Foodie Wars

Foodie Wars Health vs Yum who wins

As someone who has struggled with chronic pain for most of my life and each year it gets progressively worse, I understand how difficult it can be to manage pain while also trying to lose weight. Exercise now for me is almost non-existent and the thought of going to the gym is pure terror. I felt like I was caught in a never-ending cycle of pain, medication, and weight gain. Something needs to be done to slow, halt or even reverse this cycle, what in the name of all the foodie gods out there could i do about it.

Let me explain. I am at heart a foodie. I LOVE food but not just food, i love good and great food, simple food and in general pretty much all food. I like sweet, sour, umami, rich, light, salads, meat, seafood, pasta, rice, stir fries, stews, soups and so much more, hell i could do a blog on just a few of my favourites, a brief history i guess is needed. 

My 50 plus year culinary journey:

I will try to stick to the defining moments of my journey.

As a child I lived with my mother in western Australia on farms in the city anywhere my mother could get work. 

For example for a while mum used to work for the potato board in marketing, we would go to different shows and carnivals etc cooking potatoes in different ways showing the public the variety of potatoes and how they were cooked for example, potato cake is a real thing believe it or not lol at least it was in the 70s. 

At another time my mother and her partner at the time had a fish and chip shop in a small fishing town. My step father and my uncle we both crayfisherman they would leave for days on end going deep water, i think about 300 km out to fish for lobster a few things of note here, it's the sickest i ever was in my life that first time i went deep sea and that i LOVE seafood from crayfish to octopus and fish and anything in between.

One of my most fond memories of my uncle is a day that i was there getting tutoring help with my english i really suck at spelling, My uncle made in front of me a dish with only 4 ingredients raw crayfish, onions and tomato thinly sliced then he covered the ingredients with a white vinegar for a couple of minutes drained off the vinegar and then served it up as it hit my mouth, i swear my tongue and brain exploded with flavours that i just didn't know were possible

The other 2 great influences of my early childhood being my grandparents in Perth and my grandfather who lived near and later on in busselton western australia. So on one hand i was eating stews made with a pressure cooker of meat and veg and I distinctly remember the taste of the parsnips and turnips in almost every stew and then the taste of home made custard and the occasional terror of boiled rhubarb with no sugar. 

While on the other hand I was helping my grandfather catch and kill and butcher kangaroos on the property he lived and worked at.

The thing I remember most is him teaching me that we only kill what we need to eat. I remember this so vividly as at the time myself and my brother were very young and I remember the lessons we learned very well. 

We set out before light and started checking the snares and traps for rabbits and kangaroos, we had just got 2 roos from the first 2 snares he had set and we were off to check the third. 

Now this is important to note if we didn't succeed we didn't eat so it was so far a great day but as we approached the 3rd main snare we could see a big buck as pop called it, only problem was it had just got caught and at that moment it broke free and ran off into the woods.

 This was the first time id heard my pop swear and he was going off, he told me to get the roos back to the house and to stay with my brother wait and he would be back, he had to catch up to the roo and free him or the wire noose would kill him slowly and that was not ok. Several hours later he came back all bruised up and explained that he had to literally fight the roo to get the wire off him but it was worth the effort and I would have to say he was a true hero to me at this time. 

I can't really remember the taste of the food we ate “sorry pop you were not a great cook”, all i can remember is rabbit was dry and meh and kangaroo was amazing, but i really remember the message. 

Survival is real but only take what you need and even though we eat them, animals are to be respected and loved. I have mentioned this so all those who just eat vegetables or have lifestyles that shun meat sorry but I am a carnivore through and through your choices in life i respect you for but please respect mine.

For one summer my father deemed it ok for me to stay with him over the school holidays i was around 10 or 11 years old at the time, so it was a big deal meeting my father the truck driver, He had left my mother when I was 1 and had zero contact since then, so yep “thanks dad” i have not since then heard from him. The highlight being in the truck with him as we made deliveries to Arnhem land and the aboriginal towns there and Katherine gorge all the way down to Alice springs eating at road houses all along the way on many trips. I remember the buffalo and croc he made me try and the steak I had at Threeways roadhouse in Tennant creek. 

I spent time on christmas island with relatives who used to work for the phosphate mine and got my first taste of things like frogs legs and amazing local satay sticks.

I joined the airforce when i was 15 as a apprentice radio technician and learned very early on in my adult life that on average the food served to me was bland uninspiring and just a means of survival and if you were late for any reason and missed mess you got nothing or at best a cold meal, so I took it upon myself to start learning to cook beyond the basics.

After I left the airforce around 1988 I worked mostly in security in nightclubs and pubs in Newcastle, after the earthquake in 1989 I was homeless for a while before I moved to Sydney. 

This was the home of the in thing for martial arts at the time the wing chun academy in chinatown, I will go into depth about my history of fitness and martial arts at a later date for now it's enough to know the reason i moved to sydney was to expand my knowledge in this area.

So alongside working in the nightlife of Newcastle and Sydney I was in Chinatown on a very regular basis and I fell in love with Asian foods of all types.

A nice side benefit of working in many pubs and clubs most I worked at had a chef or cook and to be honest I partook of a lot of the food and got very friendly with the kitchen.  

This set the tone for the next several years Sydney, Melbourne, Fremantle, Perth the Nullabor  moving where the work was always staying friends with the kitchen and the local asian community.

 I started to really appreciate good quality food and ate at restaurants about 90% of the time.

My next culinary port of call was a small italian restaurant named la casetta in Perth where I worked as a kitchen hand and spent as much time as possible learning from the head chef as much as I could and learned the value of fresh ingredients. They even used to grow their own chillies out the back on several large bushes and all their dishes that had chillies used these giving them a unique flavour. 

For many years i participated in a medieval recreation society and helped prepare feasts from menus 800 years old for hundreds of people and seen the talent of ladies who make it their life's work to create such things as meade and using things like cloves as an anchor to a dish from a recipe long since lost in time.

The final and most amazing thing i discovered about food, was when i visited Thailand with my girlfriend at the time i was running a business and needed to get some new suits i went there for the clothes and fell in love with the food as i stated before the sickest i had ever been was going deep see this didn't even come close to how i felt after getting sick in Thailand for a few days the first few days in Thailand i spent on the toilet after ignoring the advice not to drink the water. 

After those few days and i was almost at the point of being ravenous I spent almost every waking minute after that eating from every street vendor and restaurant that i could convince my partner to join me in and the foods i discovered were just astounding to me, every corner had a new flavour and every stall a new experience i also discovered how wonderful the Thai peoples as a whole are. 

Many of the curry and chillie dishes I ate sent me back to the good old toilet but i'll never forget the taste and flavours I discovered, nothing like i had experienced before.

The highlight of the trip but by far not the best food was the last night there where we went to a nice chinese restaurant and got my first taste of a real gourmet duck dish the entire meal was prepared from one duck the entree a soup made from a broth cooked within the duck and filled with herbs spices and fresh duck breast, the main was fresh vegetables glazed in a sauce the duck was marinated in served with the brown meat from the duck and the desert was fresh made ice cream with pieces of sweet crispy duck skin the entire experience blew my mind.

I took from the trip to Thailand many things including a increased love of food and other cultures but the one thing that stuck with me and made me think more than anything else is how food or water can truly disrupt your entire system, I had not just been ill i felt how much the food affected my body for a good month after the visit it was like my entire system was in shock from the fuel types I had given it.  

I have eaten foods and dishes from almost every country on the planet and love and savour flavours that some would not dream of eating and some that only some have ever tasted i have sat in a Japanese restaurant as a honoured guest being served dishes that the chef had dreamed up and asked should we add this to the menu. My favourite was a sashimi dish of raw scampi served with a side of jellyfish and fresh ground wasabi.

To this day i cannot pass a sushi house or train or any japanese restaurant without stopping and seeing if they have jellyfish.

As an adult I have spent over 30 or so years watching shows like Masterchef, reading cookbooks, going to restaurants, cafes or any sort of different food vendor I can find and learning as much about food of almost every type as I could. about nutrition, flavours and if I see something I have to try to cook it and see if I can replicate a taste or discover something new. In recent years i have to say one of my vices is definitely watching food channels on youtube lol i cant get enough of the damn things 

I consider myself a pretty reasonable cook and given the means I can come up with some pretty good dishes my kids have even suggested on more than one occasion I should try for master chef but in all honesty I can say I am not in their league. Where I excel is in my knowledge of food ingredients and how they affect your taste, cravings, body and mind. Oh and lets not forget the flavours for me it's almost all about the yum factor.

Now something personal about my psyche that i should explain i am the kind of person who has always been unable to just glance at something in passing, if i have an interest about or in it i find a deep seated need to learn everything i can about the topic and by nature i am very sceptical of everything i am told or learn until i can prove its worth through practical experience or such.

I have for a great many years studied the ingredients in foods and how they affect you, I have watched countless diets and fads come and go and return again. Friends and family struggle with weight, alcoholism, dependence on substances, some succeed and some fail. I have even lost family members to these things and they are all connected. I have read many papers and studies and drawn from my own experiences and these learned peoples and many other sources, drawn my own conclusions on good dietary practices and several systems that have helped the few people I have shared them with. 

A good example is my partner over the space of a year, lost about 50 kg( 110 pounds) and not put any of the weight back on, showed general overall improvement of health, energy levels, happiness and mood and is ready to start on the next phase of her journey as i start on my own.

I asked her while writing this has she ever felt like she is on a diet or been hungry or not been able to eat foods we have craved for and the answer after consideration was “well actually no”

Please note I am not a doctor, dietician or an expert in any way and when it comes to nutrition I am just a guy with a deep need to understand as much as I can about diet food and my health as circumstances have forced me to be.

So in conclusion I feel for me taste,flavour in essence the YUM factor is always going to come out on top, but I will work with that and use food as the key to my physical and part of my mental health as most exercise is denied to me now.

If i can share some of that knowledge with others then all the better and i hope you will all discover some flavours or experiences as well as physical and mental health improvements and growth in your future.

Hopefully this is not too rushed as i planned to do this later but i have a friend in america who is in need of help with her diet and health and i needed to post this foundation before i started on the rest. I will post this to youtube as soon as I can spare the time to do it.

I am willing to help anyone who feels they need personal 1 on 1 help with questions and issues and will give my personal email address for this after I have outlined most of the information I am sharing.It is important to see the whole picture first before drowning me in questions.

Tomorrow I will be doing a detailed blog on sugar, sugar free alternatives and some pretty important information on that part of the puzzle. I hope to see you there.