Don Genova's Blog | A blog about sustainable food on Vancouver Island.

Food Matters – Put Some Spring in Your Step (And Your Diet!)

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Don Genova

I get giddy with excitement...over food. Now that we finally seem to be getting some good weather some of my favourite spring things are here to be enjoyed and that was the topic of my conversation this week with guest host David Lennam on All Points West. First up was rhubarb, a highly underrated vegetable, in my opinion.

Wait. Is it a vegetable or fruit? According to my Oxford Companion to Food, botanically speaking, rhubarb is a vegetable. But the US Customs Court in Buffalo, New York, in 1947, ruled that rhubarb is a fruit, since that is how it is normally eaten. The Companion further reveals that it was known in classical Greece and Rome as an imported dried root from Asia that was used for its medicinal properties, and it also became known that way in England in the 16th century. It took another few hundred years before people started using it in recipes. Do NOT eat the leaves, they have high levels of oxalic acid in them which is not good for you.

The first thing I do with it every year is make pies. My favourite is a recipe (below) my sister uses all the time for a rhubarb sour cream pie. This year I made my own crust using some of the hazelnut flour from Salt Spring Sunrise Organic Edibles I talked about a few weeks ago. If it starts to get plentiful and I get a donation from a neighbour who has too much rhubarb on their hands (Hilary and Patty, that’s you) then I will either cut it into chunks and freeze it, or if it lasts into strawberry and raspberry time then I combine all the fruits together with just a bit of sugar and make it into a freezable compote which I then enjoy throughout the winter with some plain yogurt, which makes a great light dessert...or over vanilla ice cream if you want it not so light.

The weather has not been that great for asparagus so far this year but I was happy to see Cobble Hill asparagus at Pedrosa’s Farm is available once again, and this year is the first year that they have their great new farm market buildings up and running and once they are completely finished the infrastructure there will be many more products then asparagus available there...

Pickled Asparagus

Today I had David taste asparagus soup. Asparagus risotto. Pickled asparagus I have left over from last year. I would give you the recipe for asparagus risotto but I made it in my Thermomix in about 15 minutes with no stirring. You probably don't have a Thermomix. But this risotto rocked, let me tell you. If you want to get a Thermomix I can get one for you. I also made the asparagus soup in it. Chopped, cooked and pureed, it was wonderful, silky, cream-free soup in 12 minutes.

My number three star of the season? Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow, skewering a spot prawn. Uh, I mean spot prawns. One of BC’s best sustainable seafood products, the season just opened last week and runs until about the end of June, so if you like them live and wriggling now is the time. And if you are looking for a fun Mother’s Day weekend activity there is the Spot Prawn Festival in Cowichan Bay and the weather forecast looks fantastic. Visit the website to get all the details, it is now a two-day festival (Saturday and Sunday) and there are lots of chef demos using spot prawns on Saturday, games and face painting for the kids, food booths and much, much more.

The spot prawns I made for David Lennam were a very simple preparation using a new chili-lime sea salt made by Organic Fair in Cobble Hill that I am putting on almost everything! Coat, shell on, and broil for about 5 minutes on each side in your oven, then peel and eat, and you get those great juices mixed in with the chili lime salt all over your face. If you want to listen to my chat and tasting session on All Points West, just click here for a link to the audio.

Here is my sister's Rhubarb Sour Cream Pie recipe:

Cathy’s Rhubarb Sour Cream Pie

This is a recipe my sister clipped out of some newspaper food section years and years ago, but now it’s just Cathy’s rhubarb pie recipe! I don’t bother making pie crusts any more. The ones you can buy in the frozen food section work just fine!

INGREDIENTS:
1 (9 inch) frozen, unbaked pie crust in its tin
4 cups chopped fresh rhubarb
1 egg
1 1/2 cups white sugar
1 cup sour cream
1/3 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup butter
________________________________________
DIRECTIONS:
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F (220 degrees C).
Spread rhubarb in an even layer in the bottom of the pie crust. In a medium bowl, whisk together the egg, white sugar, sour cream and 1/3 cup of flour until smooth. Pour over the rhubarb.
In a small bowl, mix together 1/2 cup of flour and brown sugar. Cut in butter until the mixture is crumbly. Sprinkle over the top of the pie. (if the filling starts flowing over the crust, place the pie pan on top of a baking sheet.
Bake for 15 minutes in the preheated oven, then reduce the heat to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Continue to bake for 40 minutes, or until the edges have puffed, and the topping is golden. The center may still be slightly jiggly. Cool completely before slicing and serving.

Posted in Food Matters | Tagged All Points West, Artisan Foods, asparagus, CBC Radio, Don Genova, Food Matters, rhubarb, spot prawns | Leave a comment

Food Matters – Coffee Cupping at Drumroaster Coffee

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Don Genova

We love our coffee and it seems like we don’t mind paying for it, either. You don’t have to look very hard around almost any town around here to find some sort of coffee shop; from the ubiquitous Starbucks to the specialty mom-and-pop roaster, they all use coffee beans to get you your daily jolt of caffeine, and more importantly, a true coffee flavour. That’s why some coffee shop owners even get involved in auctions to make sure they get the coffee beans they want.

Coffee sure has come a long way from 20 years ago when your only choice was brewed or instant. The quality of coffee and the selection of different beans have been on the same learning curve as wine has been in BC for the past 20 or 30 years. People are more discerning, they want more selection, they enjoy learning about different flavours, and what effects the flavour and aroma. I’ve been invited to wine tastings where the bottles cracked open were never going to widely available because they were quite rare, and I got to do kind of the same thing at a ‘coffee cupping’ at my local coffee shop in Cobble Hill last week, Drumroaster Coffee.

At this coffee tasting session we cupped 10 different coffees. The green beans have been lightly roasted and coarsely ground. Then these rough grounds are placed in cups specially made to capture the aromas of the brewed coffee….hot water is poured in, and then you sniff and finally sip from special spoons. Our cupping leader was Carsen Oglend of Drumroaster: "We use special spoons as well, they have a flat lip on one side and a deep scoop to them so you can slurp the coffee quickly from the spoon and aspirate it over your tongue and palate so you get all the flavours and aromas coming through."

These coffee beans all come from one coffee producer in Panama called Esmeralda Special. They have been ranked as some of the top tasting coffee beans in the world, and have been auctioned off in the past at up to 170 dollars a pound. Carsen and his father Geir want to offer some of this coffee to their customers at the Drumroaster. So, they are going through this tasting to see what they like, what they think their customers will like, getting ready for the online coffee bean auction which takes place in a couple of weeks.

Who would pay so much for coffee beans? It makes for a very expensive cup of coffee by the time it gets to the coffee shop counter. Some cafes do it for a fun promotional thing, once a year, charge you ten dollars for a small cup of these kinds of coffees….but Carsen doesn’t plan to go for the really expensive lots of these beans. He will choose something that can still be affordable to his customers, particularly say at Christmas, when they will sell half-pound or pound sizes for people looking for something special. He says they won’t pay 170 dollars a pound, but: "Not everyone will pay $80 for a bottle of wine, say, but some people will, and I think some people might be willing to pay, say, $20 for half a pound of coffee."

The range in the ten different beans was quite broad. Some I thought smelled like chocolate, others more lemony, and a couple even reminded me of cooked tomatoes. They were all very smooth, not bitter. I don’t drink a lot of black coffee…I’m a cappuccino and latte kind of guy. But this coffee I could drink straight, black and not need any sugar or milk with it at all. Keep in mind that all these coffees come from the same valley in Western Panama, but they are grown in different locations at different elevations, which has an effect on the flavour. They are all from the same type of coffee bush called Geisha, which was imported from Ethiopia years ago.

The people invited to the coffee cupping were mostly doing it for fun last week. But Carsen was going to do much more tasting on his own, taking a lot of notes about each coffee to zero in on what he wants to bid on in the auction. In the coffee world there are people who have jobs cupping coffee, and I wouldn’t want the pressure of making decisions on which thousands of pounds I would be recommending to buy. It would keep me up at night…not to mention the coffee would keep me up at night! And there is a certain amount of fun and challenge in this process for Carsen along with the great coffee flavour:

The auction takes place May fifteenth, so if I’m around I will pop into the coffee shop to see how they fare in their bidding, but apparently everyone can watch online as the bids go up.

To listen to my chat with Jo-Ann Roberts about this on All Points West, visit this page on the All Points West website.

Posted in Food Matters | Tagged All Points West, CBC Radio, Coffee, coffee cupping, Don Genova, Drumroaster Coffee | Leave a comment

How to Become A Food and Travel Writer – Online!

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Don Genova

Yes, you can be a world-wide ranging travel writer, or a discerning food writer, taking photos to go along with your words, and I can show you how to do it, all from the comfort of your own computer.

Next week (April 30th) my 100% online Food Writing and Travel Writing courses start through the UBC Writing Centre.

Over the following 8 weeks you'll learn all the ins and outs of the freelance writing game in whichever discipline you choose.

Both courses cover topics such as how to find the right publication to write for, how to write a query letter to an editor in order to get published and basic digital photography techniques so you have the right photos to go along with your story.

The real advantage to taking one of these courses with me is the personalized feedback you get from me on all of your assignments. It's like having an editor take you through the entire process. Here's what some of the students from my last food writing class said on their evaluation forms:

"Don was very prolific in his weekly instruction. He challenged my writing and gave valuable and extensive feedback each week. I've taken a variety of online classes in the last 5 years and Don is definitely the best instructor I've had."

"I hoped to improve my food writing skills. I am currently looking for work and felt this course would be valuable in any position in the hospitality industry. In the short time the class ran, I learned more about the food writing industry than expected and improved my skills greatly."

"The variety of topics was astonishing. I am so sorry this class is ending. I've enjoyed it immensely."

If you've ever thought of doing some writing for publication, your own blog or just for personal pleasure, these courses can help get your started. Just click on either of the links above, and don't hesitate to contact me or The Writing Centre for more information.

Posted in Classes | Tagged blogging, Don Genova, food writing, freelance writing, travel writing, UBC Writing Centre | 3 Comments

Food Matters – Where’s the Beef?

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Don Genova

Beef is one of our favourite foods in Canada. According to industry figures, every Canadian consumes 46 pounds of beef every year. But how much do you know about the kind of beef you’re buying or how it is raised?

This is a BIG topic, so all I can do here is take a small bite of it, but I hope to get you thinking about where you buy your beef and what goes into its production. Obviously this is mostly for the interest of people who are committed meat eaters. And beef is in steaks, stews, some hot dogs, hamburgers of course, meat pies, soups...a whole range of processed foods as well as what we make at home from scratch. What got me started on this, though, was a series of articles I read in Forbes magazine about labeling of brands of beef. The articles talked mainly about what real Kobe and Wagyu beef from Japan is, and how American ranchers have co-opted those names to raise cattle in America that bear little resemblance to what certified Kobe or Wagyu beef is in Japan. It didn’t say the beef wasn’t any good, but they shouldn’t really be calling it by those names.

What about here in Canada, how do we know what we’re getting?
We actually have a pretty wide selection of beef to choose from, and how it is packaged and labeled can lead to a lot of confusion. Yesterday I went to my neighbourhood Country Grocer store in Cobble Hill. I was able to buy the same cut of beef from three different sources, each with a varying degree of clarity on the label. The fourth source was the Cowichan Valley Meat Market, where all the beef comes from their own Westholme Farm, north of Duncan, where it is also processed in a federally-inspected slaughterhouse.
I bought four top sirloin steaks, all around the same thickness, from four different sources.

From the least expensive to the most expensive:

Australian Beef: $5.50/lb $12.10/kg The label just said ‘Australian Beef’. Some Australian beef is grain-finished...it’s incredible to believe it costs so little even after being shipped here from Australia!

Certified Angus Beef (A brand label) $9.00/lb $19.82/kg – This beef could be from the United States. I looked up the brand on the internet and couldn’t find any Canadian producers, but the official website states that the ranchers who raise cattle for this brand “commit to a never, ever policy, raising cattle without antibiotics or added hormones. And cattle are fed a strictly vegetarian diet.” You may find another special brand of beef in Canadian supermarkets called 'Sterling Silver'.

Island Pastures Beef $11.41/lb $25.11/kg – the label on this steak told me that the cattle are raised on Vancouver Island and Denman Island, without growth hormones or antibiotics and are grass-fed, and the origin of all the cattle is verified, which is important for tracing any food safety concerns.

Cowichan Valley Meat Market: (Quist Beef) $11.99/lb $26.38/kg
I talked to one of the counter sales people at the butcher shop, who told me that their beef is also hormone and antibiotic free. If one of the cows gets sick, it is treated, but it is tagged as such and can’t be slaughtered until three months after any anti-biotic treatment so that the medicines have been flushed out of the animal’s system. They receive a mix of feeds including silage, which is a blend of hay and grass, as well as barley, but can’t call them grass-fed or grain-finished, since they always receive a balance of those food sources.

In a nutshell, grass-fed beef only eat grass and hay their whole lives once they’ve been weaned off milk. The resultant beef has a better ratio of Omega 6 to Omega 3 fatty acids, it is leaner, has more Vitamin E than grain-finished beef and higher levels of CLA, an acid that health professionals believe has cancer-fighting properties. For more on grass-fed beef, click here.

I just brushed each steak with olive oil, sprinkled with salt and freshly ground pepper, and grilled over medium-high heat about 3 minutes a side for medium-rare.

They ALL tasted good. The least expensive beef, from Australia, is on the left, then they proceed to the right as their price increases as described above.

Australian – a little chewy, but also the juiciest and darkest-coloured of the four.
Certified Angus Beef Brand – very tender, good flavour
Island – most flavour...seemed a little fattier (although didn’t seem to have any more marbling than any of the other steaks.) Not as tender as the Angus
Quist – Also tender, but not as much flavour as the Island. The steak with the densest fibres.

What should you consider when you are buying beef? I think being able to trace the animal back easily to determine how it was raised and how it was fed is the most important issue. I don’t want to buy any beef that has spent time in a traditional CAFO, or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation. This is where cattle are crowded in and fed antibiotics and growth hormones and grain to fatten them quickly. Cows are not built for eating grain and it’s a contributing factor to e-coli production, the kind of e coli that can make you very sick if you don’t cook your beef all the way through.

More people are starting to care about this issue, so it has become easier to find grass-fed beef or at the very least cows that aren’t finished in CAFO’s. Your local butcher should be able to tell you all about the beef in their counter, just like I was able to ask questions at Cowichan Valley Meat Markets. We’ve lost a lot of knowledge in our supermarket meat sections, but if you’re lucky you will find someone with experience and knowledge about where their meat is coming from. I’ve been lucky enough to purchase a side of beef directly from a farmer and that’s a great way to ensure local production continues. And it's a great way to know what’s in your ground beef. I didn’t even get into the pink slime issue when it comes to ground beef but here's a link to another CBC Radio interview on that subject. And I’m even a member of a Facebook page called Island Meat Co-Op where members share knowledge of where to find quality Island-raise meats such as beef and pork. So, as usual, it’s a bit of work to get to know where your food comes from but in the end it’s worth it....

If you want to listen to what guest host Michael Tymchuk thought of the four different steaks I cooked, the segment should turn up on the All Points West website here.

To find out more about grass-fed food products, visit this great site, Eat Wild. It will help you locate ranchers and farmers who produce grass-fed beef products in BC, Canada and around the world.

Posted in Food Matters | Tagged All Points West, beef, CBC Radio, Don Genova, Food Matters, sustainable eating | Leave a comment

Food Matters – Local Organic Hazelnut Oil

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Don Genova

A few weeks ago I discussed the the ins and outs of one of our kitchen staples, olive oil. Our supplies of that product can come from as close as Oregon or as far away as Australia. This week I discovered another edible oil that comes from much closer to home, certified organic BC Hazelnut oil, expeller cold pressed on Salt Spring Island and distributed under the name Saltspring Sunrise Premium Edibles. I’ve always enjoyed nut oils like hazelnut and walnut, but again, like olive oil, they are all imported and you don’t know what’s gone into their manufacture.

You know me, I love wandering up and down aisles of specialty food shops and I come across a bottle of this oil at the Community Farm Store in Duncan and when I read the label and discovered it was being made on Salt Spring I had to buy some, absolutely loved it and then just followed the website info to the phone number of the young entrepreneur behind the company, Bejay Mills.

This is another great story about someone getting interested in where their food comes from and discovering that something they wanted wasn’t available here, but the potential for producing it was: "The harder I looked, the more I realized that nobody around here was making oils, and they certainly weren't making hazelnut oil. So I got an expeller and we set it up on my parents' farm on Salt Spring and we started pressing some hazelnut oil.

He'd never done anything like this before, but Bejay does have experience in the agricultural field, he works as an entymologist on the Saanich Peninsula studying and developing natural, biological methods of controlling pests in our crops. So that was why producing an organic oil was a priority for him. That meant having to source the nuts from the Fraser Valley, his only current source of certified organic hazelnuts, then getting them to the press on Salt Spring. The Fraser Valley is home to most of BC’s commercial hazelnut production. But he feels there is a lot of potential for more production on this side of the water. "On Vancouver Island, and on Salt Spring, there are pockets of production, some of it on a commercial basis, but not organic. But maybe we could set up some sort of co-op, and help people get organic certification so we can get our nuts from a more local source.

The thing that I’ve come to realize in my years spent here in BC, there’s a lot of ‘oh, we used to grow this and that...’, but farmers stopped because they probably couldn’t make any more money from the products or the infrastructure to process or store products was lost when cheaper imports became more readily available here. This oil doesn’t come at a discount price, tt’s about 23 dollars for a 250 ml bottle...but if you taste it I think you’ll agree it’s worth having in your cupboard to use strictly for salad dressings or to drizzle over finished dishes. Believe me you can pay that much for some of the fancy olive oils we import here. And as with most of our local products, we know exactly what goes into it because we can ask the producer, as I asked Bejay to describe what expeller cold pressed means: "There is basically a big drill bit in a sheath that crushes up the nuts. At the end of the sheath there is a small hole, about double the size of a strand of spaghetti, where the nut meal comes out, and then these tiny holes on the side of the sheath are where the oil drips out." Then they let the oil sit so any sediment settles to the bottom, and then there is just a light filtering to remove any further sediment and the oil is ready to bottle, hopefully with as much hazelnut flavour intact as possible.

I also had Jo-Ann taste a couple of other things on my radio show today: pasta tossed with a pesto I made using the hazelnut oil, roasted hazelnuts, garlic, cilantro, lemon juice and rind and Parmesan cheese...and then I used a sample of hazelnut flour, another product Bejay is developing from the nutmeal left over once you’ve pressed the oil out. The recipe is called Chocolate Mud Cake, but it is like a sacher torte, a chocolate cake that only has hazelnut flour in it along with the chocolate, cocoa, butter, sugar and eggs. But it means that is a gluten-free cake, and Bejay has already had interest expressed in the flour by some local bakeries that are always looking for gluten-free flours to bake into their products.

Bejay Mills has a good distributor, so he’s already in about 25 stores around BC, because everyone has been having that same great reaction to the flavour of this oil. His plan calls for putting walnut oil into production once he finds enough organic trees around for that, he has some already on his parents’ farm and although they can produce a couple of hundred pounds of walnuts each, you need a lot to produce even a small amount of oil. And he’s going to be experimenting with growing some pumpkins to produce pumpkin seed oil and has been talking with local farmers about pressing some certified organic canola seed into oil....if you’ve ever had that it has a remarkable flavour to it and a bright yellow colour, totally different to the canola oil most of us use.

One of the recipes I used today came from a New Zealand nut company website, so you can find the pesto recipe here. The chocolate mud cake recipe is here, although the hazelnut flour isn't available from Bejay just yet. You may be able to find another source like the Bob's Red Mill line. If you go to the Saltspring Sunrise website you can find a list of retailers for the hazelnut oil.

To listen to my chat with Jo-Ann Roberts of All Points West on this topic, the audio will eventually be posted here, along with previous editions of my column. Happy Listening!

Posted in Food Matters | Tagged All Points West, Food Matters, hazelnut flour, hazelnut oil, hazelnut pesto, hazelnuts | Leave a comment

Food Matters – French Kids Eat Everything

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Don Genova

There probably isn’t a parent out there that hasn’t had some sort of grief when it comes to getting their kids to eat. And I’m not even talking about eating vegetables and fruits, it could be anything. According to a new book just out this week, North American parents have it all wrong when it comes to showing kids how and what to eat.

I like to think I was a pretty good kid when it came to eating mostly everything my mom put in front of me. I had very few dislikes: asparagus, squash and cooked carrots; loved raw, hated them cooked. But I was always willing to try something several times before saying, no, just don’t like that. So it’s hard for me to understand kids who won’t touch certain foods, or who scream if one kind of food touches another on their plate, or just flat out refuse to try something new. That’s why I got interested when I heard about a book being published this spring called ‘French Kids Eat Everything, And Yours Can Too'.

The author is Karen Le Billon, she teaches part of the year at UBC and she spends the other half of the year living in France. She met a Frenchman when she was studying overseas in England, but their children were born in Canada and raised mostly in the North American style of parenting, especially when it comes to food. That all changed when they decided to move to France for a year to see if they wanted to live there full-time. Her two daughters were young, the oldest was four, the other still a toddler, when this all started. She noticed some differences right away…kids there really did eat everything...from green vegetables and fruits all the way to Roquefort cheese. They sat with their parents all the way through the meal and were generally well-behaved, not like her own kids!

That didn't make her feel that great. When they were just visiting no one really said much to her about how her children ate, but once they were actually living in France it was different. Everyone from her husband to his entire extended family were quietly, and as she writes, ‘sometimes not so quietly’ outraged. So she decided to try to figure out the strategies and philosophies that are employed by French parents when it comes to feeding their children, and this book is the result. She also notes that France’s rate of childhood obesity is one of the lowest in the developed world, so they are obviously doing something right.

Throughout the book she unveils ten ‘French Food Rules’. Number 1 is ‘Parents: YOU are in charge of your children’s food education.’ She explains that the French say children must not be in charge of their own eating, and French doctors, teachers, nutritionists and scientists view the relationship between children, food and parenting in a completely different manner than North Americans…they’ve even assessed the average number of times children have to taste new foods before they willingly eat them, the average is seven but parenting books recommend ten to fifteen tries. French Food Rule #2 is, ‘Avoid Emotional Eating. Food is NOT a pacifier, a distraction, a toy, a bribe, a reward, or a substitute for discipline’. How many times have parents here used food as a bribe or reward???

The rules continue to be revealed throughout the book as Le Billon details in a quite engaging fashion her time spent in France and her efforts to encourage her children to eat more like French children, her successes along with her disasters. At the end of book she summarizes the rules with some practical tips and tricks thrown in, and then there are about 20 recipes for kids that will help you get them used to eating a wider range of foods. So a pretty good package, all in all, backed up with research gleaned from French publications about nutrition and eating habits.

This book is a useful tool, because where else do parents in North America get their information about parenting when it comes to food? Pediatricians, health units, nutritionists? I don’t think there are enough sources out there, and probably those that are out there are underutilized because parents don’t take the time to take advantage of available programs and information. These food-related behaviours are not something kids will learn at school, in the book Karen Le Billon stresses that you have to get kids to start enjoying a wide range of foods before they are even two years old. I have a friend who is a pediatric nutritionist, and she spends some of her time at a health unit in Vancouver teaching parents about what they can feed their kids. We once did a radio show together in which she revealed that babies actually start craving some stronger flavours in their food by the time they are just over a year old…so you can start introducing some spices and herbs in their foods…it turned out to be one of my most popular radio shows ever, so that told me more info is needed. If you want to try some of Karen's recipes she suggests in the book, visit this page on the Bon Appetit website. And if you want to listen to my chat with Jo-Ann Roberts on All Points West regarding the French Kids Eat Everything, just click here.

I just read another story about a study in the journal, Public Health Nursing. The study evaluated nearly 400 low-income women with children ages 1-3 enrolled in Early Head Start programs. The research results indicated toddlers were less likely to consume fruits and vegetables four or more times a week if their mothers did not consume that amount or if their mothers viewed their children as picky eaters. So, low income, low education can result in poor eating habits and that really impacts a child’s development as they grow up, so a few things to think about as you prepare dinner for your children tonight. And I’d love to hear some strategies our listeners employ to get their kids to try new foods.

Posted in Food Matters | Tagged All Points West, childhood obesity, Don Genova, Food Matters, French Kids Eat Everything, sustainable eating | Leave a comment

Food Matters – What’s in Your Milk???

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Don Genova

The production of milk and cheese is the backbone of the dairy industry in Canada, an industry that is strictly regulated and commoditized in Canada through quota systems and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. But when milk gets processed, what else goes into the final product?

I had a couple of emails from listeners concerning what goes into our milk and cheese, fears that there may be things like pus or blood or even estrogen…these are the kinds of things that are side effects of dairy cows being treated with bovine growth hormone, otherwise known as rBST or rGBH. The hormone increases milk production in cows. But the side effects of the growth hormone include udder infections, pus in the milk and higher levels of a hormone called ‘insulin-like growth factor’ in milk. In turn, IGF-1 in high levels in some people is blamed for causing certain types of cancers of the breast, prostate and colon. The good news is that the use of bovine growth hormone is banned in Canada, as it is in many industrialized countries. And we don’t allow imported milk or cream to be sold in Canada. Chocolate milk is the exception to that rule for some reason I haven’t determined yet.

The bad news is that BGH is legal to use in many states of the USA. And the milk from those growth hormone fed cows could be used to make Modified Milk Ingredients, which ARE allowed to be used in Canada up to certain quantities in dairy products produced here, so you could end up ingesting some of that milk produced using BGH.

Modified Milk Ingredients can have pretty weird sounding names. Some of which you may see on packaging, but most are just put under the umbrella of Modified Milk Ingredients or Modified Milk Products. But here they are:
• skim milk powder
• milk protein concentrates
• milk protein isolates
• casein
• caseinates
• whey protein concentrates

There is also something called butteroil-sugar blend, which is a mix of modified milk ingredients and sugar. Because all of these ingredients aren’t actually milk, they are not subject to tariffs when they enter Canada and they are much cheaper to use than real milk in products like ice cream, cheeses and yogurts. And then there’s the dye that’s used in cheap cheddar cheeses to give it that orange colour. It’s an artificial dye called tartrazine, or ‘Yellow Number 5’. It’s banned in countries such as Norway and Austria because government bodies there believe it can cause hyperactivity in children, excess salt and is linked to asthma, skin rashes and migraines.

If you wish to avoid these products, start by reading the labels, or course. You’ll be amazed at the different kinds of products these modified milk ingredients turn up in once you start looking. Of course artisan cheeses and ice creams made here in BC don’t have those ingredients in them and the Dairy Farmers of Canada have come up with a voluntary symbol system for food processors and manufacturers who use 100 percent Canadian milk in their products. It’s a white cow on a blue background with a blue maple leaf on the side of the cow and 100% Canadian Milk written underneath the cow. I’ll put a link to the 100% Canadian Milk website on my blog so you can see what the symbol looks like. We grow up thinking that milk products are good for us for a number of different reasons, but I guess you still have to be vigilant about what goes into your dairy…and I haven’t even touched on the raw milk controversy that has been going on in Canada for the past few years, I think that will have to come up on a future Food Matters.

Posted in Food Matters | Tagged All Points West, bovine growth hormone, CBC Radio, Don Genova, Food Matters, milk, modified milk ingredients, sustainable eating | 2 Comments

Food Matters – Eat More Small Fish

Posted on March 22, 2012 by Don Genova

Please note that the Slow Fish Event mentioned in this post has now been rescheduled for April 18th

Apparently spring is here, even though I had snow covering my property yesterday morning. But one way you can tell is that spring is really here is that the first runs of little fish appear on the BC coast…herring, especially, as well as oolichan. While there are plenty of small fish here like herring and sardines and anchovies, we don’t really eat very many of them. I think many people still think of anchovies as the topping you don’t want on your pizza and sardines as stinky fish that come in a can…

It’s often only our immigrant population that eats small, fresh fish like this because they are commonly eaten in their home countries…Portuguese people love sardines, Italians love anchovies…here in North America, and especially here on the West Coast, we like big fish, ones at the top of the food chain, like salmon and halibut and tuna and sablefish, and we don’t pay much attention to the little fish, which are usually more plentiful and can be harvested on a sustainable basis.

Dan Hayes

There is an important herring fishery, but the herring are fished primarily for their roe, or eggs, most of which are exported to Japan, and the fish that carried the eggs end up as fertilizer or pet food. Herring and other small fish like this are actually good for us to eat because they are high in healthy omega-3 fatty acids. There is a growing sardine fishery, driven by our immigrant populations, but you don’t see them hardly at all on restaurant menus or in fish shops. Slow Food Vancouver Island is trying to raise our awareness of small fish and other underutilized species in the second of the Slow Fish series at the London Chef Cooking School next Wednesday night. I stopped by yesterday for a preview, and the London Chef himself, Dan Hayes, is a huge fan of small fish. He finds it hard to believe that we are not more gung-ho about them.

I did find some beautiful herring a little while ago at Superstore of all places, and I actually like pickled herring, so I found a recipe and made some up and my highest praise came from some Dutch friends of mine who really like pickled herring and they said I did it right…the recipe is from British food writer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, sometimes known as Hugh Fearlessly-Eats-It-All! Here is his recipe and the column that went with it.

Dan Hayes says one of his favourite places to find small fish is at Satellite Fish out in Sidney, where they still have a day boat that goes out and comes in with a fresh catch the same day. The boats here that go out for fish like salmon and halibut go out for days or even weeks at a time, and sadly, these little fish don’t really taste that good once they’ve been out of the ocean for more than a couple of days. So Dan says if you find them, make sure the gills on the whole fish are nice and red, the eyes bright and convex, and the flesh itself should be firm to the touch, when you poke it with your finger the flesh should bounce right back.

Dan loves to eat that little fish we usually find in a can and not on our pizzas: "Anchovy’s great…when they are nice and fresh you can just split them lengthwise and marinate them in lemon juice and olive oil for half and hour, or fry them with a little bit of gremolata or persillade on top, they are fantastic. I might get in trouble for saying this but I'd rather have a plate of crispy fried sardines in front of me any day rather than a boneless, skinless piece of salmon or halibut."

Fried Anchovies

I didn’t find any anchovies but I did find some frozen smelt so I thawed them and did them ‘fritto misto’ style as Dan mentioned, coated them in seasoned flour and deep fried them, ‘fritto’ and the ‘misto’ means mixed. So I put in some squid rings and tentacles and baby octopus and any other small fish or shrimp that I can find.

Small fish are one thing, bycatch like octopus is another. Octopus are primarily a bycatch that can come up with your crab trap. Dogfish and skate are quite often hauled up if you are longlining for halibut. UVic fisheries sustainability expert Dr. John Volpe will be on hand once again next Wednesday night to talk about the bycatch problem…since some species that get caught as bycatch can have the sustainability of their overall populations harmed that way. It’s quite a contentious issue not only here on the coast but it’s also in the news in Europe right now, where mandatory discards of bycatch result in a million metric tonnes of edible fish being dumped overboard fishboats every year. In BC there are certain measures in place to try to protect certain species from being inadvertently caught, and discussions are continuing this year. Dan Hayes says you are always going to have a bycatch problem, but if fishers end up killing bycatch, we should be eating it.

If you want to listen to Dan's comments listen to the replay of my column here.

One more fishy thing. The first annual Cowichan Lake Salmonid Enhancement Society Benefit Dinner this Saturday night, March 24th at the Stone Soup Inn with a great line-up of chefs, all for a good cause.

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Food Matters – Olive Oil – The Slippery Slope

Posted on March 14, 2012 by Don Genova

Olive Tree

We’ve heard for the past several years that a Mediterranean-style diet is the way to go if you are looking for a heart-healthy lifestyle, and the major fat source in that diet is olive oil. Almost every recipe calling for olive oil these days calls for extra-virgin olive oil, and there’s not shortage of that on our supermarket shelves. Or is there? I dealt with that very slippery subject today on Food Matters on CBC Radio's All Points West.

A lot of the extra-virgin olive oil you have in your kitchen right now is likely not as advertised. It’s got to the point that most olive oils we see are labeled extra-virgin, when in fact some of them are the furthest thing from it. There is much fraud in the olive oil business, and it happens all over the world, everywhere from olive oil producing countries of the Mediterranean right to some packing houses in Canada that mislabel the oil as it is packaged for the Canadian market.

In the worst case scenario you’re looking at some other sort of oil that has been in whole or in part substituted for olive oil, could be canola oil, sunflower or some sort of nut oil, imagine if you thought you were buying olive oil but there was some peanut oil in it and you have a peanut allergy! If it’s not a substitution you may be buying olive oil that is not extra virgin even though it says so on the label, it may have had colour added to it in the form of chlorophyll to make it look green, or it may be some extra virgin oil added to regular olive oil.

There are a few agencies around the world that define what extra-virgin olive oil actually is. Here's a great website with some definitions. To get extra-virgin olive oil you have to start with virgin olive oil. It comes from the first mechanical pressing of olives. No heat applied, no chemicals, so that’s where you will see the term cold-pressed on some labels. That virgin olive oil is then tested for acidity. If the oil has less than point eight percent acidity and actually tastes good, then it is Extra Virgin Olive Oil. And we should note that Extra Virgin olive oil accounts for less than ten percent of oil in many producing countries. If the acidity is over .8 percent and under 2 percent then it is virgin olive oil, and from there you get into many different categories. The one you really have to watch out for is pomace oil. Pomace is the ground flesh and pits left over after pressing. You get oil out of it by treating it with solvents. Quite often I see big tin cans of oil in stores here called extra-virgin pomace olive oil. You can’t call something that has been made with solvents extra virgin!

Mislabeling is rampant. Consider that over 50% of the oil produced in the Mediterranean area is of such poor quality that it must be refined to produce an edible product. REFINED oil has almost no taste or aroma. It is 100 percent olive oil but it has been refined, but not with solvents. It is not for sale to the public. It is used to blend with virgin or EV to make ‘olive oil’ which is an acceptable product. The acid level in these blended products must be less than 1 percent. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with the refined oils but you probably won’t get the same health benefits and you may be paying more than you should be if they have been mislabeled…and they probably won’t have the same robust flavour of a fresh, extra-virgin olive oil. I tend to have a variety of oils in my cupboard. For high-heat, you’re wasting your money if you use EVOO because the flavour and aroma really deteriorates as soon as you apply a lot of heat to it. Save your good stuff for salads and drizzling over finished dishes, and then maybe an ‘every day’ less expensive EVOO for your lower heat sautés and browning.

Because of the popularity of the Mediterranean diet, grocery store shelves offer more space than ever to olive oils. Where do you start when you start shopping for a good oil?
Well, I could write a whole booklet on that subject, but I would probably start by telling you to not bother going to a supermarket. Go to a smaller shop or delicatessen where you can speak to the shop owner or staff about their selection. The best places to go are where they actually have some bottles open that you can taste. Try Ottavio’s for that, or the Tuscan Kitchen on View Street. On the Tuscan Kitchen website they have a large chart of all the Italian olive oils they carry, tells you which region they come from and describes their flavour profile as well. It’s almost like you pair a wine with food, you can pair olive oils with your style of cooking and dishes as well.

Other purchasing tips: Olive oil doesn’t get any better with age. Good olive oils will tell you what year they were harvested. After one or two years at the most you shouldn’t buy it. Olives are typically harvested near the end of the year, October, November, December…so some shops will have the 2011 harvest available now. Look for organic or location certification as well. Once you get it home, your oil should be stored in a dark glass bottle or tin, since light helps along the deterioration, and don’t keep it right next to your stove because the incidental heat will help it degrade as well. I'm looking forward to reading a book that came out recently called "Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil" by Tom Mueller. I read his essay that was the inspiration for this book in the New Yorker a few years ago and it is quite a riveting read. If you would like to read and hear a blast from the past, visit my blog posting from 2007 on my visit to a 500-year-old olive grove in Puglia, Italy.

Posted in Food Matters | Tagged All Points West, Don Genova, Food Matters, fraud, olive oil | 1 Comment

Food Matters – Sustainability in Restaurants and Other Food Services

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Don Genova

CRFA Show

Reduce, reuse and recycle has become one of the catchphrases of the environmental movement over the past few decades but one industry that has been struggling to adapt to that phrase is the food service industry. The very nature of the business means a lot of food and a lot of food packaging ends up in landfills. And food waste is only one of the problems facing the industry. The good news is that there is much more thought being given to how to deal with waste in the food service business, along with many other facets of sustainability, including local food sourcing and energy management and conservation. I was in Toronto last weekend and my visit just happened to coincide with the beginning of the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association big trade show.

Not A Cup

This is where restaurant owners, chefs and anybody who has anything to do with serving food comes to see what’s new and improved and make connections. This show is so big I couldn’t even see the whole thing over about three hours. In the past I would go to see what kind of new food products were being offered to restaurateurs, but this time around I wanted to see what kind of sustainable food trends would be on display. It didn’t take me long to realize that recyclable and compostable food packaging was a big trend. I came across at least half a dozen different suppliers that offered everything from Dasani ‘green’ water bottles that are now made at least partly from plants, (apparently they are not that green) to plates, cutlery and take out boxes that can go right into the compost, even your home compost.

Be Green

The photo at left depicts a selection of Be Green packaging, It's made primarily out of bamboo and bulrush fibre, not exactly the same thing we call cattails, but related. Apparently bulrush grows fast and you don’t have to bleach it, among other attributes. Sales rep Matt Hill told me this particular product has a very green footprint:
"They look at the raw materials, they look at the manufacturing process, they look at whether the workers in the factory are making fair wages. This packaging takes about 180 days to break down in a home composting system, about half that in a commercial compost.

Each package costs about twice as much. But there other factors that bring the overall cost down, including smaller size and lighter weight, which cuts down on transport costs so much that that overall cost of buying green works out to be equal, especially for their anchor client, Whole Foods.

Dishwasher

Also on offer at the show, everything on how to filter your waste water to your cooking oil to getting your compost picked up now…it wasn’t that many years ago that all food waste just went into the garbage with everything else. Also a few booths dedicated to help manage your energy costs. And then there were the more direct connections to food. I talked to Katie Sandwell, who helps out with a program called OntarioFresh.ca funded by the Ontario government, which puts more people together to get more local food into restaurants and institutions. "So it’s a way to get any size of food service operator in touch with any size of producer. They each put profiles on the website so they can look for good fits and then hopefully do business."

Katie Sandwell

Katie says one of the big hurdles to getting more local food into the system was really a simple one. Buyers just didn’t know where to get local food, so this website puts them together and helps answer a demand from the consumer: "There’s a big push coming from universities right now, because students are becoming more demanding about eating locally produced food. We have been doing very well since our launch last year, we already have about 1100 registrations on the site, so we're looking for good things to happen for this growing season."

Paradise Farms

I also met kind of a curious guy with a really big picture in mind. His name is Shane Baghai, who is actually a real estate developer who has accumulated some land, including farmland, just north of Toronto, which will be used to create a complete sustainable community. Part of that land has gone into creating a ranch called Paradise Farms to raise cattle: "I believe in things that are unique and scarce. And cattle raised without hormones injected or raised in cramped feedlots are scarce. We live in a real paradise and that's where the name comes in. We are not in it for maximum profit by just feeding our cattle corn and grains or using growth hormones."

Green Table Network

That's all back in Ontario, but we have some pretty neat stuff going on here, and I would love to hear more about programs I may not have heard of. But we can go back to 2007 to look at the formation of the Green Table Network, originated in Vancouver by Andre Larriviere, a former CBC music producer, by the way, who started doing audits of BC restaurants with sustainability in mind and is close to announcing a new version of the Green Table Network in the near future. And then there is Climate Smart, a social enterprise that trains small and medium sized businesses to measure their carbon footprint and associated energy costs and then create a reduction strategy. This includes the food sector and there already businesses on Vancouver Island that have taken part in the training. If you want to source local foods when you are cooking instead of eating out, you can always try the Get Fresh with the Locals guide for Vancouver Island. And don't forget our farmers' markets! And now, a message from your local farmers market...

Next Wednesday, March 14th, Come join the Victoria Downtown Public Market Society at Canoe for an evening of great film, farm-folks, and local food and beer! The VDPMS has paired up with Canoe Brewpub (450 Swift Street) to show a great new documentary on the rise of the local food movement called Ingredients and we've sweetened the pot by inviting Brent Warner (Executive Director of Farmer's Markets Canada) to tell us about the economic benefits of farmers' markets on local economies.

Additionally, because doing this much good is thirsty/hungry work, Canoe will be offering free samples to the new Belgium beer they're launching that night to accompany tasty treats from three VDPMS farmers' market vendors – Cold Comfort, Cowichan Pasta and Vancouver Island Salt Company - as well as Belgium waffles by Canoe. And don't miss the local food basket and other goodies in our raffle!!

$10 tickets will be available at the door starting at 7pm

7:30 Brent Warner presentation on economic been

8:00 Screening

9:00 Raffle

All proceeds will go towards the establishment of a downtown public market. For more information, please check out www.victoriapublicmarket.com

I'll be there, hope you will be, too!

Oh, and if you want to listen to this week's show, go to this page on the All Point West website.

Posted in Food Matters | Tagged All Points West, Don Genova, Food Matters, Green Table, Packaging, Restaurants, sustainable eating | 1 Comment

Food Matters – Ethical Holiday Gifts

Posted on December 14, 2011 by Don Genova

World Vision

We all know that the holiday season can be a time of excess. We consume an awful lot of food and drink this time of year, perhaps without thinking about those less fortunate. Today on Food Matters, I talked with All Points West host Jo-Ann Roberts about a few ideas for gifts that keep on giving in the world of food that have the added bonus of being ethical and sustainable. One of the first places I tell people to visit is World Vision Canada. World Vision is Canada’s largest private relief and development agency. The Canadian arm of the charity goes all the way back to 1957 and they do a great job of helping you give gifts in someone’s name that aren’t simple relief, but a way of helping people climb out of hunger and poverty on a more permanent basis.

Get your hands on a World Vision Christmas catalogue or again, go to world vision dot ca and click on Gift Catalogue, and if you’re interested in these long-term type of gifts click specifically on ‘animals’ or ‘hunger’. When you click on animals you will find quite a few listings for live farm animals you can donate to families in need around the world. For example, you can give $100 and purchase a goat and two chickens for a family in need. The chickens, as they multiply, provide eggs to eat and to sell if there are excess, as well as a source of meat.

A dairy goat can provide up to 16 cups of milk a day which is loaded with protein and minerals and is easy to digest. And the animals also provide a source of manure that is used to fertilize crops, so it creates a very sustainable circle of life for those who need a way to take care of themselves.

The menagerie of animals available has expanded since the last time I checked the catalog. You can purchase ducks, rabbits, sheep, pigs, donkeys, alpacas, a dairy cow, even a beehive and bees. Prices range from 25 dollars all the way up to filling a farmyard or stable with up to 28 animals for $2000, which can be a great gift that your office or sports group folks could all chip into.

This is not just a random distribution of charity. Along with the animals comes training. Especially for something like a beehive with which you need some specialized training in how to handle the bees and harvest the honey. World Vision wants these gifts to help families and villages with sustainable development so they can break out of the cycle of poverty and start providing a future for the children in the community. Part of helping out from here can also be contributing to clean water projects, foot pumps that help people irrigate their crops, and packages of seeds and tools to help grow and harvest more food.

Share Organics

If you are thinking about giving one large family gift instead of individual gifts, why not the gift of a share in a Community Supported Agriculture program? CSA’s can even be called ‘trendy’ now, and some farms even have a waiting list for people who want to join. I’ve talked about a couple of them in the past on the show, but CSA’s run like this: You pay a farmer up front, and this is a great time of year for them to have some money coming in, and then during harvest season you either pick up or have delivered a box of the best produce they have to offer that week which is a share of what is being produced at the farm. It’s a great way to increase your vegetable and fruit intake, and at the same time you’re helping a farmer stay in business and have a guaranteed source of income for theyear.

And if you can’t get access to a CSA, why not consider an organic grocery delivery service like Share Organics, which delivers, mostly by bicycle, to many communities on South Vancouver Island including Victoria and Langford. They use as much as possible Vancouver Island products to put in your box.

Denman Island Chocolate

For stocking stuffers, I like to look local producers to help keep them in business and either fair trade or organic. Denman Island Chocolate has some great chocolate Santas available this time of year, along with the regular nine different varieties of chocolate bar. You could always introduce a friend to some fair trade, organic coffee from Salt Spring Coffee and why not some Vancouver Island Salt, produced in the Cowichan Valley? Giving a gift basket stuffed with local ingredients is a great way to say I care.

I will be back next week with my last minute cookbook suggestions and don’t forget our contest is still running for that brand new KitchenAid food processor. To enter the contest, which has a deadline of December 19th, go to this post and scroll down to the comments section to submit your entry.

To learn more about chocolate bar stocking stuffers, many of which are fair-trade and/or organic, you can listen to my conversation with Jed Grieve about the 70-bar selection of chocolate available at Cook Culture in Victoria. Jed starts off by talking about Victoria chef David Mincey, who is responsible for bringing all this wonderful chocolate to Canada.

Don Genova and Jed Grieve Talk Chocolate

Posted in Contests, Food Matters | Leave a comment

Food Matters – Cookbook Gifts 2011

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Don Genova

Today on Food Matters I revealed my suggestions for cookbooks as gifts for the 2011 holiday season. But it’s very important to match the cookbook to the cook. You don’t give a book that has complicated recipes in it to a beginner, and you don’t give someone who already has 300 cookbooks the Dummy’s Guide to Boiling Water.

Michael Smith

I started with someone who is known for producing cookbooks that are for the relatively inexperienced home cook. The latest from Chef at Home, Chef at Large, and Food Network star Michael Smith is called Chef Michael Smith’s Kitchen, in which he has put together one hundred of his all-time favourite recipes that he makes at home on a regular basis. No fancy ingredients, not too many fancy methods and a photo for every recipe.

Mark McEwan

If you are looking for a book with just a little more technique, but still fairly easy recipes to make in the Italian fashion, check out Mark McEwan’s Fabbrica. McEwan is the chef behind quite the culinary empire in Toronto, with Fabbrica being his latest restaurant, what he describes as a casual but elegant, authentic Italian eatery. As he built the restaurant he built his collection of Italian recipes, so decided to put all those together in a cookbook. He takes pride in both the restaurant and the cookbook for being authentic Italian, and says you can learn how to do it, too.

Jennifer McLagan

The recipes in this next book aren’t necessarily ones that require a lot of skill but it’s the ingredients that are the challenging part. This book is called Odd Bits, How To Cook The Rest of the Animal, by Jennifer McLagan. Jennifer had real hits with her previous books, Fat, and Bones, and since she’s taken care of those underused parts of animals, the Odd Bits was everything else left over. So, liver, tongue, heart, kidney, all the stuff many people shudder at just at the thought of eating it, but she takes it on in an effort to stop us from wasting an animal we’ve raised to eat and to get us new flavour sensations. This book is also full of fascinating facts about offal and if the person who you’re thinking about giving this book to already goes just to butcher shops instead of supermarket meat counters they would probably like to see this under the Christmas tree.

Natalie MacLean

The perfect wine read for this year is Ottawa-based wine writer Natalie McLean’s second book, Unquenchable, A Tipsy Quest for the World’s Best Bargain Wines. For this book Natalie traveled the world to find bargains, we’re talking well under 20 dollars a bottle for the most part here...because there is a lot of wine out there we can experience at lower prices that is just as good or even better than the higher-priced stuff.

Other books you can consider as great gifts for this year:

Jacques Pepin: The Essential Pepin

Nigel Slater: Tender, Volume II

Jamie Oliver: Jamie Oliver's Food Escapes

Coleman Andrews: The Country Cooking of Italy

Edward Behr: The Art of Eating

Becky Selengut: Good Fish

Ottolenghi: Plenty

My Last Supper - The Next Course

While researching this item it was a real pleasure to be able to interview Jennifer McLagan, Natalie MacLean, Michael Smith and Mark McEwan. The entire interviews cover much more detail about their books and other facets of their lives than I had time to mention on the show today, so if you'd like to hear more from them, just click on the files below to listen.

Don Genova Interviews Natalie MacLean

Don Genova Interviews Michael Smith

Don Genova Interviews and Mark McEwan

Don Genova Interviews Jennifer McLagan

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Food Matters – 2012 Lookahead

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Don Genova

The Road Well Taken

The beginning of the New Year is usually a time for people to try going on diets, or at least trying to be a little more conscious about what they eat after the holiday excess. If you also want to put a little more ‘green’ in your diet by eating in a more sustainable fashion for the planet, you need to tread carefully. There are many obstacles, though, to taking a more sustainable route to your shopping and eating:

A lot of it comes in the form of advertising. When food producers and manufacturers started to realize that people were getting on the local, sustainable bandwagon when it came to their food purchases, they started to take advantage of that in a couple of ways. When it comes to advertising you will note the increased use of the words, ‘natural’, ‘artisan’, and ‘local’, or anything else that will give you a feel-good jolt when buying their product. I’ve seen a couple of excerpts from a new advertising campaign coming from McDonald’s that feature some of the ‘regular folk’ farmers who grow potatoes or ranch cattle that turn up as McDonald’s fries and hamburgers. Of course it doesn’t tell you the entire story of what happens to the cattle once they leave the ranch or exactly how those potatoes are grown. And just ask yourself what it really means when you buy Wendy’s ‘natural cut’ fries?

The corporate world goes deeper into the idea of getting your dollars you want to spend on sustainable foods by purchasing or taking over smaller, successful, organic companies. For example, chocolate giant Cadbury bought Green and Black Organic Chocolate in 2005, Coke owns Odwalla Juices and Pepsi owns Naked Juice. They don’t necessarily make clear the ownership on their labels, so if you have a problem with large companies that produce non-sustainable products you might be contributing to their bottom line even if you think you are buying from a smaller, organic company. The other problem with this is that it makes it very difficult for those small companies who have to compete head to head with the large companies on grocery store shelves. So the economies of scale of production quite often means that one organic chocolate bar from a large global company will cost a dollar or two less than one from a local producer, and if people vote with their wallets instead of their hearts that is bad news for the local producer.

When it comes to less-manufactured foods like fresh fruit and produce that’s a tricky situation as well. The demand for organic produce has increased so much that in certain areas of Mexico, for example, there are organic farms producing tomatoes for our winter consumption that are putting a strain on the local water tables. The tomatoes pass the USDA organic standards, but they are kind of skirting around the issue of true agricultural sustainability. More and more organic produce is also coming out of China, which cuts local farmers out of the loop and puts you very far away from being to ask questions about exactly how those fruits and vegetables are being produced.

There is a silver lining when production it is done right. An Economist magazine article published last year cited some important strides in sustainability being made in emerging world economies:
“Manila Water, a utility in the Philippines, reduced the amount of water it was losing to wastage and illegal tapping by 50 per cent over the past decade by making water affordable for the poor. A Chinese aquaculture company recycles uneaten fish feed to fertilise crops. An Egyptian food producer set itself the task of reclaiming desert land through organic farming. A Costa Rican food and drink company adopted tough standards for the amount of water it uses to produce drinks.”

What can you do you want to eat more sustainably in 2012? Get out there and buy local. We still have Winter Farmer’s Markets on the go, there is one this Saturday in Victoria in Market Square. In the winter it is still possible to find free range eggs, organic or pasture-fed chicken and turkey, pork and beef, all from local farmers. Plan in advance to freeze or preserve the upcoming harvest. I was so happy over the holidays to pull out some of my peach preserves and blend them into drinks, top my oatmeal with a compote I had frozen earlier this year, and give gifts like my Paradise Jelly...made from quince from my tree, apples from my neighbour’s orchard, and cranberries from a farm up island in Yellow Point. And finally, start asking more questions about where your food comes from.

Resources:

The McDonald's Feel-Good Video

Wendy's New "Natural" Fries Caught Using Chemical Stew

Organic Agriculture May Be Outgrowing Its Ideals

Is Whole Foods Wholesome? The dark secrets of the organic-food movement.

Wal-Mart's Organic Offensive

Green growth: Some emerging-world companies are combining growth with greenery

Bill C-474, Triffids, and the genetically modified / engineered food debate we're NOT having

Organic food and drink sales slump

Organic Industry Structure

How Green Is Your Eco-Label? (aquaculture)

And the two free Smartphone apps I talked about yesterday that I downloaded onto my iPhone are 'True Food' and 'Good Guide'. Both are U.S.-based, so while they provide some information they don't have full details on Canadian products. 'True Food' helps you determine which food products are GMOs, and the Good Guide is supposed to let you scan UPC codes with the camera in your phone and then reveal ratings on their health, environmental and social performance. Too bad it doesn't have that large a database and it doesn't seem to include any Canadian products.

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Food and Travel Writing Classes Start Again Soon!

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Don Genova

Mr. Underwood

You don't need to have made a New Year's resolution to 'become a writer' to sign up for my food writing and travel writing classes, which start in just a few weeks. All you need is a burning desire to share your experiences in the world of food or travel; I show you how to do the rest.

In-person courses take place at the UBC Point Grey campus starting January 30th. On Monday nights it's Food Writing, Tuesday nights, Travel Writing. Each course lasts for 8 weeks, with no classes the week of February 20th. If you can't make the commitment to be there at the same time every week, you can sign up for the 100% online courses instead, which start the same week. To enroll in any of the courses go to this page on the UBC Writing Centre website.

But I guess you're wondering what you're in for if you sign up... Quite simply: all the basic things you need to know to create and sell a story. Notice I said 'sell'. There are still lots of opportunities to have your work published in print or online and make some money doing it. So, in each course I spend some time teaching you about generating story ideas for publications you've researched, as well as showing you how to approach editors with a query letter to convince them to hire you. From there, I go on to help you shape your story and bring your experiences alive for your potential readers.

Food students will also learn how to write restaurant reviews and construct recipes in a proper format. Travel students will write about how to spend a weekend in their favourite destination, photography tips and the pros and cons of scoring some free travel. Both online and in-person students get personalized feedback from me on all of your assignments. Online students will have 1-2 opportunities to take part in live text chats with me and the whole class and more interaction is possible in online discussion forums.

What's expected of you? Every week there will be articles to read that illustrate my lectures/lecture notes. You'll be asked to research a publication for which you'd like to write and come up with story ideas appropriate to that publication. All students will write a query letter aimed at selling their ideas and then write a story based on their successful query. I act as your 'editor' throughout the process so you can get a sense of what it would be like to be freelance writer in the real world.

Each course does cover blogging as a way to get published, but if you want a real intense shot of learning how to construct your blog on WordPress and how to populate it with great content join WordPress expert Tris Hussey and me on Saturday, March 10th for 'Building and Promoting a Food Blog'. This day-long session (BYOL - Bring Your Own Laptop) will have you up and blogging by 5pm!

If you have any questions about any of these courses feel free to send me an email at don@dongenova.com. Hope to see you in a classroom or online soon!

Posted in Announcements, Classes | Tagged blogging, food writing, freelance writing, travel writing | Leave a comment

Food Matters – Cowichan Valley Pasta Companies

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Don Genova

Kilrenny Pasta Extruder

Eager eaters around Vancouver Island continue to hunt out and gather more and more local foods. And if you make it, they will eat it. Today on Food Matters I profiled two companies in the Cowichan Valley that are now bringing fresh pasta to the masses.

With my Italian background I have put away a fair amount of pasta over the years…two or three times a week at home growing up, lasagna was the special dish for family gatherings, but the funny thing is that we rarely ate fresh pasta noodles, most of it came out of a box with the exception of when my aunts would get together to make hundreds of little cheese or meat-stuff ravioli. Now of course I’ve learned how to make fresh pasta, and it’s fairly quick for me to crank out a fresh batch of spaghetti or fettuccine, but most people don’t take the time to do that…

Cowichan Pasta

Which is where fresh pasta companies come in, and I know that most supermarkets these days offer some sort of fresh pastas in the refrigerated section, but lately I've been tasting offerings from two companies, both in the Cowichan Valley, and both who started, by total coincidence, around the same time last year. First up is Cowichan Pasta, the brainchild of a young chef named Matt Horn. I caught up with him at his booth at the Winter Farmers Market in downtown Victoria on Saturday morning. Business was brisk, and he's making something he's always loved to cook with and eat. Traveling through Italy and seeing so many shops selling fresh pasta convinced him that we needed that kind of choice on Vancouver Island.

Matt makes 8 different kinds of pastas, 4 that are extruded and 4 types of ravioli he painstakingly makes by hand. He uses only Vancouver Island ingredients, including salt from Vancouver Island Salt Company, Cowichan Valley beef, BC spot prawns and vegetables and foraged items like seaweed and mushrooms with the seasons. Matt stresses you don’t need fancy sauces to complete the experience when you’re eating his pastas, you don’t want to overwhelm the delicate flavour of the pasta. The flour comes from Vancouver Island-grown hard wheat that is milled at True Grain Mill and Bakery.

Sourcing that flour locally makes it a more pricey buy, but once folks try it once he says they come back for more. He's in the midst of adapting a food cart to bring to the markets so he can offer plates of pasta for sale there.

Deb Fahlman

The other pasta and sauce is from Kilrenny Farm, owned by Deborah and Russ Fahlman. I’ve been buying fruits and vegetables from the Fahlmans’ organic farm and booth at the farmers market for years now. They’ve had the dream of making pasta for sale for about 20 years, and finally last year they took the plunge, renovated their farm gate shop into a commercial kitchen, bought an Italian extruder pasta machine, visited Italy once again to learn more about making pasta, and started cranking it out. Deborah has been having fun learning to master all the bronze dies that came with the extruder, so today I brought in some malfadine, which is a ribbon of pasta that is very ruffled along the edges, really holds the sauce, which is Deborah’s marinara sauce made from tomatoes grown on their property. Along with egg based pastas Deborah also makes spelt and kamut pastas which are a lighter on the gluten factor. So while her flour isn’t local all the sauces she sells are, because she either relies on ingredients they grow themselves or are available nearby, and they’ve started to offer lamb sausages as well from their own lamb, and that is one of my favourite dishes to make, a nice grilled sausage and maybe some fried onions poured over freshly boiled pasta.

The good news is that they are both developing a list of shops in Victoria and beyond that carry their products. But I have to mention that if you want to see in person how I use some Kilrenny Pasta you can sign up for my Romantic Roman cooking class at Kilrenny Farm just in time to impress your sweetie for Valentine’s Day.

Posted in Food Matters | 2 Comments

Food Matters – Greenwashing

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Don Genova

Advertising and marketing play major roles in our daily decision-making. We can easily be influenced by something as simple as a few words in a commercial, or even the colour of a label. Today on Food Matters, I discussed how much ‘greenwashing’ has become part of the sustainable language landscape. The term greenwashing basically means when a company spends more time or money telling you its products or services are ‘green’ or sustainable than they actually spend on making those products or services green. They're not quite putting their money where their mouths are. I didn’t realize that this term has been around since 1986, when a New York environmentalist called out hotel chains for all those cards they use to tell you to re-use your towels to save the environment really just resulted in more profit for the hotels.

Nowadays, food companies routinely use labeling to convince us their products are greener. Anytime you see a yogurt container from a large manufacturer with a picture of a cow grazing in a field on the label you’re being greenwashed. Large companies need copious amounts of milk to make their products, which means the diet and movement of the cows are strictly controlled...they live in barns and eat a mix of feed designed to make them produce more milk...they don’t graze on grass.

McDonald's Green

In 2009, McDonald’s outlets in Europe started changing their colour scheme from red and yellow to green and yellow. The company said the colour change was to reflect its heightened sensitivity to environmental concerns. Recently more supermarket chains here in BC all started to make claims they were now selling sustainable seafood products, products certified sustainable by 3 or 4 different agencies that are out there. But if you go into any of those supermarkets you will find the number of sustainable seafood products available is still far fewer than the number of products that wouldn’t be certified sustainable. One supermarket chain made a big fuss about two summers ago that they carried so many local products, but then rejected a pumpkin shipment from a local farmer because the pumpkins weren’t all the same size and some of them had mud on them.

This really extends into labeling food products when it comes to health benefits. We’ve talked before about the overuse of labels that purport the products inside to be natural or pure, or artisan. Ask yourself when you read those labels, what do those words really mean in conjunction with the food itself or the way it is produced.

Apparently Canada's Competition Bureau and the Canadian Standards Association are discouraging companies from making "vague claims" about environmental impact. Any claims must be backed up and when I looked at the CSA website they do have measurable standards companies can meet when it comes to categories such as Green Procurement and Environmental Claims and Labeling. But when it comes to food products I’m not sure how many of them actually require CSA approval to be sold, and since we don’t even require labeling of genetically modified products I don’t see that there is a lot of government oversight of environmental claims.

So how do we tell the difference between a real effort to be sustainable and an empty promise? Sometimes it’s obvious, as in the case of the words on labels like ‘all natural’. Other times it’s a lot harder. Hellmann’s Mayonnaise, a brand of Unilever Canada, has been promoting a Real Food movement – and two years ago Hellmann's public relations company offered me and other bloggers an all-expenses paid trip to Toronto to explain their support of eating local and healthy. I didn't go on that trip, but on another trip to Toronto on business I put on my skeptical journalist hat and they did a mini-version of their presentation for me. I couldn't actually see the downside. They wanted to promote local food, help people to demand that from their local grocery stores, and were giving grants to people to help them start community gardens and other sustainable food projects. A couple of weeks ago, I watched a very well done Eat Local Hellman’s YouTube video from 2009 that put forward some amazing stats about how we are NOT eating local, and it encouraged us to eat local, with the Hellmann's logo only coming up at the very end of the video. I posted it to my Facebook and asked my foodie friends to comment.

Michael Pollan

When this first came up I happened to have a chance to discuss it with journalist and Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Pollan. He wasn’t buying it for a minute. Definitely thought it was greenwashing, despite the benefits I described to him. With this latest video I posted to my Facebook page, the comments were more mixed.

I even traced this back to the parent company of Hellman’s, Unilever, and that multinational company has launched what sounds like a fairly major initiative, called the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, which says it includes: over 50 concrete targets that will:
• Help more than one billion people improve their health and well-being
• Halve the environmental impact of our products
• Source 100% of our agricultural raw materials sustainably

Quite bold. But is it real, how do you measure it? I found something called the Greenwashing Index website, run by the University of Oregon and EnviroMedia Social Marketing. All kinds of info there designed to help you figure out when you’re being greenwashed, and how you can participate by rating ads you see on tv.

Posted in Food Matters | 3 Comments

Food Matters – Good Bite Lunch Company

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Don Genova

It’s one of those parental duties that you take on for years...making your kids lunches for school. It can be time-consuming and just one more thing you don’t want to think about the night before, or the morning of. And how do you make sure your kids are eating the right thing? Today on Food Matters, I looked at an innovative company that helps you provide your kids with a healthy lunch, and at the same time helps kids who might not even have a lunch to eat.

I don’t have kids but my mom faithfully made me lunch every day all the way up through high school, and while they weren’t imaginative they always included some fresh fruit, homemade cookies and a sandwich. She was a stay-at-home mom by the time I came along, so it was part of her day and she never complained about it. That was then, this is now. The family structure has changed, there are more two-parents-working families and time always seems to be at a premium.

This means more kids have to fend for themselves, rely on pre-packaged lunches, and then there are the hot lunch days, which have turned into fund-raising events for Parent Advisory Councils and that’s when Laurie Arbuthnot and Tina Vander Veen of Duncan got involved. They noticed that the foods offered on these days were typically fast foods like hot dogs and pizza and they thought that was wrong. So they started a company that would provide better foods at these hot lunch days, and as Laurie explains, they took it a little further when they realized that a lot of parents just don’t like making lunches or no longer have the time. The Good Bite Lunch Company, based just in Duncan for now, but what parents can do is go to their website, place their order for a day, a week, whatever, choose from the items available, pay and then the lunches are made in Tina’s commercial kitchen the night before or morning of and delivered right to the school for distribution. And they’ve spent some time using their own kids as guinea pigs so they are delivering lunches kids want to eat, including something called a pizza salad, which includes pepperoni made from free-range bison and fresh tomatoes along with a homemade Italian dressing.

They charge $6.49 per lunch, but that of course includes delivery and Laurie says when you compare how much a meal would cost at a typical fast food place it’s in the same ballpark, but of course their lunches are made from fresh, local, and as much as possible, organic ingredients, they even package everything in biodegradable wraps and containers so they can be composted at the school or at home.

Unfortunately, there are kids from families who can’t afford a program like this, or even to provide their children with any kind of lunch at all...so Tina and Laurie donate a portion of their proceeds to each participating school’s PAC to fund physical fitness programs and recreational equipment and they donate a lunch per day to a school in Duncan where many kids are not getting a lunch or snack. And by catering the special lunch days, Laurie hopes they can have some sort of influence on the way children learn about food and nutrition.

The really good news is that there are a few businesses in Duncan that think the same way that Laurie and Tina do, and they’ve come forward with some funding so that Good Bite Lunch Company can make some lunches at cost for some of those kids who would otherwise go without.

They started last February, so they’ve been at it for almost a year. It’s one of those ideas that everyone thinks is great, but it’s been a slow process to get people to sign up. Although once they do, they’ve been able to develop a good repeat business. If they get demand, of course they would like to expand to other communities in the area.

You can listen to my chat with Jo-Ann Roberts of All Points West on this topic by clicking here.

Posted in Food Matters | Tagged All Points West, CBC Radio, Don Genova, food, Food Matters, school lunches | Leave a comment

Food Matters – Time to Skimp on the Imported Shrimp

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Don Genova

Spot Prawns

There is nothing small about the world-wide shrimp industry. Every year billions of dollars worth of shrimp are consumed, many of them having been produced in farms in third-world countries. And we happily gobble them down, without much thought about the consequences to the environment, and the people who farm the shrimp. I've started looking into shrimp situation and discussed it today on Food Matters.

The latest Government of Canada stats I could find about this put us at about 5 pounds a year of shellfish, which includes shrimp. Personally, I know I am above that because I love eating BC spot prawns and I’m sure I put away more than that each year...but the government stats from 2009 say about 5 pounds.

We import about 560 million dollars worth of shrimp every year while we export about 270 million dollars worth of shrimp. Why do we import more than we export? Because we like cheap shrimp. Most of the shrimp we import are farmed in third world countries where labour and land costs are low. Where environmental concerns are not so important and the monitoring of issues like chemicals used in shrimp feed and the ponds they grow in is not nearly as stringent as it would be in North America. I’ve been reading quite a bit about shrimp farming and it’s pretty scary stuff. Mangrove forests on the ocean shores are being chopped down and bulldozed to create ponds to grow shrimp. The ponds are then sterilized of other sea life using powerful chemicals and because growing shrimp so intensively can lead to disease, the shrimp are often sprayed or fed antibiotics and fungus killers, some of which stay in their systems when they are harvested. The people who work in these shrimp farms are often exploited through low wages and poor working conditions, and puts people in the more lucrative wild shrimp industry out of work. That’s it in a nutshell...but there’s a lot of material out there if you want to learn more, including a new book by New Zealand-based journalist Kennedy Warne called ‘Let Them Eat Shrimp: The Tragic Disappearance of the Rainforests of the Sea.’

You will find farmed shrimp everywhere in grocery stores that you see pre-packaged frozen or previously-frozen shrimp or Tiger prawns, they are most likely imported from Asia or Central American countries like Honduras, and they are cheap. Most restaurants serve cheap imported shrimp, that’s how they can offer those great all-you-can-eat deals. But there are those environmental and human costs that don’t show up in the price.

If you are concerned, the first thing you can do is stop eating farmed shrimp from any Third World country. Then read more about it, and if you still want to eat shrimp, eat BC shrimp, especially those that are caught by traps and not by trawls, because trawling for shrimp creates its own problems with by-catch and destruction of habitat. We do export a lot of our shrimp, as I said before, 270 million dollars worth. It gets exported because people overseas in countries like Japan are willing to pay more for high quality, wild shrimp. If we were willing to pay more for shrimp, more of them would be consumed here in Canada and I know from talking to a local shrimper, he would be more than happy to sell more shrimp to folks here. And because he takes very good care of the product when he freezes it, the quality when you thaw is always excellent.

Shrimp package front

How do we know what we’re getting? My standard answer is to ask questions, find a reputable fishmonger, because the people that stock the frozen bags of shrimp in grocery stores probably won’t know much about them. Earlier this week at Safeway I was looking at bags of ‘organic shrimp’. These are a product of Honduras as stated on the label, so they are farmed, and they have a very generic sounding certification on the package. Certified Organic by ‘Quality Certification Services’, it says. I looked up the website and although they are certified by the USDA let’s just say the website doesn’t leave me with a lot of confidence as to their practices...such as this line about the company’s requirements: QCS ‘strives’ to use qualified and trained

Shrimp package back

inspectors. To me that should read QCS ONLY uses qualified and trained inspectors. Here in BC there are six species of shrimp caught commercially and you can read about them on this Department of Fisheries webpage.

Tonight I’m off to a special Slow Food Event at the London Chef here in Victoria where I’m going to learn more about shellfish and bivalves including some words of wisdom from Dr. John Volpe at the University of Victoria and I will tell you all about that next week.

Posted in Food Matters | Tagged Don Genova, farmed shrimp, mangrove forests, prawns, shrimp, Slow Food, spot prawns | 2 Comments

Food Matters – BC Shellfish

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Don Genova

BC Shellfish

Mussels, clams, oysters, scallops and crabs...all important parts of the BC seafood economy, and all delicious parts of a healthy diet. But there’s a growing concern as to how these ocean products end up on our plates.

Last Wednesday night I went to the first of a series of Slow Food seafood events at The London Chef cooking school and cafe on Fort Street. On the menu, mostly BC shellfish and Dungeness crab, with London Chef Dan Hayes showing attendees how to cook these BC products with expert commentary on how they are produced and harvested by Dr. John Volpe, who leads the Seafood Ecology Research Group at the University of Victoria. After downing a variety of raw oysters we enjoyed a very simple dish Dan prepared of fresh, raw scallops, farmed at Qualicum Beach. Dan: "All you do is just slice them, add a little salt, olive oil, dried hot pepper and a squeeze of citrus. (in this case lemon juice) This is the base for a ceviche, but instead of letting the fish 'cook' in the lemon juice, serve it straight away." The scallops were excellent, the sweet raw flavour still coming through loud and clear, augmented by the extra-virgin olive oil and lemon instead of being masked by it.

Farmed Scallops

The scallop farming industry has been growing on the BC Coast, as has most of the shellfish aquaculture component. The oysters we had before the scallops are all called Pacific Oysters, but none of them were actually native to BC. John Volpe told us that the native BC oysters aren’t that conducive to being farmed, so growers specialize in a Japanese species that has naturalized itself here. All the different names of oysters and shapes you see are actually the same oyster species, but where and how they’re grown give them the different flavour profiles. The BC government has been supporting rapid growth in the farmed shellfish industry, and this can mean a great density of oysters being grown in small areas, and that’s something Dr. Volpe says we have to be careful with, because waste from the oysters can have detrimental effects on other plant and animal life:

Farmed Oysters

"Of particular importance are the eelgrass beds, they are really the nursery system for so many other species. In studying how oysters release a lot of nitrogen via their waste into the eelgrass beds they have a negative effect on them and end up being able to dominate that ecosystem."

Dr. Volpe would like to see the provincial government pay a little more attention to densities in shellfish operations so problems like the one he described to us don’t grow along with the industry.

Dungeness Crab

Dungeness crab is still on the really good list of BC seafood to eat. It’s a wild product, the harvest is very strictly controlled so that it has remained sustainable over the past few years. And the London Chef takes an interesting attitude with it...he likes the shell more than the meat:

Dan Hayes

"So I like to break it up and saute the crab in a pan with some nice herbs, some butter and cream and that's it. I want to have the flavour of the shell in my dish, instead of discarding it. With a nice sauce all the joy comes out of licking and sucking at the shell, and dipping some hot bread in the sauce, which I think is much more flavourful than just a chunk of meat."

I think he's right! But I’m not a huge fan of cream sauces so I’ve made up a black bean sauce instead using fermented black beans, green onions, garlic, ginger, some chilli sauce and a splash of white wine. (more details below) Later that evening we also enjoyed a big pot of mussels, simply steamed, and a delightful clam fettucine. While the mussels and clams are both farmed in BC, they are not BC species, mussels originate on the Atlantic coast and the Mediterranean, and they have transformed almost all the wild mussels in BC into somewhat of a hybrid of about four species, and the clams were Manila clams. While Dr. Volpe says while you shouldn’t stop eating these farmed products just because they didn’t originate in BC, you should be thinking about the overall impact we have on our ocean environments: "These farmed products that we're eating tonight actually need a pristine, wild environment in which they can be farmed, so we have to think about how we treat those environments and how they interact together as we take advantage of these products."

Gooseneck Barnacles

The Slow Food Slow Fish series continues at the London Chef on March 29th with small fish and bycatch, with Chef Dan Hayes and Dr. John Volpe leading the way once again and then at a date still to be announced, it is Sea Things, Seaweed, Sea Urchins, Sea Asparagus and other sea things. Other sea things include the gooseneck barnacles pictured at right, which were on display only that night. The danger of red tide precluded any eating...and there is no commercial fishery for these barnacles, although there once was. (that's another story) They are highly treasured in Spain, where I saw them a few years ago where they were priced at 39 Euros for one kilo!

Oh, if you live in the Victoria area and are interested in whether local restaurants and grocery stores offer sustainable seafood, there is a great little tool produced out of a Seafood Audit the Seafood Ecology Research Group did in 2010 in 29 Victoria-area restaurants and 10 grocery stores. The results are quite revealing!

To listen to this week's Food Matters with me and Jo-Ann Roberts just click here.

And now the Crab with Black Bean Sauce recipe:

Ingredients:

1 fresh Dungeness crab, cleaned, body and legs separated into pieces

2 tbsp. vegetable oil

2 tbsp. fermented black beans, rinsed and minced

2 cloves garlic, minced

1-inch long chunk of ginger, minced

1 small shallot, peeled and minced

1 bunch green onions, green parts only, minced

1 tsp or more to taste sambalulek (hot chili paste)

1/2 cup white wine or sherry

chopped cilantro for garnish

Heat the vegetable oil over high heat in a large frying pan. Fry the black beans, garlic and ginger together for a few seconds, then add in the shallots and green onions, stirring until the shallots are translucent. Add in the hot sauce and the white wine, stir until the wine comes to a boil and then add the crab pieces all at once. Stir to coat all the crab pieces in the sauce, then cover and simmer until the crab is just cooked through. Serve in bowls with some of the sauce spooned over the crab and sprinkle with the chopped cilantro.

Posted in Food Matters, Uncategorized | Tagged All Points West, CBC Radio, clams, crab, Dan Hayes, Don Genova, Dr. John Volpe, Dungeness crab, Food Matters, gooseneck barnacles, London Chef, mussels, oysters, scallops, seafood, Slow Food, sustainable seafood | Leave a comment

Food Matters – Ads and Childhood Obesity

Posted on February 15, 2012 by Don Genova

Food companies spend billions of dollars a year to advertise their products. Some of that marketing is targeted towards children, even if the foods advertised aren’t necessarily part of what health-care professionals call a balanced diet. This week on Food Matters, I looked at one of the first studies to link advertising to childhood obesity.

The study was done right here in British Columbia at UBC, along with some help from the University of Illinois, but it was looking specifically at the province of Quebec. Why Quebec? Well, way back in 1980 the provincial government brought in legislation that was the world’s first advertising ban of fast food. This was a ban of ads in print and electronic media targeted toward children of fast food and any toys associated with fast food. The study compared purchases of fast food by similar families in Ontario, and also obesity rates in children. Some numbers from the study are quite startling...

Tirtha Dhar

Assistant Professor Tirtha Dhar, a marketing expert at UBC’s Sauder School of Business says that the ban on advertising effectively reduced fast food consumption in households by as much as 13 per cent each week, and that even though Quebec children have one of the most sedentary lifestyles, they have one of the lowest childhood obesity rates in Canada.
In North America right now every two out of ten children are obese. A lot of that obesity is blamed on the consumption of fast food, junk food, and child health activists believe that these kinds of foods shouldn’t be marketed to children because the ads lead to greater consumption of those foods and that those ads should be banned. The product manufacturers don’t like being told they can’t market their products to a particularly malleable part of the population and always claimed there’s no link to obesity because of the ads, but the authors of this study claim that this is the first proof that the link exists in fairly black and white results based on a ban of advertising that’s been in effect for the past 32 years. Other data that was out there on this was from relatively small-sized surveys that gave more of a snapshot in time as opposed to this one where there was a wealth of information available from over three decades of census and health data.

To be fair, some changes started to be made voluntarily by Kellogg’s Canada, for example, about four or five years ago. They stopped marketing certain breakfast cereals to children that didn’t meet a set of nutritional guidelines they established, and they started to change the packaging on the cereal boxes to make it easier for parents to figure out what they were getting in the package. That doesn’t mean they actually changed what was in the boxes, just changed the packaging and marketing.

Marketers have always realized that children were a good target for some of their products. I went to a seminar a few years ago on this very topic and was quite impressed with a presentation from Brian Cook, a researcher with the Toronto Board of Health. He said that if there wasn’t a clear link between the power of advertising and how it affected children a lot of marketing executives would have been fired for spending millions of dollars on those ads targeted toward children. If it wasn’t working, they wouldn’t have kept doing it, right?

What has changed over the past few years is that there are so many more ways of reaching children these days. Toys connected with food have been out there for a long time, but now beyond toys and television, there are ringtones for kids who have cellphones, and there are lots of those, celebrity endorsement, contests, online games, websites with online games and of course social networking websites like Twitter and Facebook, where incentives are often offered if you ‘spread the word’.

Michele Simon

By and large food and beverage advertising in Canada is unregulated, or self-regulated by the industry, except in Quebec. Michele Simon is a public health lawyer who has been researching and writing about the food industry and food politics since 1996. She thinks that the processed food industry is not doing enough to curb marketing toward children and tries to place too much of the blame for overconsumption of junk food on parents. Simon would like to see more governments enact legislation that would end the use of cartoon characters, toys and websites targeted toward kids by processed food advertisers, along with other electronic methods.
And what about parents, what role should they play in what advertising their children are exposed to and what they end up eating? That’s a tough question. Kids are exposed to so much marketing these days and advertisers want to build brand loyalty when they’re young as a loyal customer can represent so much to a company over their lifetime. You can’t expect to raise your kids in a bubble, either. So somehow you have to strike a balance, try to educate them about the foods they eat and be careful about how you shop.

If you would like to listen to my chat with Jo-Ann Roberts on All Points West on this subject, just click here.

Posted in Food Matters | Tagged advertising, advertising to children, All Points West, CBC Radio, childhood obesity, Don Genova, food, Food Matters, sustainable eating | Leave a comment

Food Matters – Saanich Organics: All The Dirt

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Don Genova

All The Dirt

The back yard gardening movement has been taking off over the past few years, with more people realizing how good it can be to grow some of your own food. But what about doing it organically? And what about growing enough food to try to make a living from doing it? Where do you get started? All good questions, and some very good answers are now available in the form of a book written by three Saanich Peninsula farmers. Saanich Organics is the joining together of three women who run farms in Saanich, along with some input from other organic or transitional organic farms in the greater Victoria area. But now, Robin Tunnicliffe of Feisty Field Organic Farm, Rachel Fisher of Three Oaks Farm, and Heather Stretch of Northbrook Farm, the heart and soul of Saanich Organics, have just published a book called ‘All The Dirt, Reflections on Organic Farming’.

The book really gives you an idea of what you might be getting into if you are considering creating an organic farming business. They have had hundreds of people ask them over the years about what it’s like to be an organic farmer, how they run their business, and as Robin Tunnicliffe explains, the book can provide all the answers to all those questions:
"It’s the book we needed when we started out. Nothing like this existed when we started out and what you need when you start a new career is a real slice of life, especially a career like organic farming that's getting redefined. It's a whole career and whole lifestyle, a whole philosophy and what are things going to look like for you in ten years, so in the book that's what we really tried to do."

The really great thing about this book is that although it is a how-to book, it is told through the personal stories of the three authors, so you never feel bogged down in technical talk, it’s just as though you did sit them down and ask them all the questions you could probably think of regarding their business, and all the ones you didn’t think of as well. It also takes you through their structure, the way they have diversified. They sell their products to residents through the weekly box delivery program, but also at farmers markets, to restaurants and to retailers, and they also spread their income out from over a hundred different crops, so that if a few fail because of pests or weather, there are always some backups in place.

Their success comes as a combination of things, definitely teamwork, hard work, and developing a sense of community. But it also has to do with growing their business in a part of the world where people are becoming much more concerned about where their food comes from and how it is produced. Heather Stretch says that even given that awareness, not everyone has caught on to the idea that this is the way we should be eating:
"We still import the majority of the food we eat here on Vancouver Island. We need more farmers like us, and we need more people to think about eating more than just the fancy heirloom tomato that gets sliced on top of their industrially-produced, imported greens."

Well, we do need more farmers, we need our municipal and provincial governments to be more farmer-friendly when it comes to loans, grants, incentives and infrastructure . If you want to pick up a copy of the book, which actually makes a good read even if you don’t want to be an organic farmer, you have an opportunity next Tuesday, February 28th at Cadboro Bay Books. Join Heather, Robin, and Rachel along with Saanich MLA Lana Popham, and long-time Sooke farmer Mary Alice Johnson for an evening discussion on local organic farming and to learn more about the growers in your neighbourhood. More details at the Saanich Organics website.

Posted in Food Matters | Tagged All Points West, All The Dirt, CBC Radio, Don Genova, publishing, Saanich Organics, sustainable eating, Touchwood Editions | Leave a comment

Food Matters – Fair Trade Produce

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Don Genova

While the ‘Eat Local’ food movement has been growing by leaps and bounds on Vancouver Island, there still isn’t nearly enough year-round production to satisfy demand for fresh fruit and produce. And some of the fruits we crave can’t be grown here to begin with and are imported from far away. So how, especially in winter, do you find fresh produce that comes with a more sustainable footprint?

A couple of weeks ago I was shopping at the Thrifty Foods near downtown Nanaimo, and drawn as I am to bright colours, I spotted a bag of great-looking red, yellow and orange bell peppers. But when I picked it up, the label read ‘Fair Trade Certified’. I've talked about Fair Trade on the show before, the main concept being that the people working in agricultural industries in Third World countries get a fair price for their products. These peppers are greenhouse grown, product of Mexico, and I’d never seen fair trade bell peppers in a store before.

This is an interesting co-venture between a huge Canadian and U-S greenhouse firm called The Oppenheimer Group, and a Mexican greenhouse producer called Divemex. Oppenheimer has an office in Vancouver, so I called Cathie MacDonald, Oppenheimer’s manager of Creative Services & Marketing Development to ask about these peppers. She told me they actually hit the market last year, but this is the first time they have had a commitment from a retailer like Thrifty Foods to carry them on a regular basis so you should see them on a regular basis in all Thrifty’s. Oppenheimer was also bringing in Rainforest Alliance grapes from Chile and Brazil. Rainforest Alliance is another kind of sustainable certification program specializing in some Central and South American countries as well as Africa and Asia. You likely didn’t see these grapes, though, as they were only carried by Whole Foods stores, and we don’t have them here on Vancouver Island. Next year Cathie MacDonald says we can look forward to fair trade apples and pears from New Zealand, and I’ll return to the idea of fair trade products coming from non-third world countries in a paragraph below.

These products are fair trade, but these peppers and grapes are not organic. In the case of the greenhouse peppers, Cathie MacDonald told me that pesticides and herbicides are only used in the case of extreme infestations in greenhouses, which is the norm here in Canada as well, and with the grapes, they can’t be certified organic because as they go into the United States on any journey to Canada, they must be fumigated with methyl bromide to kill any grape mites, which would be a big problem for any North American grape producers.

My next call was to Ursula Twiss at Discovery Organics, an independent organic and fair trade distribution company based in Vancouver. Right now you will find fair trade organic produce imported by Discovery in places like the Market on Yates here in Victoria, Edible Island up in Courtenay, and distributed by grocery delivery services like Share Organics and Small Potatoes Urban Delivery, otherwise known as SPUD. Their list includes bananas, mangos and avocados, and Ursula says the best way to spot this produce is to look for a Fair Trade sticker on the fruit, in this case a sticker which shows a figure standing in front of a globe, carrying baskets, and the figure is half black and half white. Right now Discovery is asking you to seek out Fair Trade mangos at your retailers, as the sale of each of these mangos sends some money to Peru to help growers who were affected by some devastating flooding a little while ago.

Earlier I mentioned fair trade certification for a country like New Zealand, a modern country we probably don’t associate with workers being taken advantage of...this is something that both Cathie MacDonald and Ursula Twiss mentioned. We are hearing more and more reports of immigrant worker abuse in agricultural production in places like New Zealand, the United States and even here in Canada. I’m reading a book right now called Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook that details incidents of slavery in Florida where tomato pickers suffer much abuse. As a result there are more domestic Fair Trade certification processes being developed to let people know that the products they buy are not the result of workers being subjected to unsafe working conditions and unfair wages. The more I look into the food we eat, the more I realize how complicated the food system is and how we really need to keep asking questions.

Posted in Food Matters | Tagged All Points West, CBC Radio, Don Genova, fair trade, food, Food Matters, organic, sustainable eating | 1 Comment

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Please note that the Slow Fish Event mentioned in this post has now been rescheduled for April 18th