Food Matters – What’s in Your Milk???

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Don Genova
 

Milking GoatsThe 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.

ice cream packageModified 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.

100 CanadianIf 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.

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Food Matters – Eat More Small Fish

Posted on March 22, 2012 by Don Genova
Sardines For Sale***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 HayesDan 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 AnchoviesFried 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.

SalmonPoster2012
 
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Food Matters – Olive Oil – The Slippery Slope

Posted on March 14, 2012 by Don Genova
Olive TreeOlive 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.

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Food Matters – Sustainability in Restaurants and Other Food Services

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Don Genova
CRFA ShowCRFA 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 CupNot 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 GreenBe 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.

DishwasherDishwasher

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 SandwellKatie 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 FarmsParadise 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 NetworkGreen 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.

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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.

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Food Matters – Saanich Organics: All The Dirt

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Don Genova
 
All The DirtAll 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.

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