Of course, it is mucho important to support your local scene in day to day life, for many reasons. But sometimes, like when we are really busy / intoxicated / getting married, it becomes easy to forget this.

LPK’s Culinary Groove makes it a delight to spread the love on a grand scale, no matter how lazy (or drunk) we may be. When it comes to wedding cakes, LPK provides a variety of bad ass, eco-friendly customary creations to suit laid back souls and bridezillas alike.

This quaint bakery prides itself on being Toronto’s “first organic pastry and chocolate shop”. Using fair trade, organic ingredients, LPK is conscious of keeping a minimal carbon footprint - the store is run on Bullfrog power, using LED lighting and gas powered convection ovens. LPK also accommodates vegan, gluten free, and kosher diets, so your wedding cake can be heart healthier, AND earth savvier. Their vegan products incorporate super delicious, fresh ingredients, so not even the most discerning soul will be able to tell the difference.

All this and they make a mean date square - something I really appreciate in a bakery. Yeah, you heard me.

The Body Shop was founded in 1976 in Brighton, England by an Italian immigrant with a simple desire to save the whales. (I know, I know ... isn't that what everyone who opens up an enormous bath product company really wants?)

Thirty four years later, The Body shop is a multi-national business with some 2,500 stores in over 61 different countries. Anita Roddick, the woman behind the production, began selling skin care products in the interest of supporting her two daughters while her husband was absent, travelling. What started off as a small organization in between two funeral homes in England launched into a major corporation advocating for sustainability, women’s self esteem and human rights.

In the early days, Roddick started recycling simply because she didn’t have enough containers for her products. Eventually, the Body Shop would turn its resourceful values into a partnership with Greenpeace in 1986. After this, Roddick began to launch other promotions tied to various social causes, obviously attracting public attention to her products. For her, “campaigning and good business is also about putting forward solutions, not just opposing destructive practices or human rights abuses”.

Roddick has been referred to as “one of the country’s true pioneers”, campaigning not only for green issues, but also women’s self esteem. A 1997 advertising campaign utilized the familiar image of Barbie to make a statement that would earn them a lawsuit for copyright infringement from Mattel. A mascot for The Body Shop was created in the form of a doll in Barbie’s likeness, except for the fact that she was a size 16 and had red hair. The slogan for the ads in which she was depicted read “There are 3 billion women who don’t look like supermodels and only 8 who do”. Her name was Ruby, and she caused the Body Shop to be forced to rethink their ad campaigns. I always thought she was pretty cute.

Anyone who has visited the Body Shop’s website will be aware of their pride in a small ecological footprint. The company states an aim to reduce waste by 9 million bottles per year. All the packaging used is made with 30% recycled plastics, and a greater percentage is currently in the works. The ingredients used are a significant part of their sustainably approach to business. Their popular hemp line in particular demonstrates an effective use of this environmentally friendly crop. Hemp requires little fertilizer and no pesticides in its cultivation, due to few natural predators. The Body Shop makes note that hemp is one of the most environmentally friendly crops they have found yet.

Unlike palm oil, which entails incredibly destructive cultivation process. 90% of the palm oil we use is located in Malaysia and Indonesia, which is bad news for the wildlife that also resides there. The Body Shop was one of the first retailers to join the RSPO (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil), which promotes the growth and use of more sustainably cultivated palm oil. On top of all this, the Body Shop has never tested their products on animals.

While the company boasts a range of efforts pertaining to sustainability, their website leaves a lot to be desired. The ingredients are said to be “inspired by nature” – (a term almost as vague as “all natural”), and their corporate offices claim to be “energy efficient”, as well as some of their new stores. (What about the old ones?) They state a goal, on their website, to be carbon neutral retailer by 2010 ... this is now. I wonder if this has been achieved?

At least the Body Shop is making a genuine effort, which is more than can be said for most other corporations of its size. The woman behind all this is pretty inspirational any way you cut it. She is actually said to have single handedly shaped ethical consumerism. Her strong sense of values pertaining to human and animal rights and sustainability is one to be admired. I can get behind any organization that makes sure its personal massagers are certified by the Forestry Stewardship Council. Talk about self gratification you can truly feel good about.

Teenage Mutants.

As we press on into a world of advancing synthetics, it is simply not enough to be diligent about reading labels, or searching Google for answers. While a scam may not be consciously carried out by food industry leaders, an entire economy has been built on the existence of invisible territory, and we are entirely subject to it. The only truth in the marketing of food is the fact that secrecy exists in abundance, and it is detrimental to public health. Being a conscious consumer might not be enough to avoid the synthetic chemicals that permeate so much of our food.

Processed food companies have fostered a belief that we have come to accept without question. This belief promotes synthetics as harmless, even superior to the products of nature that we once relied on to nourish and heal us. The food industry is operated no differently than any other competitive market - economic principles are the basis of action, not the health of consumers.

Synthetics have become an all encompassing part of our world to the point that a visitor from the past might liken it to some sort of chemistry experiment in which we humans are the guinea pigs. As a result of our dependence on the food industry, some of us might develop mutations, (cancer, reproductive issues, diabetes, the list goes on) as a result of the infinite combinations of chemicals in our food, water and drugs. It is clear that we aren’t getting any healthier. But we are getting smarter - our innovations are becoming more and more advanced daily. Our innovations in food may end up killing us.

On the surface, food labels don’t go into much detail about the “natural flavours” in our cereal, or the “sweeteners” in our soda. What is made evident to the label reading consumer is the fact that the drink only has one calorie, is sugar free, and tastes awesome. On the surface, what the label says might look appealing to someone who has never heard of aspartame. Those who have, however, have probably heard how the popularity of this calorie-free sweetener increased alongside a 10% increase of brain cancer among U.S. citizens. So it won’t make you fat, but it could give you cancer, Parkinson’s disease, or a brain tumour. It is also warned that this additive could trigger birth defects, depression, chronic fatigue, brain tumours, epilepsy ... the list goes on.

How can we be educated when information about our food is so elusive? Any curious consumer knows it can be like pulling teeth to get answers.

The pharmaceutical industry also benefits from synthetics. The conditions that make life so profitable for both the food and pharmaceutical industries revolve around the weakening of the human immune system from inadequate nutrition and the employment of synthetic chemicals to remedy the problem for a little while. This vicious cycle works for the drug and medical industries, while depleting our own resources. The technological advancements of our culture are pretty good at helping us feel better in the short term, but we generally fail when it comes to getting to the root cause of illness.

Prescription drugs are an enormous part of western life. Elderly people take as many as one dozen different prescription medications per day. Yet, there are complications that result from our drugs that land us in hospitals, even kill us. We are never told that the root cause of our illness if our medication, we always need another prescription.

How can a species that is so intellegent, continue to fail? The system is set up in such a way that the path of least resistance is often the way that involved chemical induced foods and endless drug prescriptions. We would have to go seriously against the grain to get out of this cycle. Until these industry leaders genuinely care about our health - or when people start dying, (whichever happens first),we need to demonstrate to chaos and lawlessness about our oatmeal, chicken wings and Tylenol!

Health should be made easy for us, but it’s not. Not yet, at least. Not until I become prime minister. We can trust only ourselves, and must take matters into our own hands if we wish to avoid mutating into teenage ninja turtles.

I don't do organic.

I got talking to this woman who came into my restaurant on a slow day. We were talking about restaurants, and I mentioned one of my favourites, Fresh. “Is it organic?” she inquired. “Yeah” I replied. She was unimpressed. “Oh, I don’t do organic”.

How can you not "do" organic? Is there anyone out there who especially wishes for their plants to be sprayed with toxic chemicals? Organic has become such a foreign concept, a sort of inaccessible fad that only few hold the key to. In reality, it’s what our food should effortlessly be. We should be able to go to the grocery store and buy a rutabaga and not risk consuming a dozen synthetic chemicals. Pesticide free food is the simplest form of life, and we have strayed so far from it after all these years of chemical experimentation. Health is naturally occurring, believe it or not.

A study at the Mount Sanai school of Medicine in New York found an average of 91 chemicals in the blood and urine of its nine volunteers. The volunteers had no occupational or geographical connection to the chemicals inside them, including some chemicals that were banned in the 1970's. Is there any way to flee the chemicals Have we become entirely toxic species? The synthetic revolution stems from the fact that money permeates into our food sector, the pharmaceutical industry – our lives. From start to finish, we are exposed to a myriad of chemicals, regardless of if we know it or not. The funny thing is, we have to exert effort to avoid these toxic chemicals.

The Food and Drug Administration (US) and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (Canada) whom we place a lot of trust in, rely on safety information from the food manufacturers to make its approval decisions. These manufacturers would never let it slide that there could be something hazardous in their ingredients, so how can we make an objective decision if we can’t rely on the powers that be?

Having chemicals inside our bodies may not be a death wish, necessarily. But how do we know when a chemical is truly toxic? When animals in the wild start dying, seems to be a good indication. Only then do things start to change. But things should never come to that point.

Competitive markets dictate what we eat. We are the only ones truly looking out for ourselves, and in order to live past your 50’s, this requires you to be a god damn anarchist, apparently. With everything I read regarding chemicals in the food or drugs we ingest regularly, I am becoming increasingly aware that I shouldn’t really have faith in anything. I don’t think it’s good to be cynical, but it’s good to be sceptical.