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October 16 is the day that the Walt Disney Company was founded (1923), the day that Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act in response to the October Crisis terrorist kidnapping (1970), and the day that President Bush signed into law the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution (2002). It is also, though you may not know it, World Food Day, as deemed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. World Food Day has been celebrated in more than 150 countries since 1979, and since 1981, each year has had a theme. This year's theme is The Right to Food; that is, "the right of every person to have regular access to sufficient, nutritionally adequate and culturally acceptable food for an active, healthy life. It is the right to feed oneself in dignity, rather than the right to be fed."

Downtown corners are speckled with hot dog vendors selling wieners to hungry pedestrians. There are no salad bar carts, no roti carts, no souvlaki carts, and no Chinese bun carts. Food vendors on the street sell hot diggity dogs due to Toronto's strict public health bylaws:

Food preparation must be limited to the reheating of precooked meat products in the form of wieners or similar sausage products to be served on a bun. Hazardous raw meats (hamburger patties, steaks, shish kabobs, farmers sausage and chicken) must not be cooked on the cart.

As for street eats, it’s wieners or nothing. Health-conscious and multiethnic food lovers must go elsewhere. There are also stipulations for the vending cart itself, which include policies on umbrellas and condiment protection. The street food vending bylaws differ from the regulations for preparing food inside of a vehicle. Kitchens on wheels such as Chinese food trucks on the U of T campus and ice cream trucks are permitted to sell their food since cooking, pouring, dicing, and slicing in a vehicle is acceptable.

Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, extraordinary renditions, security certificates, Maher Arar, enemy combatants, torture, all of them erosions of democracy and symptoms of a larger problem. Government abuse of power isn't anything new, and as the sole holder of power and force in most societies, our elected "representatives" can often do so with impunity.