Blog#
68…April 2017
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| Photo by Ed Burtynski |
Ed Burtynski makes art to call our attention to industrial waste, beautiful images until we look more closely and realize what it is and what's caused it.
Other artists show us the beauty that can exist in food that’s been discarded. The aim is different here - to encourage us to see this food as useful rather than repellant.
Anyone who
knows me even slightly gets it that wasting food makes me nuts. I just heard on the radio that, in Toronto,
we waste 1,000,000,000 pounds of food every year. That’s one billion pounds of
food that could have fed someone right here…we don’t even need to go into the
starving folks around the world. Up to 40 percent of the food produced in the world is discarded -some of it due to the shape, colour and
appearance of fruit and vegetables that don’t make the cut for supermarket
standards at the food terminal. Some of it is due to the sheer abundance of
food here that leads us to over order in restaurants and over buy in stores and
markets.
Toronto’s Second Harvest does a pretty good job with re-directing some food from the waste bin to hungry mouths while it’s still fresh and good. And they have a new website – foodrescue.ca – that can respond to calls from smaller stores and deliver to smaller agencies. Good for them, I wish we could do more as individuals, buy and order just what we need (helps with those weight concerns too). Enough scolding...think about making soup with left over vegetables and smoothies with fruit.
And moving west to Edmonton...a while ago I discovered that their Arts Council had established an artist-in -residence at city cemeteries to console mourning families and friends. Now, they've introduced therapy dogs at the airport to comfort anxious travellers. Bravo Edmonton, will be watching for the next thoughtful initiative.
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