Category: wtf?

I’ll See Your Organic Free-Range Chicken and Raise You a Tin of Lamb Mince

While the name Delia Smith is familiar to me, I’ll have to admit that I’m not especially familiar with her cookbooks. Given the recent fuss about her newest cookbook How To Cheat at Cooking, I sort of assumed she was one of those slack-assed Rachel Ray types with the canned goods and bagged greens, teaching fans how to spread salmonella in three easy steps.

But it turns out that Smith is more well-known for being the UK’s answer to Martha Stewart. She spent years teaching Britons how to cook real food, teaching them basic cookery techniques and classical dishes. How to Cheat at Cooking is apparently a rewrite of her first book published in 1971, but from there, her work was all about cooking with real, fresh ingredients.

Any new book sells better with a wave of press, and there is some speculation that Smith’s recent public comments about Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s campaign against battery chickens might simply be desperate publicity spin. Smith claims that her recipes are designed to feed the poor, especially the chyllldrunnn (who will think of them?), but even poor kids are likely to turn up their noses at some of the stuff in her new book.

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Ladies, Please

When we started TasteTO last year, I subscribed to a bunch of Canadian women’s magazines because I thought they might be useful references for stories. They haven’t been especially, as they’re not Toronto-specific enough, and they also run to seriously mainstream tastes and trends – generally enough that I find something about every issue that annoys and frustrates me.

The most recent issue of Canadian Living is billed on the cover as their “Go Green Issue” with a whole lot of lip-service paid to the recent trend of eco-activism without any real commitment required on the part of the reader/consumer *or* the magazine. There’s your typical spread of eco-friendly shopping bags, tips on eco-friendly laundering, and generally a whole lot of articles on how we can all be good little consumers yet still save the earth. (ie. Don’t stop buying *stuff* just buy environmentally-friendly stuff!) I saw no mention of important actions like hey – get out of your fucking car! Or – stop taking the annual family trip to Disneyworld! Just a lot of suggestions of how to renovate your house with beach stone tiles or stuff that *looks* like it’s from nature (ie, plastic photo frame that looks like logs).

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The Lies on Your Yogurt Container

There has never been any debate that yogurt is a healthy food. Yogurt adds calcium and protein to the diet; can positively affect other health issues such as cholesterol, immunity and colon health; and is easier to digest than milk. Plain yogurt contains live bacteria that can regulate digestive issues and restore balance to a system thrown off by things like yeast infections or anti-biotics.

These good bacteria are known as pro-biotics, and occur naturally in plain yogurt made with live bacteria. However, once you get into sweetened or flavoured yogurt of any kind, the sugars kill off the live bacteria and the nutritional benefit is thought to be negligible.

Because food companies are always working to keep and increase their market share, and because our society seems to work on the theory that if a little of something can be helpful then a lot of something must be really, really great, processed foods have been popping up on the shelves of the dairy case touting the inclusion of pro and pre biotic bacteria.

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There’s No More Room on the Bandwagon

Okay, so I’m flipping through one of the happy housewife magazines that I subscribe to, eating lunch and not really paying attention to what I’m reading ($160 is too much to pay for a hot trend item that looks good on exactly nobody and will be out of style in 6 months) when I come across an ad that makes me choke on my soup.

The eeeeevilest of evil corporations has gone organic.

Sweet motherfucking hell.

Currently Kraft is only offering crackers, salad dressing and coffee in organic form, but you can bet your sweet patootie that there’s more to come.

Although organic products have recently gained an increase in recognition, organic practices are deeply rooted in traditional agricultural methods. Organic farming practices employ a variety of ecologically stable methods to help sustain a healthy environment. Composting, recycling and crop rotations are just some of the holistic practices farmers utilize to ensure a sustainable land, where crops are grown with natural fertilizers such as manure and without the use of synthetic pesticides. Animals raised on organic farms have access to pasture and open air runs to foster their health and natural behaviour, and are raised without the use of growth hormones.

Kraft organic products are created with carefully selected organically grown ingredients, and their organic qualities are maintained at all stages of production. Organic foods are minimally processed and contain no artificial preservatives or genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

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No Cupcake For You

Today on Serious Eats, Ed Levine mentions a piece in The New York Times about a crackdown on parents sending kids to school with cupcakes for birthday celebrations.Apparently, in an effort to stave off childhood obesity, cupcakes are now forbidden.

Folks in the comments section bring up some relevant issues, such as:

  • How can schools get away with selling/providing pizza and french fries in the cafeterias, yet ban occasional treats?
  • If you’re banning cupcakes, does that mean kids are going to stop selling candy bars or Girl Guide cookies as fundraisers?
  • Maybe sending kids to school with a healthy lunch as opposed to cash to spend at McDonald’s every day would mean the occasional cupcake would actually be okay.

The thing to consider is that in the original case, in a Texas suburb, every child was bringing cupcakes for the class on their own birthday. Over the course of the year, that’s a whole lotta cupcakes. It’s also creates a mini class-system within the school; kids whose families cannot afford to supply the class with treats, kids whose parents send store-bought cupcakes instead of homemade, or kids whose birthdays fall outside of the school year, are all kinda screwed in the cupcake wars.

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Potato Baby

Other people find the image of Jesus in their toast, an inspiring, enlightening experience that at least nets them some cash on eBay. Me, I find things that look like deformed unborn children in my fingering potatoes.

I was gonna give it little eyes made from cloves but that only made it a gazillion times creepier.

Maybe I should search out all the deformed vegetable and set up a freakshow at the local Farmer’s Market. I’d call it the “Sidedish Sideshow.”

Going to Hell(man’s) in a Garden Basket

I saw an ad on TV the other night for Hellman’s Community Gardens. That is, Hellman’s mayonnaise.

Apparently Unilever the parent company, leased a number of empty lots in various cities across Canada, then sent out seed packets with an invitation to write a 150 word essay and submit it in a contest that would see a number of winners in each city.

The downside – the programme is a one-year project and is set to run only until September 15th, regardless of whether the gardeners still have crops in place.

Needless to say, a lot of people aren’t happy about this, accusing Hellman’s/Unilever of using community-oriented initiatives for their own corporate interests. In Halifax, The Coast, a weekly entertainment paper looked at the issue back in May:

“Hellmann’s wants to inspire Canadians to ‘eat for real’ by providing them with the space to grow their own fresh produce,” emailed Sharon MacLeod, the brand-building director at Hellmann’s Unilever Canada Inc.

As of two weeks ago, Hellmann’s had received more than 50 essays from Halifax residents eager to start gardening. But the company’s promotion has inspired something entirely different in at least one Haligonian—anger and scepticism.

“Community gardens are for people. They’re not for multinational corporations,” says north-end resident Geoff Tanner.

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Culinary Mis-Adventures

Giving props where props are due, I’ve got a lot of respect for Loblaws and their President’s Choice line for opening up new gastronomic horizons for the good people of our country and our neighbours to the south. Without the folks from PC offering us everything from peanut sauce to cheesecake, mango dressing to balsamic vinegar, we’d likely still be a society in which meat and two veg was the order of the day. President’s Choice has allowed Canadians to expand their palates and learn about the food of other cultures without shrinking their wallets.

I buy a lot of PC products, and have been known to get ornery as a bear when various items that I like but which sell poorly are discontinued – hello! Wasabi rice chips!!

However, the one thing President’s Choice really doesn’t do well – at least to my taste – is their prepared foods. Their chana masala is bland. Their fish pie lacking in fish, their pad thai is a glommy clomp of noodles that tastes of ketchup.

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If this is the Gospel of Food, Maybe that Explains Why I’m Not Religious

You know how you can go through life believing and trusting someone until you catch them, maybe not in an outright lie, but in a tiny fib, or an omission, and then everything after that is tainted with confusion as you try to determine just how honest they’re being?

Thus is my relationship with author Barry Glassner and his book The Gospel of Food.

Glassner attempts to debunk a variety of theories and commonly held opinions and beliefs about food and eating, and for the most part, he writes a well-thought-out argument in which he supports his claims. When it suits him. That is, he tends not to bring up any documentation that might refute his claims, which makes me question not just the issues in dispute, but everything he writes.

I can agree with his opening claim that people who enjoy what they eat have more joyful lives overall, as opposed to people who deny themselves real food on the pretense of health or dieting. In the chapter False Prophets he references writer Emily Green who has written against non-fat dairy products and similar items which she refers to as “nonundelows” for their prefixes of non-, un- de- or low-; foods that have been modified to have their nutritional value, fat, calories etc., removed.

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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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