Sheryl Kirby

The Downward Slider

Foodies are a fickle bunch. Since eating is, in many ways, a game of one-upmanship, we’re always on to the hot new thing.

But whatever happened to the old things? Do you remember when oil-soaked pasta salad was fancy? When we all first discovered sundried tomatoes? Or in one of the health-driven trends, when we put oat bran in every damned thing?

This piece in the New York Times explores fickle food trends and their cycles, specifically looking at the rise and fall and rise again of mac ‘n’ cheese. Homey and comforting, lurid and plastic, then back to fancy and artisanal.

But think of all the other food we once swooned over but soon grew bored of. I can remember the first time I drank Perrier in the 80s and felt oh so cool and European. And who drinks bubble tea anymore? Remember how enthralled we were with brie, especially wrapping it in pastry and baking it for parties? Chocolate-covered strawberries were once the height of sophistication, now they just seem sad to me, all bland and out of season.

It will happen to our current food trends too. Some day we will look back out the current obsession for bacon and cupcakes and shake our heads -what were we thinking? Pho? Boring. Craft beer? What was all the fuss anyway? The marketing scam that is probiotics will hopefully leave us embarrassed and humbled for being such suckers.

And maybe, just maybe… we’ll figure out that sliders are really lame and tacky.

Why You Shouldn’t Buy Girl Guide Cookies

It’s Girl Guide cookie season. But before you get too excited, stop and ask yourself if you know what’s in those tasty biscuits? We look at the sustainability of everything else we eat, why not foods made/sold for charity?

It turns out that the cookies made for the Girl Scouts in the US are loaded with palm oil. In the news a great deal lately, palm oil has a scurrilous reputation. While it is the cheapest food oil on earth, it requires deforesting huge swaths of South Asian rain forest (and destroying the habitat of sensitive species like the Orangutan) to get the stuff.

Girl Guide cookies (the Canadian equivalent, with only the vanilla/chocolate combo in the spring and the chocolate mint cookies in the fall – not the plethora of flavours to be had down South) are just as bad. Made by Dare for Girls Guides Canada, they have made changes in recent years to decrease the transfats in the vanilla/chocolate cookies (there’s still some in the mint ones), but palm oil (because it is cheap and contains no trans fats) is still the main oil ingredient.

The saddest part is that members of Girl Scouts/Guides in both countries have tried to get their respective organizations to change the recipe and omit the palm oil.

Carolyn Thomas of the blog The Ethical Nag suggests not purchasing the cookies. Instead, she tells her readers to give the girls the money, but refuse to take the cookies, making it clear why. And if you’ve got time, an email to Girl Guides of Canada wouldn’t hurt either. As an organization that promotes learning about, respecting and being part of nature (specifically to “protect our common environment”), it seems a bit shameful that they’re not more concerned about this issue. And as an organization that depends on donations (and cookie sales), letting them know that consumers expect them to source their product ethically is a lesson that would seem to be at the heart of the organization’s mission to teach girls to contribute responsibly to their communities.

Tortas de Aceite

So after finally making it to the new Longo’s down at Maple Leaf Square, Greg and I are wandering through the place, filling our cart with many, many thing we don’t need. (Seriously, biggest one-stop grocery bill ever!) Anyway, added to the cart full of things we don’t need but want, is a package of Spanish torta de aceite. I have no idea what they are, but they come in a Seville orange flavour. That’s enough incentive for me. And since I’m being a greedy girl and buying many things I want but don’t need, into the cart they go, even though they’re eight bucks for what look like 8 individually-wrapped 5-inch crackers.

The torta come in a variety of savoury flavours; olive oil, sesame seed, anise, and one sweet variety, Seville orange, sprinkled with sugar and the dough studded with bits of Seville orange peel. The package says they are to be eaten with cheese.

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SalivATE – March 2011

This month’s food porn starts with a meal at Jam Cafe (195 Carlton Street). Never heard of it? It’s a charming neighbourhood bistro just west of Cabbagetown that we happened across about a month ago when we were looking for somewhere to eat before a concert at the Phoenix. Besides the fact that the space is absolutely darling, the food is really great and classic bistro fare. Above is the applewood smoked trout with horseradish crème fraîche and homemade apple & onion soda bread.

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Is ADHD Caused By Food?

I read this piece on Civil Eats with great interest. It discusses a study that links ADHD in children in with the consumption of processed foods.

There are a multitude of credible scientific studies to indicate that diet plays a large role in the development of ADHD. One study found that the depletion of zinc and copper in children was more prevalent in children with ADHD. Another study found that one particular dye acts as a “central excitatory agent able to induce hyperkinetic behavior.” And yet another study suggests that the combination of various common food additives appears to have a neurotoxic effect—pointing to the important fact that while low levels of individual food additives may be regarded as safe for human consumption, we must also consider the combined effects of the vast array of food additives that are now prevalent in our food supply.

This is interesting because back when I was first diagnosed with allergies, as well as multiple chemical sensitivity, I read plenty of books, studies and articles that linked ADHD to chemical exposure. Not necessarily in food, although food was certainly an important medium of transfer.

Having said that, I have a friend with a child who has ADHD. She relates knowing that her son had the illness only a few weeks after he was born, based on watching him in his crib. It may have been that her diet while she was pregnant was high in processed foods, but I think it’s more likely that children are born with ADHD and that the symptoms can be made worse by exposure to the chemicals in processed foods.

But it’s certainly a reasonable excuse to ensure kids get a wholesome diet of real food, grown as organically as possible.

The Mania For Meat

In yesterday’s Globe and Mail, Katrina Onstad questions the recent ~~frenzy~~ trend towards gorging on meat. As usual, the comment section of the piece devolved into the same old tired arguments of carnivore types ranting about how we were meant to eat meat and vegetarian types talking about how horrible it is.

Having been both a vegetarian and now an omnivore, I’ve see and heard all of these tired old arguments before. They’re particularly annoying in this case because not one of the commenters seem to get Onstad’s point, which is not a rant about how meat is bad, but rather to question why it is so trendy and more importantly, how folks in the sustainable food scene hide behind artisanal meat as an excuse for our own gluttony.

Certainly, if we’re going to eat meat, happy cows, chickens, pigs and goats are a good place to start as opposed to the factory-farmed stuff shot full of antibiotics, living their short lives without ever seeing the light of day. No one is arguing the fact that happy animals are better, not only in terms of animal husbandry but also in terms of taste.

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TV Chefs Need to Clean Up Their Acts

When I was a kid, my Mom had a plaque on the wall that said: “My house is clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy.” Never one to be happy living in dirt, or even disorganization or clutter, I was never really fond of the damn thing.

Sure, there are times when a little dirt won’t hurt us. And yes, studies are all very clear on the fact that children exposed to dirt and germs end up being much healthier than kids brought up in sterile environments, particularly because all the cleaners used to make the environments so sterile are probably making them more sick than the dirt might.

In the kitchen though, poor sanitation habits can indeed make us sick.

The problem is that we have really poor role models.

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Which Came First – The Health Inspector or the Idiot?

A friend sent me this link to an article on the CBC website about a farmer/B&B owner in Prince Edward Island who is no longer allowed to serve eggs from his farm to guests at his B&B.

Paul Offer has been told that, as a food service operation, his B&B must serve federally-inspected eggs. As a small organic farmer, he’s allowed to sell his (organic, free-range) eggs to the public at the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market, but can’t serve them to guests in his own home. Rather than adhere to the law, Offer and his wife plan to shut down the B&B aspect of their business.

Holy crap, does this ever hurt my head. Supposedly this is a federal law, but Offer has been eating and serving eggs from his farm for decades.

And why is it okay for him to sell the eggs to the public via a farmers’ market? You would think it would actually be the opposite situation, as it is here in Ontario, where small farmers can sell eggs “at the gate”, but to sell them to the public, the eggs must be inspected.

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Moo Juice – Not the Magic Food You Think It Is

I’m kind of boggled to see this article about milk and calcium on a mainstream media website. For years, pretty much everyone has fallen in line with the dairy-industry-promoted tagline “milk does a body good”. But there has been lots of proof, for years, that milk, in fact, doesn’t do a body good at all and that the animal fat proteins in milk outweigh the good you get from the calcium.

I came across this same information years ago when I was diagnosed with a dairy allergy and started researching the dairy industry to maybe try and find out why (as I was also diagnosed with some chemical sensitivities, the doctor wasn’t sure if the allergy was the milk protein casein, or something else like antibiotics that might be in the milk). I came across lots of articles and studies touting the party line of milk being such a wonderful food. But in almost every case, the piece could be traced back to the dairy industry, which, it must be noted, have a HUGE vested interest in wanting people to equate their product with good health.

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Author: Sheryl Kirby