02 Jul Aspirations in the food environment via food services
Networking with another plant based food lover reminds me of my dream in this industry.
My imperative for humans generally is optimal health. I can’t say why this is so important to me. Intuitively, it feels like a passion that I have been nurturing for most of my life (including in the childhood years).
The first memory of a TASTE SENSATION I had, was sitting in my parents veggie patch. It was situated on (what I remember as) a slightly southern facing slope. My Mum had filled the slopes with all sorts of plants of the edible variety, and my memory was sitting with my best friend (we lived in a VERY tiny community in a cleared area within the bush), amongst the plants eating ripe egg (I think they are actually called roma tomatoes now) tomatoes off the vine. We were dipping them in a jar of mayonnaise, and biting into the juicy flesh of these ripe tomatoes.
It was a sensory FEAST, and a memory that has stuck with me all these decades later. I think that the reason I like vegetables so much is because we ate so much of them when we were kids.
Things seems different now. At least in some communities. I am not sure that fresh plant food is the general public’s preference, judging by what is on the menu of so many cafes and restaurants in Australia at least. This fact has bothered me for a long time, until I took a different path, and started to become more accepting of the status quo.
It is true that our preferences for food are based on what we generally eat, so my idea was to try and get more vegan or more plant forward food, I think is the term I prefer to use, into our food environments via these establishments. I came up with a few ways of attempting to do this, and they were all pie in the eye kind of stuff (although one idea was developed in the regions of Victoria, so maybe it wasn’t such a BAD idea). However, it wasn’t until I started cooking for my NDIS clients that this idea came to me, that I could teach people to fend for themselves in their kitchens. Just now I am wondering if I could do this with a plant forward focus.
It is such a tough sell, vegetarianism, so I have my work cut out for me. To try and teach practical cookery and meal planning skills is one thing. I think it would be hard to inflict a constraint of plant based food on this idea. However, I don’t want to lose sight of my purpose either. (And I have been losing sight of that, in this new endeavour).
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