Slow Food in the city of Toronto

Now, there is a BEST THING EVER that isn’t a misuse or a misconception in the English language, it is a little ideal called sustainable local organic agriculture aka the Slow Food Movement.  Slow food has been a growing movement within the world for quite some time now with books such as Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” bringing the fight to the forefront by allowing us to participate the journey from the land to the plate.  Overall, in the past twenty years people have become more and more aware of what exactly we’re putting into our bodies and what we’re taking out by choosing such things as a vegan diet for anything other than a moral belief.  It’s not a surprise that many of the metropolotian papers in cities such as New York, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, San Francisco and Seattle we’re seeing a rise in the advancements of the “Urban Farmer.”

 

Just this week in NOW Toronto (www.nowtoronto.com)  the feature article is do it yourself gardening within the city.  It features not only ideas for urban gardening in your front yard, should you be lucky enough to have one, or even patio gardening for those of us who live in the many high rise buildings that populate Toronto’s landscape.  It offers ideas for not only recession proof agriculture in the (redundancy warning) urban gardening but how to use the free industrial spaces for an ever-growing green alternative that this country seems to embrace. 

 

I’m greeted with these ideas the same month that I picked up a new cookbook written by one of California’s top chefs from the East Bay Area, David Tanis of Chez Panisse fittingly titled “A Platter of Figs.”