Food Hero Tuesday: TFT Japan Food Team

Note from the Editor: TFT "food heroes" are people who inspire us, and whose visions align with the values that TFT espouses and promotes. This post is from a registered dietician and member of the Table for Two Japan Food Team, Shoko Ohno, who tells us about TFT Japan's latest campaign and provides us with healthy eating tips. TFT Japan Food Team, we at TFT HK salute you!

Table for Two Japan's campaign, "One Million people to share TFT meal" 

"The Importance of weighing yourself and how to cut calories in your daily life"
Author: Shoko Ohno, National Certified Dietitian and a pro bono TABLE FOR TWO staff member

Your weight changes daily. Though such changes may be as small as by gram unit, watching weight every day is a very important measure to maintain your health by/for yourself.

In Japan TABLE FOR TWO's original campaign called "One Million people to share TFT meal" (Hyakuman Nin no Itadakimasu) started on 16th of October this year. This is the fourth year of this annual, month-long campaign. Participants include corporate cafeterias, restaurants and food retailers and the campaign has garnered a great deal of exposure on national TV.

TFT Japan's campaign on TV!

We are now running a brand new event for this campaign. Under my advisement, two men, one in Japan and one in the USA, are now competing to change their eating habits and lose the most weight during the campaign period. The participant in Japan is Mr. Tohru and the participant in NY is Mr. Aki. Both men are over 100kg (approx. 220 pounds). During the competition, the two men share what they eat, how they work out, and how much weight they have lost over our designated Facebook page. Their friends, supporters, and I give comments, encouragement, and advice.  Most of the news feed is in Japanese, but feel free to follow this link and take a look (you must first send a friend request): www.facebook.com/challenges.tft

So far during the first week, Tohru in Japan has already lost 2kgs (4.4 pounds). In an effort to change his overeating and consumption of unbalanced meals, Tobru weighs himself daily and bravely reports it on FB. In fact, according to OMRON, one of the leaders of measuring instruments in Japan, it is better to weigh oneself not only in the morning but in the evening, too. OMRON says that this practice allows one to see how various eating habits influence one's body; this, in turn, leads to faster weight loss.

For those smart phone users who want to make watching ytheir weight more fun, I would like to recommend this "kawaii (cute)" application called "SIMPLE DIET"! According to a source, this has already won great favor in Japan, China, Korea and Taiwan;

If you are also a good home cook, please find some hints to cut calories of what you eat! Food is not only a way to supply us with nutrition. It is also one of the joys of life. Learning to enjoy eating sensibly and without stress ensures that one will not simply gain weight back after dieting.

Let's Change
Avoid fried foods. Either broil, bake or steam. If you are an enthusiast of dessert, replace a part of it with fresh fruits.

Let's Add
Take in 5 or more servings of vegetables a day. Taking a glass of milk or yogurt in the morning also improves your diet

Let's Subtract
Refrain from eating snacks every day; cut the frequency of snacking to 3 times a week. If you really crave “junk food”, allow yourself a small splurge once a week.

Small changes are very worthwhile, because each change accumulates and each day of small changes accumulates too. The result is better health and weight loss.

You're Invited! Festival of Restaurants Grand Opening Feast RSVP deadline is Sunday, October 28th!

Festival of Restaurants Grand Opening Feast!

The Hong Kong Festival of Restaurants (FR) is coming!  The Hong Kong Tourism Board, in partnership with Table for Two, tablemap, OpenRice, Dry Soda, and Italian Cuisine and Wines World Summit 2012 is bringing us all this "celebration of Hong Kong’s international cuisine" (we'll bring you more on the Festival goings-ons in the coming days), that kicks off next Tuesday (October 30th) evening with the FR Grand Opening Feast! Here's more info on what is sure to be an incredible night of food and inspiration from some of the city's premiere chefs: 

Grand Opening Feast, Hong Kong - the inaugural opening event for the Hong Kong Festival of Restaurants. It will serve as the Press Conference for the Festival. This is a cornerstone event for the culinary capital of Asia. Top chefs from Hong Kong and around the world will talk about their vision for the culinary scene in this city. Each chef and restaurant has carefully crafted a dish that has been inspired by our theme colour “GREEN”.

Headlining this event will be Michelin Chefs that operate and own their own restaurants, up and coming young chefs as well as exceptional minds in the food and beverage industry. Each individual present has invested their sweat and blood to achieve their status today. In the culinary world, they are artists – inspired to dazzle their diner’s smell, taste and visuals. It is a rare opportunity to have so many artisans in a single place working their magic.

Tickets range from $800 to $1300 and include the chance to eat food created by many of Hong Kong's all-star chefs! To RSVP and buy tickets email feast@festivalofrestaurants.hk and/or go to the Cityline ticketing site. See below for the featured chefs' (including our TFT Chef Ambassador Andrea Oschetti and TFT partner, Peggy Chan!) bios:

Post from TFT Chef Ambassador Andrea Oschetti: "Dieting Demystified"

Note from the Editor: this article first appeared in the South China Morning Post on 23 October, 2012.

DIETING DEMYSTIFIED

Forget dieting: it slows your metabolism, reduces your lean mass and you accumulate toxins, soon enough you put back what you lost.

Forget counting calories: quality calories are full of nutrients, while poor calories increase our appetite. Cooking techniques are much more important than the calorie count, a chef can heal or poison by the way he cooks. Cook your food simply and quickly.

Forget the complexity of the commercially driven diet industry. The key principles for healthiness are few and simple. The goal of losing weight is already misplaced; you want to lose body fat, not just weight. Don’t relay on scales, look at the mirror. In terms of body aesthetic, toned is beautiful, skinny is not.

There are three simple rules if you aim at losing excess body fat or maintain your ideal weight: eat well, keep the metabolism active and do physical exercise.

On eating well Michel Pollan put it as simple as one’s can: "Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food". Avoid industrial food and deep fried and you are 80% on the right track.

Post from TFT Chef Ambassador Andrea Oschetti: "All You Need is Love"

Note from the Editor: this article first appeared in the South China Morning Post on 9 October, 2012. 

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE

Italians are in love with their food. We are blessed by an abundance of it by mother nature; cooking it with passion is what makes Italian food special and, we believe, our life happier.

"What you do is memorable, when you put your heart in it".  This is what grandma Elda, kept telling me when as a young boy I spent long afternoons in the warmth of her stoves. I remember waiting with anticipation for the week when she prepared the tomato sauce for the whole year. Her home was full of tomato baskets, empty bottles that need to be sterilized in boiling water, and the pots where the precious sauce was cooking for long hours. My help was much in demand and I was excused to have tomato all over my clothes: happy days. I grew up in the kitchen: the afternoons after school at my grandma's, the evenings helping my mom, who despite a long day at work never failed to prepare a fresh dinner for the family, the Sundays with my dad who after church prepared fresh pasta and his roast.

Today I continue my love affair with food as a professional private chef. I go to my client's home, or they come to mine, and I cook for them a four course Italian dinner. Why do people choose me? There are plenty of good Italian restaurant in Hong Kong, trendy and classic. At the level of cooking I am talking about the technique, the best ingredients, the atmosphere of where you eat are taken for granted, or should be. What I believe is the reason of my success is that I bring happiness at the table. I make my client happy by guiding their imagination into a journey, which rotates around an exotic land, Italy, and its culture and traditions. It is an experience, and as such is eventful, surprising and joyful. This is, I believe, what ultimate dining is about.

Meet TFT HK's Newest Chef Ambassador, Andrea Oschetti!

TFT HK is proud to announce that its newest Chef Ambassador is private chef Andrea Oschetti! Andrea is the Cuore Private Chef. He specializes in the cuisine of his native land, Italy, and is dedicated to creating truly memorable food experiences for his clients, educating the public about healthy eating and an active lifestyle, and celebrating food culture and history where ever his extensive travels take him.  He describes the development of his values and attitude regarding food on his website:

 "What you do is memorable, when you put your heart into it"

This is what grandma Elda, kept telling me when as a young boy I spent long afternoons in the warmth of her stoves. I remember waiting with anticipation for the week when she prepared the tomato sauce for the whole year. Her home was full of tomato baskets, empty bottles that need to be sterilized in boiling water, and the pots where the precious sauce was cooking for long hours. My help was much in demand and I was excused to have tomato all over my clothes: happy days. I grew up in the kitchen: the afternoons after school at my grandma's, the evenings helping my mom, who despite a long day at work never failed to prepare a fresh dinner for the family, the sundays with my dad who after church prepared fresh pasta and his roast. 

Italians are in love with their food. We are blessed by an abundance of it by mother nature; cooking it with passion is what makes italian food special and, we believe, our life happier. 

This past Monday, Andrea treated the TFT HK team to an incredible meal at his home. The Flying Winemaker, Eddie McDougall, joined the feast and generously paired his delicious wines perfectly with each dish. Thank you to Andrea and Eddie! We look forward to working with both of you, to help fight the global food imbalance!

Chef Andrea, hard at work

"The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012": FAO releases report on global hunger

The FAO has released a new hunger report, "The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012", and reveals that global hunger is declining. But 870 million people in the world are still chronically undernourished and Asia is home to the greatest number of the world's hungry people. The FAO has reported the distribution of global hunger as follows:

578 million in Asia and the Pacific
239 million in Sub-Saharan Africa
53 million in Latin America and the Caribbean
37 million in the Near East and North Africa

19 million in developed countries

Given the fact that hunger is on the decline, the report asserts that the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of cutting the prevalence of undernourishment in the developing world in half by 2015 is both possible and plausible. This goal can be reached, it further states, through sustained, responsible growth in agricultural output, accompanied by enhanced social protection for those in food and financial insecurity.  The FAO has stated that it must continue to improve its methodology and must find better, more accurate sources of data for its estimates of global hunger.

TFT HK at "Feeding the World: Asia's prospect of plenty"

Last week, members of TFT HK were invited to attend a conference on Asia's role in alleviating the global food imbalance, hosted by The Economist.  During "Feeding The World: Asia's Prospect of Plenty", held at the Harbour Grand Kowloon, "leaders from the food and agribusiness industry, government, academia and advocacy organisations" tackled this pressing and complex topic from a variety of angles.

The conference consisted of four panel discussions, break-out sessions in which participants discussed potential solutions to issues put forth by the panel speakers, and a special interview with Melinda Gates via video link. The first panel introduced the current state of food and nutrition security, globally and in Asia (Speakers: Percy Misika, FAO Representative in China, DPR Korea and Mongolia, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; Shenggen Fan, Director-general, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI); Anil Jain, Managing Director, Jain Irrigation Systems; Brett Rierson, Director, China Office, UN World Food Programme), the second touched on trade and its relation to food insecurity (Speakers: Kevin Rudd, Member, Australian Parliament for Griffith, Former Prime Minister, Government of Australia; Stan Ryan, Corporate Vice President, Cargill Agricultural Supply Chain Worldwide; Jose Cuesta, Food Price Watch author, Senior Economist, The World Bank;Saurabh Bhat, President and Managing Director, Development and Sustainable Banking, Yes Bank, India; Raoul Oberman, Chairman, McKinsey & Company Indonesia), the third focused on agriculture in Asia (Speakers: Rusman Heriawan, Vice Minister of Agriculture, Government of Indonesia via live video link from Indonesia; Tamarat Wanglee, Adviser to the Minister of Agriculture and Cooperatives, Government of Thailand; Robert Zeigler, Director-general, International Rice Research Institute; Gao Yu, China Country Director, Landesa; Claudio Torres, Regional Vice President, Asia-Pacific, Monsanto; Davor Pisk, Chief Operating Officer, Syngenta), and the fourth honed in upon health and nutrition in Asia (Speakers: Walter Dissinger, President, Nutrition & Health Division, BASF Group; Jeffrey Klein, President and Chief Executive Officer, The Global FoodBanking Network; Umran Beba, President, Asia-Pacific region, PepsiCo; Johann Vollmann, Professor and Soy bean breeder, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna).

Currently, the world produces enough food to feed all of its 7 billion people. Yet, as we so often state, 1 billion people are currently malnourished, undernourished, and/or starving. The earth's population is expected to swell to 9 billion people by 2050, and experts estimate that we must double our current food production in order to meet the projected demand. Asia as a whole is presently a net importer of food, and yet over half of the undernourished people in the world are from the Asia Pacific region; thus, as John Parker, Globalisation Editor of The Economist, stated during the conference's opening, "The future demand for food must be met by Asia itself."

The panel members argued that production must be ramped up to meet Asia's and the world's demands for food in the coming years, but warned that the use of new agricultural technology and biotechnology must be used with sustainability and environmental health in mind (China is currently using more fertilizer and pesticides than any other country in the world). They urged the world's governments to start prioritizing global food security, to invest more into agricultural research, to address issues of price signaling (several argued that food is too cheap in the developed world, and that its price should and must reflect social impacts such as carbon emissions), to provide support for smallholder farmers (who make up the largest percentage of the world's farmers), and to attend to issues surrounding land rights and food waste (in developing countries, food waste largely occurs post-harvest, because of inadequate storage facilities; in the developed world, most food waste is produced by consumers, after purchase). The issue of food security is incredibly complex: we have the technology to increase food production, but it is often too expensive for, and thus inaccessible to, those who need it most.  In addition, the use of such technology (especially genetically modified organisms and chemical inputs) may have long-term costs that outweigh the benefits of their use. Moreover, prosperity and adequate calories may not mean optimal health – many in the developed world suffer from nutritional insufficiencies; obesity; and so-called “lifestyle” diseases, related to diet.

Global food security is a complicated, multi-faceted issue—one that often feels too big for us to address as individuals or even as organizations. Though we cannot easily and simply “solve” the global food imbalance, we can make a difference, by engaging in dialogue and continuing to seek solutions; raising awareness; and taking small steps toward healthier, more balanced food systems. Many thanks to The Economist, for creating an opportunity to discuss global food security, for inviting TFT HK to join the conversation, and for donating to our organization.