Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

Different Cuisines Require Different Skills

Gordon Ramsay, from what I can tell on television & via video clips, is a good chef.  He knows what he’s doing in the kitchen. But, of course, his training and experience is in western cooking techniques. While cooking is cooking in theory – there are really only so many things you can do to food – how to make one cuisine well is different from any other kind of cuisine. Each type of cuisine requires its own skills and knowledge.

Sushi is considered simple. That’s why there are so many sushi fast-food joints everywhere. Doing it right and doing it well takes skill, though. Doing it quickly takes even more skill.

Gordon finds this out first-hand:

Chinese dim sum is one of those things in the world that doesn’t get much respect. In part it’s because chinese food doesn’t get much respect. Chinese restaurants compete with one another on low price, and they treat their chefs like s***. As the saying goes, if you don’t respect yourself, how can you expect anyone else to respect you?

But, having said that, making good dim sum takes skill. It really does. Once again, Gordon found out first-hand:

Food comes in nearly-infinite variety, and cuisines around the world can very so much from one another – not just in the eating experience, but also in the skills and techniques required to make it good!

Steak & Eggs According to Gordon Ramsay

I like food. I like food enough that just a few days ago, I found myself dreaming about food on my subway ride back home after work. Yes, I dream about food.

Cooking something nice at home is one of life’s little pleasures, I think.

Here are two quick little videos, one on scrambled eggs, one on pan-frying a steak. Gordon Ramsay teaches in a very direct, simple manner, and I think you’ll enjoy these little quickie-videos!

Bon appetit!

PS. I have yet to try making scrambled eggs the way he suggests, but I might just have to try it tomorrow morning!  After all, Sunday mornings are great for treating oneself to a nice breakfast

Diet-Related Disease – a Preventable, Global Killer

Americans are fat. It’s a fact known around the world. You notice it right away when you travel from America to elsewhere in the world, or travel from elsewhere in the world to America. The rest of the world, as it increasingly adopts American culture, increasingly incorporates American eating habits & preferences, and buys ever more American food products, is also becoming fat.

There is a movement around, telling people that they ought to be proud of their body shapes and body styles, whatever it may be.  That is not, in itself, entirely wrong.  Neither is it entirely right, inasmuch as it condones and facilitates the justification of continued obesity.

Obesity isn’t just a matter of style and appearance. It’s also a matter of health and quality of life. Ancient Greek writers and others around the world have always emphasized the link between the body and the mind – that a healthy mind requires a healthy body. Healthy people have more energy, they can enjoy life in more ways, and they are more productive. Healthy people have healthy diets.

Unfortunately, modern-day culture is not geared towards healthy diets. We are literally killing ourselves with the crap that we eat. We are literally killing children with the crap that we feed them, and the fact that we don’t teach them about food and how to cook healthy, economical food.

Diet-related disease – that includes heart disease and diabetes amongst others – cost our health systems an enormous amount of money. They also cost us in terms of loss of life, loss of quality of life, and loss of human potential. Kids today are unhealthy, and unbelievably, against all the progress we have made in interventionist medicine, today’s kids have shorter life expectancies than the generations before them.

The reason is because the modern, North American diet is unhealthy and unsustainable. As North American culture in all its facets continues to spread around the world, everyone else has already begun to adopt the same unhealthy, unsustainable eating patterns.

Jamie Oliver – you might know him from his cookbooks or his cooking shows – delivered a wonderful presentation about this at the TED 2010 conference. You’ll be shocked when he shows you how little kids know about fresh fruits & vegetables, and how much sugar they’re being given from milk in schools.

His key message is that this is avoidable, preventable, and can be addressed & remedied very easily: through education.

Will People Heed Warnings When the Next Pandemic Comes?

We had it easy with the H1N1 flu pandemic that hit us in 2009 to early-2010. It wasn’t the killer virus that experts had been telling everyone to plan for and to expect. It wasn’t a replay of 1918. The real danger now is that the boy cried wolf, and people may not heed the warning again next time.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, many of those who had elected to stay in the city – against the advice of friends & family, and in the face of all the warnings that officials had given – were seniors who seriously thought that everyone was overreacting. After all, in their decades of experience, they had seen bad storms and they had come through hurricanes before. In their experience, the boy was crying wolf but it was nothing more than a pup. So, when Hurricane Katrina hit with full force and with all its fury, they found themselves trapped – and many didn’t make it out.

That is a pattern that happens very often. Those who have had experience with minor events are more likely to disregard official warnings when a serious event is coming. In their own personal experience, each time in the past something happened, it hadn’t been all that bad. So why should this time be any different?

That, I fear, is what will happen the next time pandemic warnings are issued. Until people start dying, the public will not listen – they will shrug off the warnings even more than they did for the H1N1 pandemic of 2009. By then, it may be too late to take action. After all, it takes 2 weeks for a person to fully develop immunity to a new pathogen after being inoculated with a vaccine. In that time, the person who has received the vaccine is still vulnerable.

Many people shrugged off the H1N1 vaccine. It’s just the flu, they said. They had never gotten a flu shot before, they had gotten sick with the flu a few times over the years or maybe never at all, and they’re still healthy as can be.

We were all lucky this time around, particularly those who did not get vaccinated. Will we be so lucky again next time?

Ontario’s public communication message during the pandemic was “It’s a Different Flu Season.” I have my doubts regarding its effectiveness. True, we got about a 38% vaccination rate, which is higher than almost anywhere else in the world, but that is still far below the 60%-70% that our epidemiologists said would have been necessary to “stop” the pandemic in its tracks here in Ontario. People just didn’t trust the vaccine, and they didn’t believe that the “the flu” would be a killer.

How much more difficult will it be next time?

How effective will the “It’s a Different Flu Pandemic” message be next time?

The most lasting damage inflicted by the H1N1 flu pandemic of 2009 may not be the few people who died from it this time around. It may be the far greater number of people who die the next time because many of us who lived through this one will not heed the warnings next time.

International Summits Aren’t Necessarily Good Business Propositions

I keep hearing from politicians and newspaper columnists that the upcoming G8 summit in Huntsville, Ontario and the G20 summit in Toronto will be good for local economies. “We’ll be making money from the events!” is the simplified message there. There will be an influx of money, they say. Sure, I’ll agree that the huge influx of visitors will mean dollars flowing to local restaurants, hotels, and other purveyors of necessities. However, I also know that these events explicitly cost a millions of dollars in direct security costs, and who knows how much more in hidden costs in terms of public servants’ time & effort spent on planning & preparations.

What is the net balance at the end of it all?  Does the boon to the local economy outweigh the money spent on hosting the event?  I have my doubts.

Based on what I see and hear within the Provincial government and in our dealings with municipal partners & front-line service providers, I know that a lot of money is being spent on preparations.

“Security for the April confab boasted a price tag of almost $12-million, the highest security expenditure in British history.” – Globe & Mail, February 19, 2010

The Federal government has publicly stated it will pay for all security-related expenses.  That’s a few million right there. $10 million, let’s say? However, the Federal government is quite unwilling – or, since they haven’t given a definitive No for the past year, at the very least it is highly hesitant – to acknowledge the costs planning, preparation, and mitigation costs from other non-security sectors.

For example, did you know that there are at least 100 people in the likely G20 security zone who require community health assistance of various kinds?  Plans and mitigation measures to ensure their health & well-being, over and above the health support service they get when things are normal, cost money.  Ensuring the hospitals in cottage country can handle a possible surge in demand due to the influx of visitors or from possible civil disturbance issues costs money. You already know that the health system costs us a lot of money when things are business-as-usual, so it should be no surprise that it costs us a lot of money to respond to extraordinary events like international summit that attract thousands of media personnel & protestors.

All the “event planning” work that civil servants at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels also costs money.  Government likes to think it doesn’t cost anything because these are salaried people who are on payroll anyways.  However, if you think about it from a basic accounting perspective, time and effort spent on a given endeavour is a direct expense for undertaking that endeavour, because you could be redirecting that time or effort to something else instead.

It’s almost as though the money that local economies are getting from visitors coming to town for these summits is money that the various levels of government are spending to host the events.  It is, in a roundabout way, like government grants to local businesses.  People from abroad are giving money to restaurants and hotels, but we’re spending oodles of public money to run the events.

It’s a valid question to ask if the money we’re spending to prepare for the events, and then to host them, is less than, equal to, or more than the money that local businesses will get.

“But the G20 also has a legacy of violent protests and multimillion-dollar cost overruns, bestowing little benefit other than bragging rights.” – Globe & Mail, February 19, 2010

For events that take so much preparation and precautions, it is foolish to argue that they’re good for the economy until we understand whether the events are actually good business propositions.  We’re really just paying ourselves, and maybe even paying out more than what we get in local pockets.

There are other reasons to want to host the summits, but to forward the argument that one of the benefits is the boon to the economy is rather dubious, I’d say.