By Leigh O’Connor.
Demystify the world of food and nutrition with the insight of acclaimed Chefs, restaurateurs and dietitians at a time when eating the ‘right thing’ is challenging with new SBS food podcast – ‘Should You Really Eat That?’
Should you actually put olive oil or salt in your coffee as recent food trends suggest? Which seafood is actually sustainable? These questions and many more are answered in this six-part series, which drops its first episode on Thursday, October 12 and then weekly.
Hosted by food writer, Lee Tran Lam, get ready to explore the cultural, social and nutritional confusion over the staples in our diet, such as rice, bread, tea, coffee, cheese and seafood.
The subject is so confusing, Attica award-winning Chef Ben Shewry (who appears in the seafood podcast) took finned fish on his menu for two years, being unsure what to ethically serve.
Lee Tran Lam uncovers why some foods get a bad rap in Australia, yet are enthusiastically consumed in other parts of the world.
"The idea for the podcast started when I read a dietitian’s advice that they’d never put white rice in their shopping trolley, yet the grain feeds millions around the world and so many national dishes are built around white rice,” she explains.
"Similarly, humans have also been eating bread for thousands of years, but there’s now so much anti-bread sentiment. So, in the podcast we try to make sense of that: what’s happening to shift our perceptions and palates?”
A delight for food lovers, ‘Should You Really Eat That?’ seeks to find out where these assumptions come from, how they differ between cultures and sifts out the grains of truth.
First up on the menu in Thursday’s initial episode is rice where co-owner of Sydney’s Chat Thai restaurant and host of SBS’s ‘Water Heart Food’, Palisa Anderson describes eating a Thai sticky rice dish that literally translates as ‘this rice is so good, I’ve forgotten about my husband’.
The six-episode podcast also features guests including:
Dr Quan Vuong from the University of Newcastle reveals how to extract the most health benefits from your tea and whether you should actually drink it at yum cha.
Sydney roasters Nawar Adra (Stitch) and Rowena Chansiri (Ickle) share their expertise on how to make really good coffee.
Second-generation cheesemaker, Giuseppe Minola discusses how he couldn’t give burrata away two decades ago and now it is on every restaurant menu.
Indigenous Chef and owner of Brisbane’s Three Little Birds, Chris Jordan explains how he uses seafood to tell a story about the environment as well as teaching incarcerated youth how to cook.
‘Start the Spread’s’ Xinyl Lim talks about the power of sending people sourdough starter during the pandemic.
Smith & Daughters’ Shannon Martinez shows us how to produce vegan cheese you would actually want to eat and French baker Sebastien Suidalza shares the secrets of making gluten-free bread at his Sebastien Sans Gluten patisserie in Sydney.
‘Should You Really Eat That?’ is available to listen to on SBS Audio, Spotify, Apple Podcast and other streaming platforms from Thursday, October 12.
