Category: in the news

Pears Are the Perfect Fruit for Fall

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We all know the phrase about comparing apples and oranges. We tell someone they’re a peach if we think they’re especially kind, and plum good is better than just plain good any day.

But what of the lowly pear? The average Canadian eats a mere 2 pounds of pears a year; they tend to be overlooked at harvest time when the other more extroverted fruit take centre stage. Yet pears are not only great eaten out of hand, they can be a versatile ingredient in both sweet and savoury dishes, and make delicious wine and cider.

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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.

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.

Dinner in the Sky

Sometimes it pays to be critical. Many bloggers and writers work on the Thumper policy – if you can’t say something nice, then don’t say anything at all. But twice in the past few months, I’ve been offered opportunities to do something based on a snarky or critical comment I’ve made on TasteTO. The first was an offer to appear on a live call-in talk show on a local cable station (which I didn’t actually do) because of my “City of Toronto, What the Fuck?” rant about street cart vending, and the second was an invitation that showed up in my email box to take part in Dinner in the Sky, after I had referred to it as “some crazy-ass French scheme to feed people dinner while they’re hoisted 50 metres in the air”. The original company is Belgian, actually, but the folks running the Toronto arm are from Montreal.

And since I’m never one to turn down a challenge, I agreed to do it, dragging Greg along for support.

I predicted that Dinner in the Sky would be like an amusement park ride with snacks and I wasn’t far off the mark. Upon arriving at Yonge-Dundas Square and signing three pages of waivers (none of which were of the “I will not sue if I fall off” variety, but all disclaimers allowing use of video and photographic images if I chose to take part) I was directed to a swank lounge area to wait for my “table” to be ready.

We were given a brief info session where the construction and safety of the table were explained, and then were ushered out to a gigantic red carpet to be strapped into our seats.

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Apparently bitching and Complaining WILL Get you Somewhere

It’s okay to eat chicken again. Or at least chicken from KFC. In Canada.

After years of protests and campaigns by animal rights groups PETA, KFC has bowed to pressure and has agreed to work only with suppliers that can ensure less crowding for the chickens it uses, as well as phasing out non-essential growth hormones and drugs. KFC will also source chicken only from suppliers who slaughter birds with gas, considered the most humane method of processing.

An added caveat will be that KFC will add vegan and vegetarian “unchicken” options to its menu, making the chain a consideration for a demographic of customers who might never have eaten there, and allowing those of us who love the magical 11 herbs and spices coating to get our fix without guilt.

Full story at the CBC website.

Product of Canada

Did you know that Canada grows some fine pineapples? Or that we have many thriving chocolate plantations? If you’re a grocery label reader, it might be easy to assume that all of those prepared products labelled “product of Canada” were grown here. But the current law is a little bit slippery.

A recent Reuters piece about changes to labelling laws indicates:

Current rules state that a label can say “Made in Canada” or “Product of Canada” if 51 percent of the production costs are Canadian and the last substantial transformation of the product took place in Canada.

So cocoa beans shipped to Canada to be made into chocolate bars here go to the stores with a “product of Canada” label, even though they came from somewhere else.

The Calgary Herald explains the changes:

The new standards require that any label claiming a food product is a “Product of Canada” necessarily needs to have all or virtually all of its contents be Canadian. That includes ingredients, the processing and the labour used to make the product; an exception has been made for some foreign content to be included in a Canadian product and labelled as such if minor additives or spices are not available in Canada.

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If It’s Not a Food, and It’s Not a Drug, Then What Is It?

Ladies and gentlemen, please take a moment to fashion yourself a lovely piece of millinery out of some kitchen foil. You’ll need it to ward off the gamma rays, because the guberment is out to get us all!!

The issue of Bill C-51 puts me in the unfortunate position of finding myself agreeing with the Conservative Federal government. But more than I despise conservatives, I detest people who get rich selling green powder and snake oil to unwitting chumps searching for a way to cure what ails them.

In most cases, big pharma has let them down, and yes, yes, yes, no doubt big pharma is in no small part responsible for pushing the government to pass this bill and force “natural health products” to the same standards used for pharmaceuticals. Undoubtedly, the bill will force some small companies out of business – but a lot of those companies will be shysters selling magic powder and a basket of hope to people who have already gone through enough.

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Mr. Ramsay Has a Cupcake

Reputation is an odd thing. By making sweepingly asshatted pronouncements (SAP), Chef Gordon Ramsay has gotten himself a reputation for saying really stupidly elitist things that piss people off and show a real lack of common sense. Last week it was his SAP that restaurants should all be fined if they don’t serve seasonal food. As bloggers and mainstream media jumped to point out the hypocrisy (Ramsay owns a restaurant in Dubai – where absolutely nothing served is seasonal or local), Gordon Ramsay Holdings was forced to issue a statement.

Because of this reputation, any similar SAP attributed to Ramsay will be believed.

Today while reading the blog Cupcake Takes the Cake, I came across a post that indicated Ramsay had made a rather inflammatory SAP against everyone’s favourite treat, the cupcake.

The whole cupcake thing has been done to death. I thought we were through the woods, done hearing about how fucking cool and “retro” cupcakes were. I thought we were finished with interviews with the bakery proprietors telling mind-numbing stories about how they found their grandmother’s old recipe box in the attic and dusted one of the recipe cards off and lo! there was a glorious cupcake recipe and they just jazzed it up a bit to make it “cutting-edge” and it is the perfect marriage of great memories and contemporary cuisine.

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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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The Real Food Dilemma

I haven’t had time in the past week to talk about the Michael Pollan lecture. Mostly, I think, because it’s wasn’t actually that inspiring. It wasn’t bad, don’t get me wrong, he just didn’t say much of anything new. The brief hour started with Pollan reading an excerpt from In Defense of Food, then being interviewed by CBC’s Matt Galloway. His answers were informative, articulate and witty, but it felt very much as if he’d done it all a hundred times before. And of course, he had. Disappointingly, there was no audience Q&A, so anyone who had questions for the author had to stand in line for an autograph, and I’m told, was rushed through pretty quickly.

The following day, there was an interview with Pollan in the Toronto Star in which he pretty much skewered the vegetarian community based on his three vegetarian sisters who apparently eat a lot of mock meat. I’m torn on this point between being chagrined and flipping the bird in his general direction, and nodding in agreement. During my time as a vegetarian, and even today when cooking at home, I used a lot of soy-based products to recreate comfort food dishes like cabbage rolls and sheperd’s pie. I know how processed these products are, but I’m drawn into the trap of it being easier than coming up with a straight-up vegetarian dish, especially when trying to include protein. On the other hand, I really like my rule of no meat at home, because my job has me out a couple of times a week stuffing my face with everything from chicken wings to foie gras. I don’t need more meat in my diet, and relying on the protein in eggs and peanut butter gets tired really fast.

The desire to eat “real food” has left me with a bit of a conundrum.

The other issue with Pollan is this so-called manifesto. I hate lists of rules and regulations like this, because there’s always so many exceptions, and people either try to live by them devotedly and feel guilty (or make excuses) when they can’t; i.e. The Hundred Mile Diet. So while I agree that we should be paying more for better quality food, the rule about not eating alone is just asinine.

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