Concordia Journal Home > Archives > March 4, 2010 issue >

Iron chef serves up vegan treats 

It was the TV networks that established an audience for real-time competitive cooking, not the most obvious spectator sport.

So when CSU Sustainability VP Alex Oster brought Iron Chef to campus he made sure that CUTV streamed the activity in the 7th floor kitchen live to an audience eager to watch how home team Cameron Fenton and Mathew Baron would fare against the Iron Chef Douglas McNish of Toronto’s Raw Aura Restaurant.

“We wanted to showcase a culture of food that does not involve meat or animal products,” said Oster. The event reinforced the CSU’s recent adoption of a policy to make sure that all sponsored events offer animal-free dietary choices.

He also threw in a different twist, Oster used the event to cap Green Month and made it all vegan. In fact, the chefs making gold out of sweet potatoes were the (dairy-free) icing on the cake. Students were invited to meet with a number of representatives of vegan and raw-food student associations, restaurants and caterers in an information fair before the final judging took place.

President Judith Woodsworth was among the dignitaries on-hand to judge the final dishes after things heated up for an hour in the kitchen. Also evaluating were raw food chef Marie-Geneviève Lamothe and outspoken vegan professional hockey player Georges Laraque.

In the end Iron Chef McNish took home the prize, but everyone left with some sweet options to answer the question: “what’s for dinner?”