Kensington Market

While Scarborough Bluffs was fun, I also spent my amazing long weekend exploring two other staples of Toronto. On Saturday I went down to check out Kensington Market, which you can get to by walking down Spadina to Chinatown and turn right on Baldin Street. Kensington Market is an area of Toronto that features many small businesses, many of them specializing in ethnic cuisine. An interesting first stop for me was the Global Cheese Shop that sells—you guessed it—cheese from around the world. These imported cheeses are a bit pricey, but certainly delicious. After elbowing my way through a crowd to get my sample of a cheddar with mustard seed, I was surprised these cheese aren’t even more expensive. Right across the street I found Rasta Pasta, a wonderful place that sells Caribbean-style jerk chicken and pork. Their pork is certainly among the best foods I’ve had here in Toronto, and simply discovering a new cuisine was itself a fantastic experience.

Kensington market, despite being an international market, actually has a uniquely high concentration of Caribbean sellers. There are numerous restaurants similar to Rasta Pasta, and even a small Caribbean grocery store.

Needless to say, my cooking skills can’t handle produce of this caliber.

After that, I went to one Kensington’s many open-air the fruit markets and bought myself a few dried dates. This particular one was run by a Peruvian family if I remember correctly.

Kensington Market is the place I’ve visited during my stay that most exemplifies the concept of diversity. Toronto itself is very diverse, but I haven’t yet experienced a place where people from so many cultures shop for and make a living by selling the foods that are a staple of their heritage. What I especially like about Kensington is that there’s even diversity as to how cultures are expressed. It’s just as easy to find businesses that emphasize trendiness while others shoot for more traditionalism, such as Rasta Pasta. One restaurant (which I haven’t tried) that goes for trendiness also emphasizes the modern trend of “fusion” food by mixing Hungarian and Thai cuisine; it’s called… Hungary-Thai.

In Kensington you also see a lot of street art. I for one found this piece quite amusing:

At first I thought it was a silly pun, then I realized the artist was making a statement about Ford’s haphazard leadership, by emphasizing the sin of gluttony (his double chin) and apathy (the joint). While Kensington Market is bustling with businesses, it’s easy to see that the area isn’t as rich as other parts of Toronto. I don’t know whether Kensington has been become better off than in recent years—after all, parts of Cincinnati are notably becoming “revitalized.”

Nonetheless, this street art reflects a lot of wariness about the economy and the future felt by communities all across Canada and the US. With economic inequality rising for a host of reasons, undoubtedly many are feeling left behind and dissatisfied with that.

It’s funny. Once I was chatting with my co-workers and somebody brought up that so many of the OECD countries are going crazy. I won’t comment on US politics, but with radical Brexit and the rise of white nationalism in Europe, that very much does seem to be the case. But then you have Canada, who so far has been stable and hasn’t seen any big affronts to the political status quo. That alone really reflects the nation’s general preference for simply getting along and living a relatively conservative (yes, I said it) lifestyle. Things get done in an orderly manner through an existing set of institutions. If the government does something you don’t like, over here you don’t overthrow it, you paint it, and hope people catch on to change—quietly.