After a summer of re-focusing, the mealscape is back in the realm of the real. This fall and winter will not only see a handful of new and more insightful posts, but the first mealscape live event!

Where: Parc Lafontaine, in the old chalet, ‘Étangs du Parc Lafontaine’ (map)
When: Saturday, 27 November
When: 2:30 pm
What: A communal meal concocted from collaborative recipes and collectively-sourced ingredients 
Who: Anyone, as long as you let me know by mid-November, to ensure we cook the right amount of food (and a bit extra, just in case).

The ingredients from this meal will originate in the cooks’ local landscapes. With a list of ingredients thus circulated to all three cooks, each cook will create a recipe that another cook will…cook.

At the parc, under shelter, and with mitts provided, we will share this lovely meal with the public!

Ask me more about it

This Japanese cooking series has YouTube all figured out.

Quick cuts, simple instructions, and an unlikely juxtaposition. Oh, cuteness helps. And the “fail-like” nature of it all (see bad translations on) keeps you hooked until the end. The joke is on ? Us, becausse, in the process, we learn how to cook something we didn’t know about before.

But where do we pick up on our graces? Why do we read what we want, and leave the rest? And why do we feel we need to ‘excuse’ ourselves from conversations, mailing lists, blog discussions? Might there not be a lot found between the meal and the social endeavour we now embark upon? Rituals are founded for a reason: they give us cues and guides through which we can generate meaning. Otherwise, our existence would be solely subsistential. For better or worse, we have minds, AND we have mouths, the latter of which can be used for both psychic (verbal/mental) nourishment and physical life-sustenance (enjoyment-existence).

There is a crossover, a gap, a boundary.

Web 1.0 began the gap limited largely to our fingers, and our sight: text, with a smattering of imagery (at that, mostly charts or softcore porn).

Web 2.0 enunciated the moving image, the video, and sound truly came into the mix. We could call our friends free across the globe.

Web 3.0 might begin the journey to the mouth, which some say, is not dissociate from the heart, which in turn, we cannot discount from the head’s hurdles. Who can say they have been able to think clearly, for example, on an empty stomach? Who can say they haven’t had a warm intimate aha! upon lapping up a cup of coffee at just that moment, you know the one…early in the morning, or in the mid-afternoon sway, or amidst the still expanse of the night.

We are nothing but what our gut tells us: eat up, steer clear, suck up, get on, get off, move out, start that path, journey to the core, get out, you know what I mean

So why wait for web 3.0 to “rear its flashy head at hotdog eating contests” to understand what connectivity is, I mean, really!

L’effet Vezina:

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L’Effet Vézina

avec Daniel Vézina

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L’Effet Vézina

Amoureux de l’ambiance en cuisine, Daniel Vézina aime les recettes simples mais goûteuses. Dans une toute nouvelle quotidienne, ce chef vous donnera des trucs dans la préparation de vos repas et vous permettra de concocter le menu dont vous serez le héros !

Daniel Vézina est le chef de la réinvention. Profondément enraciné dans le vrai et la simplicité des ingrédients et des saveurs

http://www.theworldwidegourmet.com/recipes/recipes-by-country/flavors-of-quebec/

Le Maitre du Grill

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Heston : en quête de perfection

avec Heston Blumenthal

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Heston : en quête de perfection

Considéré comme l’un des plus grands chefs de la planète, Heston Blumenthal joue de façon extraordinaire avec quelques mets très populaires en Angleterre. Glace à la saveur d’oeufs et bacon, purée d’escargots, frites cuites au dessiccateur… Heston Blumenthal a une approche fort peu conventionnelle de la gastronomie. Dans son restaurant, “The Fat Duck” (élu Meilleur restaurant du monde 2005 par le magazine Restaurant et Restaurant de l’année 2001 par le guide Michelin), ce chef autodidacte connaît un grand succès grâce à ses méthodes culinaires scientifiques et ses menus qui sont un défi à notre perception habituelle des saveurs.

Week-end de gars

“On June 19, 2009, it was reported that the number of malnourished people in the world exceeded 1 billion people, about a sixth of the world’s total population.

There were 923 million malnourished people in the world in 2007, an increase of 80 million since 1990. The FAO purports that the world already produces enough food to feed everyone — 6 billion people — and could feed double — 12 billion people.”

The state of food production in the world was not my main concern when I began this blog, but it has slowly ripened upon me that we live in an unnnecessary state of crisis, chaos, and rupture on this planet. Why? I will leave that to conspiracy theorists, economic dudes, and the UN. The important thing is the glimmer of light: we can feed everyone, and dammit, we will!

If organizations like Food for Life – with their branches spawned all over the globe – are not enough, the next step is simply taking action: letting everyone know that the food exists, but we need to get it out there. the UN’s World Food Program, though massive in scope, is actually one of the best and most efficient hunger relief agencies on this small planet. Everyone and their dog can do something to raise awareness and funds; take, for example, local DJ Ja Big, and his Beats for Life tour.

In Detroit, they are building the world’s largest urban farm. Why not do this in our own backyards?

This is a call to arms, plants, trowels. Have ideas? Write them here!

In case this is not obvious, I have made my own rudimentary and highly-unscientific graph to…

The farm, developed by multimillionaire John Hantz, has aims to use the much-touted deserted land within Detroit’s city limits to create a massive agricultural operation that plans to sell to the entire Eastern seabord.

Will it help the destitute remaining within the shambles of this once-magnificent city? The folk at this meal-valuing blog are skeptical.

"Some of Detroit is simply too broken to fix. Some of Detroit is simply too broken to fix....."

However, it’s a development worth watching. Can you picture how big twenty-six square miles actually is? Well, I tried. It’s 20,000 acres, is about 1/8th of the entire Detroit acreage, is equivalent in size to a sizable North American town/small city (such as Trois-Rivieres, QC), and is being touted by its developers, not shockingly, as they “world’s largest urban farm”.

Odd to live at this juncture in history…

Some quotes from the official website:

“The city of Detroit is a ‘food desert’ without a single supermarket chain in the city limits…The crops on Hantz Farm will help bring healthy, nutritious food back to Detroit families.”

“Some of Detroit is simply too broken to fix. Hantz Farms solution? Take away the pavement, the concrete and the asphalt, and put Detroiters back in touch with the beauty of nature.”

Plant-based meals in the millions to Pakistan after the earthquake

They have fed (at this moment): 880,000,000 people times.

That’s nearly 1 billion people who at some point, have eaten a meal thanks to this mammoth and much-underrated service.

Help in Haiti, or anywhere else food is needed.

http://www.ffl.org/ffl_emergency_relief.php

“Throughout the fighting in Grozny, Sarajevo and Sukhumi — Food for Life was there; attending to earthquake victims in Haiti, Armenia, Russia and India — Food for Life was there; saving stranded villagers during floods in West Bengal and the Philippines — Food for Life was there; feeding hungry children in South Africa and the millions of others in the streets of nearly every major city of the world Food for Life volunteers are there nourishing people with pure plantbased meals. “

Nominate them for a Nobel Peace Prize!!

You need a napkin? I need one too!

Why are food and music, with their complementary improvisational qualities, usually relegated to drab dinner Theatre or forgotten restaurant-corner trios mandated to churn out harmless musak which should never rise above diners’ dish-clanking?

There doesn’t seem much left of the spontaneous in most people’s daily food or musical world, let alone the combination of the two.

But we have musicians, and eaters, who feel they can uplift our hearts with hope! A napkin is enough to change all that.

The brilliant ImprovEverywhere idea out of the US tackles this sad state of affairs head-on at the Trump Tower with I Love Lunch: A Musical.

Don’t miss their grocery store outing “Let’s Squish Our Fruits Together” and the founding classic (and source of the above “napkin” reference): “Food Court Musical.

Got food-improv ideas? Post them right here on the mealscape!

Soul. Soul. Soul, according to this short teaser.

Will Allen’s small, special place is known as Growing Power, and he is changing the way Americans look at food at his 3 acre farm right in Milwaukee. Milwaukee?

Makes you want to jump in and feed the worms man!

This according to a report published in late 2009 by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, one of the world’s foremost compilers of economic and social data.

Taking it a step further, a New York Times reporter took the time to collate this data into a chart and compare it against average obesity rates in several nations. Her point being that in many cases, the more minutes a day spent eating, the lower the obesity rates, the healthier the folk, and so on (see USA vs. France)

While their report only covers the 17 (economically-significant and sufficiently ‘democratized’ ) nations which make up the organisation (although talks are currently in progress with up to ten more). it’s nonetheless a thrilling snapshot of how various nations order their time.

According to their website:

The amount and quality of leisure time is important for people’s well-being for the direct satisfaction it brings. Additionally, leisure, taken in certain ways, is important for physical and mental health. Leisure also contributes to the well-being of people other than the person directly enjoying leisure. When a person engages in leisure, the benefits gained are shared with others in a multitude of ways, including improvements in personal relationships, family functioning, and in terms of creation of social capital networks (at least from some types of shared leisure). Leisure time patterns across the OECD therefore warrant investigation as an important part of social monitoring.