FED #109: The Inventionator & The Buildificationator (Justin Nadeau & James Davis)

Porkosity | SUNDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2011

Status: FED
· Pappa al pomodoro
· Zucchini & Yogurt
· Kale + Arugula + Yuzu Dressing + Pecorino
· Ptitm & Cheese
· Brigitte is bringing cookies

Guest #: Justin Nadeau
Occupation: "School Food Garden & Environmental Education Coordinator" or Inventionator
Contributed: sunflower sprouts (grown in a file cabinet), eggs (from backyard chickens of a friend of a friend)
Sent thank-you: email

Guest #: James Davis
Occupation: "School Food Innovations Educator" or Buildificationator
Contributed: Jamaican dessert thing with coconut, ginger, hemp seeds
Sent thank-you: see above

Guest #: Dawn Laing
Occupation: Environmental Biologist
Contributed: Mike Weir 2009 Underdog, egg tray
Sent thank-you: email

Guest #: Brigitte Noel
Occupation: journalist
Contributed: a selection of cookies from Soma (even though I specifically asked only for almond cookies from Soma)
Sent thank-you: Card in the mail

THE BUILDIFICATIONATOR & THE INVENTIONATOR

DAVIS
Did you dub me as the 'buildificationator?'

NOEL
Yes, and the 'inventionator'.

DAVIS
I guess we're still sort of workshopping it. They think that buildologist is a better fit …

LAING
Ooh, I like that too.

DAVIS
I like 'buildificationator'. Because we also have 'funologists', so a little too much 'ologists' for me.

NADEAU
I think it started with 'inventionator' because one of our staff has a 12-year –old daughter who was like, 'Was that built by the inventionator?' She coined this term. I think it's flattering. I hate being called an engineer.

LAING
What's your title?

NADEAU
School food, gardens and environmental education coordinator.

LAING
Oh wow.

NADEAU
Yeah, it's got a real ring to it.

LAING
So Foodshare, do you report to a board, or an environmental director?

NADEAU
So Foodshare is ambitious and taking on a lot of things, and doing it well. So it's taking on food security as a holistic thing. And I don't want to say that word ever again, 'holistic'. So you have this idea of the Good Food Box, which is providing fresh fruits and vegetables to anyone at a really great price. It beats the supermarket.

LAING
And it's all seasonal, for the most part?

NADEAU
Yeah. It's a balance between people's cultural needs. People like avocados and bananas. Culturally appropriate is above local. It's working with farmers. So for example, farmers right now have tons of squash or tons of potatoes. So we're working with farmers all over the province. But also with the food terminal, which is a thing that people may not celebrate but the fact is that we have a humungous food terminal in Toronto. So we have a buyer at Foodshare and he communicates with our staff and finds out that, right now, cucumbers are way too expensive. Let's get zucchini. Every week it changes. So we'll find out what's the most affordable, nutritionally balanced and culturally relevant food. And we're working with that point guy to figure out the costs. So kale is brilliant right now. So let's get organic kale because it's so cheap, it's the same price as regular kale.

MINTZ
Who are the boxes going out to?

NADEAU
Anyone. There are drop points throughout the city. Someone's home or church can be a drop spot.

DAVIS
And as long as you get ten orders in you can become a hub.

NADEAU
It's five. Once you get to ten, your own is free. So my friend is a drop-spot in Roncy. She has eight right now. So if she gets two more neighbours to pick up the box then she would get her own free box.

MINTZ
This sounds like a pyramid scheme.

AQUAPONICS

DAVIS
We have the aquaponics system, which is where I first met Justin. Aquaponics is, you take aquaculture, which is raising fish for food, and hydroponics, which is growing without soil, and you mash them up together, and you come up with aquaponics.

MINTZ
You'd actually get a very dirty fishcake.

LAING
But you end up with really cook stuff floating on top of the water, growing, while you have a living ecosystem underneath.

DAVIS
So Justin, I think it was his second or third project at Foodshare. He took some old 55 gallon barrels, the black plastic barrels, split one in half and they turned into grow beds. There's a tank where the fish are raised so basically the fish waste gets cycled up, bacteria turns the nutrients into a plant available form and then the plants take those up and kind of clear the water. So it's somewhat of a closed system.

LAING
So does oxygen at all getting into that system?

DAVIS
There's a tank, I'm guessing it's like a 60 gallon tank that we've got six tilapia swimming around in. It used to be a barrel that the fish were swimming in and now it's an actual aquarium tank.

MINTZ
Why tilapia?

NADEAU
So tilapia have always been, for centuries, — this is a good song, too — the best for raising fish. They're hearty. So you can change the conditions of the water and they're going to survive. Whereas other fish would go belly up. So you would start a rice paddy out in like Egypt, flood it with water and fill it with tilapia and in six months you would harvest your tilapia. That's sort of progressed and come to the point where tilapia have been this farmed fish in certain regions. It works great in north America because when they get introduced to our waters, like if they get put in Lake Ontario, they're not going to become the Chinese carp and jump out of the water and knock people out of their boats. In Australia they're illegal. I don't want to get into too much detail …

CLL
Non-native species introduction: bad.

DAVIS
This is actually a sensitive moment, if we could have a moment of sensitivity. Last year I had 25 tilapia at a TDSB building where we work. And the boiler broke during the Christmas break, when we were not allowed to access the building. Our compost guy came in and says, 'Justin, the tilapia don't look too good.' I hop on my bike and when I get there they're all bloated and dead, 25 fish that I'd been raising for seven months. Just toast. I had to compost them. But Simon gave me some of his fish and they're this big now and I thought, maybe we should bring them to Corey's and we could fry them up.

LAING
Aren't you a vegetarian?

DAVIS
That's another topic.

MINTZ
You didn't make me cook a vegetarian meal for nothing, did you?

THREE THINGS BEFORE GOOGLE

DAVIS
There's an old saying: There are old mushroom hunters and there are bold mushroom hunters. But there are no old, bold mushroom hunters.

My first encounter with Mark was, he was a phone-a-friend kind of situation. So my friend Linda has this thing she calls "three things before Google". You're in a dinner situation, you're talking and there's a contentious issue — this person thinks this — let's just google it. She says no, before you do that you've got to do three things. You call a friend, you look it up in a book, whatever you've got to do. I like it. Much more interesting things happen.

LAING
Can the person you call look it up on the internet?

DAVIS
I think that's cheating as well.

NOEL
Isn't that always what happens when those questions occur?

MINTZ
Well if someone calls you, you might ask, 'Why don't you look it up?' But you might be an expert and that's why they're calling you.

DAVIS
Or, in the case of one of the first times I played this game, or followed these instructions, this protocol, I was at a friend's house just outside of Ottawa, Chelsea, and we were talking about, I can't even remember … she's the CEO of Indogo. Heather's Picks. We were talking about Heather's Picks. And it was this discussion around, who is Heather. And I said, well she's actually the CEO of the company and nobody else believed me. They said it was just the person from that one store. We had to prove this somehow. So three things before Google. I called my roommate at the time, who knows a lot of stuff. And he confirmed it right away without any other prompting. And then another time we were having a conversation about how far it is to drive to Thunder Bay or something. So I called my father. He actually took out the 1985 National Geographic atlas and got to the page and took a ruler and did the math. It's about 1100 kilometres. It works.

MINTZ
So number one is call a friend …

DAVIS
Three things before Google. There are endless possibilities.

MINTZ
There aren't three mandated things.

DAVIS
Call a friend, look it up in a book. There's nothing mandated.

MINTZ
But the two obvious ones are that it's printed on something physical in your home, someone you know knows the answer or, try to actually figure it out using deductive reasoning.

DAVIS
Or arm wrestling or whatever. So I have to quickly talk about Marc. We were at my friends Nick and Lisa's house and Linda, who is the connector of this whole story, was talking about an article in the globe she read, where …

MINTZ
Booo!

DAVIS
It may have been in the Star. At any rate, a newspaper article she read about this woman who was bringing in truffles from Romania and selling them to high end restaurants in toronto. She'd cleared a six figure salary in two months of doing this. So right away we're like, can we do this? Instead of importing them from our family in Romania, because those people don't exist, can we start growing them in Ontario. So a conversation ensued about, is this possible or are they specific to a certain climate. So we had three different people that we called that night, one of whom was Marc. We first called the same room mate I called about Heather. He knows a lot of stuff but he also acts really confidently about things. I know Dana knows a lot of stuff but he also talks a lot of shit and doesn't admit when he's wrong. So then we called Marc. Linda was like, 'I know this guy Marc. He knows all about mushrooms. Maybe they're not a mushroom. But we've got to talk to him. So we talked to him on speakerphone. He told us a lot of facts which partially lined up. I don't know this Marc guy. I'm not gonna question him as to how valid he is.

NADEAU
It's almost like you need another offshoot, like a verification. Because you could google Marc and find out if he's verifiable.

DAVIS
But here's the thing, you have to triangulate. My older brother knows a lot of stuff and is one of the people I respect most in this world. And between the three of them there were enough common facts that we couldn't' do this in Ontario but if we move to Victoria we have a chance but the best thing to do would be to move down to Oregon and work hard or just go to Romania.

LAING
Corey, is it possible, filing cabinet mushrooms?

MINTZ
My first thought is not whether it's possible, but who do I know. I think, and Marc would be the first person I'd ask, but I'm pretty sure that the whole issue of truffles is the randomness of where they grow and that you can't actually cultivate them. I think that's what makes them precious and valuable.

DAVIS
So this is what we learned that night. There are a few things. A) You don't actually need a pig to route them out because they love them so much that they will eat them.

LAING
Can you put a muzzle on them?

DAVIS
A muzzle …. ? Yeah, that's a good question. You can use a dog. Dog's can be taught to smell it out but not eat it. B) You can cultivate it but you need the right climate and Ontario is not appropriate and it takes a long time. The people on Vancouver island who's set up a farm, they were in their fifth year of doing it and they'd started to have a very meager harvest. So you've got to really be committed. And C) Not a mushroom.

Date of publication: Saturday, December 17th, 2011

http://porkosity.blogspot.com/2011/12/fed-109-inventionator.html#more