During the Winter Olympics I helped out at Lazy Gourmet which was very busy catering to French House, General Electric Hosting, Price Waterhouse Coopers, events for the Polish Government, Vanoc, Richard Branson and a bunch of other stuff. Given this line up, and knowing Lazy Gourmet’s reputation as being the best catering in Vancouver, I expected to be working in a high stress environment. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself in an easy-going but highly efficient kitchen full of interesting and widely varied people. I realised in the 11 days I spent working there, how much I have missed the special sort of community you get when you cook together.

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I am not a huge fan of expensive supplements when herbs and other helpful natural things are available, and this is probably all a big economic war between Big Pharma and the High-Cost Supplements Industries again, so I am not advising you to sign, unless you read it and really agree. I got ripped off joining EQUINOX in the late 90’s so I know about expensive supplements and there should be a way to avoid people selling total bulls–t, but if restrictions get placed on our ability to freely use herbs as a result of their battle (see my article on Codex Alimentarius) I will really not be impressed!

In any case it is just good to be aware of what is going on. Let me know what you think. I generally try not to get involved too much in all of the legal smoke and mirrors that goes on. The legal jargon in such things seems to mainly be used for covering up stuff and wasting time. But in the hopes that I am wrong, I have signed this letter!

The following is from the Citizens For Health website:

Introduced by Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Byron Dorgan (D-ND) on February 4th as the “Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010,” S. 3002 is designed, according to the bill preamble, to “more effectively regulate dietary supplements that may pose safety risks unknown to consumers.”

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There was so much going on for Valentines Day this year that I didn’t have time to think about chocolates and roses. Instead, I was thinking about joining in the celebrations to welcome in the Year of the Tiger and eager to get to Chinatown before the whole show was over since rumors said the festivities would be closed down early due to the Olympics. In fact, our bus couldn’t get through downtown, as soon as we realised this we headed for the nearest skytrain station and squeezed ourselves in among the throngs of people and headed for the Chinatown/Stadium stop.

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As some of you may know from my snail mail New Years letter in December, I had a scheme to work for the winter Olympics and make a ton of money in a short time period. I used to work large sporting events (catered for the APGA golf tournament in 2000 and the NZ V-8 car races in 2004) and had found that huge sports events usually pay the best money. So I was pretty shocked to discover that to work for the Molson Canadian Hockey House, and provide the food for Concord Place during the 2010 Winter Olympics would only be an hourly rate of $15.

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The Chinese Year of the Tiger begins on Valentines day this year, making it extra special in my book… 14/2/2010. I was born in the year of the tiger so I confess to being prejudiced in this area . In honor of the upcoming New Year and because I was just going through an old folder full of some favorite quotes from years ago and discovered this wonderful tale of a lost tiger:

A tigress, pregnant and nearly ready to deliver, walked stealthily along the edge of a high cliff foraging for food. She looked over into the grassland below and spied a flock of goats grazing in the sunshine. Hungry as she was, she hesitated because the drop was precipitous. Then she took a great leap, and in the fall she lost her balance. The noise sent the goats scurrying into the forest for shelter. The neck of the tigress was broken as she hit the ground, but in her death throes she managed to give birth to her cub. Then all was silent.

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This post, from my series of posts on the history of Haiti, taken from Dr. Paul Farmer’s book Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor gives excerpts of the history of Haiti, especially surrounding the massacre that took place in Raboteau. An interesting side-note here is that the city of Philadelphia dumped a barge of toxic waste on Haiti, which ended up sitting at the port not far from the slum of Raboteau.

The following are taken from Chapter 2 Pestilance and Restraint: Guantanamo, AIDS and the Logic of Quarantine:

“Landmark human rights trials have taken place recently in Haiti, a first. The most important of these occurred in Gonaïves, once famous as the place where Haiti’s declaration of independence was signed, after the slaves’ decisive 1803 victory over Napoleon’s forces.”

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These excerpts are from Dr. Paul Farmer’s book Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor , written in 2004. I am putting up a series of posts from this book, because Dr. Paul Farmer is well respected in the mainstream as well as in the Christian community. He has worked in rural Haiti for more than 20 years. This post shares Yolande’s story, she fled Haiti after being beaten for promoting adult literacy and ended up in Guantanamo where she was treated even worse.

Currently Guantanamo is prepared to receive thousands of Haitian refugees, let’s do everything we can to make sure they will not be treated the same way they were the last time they visited this US base.

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These excerpts are from Dr. Paul Farmer’s book Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, written in 2004. I am putting up a series of posts from this book, because Dr. Paul Farmer is well respected in the mainstream as well as in the Christian community. He has worked in rural Haiti for more than 20 years. Being a doctor, he is also closely involved with various aid agencies and speaks of the structural violence within our culture that Haitians have been the brunt of since they kicked Napoleon’s ass in 1803 and became the first nation of free slaves that was, unfortunately for them, a little too close to the shores of our ‘great’ nation (USA).

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Paul Farmer has worked in rural Haiti for more than twenty years. He is a doctor and anthropologist and has written several books on health inequalities. Known as Dokte Paul throughout Haiti, he has improved rural health by teaching basic health practices as the best preventive medicine. He has also worked in Russia, Chiapas and various other desperate places and has even had a book written about him: Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World by Tracy Kidder.

I personally don’t know much about Haiti, what I do know has come from reading Dr. Paul Farmer’s book Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. Dr. Farmer knows the people of Haiti, he has worked with them and listened to them for years, healing them as best he can. The current situation in Haiti could have been avoided to some degree if more people had listened to Dr. Farmer years ago. This book, Pathologies of Power was written in 2004 and gives clear insight into the various levels of abuse that the people of Haiti have been subjected to for years from the international community, most specifically the US of A. There is not much I can do for the people of Haiti from where I sit except to share these insightful words. We are directly responsible for the terrible ongoing situation in Haiti.

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Most of my life I have been excessively healthy. No cavities, never sick, and with rapid healing powers so that I have no scars despite the multitude of oven burns, chopped fingertips and other disasters that being a chef generally involve (I have chopped off the tip of my left pointer finger several times but you wouldn’t know by looking at it!). I took that amazing health for granted, assumed that it was just who I was and didn’t stop to think for a second that it might not last. Working in the fast-paced and highly demanding culinary industry stresses your body physically, the long hours and high pressure alone are quite enough to wear you down over time, but along with that for years I maintained a diet of coffee and cigarettes, and generally didn’t really put anything else into my body. After a couple years of this I discovered that I was highly neurotic, with blood sugar swings that left me an emotional basket case.

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