MD Napoli Doc from Alžbeta Hrušovská on Vimeo.
venerdì 17 maggio 2013
lunedì 13 maggio 2013
Cookbook: download and share it!
The outcome of the project Mediterranean Diet is the cookbook in which we collected recipes coming from the 4 countries involved in the project.
This is the introduction:
This cookbook is the outcome of the project “Mediterranean Diet” promoted by Yap Italia, De Amicitia, Elix, Gençtur and the municipality of San Giorgio a Cremano (NAPOLI). The project was financed by the Programme Youth in Action of the European Commission. The “Mediterranean Diet” is a youth exchange
project (action 1.1) involving 20 people from 4 different countries: Italy, Greece, Spain and Turkey. The exchange took place in San Giorgio a Cremano (NA) from May 03th to May 12th 2013. The main idea of the exchange was intercultural learning through food and eating habits, reflecting upon the connection between the way you eat and the way you feel. Participants had the opportunity to identify the differences and the similarities among traditional food cultures of four Mediterranean countries.
The activities involved sharing one’s own food cultures with the others, getting to know the
similarities and the differences of every country’s culture: through workshops and non-formal
education activities, the participants discovered more about the other countries, in order to eliminate the barriers and the prejudices among them. The participants were also involved in inter-generational activities by meeting the elderly people of San Giorgio a Cremano and sharing traditional food cultures of their own grandparents. The food was the basic instrument for this exchange of experiences.
Another aim of the project was to rediscover the wholesome traditions, focusing on the use of local products from an ecological point of view too. The choice of these products has a close relation with the carbon’s emissions: in fact, the energetic resources consumed are lower than the one used for the products that come from far places. We maintain that the use of local products, indeed, might be convenient due to the reduced consumption of energetic resources that it generates.
The cookbook that you are reading includes recipes written by all the participants involved in the project. Moreover, special emphasis is given on recipes, made with leftovers food. The last part of the cookbook is dedicated to the food glossary that contains information about the ingredients that were used in recipes.
Finally, the cookbook has been already uploaded on a web platform where the participants will able to
share contents after the exchange, thus ensuring a follow-up of the experience. In the first part we had some interviews with the participants of the project by asking questions related to their eating habits and ideas of
Mediterranean diet. They were asked to express their preferences about local and imported products, the
time they spend for cooking and the differences between the way you cook nowadays and the way
your grandparents used to.
In the second part we asked questions to the local people about their interest in using local products,
their affords to teach their children the traditional ways of cooking and eating habits to avoid the consumption of junk food.
Moreover, senior people from AGAPE (association that works with disabled) were asked if they are
aware of the waste of food and have any recipes which are prepared with leftovers.
On the last day of the project the outcomes were presented during the final event that took place ın Villa Bruno, San Giorgio a Cremano, on 11th May 2013.
Download, cook and enjoy your meal and Mediterranean food and culture!
P.S. Special thanks to Fatma for the wonderful job done in editing this cookbook
Download cookbook
This is the introduction:
This cookbook is the outcome of the project “Mediterranean Diet” promoted by Yap Italia, De Amicitia, Elix, Gençtur and the municipality of San Giorgio a Cremano (NAPOLI). The project was financed by the Programme Youth in Action of the European Commission. The “Mediterranean Diet” is a youth exchange
project (action 1.1) involving 20 people from 4 different countries: Italy, Greece, Spain and Turkey. The exchange took place in San Giorgio a Cremano (NA) from May 03th to May 12th 2013. The main idea of the exchange was intercultural learning through food and eating habits, reflecting upon the connection between the way you eat and the way you feel. Participants had the opportunity to identify the differences and the similarities among traditional food cultures of four Mediterranean countries.
The activities involved sharing one’s own food cultures with the others, getting to know the
similarities and the differences of every country’s culture: through workshops and non-formal
education activities, the participants discovered more about the other countries, in order to eliminate the barriers and the prejudices among them. The participants were also involved in inter-generational activities by meeting the elderly people of San Giorgio a Cremano and sharing traditional food cultures of their own grandparents. The food was the basic instrument for this exchange of experiences.
Another aim of the project was to rediscover the wholesome traditions, focusing on the use of local products from an ecological point of view too. The choice of these products has a close relation with the carbon’s emissions: in fact, the energetic resources consumed are lower than the one used for the products that come from far places. We maintain that the use of local products, indeed, might be convenient due to the reduced consumption of energetic resources that it generates.
The cookbook that you are reading includes recipes written by all the participants involved in the project. Moreover, special emphasis is given on recipes, made with leftovers food. The last part of the cookbook is dedicated to the food glossary that contains information about the ingredients that were used in recipes.
Finally, the cookbook has been already uploaded on a web platform where the participants will able to
share contents after the exchange, thus ensuring a follow-up of the experience. In the first part we had some interviews with the participants of the project by asking questions related to their eating habits and ideas of
Mediterranean diet. They were asked to express their preferences about local and imported products, the
time they spend for cooking and the differences between the way you cook nowadays and the way
your grandparents used to.
In the second part we asked questions to the local people about their interest in using local products,
their affords to teach their children the traditional ways of cooking and eating habits to avoid the consumption of junk food.
Moreover, senior people from AGAPE (association that works with disabled) were asked if they are
aware of the waste of food and have any recipes which are prepared with leftovers.
On the last day of the project the outcomes were presented during the final event that took place ın Villa Bruno, San Giorgio a Cremano, on 11th May 2013.
Download, cook and enjoy your meal and Mediterranean food and culture!
P.S. Special thanks to Fatma for the wonderful job done in editing this cookbook
giovedì 25 aprile 2013
London's cooking waste to fuel power station
An interesting news from the UK about a sustainable way to reuse waste oil to produce electricity. Thames Water and 2OC in deal worth £200m over 20 years to turn 'fatbergs' clogging capital's sewers into energy for sewage works and homes
Cooking waste from thousands of London restaurants and food companies is to help run what is claimed to be the world's biggest fat-fuelled power station.
The energy generated from the grease, oil and fat that clogs the capital's sewers will also be channelled to help run a major sewage works and a desalination plant, as well as supplying the National Grid, under plans announced by Thames Water and utility company 2OC.
The prospect of easing the financial and logistical problems of pouring £1m a month into clearing the drains of 40,000 fat-caused blockages a year is being hailed by the companies as a "win-win" project. Thirty tonnes a day of waste will be collected from leftover cooking oil supplies at eateries and manufacturers, fat traps in kitchens and pinchpoints in the sewers – enough to provide more than half the fuel the power plant will need to run. The rest of its fuel will come from waste vegetable oil and tallow (animal fats).
The deal, worth more than £200m over 20 years, has made possible the building of the £70m plant at Beckton, east London, which is financed by a consortium led by iCON Infrastructure. It is due to be operational in early 2015. No virgin oils from field or plantation crops will be used to power it, says 2OC.
The plant will produce 130 Gigawatt hours (GWh) a year of renewable electricity – enough to run just under 40,000 average-sized homes, say the planners.
Thames Water has agreed to buy 75GWh of this output to run Beckton sewage works, which serves 3.5 million people, and the nearby desalination plant, which is used in times of drought or other emergencies. Piers Clark, commercial director for Thames Water, said: "This project is a win-win: renewable power, hedged from the price fluctuations of the non-renewable mainstream power markets, and helping tackle the ongoing operational problem of 'fatbergs' in sewers."
Andrew Mercer, chief executive of 2OC, said: "This is good for us, the environment, Thames Water and its customers.
"Our renewable power and heat from waste oils and fats is fully sustainable. When Thames doesn't need our output, it will be made available to the grid meaning that power will be sourced, generated and used in London by Londoners."
mercoledì 17 aprile 2013
Slow food - Pleasure of a good, clean and fair food
Consecutively, the presentation of the association that you can read on their web site.
Slow Food is a global, grassroots organization with supporters in 150 countries around the world who are linking the pleasure of good food with a commitment to their community and the environment.
A non-profit member-supported association, Slow Food was founded in 1989 to counter the rise of fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.
Today, we have over 100,000 members joined in 1,500 convivia – our local chapters – worldwide, as well as a network of 2,000 food communities who practice small-scale and sustainable production of quality foods.
A non-profit member-supported association, Slow Food was founded in 1989 to counter the rise of fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.
Today, we have over 100,000 members joined in 1,500 convivia – our local chapters – worldwide, as well as a network of 2,000 food communities who practice small-scale and sustainable production of quality foods.
Meeting with Auser and Agape
Shown below there are some pictures of the meeting during the preliminary visit in March with Auser, the association of pensioners of San Giorgio a Cremano, and the association Agape, that will be involved during the youth exchange that will take place in May 2013. They will cook with the participants during one day of intergenerational activities: a funny and interesting way to bring generations together, to spread the traditional culinary culture and to support the associations that promote on the ground the active ageing (The project "Mediterranean Diet" was written during the European Year of active ageing)
lunedì 15 aprile 2013
Too many Israelis eschew Mediterranean diet, reaching for fast-food instead
"Not only is the Israeli diet not Mediterranean, it's the opposite," says Dr. Maya Rosman, a nutrition and diet specialist. "Here, Italian pasta is drenched in cream, sushi is fried, and consumption of sweet pastries is very high. Supermarkets are packed full of sweets. As globalization increases, the Mediterranean diet is disappearing."
Sigal Beltzer, a certified clinical nutritionist, says the problem lies in the temptations of a culture of abundance. And Israelis simply enjoy eating animal products.
"Israelis tend to consume saturated fat, which mainly comes from animal products," she says. "On the other hand, children eat lots of processed food – schnitzel, fries and snacks that contain trans fats."
Dov Chernichovsky is a health economics professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the chairman of the National Council for Nutritional Security at the Social Affairs Ministry. He says the tendency of Western countries – including Israel – to consume processed foods full of saturated fats and sugar has its implications. "If we ate more healthily, life expectancy here would be 90, not 82," he says.
Chernichovsky estimates that one-third of Israel's NIS 60 billion in annual health spending goes to treat risk factors stemming from an unhealthy diet. Diabetes and heart disease are all too frequent.
"Medicine has gained control over most infectious diseases, and the diseases that are killing us now are the ones that stem from a poor diet or genetics," he says. "A high incidence of disease produces a clear economic burden – sick people are less productive and more reliant on the health care system and social services."
Chernichovsky brings up a shocking paradox: Poorer people suffer more from illness and obesity, even though a Mediterranean diet is generally cheaper than a processed one. The reason is a lack of awareness, the plentiful processed food on supermarket shelves, and advertising.
"We have to increase awareness of a proper diet in the education system and encourage campaigns that promote proper nutrition," he says. "People are reaching for the wrong products out of ignorance."
Chernichovsky says the state should consider economic incentives to get people eating healthily; for example, canceling value added tax on fruit, vegetables and other healthy products such as olive oil and legumes.
A key factor that makes a Mediterranean diet healthy is its antioxidants, which are abundant in fruit and vegetables.
"Studies have shown that there are fewer cases of cancer, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's in Mediterranean countries," says Beltzer. "In these countries, there is also a tendency to eat small meals and to eat slowly, which also has health benefits."
mercoledì 27 marzo 2013
Youth Exchange "Mediterranean Diet"
The “Mediterranean Diet” project is a youth
exchange founded by the programme Youth in Action (action 1.1) of the European Commission involving 20 people coming from 4 countries: Italy, Greece,
Spain and Turkey. The
exchange will take place in San
Giorgio a Cremano (NAPOLI) from May 04th to May 11th (8
days). The main topic of the exchange will be intercultural learning through
food and eating habits, reflecting upon the connection between the way you eat
and the way you feel. Participants will identify the differences and the
similarities among traditional food cultures of four Mediterranean countries (Spain, Italy,
Greece and Turkey).
The activities will involve sharing one’s own
food cultures with the others, getting to know the similarities and the
differences of every country’s culture: through workshops and non-formal
education activities the participants will discover more about the other
countries, in order to eliminate the barriers and the prejudices among them.
The participants will also be involved in inter-generational activities,
meeting the elderly people of San
Giorgio a Cremano and sharing traditional food
cultures of their own grandparents. The food will be the instrument for this
exchange of experiences.
We also aim at involving the participants in
the discovery of our local products, taking them on tours in the vicinity. Our
idea is to rediscover the wholesome traditions, focusing on the use of local
products also from an ecological point
of view. The choice of these products has a close relation with the carbon's
emissions: in fact, the energetic resources consumed are lower than the one
used for the products that come from faraway places. We maintain that the use
of local products, indeed, might be convenient due to the reduced consumption
of energetic resources that it generates. The project is organized by Youth Action for Peace and the Youth center of San Giogio a Cremano.
Food's latest hot trend: leftovers
Our
modern obsession with beautiful food – and reliance on ready meals when
short of time – has led to huge waste. Is it time to put leftovers back
on the table?
'Cookbooks in the
1970s and 1980s always had chapters on using up leftovers' … chef and
restaurateur Tom Norrington-Davies. Photograph: Phil Fisk/CAMERA PRESS
It's half past three and lunch is drawing to a close. The long
dining room of 32 Great Queen Street in London's Covent Garden is
three-quarters empty, with just a few diners left drinking coffee or
finishing off bottles of wine. One large, noisy party at the end,
nearest the open-plan kitchen remains, as the restaurant staff sit down
at last to feed themselves.
The meal is freshly cooked, but often put together from leftovers. Staff meals are made from cuts of meat or bits of veg that haven't found a spot on this week's menu. Chef Tom Norrington-Davies makes a point of using things up: when his London restaurant opened five years ago, with its deliberately unfancy decor, sparse furnishings and reasonable prices, critics heralded the dawn of a new age of thrift.
This year, with a triple-dip recession looming and the UK's triple-A credit rating under threat, the restaurant could not be more on-message. In a speech to the Women's Institute in York last week, environment secretary Owen Paterson talked about the challenges of feeding a growing world population, and called on the WI to "help us as a nation cut down on food waste". He complained that we are in the grip of a "cult of beauty and perfection" around food, and said that celebrity chefs as well as supermarkets should do something about it.
"Cookbooks in the 1970s and 1980s always had chapters on using up leftovers. But this stopped in the 1990s," he said. But is it true that Britain's top cooks have given up on scraps?
Norrington-Davies believes there was a moment in the mid-1990s when food went bling. "You had a big shift in attitudes towards cooking," he says. "Of the cookbooks I own from when I was younger, very few are illustrated. The first really super-posh illustrated cookbook I can remember was The River Cafe Cookbook. They were real coffee-table books, everything in them looked fantastic. And around the same time, supermarket merchandise became a lot more sexed-up; suddenly you had nonsense like vine-ripened tomatoes. I mean, what other tomatoes are there?"
When Norrington-Davies published his own, much more down-to-earth recipe book, Cupboard Love, 10 years later, he took aim at the kinds of cookbooks that "pander to our fantasies and aspirations". But fantasies were perhaps what people wanted, and the book didn't sell well. "It was maybe a few years too early," he says. "It could have been quite a good recession book."
Since then, two of the biggest names in cookery have bolted campaigning arms on to their booming business empires. Jamie Oliver, whose latest book, 15-Minute Meals, looks set to beat JK Rowling to the top spot this Christmas, spearheaded a campaign to raise nutritional standards in schools. Guardian food writer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall led a movement to ban fish discards. And Nigella Lawson has won praise, as well as sniggers, as a role model for women with appetites – a voluptuous alternative to the size-zero clothes-horse thought to be linked to eating disorders.
Further down the celebrity food chain, many chefs and writers have become much more involved in thinking about the issues surrounding food production. "Words like 'sustainable' get bandied around now, and I get shy of using them," says Norrington-Davies. "But I am trying to cook in a way that is more nose-to-tail, or holistically. The way to do it is to be completely upfront. I don't ram it down people's throats that if one part of an animal is on this menu, the other part we get as a result is elsewhere. But that's how it is."
Starting about 10 years ago, when he worked in a pub, he began to buy direct from a fisherman in Essex, waiting to hear what the catch was before he wrote the menu. Today he follows the same rule, deciding what he will cook according to what his suppliers can offer. "When I first started doing it, it was really scary. The biggest leap of faith was the first time I bought half a cow. I thought I was going to cry, I was so afraid. I just thought, 'I'm never going to use all this, I'll wreck it.'"
Leftovers, he points out, are not just what is left on the table. The woman he buys goat's cheese from has no use for her male goat kids. So he cooks them. The cheese straws he served this week were offcuts from a quince tart. Yucky bits such as rabbit offal or "funny looking ends of mackerel" he takes home to his cat.
"Many of my peers in this kind of place, at the mid-range, casual end of the market, are children of the 70s, which was quite an austere time," he says. "We ate a lot of leftovers when I was a lad, and I still have a horror of waste. Readymade food was just not an option, it was very expensive, and I still find it incredible that in a supermarket nowadays people are drawn to buying readymade meals because it looks cheaper than doing it yourself. It's a complete reversal."
Is it a different story at the top end of the market, where prices are high and perfection the aim? Having watched Michel Roux and his sous chef Monica Galetti put the contestants through their paces on MasterChef this week, it's easy to imagine racks of lamb tumbling down the rubbish chute at Roux's Michelin-starred restaurant Le Gavroche because they are a fraction over-done.
But Galetti says waste is as unheard-of at Le Gavroche in Mayfair as it is on the Masterchef set, where dishes, once tested, are often eaten by the production team. So what happens if meat is overcooked? "If it happens in the restaurant, then we have a box on the side where this meat goes, and it all gets eaten. If we can't use something in another dish, we recycle it into a canapé or an amuse-bouche."
Galetti thinks people understand perfectly well the difference between glossy food photography and competitions to create restaurant-standard food on television, and the kinds of meals they might eat at home. So she rejects the idea that over-glossy media cookery might have increased the likelihood of less-than-perfect food being thrown away. Instead, she thinks supermarket sell-by dates have a lot to answer for. "I know people who will look at the label on some ham, and if it's a day over they'll throw the whole packet out instead of opening it up and tasting and smelling it."
In other words, people need to be more confident and knowledgable about food. Campaigning food author Joanna Blythman believes this is where TV chefs can help, and have done ."I think any chef that gets people cooking from scratch, from raw ingredients, is to be applauded," she says. "I don't think they're saying to people, chuck in the bin what you can't use. I think a bigger problem is that we've been encouraged to give up cooking on a routine basis. My mum and her mum had a rolling programme of food in the house. You made certain things that left leftovers, and on to them you grafted other things, so food tended to get used up in a fairly systematic way.
"You would have probably a chicken carcass on a Sunday, so you would have what was left of the roast for sandwiches or something on a Monday that would use the rest of the meat. Then that carcass would make stock that would become soup, say for Tuesday. My mum would never throw out mashed potatoes – they would be made into potato scones or Irish potato cakes. That whole rhythm is disrupted by processed food. It's a kind of deskilling. One of the skills of the cook is opening the fridge and thinking, what could I do with that? It's the kind of thing that used to be taught in home economics."
Blythman preferred the more old-fashioned, practical programmes (Delia Smith, Madhur Jaffrey) to the ultra-slick, lifestyle-focused ones of today, and echoes Norrington-Davies' reservations about fantasy eating. But she believes our wasteful food culture is more about the structure of working lives than it is about people trying to cook like Heston Blumenthal or Jamie Oliver.
"You're always being steered towards a processed-food choice," she says. "If you're the person who is still in the office at 6.30pm, and you start thinking, 'What shall I eat tonight?', you'll most likely find yourself in the supermarket an hour later picking up some over-packaged food."
Food author Niki Segnit, whose first book, The Flavour Thesaurus, was garlanded with awards when it came out in 2010, says she used to be just such a person before she gave up her career in advertising. "The context for me is having gone through a period of time when I used to do that thing of buying a load of meals in Marks and Spencer, and then I would throw them all away on a Saturday and go shopping again. It seems so sinful in retrospect, but food prices have gone up so phenomenally since then."
Segnit's mother was of the generation who grew up during and after the war, and today Segnit is a different character, remade in her mother's image and fanatical about not throwing food away. "It can be obsessional. It becomes like a game of Tetris – you have these blocks and you're trying to fill in the gaps all the time. Sometimes I have to check myself, because I know it's silly to get het up about a cup of rice worth 15p.
"It can be better to just throw out the old stuff and start again. Not everything warms through particularly nicely, and my poor husband has had to put up with some pretty horrible meals. But I get a lot of pleasure from not throwing things away. It's quite an interesting starting point a lot of the time. OK, I've got this and I've got that, so what do I do?"
Segnit thinks Owen Paterson's complaint about modern cookbooks is wide of the mark. "Delia's Christmas book has a fantastic leftovers chapter that is well-thumbed in most households I've been in. Maybe leftovers were a bit old-fashioned and not the height of cool in the 1990s, but Nigel Slater almost has a fetish for using up scrapings and remnants. He writes about that sort of thing as a matter of course."
There has been significant progress on household food waste over the past 10 years, with the biggest recent study – for which researchers went through 2,000 dustbins – showing a 13% reduction. Campaigners want supermarkets to do more, and point to the competition commission's recent finding that they have tended to push problems further up the supply chain, lumbering producers with unwanted goods.
But consumers can undoubtedly do their bit, by addressing their own habits, and in the signals they send to food producers through the choices they make. The Women's Institute is planning a national campaign around food security and responsibility, with a second launch in Cardiff next month.
With millions of people in Britain now unable to afford the food they have been used to eating – figures this week showed a sharp decline in consumption of key nutrients among the poorest people – and global food prices set to rise as climate and other pressures increase, tackling food waste in the kitchen is at least a place to start.
If the government is serious about seeking a celebrity champion to front the war on waste, Monica Galetti could be just who they are looking for. She is known on MasterChef for her brisk, no-nonsense style, and admires Jamie Oliver for his work on school dinners, but would she consider taking up a cause herself?
"It would have to be the right thing for me, I'd have to believe in it 110%."
So what about waste?
"I'm not happy with any waste at all."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/dec/15/foods-latest-hot-trend-leftovers
The meal is freshly cooked, but often put together from leftovers. Staff meals are made from cuts of meat or bits of veg that haven't found a spot on this week's menu. Chef Tom Norrington-Davies makes a point of using things up: when his London restaurant opened five years ago, with its deliberately unfancy decor, sparse furnishings and reasonable prices, critics heralded the dawn of a new age of thrift.
This year, with a triple-dip recession looming and the UK's triple-A credit rating under threat, the restaurant could not be more on-message. In a speech to the Women's Institute in York last week, environment secretary Owen Paterson talked about the challenges of feeding a growing world population, and called on the WI to "help us as a nation cut down on food waste". He complained that we are in the grip of a "cult of beauty and perfection" around food, and said that celebrity chefs as well as supermarkets should do something about it.
"Cookbooks in the 1970s and 1980s always had chapters on using up leftovers. But this stopped in the 1990s," he said. But is it true that Britain's top cooks have given up on scraps?
Norrington-Davies believes there was a moment in the mid-1990s when food went bling. "You had a big shift in attitudes towards cooking," he says. "Of the cookbooks I own from when I was younger, very few are illustrated. The first really super-posh illustrated cookbook I can remember was The River Cafe Cookbook. They were real coffee-table books, everything in them looked fantastic. And around the same time, supermarket merchandise became a lot more sexed-up; suddenly you had nonsense like vine-ripened tomatoes. I mean, what other tomatoes are there?"
When Norrington-Davies published his own, much more down-to-earth recipe book, Cupboard Love, 10 years later, he took aim at the kinds of cookbooks that "pander to our fantasies and aspirations". But fantasies were perhaps what people wanted, and the book didn't sell well. "It was maybe a few years too early," he says. "It could have been quite a good recession book."
Since then, two of the biggest names in cookery have bolted campaigning arms on to their booming business empires. Jamie Oliver, whose latest book, 15-Minute Meals, looks set to beat JK Rowling to the top spot this Christmas, spearheaded a campaign to raise nutritional standards in schools. Guardian food writer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall led a movement to ban fish discards. And Nigella Lawson has won praise, as well as sniggers, as a role model for women with appetites – a voluptuous alternative to the size-zero clothes-horse thought to be linked to eating disorders.
Further down the celebrity food chain, many chefs and writers have become much more involved in thinking about the issues surrounding food production. "Words like 'sustainable' get bandied around now, and I get shy of using them," says Norrington-Davies. "But I am trying to cook in a way that is more nose-to-tail, or holistically. The way to do it is to be completely upfront. I don't ram it down people's throats that if one part of an animal is on this menu, the other part we get as a result is elsewhere. But that's how it is."
Starting about 10 years ago, when he worked in a pub, he began to buy direct from a fisherman in Essex, waiting to hear what the catch was before he wrote the menu. Today he follows the same rule, deciding what he will cook according to what his suppliers can offer. "When I first started doing it, it was really scary. The biggest leap of faith was the first time I bought half a cow. I thought I was going to cry, I was so afraid. I just thought, 'I'm never going to use all this, I'll wreck it.'"
Leftovers, he points out, are not just what is left on the table. The woman he buys goat's cheese from has no use for her male goat kids. So he cooks them. The cheese straws he served this week were offcuts from a quince tart. Yucky bits such as rabbit offal or "funny looking ends of mackerel" he takes home to his cat.
"Many of my peers in this kind of place, at the mid-range, casual end of the market, are children of the 70s, which was quite an austere time," he says. "We ate a lot of leftovers when I was a lad, and I still have a horror of waste. Readymade food was just not an option, it was very expensive, and I still find it incredible that in a supermarket nowadays people are drawn to buying readymade meals because it looks cheaper than doing it yourself. It's a complete reversal."
Is it a different story at the top end of the market, where prices are high and perfection the aim? Having watched Michel Roux and his sous chef Monica Galetti put the contestants through their paces on MasterChef this week, it's easy to imagine racks of lamb tumbling down the rubbish chute at Roux's Michelin-starred restaurant Le Gavroche because they are a fraction over-done.
But Galetti says waste is as unheard-of at Le Gavroche in Mayfair as it is on the Masterchef set, where dishes, once tested, are often eaten by the production team. So what happens if meat is overcooked? "If it happens in the restaurant, then we have a box on the side where this meat goes, and it all gets eaten. If we can't use something in another dish, we recycle it into a canapé or an amuse-bouche."
Galetti thinks people understand perfectly well the difference between glossy food photography and competitions to create restaurant-standard food on television, and the kinds of meals they might eat at home. So she rejects the idea that over-glossy media cookery might have increased the likelihood of less-than-perfect food being thrown away. Instead, she thinks supermarket sell-by dates have a lot to answer for. "I know people who will look at the label on some ham, and if it's a day over they'll throw the whole packet out instead of opening it up and tasting and smelling it."
In other words, people need to be more confident and knowledgable about food. Campaigning food author Joanna Blythman believes this is where TV chefs can help, and have done ."I think any chef that gets people cooking from scratch, from raw ingredients, is to be applauded," she says. "I don't think they're saying to people, chuck in the bin what you can't use. I think a bigger problem is that we've been encouraged to give up cooking on a routine basis. My mum and her mum had a rolling programme of food in the house. You made certain things that left leftovers, and on to them you grafted other things, so food tended to get used up in a fairly systematic way.
"You would have probably a chicken carcass on a Sunday, so you would have what was left of the roast for sandwiches or something on a Monday that would use the rest of the meat. Then that carcass would make stock that would become soup, say for Tuesday. My mum would never throw out mashed potatoes – they would be made into potato scones or Irish potato cakes. That whole rhythm is disrupted by processed food. It's a kind of deskilling. One of the skills of the cook is opening the fridge and thinking, what could I do with that? It's the kind of thing that used to be taught in home economics."
Blythman preferred the more old-fashioned, practical programmes (Delia Smith, Madhur Jaffrey) to the ultra-slick, lifestyle-focused ones of today, and echoes Norrington-Davies' reservations about fantasy eating. But she believes our wasteful food culture is more about the structure of working lives than it is about people trying to cook like Heston Blumenthal or Jamie Oliver.
"You're always being steered towards a processed-food choice," she says. "If you're the person who is still in the office at 6.30pm, and you start thinking, 'What shall I eat tonight?', you'll most likely find yourself in the supermarket an hour later picking up some over-packaged food."
Food author Niki Segnit, whose first book, The Flavour Thesaurus, was garlanded with awards when it came out in 2010, says she used to be just such a person before she gave up her career in advertising. "The context for me is having gone through a period of time when I used to do that thing of buying a load of meals in Marks and Spencer, and then I would throw them all away on a Saturday and go shopping again. It seems so sinful in retrospect, but food prices have gone up so phenomenally since then."
Segnit's mother was of the generation who grew up during and after the war, and today Segnit is a different character, remade in her mother's image and fanatical about not throwing food away. "It can be obsessional. It becomes like a game of Tetris – you have these blocks and you're trying to fill in the gaps all the time. Sometimes I have to check myself, because I know it's silly to get het up about a cup of rice worth 15p.
"It can be better to just throw out the old stuff and start again. Not everything warms through particularly nicely, and my poor husband has had to put up with some pretty horrible meals. But I get a lot of pleasure from not throwing things away. It's quite an interesting starting point a lot of the time. OK, I've got this and I've got that, so what do I do?"
Segnit thinks Owen Paterson's complaint about modern cookbooks is wide of the mark. "Delia's Christmas book has a fantastic leftovers chapter that is well-thumbed in most households I've been in. Maybe leftovers were a bit old-fashioned and not the height of cool in the 1990s, but Nigel Slater almost has a fetish for using up scrapings and remnants. He writes about that sort of thing as a matter of course."
There has been significant progress on household food waste over the past 10 years, with the biggest recent study – for which researchers went through 2,000 dustbins – showing a 13% reduction. Campaigners want supermarkets to do more, and point to the competition commission's recent finding that they have tended to push problems further up the supply chain, lumbering producers with unwanted goods.
But consumers can undoubtedly do their bit, by addressing their own habits, and in the signals they send to food producers through the choices they make. The Women's Institute is planning a national campaign around food security and responsibility, with a second launch in Cardiff next month.
With millions of people in Britain now unable to afford the food they have been used to eating – figures this week showed a sharp decline in consumption of key nutrients among the poorest people – and global food prices set to rise as climate and other pressures increase, tackling food waste in the kitchen is at least a place to start.
If the government is serious about seeking a celebrity champion to front the war on waste, Monica Galetti could be just who they are looking for. She is known on MasterChef for her brisk, no-nonsense style, and admires Jamie Oliver for his work on school dinners, but would she consider taking up a cause herself?
"It would have to be the right thing for me, I'd have to believe in it 110%."
So what about waste?
"I'm not happy with any waste at all."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/dec/15/foods-latest-hot-trend-leftovers
lunedì 18 marzo 2013
The global issue of food waste
Worldwide about one-third of all food produced –
equivalent to 1.3 billion tonnes – gets lost or wasted in the food
production and consumption systems, according to data released by FAO.
Wasting food means wasting money both at the household level and in
businesses throughout the supply chain – about $200 billion annually in
industrialised regions.
UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner told us “In a world of seven billion people, set to grow to nine billion by 2050, wasting food makes no sense – economically, environmentally and ethically. Aside from the cost implications, all the land,
water, fertilizers and labour needed to grow that food is wasted – not
to mention the generation of greenhouse gas emissions produced by food
decomposing on landfill and the transport of food that is ultimately
thrown away. To bring about the vision of a truly sustainable
world, we need a transformation in the way we produce and consume our
natural resources.” Simple actions by producers,
manufacturers, retailers, the hospitality industry and consumers - all
of us really - can dramatically cut the food lost or wasted each year.
After all here in the UK the average UK family could save £680 per year, and the UK hospitality sector could save £724 million per year by tackling food waste and the value of waste in the manufacture and retail of food and drink in the UK is £5bn.
WRAP is working with industry to tackle this issue here in the UK and helping consumers through Love Food Hate Waste to take small steps which will make a big difference.
The new Think.Eat.Save. Reduce Your Footprint campaign
to reduce food waste around the world, so we can all work together to
make a difference, was launched on the 22nd January in Geneva
by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Food and Agricultural
Organization (FAO); in partnership with WRAP and many other supporters.
The campaign specifically targets food wasted by consumers, retailers
and food manufacturers and the hospitality industry. Their premise is
that we all need to THINK about and be mindful of our food consumption patterns, we all need to EAT, and we all need to SAVE
food, especially in developed countries and among the middle classes of
the developing ones. If we can ‘Reduce our Foodprint’, we can reduce
humanity’s impact on our planet.
For more information on the global campaign visit www.thinkeatsave.org and www.fao.org/save-food, to find out more about what WRAP's doing with industry go to www.wrap.org.uk/food or for ways to tackle your own food waste take a look around Love Food Hate Waste today.
After all here in the UK the average UK family could save £680 per year, and the UK hospitality sector could save £724 million per year by tackling food waste and the value of waste in the manufacture and retail of food and drink in the UK is £5bn.
WRAP is working with industry to tackle this issue here in the UK and helping consumers through Love Food Hate Waste to take small steps which will make a big difference.
The new Think.Eat.Save. Reduce Your Footprint campaign
to reduce food waste around the world, so we can all work together to
make a difference, was launched on the 22nd January in Geneva
by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Food and Agricultural
Organization (FAO); in partnership with WRAP and many other supporters.
The campaign specifically targets food wasted by consumers, retailers
and food manufacturers and the hospitality industry. Their premise is
that we all need to THINK about and be mindful of our food consumption patterns, we all need to EAT, and we all need to SAVE
food, especially in developed countries and among the middle classes of
the developing ones. If we can ‘Reduce our Foodprint’, we can reduce
humanity’s impact on our planet.For more information on the global campaign visit www.thinkeatsave.org and www.fao.org/save-food, to find out more about what WRAP's doing with industry go to www.wrap.org.uk/food or for ways to tackle your own food waste take a look around Love Food Hate Waste today.
Together across the world, each of us taking small steps, we can really make a difference
lunedì 11 marzo 2013
Protecting your heart with the Mediterranean diet
The Mediterranean diet
has long been celebrated as one of the healthiest diets in the world,
but it’s not only a diet, it’s a lifestyle change that can actually add
years to your life.
Research continues to prove that a diet rich in plant foods and healthy fats protects against the development of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, hyperlipidemia, metabolic syndrome, types of cancers and Alzheimer’s disease. And overall, eating a Mediterranean diet leads to a longer life span.
A 2011 meta-analysis published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology analyzed the results of 50 studies covering about 535,000 people to examine the effects of a Mediterranean diet on metabolic syndrome and found those who ate it had lower blood pressure, blood sugar and triglycerides.
The Mediterranean diet is inspired by traditional dietary patterns of residents along the Mediterranean coast. Places such as southern Italy, Greece and Spain have greatly influenced the dietary components.
The core aspects of the diet include nuts, whole grains, olive oil, fruits, vegetables, unrefined cereals, high consumption of legumes, moderate to high consumption of fish, moderate consumption of cheese and yogurt and occasional consumption of wine. Limiting red meat to a few times a month is also recommended.
Fruits and vegetables are rich in antioxidants which protect us from free radicals – chemicals that play a role in the development of cancer. Flavenoids in red wine also have powerful antioxidant properties and contribute to good health. Nuts are high in monounsaturated fats, most notably oleic acid, which has been associated with a reduction in coronary heart disease risk. For optimum benefit, honey-roasted or heavily salted nuts should be avoided.
Olive oil is a staple of the Mediterranean diet, and has been shown to play a role in lowering LDL (bad cholesterol). There is also evidence that antioxidants in olive oil have anti-inflammatory and anti-hypertensive effects. Whole grains, another important part of the diet, contain little unhealthy trans fats, and are often eaten with olive oil.
Exercising and enjoying food with family and friends is also emphasized when adopting the Mediterranean diet.
Dr. David B. Samadi is the Vice Chairman of the Department of Urology and Chief of Robotics and Minimally Invasive Surgery at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. He is a board-certified urologist, specializing in the diagnosis and treatment of urological disease, with a focus on robotic prostate cancer treatments.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/03/08/protecting-your-heart-with-mediterranean-diet/#ixzz2NEl9ec2x
Research continues to prove that a diet rich in plant foods and healthy fats protects against the development of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, hyperlipidemia, metabolic syndrome, types of cancers and Alzheimer’s disease. And overall, eating a Mediterranean diet leads to a longer life span.
A 2011 meta-analysis published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology analyzed the results of 50 studies covering about 535,000 people to examine the effects of a Mediterranean diet on metabolic syndrome and found those who ate it had lower blood pressure, blood sugar and triglycerides.
The Mediterranean diet is inspired by traditional dietary patterns of residents along the Mediterranean coast. Places such as southern Italy, Greece and Spain have greatly influenced the dietary components.
The core aspects of the diet include nuts, whole grains, olive oil, fruits, vegetables, unrefined cereals, high consumption of legumes, moderate to high consumption of fish, moderate consumption of cheese and yogurt and occasional consumption of wine. Limiting red meat to a few times a month is also recommended.
Fruits and vegetables are rich in antioxidants which protect us from free radicals – chemicals that play a role in the development of cancer. Flavenoids in red wine also have powerful antioxidant properties and contribute to good health. Nuts are high in monounsaturated fats, most notably oleic acid, which has been associated with a reduction in coronary heart disease risk. For optimum benefit, honey-roasted or heavily salted nuts should be avoided.
Olive oil is a staple of the Mediterranean diet, and has been shown to play a role in lowering LDL (bad cholesterol). There is also evidence that antioxidants in olive oil have anti-inflammatory and anti-hypertensive effects. Whole grains, another important part of the diet, contain little unhealthy trans fats, and are often eaten with olive oil.
Exercising and enjoying food with family and friends is also emphasized when adopting the Mediterranean diet.
Dr. David B. Samadi is the Vice Chairman of the Department of Urology and Chief of Robotics and Minimally Invasive Surgery at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. He is a board-certified urologist, specializing in the diagnosis and treatment of urological disease, with a focus on robotic prostate cancer treatments.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/03/08/protecting-your-heart-with-mediterranean-diet/#ixzz2NEl9ec2x
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