Hot Plate

What has Covid revealed to us about our food system? Joshna and Mirella delve into what’s next and the great opportunity we have to rebuild a stronger, better connected, more sustainable food system. Vive la revolution! --- On this special series of HotPlate Podcast, craft beer and sensory consultant Mirella Amato, and chef and activist Joshna Maharaj, examine the impact Covid has had on every aspect of our food system, all the way from farm to table. How have things changed? What’s going...

On this special series of HotPlate Podcast, craft beer and sensory expert Mirella Amato, and chef and activist Joshna Maharaj, examine the impact Covid has had on every aspect of our food system, all the way from farm to table. How have things changed? What’s going on behind the scenes? The answers to these questions are often surprising and will help strengthen our connection to our food. www.hotplatepod.com

What is food security? What does it mean and how is it evaluated? Mirella and Joshna explore food security in Canada before and after the pandemic. What they find is daunting to say the least. But what are the potential solutions? --- On this special series of HotPlate Podcast, craft beer and sensory consultant Mirella Amato, and chef and activist Joshna Maharaj, examine the impact Covid has had on every aspect of our food system, all the way from farm to table. How have things changed?...

On this special series of HotPlate Podcast, craft beer and sensory expert Mirella Amato, and chef and activist Joshna Maharaj, examine the impact Covid has had on every aspect of our food system, all the way from farm to table. How have things changed? What’s going on behind the scenes? The answers to these questions are often surprising and will help strengthen our connection to our food. www.hotplatepod.com

Mirella and Joshna dig into how Covid-10 has impacted our relationship with food at home. Home gardening has had quite the renaissance, which - unlike other DIY Covid trends - has persisted into 2021. Home cooking and eating family meals together has also had a boom. Both provide benefits as well as significant challenges! ---- On this special series of HotPlate Podcast, craft beer and sensory consultant Mirella Amato, and chef and activist Joshna Maharaj, examine the impact Covid has had...

On this special series of HotPlate Podcast, craft beer and sensory expert Mirella Amato, and chef and activist Joshna Maharaj, examine the impact Covid has had on every aspect of our food system, all the way from farm to table. How have things changed? What’s going on behind the scenes? The answers to these questions are often surprising and will help strengthen our connection to our food. www.hotplatepod.com

Mirella and Joshna discover what’s interesting about fast food ‘restaurants’: despite the fact they suffered financially in the early days of the pandemic, some of them have bounced back to record profits. Why is that? Next, they cover the disjoint between the increase in coffee consumption during the pandemic and decreased sales. This being said, it’s a good news story because coffee chains, like fast food chains, are doing just fine! --- On this special series of HotPlate Podcast, craft...

On this special series of HotPlate Podcast, craft beer and sensory expert Mirella Amato, and chef and activist Joshna Maharaj, examine the impact Covid has had on every aspect of our food system, all the way from farm to table. How have things changed? What’s going on behind the scenes? The answers to these questions are often surprising and will help strengthen our connection to our food. www.hotplatepod.com

Mirella ad Joshna move through the Covid-19 timeline as it affected bars. Lockdowns and safety regulations made running bars very challenging, but legal changes were made in Ontario (and elsewhere in Canada) to help bars, alcohol producers, and restaurants. Many of these newly permissive laws are now permanent - like selling bottles with take-out! They’re sorely overdue, and will continue to positively impact the sector over the course of its long recovery. But there are still problems in...

On this special series of HotPlate Podcast, craft beer and sensory expert Mirella Amato, and chef and activist Joshna Maharaj, examine the impact Covid has had on every aspect of our food system, all the way from farm to table. How have things changed? What’s going on behind the scenes? The answers to these questions are often surprising and will help strengthen our connection to our food. www.hotplatepod.com

Alcohol buying habits have changed wildly over the course of the pandemic, and that impacted alcohol producers massively. On the one hand, people bought lots of alcohol, but on the other hand people weren’t visiting wineries, distilleries, breweries, restaurants, and bars. Production was impacted too. Thankfully, smart adaptation and smarter pivots kept the producers afloat in the hardest of times. Due to the long timescales involved in producing many alcoholic beverages, shutting down was...

This episode starts with the devastation that has occurred, and is ongoing, in the restaurant industry. But then, watching carefully, we noticed ways restaurants pivoted in order to survive. Finally we explore theories that Covid has provided an opportunity for an industry deeply in need of a “reset” to make long overdue changes. -- On this special series of HotPlate Podcast, craft beer and sensory consultant Mirella Amato, and chef and activist Joshna Maharaj, examine the impact Covid has...

On this special series of HotPlate Podcast, craft beer and sensory expert Mirella Amato, and chef and activist Joshna Maharaj, examine the impact Covid has had on every aspect of our food system, all the way from farm to table. How have things changed? What’s going on behind the scenes? The answers to these questions are often surprising and will help strengthen our connection to our food. www.hotplatepod.com

There have been significant changes to our grocery shopping habits over the course of the pandemic. There was a rude awakening when supply chains initially broke down, leaving store shelves empty. Then came a rampant adoption of online grocery shopping as we avoided encountering the virus. Finally in the evolution, consumers have slowly rediscovered the joy of buying their food directly from the source: farmers. This brings us to farmers markets, the curious space they occupy, and our...

Have you noticed the dizzying changes in junk food offerings over the course of the pandemic? We did. And don’t worry. No judgement here! Most of us are in the same boat. In this episode Mirella and Joshna look at this phenomenon, first, from a consumer perspective. Why was there a junk food boom? Then, they delve into the company perspective, trying to address the question: who really decides what we eat? --- On this special series of HotPlate Podcast, craft beer and sensory consultant...

On this special series of HotPlate Podcast, craft beer and sensory expert Mirella Amato, and chef and activist Joshna Maharaj, examine the impact Covid has had on every aspect of our food system, all the way from farm to table. How have things changed? What’s going on behind the scenes? The answers to these questions are often surprising and will help strengthen our connection to our food. www.hotplatepod.com

Joshna and Mirella start by examining the connection between factory farming of animals and zoonoses, like Covid-19. Although the virus did not originate from a factory farm, if nothing is done to improve how we farm animals, there’s a good chance our next pandemic will. Working conditions in meat packing plants were big news, with outbreaks in facilities across the country. But what was behind the the headlines? Oh boy… what we found will make your blood boil. The antidote to this...

On this special series of HotPlate Podcast, craft beer and sensory expert Mirella Amato, and chef and activist Joshna Maharaj, examine the impact Covid has had on every aspect of our food system, all the way from farm to table. How have things changed? What’s going on behind the scenes? The answers to these questions are often surprising and will help strengthen our connection to our food. www.hotplatepod.com

We’re at the beginning. That is to say - on the farm! First Mirella and Joshna spend some time analysing what happened with all the ‘dairy dumping’ and food waste that was reported early in the pandemic. The transactional nature of agriculture is revealed, which includes how we handled surpluses when covid shook up demand. (Trigger warning: we discuss some inflammatory language in the media about how farm animals were treated. That said we don’t go into any vivid detail.) We also dig into...

Sometimes it feels like we’re living inside a machine. In the case of our food, we kind of are. With Covid lingering and impacting just about everything, beer and sensory consultant Mirella Amato, and chef and food activist Joshna Maharaj, decided to take a look at how Covid has affected our food. This leads them to a step-by-step exploration of “the food system”, the complex web of people and activities involving the production, processing, transport, and consumption of our food - which...