What does Lethbridge taste like? Bison and corn or potato and sage for vegetarians according to Dodolab, an Ontario based arts and design program. They do innovative, 
community involved projects designed to create discussion and debate.
In Lethbridge’s case, at the request of University of Lethbridge Art Gallery’s Josephine Mills, Dodolab’s Andrew Hunter and Lisa Hirmer wanted to create a dialogue about food and where it comes from.
So they and about a half dozen volunteers talked to approximately 750 people on campus including students and staff as well as to several different classes. They spent most of the week on campus canvassing students and staff about which two ingredients which most exemplified Lethbridge, asking them to choose between zucchini, corn, potatoes, edamame, sage, chickpeas, shrimp, bison sausage, bean sprouts and cactus.
The shortlist was chosen, not only according to what ingredients are grown or produced in the area, but also which ingredients were associated with settlers like Japanese and Chinese people.
“It is about creating a dialogue with people about where their food comes from,” said Dodolab’s Andrew Hunter.
Hunter was impressed with the response.
“We’ve done projects in other places and they have been like pulling teeth. People just didn’t want to talk to us. But here, we were talking to people in a hurry on their way to class and they really wanted to stop and talk to us,” he observed. While they have done a variety of different projects including creating a travelling menagerie about local animals in Thetford, land use in Charlottetown, songwriting about work and labour in Hamilton, Lethbridge was the first time they designed a pizza for a community.
Bison was overwhelmingly the number one choice for a pizza topping.
They found the more people they talked to, the more people volunteered to take part.
“We have local artists, and a student who was in one of the classes,” he said indicated several tables of volunteers including University of Lethbridge art gallery staff and many others, all serving Lethbridge pizza to a hungry line up in the atrium of University Hall, over the noon hour, Oct. 6.
“We had to work with Sodexo who runs the cafeteria on campus and their suppliers. I don‘t know what Sodexo’s sources are, so just because people said Taber corn, it doesn’t mean they’d get Taber corn just because we asked them too, it might be Mexican corn,” he said.
Bison and corn were overwhelmingly the most popular ingredients associated with Lethbridge.
He said people were eager to talk with them 
about food.
“They might have been in a hurry to get to class but they were still willing to stop and talk with us, which is different than some other places,” he said.
But there were a lot of unusual suggestions.
“ A lot suggested a Lethbridge pizza should be pronghorn and endangered rattlesnake. But we couldn’t make a pizza out of that. And I don’t know why they’d want to eat their mascot, maybe a competing school’s mascot,” he laughed.
Several made a point of mentioning Lethbridge’s wind.
“ A lot of people said a Lethbridge pizza would have no ingredients. It would be a cheese pizza with all the ingredients on the floor because the wind blew them off, or some variation of that theme,” said Andrew Hunter.
“We also got a lot of people who said marijuana would be part of a Lethbridge pizza, but we had to choose ingredients that Sodexo (which runs the university‘s cafeteria) could obtain, because that was part of our contract. The people even gave us phone numbers,” he laughed.
“ I was surprised with the number of people who picked shrimp because the question was not what would you like to eat on a pizza, but what represented Lethbridge. We talked to one man, a maintenance man. He wasn’t Chinese but he noted chop suey houses, Chinese settlers and the railroad were all an important part of Lethbridge’s history. So it was very interesting and different,” he continued.
They didn’t start by telling their subjects about the free pizza, and who just answered on a whim without thinking about it.
“People were really interested in talking about what it was all about, not just the free pizza,” he continued.
“And as a nod to the Sicks Brewery, the pizza will be served with ginger ale. We wanted to serve it with Pilsner, but we couldn’t do that,” he laughed.
The response to the pizza itself was so popular that Hunter said he had started talking to a local pizza parlour Two Guys and A Pizza Place , about adding it to their menu.
The other interesting part of the project was creating the cookbook out of recipes and food preparation tips from research at the Galt Museum. They created a cookbook out of their findings and handed them out to the students with their pizza.
“We found one cookbook which was nothing but recipes for creating alcohol out of strange things like apples and dandelion and sugar beets,” Hirmer observed.
“There were a lot of different ideas,” she said.
“ There was a lot of baked stuff like how to make squares and cakes as well,” Hunter said.
“There was also a lot about food preparation. It’s something that has been lost over the years,” Hunter added. He said the book is a mixture of handy tips for properly using leftovers and cooking simple recipes as well as humour and interesting trivia.
The group is off to Croatia next to work on a project there.
