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!

& Eggs According to Gordon Ramsay">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.