A Canadian Food Hero: Chef Craig Flinn

Full disclosure: I've known Craig since high school in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, when we sang together in the choir. He's a funny, easy-going guy with a rich, deep singing voice. But for today's Canadian Food Experience assignment - to choose our Canadian food hero - I chose Chef Craig Flinn because his dedication to cooking with fresh, seasonal, local food and celebrating Canada's rich, varied culinary heritage was my first real exposure to slow food. His first cookbook, Fresh & Local, remains one of my favourites after years of use, and his other books get regular use in my kitchen at home. If you're visiting Halifax, his trio of restaurants on Barrington Street - Chives Canadian Bistro, Ciboulette Cafe, and newly-opened lunch spot Two Doors Down - are an absolute must. While Craig is one of Nova Scotia's culinary stars, he's not as well known as he really ought to be outside of the Maritimes. Let's change that.

photo courtesy of Chef Craig Flinn (via his Facebook feed)

Slow News Summary: the summery edition

There's so much great stuff to share from the past couple of months! Let's get right to it:

On slow design, slow making, and slow home:

• I've mentioned the Slow Textiles Group in London previously - you can now buy the first Geometrics exhibition catalogue. 
• I love this post (subscription required) on how retrofitting postwar/inner-ring suburbs to appeal to today's market can improve walkability and sustainability - and Spacing Edmonton's examination of the inner-ring communities in my own city and how they were originally planned.
• Thor ter Kulve's brilliant temporary playground installations got a mention on Grist (along with a raft of design-geek blogs).
• EcoSalon's list of incredible urban parks in unlikely places includes the railway bridge intervention (the LIVINGbridge) here in Edmonton.
• This gorgeous mirrored tapestry by UK artist Lee Borthwick leaves me weak-kneed.
• A brilliant design concept: empty office building to pop-up hotel. I'd stay there, wouldn't you? Let's hope someone makes it a reality.
• At my own slow-home-in-progress, we've been planting our garden and found these articles on building healthy soil and building wicking beds really helpful.

On slow fashion:

• Ecouterre continue to dominate coverage of the sustainable and ethical fashion scene, including recent stories on Heel Condoms to change your shoes' look, a gorgeous boho inner-tube handbag, the challenges facing silk jacquard hand-weavers, a farm-to-hanger fashion business, and revolutionary jeans created using eucalyptus pulp and digital priniting techniques.
• EcoSalon have been no slouches, either, with profiles of ethical fashion weeks in New Zealand and Berlin, textile certifications 101, a waterless fabric dyeing method, a fashion incubator in NYC, and a soul-searcher on clothes hoarding. 
• In response to the tragedy in Bangladesh, Sweet Cycle Apparel explained their t-shirt to promote slow fashion, the marketing gurus at MarkLives talked about trends toward slow fashion, and Ecouterre pointed out that a consortium of North American manufacturers' alternative safety plan threatens to neuter the reforms being proposed. I know which companies I won't be shopping with anymore.
• Rewardrobe describe a luscious London menswear shop devoted to slow fashion. 
• The Valente's slow fashion thesis project.
• Nadine Riopel asked, "What can a regular person with a limited budget living in a mid-sized city do to clean up her clothing supply chain?"
• A slow fashion webstore in the US is getting some buzz.  
• Not Just A Label, Blouin ARTINFO and even HuffPo are featuring editorials calling for slow fashion. 
• Modular childrens' clothing? Brilliant!
• One I'd missed that Pinterest brought to my attention: a great post on creating a capsule wardrobe on a tight budget.
• Canadians, you've got to check out Edmonton-based made-to-measure footwear designers Poppy Barley, if you haven't already. (The link is to their new, complete manufacturing information, explaining why they are working with a group of Mexican artisans.)

I love this idea, via Nutfield Genealogy: an old family recipe, woodburned as it appears on the original recipe card, into a cutting board. 

On slow food:

• NRDC's primer on the Slow Food movement.
• This film about Slow Food looks brilliant.
• I've already talked a little about the Canadian Food Experience project; the first round-up post and second round-up post (and all the link love therein) are must-reads. Personally, I'm excited to compare these two authentic bannock recipes, and the maple syrup pie and maple whisky butter tarts, and to try this poutine recipe and this saskatoon ice cream.
• An interview with the brilliant Anna Brones about her new cookbook The Culinary Cyclist.
• An affordable good food box for remote communities and food deserts? Genius.
• The Atlantic had a long, thought-provoking read on the role processed food could play in ending the obesity epidemic by making healthy food more widely and cheaply available. (Read it before you scoff.)
• On feminism and slow food - worth pondering.

On slow travel:

• A fabulous post on travelling round-the-world with your family that gives both serious advice and daydream fodder.
• Slow Travel 101 from Flashpacker Family.
• Gran Tourismo talk about using smaller towns as home base.
• The pros and cons of slow travel.
• Carl Honore on Living La Vida Local in Paris.
• How to tell if you are a slow traveller.
• Great posts from new fave The Way of Slow Travel on slow travel on the cheap, slow travel when you're pressed for time, and a thoughtful travel-focused response to my own musings on privilege.

On slow living, slow parenting, slow money, and so forth:

• In praise of slow tech - as in older technologies that force us to slow down, think harder, and focus our creative energy.
• Another take on slow tech: high tech, but human-centred, following the slow food tenets of "good, clean, and fair". What an interesting alternative to the low-tech/handmade version of slow tech!
• Scott Laningham on The Slow Fix, with an interview with Carl Honore
• A review (en francais) of the gorgeous-looking SLO magazine.
• Diane MacDonald on Slow Consulting.
• Australia's Storyology talk slow journalism.
• American friends, check out Slow Flowers to find florists who design using US-grown blooms. (Here's hoping they expand their reach to the rest of North America.) It's from Debra Prinzing, who literally wrote the book on local bouquets.

On sustainability and environment:

• EcoSalon had a great two-part post that might make you rethink your birth control routine because of the environmental and health implications of conventional methods.
• A fascinating story about oil pipelines and journalism.
• Ocean acidification is very bad news for krill. Not good.
• Inhabitat have a top-5 post that you really need to read.

U of A Surface & Textile Design course

Lucky me, last week I got to go to the world's coolest summer camp!

As part of the University of Alberta's Residential Interiors certificate program (which I'm still gradually completing), they are offering a handful of courses as one-week intensives (instead of a weekly evening class), including Surface and Textile Design. Our instructor for this very hands-on studio course was fibre artist Lesley Stafiniak. We learned wet-felting, needle-felting, shibori, batik, and silk-painting techniques, watched a documentary about natural dyes, and discussed pattern creation techniques. My mind is still buzzing with all the possibilities.

A Regional Canadian Food: Hodge Podge

I really wasn't sure what regional food I should write about, so last week, I asked my many expat friends what Canadian foods they miss. The answers were really interesting (and might provide ideas for future posts). Along with many, many varieties of junk food for savoury and sweet cravings, here are some of the things that were listed:
- for the Prairie folks: Taber corn (the super-sweet corn grown in Taber, Alberta), saskatoons, Alberta beef, green onion cakes, pierogies, cabbage rolls
- for the maritimers: seafood (crab cakes, fish cakes, scallops, mussels, lobster), Hodge Podge, blueberry grunt, donairs
- butter tarts, Nanaimo bars, cucumber / sweet pickles, maple syrup

Hodge Podge

The Slow Movement and Privilege

Privilege is problematic.

It keep us divided from each other by cocooning us in invisible comfort. Inside its walls, it is easy to assume that everyone lives as we live and thinks as we think. It whispers that anyone who is Not Like Us must not be trying hard enough. It is the nice guy explaining in the comment section that men should be welcomed to the women-only bicycle ride. It is your employer not giving the woman in the next cubicle more responsibilities, because she's just going to leave the company when she gets pregnant. It is your grandparents saying that racism no longer exists because there is a black president, and your kids' school only including the pre-contact life of first nations communities in their curriculum.

If you are reading this blog post, that means that you are part of a tiny fraction of humanity who can read and have internet access. Bloggers and social media users tend to forget that we are a subculture within that tiny fraction of humanity. We are so privileged.

One of the most troubling problems in the slow movement is its lack of diversity. People who are talking about applying slow movement ideas to various disciplines - or who talk about environmentalism, or bicycle infrastructure advocacy, or any of a number of similar topics - are mostly over-educated white people like me. The slow home hashtag is used by architects and interior designers, and we tend to assume that home ownership is the norm. We need to talk about slow home for renters. Slow design is still a term mostly used by academics. The term slow travel is mostly being used by young people who travel - often college kids with the resources to travel around the world, or digital entrepreneurs who can work while travelling. The slow fashion hashtag often skews toward talk of luxury design, or things being custom-made - or on the flip side of that, being inexpensively handmade but with a huge time investment. The slow food movement is portrayed from the outside as being about expensive restaurant meals and overpriced farmers' markets and ridiculously time-consuming gardens, instead of being about good, clean, fair food that starts locally. Even minimalism, the most diverse of the related topics, is essentially a philosophy born of privilege - "too much stuff" is the ultimate first-world problem.

Even the conversation following the (brilliant) Salon post on Pollan's possible sexism and the issues of privilege in the slow food movement has tended to turn into arguments over feminism, or whether the DIY movement is actually disproportionately female, or comments pointing to worthy slow food projects being done in partnership with communities in need - instead of examining the critique that the ideas of the slow movement seem largely irrelevant if you lack the means or the time to adopt them. (Note that I said they *seem* irrelevant, not that they *are* irrelevant.)

"We Are Better Together" art print by Ello Lovey on Society6. LOVE this.

How do we broaden the reach of our conversations, and find ways to tell our stories and share our ideas outside our little subculture? How do we describe the ideas and projects of the slow movement for a different audience with different concerns? How do we answer - or acknowledge and address - charges of privilege or elitism? How do we include other cultural traditions in the mix without colonialism or cultural imperialism? How do we, to imperfectly borrow a term from feminism, create an intersectional slow movement?

There are no easy answers.

Maybe, we can make a start by acknowledging our privilege, and being mindful of it. We are lucky; we can use our privilege as a tool to help us make changes that those who haven't been as lucky might be unable to make alone. (And yes, if you dig a little deeper, 'luck' itself is a social construct that lets us feel more comfortable wearing our privilege, but that's another whole blog post.) If we create projects after careful consultation, charrettes, or co-design processes, we can make change *with* communities instead of *for* them, on their terms, with their trust and support and ingenuity. We are better together, and we can create brilliant things and elegant solutions by truly engaging with each other as equals in the design and planning process.

Also, perhaps we can make a start by taking our ideas out into the wider world. We can talk about the great things we can do on a limited budget, with limited time, with limited resources, or in different cultural contexts, but that does no good if we only end up talking to people like ourselves. We need to be engaging. We need to make our work relevant. We need to do more than academic papers and blog posts and art shows and conferences. We need to share our ideas through demonstration projects and street art and pop culture. We need to think big and scale up. We need to showcase brilliant projects and put conceptual designs into production and into peoples' hands.

Tell me: what else do you think we need to do to broaden the appeal and the usefulness of the slow movement?

Dyeing silk with blueberries, logwood, and onionskin

Time to make some end-of-schoolyear gifts for the kids' teachers! 

I started with a dozen 8m/m 11" x 60" Chinese habotai silk scarves. (I know, not at all local, but great for gift-giving and a nice size to allow me to experiment with different dyeing techniques.)

Community Building: Throwing A Block Party

All the houses on our four-year-old cul-de-sac have now completed construction and been sold, so the timing is right to start a neighborhood tradition and make friends with the neighbours. At a Christmas get-together, the idea of a block party met with enthusiasm, so I decided to get the ball rolling and start the process. Once the idea was out there, several of my neighbours banded together as an informal planning committee, and things fell together easily.

Here's what we did: