Meet some of the vendors behind the Kwantlen Street Farmers Market

Where chic meets the street

In the shadows of humming food-truck fryers, a cast of vendors offer you all things artisanal and green. This is the Kwantlen Street Market, a community and student-led initiative showcasing a grand selection of local products—including Okanagan cherries, kohlrabi, and lemon-aide—from all corners of the Lower Mainland.

Beyond temporary henna tattooing and Eli’s Serious Sausage, visitors can indulge themselves in fresh and sustainable, student-grown fruits and vegetables, as well as homemade wool dryer balls. Janelle Laycock from Mountain Naturals, is concerned largely with the latter.

Standing firmly in opposition to the corporate monsters who spike our toiletries with synthetics and dyes with names too long to read, Laycock creates luxury-quality soaps, face oils, stain sticks, as well as the abovementioned wool dryer balls and lip balm—sans the allergens and chemicals, of course.

“Everything is as natural as it can possibly be,” she says. “The oils are non-GMO, and mechanically-pressed,” without the use of solvents.

After trying her own handmade, all-natural soap in the shower, Laycock, for the first time, experienced bathing itch-free. Such experiences led her to begin creating her own laundry detergents and shampoos from natural ingredients. She has found that her own products are gentler and more effective than their commercial counterparts.

As she has no “duty to her shareholders,” Laycock is able to strictly limit her ingredients to include essential oils, herbs, and spices. This differentiates her, she believes, from larger soap and cosmetic manufacturers who cut corners where quality and safety are concerned by using abrasive dyes and artificial fragrances.

Mere metres away from the shampoo-bar and soap stand sits Caroline Chiu, coordinator at the student-led Tsawwassen and Richmond Farm Schools, part of Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s research and extension unit: the Institute for Sustainable Food Systems.

The Farm School programs—which are non-accredited, 10-month-long practical training programs operating on a full cost-recovery basis, meaning that the schools are not profit-generating endeavours—work closely with the Sustainable Agriculture program, an undergraduate degree program at KPU.

Challenging the idea that all farmers are old men, KPU students are engaged on campus in vibrant, small-scale farming and all-around green living.

“Just outside the terrace,” says Chiu, “students grow the vegetables [on Richmond] campus.”

Re-stabilizing the long-forgotten human connection to vegetation, as well as the connection between land and self, ultimately, is an underlying philosophy of the institute—a claim endorsed by both Chiu and student Stafford Richter.

“[It’s about] making old [farming] techniques new again,” says Richter. This is achieved by moving away from chemicals and in general making young people take more critical stances toward their food.

According to Chiu, students in the agriculture and food systems programs at KPU go on to become farmers, policy makers, educators, community activists, and outreach workers. Still, the bulk of students’ work begins on the farms and in the Kwantlen St. Market.

“Education and access,” and more specifically, “helping people to access local, seasonal, healthy food,” is what Mairi Lester, sustainability coordinator at the Kwantlen Student Association, deems one primary objective of the Market. The KSA is one of the primary organizers of the event. It’s for “students who have small businesses,” who “make jewellery, design their own clothing.”

The Market targets the student demographic and is a worthwhile opportunity for grassroots, student-run businesses, says Lester.

For those curious about the origins of their soap, or perhaps those intrigued by community-building, or getting their hands dirty by spreading the green message—even for those who come only for the kettle corn—the Market runs from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., each Tuesday until Oct. 18, in the parking lot neighbouring the bookstore at the Richmond campus of Kwantlen Polytechnic University.