Illustration by Dave Donald

A call for co-operative housing reform

After spending the first 23 years of my life living in co-operative housing, I worry “co-operative” has become nothing more than a platitude used to paint a picture of true democracy. Even at the most local of levels, a functioning democracy needs supervision.

Over a quarter of a million Canadians are housed in over 2,000 co-operative housing projects across the country. Whether apartments, townhouses, or a combination of both, co-operatives are established as non-profit corporations, complete with committees and a board of directors, and are—theoretically, at least—run by residents. Residents become members by purchasing a small share in the co-operative and continue to pay monthly “housing charges,” a term used to differentiate the arrangement from “rent” in a typical landlord-tenant relationship.

Many co-ops were created as mixed-income communities in an attempt to avoid the ghettoization of the poor, and rely on individuals assuming a degree of personal responsibility. Members commit to putting in a small number of volunteer hours a month for the upkeep of their co-op, anything from mowing common grounds to conducting unit inspections. Every now and again, members get together and have meetings to elect a board, vote on an eviction, change the bylaws, or sort out any issues that arise, in a one-member-one-vote system.

But these defining features are by no means universal. Some co-ops hire a property manager or co-op co-ordinator and, in rare cases, co-ops are run by board members who do not actually live there. In others, rather than buying shares, members make loans, and some don’t require members to put in volunteer hours.

Crucially, there is no single regulatory body that oversees all housing co-ops. The sector is a muddle of acts, bylaws, and government and non-profit agencies.

The only national, umbrella co-op housing organization is the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada. CHF Canada, itself a co-operative corporation, is primarily a lobbying group, focused on policy changes and acquiring funds from government on behalf of housing co-ops. There are regional associations for housing co-ops, and an agency that took over responsibilities from the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation for federal co-ops in P.E.I., Ontario, Alberta and B.C. The other provinces and territories have their own schemes.

This confusion has created a sector which is barely understood by many in it, let alone those on the outside. As a result, the sector is largely left to its own devices, requests for financial records are denied.

Members who raise concerns with the lack of oversight and issues of governance in co-op housing are often given the runaround or subsequently targeted as dissidents. Ken Hummel, a co-op resident from Whitby, Ont., who for the last 15 years has tried to hold his housing co-op accountable by requesting information on audits, raising issues of favouritism, and filing complaints with police and government, is constantly told to find solutions internally.

“I had shared my concerns and complaints about [my co-op’s] governance and management problems with CHF Canada and CHF Canada referred me back to the co-op board of directors to find some resolution with issues,” writes Hummel in an email.

A member in Toronto was recently told by her co-op’s lawyer “to remove my digital footprint anywhere on the internet where I may have talked about co-ops suggesting I was disparaging them or receive a ‘notice to appear’ for consideration for eviction.” These kinds of actions create an environment of fear and submission in co-ops, something most outside the sector rarely understand.

Nicole Chaland, the Community Economic Development program director at Simon Fraser University, established a housing co-op in Victoria, B.C. a decade ago with strong ideals and high expectations. She envisioned a community-supported lifestyle, separate from the “paternalistic” system of a mainstream, managed housing provider. Though she didn’t live in the co-op she co-founded (a stipulation of a financial backer), Chaland saw the factionalism develop.

“The potential for built-in resentment is all there,” she says. “I think housing co-ops are particularly difficult because you actually have to cooperate with your neighbours and there is that opportunity for resentment to breed.”

Chaland also described the fiction she was sold early on that coops are cheaper to run due to lower operating costs. “Every single co-op is doing two things at the same time,” she adds, “you’re running a business and you’re nurturing an association of people. And that means the costs are higher.”

There are, naturally, some advantages to the co-op model. Through her research on housing co-ops, Catherine Leviten-Reid, assistant professor at the Shannon School of Business at Cape Breton University, discovered that members who actively participated benefited from “skills development, the development of self-confidence, social ties and the ability to influence the housing in which one lives.” There is no doubt that many housing co-ops do work well. But there are too many that don’t.

Victims of abuse, harassment, and fraud are left naked before their management, with nowhere to turn for help. By design, many co-op members are economically vulnerable, unable to afford representation or represent themselves.

Co-op housing represents so many appealing concepts, which is why it’s hard to find anybody who doesn’t support it on principle. A recent bill to amend the co-op legislation in Ontario received all-party support. Co-ops symbolize participatory democracy, social justice, redistribution of wealth, DIY—so many progressive movements rolled into one. They’ve maintained the impression they are bastions of true democracy, a place for the people by the people, while the number of people practicing these ideals has become smaller and smaller.

“That’s a small radical subset of the housing co-op movement in Canada,” says Chaland. “This isn’t really part of our culture. We teach competition. We teach persuasiveness, we teach winners and losers. And these things are at odds with co-op principles.”

JOSH HAWLEY is a writer, editor, and musician living in Montreal. He studied journalism at Concordia University

Illustration by Caitlin Taguibao

Meet the foodies on the hunt to redefine Canadian cuisine

Anita Stewart has spent more than 30 years travelling across Canada, all in the name of food. In B.C., Stewart scuba-dived off the coast of southern Vancouver Island to see sea cucumbers and urchins. On the edges of the east coast, she tried everything from caviar to moonshine. And in the prairies, Stewart tasted sweet Saskatoon berry pies, bison meat, and everything in between. Through all these culinary adventures, Stewart searched for the answer to one, elusive question: What is Canadian cuisine?

When Stewart began her journey in the in the 1980s she says, there was a real sense Canadian cuisine didn’t exist—or, at least, nobody was calling it that. “It was really an oxymoron,” she quips. But now, embracing Canadian cuisine has become a movement, even a form of activism, with chefs, farmers, and bloggers from all across the country advocating for Canadian cuisine to be promoted and celebrated. These days, Stewart bristles at the suggestion Canadian cuisine isn’t actually a thing. If Canadian cuisine doesn’t exist, she says, then neither does Italian. “A cuisine is the way a people eat,” she adds. “It’s the product of a people and a place and the ingredients.”

Still, ask Canadians and non-Canadians alike to name our nation’s food and many are likely to respond with the stereotypical: poutine, beavertails, maple syrup—perhaps Tim Hortons. Stewart says she doesn’t care if people want to argue over the minutia of whether a poutine is Canadian; she defines Canadian cuisine as one of possibilities. That is, a diverse spectrum of local, regional and national ingredients that come together to create unique dishes—one that celebrate the huge variety of ingredients that Canada has to offer.

Stewart has written 11 books and co-authored another three. Her most recent book Canada: The Food, The Recipes, The Stories, published in 2008 but reprinted in Spring 2013, is an extensive compilation of recipes from across Canada, and from all the cultures of Canada. Recipes focus on the importance of local fresh ingredients (rather than a small handful of dishes to “represent” Canada). Diversity is celebrated: Ukrainian, Indian, Scottish and French recipes, for example, are included, spanning from Red Shoes gingerbread to lamb and from prune tagine (a Moroccan dish) to grilled pacific halibut garnished with Indian-spiced yogurt.

Such variety doesn’t surprise New Brunswick-based Christina Allain, a food activist and blogger who specializes in Acadian cuisine. Even culinary choices within Acadian cuisine vary vastly from region to region, she says, and that’s just one subculture. “We’re the contrary of a homogenous group,” she adds. “You look at Acadia and
all the differences in the region; they blow up when you look at all of Canada.” Like much of Canadian cuisine, Acadian food has been heavily shaped by relying on regional ingredients. Whatever grew in the area became a central part of the food—one reason why seafood is so prominent.

Allain’s favourite recipe is Acadian chicken fricot, which she describes as “a hearty stew containing potatoes, dumplings, chicken, and summer savoury.” Allain adds that a dish like chicken fricot can be reinvented depending on where the cook is located in Canada and what seasonal ingredients are available.

Let’s not forget the role of pre-colonial food, either. Indigenous cuisine is anything but new—you could call it the original food of Canada, produced centuries before our legal independence as a country in 1867. Yet unlike other historical comeback foods, such as Acadian cuisine, indigenous dishes are rarely available in restaurants, and there is no sense they’ve become popularized in grocery stores. Like with the broader Canadian cuisine conundrum, indigenous food is hard to define. Despite stereotypes that would limit it to bannock, indigenous cuisines across Canada are both diverse and largely dependent on the geography and natural vegetation of the region.

Rich Francis is an aboriginal chef (his father is Tetlit Gwich’in and his mother is Tuscarora). He’s currently working on perfecting his own restaurant, District Red, which specializes in indigenous cuisine. He’s also a Season 4 Top Chef Canada finalist. His focus is on pre-contact indigenous food—dishes that existed before European colonizers came to the land North America. First Nations food, from post-contact right up to today, says Francis, is perceived as both bland and boring— largely because it was a colonized diet given to First Nations. Much of the original tradition and culture was lost in that colonization, he adds. But that’s changing.

Francis hopes District Red will help bring indigenous foods to mainstream cuisine in Canada. “The ways I achieve this is by going back to before pre-contact,” says Francis, “utilizing what’s been given to us through tradition, culture and storytelling.” Francis wants to add his “personal touch, fearless creativity, and modern cooking technique”
to traditional indigenous foods, without feeling constricted by labeling his food as Canadian.

When I later ask Stewart how she would explain Canadian cuisine to someone who’s not from Canada, she says she’d tell them to get in the car, start driving, and eat their way across the country. Though a cross-country road trip may not be exactly practical, Stewart has a point. Maybe that’s what Canadian cuisine is: not a few iconic dishes, but a constant exploration of foods and people—a cross-country journey of flavours and histories that make up an entire nation’s cuisine. “If we squander our food tradition, and we turn our back our own products, then we turn our backs on our history, because food is the basis of everything,” says Stewart. “All I know is we’re cooking really good food in Canada and have for a long time.”

Illustration by Matt Daley

Are we too apathetic when it comes to social media user experiments?

A few months ago, Facebook got into trouble for experimenting with some of their users. In the name of “science,” the company decided to start tweaking people’s newsfeeds with an excess of either positive or negative status updates from friends. The study showed that exposure to these updates could make people more positive or negative themselves. In short, Facebook made some people sad. On purpose.

Shortly after Facebook published its study, the dating site OK Cupid admitted that it, too, was screwing with its users. The company told people who weren’t matches that they were perfectly compatible. It removed photos from profiles. It tracked conversations between people. Its motive was simple: to see what would happen and maybe improve its own matching algorithm.

Both of these experiments were wildly fascinating. They were also wholly unethical. Neither company had anything even close to informed consent from the people they toyed with. These sites treated their users like guinea pigs, which is weird because I’m not entirely sure it’s even legal to treat guinea pigs like guinea pigs anymore.

The response to these experiments was strange. Some people were outraged, obviously. But most either didn’t notice or didn’t care. Facebook—a site with more than a billion active users—decided to screw with random people’s emotions and the general response was an overwhelming “Meh.” Data collection is bland and uninteresting.

Maybe we just aren’t surprised when this stuff happens anymore. If you use the Internet, you’re experimented on. It isn’t new. In the early 2000s, I worked for a digital agency and one of our clients was a large retail website. For about six weeks, we showed half the site’s visitors yellow “buy” buttons, while the other half saw shiny new green buttons. The green ones showed a marginally higher click rate, which, extrapolated over a year, meant about $50 million. So all the buttons turned green. This is basic A/B testing—an exercise in using data to determine and influence behaviour.

By today’s standard, that kind of experiment is quaint. In the last decade, the Internet has become exceedingly good at tracking and manipulating people. Amazon uses browsing and purchase history to flog products, Google “scans” (but doesn’t “read”) email to try targeting ads, and pretty much every website you visit weighs and measures the actions you take for their own gain. As far as the Internet is concerned, you are the sum total of your clicks, likes and purchases. You are a data profile they can apply an algorithm to and nothing more.

It’s not the worst deal. You get a worldwide network of infinite information and constant communication; they get to sell you stuff. As far as Faustian pacts go, that seems sort of fair. But how far does it go? We get upset when a government starts peeking at our data, but we willingly hand it over to Facebook, Amazon, and Apple and, well, everyone else, assuming that the “Terms of Service” we didn’t actually read are reasonable. (It’s worth noting that Facebook inserted the clause saying they could experiment on you only after their emotion experiment had been conducted, but before they told anyone about it.)

I’m not bringing this up to fear-monger about the evils of modern technology. I like technology, I use Facebook and I shop with Amazon. And I understand that sometimes it brings on big sweeping cultural shifts. But we’re on the cusp of owning Apple Watches that can send our heartbeat to our spouse. Or, theoretically, Facebook. Or a doctor. Or an insurance company. Given where technology is headed, it’s not too much to ask that the companies handling our data be honest about what exactly they’re doing with it (or that we bother to pay attention).

Dave Eggers’ 2013 novel, The Circle, examined people willfully (even gleefully) handing over their information, their privacy and, ultimately, their humanity. People who didn’t like the book criticized that Eggers doesn’t understand technology; that he just doesn’t get it. After seeing the the crowd at Apple’s iPhone and Watch announcement react with almost religious fervour, though, I’m convinced saying Eggers doesn’t understand technology is a lot like reading 1984 and saying George Orwell doesn’t understand government.

Recently, a Vulture story listed “the seven most messed-up things about Sex and the City.” There are more than seven, of course, but one of the most egregious is a season three episode in which Samantha dates a music executive named Chivon. Samantha is white, Chivon is black, and his sister, Adeena, doesn’t want him dating Samantha. When Adeena confronts her at a nightclub, a fight ensues. The latter tells the former to “get your big black ass out of my face,” adding that the okra she serves at her restaurant—where “Martha Stewart meets Puff Daddy, on a plate,” in the words of Carrie’s voice-over—“wasn’t all that.”

I always took Sex and the City with a grain of salt, but I would be lying if I said I haven’t, oh, watched every single episode at least three times each. And while I never totally identified with the show’s value system, it didn’t seemed as malignant then, for many reasons, as it does in hindsight. The year 2000 doesn’t feel that long ago—clothing styles, at least, haven’t changed much since then (or rather, the limits of what is stylish have stretched enough to accommodate even Carrie’s most inexplicable outfits). But when re-examining the culture I came of age with—music, movies, and television from the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s—it’s easier to see the pitfalls.

It’s obvious now that some of the most beloved bits of the ’90s are totally, totally not okay—so obviously not-okay that they sometimes go overlooked, at least by those they don’t target. Consider Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the manager of Springfield’s Kwik-E-Mart, or Seinfeld’s Babu Bhatt, a Pakistani immigrant whose mannerisms were played up for comic effect (Seinfeld featured at least a handful of gags in which the show’s protagonists try not to seem racist). The ’90s were, in many ways, a progressive time for women—Elaine was a smart, sexually active professional, and Buffy the VampireSlayer, Clueless, and The Craft offered worlds in which girls were the protagonists, and female friendship were often key. Still, these worlds were sometimes marred by terrible sexual politics.

“It’s alright for guys like you and Court to fuck everyone, but when I do it, I get dumped,” says Sarah Michelle Gellar’s character, Kathryn Merteuil, in 1999’s Cruel Intentions, before hitting the nail on the head: “God forbid I exude confidence and enjoy sex.” But Merteuil is the film’s heartless villain, and by the end she is publicly humiliated for her misdeeds. In Can’t Hardly Wait, released a year earlier, justice is served to the malevolent jock when he’s called a “faggot” in front of his classmates. Nerds try to exact revenge on him by knocking him out with chloroform and posing him in photographs that suggest he’s gay.

It’s obvious that cultural products carry germs from the culture they come from, and equally obvious that our culture is, in many ways, afflicted. And yet, it’s easy to ignore the fact that so much of our deepest nostalgia is tainted by the worst of its time. We can acknowledge that the past had its problems without acknowledging that the past was our past. Nostalgia, so blissful in memory, is supposed to be an escape from the wormy world of now, but to rewatch, say, “Homer and Apu,” from the fifth season of The Simpsons, is to remember the times you laughed while a white guy impersonated a South Asian accent.

It goes without saying that it’s important to confront the ugly parts of pop culture, and also to acknowledge the ways we affirmed them—it’s dangerous to not be critical of who we’ve been, or to take stock of where we’ve ended up. Watching Sixteen Candles for the first time, I was horrified by the character of Long Duk Dong—it seemed shocking to me that such an obviously racist caricature could make it into a mainstream flick released just two years before I was born (it seems a lot less shocking to me now). It took me a while longer to realize that Sixteen Candles ends, happily, with a rape.

Of course, just because something—a word, a practice, a joke—is unacceptable in television doesn’t mean it’s not still a social problem. Standards of public decency are just the tip of the iceberg, which is why nostalgia can be constructive: a way to sift out problems that badly need addressing, problems we ignored the first time around. It won’t be long before the shows we watch today will elicit the same reactions in hindsight.

Photo by Janet Morton

In spring 2014, the ReMediate project brought together artist Christina Kingsbury, writer Anna Bowen, and non-profit Pollination Guelph, to make a 305 square metre quilt for the decommissioned Eastview Landfill in Guelph, Ont. Embedded with native seeds Kingsbury collected, the quilt was made from recycled paper and plant material. Sewn together entirely on site, the quilt is now in the process of biodegrading, taking root, and becoming a living habitat for threatened pollinators, such as native solitary and ground nesting bees, bumble bees, butterflies, and other indigenous species. Pollinators account for plant reproduction and are responsible for an estimated one out of three bites of food people eat. Devastatingly, however, there is a widespread global decline in pollinator diversity due to habitat loss, pesticide exposure, and climate change.

The Eastview Landfill site was historically wetland, and in parts, farmland. In use from 1961-2003, the site is now capped with clay and harvested for methane. Through research and interviews with professionals and citizens who held memories and information about the site, Bowen and Kingsbury documented fragments of its natural and waste history. The interviews informed Bowen’s accompanying poetry, which tells the story of the layered history of the landfill site, the writer’s experience, and the making of the quilt. During the installation, as Kingsbury sewed, Bowen printed selections from her poetry onto the sewn quilt. The public was invited to hear the poetry at audio listening stations on-site and to participate in the performative process of sewing and planting.

A gesture of care that critiques the exploitation of land and labour inherent in a consumer culture, the ReMediate project makes many connections: between work that is devalued in our economic paradigm; the labour of bees and pollinators; the domestic labour of women; and the low-wage labour of outsourced workers. Its creation embodies an intimacy that moves beyond commodification and nurtures different possibilities for relating with ecology.

Photo by Dan Hauser

Pins and needles

I

The man leans back and shifts his weight
looks out the kitchen window to the barn

He sees the starlings like iron filing overhead
the slump of bulrushes near the swamp

The spring peepers are out
and fireflies will light the field this evening

His son has seen them,
so many splinters of light caught glowing in the grass

He leans back and glances at the clock
its sturdy oak and constant ticking comfort

His wife does the dishes
her hands are ruddy from the scalding and soapless water

II

Women sewing together remember the landfill
how people would gather and compare their trash

Mattresses with the springs poking through
fridge magnets from trips to New York, burnt out night lights

The fabric puckers, a scramble for seam rippers
the plastic kettle is reboiled for decaffeinated tea

—I heard the man who sold the land took his own life
when he found out it was going to be a dump

—I heard that too

III

The man goes out to the barn once his dishes are done
takes the slop to the barrel-bodied pigs
Hey-o there you are

The boys have gone back out to play kick the can
to catch frogs in the failing light by the edge of the marsh,
its fat-thumbed bulrushes bobbing in the low wind

IV

Seams ripped, the women resume their sewing
Pull-pull, sew
Pull-pull, sew

One of the women pours the boiled water for tea
scalds a finger, stomps her foot

Recovered, she produces a wax paper-lined tin from her shopping bag,
passes around butter cookies

—I heard it was the neighbour.

Photo by Janet Morton

We know the wildness

We know the wildness
that treads above the two foot thick clay cap:

Coyote flank in the cold wood
that traces the edge of the creek

The unlikely heron arcing down to land
on an October hillside between fence and vetch—
somewhere deep in the cells of its iron-feathered wings
its heron body knew this place

An apple tree gone wild but sweet
having thrown off years of pruning

We know that wildness
we feel its paws on the clay cap
breaking into the shell like an egg tooth
slipping through a membrane of soap and
sinking up to its coyote knees in plastics

But the unread wildness awaits us:
decay, the shuddering of elements coming home

Photos by Robert Kingsbury

Illustration by Caitlin Taguibao

Inside food banks’ controversial no junk food policies

Controversy erupted in August after Ottawa’s Parkdale Food Centre announced it would stop accepting junk food, such as Kraft Dinner and hot dogs, effective immediately. Some wholeheartedly agreed with the centre’s stand; others virulently opposed to new restriction. Those in favour felt, like Karen Secord, Parkdale’s co-ordinator, that food bank users’ health is worth as much as anyone’s, and Parkdale should strive to provide healthy food. Those opposed to the move, however, asked why the food bank felt it had the authority to restrict people’s diet choices. Some former food bank users shared the opinion hotdogs were better than nothing, while others pointed out they didn’t have refrigeration to store so-called healthier food. Yet, for or against, and whether the commentary was rooted in personal experience, politics or stereotypes, the public conversation revealed something essential: our own attitudes toward those using food banks.

Parkdale isn’t the first or only food bank to restrict food donations. Founded more than 30 years ago, Toronto’s The Stop Community Food Centre, has made it the centre’s policy to only accept healthy food—a policy created after the community members it serves told the organization they wanted it that way. “We started as a food bank in the traditional sense, and over time our community members told us the food that we were providing was not enough,” says Kathe Rogers, The Stop’s communications manager. “It was not healthy enough, it was not meeting their dietary needs. And so over time, we became a healthy food bank. Because that is what people really need when they’re struggling. When they’re out there on low incomes, or they’re living in poverty, these are the items that are beyond their means.”

“I often joke that the folks at the food bank in The Stop have, without question,  more organic food than my kids do,” adds executive director Rachel Gray. “And that’s one of the things we think is really important.” Her philosophy is people can’t get or be healthy without healthy food. Heavily processed food loaded with sugar, salt or fat is unhealthy no matter how you slice it, she adds. Gray says people can debate whether it’s nice to have a box of macaroni and cheese, but if that’s all a person has to eat it becomes problematic: there’s no choice; it may be culturally inappropriate or irrelevant; and it’s not a balanced diet. “It’s not the way to good health,” she adds. “And if we’re not supporting people to get healthy, what are we achieving?”

Ideas such as “any type of food helps”—which goes hand-in-hand with the assumption that low-income people should be grateful for whatever they get—can belie fundamental assumptions about people’s worth. Stigma that blames the economically disadvantaged for their situation is often included in conversations about food banks, as are the stereotypes “poor people don’t like to cook” and only like junk food. A report from Washington, DC-based organization Cooking Matters, found that while assumptions about the eating habits of low-income Americans were rampant, the reality is poor families most often cook dinner at home, mostly from scratch, and are highly interested in making healthy meals. The stumbling block for many families is the price. An article by Jesse Bauman entitled “Poor People Can’t Cook and Other Myths,” published on Food Secure Canada’s website, reflects similar data for Canadians. In a small survey that asked low-income people about their food skills, Bauman found those who have to carefully budget a meal plan simply can’t afford to eat out. Instead, he writes, people “have developed many of the skills necessary to make the best of their situation.”

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the food bank discussion will go away anytime soon. Every month, more than 830,000 Canadians access a food bank, according to HungerCount 2013, a report created by Food Banks Canada. Of these 37 percent are children. And, despite being once envisioned as a short-term solution to economic crisis in the ’80s, food bank usage is on the rise. “Within the food bank network,” HungerCount 2013 reports, “crisis has become the norm. Canadians continue to give generously, and food banks continue to stock, give, and re-stock.” While Gray would like to see food banks become obsolete—The Stop advocates for increases to social assistance and minimum wage that would put solid safety nets in place—she agrees they’re double-edged swords. “Food banks are still around because people are still hungry,” says Gray. “Our food bank is busy and thriving because food banks don’t work as a means of addressing poverty and hunger.”

Photo by Mark J Chalifoux Photography

Montreal choreographer confronts street life, addiction, and the Canadian aboriginal experience

As calls for a public inquiry into the many cases of missing and murdered aboriginal women in Canada go unheard by the federal government, Montreal choreographer Lara Kramer’s most recent piece, titled NGS (“Native Girl Syndrome”), could not be more timely.

“Native Girl Syndrome” references a term Kramer came across as she researched her first dance piece on residential schools (a compulsory education system notorious for its abuse and assimilation of aboriginal children in Canada). The term refers to the likelihood of aboriginal girls who, upon leaving residential school, enter abusive relationships or prostitution. Too often,  these women also end up on the streets or in jail. “I thought the name was really potent,” says Kramer, “so I held on to it. It really helped shape the piece.”

NGS explores themes of addiction, cultural disorientation, and alienation, all in relation to the Canadian aboriginal experience. Performed by Karina Iraola and Angie Cheng, it unfolds against a backdrop of street and urban culture. Kramer says the initial inspiration for the work was her grandmother, who moved  from her remote community of Lac Seul in northwestern Ontario to live on the city streets in Winnipeg.

The piece is not, however, a depiction of the one specific story of her grandmother, adds Kramer. Rather, NGS offers comment on street life, the addiction of two women—and something larger.  Kramer’s characters have a history. “NGS looks at the aftermath of cultural genocide in Canada, the whitewashing of native people in this country and its effects,” Kramer says, “When I see the vicious cycle of addiction and prostitution of First Nations women, I feel it’s part of something bigger.”

Since it was first performed last year, NGS has toured to Montreal, Vancouver, and Edmonton, among other cities. Kramer has designed the piece to be accessible to an audience beyond contemporary dance enthusiasts—she straddles the line between dance and theatre to be as realistic as possible. No background in dance is required to understand the themes and messages.

In this regard, NGS is characteristic of Kramer’s approach to movement and the body. She didn’t want to use the body as an abstract form, says Kramer. “I wanted to go from a realistic approach,” she adds, “so a lot of my approach to the body is giving the performer time to investigate the environment.”

Although Kramer’s roots, ancestors and much of her family are from the Lac Seul First Nation community, she was born in London, Ont. She has been dancing since she was three years old, eventually moving to Montreal, Que., to study dance creation at Concordia University, graduating in 2008. In 2012, she founded her company, Lara Kramer Danse, to support the research, creation and production of her work and community projects, such as offering school-age children an opportunity to connect with theatre and dance. Her work has become more politically charged with time and now focuses around human rights issues affecting aboriginals in Canada, which earned her recognition as a human rights advocate from the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre.

Next spring, Kramer will start on the creation of a piece titled Tame, which deals with the themes of restraint on self-expression and the boundaries between normalcy and creative expression, which she expects to be ready for fall 2015. Although no performances of NGS are scheduled at the moment, Kramer is planning some for the coming months, notably in the U.S.

Illustration by Caitlin Taguibao

On the front lines of the North’s rising food crisis

A young, Arctic Bay protestor, about as tall as a baby tree, appears snug in pink mittens and a fur-trimmed coat. Their hands clasp onto a rectangular-shaped cardboard sign: “I need milk.” For Nunavut residents, two litres of milk can cost as much as $14.

Canada’s North is in crisis. The short phrase “food insecurity”—as blunt as the high-price stickers—comes with a complex history of the North’s experience with Westernization, poverty, and isolation. The term itself refers to inaccessibility of healthy and affordable food. In Nunavut, there is a 70 percent rate of household food insecurity, over eight times higher than Canada’s average household. Essentially, this means many Nunavummiut go hungry every day. And on June 9, 2012, they decided to stop suffering in silence.

That day, 30 members of Feeding my Family, a Facebook community of Northerners founded in that same month to bring awareness to the area’s high food costs, took their protests offline. Gathered in front of Iqaluit’sbig box grocery store,NorthMart, the group cheered, chanted, and waved protest signs. Within four days of the inaugural peaceful protest, Feeding my Family’s online member count jumped from around 4,000 to 19,000—over half of Nunavut’s population.Two years and five protests later, the Facebook page is updated daily with posts from Northern citizens and angered Canadians who want to help.

Feeding My Family creator,Leesee Papatsie, who launched the group as an answer to the territory’s outrageous food costs, says that she expected to only do one protest. However, after the first protest, community members expressed a desire to do more. If you were to look up the word “protest” in an Inuit dictionary, she says, there would be no definition. Though speaking against injustice is “not traditionally who [Inuit] are,” she adds, “You look at those prices and think, ‘Who in the world would put those prices?’”

Today, the group continues as a “wall” of shame: members post pictures of food, household items, diapers, hygiene products, showing their high costs. On May 29, 2012, Papatsie shared some of the group’s first photos showing the high cost of food in Nunavut: $16 for cranberry juice, $11.65 for four litres of milk and $13.69 for 2.2 kilograms of flour. Feeding My Family now has 21,000 members. Yet, prices have not improved. In September 2014, for instance, a member posted a photo of an Orville Redenbacher’s 10-bowl pop-up popcorn that cost $20.59. Ontarians have the luxury of visiting their local Walmart to buy the same product for $6.97.

Papatsie says she understands food costs in the North will be higher—they’re in an isolated area with scant resources for infrastructure—but she maintains retailers hold some responsibility when it comes to pricing: “They are ripping people off. Period.”

Chris Klar, who manages one of the two independently-owned retail stores in Arviat, Nunavut, located in the Kivalliq Region, says that isn’t the case. At Klar’s store, customers can buy a pound of lean ground beef for $4.99, an 18 carton of eggs for $4.99 and four litres of milk for $6.79. This is, he adds, thanks to competition—unlike other Northern retailers that might be the only store in the community, his store, Eskimo Point Lumber Supply, can abide by the laws of supply and demand.

Even so, Klar contends many people who complain about food prices in the North are actually misinformed. Some foods, he adds, such as flavoured water and most “junk food,” are not covered under the Nutrition North Canada (NNC) federal subsidy program. Introduced in April 2011, NCC replaced the former Food Mail program.NCC differs in two key areas: unlike Food Mail, it only subsidizes so-called “healthy” foods, and, also unlike Food Mail, it passes those savings directly to the retailers. Subsidies are based on the cost per kilogram of a particular food, multiplied by the kilograms of the product. Stores are supposed to pass savings onto the customers. Some indicate what a product would cost if there were no subsidy; others don’t.

Reasons or blame aside, some just want to help. The grassroots group Helping Our Northern Neighbours works with members of Feeding My Family to connect those seeking food donations with those eager to donate. As of September 2014, the group’s donor list (those waiting for donations) consisted of 106 families. It includes elders, single parents, couples with children, grandparents raising grandchildren, and extended families living together, according to B.C. resident and group director Jennifer Gwilliam. “We need to get our name and mission out there so that we can reach many more potential donors,” Gwilliam says, “I hate having to make people wait a long time for help.” People are often desperate, she adds, and many tell her they go without food for a day or more so they can feed their children. Some days an entire family may not eat.

The Government of Nunavut has also created an initiative to alleviate hunger and poverty. The Nunavut Food Security Coalition—which includes Feeding My Family and grocery chain North West Company—released the Nunavut Food Security Strategy and Action Plan in May 2014. The plan is designed to “provide Nunavummiut with an adequate supply of safe, culturally preferable, affordable, nutritious food” and to also promote traditional values and  and environmental sustainability. The Coalition has identified six focus points, including food production and legislation, alongside several objectives, such as enhancing school nutrition programming.

Sara Statham, the territorial food security coordinator for the Government of Nunavut, admits there are still a lot of “big picture items” that need to be addressed—such as the loss of traditional culture—but believes the plan is a start. Grocery stores, for example, she says, are relatively new in the North. Papatsie adds it’s a common misconception for southerners to think the Inuit can easily harvest food.Many are finding it harder to keep up with the demanding prices of harvesting country food, such as caribou, char and berries. Foundational changes must be made, says Statham. “But in the meantime,” she adds, “we can do what we can in terms of ensuring people have access to resources that can help them in the short term.”

In Feb. 2014, Samara, a Canadian research group, nominated Papatsie for their “Everyday Political Citizen Award.” Papatsie accepted the nomination with hesitation. “I didn’t create Feeding My Family for me. I created it for the people. The people who keep posting pictures and the people who keep the site alive,” she says. “I know kids go hungry daily. I know people struggle to put food on the table meal-by-meal, day-by-day. That’s who the site is created for.”

Illustration by Caitlin Taguibao

A personal journey through food and assimilation

My eighth grade classroom was in a portable with a faulty air conditioner. At lunch, the little tin can of a classroom would fill with the pungent smells of masala—a distinct whiff of bay leaf, turmeric-infused curry, and kabobs marinated in garlic paste. The class was predominantly South Asian kids; technically, the white kids were the minority. Still, there might as well have been hundreds of them—loud and popular, they owned the classroom. And, at lunch they always complained: “Ewwww, this place stinks.”

I knew exactly what food they were talking about. My food. The food my family has eaten for generations. But I joined in, pretending the smell of these “foreign” lunches also repulsed me. I desperately hoped it would spare me from the rude stares and comments about “those people’s” food. You could say it worked: nobody ever aimed their snide remarks directly at me—and yet they did. It didn’t matter that my lunch wasn’t centered out. I was there, obviously the “Other,” with my big nose, frizzy hair, and olive skin. I was “those people.” My Grade 8 lunches taught me that.

My story is the story of many non-Western kids living in the West—particularly those of South Asian and Middle Eastern descent. I’m sure some of us escaped the subtle racist teasing, but for so many others any lunch but crackers-and-cheese, Fruit Roll-Ups, or bologna sandwiches, became a source of deep cultural shame. Add to this our clothes (in my case, shalwar kameez and gold necklaces with Arabic calligraphy, courtesy my pious aunts), our foreign languages (Urdu and my family’s village Persian dialect), and our status as the “Other” soared. Seven-year-old me cringed at the thought of the other kids hearing me call my father “Baba.” What started with humiliation over school lunches, ended with everything that made me, well, me. But I did what many kids like me did: attempt to assimilate.

I begged my mother to start buying me Lunchables, those strange artificial pre-made lunch meals for little kids. The cold cuts looked like plastic and the cheese tasted and felt like rubber. But I chose that over homemade kabob wraps.By the end of elementary school, my culture felt worthless; my food felt like a burden. White and western seemed better, cooler. Eventually, I embodied this feeling of cultural inferiority so deeply that it grew bigger than asking for bland pre-packaged foods for lunch. In place of cultural pride, manifested a self-loathing I would use to show the white kids that I was just like them. I pretended to hate the green chutney sandwiches my mother packed, made fun of my own food and my own people, all for the amusement others.

As I went through high school and now university, my South Asian and Middle Eastern friends talked frequently about the relentless lunch-time teasing. We even laughed about it. But it was an odd laughter, one with an undercurrent of rage and sadness at the erasure of our cultural identity. Why were we all so okay—or at least pretending to be—with the pressures to assimilate, to figuratively blanche our meals and ourselves? Why chose to look back on it as if it was all just some big joke, rather than confronting our collective embarrassment? The wrongness in the way our lunches—and us—were treated as dirtier, stinkier, and lesser?

I knew it wasn’t just me and my small circle of friends who had experienced the grossed-out reactions to our roti and curries, so in August I took to Twitter and asked others to share their experiences with me. The replies flooded in—from all over the world. Many wanted to speak with me privately, uneasy about expressing this cultural hurt and anger in the open. Some were willing to speak out publicly. Public or private, my suspicions were confirmed: variations of my Grade 8 lunch had happened, and continues to happen, to so many of us.

One story that struck a particular chord with me was that of 18-year-old university student Tasnima Uddin whose parents emigrated from Bangladesh to the UK, where Uddin was born and raised. She recalls the first day of Grade 4 where she took out her lunch and her classmates let out a chorus of “ewwws”; they even complained to the teacher about the smell.  “I can remember crying about this for a long time in my room,” says Uddin. “It wasn’t just the food I was crying about. It was my culture and especially my skin colour.”

Eventually, Uddin started to throw away her lunches. When her mother noticed none of her lunch containers were coming home, she said nothing about it. The next day when Uddin unpacked her lunch, there was no Bengali food—instead, a tuna sandwich. She never brought her “own food” into elementary or secondary school again. Uddin has only recently began bringing her own cultural food to university. She says she still gets negative responses, but feels stronger this time. She’s determined to develop a thicker hide to withstand the backlash. It occurs to me, though, that she shouldn’t have to.

This shaming doesn’t just happen to kids. Liane Khoury, now 30, moved to Halifax from Jordan 12 years ago to go to Dalhousie University, where she’s majoring in Spanish. She lived in an apartment-style residence, and whenever she ate home-cooked meals, she received comments. “Such as,” she says, “‘Oh this smells spicy’ or ‘that looks weird’ and even ‘Oh my god! You eat hot yogurt? That’s disgusting.’” It bothered Khoury, but it didn’t stop her.

Now out of university, Khoury says friends often ask her to make Middle Eastern food.A self-described “serious foodie,” she loves when her friends want to taste her cooking. Recently, she made them kusa and warak—stuffed zucchini and grape leaves, a very popular Middle Eastern dish—and freekeh, or green wheat, which is similar to quinoa.

I wonder if this change has less to do with maturity—leaving the school environment and entering adulthood—and more to do with the new hipness of “ethnic” food (a term that makes me cringe). Every time I walk down Toronto’s trendy Queen West Street, which Vogue recently named the second-coolest district in the world, I pass multiple Indian restaurants, a Korean restaurant, a Vietnamese restaurant, and a sushi place. NOW Magazine’s Toronto’s 25 Hottest Restaurants 2014 includes Japanese restaurant Kinton Ramen and Indian restaurant Pukka, which is described as going “beyond the clichés of mainstream Indian restaurants.” The latter looks like a cool place, but I doubt the food is truly “authentic.” I certainly can’t imagine my father, born and raised in Mumbai, eating there. For so many of these restaurants the key ingredient to success isn’t food, but people—specifically the restaurants white patrons.

These restaurants serve a sanitized Westernized version of our food, something to keep customers comfortable, to let them experience the “exotic” within the safety of the fashionable Western realm. In the trendy areas, I see patrons of all backgrounds in so-called “ethnic” restaurants— where the waiters don’t speak in strong accents, the food is described in Anglicized terms on the menu, and the food is served stylishly in porcelain white bowls, rather than tin plates. But I rarely see white patrons in Indian restaurants in the heart of Toronto’s Gerrard Street India Bazaar. Here, there is no jazz playing softly through the speakers. Here, we blare over-the-top Bollywood hits, and there are no stylish 20-somethings sipping wine with their butter chicken. Instead we have loud South Asian families of five sipping mango lassi from foam cups.

Maybe there’s nothing inherently wrong with the trendy spots, but it’s hard to avoid the fact they’re making money serving Indian-style food that is, in many ways, disconnected from Indian culture (and the same is true of Thai food, Chinese food, Korean food, and on and on). This doesn’t creates cultural pride or erases racism in—in fact, it might even make it easier and more normal for white people to appropriate it.Take the experience of Keerat Sandhu, a 22-year-old student and social activist, immigrated with her parents to British Columbia from India in 1994.

When Sandhu was 19, she suggested her group of friends—all white—go to her favourite Indian restaurant for dinner. Immediately, her friends responded with a chorus of comments like “All the food looks weird,” “I just don’t like the smell.” “I don’t know, I just find it gross.” Before that moment, Sandhu believed the older people became, the more accepting they would be. As she stood listening to her friends, she realized that wasn’t the case. “From the food, to the clothing, to the language—it was all seen as a savage foreign concept until the titular moment where being exotic became cool,” Sandhu says now. “But please remember, it was still only seen as cool if you were white and doing it, not if you were brown.”

I’ll admit the recent popularity of cuisines from all over Asia has certainly made my life a little easier. I no longer feel the overwhelming paranoia that a white kid will tease me for eating curry; friends flock to my house to taste my mother’s homemade biryani. But the uneasiness of heating my lunches in the Ryerson University student lounge microwave hasn’t entirely disappeared. It’s a bittersweet victory—if it is one at all. The mainstream may enjoy eating Indian, Arabic or Chinese food, but not the culture that comes with those foods. Racism is still bubbling under the surface of the pseudo-acceptance; it’s not as if it magically disappeared when shawarmas became popular.

I no longer secretly loathe my culture—in fact, I’m immeasurably proud—but the reasons behind my transition are complex and difficult to articulate. I often ask myself if I’ve based my newfound cultural pride on the acceptability of the Western gaze. Am I only okay with my food now, because the West has reached surface acceptance? If the teasing were still harsh, would I be as openly proud as I am now? I’m not really past the racism, or past the teasing. Some of this pride, I know, stems from anger—a middle-finger response to the humiliations of my grade school days. And, as an adult, I understand now the problem isn’t actually the food, but the deep-set toxicity of racism and anti-immigration sentiments. The food was only a conduit for people to unleash their perceptions, perhaps without even knowing that they had them.

It makes a difference, too, that I now live in a city as diverse as Toronto. I’m not sure I would feel the same kind of confidence in my culture and my people were I living in a homogenous, predominantly white town in northern Ontario. Still, I’d like to believe I could walk into any lunch room, not even remotely embarrassed at the smell of some homemade, expertly seasoned kabob. And if anyone said something, I’d proudly declare, “I’ll take my green chutney sandwich over PB&J any day.”

Illustration by Caitlin Taguibao

How agribusiness erased our food culture—and why it’s time to start fighting back

Once taken for granted in most societies, including North American ones, the lively and dynamic connections between the sheer physicality of food and the imaginative realm of culture were thrown under the food truck in 1954. That’s when Harvard University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture teamed up to launch a seminar on a new word coined for the occasion of a new food system: agribusiness.

This new term dramatically reframed many things food-related, not least the way culture and food were erased from the picture. Gone was the idea of agriculture—a term that recalls ancient Rome’s cultivation of fields (fields are the Latin-based agri in agriculture). Agribusiness said it like it was, and identified food products as commodities that came to consumers through a supply chain made up of large corporations that handled every detail from farm inputs, processing, distribution, and retailing to the prep work prior to heat and eat.

Ever since agribusiness devoured the space for agriculture, the relationship with a living and public food culture has been kept to the sidelines of the food system. As in days of old, people still celebrate major holidays and life events with food—all the better to sell you commodities, my dear—but food no longer has a place at the table of how place, tradition, identity, connection, generosity, conviviality, commensality, competence or personal power, responsibility and spirituality are measured, understood, entrenched and supported.

Of course, though agribusiness is a workhorse of a word, it’s not the word itself that singlehandedly pushed aside notions of music and culture as the food of life (as Shakespeare once intimated). We can also, and largely, pinpoint the way in which the entire logistics of the food industry was restructured—sidelining culture along with other unproductive (i.e. not commodity-producing) elements of social well-being and cohesion.

Absent culture, the North American food system is one where few can grow or cook food from scratch; where half the population do not know when to start or stop eating and are either therefore seriously overweight or underweight; in which few believe that food should be thy medicine and medicine thy food; where a quarter of all meals are eaten alone in a car, at a desk, or in front of a TV; where labels are necessary in order to know where the food came from and what it contains; where foods can be advertised as low-fat, low-sugar, or low salt, all referring to the conditions under which the food was processed in a factory, not raised on the land or sea; or where donuts produced by a foreign-owned chain are something people line up for and treat as a signature of their national identity. If warning labels are worth the paper they’re written on, they should really specify “culture-free,” and the food safety term for “identity preserved” (a reference to the ability to track food travel along the supply chain) should be replaced with “identity gutted.”

The disappearance of culture from a food system is a sad thing to behold or bemoan. But the rescuing, reclaiming and updating of food-culture connections, a central if seldom-stated project of Canadian food movement activists, is as joyous and enlivening as political culture can get.

I’m ashamed to admit that I’m such a political economy geek that Susan Crean’s great 1976 book, Who’s Afraid of Canadian Culture, is about as close to participating in culture as I’ve ever come. But I know what I like, and I think Crean was bang-on to highlight the word “afraid” in her title. The ultimate expression of dependency and colonization, after all, is fear of going deep within to find the strength to recover personal power and to stand on one’s own—perhaps to fall—and have no outsider to blame.

Since Crean’s book came out, many Canadian cultural producers have come out of the shadows to win national and international acclaim for music, film, novels, photography, radio and television documentary, current affairs programming, alternative newspapers and journalism, and much more. But cultivation has barely started on the wellsprings of popular and high culture: a confident, engaged, empowered population imbued with a workplace culture of artisanal pride and competence, an informal culture of activity and participation, and a personal culture of grace, connection to place and responsibility for stewardship.

Food could play a starring cultural role precisely where it needs to be played—in the humble activities of daily life that prepare people to receive and produce cultural works of expansive imagination and creativity. I’ve been actively involved in the food movement for over 20 years, and I’m proud to say the food movement is at the forefront of reclaiming food as a site of a vibrant public culture and social customs in general. Yet, at the same time, because the public discourse and conversation around food so often obsesses around matters of nutrition and of disorderly misconduct (overweight, anorexia, gluten intolerance, all the ad nauseums), few observers have waxed on about a food policy agenda which is fundamentally cultural.

We can, I think, do better. Start with the word actionism, which comes from Michael Sacco, founder of ChocoSol Traders. Sacco and his merry band of social enterprisers import direct-traded cacao from Indigenous villages in forested areas of Oaxaca, Mexico, a center of vibrant Indigenous food culture and Zapatista-style politics. The imported cacao is processed in Toronto, using bicycle-power and adding ingredients grown on the organization’s roof and nearby farms, and then sold at farmers markets. A label declares it is not a product, cacao, but a relationship with Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

This is the style of hundreds of food-based social enterprises and civil society organizations: Eat the change you want to be; practice what you preach, while preaching and advocating for change. Sacco calls this full-spectrum approach to change-making actionism to distinguish it from activism—normally understood to mean demonstrating against the wrongdoings of the powers-that-be.

Sacco also came up with the term “inter-culturalism” to distinguish the world foods orientation of many in the food movement from mainstream multiculturalism—ordinarily taken to mean respect for distinctive customs of the huge variety of ethno-cultural groups that make up Canada. What Sacco and many food actionists promote is based more on actively sharing, learning and adapting from many cultures.

Such intercultural practice is the norm at FoodShare, North America’s most influential city-wide food security organization, which has based many of its programs on adaptations from South America— especially its signature Good Food Box program, based on farmers’ market baskets organized for people on low income in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

First cousin to actionism is empowerment, which is the food movement’s strong suit. Critics may scoff at those who think the way to a better world happens one consumer purchase at a time, but the fact remains food offers everyone a range of 200–300 choices every day to eat healthier, more locally, more sustainably. Coffee double-double or black. Tea fair trade or not. And so on, all the livelong day.

And, please, don’t duck the issue of choice by saying some healthier choices cost more. Most cost less— less booze and less tobacco (both agricultural products, lest we forget), followed by fewer cheap meats, candies, and adulterated starches. With the savings, we can buy more whole grains and fresh produce. Let’s also try fewer foods from the store (mostly imported from afar, anyway) and more sprouts grown on windowsills, herbs grown on balconies, tomatoes on the roof, and squash and greens in the backyard.

The food movement popped its head up during the 1990s and started to grow like a weed after 2000. It is, dare I say, quintessentially post-modern and a product of the millennial generation. It has no formal program or organization. It is, as Vandana Shiva says, a movement of ands, not buts. But its starting point, I believe, is an understanding that food is many-sided. I liken it to a Rubik’s Cube that can’t be understood or solved on one side, but must link actions on six sides. One side relates to food safety and nutrition that produce health. Another to production, distribution and consumption patterns that produce environmental sustainability. A third to job-related income or sustenance. A fourth to community cohesion and identity. Yet another to equity and inclusion (sometimes called justice). And the final side to the grace and connection that flow from all the people and forces that have had their hand in bringing food to the table.

Each of those six sides requires a culture: either in the anthropological or sociological sense, relating to community; or in a spiritual and ethical sense that permeates a society; or in a deep personal sense that flowers from gratitude and connection. And, yes, it needs to be said: Culture is what’s good for what ails today’s food and all the people who want to liberate themselves from today’s food system strictures.

Wayne Roberts wrote this on his 70th birthday. He is the author of the No-Nonsense Guide to World Food and Food for City Building: A Field Guide for Planners, Actionists and Entrepreneurs.