Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts

Friday, September 3, 2021

SO MANY QUESTIONS

                              Part II

     Many of the questions in this list could be talked about all night. So writing brief answers doesn't do them justice , but it does make me think about things. 

  • favorite color 

                 Well again I don't have a favorite color. When I was a kid we had 7 or 8 basic colors in our box of crayons we had for school. Now there are hundreds of colors and I don't keep track of them.  

           favorite food/dish/meal?

               I have a good appetite and like food. I'll just be very direct and come out and say my favorite is everything my Mom cooked! Now I hope you don't take offense because I've eaten your food and you're a very good cook. . My Mom , your Grandma was a very good cook. We had meat , potatoes and veggies. She was the best baker in the whole world...cakes, cookies pies, bread, desserts . Oh ya. She always gave us a hunk of bread dough to play with! All this she did on a wood burning cook stove . Not only great food came off that cook stove but it was warm to cuddle up around when we were little kids. I will never forget Mom's Christmas dinners. I will never forget all the baking she did for Christmas. I would like to be able to eat it all again. 

  • if you hadn't been a teacher, what else would you have wanted to do for a living?  what did you dream of being when you were a kid?

      When I was a little kid all I ever thought about was being a farmer. It's the only thing we knew about as we hadn't been exposed to anything else.  I became a teacher by accident. Close to the end of gr 12 I knew that I would "pass". I didn't get along with Dad on the farming business. He encouraged me to try something else. His suggestion was nursing.  Nursing did not interest me in the least. . So the only thing that interested me and was doable was to go to Teachers' College. Looking back. I chose the right thing. I really wanted to do something that was outdoors. Working with wildlife interested me. To this day I'm very interested in birds , animals and plants. 

  • did you always want to move far from home when you were younger (and went north) or was that just a happy accident?  

              This is really two questions. I am and was an introvert. I didn't want to leave home however, staying at home and farming was not an option. The first year I was away I was very, very homesick. However , you get used to being on your own. Going north was an accident. As I little boy I was keenly interested in the north. I read many books about life in the north. The planning of Inuvik started about 1950 and they started to build in the early fifties. There were quite often items in the paper which I read. I followed developments. However, I never had any thoughts of going there. Years later I applied for a teaching position in Canada's Northland and they placed me in Inuvik.  

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

What's Happened to our food?

     I'm reading Michael Moss's Salt Sugar and Fat. This is a Pulizter prize winning book and I and see why it won the prize.

    Last night I read the chapter on convenience foods. Moss covers the history of convenience foods and how the big companies used it to sell more food. After the war more women began working out of the home. They needed some help in preparing meals. The food companies were all too ready to oblige. Television was established and for the family to watch an evening of television, food preparation had to be more convenient.

   This got me thinking about food when I was a kid. I was raised on a small farm. I was born just before the war started. At that time most of our food was produced on the farm. Very few things were bought from a store. Mom bought, flour, tea, coffee, sugar, salt, pepper, yeast, baking powder, rolled oats and probably a few more items at odd times. All of our food was prepared on the farm. Mom canned hundreds of quarts of food...beans,corn,carrots, peas, fruit, chicken, beef and probably many more. One more that's special would be sauerkraut. Several large crocks of sauerkraut were made and lasted all winter. Mom baked bread, pies, cakes and cookies. We made our own butter and I can remember crying about having to turn the churn. Then I would fight with my brother as we both wanted to be turning the churn when the butter formed. Mom and Dad grew a large garden which more than supplied them with enough food. Potatoes, turnips, beets and onions wee stored in cold storage. 

    So in one way you can see why women looked for convenience foods. This was a tremendous amount of work for my Mom. We also had much better food than the convenient foods that are full of sugar, fat ,salt and a multitude of strange chemicals.

   I know that when I look back nostalgia sets in. Was the food really that good. I think we would be much better off with food that had a lot less fat, sugar , salt and weird chemicals..

Saturday, March 9, 2013

The Food Baddies: Salt, Sugar and Fat

      On Thursday morning I listened to and interview on CBC with Michael Moss who has just written a book called "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. What  fascinating interview!

     Michael told how large food companies go to great lengths to put the right balance of salt,sugar and fat in their products so that we will literally become addicted to the product and there fore buy more of the item over and over again. 

    Salt enhances flavor so that we find the food pleasing to the taste and therefore eat more. Salt also causes high blood pressure, but do the large companies care? Nor one bit. 

    Sugar is used in an amazing number of products. Relish has sugar in it. He covers cereals which are pitched to kids and how the sugar content has steadily increased and why. Kids are growing. A sugar kick doesn't last long so the brain tells the kid you're growing, you have to eat some more. It's unbelievable how much sugar is loaded into cereals.   Sugar leads to diabetes and diabetes is a nasty that causes all kinds of other health problems.

     Fat also makes food more pleasant. Fat can lead to high cholesterol which can lead to heart attacks and strokes.

    So people eat the three baddies and they first of all become obese and that leads to a very unhappy life style and huge health costs.

    What to do? Moss has all kinds of practical suggestions. However , the whole thing is a challenge. Just the other day a motion was made in the Canadian Parliament to require salt labeling to be more precise. Prime Minister Steven Harper voted against this motion as he thought it would cause companies difficulty. What rubbish!

    I am not innocent when it comes to salt, sugar and fat. I have been lucky. At school I developed a coke habit. Usually one a day but on a bad day maybe three. I also had a small bag of cheezies each day! When I retired I heard that sodas had 7 teaspoons of sugar in them. I stopped drinking pop immediately. I did eat a lot of chips. I loved chips. Now I rarely eat them. I don't have salt on the table and rarely put salt in things that I cook. 

    My wife was diagnosed with high cholesterol quite a while ago. We made an effort to change our diet and reduce fat. I benefited from that one.

    I still have some vices to face. I eat quite a bit of canned soup. It's loaded with salt. I can remember enjoying tomato soup and putting lots of salt and pepper on it. Yikes!

    I certainly enjoyed Moss's comments. They made me think again and I will try and cut down on these some more.

   It was interesting to see that Moss was interviewed by a number of programs. Papers covered him too. I guess that's what happens when you come out with a hot new book.