Desperately seeking the source of this smell

There’s a smell out there on the street that I just can’t place. It’s not entirely unpleasant. A bit sweet, I’d say, toasty perhaps. It isn’t the smell of the Koff brewery down the road, however, since that was closed down, or rather relocated, in the early 1990s.

The first industrial brewery in the country, Koff was established by Nikolai Sinerbrychoff, an innovator and investor with Russian roots. In 1819 when the brewery went up it must have felt like it was in the middle of nowhere, or at least off the edge of civilised society. But it was near the workers of Punavuori and the port facilities of the Bay of Hieta (Hietalahti, you see). By the yuppifying 1990s enough people looked at the spot and saw an opportunity for luxury-end housing stuck onto the remains of a quaint piece of industrial history.

So brewery smell this ain’t.

A visit to the City’s Website produced a wealth of information on various smells or on hajuhaitat in Finnish. (Sounds poetic to me, those two letter-h’s.) But mostly they were about smells generated indoors.

It’s not cars or leaves or snow or anything like that. I wonder if it could actually be coffee roasting. There is a food processing plant, Meira, on Sturenkatu in Vallila in the geographical heart of the city, but Paulig, another grand old Finnish-based company started by an immigrant, has its gleaming new coffee roastery in remote Vuosaari, next to the brand new harbour. According to their website Paulig was established in 1876 – whipper-snapper! – and relocated from Katajanokka to Vuosaari in 1968. In fact, were it not for Paulig, “old” Vuosaari from the 1960s probably wouldn’t exist.

By coincidence, I have some pictures of the new plant to share, even if somewhat dark, to suit the November weather. The site is next to a former rubbish dump. Besides employees of the docks and various industrial facilities in the area, and possibly Vuosaari residents, not that many people are likely to stumble on it. Which is rather sad in my view but goes with the times, I suppose – we live our lives over here, let others live theirs over there. Siting policies on industrial activity end up  putting physical as well as other kinds of distance between groups of residents from the same city. A remote harbour also makes it possible to transport ginormous amounts of stuff into and out of Helsinki without most people ever being aware of it.

Getting back to the building though, it’s rather lovely behind its black-painted fence. An unusually large project of industrial architecture in Finland in recent years, one of its notable features is the cor-ten steel, the stuff that looks like rust (coffee?!), of which there is apparently 14 000 square metres. The internal floorspace is about 32 000 square metres. They’ll need it. Paulig still appear to be doing extremely well in the Finnish coffee market.

You’ll have heard of how well Finland does in various international ranking lists so you may also know that Finland regularly scores high in the competition for biggest coffee consumption per capita. For more, see kahvi.net which provides all the statistics.

I notice the media web page calls the location the Vuosaari Harbour Business Park. Given the sheer size of the plant, I suppose it’s not impossible that a smell could travel the full 15km from this “park” to the downtown area.

Another post on shops

Since the producer of this blog has been away from Helsinki for some considerable time, it is hard to guess how much her observations reflect her obsessions and how much they really do say something about the world. But it certainly seems that “local food” and “organic” and “consumer choice” (in Finnish of course: lähiruoka, luomu, kuluttajavalinta) (hmm, the last one is almost untranslatable, but hey, tradittore traduttore, as they say, eh.) have suddenly erupted on the Finnish scene. Even the usual source has taken up the issue of megamarkets and retail monopolies.

Could it be that the efforts of the Megapolis team (on this blog at the end of last month) might have had something to do with this? More long-term efforts are known, though, not just in Helsinki (Hakaniemen Halli, Laivurin Valinta (above), Ruohonjuuri all go back several years) but in the countryside.

Our protagonists had the pleasure of discovering this in Heinola: Local food market Heila, the name a sweet but, again, impossible-to-translate word-play. Suffice to say it evokes images of nostalgic summer fun and all things wholesome and (re)productive.

Inside were impeccable toilet facilities, a decent self-service canteen and a sizeable food market where everything was sold as a special item, whether as locally and/or organically produced or in some other form particularly Good For You. Mr. Protagonist dared to question how, exactly, “local” in this context was being defined.

No matter. There was obvious interest in the produce since the place was heaving and, indeed, was able to offer several interesting delicacies. There was also a sign advertising a full day of matters organic this coming Saturday, October 17th.

The thing, perhaps, that somewhat tempered our protagonists’ enthusiasm was no doubt the wider setting. Not, in fact Heinola as a conurbation but a retail “park” off the motorway. In the picture above you may catch a glimpse of the now ubiquitous ABC Asemat, now one of Finland’s largest chains of service stations and, not coincidentally, a major player in the contemporary food retail sector! The photos that we took in all other directions differ not at all from the usual retail expanse now to be encountered everywhere in the wealthy world, and so we won’t bother with them.

However, there was an uncanny aspect to the whole experience. The very organicness of Heila was accentuated by recollections of the North America our protagonist knew in the 1980s and 1990s. That was an ever-expandable universe of countless shopping “villages” and other variously self-conscious architectural postmodernisms. And weirdly Heila’s design, the aesthetics of the place also had that eery quality of American nostalgia. What do you think? Or was it just the Rotary Club sign on the wall?

Hungry for eco-gourmet and small shops

Gourmet will meet eco and all will be well. This sentiment, initially publicised by the Slow Food movement, used to sound like an invitation to scepticism, or worse. In 2009 in Helsinki it remains a minority interest but certainly has  momentum as this blog has already indicated. Between such yearnings and the world of city planning there isn’t that long a distance.

The monopolisation of food retail is a giga-trend that’s making life harder for the rich and poor alike, in the global south as well as in northern pockets of privilege where we mourn the loss of those old shops. But if you don’t mention the monopolisation of agribusiness and its tight embrace of food retail it might seem hard to debate what’s wrong with it all. But it’s not impossible it seems. Megapolis 2024 barely touched the centralisation of food retail. Instead, it was enthusiastic, inspiring and fun.

Held in Vanha in Helsinki it was the fourth annual urban festival organised completely by volunteers in the organisation Dodo. This in turn was formed in 1995 as a forum for townies to talk about environmentalism. In those days that topic, at leat in Finland, was largely dominated by people interested in saving bits of nature from industrialisation. Dodo was inspired by people who anticipated that the environmental crisis is above all an urban problem.

And how many times did we hear that statistic (dubious if still powerful) about more than half the world’s population now living in cities – and more coming every day. Grim, grim statistics. But those who came to the event and certainly those who spoke, from Finland and beyond, came from the optimistic end of the humanity, and the one where life has to be more fun because you’re doing interesting, fun and ethically defensible things, like urban gardening off the old railway tracks in Pasila, for example, picked up by the press too. Here a few shots of that wonder.

Megapolis 2024 (as in looking ahead 15 years to that year) included an impressive line-up of speakers on topics to do with food and its place in making cities happier and more sustainable places, a host of exhibitors, some sessions with the ‘Allotment garden game’, films about food and the politics of food and a late-night club to top it all off. In this photo you can see the terrace of Vanha sadly shrouded in a “Sale” sign. But it still gives a view of Stockmanns and the Three Smiths that, well, that’s good for people watching and that one had forgotten about since growing out of the target demographic.  

Proceeds from the night’s entertainment were put to excellent use.

This morning Michelin-quality chef Pietro Leemann, the only such creature who doesn’t serve meat in his gourmet establishment, teamed up with Finland’s Carrot-mobbers to offer a  vegetarian brunch behind Lasipalatsi. Ten minutes after the advertised start time the queue was huge, hundreds had shown up.

We got the very last glass of vegetable ‘jus’. To our  chagrin the last beetroot towers went about seven queuers ahead of us.

Food & prices

Food is a very visible topic in this city right now. Tomorrow will bring concerned citizens and inspiring pioneers to the Old Student House (Vanha Ylioppilastalo) to discuss the ways in which the environmental crisis can be resolved through what we consume literally, at table. But I’ll blog about that when it’s happened!! (Don’t mind plugging it though: http://megapolis2024.org/)

Bizarrely, though Vanha has been the backdrop for generations of student debate, debauchery and entertainment, and though it’s open to anyone for a relatively cheap meal or drink, visiting in the virtual world you’d get a rather different idea. Following internet links, Vanha yields a website that’s got some ingredients of a Helsinki site that are becoming a little too standard: an invitation to a local culinary experience. Foodies not food get the spotlight.

On a similar topic a new arrival in the city is a purveyor of local food. Centraly located  in Lasipalatsi (and you can’t get any more central than that, distances to Helsinki are measured to the clock tower next to it, here photographed from the other side, three pairs of shoes hanging off the wires coming off it), this is the Maatilatori, a specialist shop for foodies and, possibly, for greenies. Not cheap but not nasty either. Also, they seem not to have their own website, though information is available via Lasipalatsi’s site, but there’s something quite nice about a shop that’s looking at the basics and highlighting the importance of geography to food production, that doesn’t have a virtual presence.

It’s there, and they were really lovely. Outside and inside. Got 2 different kinds of red potatoes. Look forward to cooking with them, but first, an evening in a restaurant awaits.

Oh, almost forgot. They have a name in the third domestic, though not the second: Eat&Joy. Enough said.