Fri 12 Oct 2007
Here is some of the planned info for Friday Oct 12 appearance on CHML900 Talk show idol.
Links and book titles are towards the bottom of the post…..
Hi there and welcome to the chefjono segment of the Talk Show Idol.
I am a personal chef and caterer and travel all over the province performing gourmet meals from scratch in the client’s home.
I was a restaurant chef for 25 years in all the expensive restaurants in Toronto and a co-founder of Shasha Bread Co., an organic bakery in Etobicoke. As well I have taught at Liaison Culinary College and do the LCBO cooking series in stores in Burlington and other locations. Now I am a personal chef and caterer and travel all over the province performing gourmet meals from scratch in the client’s home. For lots of info on catering and what a personal chef does you can visit my website at www.chefjono.ca
All of this cooking in people’s homes brings me in contact with real people, eating real food and I get to poke about their cupboards and fridges.
What I want to talk to you about today is the direction our food and eating habits are going, and especially what sort of world our children will encounter as they grow and learn to feed themselves.
Lets call it, “ Honest Food, let’s get Real!”
END OF INTRO
In just a moment we’ll have a chat with Pam Killeen an author and educator who is working with the Durham School Board on a new approach to school lunches.
Now I suspect this radio show audience has a lot of men with flexible schedules who have taken over in the kitchen and very much enjoy doing all the cooking.
You wouldn’t believe the number of young women who tell me, “Oh I don’t do any of the cooking at all”.
Why are so many people absolutely lost in the kitchen?
Back in the Trudeau years, the feminist influenced moms urged their daughters to be Doctors and Lawyers and deliberately didn’t teach any cooking lessons.
Many of those girls have grown up and now have no cooking skills at all to pass on to their own daughters.
I have gone into wealthy homes to do dinner parties and have seen brand new ovens never used once.
And I have also searched for olive oil or butter and found only margarine or Pam spray.
One memorable kitchen of single woman had only cup a soup and yogurt pops.
No salt, not a decent pot or knife or anything to work with. (You can guess that I take a well stocked kit with everything I might need!)
So at the same time that we have the Food TV network broadcasting what some call “Food Porn”, magazines with beautiful pictures of glorious food dishes, and more kids are joining cooking schools than ever before, we are all, as a group, cooking less.
The scary part is that convenience foods have filled a void and taken over to such a large extent that millions of families don’t even know what real food is any more. Let me just make it clear that I am not looking at this from a snob foodie perspective, but from someone who is seriously concerned that there is a great deal at stake, no less than the future of mankind’s food supply and all of our overall health as a human race.
So before I continue proselytizing on this important subject…
Here are the warning signs of what losing touch with honest food has done to us.
-An epidemic of obesity among children, not to mention their baby-boomer parents.
-Allergies, have you ever heard of anyone older than 50 with a peanut allergy?
-A seven fold increase in Autism in the last twenty years
-Attention Deficit Syndrome and with it a proliferation of psycho-therapeutic drugs especially among very young boys
-diabetes and even the beginnings of heart disease among elementary school children
What is going on here?
The coincidental rise of so many health problems has a pattern that goes back to the early 1900’s but especially to the last 20 years or so.
What changes have taken place in our food supply that time?
Probably most importantly is the overwhelming introduction of high fructose corn syrup, almost completely replacing cane sugar and beet sugar. This came about because of a change in government corn subsidies leading to the use of exclusively GMO corn. The use of high fructose corn syrup in cola, is the number one best selling food substance in North America. In Michael Pollan‘s book, “the Omnivore’s Dilemma”, he explains how the corn plant is processed 100% at the factory, into the following food additives > citric and lactic acid, glucose, fructose, and malto-dextrin, ethanol, sorbitol, mannitol, xanthan gum; modified starches, dextrin and MSG.
A similar conversion happens with soy beans, which is very popular to grow on the Great Plains of North America because it doesn’t need as much rainfall as wheat or vegetables and is the rotational plant partner to corn, completing the cycle.
Another historical change is our consumption of vegetable oil, from zero to many litres per person per year, most of it in the form of french fries, potato chips an the highly damaging trans-fat deep fry coatings. If you were to go back one hundred years and look in kitchen cupboard, the only place to find oil would be under the sink, the bacon fat or tallow, drained and reserved. Other than butter, fresh cream or, over the Mediterranean countries, goose fat and olive oil, there was no such things as vegetable oil. It was invented as a consumer item to get rid of the waste product of corn and soybean industrial processing.
As well we have the huge increase of sugar free chemicals, much of it by children, and all of it highly processed and damaging chemicals.
The main reason for this food revolution is profit. When you can take a commodity with a low sale price point, like a large bag of rice for instance, and instead of selling for $9.00 a bag, turn it into heavily flavored single servings that sells for $3.99 a portion, processed and marketed as a Value Added Product. Now there is a fortune to be made.
And now we are seeing the marketing of a new category of “fat reduced” or diet foods, often treating a commodity and making it less healthy in the process.
Repeat this process with milk, (why do we need to believe that homo milk, which is already 96.5 % fat free, when processed and then sold as 2% milk or skim milk are healthier alternatives?)
An example is the flour used for white bread and breakfast cereals, where the very nutritional wheat germ and bran are first removed, then replaced with “fortified vitamins”. In this case, 4 cents of worth of commodity corn is transformed into four dollars worth of processed food.
I am going to talk today with Pam Killeen who has been in touch with the London School Board, consulting with them about a “Healthy Initiatives” program, that is looking at replacing many of the saturated fats in cafeterias with low fat alternatives.
What she is alarmed about is that the same companies that have been effectively operating a “near-monopoly” with our food supply while engaging in “child profiteering” in the food lunch market.
Wouldn’t you assume that school cafeterias which are supervised by teachers who take an oath to protect our children, would run on a non-profit basis and provide healthy meals?
In fact the opposite seems to be true.
So last Thanksgiving weekend, I take it wasn’t a Tofu Turkey for you?
Pam, why is a low fat diet actually dangerous to children?
Where did soy protein and TVP come from anyway?
Weren’t you a vegetarian for quite a while?
Can a vegan diet be a dumb idea for kids?
What is the current regulations regarding food lunches, aren’t they legislated?
What’s to stop individual schools from contracting health food caterers?
How about diets like Atkins or South Beach. ?
What the heck is notgonnakillyou.ca ?
And the http://breakfastforlearning.ca/english/index.html
Who promotes these?
Hi Jonathan:
For my intro, you could say, Pam Killeen co-author of the NY Times bestselling book, The Great Bird Flu Hoax. Her interest in nutrition stems from having been sick with chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, environmental illness and multiple chemical sensitivities. (If you want to say that I’ve also been diagnosed with ADD, that’s fine too). During her recovery she experimented with several different diets, including a vegan diet. She now calls herself a recovering vegan and has come to her senses surrounding food by returning to traditional whole foods (including wholesome meat and dairy products).
Be sure to listen to the CJBK interview I sent earlier and read the newspaper article as well (both on the recent school food talk I gave to the school board).
You may be interested in these two clips:
1) Garth Riley interviews Professor Joe Cummins, Institute of Science in Society (www.i-sis.org.uk) and Pam Killeen, co-author of The Great Bird Flu Hoax, about the disappearance of the honey bees. Production of CHEX TV, Oshawa, Ontario and www.dancarter.ca. Downloaded July 22, 2007. Air date June 19, 2007:
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=6349049123736600538
2) Garth Riley interviews Pam Killeen, co-author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Great Bird Flu Hoax, about the importance of choosing locally grown food. Production of CHEX TV, Oshawa, Ontario…
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=482055166459749807&hl=en-CA
Exposing Fake Foods, January 4, 2007
By Pamela Killeen “Investigative Reporter, Co-au… (Canada) - See all my reviews
As a former vegan, I commend Dr. Kaayla Daniel for exposing the dark side of the commercial soy industry.
Over the ten year span where I was a strict vegetarian (no animal protein), I had no idea that one could suffer health problems from eating unfermented, commercial soy.
During this time, I completely lost touch with the foods that were traditional to my ancestry (meat, eggs, dairy). My health certainly suffered for it.
Thanks to Dr. Daniel’s book, The Whole Soy Story, I can now warn other vegans about the problems associated with soy.
With so much commercial pressure in today’s world, it is difficult to find science that is based upon integrity. Dr. Daniel is a very distinguished scientist who is has done a thorough and professional job explaining the dirty secrets of the commercial soy industry. Her book is an exceptional achievement that deserves a great deal of praise from the media, scientific community, food industry and consumers.
In a sense, The Whole Soy Story takes off where the movie, Soylent Green, left off (many consider this futuristic movie a warning about the problems associated with “fake” foods). Remember the scenes in the movie where crowds of people line up to get their synthetic food bars? In Soylent Green, fake foods take over real, nutrient-dense traditional foods such as meat, dairy and eggs. After reading Dr. Daniel’s book, The Whole Soy Story, the reader will gain a better understanding as to why soy is being touted as a new superfood (and why the movie, Soylent Green, is so prophetic) - since soy is so cheap to produce, food companies can make better profits. In other words, the soy industry is more concerned about making money than it is about feeding the world a genuinely healthy food.
My hat goes off to Dr. Daniel for blowing the whistle on the commercial soy industry. If you have any friends or loved ones who are eating unfermented, commercial soy products, this book is a must-read!
AFTER INTERVIEW
There are positive signs are that children are spontaneously coming alive to real food.
The two arguments I get from adults about revamping kids food, is, number one; that it’s too expensive for the schools to be practical and number two; the kids won’t like it.
Which is nonsense, the evidence is that there are plenty of ethnic and natural restaurants at get by using quality foods, and besides when we are talking about life supporting food, brain food for you and you family, here is a little jono-ism for you…..BUY LESS….PAY MORE….
The reason a lot of kids don’t like vegetables is that they probably have never had them cooked properly. How many of you out there had overcooked bland green beans or carrots forced on you?
Chefs actually embrace vegetables, as they are a way to brighten up plate with colour and texture. As an example an orange and honey glaze for carrots with a pinch of cumin, or some garlic sautéed almonds for the green beans are two classic ways “chef “ ways to embellish those two standards .
And as far as the second objection which is that kids are too picky and difficult so its easy to give in to convenience foods, Yes I certainly know how picky kids, teens and adults can be but..
YOU KNOW WHAT?
THEY ARE THE CHILDREN, WE ARE THE ADULTS, GROW UP AND ENFORCE SOME SMART DECISIONS!
Part of the problem is that there is no one simple solution. The lazy way is to let the food service giants, which so far have done us a dis-service, go ahead and formulate a so called low fat fix.
The worst things is to buy into “Food Fadism” like low-cal, low-fat, high-fibre, Atkins, South Beach.
It isn’t about everyone eating low fat or sugar free, it’s about eating better food in general, fresh vegetables, hormone anti-biotic meat and dairy, and a nice wonderful variety more often.
What we need is a common sense revolution, often the knowledge is there but we look for the easy way out. Try cooking with your kids, it may even turn out to be fun.
Get real and eat honest food!
If you might be thinking I don’t have kids, so the school meals doesn’t affect me, just remember that we are all subsidizing this cheap and dangerous food with added health costs for all the young people who grow up into un-healthy adults and overburden the already strained health care system. The baby boom population will be adding a lot of pressure as is, we really don’t need to add a generation of sick people, who for the first time are expected to live shorter lives than their parents. of sick people on top of that.
Even if you are a person who knows what quality and natural food is, doesn’t eat a lot of junk food and doesn’t go to fast food restaurants, you are most certainly going to be exposed to some fake dishonest food along the way.
Where could that happen to you?
Been to a wedding, Christmas party or bar-mitvah lately?
Well you will eventually and I guess that some of these affairs might fit into the category of the rubber chicken circuit, or cocktail party math dilemma.
On my website, if you click on the link, Catering Exposé: Chef Jono takes you behind the swinging doors
you will find an article spelling the purely mathamatical reason, why that even when paying top dollar, you will often get mediocre food at large events.
My approach?
Cook everything from scratch, with a team of other personal chefs at action stations.
Honest Food.
I am not the only caterer who does so, but I may be one of the only ones who do a dinner party and teach a course at the same time!
LINKS AND BOOKS
http://www.flickr.com/photos/57719910@N00/
google search Thom.su and sous vide and flickr
Small Pleasures and Little Annoyances from April 24 2006
By Frank Bruni
Tags: Chefs, Entrees
Why is what’s served at Weddings so wretched?
By Regina Schrambling
http://slate.com/id/2168011/
Dr. Daniel’s book, the Whole Soy Story
Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser
Heat, Bill Buford
The Omnivore’s Dilemman, Michael Pollan
