it's a Kirby

From Village to Market.

March 30, 2008 · Leave a Comment

thisaint

The good news: “Canada’s Best Independent Bookstore” isn’t closing. This Ain’t The Rosedale Library is simply moving to one of Toronto’s last bastions of Bohemia, Kensington Market (86 Nassau Street). While this pretty much “nails the coffin” regarding the dearth of any/all places of interest on Church Street, it bodes well for small press literary lions Dan and Charlie and their legion of devoted booklovers (count me as one).

More good news: their current “Moving Sale” . . . 30%-off all hardcovers, 50%-off all remainders (and this is remainder heaven). Stock up on some great lit/poetry!

Photo: blogTO

Categories: Current · Read. · T.O.
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Shake the hand that feeds you.

March 30, 2008 · 1 Comment

Young Farmer with Leeks

Eating with the fullest pleasure—pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance—is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.*

Don’t eat anything incapable of rotting. Food v. “food product.” There are many reasons to avoid eating such complicated food products beyond the various chemical additives and corn and soy derivatives they contain. One of the problems with the products of food science is that, as Joan Gussow has pointed out, they lie to your body [my ital]; their artificial colors and flavors and synthetic sweeteners and novel fats confound the senses we rely on to assess new foods and prepare our bodies to deal with them. Foods that lie leave us with little choice but to eat by the numbers, consulting labels rather than our senses. (And, one might add, infinitely less pleasurable.)

MICHAEL POLLAN, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto

Please, before you start yet another diet, restrictive food regimen, or the latest, flavour-of-the-week, TV-certified, self-help/lifestyle how-to fad, read Michael Pollan. One of the most sensible, pleasurable, indeed doable, approaches to food, eating, and a well-lived life I have ever enjoyed reading/relishing. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” And devour this book.

Slow Food Canada
Toronto’s Farmers’ Markets
Farm Boys
Photo: Edible Nation

*Wendell Berry

Categories: Current · Read.
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