in the news – Page 10

Cooking For Dummies

It’s pretty much been determined that The Food Network has been dumbed down to make it more “entertaining” as opposed to educational. Cooking shows never give you the recipe for things anymore, and viewers choose their programming based on pretty hair, big boobs and which TV celebrity chef has the most gadgets for sale.

Apparently this desire to want to cook but not really put the effort into the process has created a whole new (lowered) standard in cookbooks. As today’s cooks are bewildered by basic techniques and standardized cooking terms, recipes get longer and more detailed in an effort to explain the process enough so that the inexperienced home cook can turn out a halfway decent product.

In today’s Toronto Star, Susan Sampson explores the difficulties faced by both cookbook publishers and food writers.

We don’t sauté. We cook, stirring.

We don’t combine. We toss gently. Or stir in. Or whisk.

And we never, ever julienne. We cut in matchstick strips.

It’s our way of speaking very s-l-o-w-l-y and enunciating as home cooking skills continue to slide downhill.

We are not alone. Cookbook editor Rux Martin, for example, also tries to avoid terms readers may not know, like blanch or baste.

The catch? “If you can’t use those terms, how do we educate cooks?” wonders Martin, an executive editor at Houghton Mifflin in Boston.

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The Cost of Service

The Toronto Star is reporting that Joe Badali’s restaurant has backed down from a proposed $2 levy against their servers to cover the costs of cleaning aprons.

A popular Toronto restaurant has backed down after trying to claw back most of the extra 20 cents an hour it has to pay its minimum-wage waiters.

Joe Badali’s, on Front St. at University Ave., told servers it would start charging them $2 a shift to cover the costs of washing their aprons and providing notepads and cash envelopes.

This charge would essentially strip the staff of any increase they might expect to reap in yesterday’s rise in minimum wage.

While Joe Badali’s now says they will leave the charge at the current 50 cents per server per shift to cover cleaning costs, even that seems a little miserly to me. Laundry bills are part of the cost of running a restaurant, and servers or staff shouldn’t have to pay for the cleaning costs of items necessary to the job like aprons or chef’s whites. Having worked at establishments where there was an enforced uniform that had to be purchased from head office (a tacky little vest while working as a barista at a local coffee chain), I’d even go so far to say that uniforms that cannot be readily supplied by the servers themselves (ie. white shirt, black pants) should be offered to staff free of charge.

What’s next – is Joe Badali’s going to start charging the dishwashers for soap, or the bartenders for ice?

Eat the Rich

Before we even officially launch this site, I want to make something perfectly clear – while TasteTO was created in order to celebrate all of the wonderful food choices we have here in Toronto, we should never ever forget that there are a lot of people in our city who do not have those options. Sure, we’ll be running reviews of nice restaurants, and features on wonderful products and ingredients, but it would be remiss of us not to report on other food issues that affect Torontonians aside from whether this year’s truffle crop is as good as last year’s.

An article in yesterday’s Toronto Star advocates a meal subsidy for people on social assistance, calculating that a family of four receiving benefits has only $396 left after paying rent to cover all of their bills for the month, including groceries.

For instance, the average monthly rent for a three-bedroom apartment for a family of four in Toronto is $1,272. That family would receive $1,668.35 per month in social assistance benefits, child-related tax benefits and GST tax credits.

That would leave only $396.35 for food and other basics, far short of the $538.43 a month called for in the Nutritious Food Basket, which is based on the Canada Food Guide.

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Let There Be Pie

About a year ago, I wrote a post bemoaning the transfats in shortening and a bunch of people suggested that I try a butter crust for making pies. I was generally pleased with a butter crust – it handles great and tastes delicious, but I was never totally happy with the fact that it seemed to get soggy. There’s just two people in our household and lest we make pigs of ourselves, we’re not really able to eat a whole pie between us (nor should we ever aspire to) before the crust got downright nasty.

Wednesday, Crisco announced that they have removed the transfats from ALL of their products. Not just that one, hard-to-find, green can of non-hydrogenated shortening, but the whole shebang.

Now that still doesn’t make Crisco a perfect product – as I’ve pointed out before, it’s made of t-shirts doused in pesticides. But butter has its failings as well, and while I’m not adverse to butter for specific, small-scale uses, I don’t always want the scary pile of cholesterol that a slice of butter-crust pie carries with it. (And yes, I’m a vegetarian, and yes, despite the fact that I’m a big gal, you’d kill your mother to have my cholesterol levels, but still – it all helps.)

So I think I might just have to switch back to shortening for my pie-making needs. With the health concerns pretty much evenly balanced now, it really does come down to taste and texture.

If Soy Makes You Gay, How Come There Are so Many People in China?

Oh, those crazy Christians. Always questioning the world around them looking for answers to the things they don’t understand. Which would normally be a good thing, except when answers = scapegoating. Now that we’ve confirmed that Tinky Winky and his purse aren’t turning the world’s children into raging drag queens, the time has come for the Christian right to determine exactly what causes “teh gay”.

Apparently, it’s soy.

According to columnist Jim Rutz at WorldNetDaily (an informative site with articles titled “25 reasons to celebrate the nativity”, and why you should pull your children from public school (hint- it’s the debbil!!!), soy, which contains estrogen, is turning the fine, masculine young men of the United States into limp-wristed girlie-men.

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Eat Cake and Lose Weight – The Truth About “Moderation”

All things are fine… in moderation.

How often have we heard that phrase in regards to health and dieting? But what does it really mean? Experts tout a “balanced diet”, which, in theory, offers a bit of wiggle room for an occasional piece of cake, but what they really mean by “balanced” is choosing a variety of foods from all four food groups (the veg and grain and protein food groups, not the sugar, fat, alcohol and caffeine version) and eschewing junk food completely.

Oh, but that’s no fun, is it? We are drawn to diets that encourage moderation because we don’t want to feel deprived of our favorite foods. You’ve got to treat yourself occasionally, right? The problem is – few of us seem to know exactly what occasionally is. A recent study on obese people indicated that 75% of the study respondents claimed to have healthy eating habits which has led doctors to believe that most people don’t actually know what “healthy eating habits” are.

And the term “moderation” or the encouragement to “eat snack items in moderation” doesn’t help. Is moderation a junk food snack per day? Once a week? Or once a month? Do we save cake for a special occasion (such as a birthday), or is every day a special occasion because there’s cake?

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Can Following the Food Guide Make You Fat?

Both Canada and the US have versions of a food guide which outlines recommended daily intakes for the four main food groups. Started during the rationing of WW2, both countries have revised their guides a number of times since then.

Canada’s last revision was in 1992 where we went from “the four food groups” to a rainbow design to show that some items can and should be consumed more frequently. The US went with a pyramid design, although both guides are fairly similar in regards to quantities.

The main thing both guides have in common is that both are heavily influenced by the various food lobby groups (what boards, cattle farmers associations, dairy boards, etc) whose clients have a vested interest in having the goverment encourage people to eat specific foods.

The revised Canadian guide was supposed to have been released in spring 2006, and is now slated for some time in early 2007.

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Cultured Meat – Frankenfood or Brave New World?

What if I told you that you could have a steak, or a breast of chicken or a nice slice of ham, without having to worry about antibiotics, hormones, over-crowding of factory farms, environmental damage or the death of an animal?

And how about if I told you that in a decade or two, you’ll be able to make that same steak or chicken breast yourself, on your kitchen counter?

Welcome to the wonderful world of lab-grown or “cultured” meat. Invented as a source of easily accessible protein for astronauts, cultured meat may be available to consumers in as little as five years.

To create the meat, small amounts of muscle cells are removed from an animal and grown in a culture or solution. Stem cells from embryos may also be used. This culture is usually made from bovine fetal tissue, although researchers have had some success with a mushroom-based solution as well.

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The Fish List

It’s the middle of summer and there’s nothing tastier than some lovely fresh fish. But wait – aren’t fish bad for you now? Or are they good for you again? And some of them have been overfished, haven’t they? And what about pollution?

Buying fish can be a confusing process. Besides obvious concerns about taste, freshness and price, we now have a plethora of other issues to worry about. Is the fish contaminated with PCBs? Is it being overfished or does the manner in which it is fished contribute to destruction of the oceans or the environment? What about farmed fish versus wild fish? And how the heck is the average consumer supposed to know any of this?

The fact is, it’s hard to buy fish without some kind of guide. Farmed salmon is bad, farmed catfish is good. Cod from Alaska is fine, while Atlantic cod is almost non-existent. Farmed mussels are good, while wild ones may be contaminated. Imported shrimp contribute to the destruction of lands in India and Thailand, not to mention the unnecessary deaths of a variety of sea creatures who get caught in the trawlers.

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Getting Real About Cereal

I’m sure they must be terribly alluring. Those colorful bins of sweetened treats, the cute workers in their pyjamas to ring up your order. Even the sneaking knowledge that you’re getting away with something, by ordering up a bowl of your favourite childhood breakfast cereal instead of something more, well… grown up.

But here’s the deal. Cereal companies are corporations. They have a duty to their stockholders to expand their market share every quarter. Which means cereal companies have to come up with new and innovative ways to get all of us to eat more cereal. In recent years, someone clued in to the fact that cereal is comfort food for many people, and started marketing it as a tasty snack designed to replace the chips, pretzels and ice cream we used to eat.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? After all, cereal is good for you.

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