What's really in our oce-cream

During my travels to LA, I was lucky enough to meet and chat with John Robbins the once heir to the Baskin Robbins ice cream fortune. John grew up in a family where ice cream was an everyday accepted food source. During his informed years, it was considered John would take over the family business and continue the success of his late Uncle and father in the Global Empire that his family had built from a small store in Glendale, California, back in 1953.

Indifferent to his family, from an early age John was aware of just what this amount of sugar and dairy was doing to the people around him, his uncle died of a massive heartache which was considered due to his eating habits and John could see other family members going the same way. Rather than inheriting the family business John Robbins used his moral compass to guide him into a career of uncovering the truth behind the Frankenstein food industry and is now an acclaimed author of No Happy Cows and The Food Revolution.

One of the alarming topics I discovered during our meeting was the rapid increase in infants growing breasts. Babies on milk formula in China have shown levels of oestrogen as high as that of a fully grown woman. The company who produce the formula claim the growth hormone has been added during the rearing of the livestock. There are no regulations currently in place in China or the US banning the use of bovine growth hormones and with global export at an all time high, how do we know what is in the products we buy.

The recent horse meat scandal has at least left us with a lesson of think about the food we eat. My meeting with John, left me with a renewed hunger for education and whistle blowing. To meet a man who stood to inherit billions of dollars and who is willing to draw attention to the fact that his family’s company Baskin Robbins and others such as Haagen Dazs are using milk from cows injected with the Bovine growth hormone is inspired.

His lobbying has grabbed the attention of major food distributors such as Starbucks and Ben and Jerry’s to acquire their milk from dairy’s pledged to not inject with growth hormone. My quest for foods that taste great but are healthy and benefit the body continues, each day I create a new recipe that I can add to my repertoire. During my time in LA the joy of being able to go into a Supermarket and grab an organic, dairy free, gluten free chocolate fudge cake and know exactly what 5 ingredients went into making it was liberating.

Now back in the UK and back in My Rawchi Kitchen I’m keeping the momentum going, to educate and inspire people with their relationship with food. If you really knew that together with growth hormones, there is also the chemical Diethyl glycol, which is used in anti-freeze and paint stripper in your tub of ice-cream would you be so keen to feed it to the family? For gluten free and dairy free ice cream recipes, check out my Rawchi chocolate book.

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