The unfiltered truth about vegan wine
Your article on Toronto’s vegan scene (NOW, July 12-18) makes a broad generalization about wine not being vegan with its statement that most bottles at the LCBO aren’t vegan “because the filtration process usually involves animal products such as bone marrow.”
In fact, although some wines are “fined,” as the process is called, with egg white, milk protein or a substance called isinglass produced from the bones of fish, increasingly producers are using bentonite, a form of clay, for this purpose.
Although none of these substances are actually present in finished wines, federal allergen regulations require wines be labelled (“may contain fish, eggs, milk, etc.”) if any of these animal-based substances are used in the production process.
Howard Kaman, Toronto
Climate change is killing us, people
I live in Toronto and have been sweating now for over a month. The rainfall has been pitiful and the grass in parks and other civic areas is brown. Climate change is here. Others, too, are suffering. There were massive forest fires in BC last summer, and flooding in the Prairies and Maritimes this spring.
Record temperatures have also been set in recent weeks in Asia to the Middle East, in southern Europe and North Africa and from Quebec to California. People are suffering and dying.
We need a real plan to transition off fossil fuels. Not more pipelines.
Katherine-Anne Skinner, Toronto
Lost on lingo
Regarding your review of The Girl in The Photograph at the Toronto Fringe Festival by David Silverberg (NOW Online, July 7).
As a member of the Toronto theatre community, we feel the need to call you out on some important comments in the review. We are referring to the following: “What hurts the show for English-only audiences are the many key pieces of dialogue spoken in Spanish, without any translation. As authentic as the show creators want to make the Mexico-set show, that language barrier will leave some audiences feeling lost.”
Part of being a Torontonian is hearing a variety of other languages and experiencing a diversity of cultures depending on what part of the city you’re in. Approximately half the city’s residents don’t speak English as their first language.
If our use of Spanish truly bothered the reviewer so much, we question what his experience of Toronto has been.
Part of our use of another language was to provoke audiences to pay closer attention to behaviours in order to follow the scenes. We took great care on selecting the lines in Spanish to ensure that key plot lines were not lost in translation.
We come from a philosophy that believes human behaviour speaks louder than words. This is a huge part of our show and is an opportunity to embrace connection, no matter what language we speak.
Andrea Cabeza, Executive producer, On behalf of the creative team of The Girl In The Photograph
City has lots of bike lanes – they’re called sidewalks
Recent NOW articles state that Toronto needs more bicycle lanes (NOW, July 5-11), but this is not the case. Almost every street in the city already has wide, well-maintained and separated bicycle lanes on both sides that are used by a large number of cyclists on a regular basis.
Colloquially referred to as “sidewalks,” they are for the use of pedestrians, but now they provide a welcome alternative to cyclists who are terrified of riding in heavy traffic.
Sure, most pedestrians are annoyed about the nuisance of having to share space with bicyclists slaloming around them but what can they do, eh? Everyone knows that the bylaw against riding on the sidewalk is never enforced.
And those on foot always have to jump out of the way since in any collision between a cyclist and a pedestrian, the pedestrian invariably gets the worst of it.
Eddy Ryan, Toronto
