August
19
2010

Logistics Makes for Successful Emergency Response Team Deployment

My aca­d­e­mic instruc­tion and my own con­tin­ued read­ings rein­force the premise that logis­tics will make or break an emer­gency response effort. My expe­ri­ence and what I hear from other deployed teams strength­ens my belief in the absolute impor­tance of logis­ti­cal con­sid­er­a­tions. The debrief ses­sion from one of our emer­gency response teams’ deployed to Huntsville for the G8 Sum­mit drilled home the point repeatedly.

The team’s deploy­ment went smoothly. In fact, they were test­ing out their recently mod­u­lar­ized equip­ment and the setup and tear­down went so smoothly that both were com­pleted ahead of sched­ule. The 3-day around-the-clock deploy­ment went with­out a hitch. Although the team was not placed under heavy stress on this deploy­ment, since noth­ing much hap­pened up in Huntsville dur­ing the G8 Sum­mit, it was nonethe­less a good test of the team’s logis­ti­cal capa­bil­i­ties to deploy and oper­ate smoothly.

Lessons from the deploy­ment include the following:

  • Ensur­ing a con­tin­u­ous and unin­ter­rupted fuel sup­ply for the power gen­er­a­tors takes more atten­tion and effort than you might think
  • Ensur­ing suf­fi­cient gen­er­a­tor capac­ity is cru­cial — you have to cal­cu­late it out before your deploy­ment and build in a suf­fi­cient safety mar­gin in case your gen­er­a­tor is out­putting below spec or you end up using more equip­ment simul­ta­ne­ously than planned
  • Hand hygiene is an often-overlooked but crit­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tion — gas­troin­testi­nal issues can eas­ily crop up around tem­po­rary camps unless you make sure every­one keeps their hands clean, and putting up hand san­i­tizer pump sta­tions all over the place is a great thing to do
  • Potable water is always crit­i­cal, and all the more so dur­ing a hot sum­mer deployment
  • Equip­ment needs to be suf­fi­ciently “weath­er­ized” — the team expe­ri­enced 50-60kph wind gusts dur­ing the deploy­ment and were glad their new tents were anchored well and ade­quately weath­er­ized, which in the past was not always the case
  • Feed your peo­ple good qual­ity food — it’s impor­tant for morale, and it’s nec­es­sary in order to keep your peo­ple run­ning at peak per­for­mance for an extended period of time
  • Ensure suf­fi­cient light­ing — when you have equip­ment and power cables going every­where through your camp, shad­ows cast by your tents and equip­ment are health & safety hazards
  • Ensure proper secu­rity fenc­ing & guards around the camp to enforce perime­ter security

These were lessons from the deploy­ment of an emer­gency response med­ical team, not from a mil­i­tary unit. Even so, you’ll notice that at the most basic lev­els of what it takes to keep a team oper­a­tional in the field, the two dis­ci­plines are not that far apart.

The biggest lessons were actu­ally the hand safety, gen­er­a­tor capac­ity and lighting.

At other camps set up by police or secu­rity orga­ni­za­tions, there were some gas­troin­testi­nal issues that may have been due to hand hygiene. At a high-profile event many years ago, site secu­rity was at risk due to food poi­son­ing due to poor food safety. Peo­ple have to eat, and you know from your own expe­ri­ences as a tourist that if you eat some­thing that isn’t clean or that has been sit­ting out for too long that you aren’t going to be in any con­di­tion to do a seri­ous job for at least a half day. Your peo­ple can be taken out of com­mis­sion by some­thing as sim­ple as hand hygiene or food safety. This spe­cific team’s deploy­ment, how­ever, went totally smoothly and part of that was due to the atten­tion paid to hand hygiene.

Gen­er­a­tor capac­ity is an area where more is bet­ter than not enough. The team learned that its one gen­er­a­tor was suf­fi­cient for this deploy­ment but did not give them a suf­fi­cient safety mar­gin in terms of power avail­abil­ity. They will be procur­ing a sec­ond gen­er­a­tor and bring­ing it along to future deploy­ments. Note, how­ever, that this increases load on your logis­tics team to keep a con­tin­u­ous, unin­ter­rupted sup­ply of fuel com­ing in.

Finally, light­ing was a rev­e­la­tion to the team. It had brought along its stan­dard light­ing setup which in the past had always been “suf­fi­cient.” How­ever, for this deploy­ment they bor­rowed addi­tional light­ing equip­ment from one of the Province’s HUSAR (Heavy Urban Search & Res­cue) teams and, appar­ently, it was like night and day. Hav­ing more, and bet­ter, light­ing kept the camp safer and would have enabled the team to oper­ate at the same tempo & inten­sity in the mid­dle of the night as dur­ing the mid­dle of the day.

Think about any of the times you have had emer­gency deploy­ments or had to acti­vate emer­gency response plans. I’m will­ing to bet that logis­tics will have played a role in many cases, either clearly enabling a suc­cess­ful out­come or clearly caus­ing many need­less trou­bles or challenges.

When you are putting together emer­gency response plans or busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity plans, give seri­ous thought to your logis­tics. Think through the prac­ti­cal ele­ments of what it takes to get the job done and what it takes to keep your peo­ple safe and at their best.

Logis­tics can, very lit­er­ally, make or break you.

categories Emergency Management | comments Comments (0)
August
18
2010

Little Big Soldier: A Jackie Chan Movie that Actually Made Me Feel Something

Jackie Chan’s movies — at least any­thing I’ve seen since Police Story 1 — are usu­ally enter­tain­ing but ulti­mately for­get­table fluff. I saw Lit­tle Big Sol­dier this week, and while it isn’t a cin­e­matic mas­ter­piece by any stretch, I think that it’s very well done as cin­e­matic art. It is enter­tain­ing, and almost uniquely among Jackie Chan movies, actu­ally got my emo­tions moving.

This is ulti­mately an enemies-become-friends movie, which has been done a num­ber of times, of course. This one, how­ever, is set in the China’s War­ring States Period (475BC — 221BC) and the dif­fer­ences between the two main char­ac­ters are not ulti­mately polit­i­cal or mil­i­tary. Yes, Jackie Chan’s char­ac­ter is an older, com­mon foot­sol­dier from the State of Liang, and Lee-Hom Wang’s chat­ac­ter is a young gen­eral from the State of Wei. The prin­ci­pal dif­fer­ence between them is one of life goal’s and out­look. Jackie Chan’s char­ac­ter is a farmer at heart — he longs to live in peace and tend his own farm. Lee-Hom’s char­ac­ter is an ambi­tious aris­to­crat with defeat­ing the other nations and sub­sum­ing China under his per­sonal rule. One is a com­moner, through and through, who longs sim­ply to live in peace. The other is a mil­i­tary man, who sees mil­i­tary con­quest as the road to peace.

The story is not com­pli­cated, and of course has its own holes and short­com­ings. The char­ac­ters are not par­tic­u­larly deep, par­tic­u­larly all those other than the two prin­ci­pal char­ac­ters. The fight scenes are nice, but noth­ing like the acro­batic & chore­o­graphic won­ders that Jackie Chan used to do when he was young. What, then, redeems this film?

I found it enter­tain­ing and engag­ing because I liked the main char­ac­ters and the dynamic between them. They are both good, hon­or­able men who — through the film’s var­i­ous tri­als and chal­lenges, forge a strong bond together. They never become bud­dies, but they highly respect one another.

And… the end­ing. I found the end­ing of the film very touch­ing, though it is not in any way a happy end­ing. One man’s world and dreams are shat­tered, and the other man is changed to the core forever.

I did not expect the end­ing, and I felt that it was very well done. One of the themes through­out the movie is about the very human cost of war, and see­ing the demise of one of the main char­ac­ters to whom I had grown attached per­son­al­ized it.

Indeed, I found myself think­ing this morn­ing how very lit­tle our his­tory books cap­ture this very basic and imme­di­ate fact of his­tory and war­fare. “The Romans con­quered France.” “Qin con­quered and uni­fied China.” These are state­ments of fact that entirely omit the human expe­ri­ence of those times. Films, how­ever, are a medium that can be art­fully used to truly move an audi­ence to under­stand the human side of his­tory. Any­one who has seen Schindler’s List, The Pianist, or Life is Beau­ti­ful has expe­ri­enced this. Lit­tle Big Sol­dier can­not objec­tively be held to the same level as Schindler’s List, but to me the film brought home its mes­sage just as strongly — although hav­ing done so with humor through­out most of the movie.

I greatly enjoyed this movie, and I cer­tainly would like to see more movies from Jackie Chan done with this level of heart and thought.

categories Other Fun Stuff | comments Comments (0)
August
16
2010

Knife Advice to a Friend Working at a Sushi Bar

A friend is cur­rently work­ing at a local sushi joint and has plans to open his own sushi restau­rant or sushi bar in the near future. He asked me for some infor­ma­tion and advice about knives and the fol­low­ing is what I wrote to him ear­lier today. The infor­ma­tion is not com­pre­hen­sive, but if you are in the mar­ket for tra­di­tional Japan­ese knives, this might serve as a good intro­duc­tion or primer for you…

I am pre­sum­ing that you will want tra­di­tional Japan­ese knives for use at the sushi bar, and will limit the fol­low­ing infor­ma­tion to just tra­di­tional single-bevel knives and will not talk about double-bevel knives. I am speak­ing as an ama­teur who knows some­thing about the equip­ment, but I do not pre­sume to know what the demands are like on the line. What fol­lows is what I know from my own read­ing, and my own use in a home (or office!) environment. Please excuse me if I’m going over infor­ma­tion that you already know — I just want to make sure I cover every­thing that might be helpful.

You’ve got 3 pri­mary knives that you’ll want to have:
  1. usuba for veggies
  2. deba for fish butcher­ing & fileting
  3. yanagi for slicing
You could get a spe­cial­ized knife for muki­mono, the art­ful prepa­ra­tion of fruit & veg­gie gar­nishes, but I think you can prob­a­bly make do with­out one. In all 3 cases, you will need to decide:
  1. What length will serve you best
  2. What steel you want for the cut­ting edge
With regards to length, that comes down to per­sonal pref­er­ence and your work­space lim­i­ta­tions. I think you prob­a­bly know what lengths you like by now from your own use and experience. For steel… well, you will need to choose between stain­less and carbon. Stainless is the lower-maintenance option, but (a) will not hold as sharp an edge as car­bon, and (b) likely takes more effort to sharpen.  Car­bon will take a much finer edge, but will oxi­dize eas­ily. That means you’ll need to make sure you have a towel at the counter with you to wipe down the blade every so often. That will help to avoid rust­ing, but the blade will still turn dif­fer­ent col­ors through use — dif­fer­ent shades of grey, blue and purple. If you opt for stain­less steel, your advan­tages are:
  • it will always be shiny
  • you can let it sit for a while before wip­ing it down in case things get too busy dur­ing ser­vice (but it only takes 3 sec­onds to wipe down the blade on both sides)
  • it may hold a decent edge between sharp­en­ing or hon­ing for a longer time than carbon
For high-quality stain­less, you are look­ing at either gin­sanko or pro­pri­etary they-will-not-tell-you-what-it-is steels (such as from Suisin‘s INOX… INOX = inox­i­diz­able = stainless). However, you will pay more $$ for stain­less steel while get­ting less per­for­mance (per­for­mance in this case = sharper edge & eas­ier to sharpen)
For car­bon steel, you have more choices:
  • unnamed car­bon steel, which is prob­a­bly tool steel
  • unnamed pro­pri­etary car­bon steel
  • unnamed Hitachi car­bon steel, which is most likely Hitachi yellow
  • shi­rogami or shiro-ko (white)
  • aogami or ao-ko (blue)
  • aogami super (AS or blue super)
To think of this sim­ply, you could say that you have bet­ter steel as you go from top to bot­tom. How­ever, that is not entirely cor­rect. They are all trade­offs, and which is best depends on what you want most.
Tool steel is hard, hard stuff. It is designed for car­pen­ters work­ing on wood. It is cheaper, but may not hold as sharp an edge and will be a lot of effort to sharpen. Proprietary car­bon steels are not at all com­mon, and you will only find them with some high-end mak­ers such as Shige­fusa. In the case of Shige­fusa, the steel is appar­ently very very good steel — holds an incred­i­bly sharp edge, and is easy to sharpen, but it is very reac­tive and oxi­dizes very easily.

The other car­bon steels on the list are all from Hitachi and are the most com­mon high-quality car­bon steels you will find on the market. As we dis­cussed in the kitchen, the dif­fer­ences between them are trade-offs. Yellow is a step above tool steel. It has been refined more than tool steel with impu­ri­ties taken out, which means it will hold a bet­ter edge. Yellow steel is cheap by com­par­i­son, and you will gen­er­ally only find this on more economy-grade car­bon knives that still want to be able to say they are using Hitachi steel. White, Blue, and Super Blue are your stan­dards, par­tic­u­larly White and Blue. Super Blue is hard to come by. Not many mak­ers will use AS because it is, apparently, hard to work with. Its main ben­e­fit over shi­rogami (white) and reg­u­lar aogami (blue) is that it is tougher and will hold its edge longer.

As we dis­cussed in the kitchen, many peo­ple will choose aogami (blue) over shi­rogami (white). You will pay more $ for aogami, and what you get in return is an edge that is a lit­tle tougher than shi­rogami and which is a lit­tle less reac­tive than shi­rogami. In my expe­ri­ence, aogami is a fine steel to use.

Shi­rogami (white) will give you the sharpest edge of all the car­bon steels (except *pos­si­bly* some pro­pri­etary steels like Shige­fusa, but I have no expe­ri­ence with that). It is also easy to sharpen to a super-fine edge. My rec­om­men­da­tion is to find some­thing made with shi­rogami. It‘s prob­a­bly your best bet in terms of per­for­mance for your money.

In terms of con­struc­tion, we have 3 main lev­els to choose from. I will not include here any dis­cus­sion about cos­met­ics like dam­as­cus (wavy-line pat­tern) or fancy woods used in the han­dles. Those cost a lot and are purely for looks and per­sonal plea­sure, not for performance.
  • kasumi
  • honka­sumi (hongasumi)
  • honyaki
Kasumi blades are made using the expen­sive, hard steel for the cut­ting edge and core or back of the knife, wrapped in softer steel for support. Honkasumi blades are also mul­ti­lay­ered, but fin­ished to a higher level of qual­ity. Honyaki blades are entirely made from the hard cut­ting edge steel, but dif­fer­en­tially tem­pered to pro­duce harder and softer regions. Hard at the edge, softer at the spine. I think kasumi is good. Honyaki are the really expen­sive $1000–4000 knives but they do not give you bet­ter cut­ting per­for­mance. They will, however, last a lot longer — but of course, you pay for that added longevity. They
are also a bit more work to sharpen.

Among mak­ers that you may want to con­sider are…

Tanaka: good value for knives that per­form, by knife com­mu­nity consensus, as well as knives cost­ing 2x as much. I have a num­ber of Tanaka knives — I own more of them than any other make — and I am very happy with the blades. The han­dles are very no-frills, but the blades are very nicely made. Good sell­ers for Tanaka include Metal­mas­ter, ChefKnivestoGo, and 330mate on eBay.

Yoshi­hiro: from what I know of them, they are the mak­ers behind a num­ber of other well-known brands who rebrand them — in other words, Yoshi­hiro is the OEM man­u­fac­turer for other com­pa­nies who sell them under their own names at higher prices. They are, by all accounts, very nice knives and I would per­son­ally by some myself if I needed more.  Your best bet for Yoshi­hiro is sjiec­i­cap on eBay. I would rec­om­mend going with their kasumi line. Their kasumi line uses shi­rogami and their hon­ga­sumi line uses aogami. I have a usuba from their kasumi line and I think it per­forms very well and holds a great edge.

Those are your best bets for excel­lent per­for­mance at a good price. I think you‘ll be happy with either Tanaka or Yoshihiro.
How­ever, there are many other choices out there.
These are the sell­ers that I rec­om­mend. Paul‘s Finest is Canadian. ChefKnivesToGo and Japan­eseKnifeIm­ports are both from the US, but very good mer­chants. Over $200 and ship­ping is free from CKTG. They both ship by US Postal, which is impor­tant, because you do *not* want FedEx or UPS com­ing across the border.

Stay away from Takeda and Mori­taka. They make excel­lent knives, but their knives are *all* double-bevel. That means their yanagis are not true yanagis but are actu­ally suji­hikis which do not meet your needs for sushi.

Let me know if you want me to touch upon sharp­en­ing stones. I am pre­sum­ing you already have your own, but if not, I would be happy to talk a bit about them as well. They are at least as impor­tant as the knives them­selves, of course!
categories Goodies & Toys | comments Comments (0)
August
13
2010

Food Is More Than Just Fuel

I have at least two friends for whom “food is just fuel.” One tends to look at the world through a sci­en­tific lens, trained in his pro­fes­sion to trust only that which is based on solid, peer-reviewed sci­en­tific study. The other just inex­plic­a­bly doesn’t care, though it may be from liv­ing too long in rented rooms rather than a place all to oneself.

In any case, while I freely admit that I give more thought to food — it’s prepa­ra­tion, its vari­ety, its expe­ri­ence, and its ethics — than many in my social cir­cles, I think the “food is fuel” per­spec­tive is dan­ger­ous, short-sighted, and unnec­es­sar­ily self-depriving.

Here’s food for thought from the intro­duc­tion to Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food:

“His­tor­i­cally, peo­ple have eaten for a great many rea­sons other than bio­log­i­cal neces­sity. Food is also about plea­sure, about com­mu­nity, about fam­ily and spir­i­tu­al­ity, about our rela­tion­ship to the nat­ural world, and about express­ing our iden­tity. As long as humans have been tak­ing meals together, eat­ing has been as much about cul­ture as it has been about biology.”

We are, as a peo­ple in mod­ern soci­ety, becom­ing increas­ingly dis­con­nected from our food. The “food is fuel” is but one man­i­fes­ta­tion of this. Another being the rise of a gen­er­a­tion raised on processed foods. Another is the pre­delic­tion of hordes of peo­ple who fret, worry, and most impor­tantly, pur­chase based on nutri­tional fads and ever-shifting nutri­tional advice.

Thank God we don’t live on meal-in-a-pill because it sure is evi­dent that nei­ther sci­ence nor com­mer­cial indus­try knows enough or cares enough to sus­tain our health, our cul­tures & social foun­da­tions, or our environment.

Food is more than just an agglom­er­a­tion of num­bers: this many calo­ries, that many grams of pro­tein, this many micro­grams of vit­a­mins and minerals.

Food is an intrin­sic part of tak­ing care of your body, your mind, and your world. Food is more than fuel: it is pol­i­tics, eco­nom­ics, val­ues in action, cul­ture, plea­sure, adven­ture, and connection.

Food isn’t just the thing that keeps us alive. Food is an inte­gral part of what it means to be alive — and what it means to be human.

categories News & Commentary, Tastes & Experiences | comments Comments (0)
August
12
2010

What Makes an Excellent “Sushi Chef” (Itamae)?

Sushi is pop­u­lar, but crappy sushi abounds because many of us (a) don’t know what makes good sushi and (b) don’t care as long as it’s cheap. There’s a time and place for fast food, even if it’s of the sushi vari­ety, but when one is look­ing for the real deal and look­ing for excel­lence, one should know what to ask for and look for. Since I’ve just signed myself up for a 6-week sushi class and was talk­ing to some­one yes­ter­day about how “sushi chefs” (ita­mae) are more than just fish slicers, I fig­ure this post is well overdue.

I recently fin­ished the book The Zen of Fish: The Story of Sushi from Samu­rai to Super­mar­ket (also called The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice) by Trevor Cor­son. It’s a won­der­ful read for any­one inter­ested in the his­tory of sushi and what a good sushi chef goes through when being trained prop­erly. In this book, the journalist-author recounts the story of a class of itamae-in-training through a 12-week inten­sive cur­ricu­lum (and appren­tice­ship) and wraps in the his­tory of the var­i­ous ele­ments of sushi. It’s a wonderfully-entertaining and edu­ca­tional read. How­ever, the sushi acad­emy isn’t the tra­di­tional way ita­mae were trained. The tra­di­tional ita­mae in Japan go through a 5– to 6-year appren­tice­ship. It is about an intense focus on the details — it’s about per­fec­tion at every step of the way. There are many sources in books and online about the tra­di­tional appren­tice­ship process that ita­mae go through.

An ita­mae must know not only how to make per­fect sushi rice (a test that most sushi joints in North Amer­ica — cer­tainly around Toronto — fail right away) but also how to make a vari­ety of cooked dishes. When you sit at the sushi bar and, ide­ally, go omakase (“it’s up to you, chef!”) the ita­mae will show­case his skills to you with his best sushi & sashimi but also small cooked dishes. Think of it sort of like tapas. The chef needs to do it all.

But there’s more to it than that. What are the key things to look for when assess­ing the ita­mae at the sushi bar in front of you?

  1. First and fore­most, the sushi must be good. The ingre­di­ents must be excep­tion­ally fresh. If the fish or veg­gies are in any way off in terms of fresh­ness, and if the rice is too mushy or too hard or if any­thing just doesn’t taste right, that is unacceptable.
  2. The ita­mae should take full respon­si­bil­ity for your din­ing expe­ri­ence. If any­thing is off and when you com­plain, they should take all steps to make it right. If they try to pass the buck, you have an ita­mae who isn’t run­ning his sushi bar properly.
  3. The counter and food prepa­ra­tion area must be scrupu­lously clean. A good ita­mae knows that clean­li­ness and orga­ni­za­tion are key not only to food safety but also to cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion and his (or her) own pro­duc­tiv­ity. A messy sushi chef is not a good sushi chef. A good ita­mae will be nearly (or actu­ally) obses­sive about his equip­ment and his area. It should all be spot­less and in 100% condition.
  4. The ita­mae should be inter­act­ing with all his cus­tomers. Any­one sit­ting at the sushi bar should be able to inter­act with the ita­mae and engage them in inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion or ban­ter. A good sushi chef should be able to con­verse with cus­tomers while prepar­ing food the way a good bar­tender will con­verse and joke around with customers.
  5. The ita­mae should be able to han­dle the pres­sure of busy ser­vice (at lunch or din­ner peak times, for exam­ple) while still remain­ing con­fi­dent, poised, clean, orga­nized, effi­cient, and still main­tain con­ver­sa­tion with patrons.

A good ita­mae isn’t just a fish slicer. A good ita­mae is a skilled crafts­man — a mas­ter, if you will — prepar­ing a wide vari­ety of foods, car­ry­ing on a busy work­load of tasks, keep every­thing clean and pris­tine, and cre­ate & main­tain a jovial atmos­phere with cus­tomers all at the same time.

If you go to the neigh­bor­hood strip mall sushi counter, you prob­a­bly don’t have a skilled ita­mae on your hands. But if you go to a restau­rant that pro­motes itself as being seri­ous mate­r­ial (e.g. isn’t all-you-can-eat), you should assess the man or woman behind the counter with a strin­gent set of stan­dards. Do they meet the con­di­tions listed above? If they do not, you do not have a good sushi chef on your hands, and you should con­sider going else­where next time.

categories Tastes & Experiences | comments Comments (0)

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