63: Solo Episode Season 4 Wrap-Up with Special Guest!

December 17, 2019

Wrapping up an amazing season 4 with a solo episode this week - I reflect on some of the major themes and responses we got to episodes, and share a bit more on the personal side of things, particularly some lessons I've learned this fall about reconnecting to and through food. Plus there's an extra special guest on the show today... my daughter!

We will be back with all-new episodes for season 5 on January 28th - until then, be sure to follow us along on social media and feel free to share ideas and guest recommendations that you'd like on the show. This show is made for you - so if you feel like we're missing voices and perspectives, we'd love to hear more about it!

Thank you all for listening and joining us this year. It's always such a joy to be able to create these episodes and build a community of people that are invested in food sustainability, sovereignty, and challenging broken systems. See you in 2020!

62: The Power of Bee Propolis with Carly Stein of Beekeeper's Naturals

December 9, 2019

I’m really excited about this week’s topic, because I find the connections between bees and humans such an interesting one, and we’re talking today about the power of bee-based medicines. My guest this week is Carly Stein, who is the founder and CEO of the wellness brand Beekeeper’s Naturals – whose mission is to improve the health of humans and bees alike. As a beekeeper and tireless advocate for the preservation of the waning global bee population, Carly is dedicated to using her company as a platform for making a difference and was recently recognized as a game-changing entrepreneur on the 2019 Forbes 30 under 30 list.

The mission of Beekeeper’s Naturals is to revamp your medicine cabinet – they rely on plant extracts and potent nutraceuticals from the beehive for their products – using ingredients like royal jelly, propolis, and bee pollen to craft solutions for everyday health issues – like brain fog, low energy, and scratchy throats. We speak today about the fascinating cultural history behind using bee-based ingredients in medicines in Europe and how her company fosters both human health but also bee population health. She’s got such an important and unique perspective on North American wellness, and I’m excited to share this with you!

For those who are interested, Carly’s team also sent over a discount code for you to use if you’d like to check out Beekeeper’s Naturals products! Enter ANTHRODISH15 at checkout for 15% off your purchase.

Learn More About Beekeeper's Naturals:

Website: https://beekeepersnaturals.ca/

Instagram: @beekeepers_naturals

61: Women on Food - Exploring Gender, Race, and Power in Food Writing with Charlotte Druckman

December 2, 2019

Have you ever read a book you just couldn’t put down, and dreamt that you’d be able to chat with the author to steep a little bit more in their perspective? This week’s episode is a bit of a dream come true in that sense for me! I’m speaking with Charlotte Druckman all about her newest book, Women on Food. Based out of New York City, Charlotte is a journalist, food writer, and the creator of Food52’s Tournament of Cookbooks (aka the piglet). She is also the author of Skirt Steak: Women Chefs on Standing the Heat and Staying in the Kitchen, and Stir, Sizzle, Bake, and coauthor of Anita Lo’s Cooking Without Borders.

Women on Food unites the radical, diverging female voices of the food industry in an urgent, moving, and often humorous collection of essays, interviews, questionnaires, illustrations, quotes, and more. When reading the book before the interview, what was most striking was the energy that came from it – she’s not afraid to challenge conventions of what we think “good” food writing should be, and she’s actively redesigning the spaces in which we read and think about food through her anthology. In our interview, we explore some of the patterns she saw around the themes of power, race, and gender within each piece, and explore the process she went through writing some of her own original pieces within the book.

Before we dive into the interview, I wanted to share with local Toronto listeners that Charlotte will be in town this THURSDAY December 5th for a chat with Jenn Agg at VSP Consignment. I have the details posted below:

From https://www.womenonfood.org/new-page

Toronto Event:

Thursday, December 5th, 6:30 PM at VSP Consignment (1410 Dundas St W).

Email rsvp@monacreative.co to RSVP to the event and for more details.

Learn More About Charlotte

Women on Food Anthology

Instagram: @chardrucks

Twitter: @cettedrucks

60: Breaking Down Diet Culture and Healthy Eating Myths with Jennifer Rollin

November 26, 2019

With the holiday season in full swing, I always like to come back to conversations about body image and disordered eating… because holidays are really intense for a lot of people, myself included, and we are often face to face with anxieties about ourselves, our families, and sometimes with our relationship to food.

My guest this week is Jennifer Rollin, an eating disorder therapist and the founder of The Eating Disorder Center. The centre is a therapy practice that provides support to people in Rockville, Maryland and worldwide via video chats. She also writes and speaks about eating disorders on Fox, NBC, ABC, and PBS, as well as writing for The Huffington Post and Psychology Today.

What I love about Jennifer is that she’s very no-nonsense and to the point about diet culture – she calls it like she sees it, and her online presence serves as a strong reminder to take a step back from the wellness and health industry messages we’re bombarded with on a daily basis and reset our minds in terms of what those messages are actually getting at. We chat today about debunking this idea of healthy eating, or of wellness culture fads in terms of diet and exercise, and she provides some really useful tips and boundaries you can use to confront these challenges in your day to day lives. She also has a forthcoming book deal that she shares a bit about – so tune in to find out more!

Learn more about Jennifer!

Website: The Eating Disorder Center
Instagram: @jennifer_rollin or @theeatingdisordercenter

59: Cash Only and LA Food Zines with Amanda Lanza

November 18, 2019

This week we are exploring the food scene in Los Angeles, California, with my guest Amanda Lanza who works with Cash Only Productions out there.

Cash Only is a collective of culinary and community-minded creatives – most of whom work in different creative worlds outside the culinary world, but who all view food as the building block for their community. Cash Only started as a zine that honoured restaurants in LA that had been around for decades, but often went unrecognized or inconsistently honoured by internet hype machines – I’m sure we all know places like this, and the algorithm doesn’t do them any justice!

The collective has evolved to hold more space in the educational realm, with food-based discussions that provide language for food lovers or hands on workshops. They also help to highlight the various ethnoburbs of LA and the stories that come from them.

Amanda runs most of the operations, production, and creative endeavours for the project. She’s both a chef and a food anthropologist who is doing her MA at CSULA. She loves to work and explore the idea of what authenticity means in cuisine and what that looks like or takes shape as in LA food communities.

Cash Only does a terrific job focusing and honouring culinary heritage and origin stories, and how these have shaped food consumption and creation experiences in LA, and I can’t wait for you to learn more!

Learn More About Cash Only

Cash Only Website
Instagram: @cashonlyproductions

58: Empowering Youth in the Kitchen with FoodWorks Ottawa

November 11, 2019

Sometimes the stories we want to share through AnthroDish are bigger that just one person's perspective. We've been working to create more thematically based narrative-style episodes, using multiple interviews to explore how different folks look at the same topic. In this way, we’re able to get a bigger picture story about the ways in which food can be used as a tool for powerful social moments and conversations.

Today we are sharing the story of FoodWorks, and what this program is doing to empower youth in the kitchen. FoodWorks is a social enterprise launched by Operation Come Home in 2016, in cooperation with Causeway Work Centre in Ottawa, Canada. The goal of FoodWorks is to provide meaningful work opportunities to youth while offering healthy meals to those who may need it. It began as a way to bridge the gap between youth and seniors in Ottawa through a meal delivery service, but the program has grown exponentially to better suit Ottawa’s food culture and needs through meal delivery programs that are open to all residents, while also providing catering services for events and restaurants.

The program hires youth who are recruited from Operation Come Home, and helps them develop their culinary skills with a world-class chef, Bruce Wood. All proceeds go to supporting Operation come Home’s mission of preventing homeless youth from becoming homeless adults.

I spoke with four people who all work with FoodWorks or Operation Come Home in varied ways: Chef Bruce Wood, Eric Bollman, Mandi Lunan, and Katie Sanders. After learning about the program from Eric, I knew that it would be important to get different perspectives and voices on the show, given that their enterprise is so rooted in creating strong communities and empowering youth -- an individual interview just wouldn't cut it! I am excited to share the final product today with you, complete with some fun soundscape play woven throughout the narrative.

Learn More about FoodWorks