By Dana McCauley
As the end of the decade advances, I find myself looking back, taking stock of the trend landscape and wondering about what we can expect to see in 2010 and beyond.
During the last ten years products that offer a wellness advantage that promote either longevity or enhance our beauty have become mainstream. Likewise, blending sweet and savoury ingredients in desserts and main meal components continues to be a popular way to add flavour and interest to Canadian recipes and restaurant meals. We’ve also seen a plethora of …

Trends, trends, trends.  Everyone’s talking about them.  Food trends abound, but which ones are here to stay (at least for the time being).  Bensimon Byrne’s recent Consumerology Report focused on food consumer trends for Canadians, and the insight is interesting.  Where we are going, as a nation, with how we interpret food and health, is enlightening, but also clouded in misconceptions, and full of potentials for food professionals.
No big surprises are here for anyone in the food industry, still let me summarize some of the most interesting findings:

Consumers are …

Recent discussions with a friend of mine, Paul Spence, a cash crop farmer from Ridgetown Ontario, really brought home the crisis, the opportunity, and the barriers in diversifying in the agricultural sector today.
We all know that many sectors of the Canadian agriculture are in trouble.  Case in point, the pork industry. It’s under catastrophic collapse from fluctuating commodity prices, trade barriers instigated by disease outbreaks, and supply and demand issues which have left the pork industry in chaos.  Pork farms are going bankrupt under the current system.
So there are a myriad of farmers who …

I finally got around to reading Massimo Marcone’s book, In Bad Taste?, awarded last year’s Honourable Mention for Special Interest Books at the Canada Culinary Book Awards. Massimo is a friend and colleague of mine, so he has been cajoling me to read the book since it came out. Browsing through the public library, it finally got the best of me, and I read it this past long weekend.
What fun! It’s a whirlwind tour of weird food, fascinating places, and the futuristic world of the scientific lab. And it is …

When I’m traveling I pay more attention to things that would normally go unnoticed. Like this Starbucks’ bag from an afternoon snack I had in New York.
I’m not sure how natural a marshmallow square can be, but apparently mine  was made without artificial ingredients. With the promise of “more to come” I wonder if organic is next on this coffee giant’s agenda.
A couple of days later I ate at Pret a Manger, a fast food chain that started in London, UK and has expanded to the States. Their policy? To …

It is easy to fall into stereotypes.  It’s easy to think that Canada is so cold that we can’t grow exotic fruits and vegetables found in other countries. But as we highlighted recently, diversification into new crops, such as quinoa, is the new trend. All it takes is a few adventurous farmers to push the limits on what we can grow in Canada. Season extension, appropriate cultivar selection, and creative use of thermal resources has even allowed producers to grow tropical crops such as olives and lemons with great success.
The …

Here’s a topic you won’t see in the food magazines — horsemeat. Chef’s love it, animals lovers balk at the idea and the Japanese want us to ship more.
But this $60-million industry has virtually no regulations and generates a lot of controversy.
To set the record straight, Cuisine Canada’s intrepid Dana McCauley did a lot of digging. In her article Behind the Barn Door: The Hidden Facts about Canada’s Horsemeat Industry, McCauley logs dozens of hours talking to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, meat specialists, the Horse Welfare Alliance of Canada …

The CBC, CTV, and a variety of media outlets have recently highlighted a Food and Consumer Products of Canada and Canadian Medical Association Journal report on discretionary fortification, with the intent of streamlining regulation to allow the addition of vitamins and minerals to a wider variety of food products.  It sounds like this is a new thing, but Health Canada has been investigating the issue of discretionary fortification for more than a decade.  Even before the advent of calcium fortified orange juice, Health Canada has deliberated with how to regulate …

Yet another press uproar, yet another set of watercooler debates. The Food Standards Agency in the UK reopened the debate over whether organic food is more nutritious than conventional food. Their two full reports (First Report and Second Report) and accompanying article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition suggest that there is no difference when it comes to the nutritional content, and the health impact. And this has people talking.
After a thorough review of several hundred papers, extraction of relevant data, and comparison of conclusions, in general …

New Cuisine Canada member, Dana McCauley, brought this article to my attention. As a food trend expert, Dana keeps her eye on what’s hot and what’s not in the food world, and it looks like the push for local food is getting a bit of backlash.
In the recent Boston Globe article, “A Bitter Reality”, Tom Keane writes, “The local food movement is an affectation based on bad logic and bad economics.” While he claims local food tastes better when in season, he says the sustainability claims are myth. He points …