So, Gigi and I spent two days at the Canadian Health Food Association (CHFA) Expo East, talking with vendors and gathering samples for food reviews for CanadianFoodies.ca and NaturalHealthcare.ca. Both of us foodies with a taste for sampling new flavours, we were pretty excited about the opportunity to try out so many different foods. It seemed like such a cool idea..especially as our bags began to fill up with chocolate bars and coffees, yes, there were cereals too and supplements, but seriously, who gets excited about those? Organic chocolate baby...that's the ticket! The thing is, when you are trying food samples for reviews, the samples you get are not necessarily the sort of foods you eat (except obviously, the chocolate)...
My version of eating natural foods means for the most part, buying ingredients, not 'food products' I do a bushel or two of tomatoes in the summer and such other produce as comes my way, I make my own cake and biscuit mixes (the biscuit mix is also the base for my fried chicken coating and a few other things), freeze home made TV dinners...and so on. It's health food in the sense that most food was 60 years ago before our entire diet became corporatized. To me, health food is buying whole foods and making stuff from scratch.
What we found at the show was more 'health food product', than actually healthy food...mostly organic versions of candy bars, dressed up as power snacks...the sort of thing I try to avoid like the plague (why waste valuable decadence points on pseudo 'healthy junk food' when chocolate is already fundamentally healthy in small quantities and tastes SO much better?). To be fair, the show was so big that the two of us, stopping simply to introduce ourselves and the website at the booths we visited, were only able to cover 1/5 of the possible booths in 6 hours onsite (to aisle 5 of 25). We may simply have been at the healthy junk-food end of the room if the booths were organized thematically.
The joy joy bubbliness of chocolate acquisition faded into the stark realization of a sack full of 'convenience foods' that also had to be tried and reported upon. Oh dear. This is going to take a bit longer than I had originally thought.
I'm overstating it a bit, I suppose, there were some whole grains and basic ingredients, we were given some lovely spices, teas, flavoured salts (to encourage lower consumption), oils, herbs and juices as well cleaning supplies, coffee...and a huge pile of chocolate.
Since that show, we've also acquired even more food from the Oct 24, Table Talk show, sponsored by the Quebec government and also from the Grocery Innovation Show, and apparently, more is being sent to us. Fortunately, we like to eat.
A supertaster with a lifelong passion for food, Gayle's training was at the elbow of her Grandfather and at the Broadcast School of the Galloping Gourmet. She made her first pie at 8 years old and was baking bread solo by 10.
Gayle has written and illustrated a cookbook, Easy Date Oven, that will be published by CanadianFoodies in early 2012.
