Toronto’s Poster Plants

When I wrote about the political and cultural importance of posters (not to mention their aesthetic contribution to the city by making it look messy and lived-in), I never considered that they could also have an environmental benefit. Luckily, two artists in Toronto, Eric Cheung and Sean Martindale, have demonstrated exactly how this can be done: they’ve turned lamppost posters into tiny planters.

How’d they do it? Spacing’s Jake Schabas has the answers. “First, they cut triangular shapes directly into the thick existing poster layers. Then they peeled back those layers, wrapping the outside edge of the cut-out posters back into the pole to form the cones.

“Only staples were needed to hold the cones in place and support the soil and flowers planted, with some cones needing extra poster paper wheat-pasted onto the underside. All of the cones have an aeration hole at the bottom and are placed in a corkscrew patter that allows water to flow from one plant to the next.”

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Flying on Two Wheels

Sam Javanrouh, the Toronto photographer who often collaborates with Spacing, has a talent for riding a bike without hands, which he often uses to take photos for his blog, Daily Dose of Imagery. This time, he’s gone one step further and made a video. Forget for a moment that riding without hands on a city street is dangerous; this video captures, more than anything else I’ve seen, the real sense of freedom that set bicycles apart from other modes of transportation. Javanrouh speeds past cars, pedestrians and streetcars with the help of nothing but two wheels and his own energy. In Montreal, I could bike downtown from my apartment in about 10 minutes, about the same time as a taxi, 5 minutes faster that the bus and one-quarter the time of walking. It was like having the speed of a car without any of the additional baggage.

Free the Street Vendors

Hot dog vendor at Spadina and Queen. Photo by Kevin Steele

Toronto is finally getting the street food it deserves. After suffering under years of legislation that prohibited nearly everything but precooked sausages from being sold on the streets, vendors will now be able to serve food from hundreds of culinary traditions.

There’s just one problem: rather than embracing liberalized street food and all of its potential, City Hall is taking an overly bureaucratic approach. Just eight street vendors, out of a total of 19 that applied, will participate in a pilot project that will see Afghan chapli kebabs in Nathan Phillips Square, Ethiopian injera at Roundhouse Park and jerk chicken at Yonge and St. Clair, to name a few delicacies that have been specially chosen for their “nutritional value” and representation of Toronto’s ethnic makeup. Every aspect of the vendors’ operations will be tightly controlled: each one must use a custom-designed food cart (which range in price from $21,000 to $28,000) and they can’t deviate from their designated location.

City officials are concerned about food safety, naturally enough, but they’re also fussy about the nutritional value of what street vendors dish up, having gone so far as to pass a bylaw last December to ensure that street food is not only more “culturally diverse,” but “wholesome and nutritious.” It seems they want to discourage competition among vendors, too, since they’ve gone to great lengths to designate a handful of disparate locations at which street food can be sold under the new program.

It’s a remarkably heavy-handed approach, one at odds with the world’s great street food traditions, which are grounded in the ability to adapt quickly and flexibly to customer demand. Think of something like the now-famous Kogi taco truck in Los Angeles, which serves up Korean-inspired tacos from a roving truck whose location is announced only by Twitter and word-of-mouth. It’s innovative, delicious and exactly what people want — but it would be impossible in Toronto, where food vendors aren’t allowed to move around.

People less cynical than me can consider Toronto’s new approach a step towards street food freedom. But it’s an awfully small step. Even if this pilot project works out, what will dissuade city officials from micromanaging every future street food venture?

Early Morning Walks

Walking by the tracks, Danforth and Woodbine, Toronto, 2005

Leftovers

Lowrise to parking lot conversion, Toronto, 2008

Smoke Break

Audi carpark, Avenue Road, Toronto

Zzzzzs in the Moonlight

Sunday’s Southern Sky

Morning sun over Eglinton Ave East, Toronto

Bus Window

Montreal

Toronto

Hong Kong

Earth to Mouth

For all the times I went to buy groceries at Montreal’s Chinese supermarkets, it never once occurred to me that much of the food I was buying was in fact locally-produced. Then I saw Yung Chang’s short documentary, Earth to Mouth, which my friend Cedric screened last year in a fifth-floor room in Chinatown. In his disarmingly quiet way, Chang introduces us to Wing Fong Farm, just outside Toronto, which grows the produce sold and consumed in the city’s big Chinese malls and supermarkets. In a particularly inspired scene near the beginning of the film, the farm’s 73-year-old matriarch, Lau King Fai, introduces us to some of the produce she grows, like gai lan (best prepared with smashed ginger and stir-fried with wine and salt) and go lai choi (stir-fry with vinegar and serve with oyster sauce).

As you would expect from someone who made Up the Yangtze, which put a defiantly human face on a massive technological achievement, Yung Chang has made a film that is more about the people who run Wing Fong Farm than it is about the food they produce. We learn about Lau’s path from Changsha to Guangzhou, and then, late in life, to rural Ontario, where she slipped quietly into the role of a farmer after a lifetime spent in cities. She rises at dawn each day, putting in long hours overseeing the farm’s operations, but it is the six Mexican workers she and her son employ who do the real grunt work. Watching the interaction between the farm’s Chinese owners and their Mexican employees is one of the things that makes Earth to Mouth so fascinating: this is the ordinary, everyday face of globalization.

2:51AM

North Toronto Memorial Community Centre

Bathurst South

Cheery Stepping

Queen Street West, Toronto

Bikes, Trees, and People

College Street West

Queen Street West