Potato Chip Alert

When I was a child, there was a potato chip factory in St. Catharines.  It was beside our community swimming pool.  We passed it on the way to downtown shopping all the time.  The smell was glorious to us children.  The Lever's Potato Chips factory was around for quite a few years.  A St. Catharines Standard article tells us exactly where to look on Grote Street for the original site - the ServiceMaster business is where the factory was.  One of the Levers daughters says that if you go downstairs there, you can still smell the oil.  Front and centre in the Globe and Mail today is the conflict between the Canadian Health Agencies and the Food producers over the warning labels on potato chips.  A potato chip bag will indicate the contents are high in trans fats, sodium and sugar. The various warning symbols under discussion include red circles, yield signs, exclamation marks and magnifying glass.  I knew that potato chips are a poor food choice.  We would guess the bad choices to be chicken nuggets, french fries, pop, and fast-food hamburgers. I didn't realize that white rice is in the group:  this was in a huffingtonpost.ca article Ten processed foods to remove from your diet now.  It made me realize that people probably need significant warning labels. Our first picture is in Queenston - the Soaring Brock's Monument. Our bottom 2 pictures today come from Niagara-on-the-Lake's "Paradise Grove and the Commons".  This is one of the old forest stands in Ontario with an Oak Savannah located here.  Oaks have been planted along with native wild flowers and the natural habitat is naturally regenerating. The oldest oaks date from before the War of 1812.  The Commons walk towards NOTL comes to Fort George and to Butler's Baracks, two historic sites of the War of 1812.

Wild Lupines in High Park Toronto

Today's image is of wild lupines in the Oak Savannah of High Park.  This was a first for me - I had no idea we had native lupines in Ontario.  These are small plants - maybe up to 12 inches tall. Here's the description  from the website www.highparknature.org: "About 1/3 of the park’s natural environment consists of nationally rare oak savannah, an open, park-like landscape that contains widely spaced black oaks, scattered low shrubs and a rich variety of prairie grasses and wildflowers.  Of the over 2 million ha of prairies and savannahs that once covered southern Ontario, less than 2,100ha (0.1%) remain today. The Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources has identified approximately 44 hectares (110 acres) of the park's natural environment as significant oak woodlands. Experts consider the oak savannah at High Park to be "continentally significant" because it occurs near its northern limits in the park and because of the size, nature and characteristics of the remnant ecosystem. High Park shelters 41 rare plant species, 32 of which appear in the savannah. Among these plants are nationally rare woodland fern-leaf, wild lupine and cup-plant. Savannahs are dependent on periodic fire to maintain their open character and rich variety of plant species."