Flipper pie, anyone?

The Newfoundland seal hunt officially began today, and I don't feel I can let the moment go unnoticed, especially as I know Paul Watson's ship is on its way to the Grand Banks. Some might say my history makes me biased, but I've thought about this a lot and I think I have a fairly balanced view of the whole situation.

Watson and his Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, along with other groups such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare, are doing everything they can to once again shut down the North Atlantic seal hunt. Didn't they learn anything from the stupidity of Paul McCartney's comments to Rex Murphy last year? I am not exactly a vociferous carnivore, I don't exactly have a lot of fur in my wardrobe, and seeing cruelty of any kind hurts me to the very core of my being, but I do not agree with this effort to stop the hunt.

The debates pro and con the hunt are easily available online. And yes, it can be considered cruel and it is ugly to see. No form of killing, no matter how humanely done, is pretty. What really bothers me, aside from the inaccurate information touted by these organizations—they kill baby seals; it's only for the fur; they skin them alive; they kill them more brutally than necessary......in fact, seal meat is a Newfoundland delicacy; it's been illegal to kill white coats for 20 years; the hakapik and the club look nasty, but kill quickly, and quick is what you want—is the hypocricy.

Paul Watson claims to be upholding international law by his activities, which include ramming sealing ships on the North Atlantic, putting hundreds of lives at serious risk. A few minutes after making this claim in an interview with Shelagh Rogers today, he followed with "I don't really have much respect for the Ministry of Fisheries and Oceans." These would be some of the people making the laws. Hmmm, something isn't quite right here. Watson is breaking international law to stop something that is fully within international law. (Unlike Sea Shepherd's fight against many other kinds of marine hunting, the Canadian seal hunt is fully legal.)

It's not so much that I am pro sealing; I'm just not violenty opposed to it. And I do adore seals. It's just that I see this issue as an easy target. Hunting seals on the ice provides vivid imagery. They are furry and cute, even after their coats turn grey. Red blood shed on white snow makes a striking picture. The cries of seals sound eerie against the silence of the north. It is exactly because we can see all this that we are bothered by it. And we should be bothered by it. The killing of living beings, regardless of how humanely it is done or for what purpose, should never be taken lightly.

My question to people who oppose the hunt is this: Have you ever eaten meat that came from the supermarket, a fast food outlet, or pretty much anywhere other than your own farm? If you answer yes, I don't think you have the moral right to oppose the seal hunt. The atrocities that occur in CAFOs and industrial slaughterhouses are well documented by journalists and authors from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) to Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006).

Our food system is wrought with problems, particularly in the way we produce and process animals. The success of this system is dependent on people's ignorance of what is really going on. It would take a hardened soul to visit a CAFO and slaughterhouse and immediately after sit down with a burger. But we buy our meat ready-cooked, or on nice little styrofoam trays at the supermarket. We no longer even need to visit the butcher, where evidence of the fact that we are consuming flesh is still evident, even if hidden behind the plastic curtain. Whether it is meat, organic spray cans of pancake mix, or so-called organic lettuce, we are disconnected from our food sources and rarely know where it has come from, how it got here, or even what's really in it (who can understand the ingredient lists on most foods without a chemistry degree?).

And so we see the brutal reality of the seal hunt, and naturally it stirs feelings of disgust and remorse. If we could see the brutality or absurdity of many of the other foods we eat, wouldn't we have the same reaction? I think so. Aside from meat, our carefully constructed processed food products systematically remove any remnants of nature or real food from the things we eat. We rape the land of its fertility by growing crops in huge chemical-dependent monocultures. We allow rural communities to decay because small farmers can't squeak out a living growing real food. We use huge amounts of oil shipping food back and forth across the globe in the name of efficiency, even those foods that we can grow locally.

In the end, I think the debate over whether the seal hunt
is or isn't excessively cruel is irrelevant. (Never mind issues of cultural heritage, disappearing cod stocks, attacks on fisherman, slander of the Newfoundland people, and so on.) The sanctioned violence in the mainstream industrial food system far outweighs anything that happens on an ice floe a few weeks each year. The social and ecological violence caused by industrial farming, processing, and long distance transport is massive, but how can it ever compete with those big brown eyes* looking into the barrel of a rifle?

*And why do they always show pictures of the whitecoats, which are not part of the hunt? If they have a legitimate issue, they shouldn't have to stretch the truth to get support.

Down on the farm, on the radio

Back in October, I was at Bija Vidyapeeth, home of Navdanya's organic teaching farm and seed bank just outside of Dehradun, India. While I was there, Bija Vidyapeeth was host to Vasundhara, a huge gathering of farmers from all over India who came together to talk about farmers' rights, traditional regional crops, and seed saving.

Tonight, while cooking up a nice late winter supper of noodles, kale and chickpeas in a peanut sauce, I turned on CBC Radio and found that tonight's episode of Dispatches had a piece on Indian farmers' civil disobedience. Turns out it was recorded by David Kattenburg, a freelance journalist from Winnipeg who I met during Vasundhara. Next thing I knew, I heard my own voice talking about my research.



Missed it? No need to panic, because you listen here or download the podcast. (It's the second part after the stuff about Chavez and his Venezuelan baseball players.)

Organics Gone Wild

Um, I should probably refrain from writing about this until the shock wears off, but I just can't wait. Thanks to one of my trusty food-nerd listervs, I just discovered this new "food," if I can use the term loosely. Batter Blaster is a spray can of pancake/waffle batter. It's like CoolWhip or spray cheese that you squirt directly onto the skillet and cook like a pancake.

This alone is worthy of comment. The ad talks about how labourious it is to mix up milk, eggs, and flour to make pancake batter for one's children. (I've never timed myself doing it, but I think that process takes about 3 minutes.) I am of the old school mindset that pancake mix was a ridiculous thing; is it really so hard to mix 3 ingredients, or so much easier to "just add water"? Especially if one is concerned about providing a wholesome breakfast for the family, as the Batter Blaster ad says.

It's really worth the time to watch the demo video from the website. It shows a miserable child pouting while waiting (apparently for aeons) while her mother mixes up pancakes. This raises a few points in my mind. First, it doesn't take long to mix pancake batter. More importantly, while is the child sitting miserably while her mother does it? Why isn't she helping, and learning how real food works and how to make it? Children take great pleasure in mixing up goopy things and can learn a lot from doing it. This child, who will be an adult one day, may never know what pancakes really are: flour and eggs and milk. What will she do when oil and commodity prices go so high that it's no longer economical to process the hell out of everything and we have to go back to [gasp!] actually cooking? I suppose we can only hope that she is wealthy enough to hire an immigrant cook, displaced from her own country by the impacts of climate change on food production.

Cultural trends in cooking skills aside, what really got my attention about Batter Blaster is the fact that it is USDA certified organic. That's right. Organic. You know, that movement started by a bunch of hippies interested in getting in touch with the land, stepping outside the corporate system, living sustainably, and eating wholesome food. What has happened to a regulatory system that will certify spraycan pancakes as organic?

I will admit, the ingredient list isn't as bad as I expected, nor as frightening as some other foods found in spray cans. Still, aside from the flour and cane sugar (I'm amazed it's not corn syrup!), all of the ingredients are chemicals derived from commodity crops. They are not in fact actual foods and never were. The crop varieties used to produce these constituents ('ingredient' seems too generous a term here) are not actually edible in their raw form, yet their descriptions on the label make them seem fairly innocuous. It's what goes on between the farm and the spray can than nobody knows anything about, and that's the part that really scares me.

Batter Blaster Ingredients:
Filtered water; Organic wheat flour (unbleached); Organic cane sugar; Organic whole egg solids; Organic soybean powder; Sodium lactate (lactic acid from beet sugar); DiCalcium phosphate and Sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) (leavening agents); Organic rice bran extract propellant

Part of me wonders if this is all real, or just a fabulous joke. I sincerely hope it's a hoax, but I'm not that confident. I think it is a frightening commentary on our culture that we put so little value on the time it takes to prepare a meal. I refuse to accept that spending 5 minutes — or 3 hours — cooking food is a waste of my time. It's creative and nurturing to feed people, and by putting a little time and effort into it we can hopefully find our meals fulfilling, rather than simply filling.

Diet water?

I'll be the first to admit that I insulate myself somewhat from mainstream media. I watch TV only while falling asleep in hotel rooms in strange cities. I only listen to CBC radio. My occasional magazine reading is limited to things like Harper's, Shambhala Sun, The Walrus, and The NewYorker. Somewhere along the way, the world went even crazier than I had suspected.

Today I was at my cushy Yaletown dentist and absentmindely picked up some glossy pop culture mag in the waiting room. As I was flipping through, an ad for some kind of diet product got my attention. When I looked closer, I realized the ad was for water. It only had 25 calories, in comparison to the competitor's water which had 125 calories. Now, I know I didn't finish my dietetic internship, but last I checked water didn't have calories. It's water. WA-TER. But, this ad wasn't for any old water; it was for Propel Fitness Water. Apparently, PepsiCo has found a way to make water—one of the most ubiquitous substances on earth and the one that constitutes almost 2/3 of the human body—even better. These guys are good.

The word is out. Get out there and get your Propel, because you'll have to exercise a whole lot more to burn off the calories in that old brand of water.

.....SSSSSHHHHHH. Nobody tell PerpsiCo, but there's stuff that's been around for millennia, ironically also called water, that has absolutey ZERO calories, and in much of the world it's even FREE (for now).

Michael Pollan is plagiarizing my mind

I found myself saying that the other day while talking about Michael Pollan's new book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. Nothing personal Michael, but there are some ideas in there that relate closely to what I have been planning to write either in my thesis (which, sadly, is still just in my mind) or to a lesser extent in a different sort of manifesto that I plan to write. The elusive thesis, of course, is really about the cultural and spiritual place of food and its relationship to health and sustainability. It's about caring and thinking about what you eat — eating mindfully, you might say — so that all the rest (nutrition, rural livelihoods, community vibrancy, social relations, culture, etc.) just falls into place without use having to be so conscious of it. If we are mindful of our food, what it is, how it got to us, who grew it, how they grew it, who's handled it in between and what they did with it, we'll probably eat things that are good for us, good for the farmers, and good for the ecological life of the planet. My not insignificant job is to try to figure out how to go about making this the norm. I realize this is a somewhat radical departure from my dietetics and epidemiology training, but what can you do?

When I talk about what I do, people inevitably ask me what they should be eating. Over time, I've heard myself repeating many of the same things. I started to compile an unofficial manifesto in my mind of how I think people should eat. A colleague and friend from the Schumacher Centre for Development in India suggested I write it down in an article for one of the Delhi newspapers because he thought it was useful stuff for people to hear, and most people had no idea about. My roommate is encouraging me to create a website information about food, health, culture, and sustainability. These ideas, and a few others that are still being filtered through the maze of my mind, were close to being written down when I read Pollan's fabulous new book.

So for what it's worth, here is my own set of guidelines for how and what to put in your body:

• Eat things that taste and feel good, and enjoy them.
• Eat foods, not brands.
• Eat food, not nutrients.
  
• Eat foods with as little packaging as possible, preferably none. Avoid eating things that come in a box.
  
• If it has more than 5 ingredients on the label, don't eat it.
• If you can't identify or pronounce an ingredient, don't eat it.
  
• If an ingredient name includes a number or an acronym, it's not a food, it's a substance.
  
• Don't be afraid of fat or carbs. They are not evil. They are your friends.
  
• If it seems strange that it doesn't need refrigeration, be wary. (I have seen various forms of bacon, French fries, cheese, and cream in the aisles of grocery stores.)
• Don't eat anything without a shelf life. Real food rots.
  
• Avoid too many white foods. Eat foods with colour, but not dye.
• If it makes a health claim, be suspicious.
  
• It's made to be microwaved, don't eat it.
• If it's fortified, think about why that is necessary, and find something that actually contains those nutrients.
• "Improved" on a label really means "less bad."
  
• If it seems impossible to make at home (culinary skills notwithstanding), it's not real food.
• Run screaming from high fructose corn syrup (aka fructose, corn syrup, dextrose, maltose, golden syrup, .... the list goes on).
  
• If the ingredients for a recipe have ingredients themselves, it's not cooking but home assembly (kind of like "building" IKEA furniture).
• Avoid the middle aisles of the supermarket, or better yet, avoid the supermarket altogether.
  
• Visit a farm. Hug a farmer.
• Join a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) group, buying club, or go to a farmers' market.
• Eat as many different things as you possibly can.
• If it seems too cheap, it probably is.
  
• Eat mindfully.
• Eat with people you love.

Side note: I should clarify here that I am not actually accusing MP of plagiarism. I love his writings. That title is just something that came out of my mouth and I liked the way it sounded. I'm actually quite glad that these ideas are not as freakish as they might have seemed a few years ago, largely thanks to folks like MP. And just to clarify, all the stuff above is from my own mind and not a book.

With An American in Paris

I had the great fortune to spend my most recent birthday in Paris. It was my first trip to Paris, to France, and to continental Europe, which was exciting. It was my first real vacation in a few years. It was a much needed break in the midst of lots of work. And I was going to visit Nathan, which was even better than all that.So, Paris. It's hard to sum it all up. Mostly, we ate, walked, and then ate some more. In between all the eating and walking we did a little shopping, looked at some art, and saw some really old and really nice buildings. And all those stereotypes about French people walking around with baguettes in their purses: true. Thankfully, the stereotype about everyone smoking may still be true, but it's kept in check by a recent ban on smoking in bars and restaurants in Paris. The stereotype about all the meat and dairy eating is also true, so I was glad that I've successfully re-introduced dairy products into my diet and that I've been making selective forays into the consumption of flesh.

Side note for those of you who don't know yet: I broke my 20 years of vegetarianism with some homemade bacon on a farm last summer. Sure, I've been eating the occasional fish for the last few years, but mammals and birds was a whole new world. I couldn't really say no to farmers who offered me any kind of food produced on their land, so I ate the meat when it was offered. I kinda liked it, so from there I've gradually starting eating little bits of meat when I feel comfortable with what I know about where it came from.


Anyway...... some highlights of Paris, from my nerdy foodie perspective:

• Bread is serious business. There are laws in France about allowable ingredients for certain types of bread. To be called a baguette there can only be a few specific ingredients. And the same goes for many different kinds of loaf. Even fava bean meal is considered an adulterant. This is refreshing after reading the ingredients on an average loaf of whole wheat health bread in a Canadian supermarket, or after being in India where the adulterants of concern are actual toxins rather than a deviation from the traditional recipe.
• The shops and supermarkets are full of yoghurts, crème fraishe, and beautiful cheeses. The average supermarket chain carries more and better cheese than most specialty cheese shops in Canada. I bought goat cheeses I had never seen, and sheep's yoghurt in tiny glass pots. Even Picard, the new chain of frozen food shops, sells beautifully constructed frozen meals. Perhaps these are the beginning of a slippery slope to TV dinners, but for now they are real meals that happen to be frozen. If you are not going to cook, which is difficult in the tiny little Paris apartment kitchens, these aren't so bad.
  
• Meals in restaurants are slow, long, important events. You stay as long as you like, and everyone seems to eat dessert. (I've developed a whole new appreciation for dessert after all the crème brulée, and the amazing cake Jess brought for my birthday dinner.) Being a waiter or any kind of service industry workers is considered a career and people are given respect. People seem happy to be doing this work and are respected for doing it.
  
• Breakfast, it seems, is bread (if you must) and coffee. The place we went for breakfast on my birthday listed the menu as bread, butter, orange juice, coffee. So that's what we had.
• The best ice cream in the world is on l'Ile de la Cité. Maison Berthillon. Yummy. €3,50 for two tiny delicious scoops. The vanilla would be worth selling your first born for. I also tried the fig, and the cherry, both fabulous.
• Coffee (café) is treated with the respect it deserves. There is no drip coffee, no syrupy lattes, although I did see a few sad little Starbucks popping up here and there. Normally, there is only espresso, or espresso with milk. I didn't have any that blew my mind, because I didn't find the specialty places, but every random brasserie and bistro had good coffee.
  

All in all, a pretty amazing visit. Nathan. My dear friend Jess. And more wine, coffee, cheese, bread, sugar, and fat than I thought possible to fit into my little body.

The complexities of taste

So the latest news from the New York Times is that MSG ain't really so bad for you after all. The Guardian came up with the same idea two years ago. They put forth a good argument. MSG is a synthetic form of the the amino acid glutamate. It was first commercialized by the Ajinomoto* Corporation in Japan in 1909.

According to these articles, glutamate is naturally found in many foods, most notably Parmesan cheese and tomatoes, which are often used to season dishes. Traditionally, glutamate was added to foods in Japan by boiling kombu seaweed to produce a broth. Apart from the naturally occuring glutamates, the synthetic monosodium glutamate is added to all kinds of things, under all sorts of names, including monopotassium glutamate, glutavene, glutacyl, glutamic acid, autolyzed yeast extract, calcium caseinate, sodium caseinate, E621 (E620-625 are all glutamates)**, Ajinomoto, Ac'cent, and Gourmet Powder.

Apparently, the MSG myth has been debunked; there is no evidence to support that people are sensitive or have health effects to it. The authors of these articles suggest that MSG is in a lot more than Chinese foods and people are eating it all the time. I disagree, as I have been aware of many of its names and avoid eating it in anything. Not so hard, since I avoid eating those foods - soup mix, Worchestershire sauce, Doritos - for so many reasons.

My argument is this: there is a difference between the naturally occuring and synthetic forms of any chemical. MSG is not identical to what you get when you boil seaweed. So it makes sense that people will react differently to the two substances. For example, I like corn (the vegetable). Corn the vegetable tastes good and feels good. I also like fruit, which naturally contains a sugar called fructose. Corn syrup and processed corn in all it's ubiquitous glory does not agree with me so well. I can tell immediately if I've accidentally eaten something with corn syrup, especially high fructose corn syrup. Once you start messing with things in the lab, they are different, and our bodies react differently to them. (I could go on at length about the biochemistry behind behind synthetic corn syrup metabolism, but I'll spare you unless you really want to know.) Moreover, MSG is manufactured from starch, which in today's world pretty much always come from processing corn. In the end, I'm not convinced yet that synthetic MSG, or fructose, are just like what is found in real food, and I'm still not gonna eat it.

There's just one problem. The Guardian article singles out the "yeast extract" in Marmite as MSG. I thought it came from the sludge left behind after brewing beer, and according to the Wikipedia entry for Marmite this is true. If it really is MSG, it would be the only form of synthetic MSG I've willingly consumed, and I haven't noticed any serious aftereffects. I don't eat it often, but it's a food I hold in high regard - a vegan source of vitamin B12!!. (Yes, I am on the pro side of the Marmite debate. I don't believe it is a weapon sent to destroy society, as some people I know do.) So what to do? I'm going to have to get me a new jar and test it out, or else do a little research on the Marmite company. I hope they don't let me down!


*This explains why, after months of trying figure out how to ask for food without MSG in the many mediocre Chinese and Thai restaurants in India, I finally discovered it was referred to as Ajinomoto. This didn't sound very Hindi to me, but now I know why.
**Another mystery of India explained. These E### additives were in so many packaged foods in India that I refused to buy. It was described as an "approved food additive," which is true but sneaky. In a place with so many problems of food adulteration with unapproved additives, I guess this is important to know.