102: Season 8 Launch! [Solo Episode]

Welcome to Season 8!

It has been far too long and I am really excited to be back behind the old mic bringing you all new interviews this season. I am so grateful for the conversations that I’ve had so far for this season, and have some more planned that I am really looking forward to sharing with you.

True to any season launch for AnthroDish, I’m going to give you a breakdown of all the reasons why the season ended so abruptly at the end of March 2022 (and how it almost always happens that seasons end abruptly in the spring and launch in the fall).

Check out the solo episode to hear some more personal updates, and then brace yourself for all the amazing conversations that have been happening behind the computer scenes for the last many months! New episodes each Tuesday

101: Upcycling Imperfect Produce into Healthy Eats with Monique Chan of Bruized

We started off this season looking at just how much Canadians wasted food, and how food systems management can be used to tackle this from a research based perspective. But the realities of how to navigate food waste, and the chain from supplier to consumer get a bit more murky. So how can it be done?

This week, I’m chatting with Monique Chan, who is working on a solution through her company, Bruized. Monique is a 26-year old creative from Toronto, Ontario. She founded Bruized in 2019 as a way to combat the food waste crisis through upcycling commonly discarded ingredients like juice pulp, imperfect produce, and more into tasty, plant based snacks. At Bruized, the mission is to create feel good food for the planet and people. Well finding renewed purpose for the ingredients they rescue, Monique and her team see the potential where others see waste, and want to help break the stigma around wasted food. By embracing the imperfections of the foods we eat and within ourselves, she sees it as a way of working towards a more sustainable future.

Monique today discusses how she started Bruized, some of the major challenges of working within food waste, and creative ways to start thinking about using your own food waste in scraps. She also highlights some of the lessons that we can learn about ourselves through thinking about food waste, which I found so fascinating.

Learn More About Monique:

100: Sarah in the Hot Seat with Guest Host Sydney Gautreau

I'm someone who normally doesn't stop to take a breath and appreciate everything I've done, but I wanted to take a moment this week to celebrate AnthroDish hitting 100 EPISODES!

I'm so excited that we've made it this far together, I can't thank you all enough for tuning in over the years, bringing in your expertise and your questions to make this journey even more dynamic than I could have possibly imagined when I first started it. 

To properly celebrate this, my friend Sydney Gautreau is interviewing me this week! We've been toying with this idea for a while, so when she proposed it as the way to celebrate 100 AnthroDishes, I couldn't say no. Even if I am the worst interview guest - I am normally the type of person to quickly turn questions back on interviewers because of my hosting tendencies. Yet the perks of having a friend interview is that she knows the types of questions to ask me where I feel genuiney encouraged to answer it in more vulnerable and real ways. 

So today, Sydney asks me to share more about my own experiences than I normally do. Which is scary, but also exciting. So here we go! 

PS, Sydney is a fabulous editor and writing coach outside of her hosting abilities - please check out her website if you are in need of some powerful editing and coaching that makes you feel more aligned with your own writing:

Sydney's Editing and Writing Coach Website: https://sydneygautreau.com/

99: Opening Two Vietnamese Restaurants in Small Town Ontario During a Pandemic with Susan Tung of Hanoi House

This week’s episode feels particularly special and close to home for me – because it kinda is! This marks my first episode getting to connect with someone from my hometown of Peterborough, Ontario. During the first year of the pandemic, I moved back to Peterborough to be closer to family while managing my daughter’s online schooling. It was a really difficult choice for me, because I had a lot of pride about living in Toronto and coming back to your smalltown can be challenging. But there was one place that kept filling me with joy (and delicious food) and hope during lockdowns – Hanoi House!

This week, I have Susan Tung, the owner of Hanoi House, on the show to share her story of opening not just one, but two locations of this Vietnamese restaurant in our small town. Susan grew up in the Cavan Monahan area (which is a bit outside of Peterborough and smaller still), where her parents owned a Chinese restaurant called Golden Wheel.

While Susan aspired to building a career in the healthcare industry, she kept getting drawn back into the hospitality industry due to her upbringing, but made some really smart and creative changes to bring Hanoi House to the Peterborough food scene that allowed not only for business success during a pandemic, but thrived enough for her to open a second location! This story is really special for me to share, because I think Susan represents a lot of the good I see in my hometown, and I’m really excited for you to all get a glimpse into story and the beautiful dishes she’s created.

Learn More About Susan and Hanoi House!

98: Reducing Cultural Food Insecurity through Grocery Delivery with Boyede Sobitan of OjaExpress

“We understand the concept of food insecurity - I live in Chicago, there’s areas where there’s not access to fresh foods. When you come from a cultural background, or an immigrant background, that’s further amplified. Now, not only are you challenged with getting fresh food, but then also the foods that matter that you, the food that makes sense to you. You know, the foods that has generations of ancestral lineage that you grew up with, that you’re aware of, that you have to cook as opposed to using poor substitutes to try and recreate those memories.”
— Boyede Sobitan

The idea of food security has been around for quite some time, but never manages to grasp the full complexity and nuances of what it means to secure foods, or what foods are the most culturally appropriate and nourishing. And in turn, efforts to assist those facing food insecurity quite often miss the mark in making cultural food easier to reach. And with increased regional lockdowns and the significantly reduced accessibility and time that many people are facing, finding culturally appropriate foods gets more challenging. While there is a growth in grocery and food deliver apps, they tend to favour big chain grocery stores – and means that there are certain trade-offs in deciding what foods to get. For those trying to source and buy their cultural foods, how can they use these technologies and find the cultural ingredients they need to make their foods?

Boyede Sobitan with OjaExpress co-founder Fola Dada

This week’s guest, Boyede Sobitan, has created a really inspiring solution to this. Boyede is the founder and CEO of OjaExpress, a Chicago-based online marketplace and delivery service that sources cultural ingredients from specialty stores. As a Nigerian immigrant, Boyede experienced how difficult and inconvenient it was to find ethnic groceries to make his favourite meals from home. At the same time, he recognized the disparity of capabilities between the mom and pop stores that immigrant communities rely on, versus the more established big-box competitors. These smaller stores were simply not equipped with the technology or means to provide the same level of service that supermarkets could provide. To address this, Boyede founded OjaExpress to be the “United Nations of groceries” by making ethnic foods accessible for those craving a taste of home.

Learn More about Boyede and OjaExpress:

97: How Can We Talk About Bodies and Diet Culture Online? with Ary Maharaj from NEDIC

“Diet culture existed in all our ancient societies as well - like who’s statues were made into bodies? I want us to be really specific and particular when we blame social media. I don’t think I blame social media personally for creating diet culture. I think it’s led to some nuances, youngins have access to filters where before you maybe needed digital editing skills to do that.”
— Ary Maharaj

With every new year, we get absolutely bombarded by diet ads, fitness discounts, gym memberships (even if gyms are closed during lockdowns), and constant messaging about what our bodies are worth. Even when expected, it’s incredibly overwhelming. So how can we practice more conscious language and information sharing about our bodies, foods, and diet cultures online?

This week, I am chatting with Ary Maharaj, who’s speaking as the Outreach and Education Coordinator for the National Eating Disorder Information Centre (NEDIC). Ary is a qualifying Registered Psychotherapist and a graduate of the University of Toronto’s Master of Education in Counselling and Psychotherapy program. Through his work at NEDIC, he’s striving to take a preventative, proactive approach to helping people with their relationships with food and weight, while buffering them from developing eating disorders.

In our conversation, we’re talking about how younger generations face challenges online with pervasive messaging on Tik Tok and Instagram, how to approach conversations with friends and family members who make comments about any body changes we’ve had during the holidays, and how we can approach food and body image discussions online in more respectful, accessible, and supportive ways. I will just say before this interview starts, that we do talk about eating disorders throughout this, so please consider this and if you are in a good space to listen to these themes before continuing to listen.

Resources: