Sheryl Kirby

When Your Food Makes You Swell Up and Fall Down

There’s nothing more delightful than an ice cream cone on a warm summer evening. Strolling along and licking at a scoop of chocolate gelato as the sun sets is one of the season’s great pleasures – a pleasure unknown to anyone with a life-threatening dairy allergy, where the joy of a cold treat can swiftly be cut short by having your throat swell up and your breathing cut off.

Anaphylaxis is the most severe reaction to a food allergy, and the most dangerous, but even milder reactions can cause discomfort and frustration. Allergy-sufferers who experience severe, life-threatening reactions from common food allergens such as peanuts, shellfish, eggs or dairy often carry a device called an Epi-pen which contains an antidote that can be used if they accidentally ingest a food they’re allergic to. But while the Epi-pen will save the life of a person suffering from anaphylactic shock, there is no ongoing treatments for food allergies as there are for other allergens such as mold or dust where weekly injections of the allergen can be administered to build up resistance. Avoidance is the only real option for people who find that certain foods make them sick.

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The Deadwood of Canadian Food Safety

Saturday’s National Post had an article about how the Canadian Food Inspection Agency plans to allow companies to police themselves when it comes to health and safety inspections.

The document, addressed to the president of the agency, details how the inspection of meat and meat products will downgrade agency inspectors to an “oversight role, allowing industry to implement food safety control programs and to manage key risks.”

Obviously this is a bad, bad thing. With diseases like bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) still present in our food systems, government inspection is imperative. But it seems that the government doesn’t care, as funding for BSE testing is also slated to be cut.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is also ending funding to producers to test cattle for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease) as part of a surveillance program, the document indicates, a move expected to save the agency about $24-million over the next three years.

Given the number of food borne illnesses that have shown up in the US factory-style food system in recent years, is that really something we want to be emulating here in Canada?

If you weren’t already concerned about where your food comes from, if you haven’t already made friends with a farmer, a baker and especially a butcher, now might be a good time to get that ball rolling. Because once this deregulation comes into effect and food companies don’t have to answer to a government inspector, it’s pretty safe to assume that an already screwed-up system is going to look like the wild wild west.

Sunday Brunch – Easy Restaurant

Easy Restaurant
1645 Queen Street West
416-537-4893
brunch for two with all taxes, tip and coffee: $42 (cash and debit only)

I was a big fan of Easy for the first few years after they opened back in 2000 or so. It was a favourite brunch spot for me until an unfortunate incident when a really stupid and obnoxious customer chose to change a baby’s shitty diaper on their table while people around them looked on in horror. Despite the fact that the food was always great, and the service was always friendly, the stupid obnoxious customer really ruined Easy for me, and on weekend visits after that, the restaurant always seemed to be full of kids, which really turned me off.

A recent visit reminded me that the food and service is still top-notch, but the stroller brigade continues to maintain a presence, although patrons with kids don’t seem to let their progeny run around like it’s a daycare centre, as is the case with other brunch places in the ‘hood. The childfree should be forewarned of screeching, but there is a considerably lower risk of coming in contact with jammy little hands. And a change table in the loo has hopefully thwarted any potential for a reenactment of “that fateful day”.

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Thirteen

There was a post the other day on Shapely Prose, a kickass fat acceptance blog, that included a heart-breaking letter from a 13-year-old girl who was considering suicide because of pressure from her classmates and her family. As of this writing there are over 150 responses, the majority of which seek to reassure the girl of how it all gets better because thirteen sucks so heartily for everyone.

The letter caused a lot of upset, sending almost all readers back into the depths of their own pasts to recall being thirteen.

For anyone who has been fat, heavy, plump, etc., their whole life, thirteen was likely a pretty shitty year. I know it was for me. I wasn’t actually the heaviest kid in my class, but as the other heavy kids were athletic in some way, and appeared on the surface to have a higher sense of self-esteem, I was the lucky pariah of the class who got picked on. Constantly.

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Back to Basics – The Silver Lining

First, let me say that I’m not happy about the world food crisis in so much as people are starving and dying and rioting over the cost of rice. That’s not really what this post is about. However, in the western world, we’ve had it pretty easy for a very long time in terms of food costs. We’ve demanded cheap food and the corporations have met that demand. Governments are subsidizing farmers to notgrow food, and cheap junk or processed food is contributing to a variety of health concerns.

But as food commodity prices rise, along with the cost of the oil required to produce and acquire those foods, it’s kind of refreshing to see articles like this one in USA Today that shows people reverting back to real food, and even growing their own.

For a long time, advocates of Slow, ethical, local and organic food have been bewildered at the fact that people are just not willing to pay higher prices for food. The same person willing to spends $1000 on a sofa, or (sweet sassy molassy) $3000 on a handbag, will go eat at a fast food drive-through because it’s cheap. We care more about the quality of what we put on our bodies, or what we put our bodies on, than we do about the quality of the food we’re putting in our bodies. Which is absolutely shameful.

So while I’m not celebrating the fact that higher food prices are putting people in dire straits, I can’t help but hope that maybe higher food prices will get people thinking more about what they eat, or that it will get them into the kitchen to cook their food from scratch, or out to a farmers market to spend their hard-earned money on real food, not processed fillers and crap.

Back to the Farm with Harvest Wednesdays

Pulling up the driveway into Chick-A-Biddy Acres, I almost want to break into a rendition of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm”, for Sherry Patterson has created something that seems almost too good to be true. I am tagging along (“embedded” in journalism-lingo) with some of the kitchen and catering staff from the Gladstone Hotel as they join Patterson and her three employees for a day of weeding and a tour of the 75 acre community supported agriculture (CSA) farm.

From the second we arrive, I am enchanted, opening the car door to find half a dozen of Patterson’s colourful laying hens rushing toward me with curiosity. We’re not here to play with chickens, however, and Patterson quickly directs us to a nearby field where we’re put to work weeding rows of peas.

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Tee-Totaler

A Social History of Tea
Jane Pettigrew
The National Trust

Every afternoon at 3pm, I have a cup of tea. It doesn’t matter the weather or the season, if it’s hot I’ll have it iced, but every afternoon, barring some great calamity, I take a break from my day to have a cup of tea and something sweet.

Tea is one of those things that we sort of take for granted; less popular than coffee, it’s still typical in many homes, particularly in Eastern Canada where I’m from originally. There, harsh orange pekoe tea can sit and stew for hours, with a couple more bags and a top up of water the only acknowledgement that the pot might need dumping or cleaning.

Jane Pettigrew is one of the UK’s tea experts, having run a tea shop for many years and written a number of other books on the subject .

A Social History of Tea traces the importance of tea to Britain from the seventeenth century onward, exploring its arrival in England, its origins and the politics surrounding the commodity. Pettigrew looks at how tea became popular, first with the upper classes, then with the middle classes and the poor.

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Sunday Sips – Tequila, You’re Breaking My Heart

Living with a beer aficionado, I’m by no means a teetotaler, but I seldom feel compelled to drink alone. Which is why it’s freakishly odd to find myself on a Thursday afternoon with a selection of tequila samples in front of me, and no one but the dogs to share my thoughts with. How the hell did this happen?

I suspect I’m not the only person for whom the word tequila brings up bad memories; in my case a hazy night of shots followed by beer chasers at the Bovine in my wild and misspent youth, and truly the official worst hangover ever the next day. Not to mention the more coherent image of members of a rock band standing around in my kitchen, doing “body shots” off the near-naked chest of an under-aged girl who was supposed to be one of the people in charge of the music festival we were producing. Both events came with the forethought; “this is a bad, bad thing.”

But for most people, that’s what tequila means to them. For decades, there were only a couple of low-end brands of the Mexican liquor available in Canada, and outside of sweet drinks like margaritas, it was consumed with the sole purpose of getting shitfaced and/or laid.

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Orgasmic Organics

Multiple Organics
1545 Dundas Street West
647-435-5340

What are two well-educated young women to do when they find themselves with doctorates, but no where to use them? Why, open an organic food store of course!

Such was the case for Nupur Gogia and Carrianne Leung recently when they discovered that the only way to make use of their formal education was to leave Toronto, something neither of them wanted to do. Gogia was already part of an established family business, running the successful Raani Foods, and Leung wanted to stay close to her family in Toronto’s west end. With no retail background other than Gogia’s experience selling her famous samosas at St. Lawrence Market, the pair leased a storefront in the Dundas West and Dufferin area and opened Multiple Organics just over a month ago.

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Why Go to New York? We’ve Got the Lower East Side Right Here!

As an urbanite who understand the issues regarding urban sprawl, I realize that we’ve got no choice but to accept the presence and growth of condo developments in the downtown core. Better that we create density in an area where people don’t need cars than to continue to force people out to the burbs where their ugly houses destroy valuable farmland and their hour-long commutes create pollution.

That doesn’t mean I have to like the whole “lifestyle marketing” scheme that comes with so many condo projects.

Today in the mail, I received a postcard for something called Kormann House (note – bullshit Flash website – click at your own risk!). This is a historic 19th century building at Queen Street East and Sherbourne that is in the process of having an ugly glass tower perched atop it. These types of buildings are accepted and encouraged because the facade at street level remains virtually unchanged, but the overall structure often comes off looking like two very disaparate buildings mushed together.

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