The Great Food Revolution

CBC is airing a 4-part series called The Great Food Revolution on how Canadian food habits have changed. The first two parts air tonight (March 19th) at 8:00 and 9:00 on the series Doc Zone.

Episode 1: The Great Food Revolution

 Travel and immigration have introduced us to new foods and radically expanded our palates. An explosion in food TV shows, magazines and cookbooks educate and tantalize. Celebrity chefs rule the airwaves and have inspired a generation to take up cooking. And what was once rare and exotic can now be found at your local market.

Episode 2: The Battle to Get on Your Plate

The food retail sector is in a state of turmoil. Hanging on to long-standing customers and attracting new ones is a constant battle. Supermarkets are employing an arsenal of tactics and strategies. It’s a free-for-all.

But even the best efforts of scientists and chefs aren’t always enough. Getting a new product onto your plate is a bit like high stakes poker. In North America, the food industry develops roughly 18,000 new items each year, but nine out of ten don’t even make it to store shelves. It’s especially difficult for small players in the industry to get a foot in the door.

Episode 3: 24 Hours, 24 Million Meals

The Big Apple. It’s the center of the universe for art, culture, finance, fashion, and food. Eight million people clamoring for three square meals a day.

How does one of the world’s most populous centers, a city of concrete, glass, and steel, feed itself? Feeding New York shows the complex choreography of distribution that keeps New Yorkers fed. It’s a dance of supply and demand that happens in cities all over the world, every day.

Episode 4: Food of the Future

What is the food of the future? Will steaks be cultivated in petri dishes? Will we grow our food in high-rises? More fact than fiction, the emerging foods and trends are closer than you think. From oceans to land, from laboratories to swanky black-tie affairs, our cameras will take you on a voyage of discovery to these new frontiers.

Few chefs have had the impact of Jamie Oliver. Books, TV shows, he’s done it all. Yet today Jamie Oliver is on a mission. He is leading the way towards a simpler, more healthy way of eating. We’ll take you into action-packed world of Jamie Oliver—from the superstar chef to social activist.

 

Rachel Maddow

Rachel Maddow is without a doubt my favorite TV personality. The Rachel Maddow Show airs at 9:00 pm EST on MSNBC. If you don’t have access to MSNBC you can watch clips on her website or subscribe to the video podcast from iTunes for free.

To get a sense of her wit and ability to find fun quirky stuff check out this video. It is a real-time recreation of the splash down in the Hudson river that occurred in February 2009.

 

Rachel is a Rhodes Scholar with a Ph. D. from Oxford. Her interviewing style is hard-hitting but her show tries to see some humour behind the stories. My favorite segment is “Scrub, rinse, repeat” where she discusses the problems that President Barack Obama still has to deal with from the Bush administration.

Another very endearing quality of Rachel is that she is an ardent mixologist with a preference for classic cocktails. The more I find out about her, the more I like her.

 

Reliving Your Life

How many episodes of your life do you wish you could go back and change the way you reacted? Having regrets and wondering “What if?” haunts many of us. Erica Strange gets to do just that on the new CBC series Being Erica that airs Wednesday nights at 9:00. Erin Karpluk plays the single 30-something that is trying to find her way in life. Dr. Tom, a time-travelling psycho-therapist helps her to see her life for what it is by letting her go back to the troubling times of her past. This is an excellent CBC offering – check it out!