Her overarching mission is simple – connect people with food and get them cooking .
It ’ s a completely free , curriculum-aligned resource , but it ’ s designed to go beyond the home economics or food science , into every subject . “ So , as a dietitian , if you ' ve got a picky-eating client , you can suggest to the parents that maybe they listen to Nomcast ( Zaslavsky ’ s podcast ) on the way home , or send the
Phenomenom link to their child ’ s teacher , or that they do a little bit of remote learning from home and look at the videos or try out some activities .”
Her most recent project has been In Praise of Veg , a 500-page reference book about vegetables , but it ’ s not the dry monolith you might expect . Alice feels that veggies have had a rough ride in people ’ s minds , and somewhere along the ‘ healthy eating ’ highway , the simple messages about delicious , fresh , flavoursome food have been lost – “ Just cook food that makes your heart sing . Connect with it . Find the joy in it yourself and it oozes out of you and bounces out of your face . Hedonism and health should not be mutually exclusive ”.
A strong proponent of the healing power of food , Zaslavsky believes that it ’ s far more resonant to talk in terms of ‘ function ’ over ‘ flavonoids ’. “ One of the key aspects that sets our food literacy resources apart is that when we do speak to kids about nutrition , it ’ s through the lens of ‘ functional benefits ’, because research shows that ’ s what most interests them . I don ’ t actually think that changes too much into adulthood .” The book contains Functional Benefits for many of the entries , focusing on a whole-family approach to feeling your best by upping your veg .
In Praise of Veg celebrates vegetables , their texture , warts and all . Zaslavsky is an advocate for accessible , real food , saying “ the fetishisation of perfect-looking produce only makes it more inaccessible for people who can ' t afford it . When we first came to Australia , Mum and dad had to leave everything behind . They took a little while to get work so my childhood meals depended very much on what cheap root veg mum could find to the side of the green-grocer and cooking all of that up into a borscht or a vegetable soup on a Sunday night , which would then be our afterschool meal for the week ”.
© Dietitian Connection 18 Infuse | November 2020