Nutrition

Blog post #2

Allergen Free Chicken Noodle Soup

Allergies are becoming more and more common. With that- chefs are facing more challenges and obstacles when running a kitchen. One problem that has really developed over the years that some people have to face is celiac disease. People with celiac disease are unable to digest gluten without facing some issues which include bloating, lethargy and irregular bowel movements. Gluten is a protein that when these people eat it, it triggers an immune response that attacks the small intestine (specifically the villi) which is where most of the nutrient absorption takes place. A simple way to avoid triggering any of these symptoms is to simply stop eating gluten. If these people continue to ignore their bodies, eating gluten can eventually lead to anemia, osteoporosis, and even cancer.

There aren’t very many people who have celiac disease compared to the amount of people that choose to go gluten free. A main reason why people choose to go gluten free is because gluten isn’t very good for humans. Most people are able to tolerate gluten (celiac people are intolerable), but it’s the same argument when the fact that humans aren’t supposed to drink cow’s milk. A main benefit of going gluten free is that it helps with digestion. Avoiding gluten while still maintaining a healthy diet will ensure that your villi stay strong and absorb as much nutrients as possible. Gluten is also found in a lot of processed foods, so going gluten free can also (potentially) prevent your overall health by not allowing you to eat processed foods.

Working in the culinary industry for over four years now, I would say being gluten free is the most common obstacle about customers. It’s also very common for people to be allergic to dairy, nuts, and shellfish. Luckily, chefs are great problem solvers and thanks to globalization, we are able to come up with a large variety of solutions to fit these people’s needs. For example: a customer comes into the restaurant and is severely allergic to shellfish. All night in the kitchen, we are cutting shrimp and lobster. When the server tells us that this certain person is allergic to shellfish, make sure the customer knows we have a variety of other shellfish free proteins that we can use if the dish they wants has shellfish. If they decide on a dish that doesn’t have shellfish, we make sure to use a heavily cleaned pan to cook their food as well as clean all of our stations, use different equipment, and (if possible) prepare their food in a different part of the kitchen. There are 10 main allergens in Canada and they are: shellfish, peanuts, tree nuts, mustard, eggs, dairy, sesame, soy, wheat, and sesame. I have a personal recipe that is free of all these allergens (while still being a classic) that I would like to share:

When you think that there are 10 main allergies in Canada, it can be a little overwhelming for a chef to try to consider all those people in one dish. But upon making this recipe I discovered that it is much easier than I thought to accommodate all these allergy stricken people and was able to provide a classic dish that’s healthy, delicious, and incredibly easy to make. I owe the Instapot for the speed of this recipe, but even making this recipe without an instapot would be extremely easy. After making this dish I will continue to look for more classic recipes that can potentially accommodate all people that suffer from allergies.

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Blog post #1

In my opinion, nutrition is often disregarded when we eat. When we’re hungry most of the time we just eat something easily accessible and convenient. As a chef, I think it’s important to consider what we put in our bodies because we have the potential to eat only high-nutrient foods and that will not only help our day to day routines by giving us ‘clean energy’, but it can also help our overall health.

As obesity and illness rates climb, I definitely think that nutrition will play a big part in the future of the culinary world. People are finally start to care about what goes in their body and a lot of restaurants are going to have to give the people what they want in order to succeed. I also think because the health scares are relatively new, if a restaurant were to incorporate nutrition into their menus, it would be a niche- which could also make them very popular and the foundation for what restaurants will become.

One of the more popular ways that restaurants are incorporating nutrition is being fully vegan or having vegan options on their menu. I spent a year and a half working in a vegan restaurant and I’ve learned it’s not that hard to have a fully vegan menu and be successful. There’s a lot of stigma around not having meat as a part of our diet, but the truth is, you can eat in a vegan restaurant and potentially not even know it’s vegan until someone tells you. Almost all the menu items that are served are ‘everyday’ foods that we already eat. Veganism has the potential to make us much more healthy, but I also learned that there are A LOT of processed foods in order to simulate meat and dairy products for those who miss them. I think a lot of people need to learn that just because you’re vegan, it doesn’t mean everything you ingest is healthy. If you take a look at the ingredients on processed cheese, you can’t even say half of them. This is the same as ingesting any other overly processed food.

Something nutrition related I would like to learn more about is calories. Calories are a unit to measure energy we get from food. I would love to learn how to measure them and be able to incorporate how many calories are in the dishes of my own restaurant to show people what they’re taking in. I also think it would be a great opportunity to show people that foods can still be delicious without being high in calories.

There are many credible nutrition websites that we have access to, one of the most important ones being https://food-guide.canada.ca/en/ . This website is important because it gives Canadians an idea of what we should be eating in order to maintain our maximum health. This website is credible because it’s a government website that frequently updates when new nutritional evidence is presented. There are also links to dietary guidelines, evidence review for dietary guidance, and the revision process- which are all provided from Health Canada.

An example of a website that would not be credible would be one like https://www.livescience.com/health . You can tell this website (and others like it) are not credible because the authors of the website are not qualified to to present their findings (check for qualifications after their name). The website is also not just a ‘health’ website. It is a media website that has options to view other random topics like ‘Planet Earth’, ‘History’, and ‘Tech’. Their focus is not just on health, it’s on entertainment, so any ‘facts’ presented on this website should not be taken seriously.

Citations:

Canada’s food guide. (2019, July 30). Retrieved from https://food-guide.canada.ca/en/

Cheddar Cheese Slices – Ingredients. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://world.openfoodfacts.org/cgi/product_image.pl?code=0871459000220&id=ingredients_en

Health. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.livescience.com/health