Green Living Show 2012 Review

We went to the Green Living Show and had a great time, saw a lot of vendors and met Twitter friends IRL

Here’s Mat posing kindly for me against a really nice background that I wish we had in the living room.

One of my favourite displays was the Yurt. What a neat way to live. I wish this was an option in Toronto.  This way of living makes total sense and really was comfortable inside. I really liked the attention to detail, the drawings on the visible surface areas, the practicality of it all; being able to hang up pretty much everything on the inside walls.

The doorway was very short and we both had to duck when stepping in.

Who knew Yurts were commercially available?

We went straight towards the food section to see our friend Seema, who operates Tiffinday, a fantastic vegan (with gluten free options) Indian food tiffin delivery service. If you’re in the Toronto area and want a fantastic catered lunch – check them out, tasty, environmentally friendly and reasonably priced. Excellent value over all. We cannot say enough good things about Tiffinday. An excellent food option and a great way to support the community.

Right next door was LPK’s Culinary Groove with vegan gluten free baked goodies. It’s too bad they didn’t have the panini press on Saturday (it was at the Brickworks), but lovely treats either way.

The food side was incredibly busy and after being hit with strollers (Mat actually had a mother hit him on purpose with the stroller and then forcefully told him to “Move!”. Really? If I hadn’t been speaking with someone at the time I think I would have had a few choice words for her.) we decided to go to the other half of the show.

The Plane People were there with their product Gloves Off – very cool to see an eco cleaner that actually works. Here’s a video of Ami Shah explaining the products (don’t mind the Christmas theme).

Interesting products for sure, we have a few bottles of iQ at home and I really enjoy the smell vs vinegar, and they actually work.

We came upon a familiar face with a new message. Elmer’s school glue has become eco friendly! Very cool what they’ve been able to do. I really loved this glue as a kid and it’s great to see the company take responsibility for their product and reduce their carbon footprint while making friendly changes. I am very impressed to see the formula is so heavily made from plants. Amazing.

I had no idea Soap Nuts could be used to clean more than laundry. Love how a natural substance can do so much.

 

Speaking of nature, here’s something that made me not so please for the creatures of the sea.

I’m pretty sure the picture above was from the Loblaws booth, but I could be wrong. I couldn’t believe people actually believe fish farming is “sustainable”, so let’s get this straight – we’ll breed these animals, just to kill, but then we’ll breed them again, like plants! No. This is not sustainable.  Can we do the same to children? It’s okay, just breed some more, it’s sustainable.

This really made me angry and not impressed that a “green living” show would accept this. This is incredibly disappointing as well as the other vendors who had meat products available. Factory farming is wrong on many levels. I can’t agree with animal enslavement.

Organic Meadows (was there as well) apparently has cows that go outside and come inside on their own, according to some of their videos on Youtube – kudos to them for not chaining their cows. This still doesn’t make it right. Inseminating the cows over and over again to produce milk. I wonder what they do with the offspring? Humans should stick to drinking their own milk or alternatives. As grown adults, we do not need milk, this is baby food; especially interspecies milk, that’s pretty gross when you think about it.

It’s too bad the Green Living show feels the need to have animal based products. I thought it would be green and clean, instead it was some green over here, oh, here’s a company pretending to care and piggy packing on the movement; TD Bank for example.

Great they have some green initiatives, but in the end they are a bank and they care heavily about the bottom dollar. When was the last time a bank turned away a profit to be green? I’d love to know. Any effort is a good effort, but I would like to see larger companies really do more and truly think hard about what they could do to improve.

I hope the show increased awareness of green initiatives and what we need to do to help the planet. I’m not sure how that is accomplished with making it okay and friendly to factory farm sea creatures by calling it sustainable. Maybe next year the Green Living show will say no to these kinds of companies and have more credible vendors.