The Friends Who Fed Me

July 26, 2009 | Location: Canada | 2 Comments 

“There are things you will miss dearly about Edmonton when we leave.” Hélène laughed every time I told her that when we arrived, a year and a half ago. She’d glance out the window at the urban sprawl, its highways and shopping malls, as if to say, What is there to miss about this?

On Saturday the 18th of July, Hélène was still laughing; but this time, it was to hide the sadness in her heart. We were going around the Old Strathcona Farmers’ Market for the last time. I almost wished I hadn’t been so right.

The Rural Rebellion

Growing up as a city boy, I always pictured farmers living dull intellectual lives. I know; it’s a terrible stereotype, and I’m glad the market shattered it. As it turns out, the farmers and producers at our local market are among the most rebellious, anticonformist individuals I’ve had the delight to meet.

Jerry Kitt, owner of First Nature Farms, is a prime example of this rural rebellion. In 1977, he and his wife moved to Goodfare, near the British Columbia border, to begin raising cattle. Today, Jerry operates his farm as a natural reserve, focusing on biodiversity and sustainability. He has traveled to Cuba to learn from the farmers there, who have faced the phenomenon of peak oil 30 years ahead of us all, as the fall of the USSR condemned them to oil starvation. In 2008, he was one of a handful of farmers invited to Italy by the Slow Food movement to discuss the future of agriculture under the dual threats of global warming and oil depletion.

Jerry figured out decades before most of us that perpetual growth is impossible in a closed system. To Jerry, sustainability and biodiversity are more precious than growth.

How’s that for a revolutionary idea? And it makes for a stunning good steak, too.

Shake the Hand that Feeds You

Take the time to talk to the various producers at the Old Strathcona Farmers’ Market, and their stories converge on Jerry’s point of view. The market itself has changed little over the years; you hear ‘sustainability’ a lot more than ‘expansion’ coming from the market administrators. Some of the vendors barely break even, but nevertheless come to the market every Saturday, providing their customers with the same food they have come to love over the years. In return, they get a Saturday spent with the extended family of vendors, and the deep gratitude of customers they can call friends.

Shaking the hand of the men and women who grow your vegetables or roast your coffee is a transformative act. You stop relating to brands like Starbucks or Safeway, and instead feed yourself based on human-sized relationships. You don’t need an organic label when you can look the farmer directly in the eye.

Imagine if every CEO of major food companies was forced to spend an entire day meeting the people whom they fed, to shake their hands and greet them. How many times would they sacrifice the well-being of their customers in the name of profit?

The Grind of the Industrial Machine

To understand the beat of the farmers’ market is to get an intimate glimpse at the gears moving below the surface of our society. Edmonton, in many ways, replicates on a smaller scale the vicissitudes of our entire civilization, as it completes its transition from sustainability to multinationalism.

Many travelers complain about the way American culture is taking over the world. The truth is, American culture has been dying for a long time. What took it over is something else entirely, bred from greed. It moved in with an army of Walmarts and Starbucks, and slowly choked out the pockets of authenticity, one town at a time. Some are still there, but they’re getting harder to find.

Edmonton, just like most North American cities, is under siege from those same forces, and it’s slowly losing that battle. Most of its surface is comprised of malls bursting with multinational corporations. The farmers, growers and bakers of the farmers’ markets around the city are an eccentric, even folkloric breed, with their antiquated values and unproductive methods.

But they hang on. And many of us are barely just beginning to understand the importance of their fight.

They cling to ideals and principles that we thought we had buried with our ancestors. But in an age when we are growing more and more aware of the ecological, sociological, cultural and health impacts of our modern way of life, they have kept alive principles that may prove to be our salvation.

This Is Family

Helene and I hug Grace, of Grace’s Traditional Foods. Poor Grace has tears in her eyes as she gives us one last poppy seed roll, a traditional recipe she has brought with her from Poland and recreates every week.

We also receive hugs from Paul and Janice, whose creams and natural beauty products Hélène has fallen in love with over the last year. From them, Hélène received a gift of essential oils to bid her health on our journey. Maureen gives us one of her delicious, spicy lentil soups that got us through winter. Tracy from Catfish Coffee Roasters gives us bags of coffee to drink with our friends and family in Montreal.

Over our last days in Edmonton, each meal brings back memories of the people who grew, raised or baked everything we eat. When we taste the flair of spices on Ayikarley’s Ghanaian chicken, we remember her easy laugh and generous smile. Tasting Mrs. Helbig’s stunning broccoli, I picture the kind, elderly woman plowing her field, her quiet strength brought to harvest the bounty of her land.

This is what we left behind in Edmonton. We left amazing food, but also a deep sense of community, a family.

I’ll miss it as I would a dear friend. And every time I will look at a new city’s urban sprawl, I will wonder what rebels hide behind this facade, keeping the soul of our society alive.

To Dom, Tracy, Jerry, Gisèle, Mrs. Helbig, Ruth, Walter, Molly, Dawn, Ayikarley, Paul, Janice, Grace, John, Madalina, Mariana, Sue, Maureen, and everyone else  I have the terrible misfortune of forgetting in this post:

I will miss your food, your friendship and your kindness. You have taught me the true meaning of community, and for that I am eternally grateful.

Bless you, one and all!

The Old Strathcona Farmers’ Market is located at 10310 83 Avenue, in the Old Strathcona historical district of Edmonton. Edmonton is fortunate enough to have a few other high-quality markets around town, including the City Market in Downtown Edmonton, and the St. Albert Farmers’ Market.

More and more farmers’ markets are appearing everywhere in North America, and chances are your local city or town features a similar band of rebels and iconoclasts growing delicious food outside of the industrial food complex. Find out about them, go try their food, and listen to their stories. They deserve to be heard, wherever you are.

For more thoughts on sustainability and small-scale production, please see my blog post about Catfish Coffee Roasters, Black Coffee, No Barcode, where I recount my experience as a vendor at the Old Strathcona Farmers’ Market.

Out of the Matrix, Into the Light

July 17, 2009 | Location: Canada | 11 Comments 

“The Matrix is the wool that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”
- Morpheus, The Matrix (1999)

The TV unit’s prints linger in the carpet as they take it away. The DVDs, videogames, beer glasses and souvenirs it used to host will spend at least a year in cardboard boxes. The wall previously hidden by the TV unit blinds me with white. I am one step closer to the light.

Plato’s Cave

In Plato’s The Republic, the great philosopher asks the reader to imagine men born prisonners in the depths of a dark cave. The only light they see comes from a fire outside their reach that projects shadows on the walls before them. To these men, Plato argues, the shadows would be all that is real.

How, asks Plato, would one of these men feel if he were taken out of the depths of the cave, and allowed to see the real world? How would it feel if he were then returned to his emprisonment?

The New Machines

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave has been at the forefront of my mind ever since I returned from living three years in China. I have seen and experienced things during my time in Shanghai that reveal to me the illusory nature of our world. Kind, honest folks getting by with a tiny fraction of my weekly income. Crippled children, sold into slavery by desperate parents, broken by their owners to illicit more pity. Buildings of such insane proportions as to put Blade Runner to shame. Opulence and poverty, living side-by-side, an image of the world, impossible to ignore.

Our consumer society is, to paraphrase Morpheus, the wool that has been pulled over our eyes. (And isn’t it ironic that a Hollywood film would present such a self-aware metaphor?) We are trained to think that hundreds of Iranian students dying for democracy are of passing interest, but the death of a pop star affects us deeply because we once purchased his records.

The tragedy of this consumer matrix is that its machine masters move among us in plain sight. We even know their names: Coca-Cola. McDonald’s. General Motors. Monsanto. Shell. Pfizer. These corporate entities exist as full moral individuals in our laws, hold recognized rights. They have self-perpetuating mechanisms, clear goals, and are fully able to defend themselves from any threat to their survival. When we feed their hunger with our money, they gently rock us back to sleep. But when we speak up, they use their human agents to crush our spirits. They have even subverted our own means of government to their own means.

What’s more troubling is the machine’s ability to adapt. When consumers began to reject industrial food, for instance, the food giants began adopting organic by also industrializing it. When the airline industry came under criticism for its carbon emissions, it began selling ‘indulgences’ in the form of carbon offsets. All so that we continue consuming without question.

Out in the Light

When I traveled to China, I took the red pill. I didn’t know it at the time, but something within me was awakened by three years in Shanghai. It started as an itch on my soul, and grew into full discomfort. It was knowledge: that the world was more than it seemed. That the struggles and triumphs of billions were drowned by manufactured entertainment.

I don’t travel for comfort, but for authenticity. To exchange a smile or a meal with someone outside your own personal sphere of influence is to take a step outside the cave. You don’t need the news to tell you what to think of them. Hollywood fables finally reveal themselves: projections on the wall of the cave, meant to distract you from looking back at the projectionist.

Unplug Yourself

Turn off the television. Question authority. Crave human contact. Sell anything that is neither useful nor beautiful. Become a citizen first, a consumer second. Volunteer. Favor independent music. Read books that don’t make it to the bestseller list. Talk to strangers. Travel without a tour. Buy your food from farmers. Trade your used clothes. Care.

I’m not saying I’m free of the cave myself. But I’ve seen a glimpse of the Sun peeking through the entrance. I can no longer stand in the darkness, and I’m pulling at my chains. Soon, I hope, I will stand in the grass.

We are more than our bank accounts. Let’s see what happens when we act as human beings first, consumers second.

Further Reading

Here are a few books and movies that helped shape my worldview and led to my decision to step away from the corporate life and travel the world as a nomad. I hope they can help you as well. Aside from Food, Inc., they should all be available from your local library.

	The Merchants of Cool is a Frontline exposé on how a few big media corporations manufacture mainstream teenager culture and recuperate any trace of dissent. Although the documentary focuses on teenage culture, it’s easy to see how it applies to almost every facet of our lives. You can watch it for free on the PBS website.
	Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma is the most important book I read last year. It discusses the chains that bring food to our tables, from industrial corn to small-scale organic. This book inspired me to radically change what I eat.
	Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy picks up where Omnivore’s Dilemma left off, and discusses economic models that promote sustainability, community and happiness. This is a book I am keeping as I begin my world travels, as I plan to reread it every few years.
	Tom Hodkinson’s How to be Idle is a tongue-in-cheek discussion of how the corporate world has fed us the values of hard work and obedience, and how to reclaim leisure in our lives. What Hodkinson has to say makes a terrible lot of sense, and is not as light a topic as the book’s cover and blurbs would let you believe.
	Food, Inc., just out in theaters, is a fascinating and insightful documentary in the vein of Omnivore’s Dilemma and Fast Food Nation. I would recommend those two books over this movie, but if you don’t want to commit to reading them, this is the right place to start. Even if you have read Pollan, the sight of the gigantic feedlots is a striking, somber reminder of the excesses of our industrial food chain.
	Although I have not read Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods, it has left a powerful impression on Helene, and she recommends the book to all parents and educators. Louv argues that we are emotionally stunting our children by cutting them off from nature.

The Cost of the First Step

July 9, 2009 | Location: Canada | 15 Comments 

“We quit our jobs, sold everything, and left on a world trip.”

That’s how our future selves will sum up their decision, over drinks in a foreign land, with nothing but their backpacks to call home. People listening might admire their courage, but they might not know how much they left behind.

Voluntarily Unemployed

When I explained to my boss at BioWare my decision to leave, I damn near broke down in tears. I’m not sure which one of us was the most surprised. Here we were, sitting in my office, having closed the door at the first sign of gravitas. I tried to explain why I was doing it, and I couldn’t find the words. Looking back, my choked attempts were more convincing than anything I could have articulated.

Until I closed that office door, there was some theoretical way of backing out of this project. I had sealed my escape route.

I’ve taken leaps of faith before, but this is the first without a bungee cord. As of Friday, June 26th, I’m voluntarily unemployed, and not looking for a job. That kind of life-changing decision usually leads to sleeping on a park bench. Hopefully, it will be somewhere tropical.

I closed that door on eleven years of continuous employment, including six in the game industry. I didn’t just quit my job, I quit the corporate world. I quit the 9 to 5 and the steady paycheck. I try not to let my mind wander to it.

The Weight of Stuff

Here’s something you find out real quick when starting a vagabonding lifestyle: owning stuff sucks.

‘Selling everything’ sounds like such a simple thing. I have daydreams – steadily turning pornographic-intense – where I snap my fingers, and all the furniture is replaced by little piles of money. Instead of that, I harass my friends with an insistence right out of a carpet bazaar. “You’re sure you don’t want a used guidebook to the Netherlands? How about a mattress?”

With two weeks to go before we leave Edmonton, you’d think I’d be stressing over the contents of my backpack or how to avoid roadside robbery and malaria. Instead, I wake up worrying about the fate of my couch. (“Just $250, how can you say no to a friend!”)

Ownership is slavery. Every piece of furniture drags at my ankles as I try to walk away. I stare at the piles of seldom-used clothes cluttering my wardrobe, and it dawns on me: freedom is owning three pairs of underwear.

International Hobo

Another source of malaise lingers deeper within me: two weeks from now, I will be unemployed and homeless. In a society where success is measured by career and ownership, the alternative is at once terrifying and exhilarating.

I’m working hard, not always with success, at referring to my videogame career in the past tense. I was a videogame producer. But what am I?

At the same time, I watch some cherished items – game consoles, books, furniture – disappear from our apartment, and it transforms our home into a place of transit. We sold the coffee table, so we put down our beer bottles on the floor. Soon, we will probably join them there. The emptiness of space reclaims what we worked so hard to coax into a home.

Friends now hesitate before saying goodbye, calculating the odds of this being our last time together. Sometimes, we lie to one another and promise to make time before I leave. Other times, we shake hands firmly and wish each other luck, only to do it again when next we run into one another.

My New Self

I am percolating under the forces of this emerging reality. Some unknowable alchemy transmutes my sense of self-worth, the way I see myself. I am not a traveler yet, but neither am I a videogame professional. I don’t really live in Edmonton anymore. I have no home, only destinations.

In suspension between my past and my future, my present is a footnote in the narrative of my life.

The fleeting ghost of a videogame producer moves in exact synch with my body. Someone else than him will do the travel. Some other form of me, having shedded me, will board a plane a month from now.

Such is the price of the first step: you feel the wind mess up your hair as you slip off the cliff, not knowing yet the thrill of the jump.

Helene and I are hard at work selling everything, and will be leaving Edmonton on the 23rd and 25th of July, respectively. In the meantime, if you live in the Edmonton area, I know a great couch looking for a new home. Check out Helene’s sale listing if you’re interested in helping us get rid of stuff!

Life’s Precious Mistakes

July 1, 2009 | Location: Canada | 3 Comments 

We had made the mistake of expecting things to work, and that’s all China needs to throw you a curveball. We assumed we’d find a working ATM in the city of Hangzhou, and China responded with a city-wide bank network outage. Ask for predictability, and China gives you a cigarette-stained Buddha grin, then hands you adventure instead. Helene and I appraised our situation: Chinese yuans for $8 USD, a train ticket home, and ten kilometers of sweaty, polluted streets between us and the train station. In other words, a fortune.

I’m thinking back to our day of adventure in Hangzhou six years ago today in a way of making sense of my time in Edmonton. China goes around throwing wrenches in cakes with the subtlety of a cartoon spy, but Edmonton, it turns out, is no stranger to mischief.

When I came to Edmonton fifteen months ago, I also made a mistake.

I expected a great job in a great company, and I got that. But I was foolish and thought that’s what I needed to be happy. My mistake was to trust that my career ambitions would dull my wanderlust, at least for a few years.

Six years ago in Hangzhou, Helene and I took a cab to the train station, then set about exploring the station’s surroundings. What followed constitutes one of my fondest memories of China. We had lunch in a restaurant inside the station, with a side-order of construction workers who sat and stared at us as long as one noodle remained unslurped. Then, we sat in a nearby park, causing drivers to nearly rear-end each other from the shock of seeing white faces for the first time. A couple of kids whistled at us, and when we whistled back, they chuckled like they would if a cow mooed back.

For the same reason, I don’t think of Edmonton with regret. I came here expecting a job, and I found friends and a sense of community on top of it. I’m going to miss the farmer’s market so much, I wish I could send it Christmas cards. I can’t say I fell in love with Edmonton, but I think we respect each other. We even look away with a smile when the other is looking. I like the blue of Edmonton’s sky, a startling sight even three years after Shanghai’s yellow haze. I like how so many Edmontonians are proud to be from around here, but a bit embarrassed at the same time. I love how multicultural the city really is, behind its facade of whiteness and pick-up trucks.

For these reasons, I’m not ashamed to call Edmonton a mistake, because I don’t mean it in a bad way. I see my time in Edmonton as straying from the path, and finding a shiny dollar in the grass. You walk in the field for a while, and remember that not everything is about a destination; but seeing the path from afar fills your heart with a longing for home.

Helene and I made it in time for our train back to Shanghai, on that day in Hangzhou. And we’re about to get back home again, come this September. Home is where the heart is: and my heart is somewhere out there, wandering the world at large.