this stuff.

My current pair of shoes, pictured below, have been great shoes for the past year and a half, but I’ve literally worn them right through and they’re now splitting apart.

I’m not big on bigging up companies or promoting products, but I’ve just ordered my second pair of Vegetarian Shoes and I do think they’re worth a mention.

When Adbusters started producing their Blackspot sneakers, it had plenty of ideological weight behind it. People like me who don’t want slave children being beaten into shoe production while toxic pollutants pour off from the processes involved were interested in the Blackspots, and I bought a pair.

They were pretty much comparable to these other canvas-y shoes I’d gotten from, I believe, Grassroots. The bottoms were hard and flat, and the uppers were thin and porous. They fit the technical definition of a shoe, and had none of the ethical implications of the basketball bullshit I used to wear as a kid.

Funny how, when I had those high-quality shoes, I don’t really think I did much with them. I certainly wasn’t playing basketball.

So now that I was at a point in my life where I was walking kilometres and kilometres every day, the quality of my shoes started to be pretty significant.

The folks at Adbusters put out a terrific publication, but they don’t know shit about making shoes.

Or, rather, it’s the middle-class-liberal syndrome… eating overpriced and flavourless packaged ‘health foods’ instead of just knowing how to eat well properly with produce. Too much money and no analysis whatsoever, that’s the fundamental problem with the Grassroots type approach…

Well, just like hindu Indian or buddhist Vietnamese people can be vegan totally casually without a second thought and certainly without having to gag down any quinoa puff cakes, it is perfectly possible to set out to make a shoe and make it properly by all the standards that conventionally matter, simply omitting the part where you slaughter animals, take their skin and then force children to sew it together.

Vegetarian Shoes does exactly that. They make excellent shoes, in Europe, at prices that are pretty much on par with the North American shoe market. Also, everything from belts to jackets, and everything both stylish and functional.

If you’re in Toronto and wary of ordering footwear from overseas without a chance to see it in person first, you could always drop by Left Feet in Kensington Market. They stock some Vegetarian Shoes products, as well as other brands, although honestly this is the make you want if you want a proper shoe.

You can also check out the Blackspot V2’s while you’re there. They’re, uhm, covered in a dusting of fake dirt for no reason.

Well, it’s been nearly a month since the Om Re:union Project’s Re:treat festival took place (around the summer solstice) and it’s about due time I come back down to Earth and put into words what I experienced.

Well, actually, if you know me, you know I tend to compile things… so here’s what I actually wrote by hand at the festival, bearing in mind that I haven’t actually hand-written anything in literally years:

One day after the solstice, 2007

I’m sitting on a cliff’s edge overlooking a rocky pair of ponds.

Really, it’s more of a wet rockbed than a pond or lake.
It’s quite nice though.

I’m here for the Om Festival Re:Union Project.

I haven’t been to an Om since 2004, which was the final year for the broadly-publicized festival, open to the public.
In the years since, Om has transitioned into being a closed community, though it remains open to applications.

The moon’s exactly half-full.

I’ve been picking up cigarette butts, as for some reason smokers don’t realize butts are litter. Just an aspect of a whole habit of denial, I guess.

The joints, on the other hand, are rolled with birch bark filters… they’ll decompose, unlike the synthetics and carbon of the cigarettes.

It’s getting dark and the bass just kicked in. Time to go party.

We talk pure Earth but sleep in plastic tents.

At least at Om, the stages are powered by solar panels (very impressive) while teknival’s 15 radical stages require 15 radical gas generators.

Understand that we’re trying our best, though, genuinely.

We’ve been born into a horrid plastic system and at this point in our history it’s literally almost impossible for people to break free, in psychological, cultural or lifestyle activity terms.

I wonder what life will be like for Haven, the 6-year-old boy here who volunteered to be a model for a Mark Jenkins-style tape sculpture body cast. It was pretty funny watching him be wrapped in saran wrap and tape.

Again, people even commented on the waste, but decided it was alright based on its artistic value.

It’s the same thing with computers. They’re disposable, deliberately obfuscated toxic contraptions that consume ever-increasing amounts of electricity.

But they’re helping us break free.

It’s literally impossible to be separate from the system when born into where we are. But we know that and are fighting it… Unfortunately every move we make, at least initially, does damage.

Eventually, we may own land, grow crops, use solar and be thoroughly self-sufficient, and we are trying…

The Om people have long had the plan of buying a piece of land.

It’s also something I’ve thought of alot. Two of my friends have family farms and could conceivably be down, Cowboy in particular, given his description of his lifeplan.

Several quick notes:

• The food (made from the random array of donations everyone brings in and prepared by continuously-changing volunteer groups, then served out freely at regular meal intervals and with snacks out at all hours of the day and night in between) is fucking incredible.

  So much larger servings than 2004 and even more than I can eat… which is a limit that barely even exists. Sushi, salad, rice, soup, chili, lentil stew, bread with pesto, tortillas, and oh my god melted vegan chocolate with granola and mixed fresh berries. One of the best vegan desserts I’ve ever had. The guy making the soup threw some of my ginseng in to energize and revitalize everyone. Very cool.

• I had a wicked conversation with Solomon who gave the hugging workshop and 2 other people about free parties, free culture and the post-society waste niche it exists in, as well as the oft-ignored fungi kingdom, the decomposers with incredible and unique properties that exist in an overlooked niche gap.

  I was telling Solomon that animals are actually closer to fungi than plants, and while I only meant taxonomically/genetically in an evolutionary sense, I just realized that we free radicals behave quite like the fungi, especially the ones that had colonized a tree stump up amongst the camps on the ridge and were glowing bioluminescently in the dark.

  I told Solomon, “You can build a kingdom from the things Toronto throws away.” Free culture, like fungal culture, is often disregarded from outside and thrives on that which is discarded.

• Paranoize came on late and then dropped the best set I’ve ever heard him play. He’s actually like one of Toronto’s best DJs. Given that he knows so many Guv people, it’s very respectable that he isn’t a big sell-out.

I’m very impressed with how much ORP has developed on Om, which felt special but also seemed like a hippie-leaning yuppie commercial weekend escape. This is so much more of a genuine community of this type than I’ve ever seen.

It makes Petra’s assertion that Teknival is a DIY party, not festival, (at least as it exists now) ring true.

I really like the announcements system here. A combination of a walkie-talkie network, message boards + signage, and group-hollering to make good use of word of mouth.

I also really like how much new technology has been integrated. Steve Mann has brought up his hydraulophone, which I’ve only seen at Nuit Blanche 2006 and the Ontario Science Centre. Also, the solar panels (though there definitely is a gennie down at the Home Bass stage now) and geodesic dome tents all over the place.

What with my mom giving me this ‘hippie gothic’ article about a commune that’s still around from the ’60s (not to mention free everything-important-in-life!) and my dad taking me to the cottages with Chris Brown back in the day and other things……. You know, I think I might be a bit like Haven after all.

This genuinely seems like a sustainable (or at least headed in that direction) model for an alternative lifestyle that is neither urban nor rural, but naturalistic.

If the Baby Boomers have infused their children with the energy and ability to divorce ourselves from the suicidal global machine and I’m experiencing this junction in history out of which evolves a synergistic, co-dependent sustainable lifestyle framework, then infinite blessings upon them.

If not, they fucked us all over for SUVs.

I’ve got faith in my mom + pop, though. I think they’re owed some karma.

2 days after the solstice, 2007

I went to Moon Bass to find it littered with shimmery ribbons. I started picking them up to clean them up, then decided to make bracelets from them.

And it turns out Steve, the first person I met at my first genuine party experience, produces and live-PAs some of the best techno I’ve ever heard in my life.

Mike Soma’s set was awesome too, much talked about around the fire while corn roasted.

I feel like I’ve broken through from my individualist hard ghetto sense of social relations and really connected synergistically with alot of people here.

The feeling of operating in a smooth and totally positivity-oriented direction is beyond euphoric.

I think I’ve discovered secular spirituality through this idea of being a part of a greater whole, which is self-aware and consciously synchronized and harmonious with both itself internally and its surrounding environment.

The internet’s a pretty good one for that, too, and really I think it’s an important part of all this.

I always wanted to be a superhero.

“Everybody works and nobody gets paid, because we love it.” That’s the slogan…

I just finished duty as a garbageman…

…which brings to mind the often-hurled attack on anarchism of “who will take out the garbage if everyone does as they please?”

I know plenty of people who are more than happy to do such dirty work, and when I feel like I’m part of something good and positive, I can actually enjoy it myself. I enjoyed scampering through the festival collecting garbage and recycling, assisting people with random things along the way… and when I came home, I enjoyed doing the dishes too, which had been piled high and colonized long enough that I ought to be signing rights agreements with them.

Om showed me, for the first time, what it really meant to be a perfectly-functional part of something…

My entire life to date had been one of ghetto contraryness and cynicism fused with a reductionist education and worldview.

Previously, I’ve always conceived of the world in relation to inner Toronto, my anchor point. Now, I feel much more detached and floating free but as a part of a broader whole, and the bad attitude seems simply stupid to me.

Where I grew up taught me to fight against others to get what I wanted for myself, both in terms of the ghetto childhood and the capitalist system.

Om showed me that, rather than being a bratty cancer cell, I can be a key part in a beautiful and all-encompassing whole.

This is the part where I don’t use the word enlightenment.

Some Om photos, more Om photos.

Now I’m off for a couple days on a site-scouting mission for Northtek!

My wonderful friend Lisa just sent me this wicked contemporary field guide, which is doubly cool for a taxonomy nerd like me:

It’s by Julian Montague and out under Abram Image.

The book goes into a lot of detail in distinguishing the different types of discarded shopping carts (by origin, placement, history, etc), starting with separating them into two broad groups. These are the ‘true’ and ‘false’ strays, and a lot of this reflects a lot of my own ideas about finding and cataloguing carts…

I don’t go into as much detail, though I may start applying the system they use now to my own collection. The difference between true and false strays is something I try to be considerate of, though, and I try to only include carts that are truly removed from their places of origin (as opposed to simply unusually distant but returnable)… though I make exceptions for damaged carts and carts that I find to be of particular interest, such as these two:

Here’s an example of a type class identified in the book (links to a related MAKE Magazine article on modifying shopping carts):

She also sent me these vegan chewy chocolate chocolate chip cookies! Yummm… thank you, Lisa!!

Update, May 29: Thanks to John B, I also know about the accompanying stray shopping carts website.

I had a long day downtown yesterday, which I’ll detail separately, but I wanted to complain about this first:

I was down on Queen W and I’d been craving falafel all day. I knew it wasn’t the best place to try and get one, but I’d been to the above-pictured “Quick Pita” before and remembered them being alright, so I went in.

They offered an array of toppings, but what caught my eye (naturally) was the fried eggplant and cauliflower. These are only offered some places, and I find them to be an excellent addition to a falafel.

So, I looked at the menu:

It’s hard to see in that cell-phone snap, but there were two separate options. One was a falafel sandwich, the other was a ‘veggie’ sandwich, which included the cauliflower and eggplant but did not come with falafel balls.

I asked the lady if I could get a falafel with fried eggplant and cauliflower added to it, and she did something completely ludicrous. She just jammed the two prices together, and told me it would cost $7.50!

At Sarah’s on Bloor, the über-delicious “falafel combination” sandwich which includes falafel balls, fried eggplant and cauliflower costs a mere $4.20, tax included. At this place, that wouldn’t even get you either of the two types of sandwiches.

I understand it’s Queen St., but if you’re gonna try to rip people off you better at least be making them designer falafels.

Sadly, Queen W is largely barren of worthwhile falafel places. “Loulou’s” in the Queen West ‘marketplace’ building by Queen + John handed out groan-worthy falafels before the change in management, and has gone downhill since that. And reaching all the way down to Queen + Bathurst, there’s “Falafel Queen” where, granted, I did buy 4 falafels at once on my birthday, but that wasn’t because they’re amazing. They, like their aforementioned sister stores and the Ali Baba’s across from the Funhaus, fall into the class that most Queen West falafel places do - that is, “they usually don’t make you feel nauseous.” Say, 75% of the time.

Then there’s the Pita Pit, also at Queen + Bathurst, and I don’t think I really need to explain what’s wrong with that… if you don’t notice their high prices (plus extra for hummus?!) and bland, grill-heated food, then you may as well be eating whatever falafel you find sitting discarded on top of a newspaper box.

Queen West’s one possible saving grace, in my eyes (or mouth), might be King Shawarma at Queen + Spadina. They’re definitely minimalistic, but they have some secret recipe hot sauce that I’m sure I’ll always be slightly in love with. Too bad they don’t have that flashing neon “FALAFEL” sign in the window anymore, that was great.

How can there be so many good places battling it out between Spadina and Bathurst on Bloor, and nothing but overpriced bleah to be found on Queen? Maybe it’s the general character of the streets… Honest Ed’s versus, say, The Gap.