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Sustainability, collaboration and creativity are at the basis of the changes currently being experienced by our society. Since 2008, Defiant Imagination has been looking at how these concepts are being applied to different areas of our daily life: urbanism, food, the economy, social media, and more.
Its author, Flavie Halais, is a Vancouver-based freelance journalist.-
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Category Archives: Food
What bee crisis?
Today I’d like to go back over this Guardian article I tweeted about last week, which brings a new perspective on the bee crisis. You’ve probably heard of the Colony Collapse Disorder, this phenomenon that has been affecting beehives across North America for the past few years, causing the disappearance of millions of bees. The [...]
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Meat is back, part 2
This is the second part of my two-part series on meat. This post is not intended to criticize vegetarianism or veganism, but rather to analyze a trend that has been developing in North America. DIY butchering Why limit yourself to the supermarket or the butcher shop to get your meat? A number of communities around [...]
Meat is back, Part 1
Meat is back. Of course, it never totally went away. Montrealers still lined up in front of Schwartz’s deli, even in the coldest temperatures, Oprah still indulged on Seattle’s Ezell chicken, and the kitchen still smelled of bacon every Sunday at brunch time. But meat had become a guilty pleasure. By eating it, we were [...]
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Direct Trade: coffee at its best
Defiant Imagination is back! After a months-long hiatus, due in part to an international sporting event that took place in Vancouver last month. I hope to be able to write here regularly again. A little bit of self-promotion: my article on Direct Trade was published in The Warehouse. High-end coffee was just beginning to reach [...]
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What is your farmers market for?
I just stumbled on this March/April 2009 Mother Jones article discussing the evolution of farmers markets in North America. It explains how many farmers markets bring more diversity into the range of products that are being sold in order to generate more revenue. Street performers, baked goods and restaurants are now commonly seen alongside honey [...]
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Wal-Mart’s eco-labels: brilliant or evil?
Wal-Mart announced today the launching of an eco-labelling program that will allow customers to see the environmental footprint of the products they wish to buy. In collaboration with a consortium of universities, the giant retailer will work on issuing an index that will reflect the life cycles of its products. The news seems to have [...]
Urban agriculture: an interview with Joe Nasr and June Komisar
This is an interview I did a couple of months ago with Joe Nasr, Co-coordinator at MetroAg (Alliance for Urban Agriculture) and June Komisar, Associate Professor at Ryerson University’s Department of Architectural Science. They both curated Carrot City, an exhibition that ran in Toronto last Winter and showed how design, architecture and urban planning can [...]
Also posted in Urban agriculture 4 Comments
Meat: Martha Stewart loves butchers too!