Don Genova's Blog

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 – 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 | 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 – 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 | 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 – 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 – 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