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What does Lethbridge taste like? Bison and corn, and for vegetarians is tastes like potato and sage, according to DodoLab. The Ontario-based arts and design program does innovative, community-involved projects designed to create discussion and debate.
At the request of University of Lethbridge Art Gallery’s Josephine Mills, DodoLab’s Andrew Hunter and Lisa Hirmer wanted to create a dialogue about food and where it comes from.
So they and about a half dozen volunteers talked to approximately 750 people on campus, including students and staff, as well as several different classes. They spent most of the week on campus canvassing about which two ingredients most exemplified Lethbridge. Those polled were asked to choose between zucchini, corn, potatoes, edamame, sage, chickpeas, shrimp, bison sausage, bean sprouts and cactus. The shortlist was chosen, not only according to what ingredients are grown or produced in the area, but also which ingredients were associated with the city’s early Japanese and Chinese settlers.
“It is about creating a dialogue with people about where their food comes from,” said Hunter.
Hunter was impressed with the response.
“We’ve done projects in other places and they have been like pulling teeth. People just didn’t want to talk to us. But here, we were talking to people in a hurry on their way to class and they really wanted to stop and talk to us,” he observed.
While the company has done a variety of different projects including creating a travelling menagerie about local animals in Thetford, land use in Charlottetown, songwriting about work and labour in Hamilton, Lethbridge marks the first time the company designed a pizza for a community.
A pizza with overwhelmingly Lethbridge flavour was served by several tables of volunteers to a hungry lineup in the atrium of University Hall over the noon hour on Oct. 6.
“We had to work with Sodexo who runs the cafeteria on campus and their suppliers. I don’t know what Sodexo’s sources are, so just because people said Taber corn, it doesn’t mean they’d get Taber corn just because we asked them too, it might be Mexican corn,” he said.
Bison and corn were overwhelmingly the most popular ingredients associated with Lethbridge but there were a lot of unusual suggestions.
“A lot suggested a Lethbridge pizza should be pronghorn and endangered rattlesnake. But we couldn’t make a pizza out of that. And I don’t know why they’d want to eat their mascot. Maybe a competing school’s mascot,” he laughed.
Several of those polled made a point of mentioning Lethbridge’s wind.
“A lot of people said a Lethbridge pizza would have no ingredients. It would be a cheese pizza with all the ingredients on the floor because the wind blew them off, or some variation of that theme,” Hunter said.
Another ingredient that came as a surprise was the number of people who picked shrimp, he said. “Because the question was not what would you like to eat on a pizza, but what represented Lethbridge.
The exercise also served as a learning experience for the duo.
“We talked to one man, a maintenance man. He wasn’t Chinese but he noted chop suey houses, Chinese settlers and the railroad were all an important part of Lethbridge’s history. So it was very interesting and different.”
As a nod to the Sicks’ Breweries Ltd., which opened its doors in Lethbridge in 1901, the Lethbridge pizza was served with ginger ale.
“We wanted to serve it with Pilsner, but we couldn’t do that,” he laughed.
The response to the pizza was so popular that Hunter said he had started talking to a local pizza parlour Two Guys and A Pizza Place about adding the uniquely Lethbridge greation to its menu.
In another slice of interesting tidbits, a cookbook was created out of recipes and food preparation tips discovered during research at the Galt Museum & Archives. Hunter and Hirmer created the cookbook and handed them out to the students along with their pizza slices. The cookbook is a mixture of handy tips for properly using leftovers and cooking simple recipes as well as humour and interesting trivia.
“We found one cookbook which was nothing but recipes for creating alcohol out of strange things like apples and dandelion and sugar beets,” Hirmer observed.
“There were a lot of different ideas.”
Hunter noticed plenty of recipes for baked items such as squares and cakes.
“There was also a lot about food preparation. It’s something that has been lost over the years,” Hunter added.
Hunter and Hirmer’s next project takes them to Croatia this week. |
