Don Genova's Blog

This week on Food For Thought, the 100-Mile Diet.  Pictured at left is Jenn Lamm from the Nanaimo 100-Mile Diet challenge, with some Vancouver Island kiwi fruit harvested last year.

I’m a little under the weather this week, trying to recover from a bad cold and cough I caught in Crete last week, but I will update the blog with more links, audio and info on the 100-Mile Diet book in a few hours.  Okay, it’s been more than a few hours, but here is the audio file from this week’s show.

The 100-Mile Diet , a Year of Local Eating, is a book by James MacKinnon and Alisa Smith, based on their experience from March 2005 to March 2006 of eating only ingredients produced or procured within 100 miles of their homes in downtown Vancouver.  You can click on the link above to order the book from amazon.ca and save 37  percent off the cover price!  You can also learn more about their experiences by visiting the 100-Mile Diet website.  I’ll be constructing an All You Can Eat podcast based on my interviews with them, so make sure you check that portion of my blog.

Going to Crete also meant I missed a posting for Food For Thought last week on pizza, so I will try to get that audio on a separate posting later this week.

This week in addition to my regular Food For Thought documentary, I was interviewed by CBC Radio stations across the country about some of the latest news in Canada regarding labeling of food products.  Here are some links you may find helpful:

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency on current labeling legislation.

The House of Commons Standing Committee on Health report titled Healthy Weights for Healthy Kids.

A CBC.ca report on the Committee recommendations.

Felicity Lawrence of the Guardian newspaper in the UK has done some excellent articles about the battle over labeling in Britain.  Here’s the latest one.  For more on this issue from Felicity Lawrence, you can find of list of articles here.  One of my recent podcasts contains a piece on childhood obesity from my archives, if you’d like to listen to it, you’ll find it on this webpage, look for All You Can Eat Vol. 34.

I used a quote from Michael Pollan during some of the interviews.  This professor of journalism and food writer says, "Don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize!"  I highly recommend his book called, ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’.

I’d love to hear your comments about labeling.  Scroll down to the bottom of the page to enter your thoughts.  How should foods in Canada be labeled?

This week on Food For Thought, a visit to Canzine West, an independent ‘zine and website fair put on by Broken Pencil.  Meet some young food writers who read excerpts from their works.  Listen to the audio file here. One of the writers you heard from was Trish Kelly, here’s her blog. Ben Hart was also featured, reading his odes to donuts.  He’s the fiction editor at Prism International Magazine.

If you want to get into some good food writing you can start with these authors:  MFK Fisher, Elizabeth David, R.W. Apple, Mark Kurlansky, Anthony Bourdain and Michael Pollan.

This week on Food For Thought, meet Meeru Dhalwala and Vikram Vij, owners and operators of Vancouver’s most famous East Indian restaurant, Vij’s.  Here is the audio file of today’s documentary. Their first cookbook, Vij’s, Elegant & Inspired Indian Cuisine was published to great acclaim last fall.  If you want to give it a try before you buy, here is the famous Vij recipe for ‘lamb popsicles’!

You can find a few more recipes to try at the Vij’s website, and don’t forget about Rangoli, a little shop and diner right next to Vij’s which sells frozen and refrigerated ready-to-eat Indian dishes as well as freshly roasted and ground Indian spices.  The diner serves a small, five to six item lunch menu for eating in or take out.

You can save 37 percent off the cover price of the cookbook by clicking here and ordering from amazon.ca! And be proud of the fact you’ve donated about $1 to help me keep my website and blog running.