Cheftimony Episode 013 - Vegan 1.0
Today’s episode started a few months ago at the Annual General Meeting of Growing Chefs, a Vancouver-based charity that sends volunteer chefs into elementary school classes to teach kids about growing and cooking their own food. At the end of that meeting, vegan chef Karen McAthy of Blue Heron Creamery treated everyone to a tasting of Blue Heron’s wonderful, complex, delicious vegan cheeses.
I next encountered Karen through a national Canadian newspaper, the Globe and Mail, in an article titled Vegan food producer ordered to drop the word ‘cheese’ from its marketing. The controversy described in the Globe article arose from a complaint to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency whose definition of cheese flows, as it were, from its definition of milk, which, I’m told, is the lacteal secretion of the mammary gland of certain ruminants.
Not what first pops to mind when you think of the word “cheese”? Karen and I (we’ve both taken to calling the whole thing “Cheesegate”) have a great discussion about just what “cheese” is, what cheese could be, and how we might define it. Should the definition of cheese be based on a thing (say, the lacteal secretions of mammary glands?) or might cheese more usefully be defined by process, say, the application of microbes to some medium?
Karen McAthy is well placed to comment on the whole issue. She’s written a book on plant-based cheese making, she operates a vegan restaurant in Vancouver, and she teaches courses on making vegan cheeses. In addition to everything she does herself, Karen shares in our talk some other resources for those looking to learn more about vegan food production: The Vegan Project by Bridget Burns, the Vancouver Vegan Resource Centre by Zoe Peled and, for the professionally-minded, the plant-based programs at Vancouver’s Northwest Culinary Academy.
After my talk with Karen, I connect with another name I encountered in the Globe and Mail article, Glenford Jameson, a lawyer in Toronto whose legal practice focuses on the food sector. Glenford and I have a great talk about Cheesegate and a host of other topics, including the Canadian Association for Food Law and Policy and the Global Food Law Master’s Program at Michigan State University, where Glenford teaches. Heck, we even talk about “novel foods” and how crickets (not exactly vegan, I appreciate) might fit into that concept.
Join me now, first in Vancouver with Karen and then in Ontario with Glenford, for Cheftimony’s first foray into the vegan world: Vegan 1.0!