7:00 AM – savoury oatmeal & red river cereal cooked with celery, ginger, and turmeric and seasoned with soy sauce and sesame seeds. Served with an egg on top.

10:00 AM – a cup of black coffee at the library

Noon – leftover couscous salad with kale, dried cranberries, & walnuts

2:00 PM – coffee at coffee social at department

7:00 PM – Veganomicon’s Chickpea cutlets served with homefries mixed with spinach, shallots, and mushrooms cooked in a white wine sauce. The sauce on the cutlets is homemade ketchup. The cutlets were… ok… a bit flavourless, I have to admit. I don’t have much luck with seitan or anything made with vital wheat.

It was in Barcelona that I truly began to reconnect to a simpler life, to go back to basics. Although there were a fair number of supermarkets near our house, I quickly noticed that there were also lots of small independent shops where many of the locals shopped. Each neighbourhood had its own farmers’ market. Ours was the Mercat de l’Abaceria Central, in the neighbourhood of Gracia. I quickly learned to shop according to the seasons. In the last two months in Barcelona, we lived with our friends Jackie and Sebastian. Sebastian was trained as a cook, worked as a chef for a while, and now teaches cooking to the unemployed. Both he and Jackie have a keen interest in food but not in a stereotypical foodie sense. There was nothing fancy, exotic, processed in their house. Just lots and lots of whole foods. Shelves were stocked high with jars of dry legumes and grains of all types. There was not shortage of spices, vinegars, oils. Living a block away from the Boqueria market, everything was bought in small shops or directly from farmers. Daily meals were simple and basic – a few grilled vegetables and seafood with plain noodles;  maybe a simple curry. Meat often as a dressing rather than as a main focus. They shopped often, never for more than a few minutes, and were never stressed about food.

Coming back to Toronto was hard at first. The typical North American grocery store felt huge and intimidating. I wanted to the shopping habits I acquired in Barcelona. I longed to connect with the people from whom I bought my food. I wanted to keep eating seasonally. So we started shopping more at Kensington Market. I began to get my dry goods from local bulk food stores. 4 Life quickly became my main shopping place. I buy all of my dry goods there and store them in canning jars at home. It’s also our main source of local yogurt and kefir. Pots, the owner, gets a lot of his produce from local farmers and is very picky about the quality of everything he carries. He is always true to himself and will rather not make money than compromise on his beliefs. Some of it can be controversial – for a shop that sells only organic produce, I was surprised not to see any soy milk. When I asked about it he told me he believes the hormones in soy were not good for us so he chose not to sell it in his store. Over time we became friends and he now greets me with a big hug when I walk into his store and quickly brisks me to the back to show me his latest food creation in his ceramic rice cooker.

When I need cheese, I go to the cheese store. When I need spices, I go to the spice store. We buy cleaning products at local health food stores. I’ve never liked strong chemicals so choosing to buy natural cleaning products is a no-brainer for me. I don’t eat meat very often but when I do, I buy it at the butcher on my street who specializes on meats from local, humanely raised animals. But what has really connected me to local food supplies and made me feel more a part of a community was joining a CSA. Every week I get $25 worth of fresh produce. I get to really experience the seasons. I also get to buy jams, pickles, maple syrup, bread, flours, fresh pasta, produced locally from real ingredients.

All of that was no sacrifice. Most people find shopping and doing errands a chore. To us it is our break. It’s when I’m able to relax from my hectic week. We wake up on saturday morning, go out for breakfast and then go visit our friends at Kensington Market. We stop at the bike shop to chat with our friends Sean, Liam, Derek, and pet little Mabel (heck, they even put us on their website!) , we then proceed to 4 Life where we spend at least half an hour chatting with Pots and Dwayne, one of the local farmers that helps Pots on saturday mornings. We often meet interesting people at the shop and although I pick up most of what I need in less than 10 mins, we seldom leave the shop in less than 40 mins. We buy our coffee and tea at Casa Açoreana, where we spend some more time socializing with Ossie and his brothers and some of the locals. Either before or after our shopping, we stop at Manic Coffee where we spend some more time chatting with Louie, the portuguese skate-boarding barista that makes the best cortado I ever had.

On wednesdays, after work, we go to the U of T farmers’ market to get our share from Kawartha Ecological Growers and hang out a bit with Shannon, who manages the stand, and her remarkable three year-old son Elliot. Alan meets me there and he and Elliot hang out while I shop. Last time I overheard Alan telling Elliot about the big bang. When we run out of anything – milk, bread, olive oil – we run over to Pusateri Fruit Market, a family-run small grocery store across the street from our place.

The other day we ran into the Dominion grocery store at Yonge and College where we used to shop to pick up a loaf of bread. It’s not particularly large but it is your average chain supermarket with lots of cashiers, and aisles after aisles of … stuff. We hadn’t been there in many months. I hadn’t realized the difference between shopping the way I had been shopping and going into a typical supermarket until that day. It felt completely overwhelming. There were SO many choices of everything. Shelves and shelves or colourful, attractive packaging. Lots of light. No wonder most people feel stressed and anxious.

So when people look at me funny when I say I don’t want to go back in there, I explain how easy* it can be. All of them say they would love to do that but it would be too expensive. I have honestly not compared every single produce I buy against the supermarket’s price. I find life is too short for that. All I can say is that we spend less overall – perhaps because we are not tempted to buy all kinds of processed junk we dont need since we rarely see them – and that we can still pay all our bills, go out, and do all the same things we ever did. And we are far from being well off. I’m a student and my husband is a pensioner. It’s not a question of money, it’s a question of will. Or of changing habits. But worth every minute.

* I have had the occasional person tell me that it’s easy for me to do that because I don’t have kids. I think I would be even more likely to stay away from the supermarket if I had kids. Besides, families with kids shop this way all over the world, every day. And I see them at Kensington Market every saturday. The kids walking around on their own, the whole family (often three generations!) shopping together and making it a big family event. I’ve seen them going over the years, the kids growing from babies to 7 year-olds who know the local shop keepers by name and who can pick produce on their own. The beauty of kids is that it is up to us, adults, to get them used to the lifestyle we want.

The movie opened the last edition of Toronto’s International Film Festival and was released in threatres across the US last Friday to much media attention, leading to some interesting discussions. The screening we attended this past Monday was followed by a Q&A session with local activists as well as Gary Hirshberg, founder and CEO of Stonyfield Farm and one of the people interviewed in the film. There were no surprises for me in the movie. It felt like a film version of the Omnivore’s Dilemma and dealt with the dark side of the American food industry (whose model is exported all over the world, so don’t think you are off the hook for living in Canada or other countries), and deals with everything from the rise of food-born illnesses, the development of deadly strands of e-coli or salmonella, factory farm workers, the powerlessness of farmers who refuse to play the game according to the big industry’s rules, and the presumed powerlessness of consumers. It’s dark and it leaves you stuck between disgust, anger, and frustration.

The basic message sent by Gary and all the others is that although we have known that there are serious problems with the food industry for years, nothing will be done until we are able to make it a mainstream issue rather than a concern of activists only. And to get there, people need to know where their food come from and what is hidden in it. It’s all about transparency and education really. You can’t just pretend it doesn’t affect you. That people are over-reacting. I mean, we are all under the illusion we know what we eat. But that can often be an illusion. Take hamburguers, for example, the quintessential North American food. We all know that eating too many burguers is not really good for us but we assume that’s because too much meat is bad and that’s what burguers are, right? Ground beef. With perhaps a bit of preservative. But do you know that the entire meat industry in the US is controlled by four companies? And that 80% of the hamburguer meat available in the market is washed with ammonia? And that it is washed with ammonia because that meat originally had a much higher content of e-coli bacteria than meat ever had before. You know why? Because cows are fed corn, which their bodies have not evolved to be able to digest. So either you eat hamburguer laced with ammonia or you may share Kevin’s fate.

I have writtenbefore on this blog about the importance of knowing what you eat. Some people tell me it is too difficult to eat healthy, that they don’t have the time or the knowledge, or that organic food is too expensive. That’s not necessarily true. Good food can be deceavingly simple. If you are not sure where to start in the kitchen, I highly recommend any of Mark Bittman’s books (or even his site) since they are very didactic and based on principles of cooking rather than holding on to steadfast recipes. As for organic food being more expensive than “conventional” food, yes, that’s true, but only if you don’t consider the hidden societal, health, and environmental costs of this so-called conventional food or the real reason fast food is so cheap. The real reason is that since the entire American food industry is controlled by four or five companies, these multibillion-dollar players have enough power and influence to bend food safety rules and guarantee massive subsidies, allowing them to sell food at well below the cost of production (incidentally, conditions in these factories are so dire that these business have to rely on hiring the powerless – such as illegal immigrants – to work in them) . If sustainable farms could get half of the same subsidies, you wouldn’t have to choose based on price. Also, if there was more demand for organic products, more organic products would be produced. We see that beginning to happen. During the Q&A Gary Hirshberg mentioned how his company’s decision to go for organic sugar made a huge impact on its price and availability. When they made their first orders, organic sugar cost nearly five times the price or regular sugar. With the higher demand, more farmers turned to organic farming methods (which achieve the same yields as “conventional” methods) and began to produce more sugar. Now Stonyfield is able to buy sugar for the same price, if not cheaper, than regular sugar.

There is certainly a segment of the population than cannot afford a 50-cent difference on a particular produce. That is a shame and I’m glad there are organizations dedicated to making organic food more accessible. But many of us can afford to pay a little more to ensure not only optimal health but also encourage the organic food industry. It’s all a matter of priorities. And my health has priority over any other luxury in my life because without it, let’s face it, nothing else really matters.

So do yourself and the planet a favour. Learn about the issues. Watch the movie.

If you have trouble playing the video above, watch it on the official site.

See the discussion on my original blog.

Read the review in the NYT.

1. Eat fewer animal products than average
2. Eat all the plants you can manage
3. Make legumes part of your life
4. Whole grains beat refined carbs
5. Snack on nuts or olives
6. When it comes to fats, embrace olive oil
7. Everything else is a treat, and you can have treats daily

Numbers 1 & 2 are the hardest for those in a strict meat-and-potatoes kind of diet. But you can cut down gradually, making dishes that combine meat and grains to reduce the proportion of meat. Number 7 will depend on how you feel. If you are feeling fine, losing weight and your doctor is happy, then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t indulge on your daily dessert but if you are not getting the results you want, it might be better to reduce the treats.

His plan is not really a diet in a faddish sense. He doesn’t preach we must eat all organic although he admits that eating what is produced locally and in season would be best not only for us but for the environment. And this is where all this eating sanely leads to – better health for us and for the earth we live in. Bittman started becoming more conscious of his eating habits after he read a scientific report that showed that the meat industry was responsible for producing one-fifth of greenhouse gases, much more than the transportation industry. At the same time his doctor raised the red flag telling him his cholesterol and blood sugars were out of wack. By switching the proportions of animal and vegetable products, cutting junk food and prossessed food (anything with more than 5 ingredients or with ingredients with more than five syllables), he lost 15 pounds in the first month, his lab work turned out normal in the second month, and within four months he slept better than ever before, lost 35 pounds (his weight eventually stabilized) and he felt confortable and well with his new eating style.Without counting calories, nutrients, feeling hungry, or rebounding.

Makes a lot of sense to me and I do try to follow many of these tips in my daily life.

Worth a read if you feel your health is below optimal and/or you are concerned about the environment.

Check the Globe and Mail review of the book.