SBS’s newest podcast Should You Really Eat That? explores the cultural, social and nutritional confusion over food staples with host Lee Tran Lam looking at why some food choices (like salt or olive oil in your coffee??) get a bad rap in Australia yet are enthusiastically consumed in other parts of the world.
Host of Should You Really Eat That, Lee Tran Lam
Alongside chefs, restaurateurs, and dieticians, Lam looks at topics like sustainable seafood and why white rice has a bad reputation.
Lam said:
“The idea for the podcast started when I read a dietician’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.
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?”
The first episode is all rice. It features the co-owner of Sydney’s Chat Thai restaurants and host of SBS’s Water Heart Food, Palisa Anderson, describing eating a Thai sticky rice that literally translates as ‘this rice is so good, I’ve forgotten about my husband‘.
Anderson says:
“Consuming rice is so ingrained in Asian countries that the main greeting in places like the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam is, ‘have you eaten rice yet? In Japan, the names of meals translate as morning rice, noon rice, and evening rice.”
Rice’s reputation has suffered due to a high glycaemic index and fears of food poisoning from not being properly refrigerated.
Apparently though rice also gets a nutritional boost from being left out to cool.
“So, we have a bit of a complex story there with rice, don’t we? You can cook it and cool it and it’s good for you. But cool it really quickly and put it back in the fridge, so it doesn’t do any harm,” says Dr Evangeline Mantzioris, program director of Nutrition and Food Sciences at the University of South Australia.
A balance of sweet personal stories and salty truths about the foods many adore, Should You Really Eat That? gets to the bottom of the bowl of how we should eat. The six episode series will be available weekly from Thursday October 12 on SBS Audio, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and other streaming platforms.
Guests include:
- Good Fish ambassador and Attica’s Ben Shrewry on which seafood is actually sustainable to eat.
- 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 a good coffee.
- Vannella Cheese’s second-generation cheesemaker Giuseppe Minoia on how he couldn’t give away burrata two decades ago – and now it’s on every restaurant menu.
- Indigenous chef Chris Jordan and owner of Brisbane’s Three Little Birds on using seafood to tell a story about the environment; he also uses seafood to teach incarcerated youth how to cook.
- Start The Spread’s Xinyi Lim on the power of sending people sourdough starter during the pandemic.
- Smith & Daughters’ Shannon Martinez on producing vegan cheese you actually want to eat.
- Sebastien Syidalza on being a French baker making gluten-free bread at his Sebastien Sans Gluten patisserie in Sydney.