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The Current Transcript for January 6, 2021

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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SOUNDCLIP

You need to think we're all in this together, you know, and none of us are safe if everyone is safe and somehow we haven't been able to in these times to make those common appeals.

MATT GALLOWAY: In the midst of this pandemic with cases skyrocketing in many parts of the country, it's hard to think about what life will look like whenever we get to the other side. Fareed Zakaria has been thinking about that and he says it's up to us in 30 minutes. The author and CNN host is here to talk about what our post pandemic world could be from work and globalisation to our relationship with the natural world and each other. Also this morning, one of the effects of these indoor times is that our usual ways to connect have gone out the window. No worries. There's an app for that or apps in an hour, how technology is offering creative ways for us to get together. When these times are done, the first thing I'm doing after, of course, hugging my parents is throwing a dinner party.

SOUNDCLIP

Food and sitting and sharing food is about peace or it's about trying to understand the other person.

MG: Food means so much to so many to refugees forced to flee their homes. It can be a point of connexion to a culture they left behind and a way into their new lives. Coming up, three contributors to a new cookbook from the U.N. refugee agency in Canada on the cultural ties of a good meal. We begin, though, with your questions on the vaccines. We all have many questions and the doctors are here with answers. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current.

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Experts answer your questions about COVID-19 vaccines

Guests: Dr. Lisa Barrett, Dr. Gerald Evans

MG: It has been three weeks since the first delivery of covid vaccines in Canada, and critics say the rollout is going too slowly amid skyrocketing cases. Thus far, just over one hundred doses have been administered. And Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had this to say yesterday.

SOUNDCLIP

We have seen some challenges that I think we're all impatient about in terms of getting those vaccines into arms. But we are confident and very hopeful that over the coming weeks the challenges will be overcome and the federal government will continue to work closely with the provinces on ensuring that we're able to get these vaccines out to the most vulnerable and to our frontline workers as quickly as possible.

MG: Meanwhile, many Canadians still have unanswered questions about when it will be their turn and what the vaccine will mean for themselves or their loved ones. Dr. Lisa Barrett is a clinician scientist with expertise in infectious disease and immunology at Dalhousie University in Halifax. And Dr. Gerald Evans is an infectious disease specialist at Queen's University in Kingston Health Sciences Centre, and they are here with us to help answer some of your questions. Good morning to you both.

DR. GERALD EVANS: Good morning.

DR. LISA BARRETT: Good morning.

MG: Dr. Barrett. Before we get to some of our listener questions, how would you just briefly assess Canada's vaccine rollout thus far?

DR. LISA BARRETT: Well, I honestly think it is a little bit more complex than we haven't rolled things out quickly. Certainly, you know, the vaccine is the fourth tool in our toolbox to prevent infection. So I think there's a lot of room for us to move more quickly and more innovatively in how we deliver them. But I don't think it's been a disaster so far. What would be a disaster if we keep going slowly and now we have an opportunity to really look at some innovation and do things differently around the country.

MG: Dr. Evans, as of the 3rd of January, Canada has administered 0.31 vaccines for every 100 residents. That's a lower number than Israel, which is 14.4 per100. Britain is 1.39. In the United States is 1.28. Taking Lisa's point that this is a complex issue, the question that a lot of people are asking is, why are we waiting? What's behind these lower numbers?

DR. GERALD EVANS: Well, I think, you know, a lot of it has to do with to the countries that the geography is a little bit different than what we have here in Canada. And I think also in terms of the impact that covid-19 has had in those particular countries and everyone has been planning to get their vaccine programmes up and running, I think somewhere a little bit quicker, perhaps off the mark. But, I would agree with with Dr. Barrett. I mean, a lot of this does relate to the fact that we were really only expecting vaccine right about now. And in fact, we're a good month ahead of that schedule in terms of the delivery and approval of vaccines here in Canada. So it is a complex issue. And I think what we can do is learn from these other places what they've done that has been very successful in their rollout.

MG: Dr. Barrett, one of the things that people have been asking is why aren't we giving vaccines to people 24 hours a day, seven days a week? I mean, I can go and get an MRI at three o'clock in the morning because that's when the technology is available. Why aren't we giving vaccines to people 24/7?

DR. LISA BARRETT: Well, I would say that's not a terrible idea. I mean, if 2020 was brought to us by the letter V for virus, now it's going to be vaccine. And there's really no great reason as long as you have people around to monitor for that 15 minute period after your vaccine that we could be doing this 24 hours a day. To do that, we're going to have to generate enough capacity from a human resource perspective to do it. And in order to do that and not take people from front lines and other public health jobs, we're going to have to think really seriously and hard and well about other resources within our communities that can help us do that 24 hour plan.

MG: What do you make of the idea of draughting in other health care workers? There's been talk of perhaps bringing in workers from other parts of health care, bringing in people who perhaps have retired from health care, making a greater use of nurses within this or pharmacists. Is that what we need?

DR. LISA BARRETT: Well, I really, really like the idea of taking something like a vaccine and making sure the community is able to both own it and help co-lead it with the community. So, yeah, for sure. Different kinds of health associated professionals. I'm pretty sure can be taught to do one particular task very well, like an injection with some oversight and minimal training. And then why not think more aggressively about changing our registration processes so that they're streamlined and allowing some community folks who have capacity to volunteer and or get paid to help out on either end of that situation. So we're not using critical health resources and human resources to do things that don't necessarily always require a registered health professional. I think it's a great idea.

MG: One of the other questions is just around the vaccine itself. Some health officials are saying that for now, people should just be given one instead of two doses so that more people can have some degree of immunity. Quebec is going to delay the second shot of the Pfizer vaccine so more frontline workers can have one dose. Yesterday, Dr. Teresa Tam had this to say.

SOUNDCLIP

All I would like to really strongly emphasise is that Canada is committed to a two those vaccine regimen, given what the supply situation and the uncertainties in December, people were holding back that sort of second dose. Now, I think with a bit more certainty in the supply, I think provinces are looking towards not holding back that second dose.

MG: We have a lot of listener questions on this, including one from Susan Wilkins who wrote, after hearing about the government thinking around administering half doses and or inoculating people with one brand first and maybe then a second brand for the second dose. I found this news really quite stressful. People are already wondering if they should get the vaccine. Now, I feel like a guinea pig. Dr. Evans, is the possibility of of delaying those second doses or inoculating people with one brand of one vaccine, first in another brand for the second dose? Is that a good idea from your perspective?

DR. GERALD EVANS: Well, at the moment, no, because there's not much science to back it up and the only country that has really sort of pushed the idea of what we call mix and match, so different vaccines for the first and second dose has been the UK. And I don't think that that programme has been rolled out substantially. The other thing that I heard was this issue around half dose. I've seen no recommendations anywhere in the world for a half dose. And I think part of that is extrapolated from the fact that the AstraZeneca Oxford vaccine clinical trial, there was a bit of a problem in the early part of that trial where a half dose was given as the first dose and a full dose for the second one. And that seemed to have in that subgroup in the analysis that suggests that it was more efficacious. But I don't think I've seen or heard anyone really propose that people receive a half dose of the vaccine.

MG: Dr. Barrett, is there any room for a creativity but in in a pandemic where you want to get as many people, you know, vaccinated with something as quickly as possible, is there any room for for wiggle room there?

DR. LISA BARRETT: So there's a little bit more to it. I mean, the half dose business also comes from the fact that Moderna, which was part of the warp speed programme in the U.S. and also had an association with the NIH, they're officially testing that at 50 or 100 percent because it looked to be the same immunologic response really early in phase two. But really, that's not a prime time thing. That really is an experiment and shouldn't be rolled out in terms of the one dose or different dose strategies, really, if we can at this point, following the right suggested protocol is very much the best thing to do, but when might you suggest not doing that or at least delaying the second dose? And I do want to make clear that there's a difference in delaying the second dose beyond the 21 or 28 day optimal to the 12 weeks maximum. That's what most places are considering doing, not offering one dose schedule, which is a very different thing. If there some place where you might do that? Well, if your cases are overwhelming and you really, really, really want to start to get cases down. But again, we don't necessarily know that that's always the best bet and certainly not a one dose strategy from an immune perspective. We want to give people the best immunity. And I don't want people to forget that we have those other bits in our toolbox, testing, masking, distancing, handwashing that actually do also prevent virus. And if places aren't able to get those down pat, we are going to see a lot of cases while we're waiting for vaccine to roll out. So short of that is best to go with what we know the science says, because that's based on good science of immunity and the data and people. No two, delay maybe if you've got overwhelming cases. But number three, please don't give up on the things we know that are already in the toolbox to prevent this virus.

MG: All right. We have a lot of questions. I'm going to try and move through as many of these as efficiently as I can. This comes from Chen Changgeng, who emailed: I'm 82 years old with COPD and staying at home. Would I get a notice from the health authority when I can get the vaccine or should I apply by phone or online? Dr. Barrett, I think a lot of us are wondering, well, how are we going to know when it's our turn?

DR. LISA BARRETT: Yeah, yeah, it's a great question, as everyone is very familiar and everyone keeps repeating, the actual logistics and details of the rollout are going to look different in each province if that provincially provided plan with federal support. And so most provinces are taking advantage of existing records, census records, university records and family doctor office records, previous immunisation records, if they have any, to reach out to people. But as well as that works, and I'm sure we're going to reach most people that way. I also encourage people to make sure that they're watching social social media, that they're in an age group that's appropriate and also their public health office, as well as their government sites to keep an eye out for announcements that will be there. But the short answer is, I would be a little bit proactive in a big effort like this and make sure that I was checking every state I could to know when it was my turn.

MG: Virginia Kerry picked up on this saying that I'm a retired health care professional who lost my GP. So if people don't have a family doctor, how are they going to know?

DR. LISA BARRETT: Yes, and there is, as I said, census data. And there's also different forms of, you know, governmental registration that gets done tons of different ways to do this. And I know every province is looking at doing it differently. But again, nothing wrong with being proactive and keeping an eye out and checking in when it looks to be that people in your group, whomever they may be, are getting vaccinated. I will say that the general population is probably going to be quite a while. But for older folks, especially as in the case of your first questionnaire, that would be a really good thing for them to keep an eye on, particularly in late spring in most provinces.

MG: One more question on this. And this comes from a listener in Ontario.

SOUNDCLIP

Hi, my name is Catherine Bauer and I'm calling from Kumara, Ontario. My mother's in her 80s, living independently and alone in a condominium. I'm concerned about where she fits in the list of priorities for vaccination since she doesn't live in a long term care facility or even a seniors home. How did she get on the list?

MG: Dr. Evans, do you have any insight there as to when someone like that living on their own might be able to get the vaccine?

DR. GERALD EVANS: Well, I mean, I can certainly speak to what's happening here in Ontario, which is that those particular individuals, elderly persons living on their own form, a sort of second priority group within that first phase of rollout for the vaccine. So they are going to be using administrative data that we have in our health system to be able to reach out to those individuals and to look to contact them in order to make them aware that they will be on the list and then to wait for a second announcement that would come out that would suggest where they can go or if they're unable to travel, to be able to have a travelling immunisation team go out to them. So, I think I would sort of echo Dr. Barrett's comments. It's going to vary from province to province is how they deal with this. And I think that recommendation she made about being proactive and working with your family, perhaps if you're not technologically savvy to go check a website or whatever, would be the route to go. And I've certainly had and I'm sure Dr. Barrett has as well, all kinds of contact and correspondence from people who are asking that exact question. So really, right now, it's a matter of where that is moving in each province, because we certainly keep track of things, thankfully, for a universal health system, you know, the age and the registration data on people and hopefully, if that's up to date, contacting them should not be particularly difficult.

MG: Question from Linda Bush, who emailed to ask Who cannot be immunised against covid. I've heard that those on blood thinners and diabetics are excluded. Is this true, Dr. Evans?

DR. GERALD EVANS: Well, right now, I mean, just even recently, although there were not a lot of enrolees within the clinical trial who were pregnant or her immunosuppressed, there were individuals within that. And what we've seen so far with the data that's been gathered, as with the rollout of the vaccine around the world, is that there do not appear to be a significant number of problems in people with underlying immunosuppressive disorders, women who are pregnant or breastfeeding. And so I think, although I should always say it's on a case by case basis and you should speak with your physician, right now I don't personally see that as a barrier to immunising those individuals. Those with bleeding disorders, really relate to the fact that if you're sticking a needle into a muscle and you have an underlying problem with clotting, you can create a haematoma in that area, which can be painful and increase the possibility of a local reaction. But that's a kind of universal issue around all people who receive immunisations. And nowadays we use a smaller needle. And, you know, if it's done properly with someone with skill, it shouldn't be an absolute contraindication to them receiving the vaccine.

MG: All right, let's get through some more of these questions. Patricia Lawrence asks if someone has a covid positive test. Do they still need to get the job or do they have immunity, Dr. Barrett?

DR. LISA BARRETT: Great question. The studies that we have have not included, for the most part, deliberately, people with an exposure to covid-19. So we don't know exactly how much more immunity they would get from the natural infection itself. There is reported, at least in the test tube and may be clinically meaning how you react to every exposure to be some immunity. But we really don't have a good handle on the robustness of that immunity after a natural infection and how long it lasts. So the advice at the moment is that it seems to be safe to give these vaccines to people who have been previously exposed to covid. But also, if you've had covid, I would not avoid getting the vaccine at this point because we don't know how long that immunity lasts that you had before and what the quality of it was. At this point go for it.

MG: Well, and this next question kind of picks up on that. In some ways it's going to influence people's behaviour. Nel Keith emailed to say: once you have been vaccinated, can you still be a covid carrier and infect others? Dr. Evans, do you have any thoughts on that?

DR. GERALD EVANS: Yeah, we we really are just really studying that question right now. So the one thing that seems to be apparent is that there is some protective immunity from the vaccine. That is, we know that people who receive the vaccine when compared to people who didn't had a much lower rate of symptomatic infection. The issue then becomes is it provides something we call transmission immunity. That is, being immunised, does that prevent you from then carrying the virus and potentially transmitting it to others? That would be an incredibly useful effect. And that's currently being studied right now by following up patients who were in the original trials, as well as the ongoing trials that are enrolling others. So we don't know that at the moment. So I would go back again to Dr. Barrett's suggestion in somebody who deals with infection prevention control. We're going to have to continue with all of the other measures that are in place. We need to physically distance. We need masks. We need to wash our hands. We need to do all of those things until we can answer this question based on on a study of further study of the transmission that occurs in someone who has received the vaccine.

MG: Dr. Barrett, that's the big question, I think, because we got another you know, this comes from Andrew Zo saying, if I got vaccinated, do I still need to be in lockdown mode? A lot of us are wondering how long these lockdowns are going to continue as more people get vaccinated.

DR. LISA BARRETT: Yeah, you know, boy, I am one of those people that really, really want this to be done.

MG: You and me both.

DR. LISA BARRETT: I want to never say pandemic again for like two weeks, but we're not there yet. And especially as we start to see other versions of this virus show up in different places, I think I consider us to be in a better place in the pandemic, but nowhere near the end. And what I mean by that is our toolbox needs to keep building tools into it, the handwashing, distancing, prevention, testing as prevention, and then vaccines as another huge tool of prevention at a personal and population level. But you notice, I'm never saying we're going to stop doing a lot of those things soon. We've got months of this yet. The vaccine is an amazing addition, but we're still in it for a bit of a haul yet. And I have a feeling Canadians are going to get their head around that soon. But I recognise everyone's tired, so we got a bit of time yet. No, you can't just go and get a vaccine one day and forget that the P word exists the next day.

MG: But in the meantime, Dr. Evans, we just have a few seconds left. You're confident in the rollout thus far? I mean, it is early days and there have been questions around this. But but you're confident overall that we're going to get this right?

DR. GERALD EVANS: Oh, absolutely. And again, I have to reinforce the fact that we are learning and sharing information globally around all of the right strategies to use. It varies country to country, of course, but I'm confident that by the end of this year, I wouldn't be so bold to say September, but by the end of 2021, we should have a substantial number of the population immunised and vaccinated, and that will help to begin the process of moving forward. And as Dr. Barrett said, I think we're looking at at least another year of these kinds of measures in order to control the pandemic.

MG: I would like to have you both back because we have so many questions and we only got to have a handful of them. In the meantime, I really appreciate your insight this morning. Thank you very much.

DR. GERALD EVANS: Thank you.

DR. LISA BARRETT: Thank you.

m: Dr. Lisa Barrett, a clinician scientist with expertise in infectious disease and immunology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Dr. Gerald Evans, infectious disease specialist at Queen's University in Kingston. Thanks to all of you for your questions. Coming up on the programme after the CBC News.

SOUNDCLIP

What we have realised is that we can really do almost anything online. It doesn't mean we will. It doesn't mean we should do it, but we can that the capacity exists. And so you're going to start, I think, have this great sort of what's going to go online, what's going to stay.

MG: Fareed Zakaria on lessons. Or our post pandemic world whenever we get there. I'm Matt Galloway this is The Current, we're back in six minutes.

CNN host Fareed Zakaria on a post-pandemic world

Guest: Fareed Zakaria

MG: Good morning, I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current.

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MG: Still to come, many cultures call Canada home, and a new cookbook chronicles the foods and flavours that refugees to this country carried with them. But first, lessons to learn from covid.

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WHO has been assessing this outbreak around the clock, and we're deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity and by the alarming levels of inaction. We have therefore made the assessment that covid-19 can be characterised as a pandemic.

MG: Feels like a lifetime ago, in March of 2020, the secretary general of the World Health Organisation confirmed what so many had feared; the novel coronavirus was a worldwide pandemic. In the months since, covid-19 has killed more than one point eight million people worldwide, including more than 16000 Canadians. The death toll in the United States is a staggering 350000 people, and pretty much every aspect of our day to day life has been upended. Fareed Zakaria has some advice for this reeling world. He is the host of CNN's flagship international affairs programme, Fareed Zakaria GPS. And his new book is called Ten Lessons for a Post Pandemic World. Fareed Zakaria. Good morning.

FAREED ZAKARIA: Welcome, Matt- Sorry. Thank you for having me on.

MG: Welcome to our programme.

FAREED ZAKARIA: I'm used to being the Host myself.

MG: It's great to have you here. What went through your mind when you heard the WHO announce that a pandemic was confronting this world by that point?

FAREED ZAKARIA: If you remember people who you know, I have been talking to medical experts and scientists and it was pretty clear that it was already happening. I already, in a sense, knew what was happening. Tedros, the WHO president was a bit slow to act initially. Many of the things the WHO has done have actually been quite good, in fact, very good in poor countries, but they were somewhat slow off the mark. So that was really a final confirmation of what we already knew.

MG: You write about this in the book that in October of 2013, Johns Hopkins University rated the United States as the country best prepared to handle a pandemic. What happened?

FAREED ZAKARIA: I think the best way to think about it is imagine if you have a gleaming set of Porsches and Maseratis and, you know, the most extraordinary equipment in your garage. But you don't really know how to drive. You haven't maintained them. You haven't you know, in many cases, maybe you forgot to put gas in the tank, petrol in the tank. They're not going to drive very well. What happened with the United States is it has at the very high end, without any question, the best health and medical establishment in the world, not just the CDC and the NIH with all its scientists, but, you know, Johns Hopkins itself and the Cleveland Clinic and the Mayo Clinic. But for the last 40 years, the United States has gutted the heart of day to day administrative government, really ever since the Reagan Thatcher revolution. And what I say in the book is it turns out that it's not the quantity of government that matters, it's the quality. In other words, forget these debates we had, you know, which were 20th century debates about the size of government. Are you a socialist or a capitalist? What turns out to matter in the 21st century is whatever government you have, do the bureaucracies work? Are they staffed? Well, do they have autonomy? Have you have you taken pride in making sure that they work well? And you can see that the East Asian countries, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, that did the best in handling the pandemic, really take pride in that kind of government. The United States, Britain, you know, these are places where the state has been eviscerated. So what do you have? The crown jewels, you know, which is really a few hundred scientists in these places. That doesn't change the fact that look at us with the vaccine. We have lost the capacity to roll out public health measures for hundreds of millions of people.

MG: You trace that back, as you say, to Ronald Reagan, that whole idea that, you know, government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem.

FAREED ZAKARIA: Exactly, and in fact, in many ways, Canada and the United States, it's a very good social science experiment because the truth is they're very similar societies are very similar countries in Seltmann. In many ways, the United States should do better like we have we have better, higher quality, high end fancy health research, stuff like the Mayo Clinic, like the Cleveland Clinic. But Canada did not go through that kind of anti statist wave and certainly not with the intensity that the United States did. As a result, Canada has a state that functions on a day to day level better. If you look at just the benefits, Canada got its benefits out to people. This is the post covid benefits, you know, that will were given to stabilise the economy. The Canadian benefits went out. Benefits went up fast. They were simple. The checks were cut, I think within a week in the U.S., you know, two months after the Congress had passed the 2.2 trillion dollar CARES Act, 1.5 million people still hadn't gotten their checks in Canada.

MG: We have had and you've seen this in the United States as well, political scandals involving elected officials who ignored travel advisories. The UK has seen similar things. There's this idea of a social contract that we're all in this together. This was a phrase that we heard from the very early days of the pandemic. Do you think that social contract has been damaged by the pandemic? The sense that we're not all in this together, that some people are going to make out just fine and other people are going to be ripped apart?

FAREED ZAKARIA: Yes, and I think it really highlights one of the central lessons of the book, which is about inequality. We were already facing a problem of growing inequality. The pandemic has really accelerated this phenomenon. More than one could not have believed. You would end up with a situation like this where you have this kind of dramatic acceleration of inequality. To put it very simply, there's about 30 to 40 percent of the population. And here the Canada and the U.S. are interchangeable. There's about 30 to 40 percent of the population that functions just fine in the digital space. You and I, Matt, you know, doctors, lawyers, accountants, consultants, most businessmen can continue to generate the same kind of income that they generated in the real world, in the digital world. But for anyone working in a restaurant, a hotel, a cruise ship, a theme park, retail, a mall for those people, this is the Great Depression, right? With the clothes, the closures, the lockdown's, the slowdowns. And that reality has become so transparent that it is becoming much, much harder to believe we're all in this together. And it feeds, you know, another theme of the book, which is this growing class consciousness and class of resentment that you are seeing amongst people who feel that they are rural, less college educated, the noncollege educated, perhaps not working in the service sector, working with their hands rather than with their heads, versus the sort of professional the knowledge workers. And and all of this has made it very hard to believe that we are in in this together, even in something like a pandemic, which really does not discriminate. You know, it's affecting everyone.

MG: I want to come back to the work issue in a moment, but go back to the United States. You write in the book that for the first time, a lot of the world is looking at the United States with pity. Can the U.S. really be a leading world power if it's the subject of pity?

FAREED ZAKARIA: Well, there's no question we are facing perhaps the most challenging time for the United States in decades, maybe perhaps at some level ever. And I think that's happening for two reasons. One is external. You have the rise of a new world fuelled by the rise of great new powers, including for the first time, really, I would say in 100 years at least, a real peer competitor in China. So the United States faces the reality that it is not going to dominate and shape the future the way it was able to for the last century. And the second is a breakdown of not just a social compact, but the political compact, a sense of democratic values. Look at what's happening right now. You have a Republican Party that is essentially trying to in some way undermine core values of American democracy is not the whole party, but a very substantial part of it. So, in a sense, you're losing hard power because of the rise of China and you're losing soft power because of the internal decay of American democracy. That's a hard recipe to fix. But that said, the United States is distinguished from other great powers by one signal feature, which is it has a capacity to reinvent itself. It has a capacity to take all the messiness and out of it generate a certain kind of energy and rejuvenation. So naturally, as an American, I'm hoping for that. But it's it's going to be a challenge.

MG: So when you say in the book that America is successful enough never to collapse, but then you see your president calling leaders in Georgia kind of begging for them to dig up votes and he's retreating. Conspiracy theories in the wake of last night's runoff votes in that state. That doesn't give you pause in terms of that idea that that America is successful enough never to collapse.

FAREED ZAKARIA: Let me put it this way. So America today is a big, messy, ragged country with dramatic successes and failures. So what you described fills my heart with sadness. On the other hand, when I watch what Pfizer and Moderna were able to do in producing a vaccine in nine months, just to remind you that it used to take 15 years to produce vaccines, only a decade ago, in nine months, they have produced this vaccine using a revolutionary technology. This MRNA technology, is really extraordinary. Basically, it would take the making of vaccines from what used to be a kind of boutique bespoke system to essentially a mass industrial system. If you look at Silicon Valley and how the digital economy has performed in the midst of this extraordinary pandemic, you know, we're all using 10 times as much bandwidth as we were a year ago. And the system is working fine. If you look at the extraordinary advances that are taking place in manufacturing and nanotechnology, all that's also happening in America. So you you can't lose sight of the strengths of America. We wash our dirty linen in public very, very visibly. So everyone sees all the flaws which are real. But don't forget, there are these extraordinary successes as well.

MG: So many people in this pandemic, as you've mentioned, are focussed on the small stuff, which is work and keeping the lights on and ensuring that they have a roof over their heads. Let's talk more about the future of work in a post pandemic world. And we'll start with a little inspiration from a cartoon.

SOUNDCLIP

MALE VOICE: You got to have it up here to know how to start these things and stop them and start them again. This is more like it.

FEMALE VOICE: Hello honey. Bad day at the office.

MALE VOICE: Yeah, those three hour workdays are killing me.

[Music]

MG: Fareed Zakaria, what can The Jetsons tell us about the possible future of work?

FAREED ZAKARIA: You know, I write about it in the book into the first show that bothered to pull up that the clip. So that is George Jetson from that cartoon series. And people sometimes forget his job was to push a button, to start a machine and push a button to stop the machine. And he works for three hours a day. And that is in fact, that was a very seriously considered future, that even people like John Maynard Keynes, the great economist, talked about that we were going to get so efficient and machines and particular technology was going to make us so efficient that we were going to get to the point where human beings would have all this free time because we were going to generate lots of income, generated lots of output, but we didn't need to work that hard to do it. What I think, in some ways, fundamentally, Keynes had it right. What he did not realise was that it was going to be distributed in a very different way than he imagined. So it's not that all of us would get equally productive and therefore each of us would be generating enough wealth that we could work three hours with and make the same amount of money as we were when we were working 10 hours. It's that, broadly speaking, 20-30 percent of the population is going to generate a huge amount of the national wealth and then add about 20 or 30 percent of the population, no matter how hard they work, just cannot, you know, don't make enough to to really make a living wage. That has become the real challenge of post-industrial, technologically driven societies. The pandemic, of course, has accelerated this. But it is the fundamental challenge I think, that we face economically. It is no longer the fundamental challenge is not generating economic output enough to cover the country's needs and some sort of broad sense. The fundamental problem is that you are seeing this massive disproportion. Give you a simple example. Joe Biden won the election by seven million votes, but roughly speaking, right, about 80 million people voted for him. About 72-73 million people voted for Trump, just roughly the same numbers of people. Joe Biden's electorate generated 70 percent of the GDP of the United States. Donald Trump's electorate, just seven million less, generated only 30 percent of the output of the United States. If you ran that experiment backwards four years ago, Hillary Clinton's electorate generated 66 percent of the GDP of the U.S. and Donald Trump's 34. In other words, you see, what's happening is smaller and smaller number of people are generating more and more of the output. I bet you the numbers aren't that different of Canada. Probably a little skewed, a little better because of the oil industry.

MG: But in general, this is happening in every advanced industrial society, which is why, I mean and again, it goes back to the inequality piece, which is some of the most pessimistic work in the book we hear coming out of this. Whenever we get out of this, people say, well, we're going to get back to normal. And there's a lot of people who say we don't want to go back to normal because normal wasn't working. When you think about post pandemic. Are you confident that we will take those lessons of inequality and act upon them to try and create something better coming out of the situation that we're in?

FAREED ZAKARIA: I'm pretty confident that we will see a greater willingness of government to spend money to help poor people. To put it very simply, because I think one of the things that's happened in the pandemic, strangely, is we have broken through the budgetary constraint. People have realised that we are living in an age of collapsing inflation, of very low interest rates in which the servicing of debt is not that expensive. Despite Americans having taken spent two trillion dollars, three trillion dollars more than, in the last year, our interest, the amount of money we use to pay off interest is lower than it has been in the past. So that that constraint is broken. I think that's a good thing. But I think that we are we have still not fundamentally figured out how to solve this problem that I was describing. And I don't pretend on this one. As you say, I'm pessimistic partly because I think the forces generating this inequality, the structural inequality, are very much structural. They are about the rise of the information revolution. They are about the rise of globalisation.

MG: But also about the rise of China, as you say. So there are people who say that this is the end of globalisation, but you don't buy that either.

FAREED ZAKARIA: No, because at the end of the day, people want growth, right? I mean, it's at some level you have to have economies grow. And as a result, when you're looking for growth, you're looking for trade. You know, the United States is four percent of the world's population. Canada is where? Probably about half a percent of the world's population. You have to trade with the other ninety nine point five percent of the world's population if you want to generate economic output. And that's why you're seeing, by the way, in the last year, contrary to a lot of what people thought and as I predicted in my book, you are actually seeing a greater impulse to its trade. The Europeans and the China signed a massive new investment and trade treaty. Just in the last three weeks, the 15 countries in Asia came together to sign a new trade deal. The Africans have created a free trade and free trade union. Why? Because everyone is looking for growth. So that's why I say it's not going to be that easy to get a get around this inequality because we all want growth, which means we're all going to embrace the trade and technology. But the outcome of this trade in technology is that you generate growth, but it is not distributed equally within countries. So the obvious answer, which Canadians are better at than Americans, the obvious answer is you embrace the growth, you embrace the technology, generate the output, get dynamic and then redistribute. Unfortunately, in America, we tend to do much less of that redistribution and as a result we have much greater social unrest.

MG: At the beginning of the book, you quote Larry Brilliant, the great physician who says that outbreaks are inevitable, but pandemics are optional. What do you think? We have learnt in this, too, to remind us that something like this may happen again and that we need to be better equipped as a world?

FAREED ZAKARIA: Yeah, in some ways, I think this is the central lesson or maybe the elemental lesson, the fundamental lesson, because if you think about human development, what we have assumed is that human beings can develop at any pace, at any scale over any space geographically in a kind of reckless, unending, thoughtful manner. You know, we can just continue to build out cities and suburbs no matter where we want, no matter how we want. We can destroy natural habitat no matter where we want, no matter how we want. And what we are beginning to realise, I hope with the pandemic, but also, frankly, with the number of natural disasters over the last year or two, that there is a cost. There is at the end, there is something happening here which one could think of as nature's revenge or nature of fighting back, because why did this pandemic happen at some fundamental level in East Asia, particularly in Southeast Asia? You have seen the destruction of large numbers of natural habitats, of wild animals like that. That's happened to have a lot of viruses in them. So that means the bat is moving closer and closer to human beings. And what happens is the viruses and bats hop species and go to chickens or pigs or pangolins. And then from that they help to to human beings. That that is essentially what what seems to have happened in not just the coronavirus, but in H1N1 and in SARS and birds in all these cases, the some kind of transmission that took place from wild animals to domesticated animals and then. Human beings all look at the forest fires that have taken place in the United States, worst forest fires than ever in one year, we have burned to the ground five million acres of land, that is the state of Massachusetts burned to the ground. All this is happening because of a reckless kind of development that allows human beings to live at the edges of forests on another level, at the edges of coastlines. So all of it put together makes you think, I hope we have realised we're living dangerously. We're living in a way that is very risky. It is not sustainable. And what we need is a is a much better sense of how do we do this? We want the growth. We want the dynamism. We want to race people out of poverty. But we've got to do it in a thoughtful way, in a sustainable way. And there are many ways to do it. But we've never bothered to worry. You know, we've thought we could have it all and we really can't have it all because we just have one planet.

MG: Just in the last minute or so that we have. Are you confident that we'll seise that opportunity? You end the book by you quoting Lawrence of Arabia saying nothing is written. Will we will we seise that opportunity to rewrite things?

FAREED ZAKARIA: I don't know if we'll seise that opportunity. I hope we will. One of the reasons I wrote the book is that that I hope we will. But look, at some level we have no alternative, because at this largest scale that I mentioned, this existential scale, the most important thing to remember is nature is not by inherently benign in its attitude towards human beings. Nature is not trying to make sure that it protects human life. If we push it too far, nature is just a series of chemical reactions that could go very badly. And, you know, that could be the end of human life on earth.

MG: Fareed Zakaria, it's a real pleasure to talk to you about this book. There's a lot to think about in the midst of the pandemic that we're in about where we might go when we get out of it. I appreciate your time this morning.

FAREED ZAKARIA: Thank you, Matt.

MG: Fareed Zakaria is the host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria's GPS. His new book is called Ten Lessons for a Post Pandemic World. Your regional update is next. And then.

SOUNDCLIP

The cook comes with the food. If you like the food, you have to think about the people who brought it. And the people are bringing us an enormous amount of richness. And we have to respect the people and understand that even people who have been here for several generations, their family came from somewhere as well.

MG: Finding Home: One Dish at a Time. We will speak about a new cookbook that collects the recipes of refugees who came to this country fleeing home, arriving in a new home and with them, they brought some of the ideas that ended up on their tables there and our tables here. I'm Matt Galloway you're listening to The Current. We're back in 90 seconds. Stay with us.

Online tools to help you connect with family and friend; A new UNHCR cookbook highlights recipes from refugees in Canada

Guests: Yasmen De Leon, Aya Wadi, Rivka Augenfeld

MG: I'm Matt Galloway you're listening to the current so far this morning, we've been talking about finding our way out of this pandemic, but it still feels as though we have a long winter ahead of us. And by now, maybe you, like me, are getting a little tired of the same old zoom chats with friends, or you're wishing for something different from another Netflix binge. We all know that getting together with friends and family isn't quite the same when you can't do it in person. But it turns out there is a whole world of online platforms popping up that help people chat, create and collaborate. And in some cases, maybe, just maybe virtual could actually be better than the real thing. Julie Crysler, one of the current producers, got a tour of some creative examples.

SOUNDCLIP

JULIE CRYSLER: Oh, good. Oh, there it is. There it is. Now I hear you.

MARIE CLAIRE LEBLANC FLANAGAN: Am I starting to have new audio problems?

JULIE CRYSLER: I can hear I can hear you now, but it sounds like you're not here anymore.

MARIE CLAIRE LEBLANC FLANAGAN: There we go. I have sound again. I have sound again.

JULIE CRYSLER: Can you hear me now?

MARIE CLAIRE LEBLANC FLANAGAN: Yeah, you sound great.

JULIE CRYSLER: Great.

MARIE CLAIRE LEBLANC FLANAGAN: My name is Marie-Claire Loblaw Flanagan and I'm an artist working in experimental video games and focussing on intimacy between people. So lately I work with people connecting with each other is completely online. I've been exploring different platforms and tools where people can can connect online and some of them are very experimental and weird. Some of them are a little bit more polished. But my work has just been bringing people together and exploring these platforms together with an eye for for what is possible. Let's start with some music. So I chose playing, there are many online musical collaborative spaces. Some of them require some technical knowledge. What I like about Plink is that it requires very little from you. So you come in here, you can go into a public room with people. But but I've made us a little private room just so we can play around.

JULIE CRYSLER: It's giving me the name Soft Porcupine.

MARIE CLAIRE LEBLANC FLANAGAN: Soft Porcupine. Yes. That sounds like a good name.

JULIE CRYSLER: So there I am.

MARIE CLAIRE LEBLANC FLANAGAN: There you are. And here I am. I give myself my real name. This is where you can be anonymous, which is amazing. If you just click, it will make sounds.

[Music]

MARIE CLAIRE LEBLANC FLANAGAN: Yes, so what we're doing is we are clicking around to choose instruments and then just flowing up and down these online spaces to make our notes go high or low, we have some control over how things sound. We choose our instruments, we choose whether we're clicking or not, and we choose, I guess the pitch of the sound. It really has this feeling of like we're dancing together or moving together in the spatial way. This is a beautiful trail of coloured balls going along. It's almost like when you learn how to read music, you know, there's these notes on the notation and it's almost like you're playing in the musical notation. That's how it feels to me. Like these notes you're going up and down and there's something they've done with the code here. So it always sounds good.

[Music]

MARIE CLAIRE LEBLANC FLANAGAN: When you go in the public rooms, it's interesting because I find that it seems like people often develop a rhythm together, so they'll take solos like one person will do a solo and then the other person will be playing backup support for them just by doing a simple little [unintelligible]. Yeah, it's really it's really quite nice. The next thing I'm going to show you is called Draw Chat. It's online collaborative drawing tool. I'm going to start drawing with a textured marker in purple.

JULIE CRYSLER: Oh, nice.

MARIE CLAIRE LEBLANC FLANAGAN: Yeah. Yeah, there are colours and shapes you can add in photographs and mark those up.

JULIE CRYSLER: Oh, my God. This is so cool.

MARIE CLAIRE LEBLANC FLANAGAN: Yours has so much character, you know, it has so much personality. Yeah, I met up with Friends Weekly and we do collaborative drawing like this. And I feel like it's there's something really special about drawing with people on a shared canvas that is actually almost better online than it is in person, because in person, it's like Twister. You know, if we were trying to draw together on a piece of paper in person, we'd be navigating around each other. But when we're drawing online, I could come and give you a little guy, like some eyebrows. The other is more intimate in some ways, this kind of collaborative drawing.

JULIE CRYSLER: Are there things you wanted to show me? What else can we look at?

MARIE CLAIRE LEBLANC FLANAGAN: This platform was a very funny name. When you click on that link, it'll say, welcome to here.

MARIE CLAIRE LEBLANC FLANAGAN: Yeah, I feel like it's like meet me, meet me here. Where? You here. So a lot of these platforms have been popping up. Here is just one very interesting example. It's a video platform. There's voice, there's video, but they've put a lot of work into trying to to create other feelings as well. Other things happening. So it's not a grid of faces staring at you like Zoom. First of all, my camera is round, you see, like a circular representation of me. And I'm floating in outer space right now in here. So you can add text to here, you can say hello. You can add just like a little text box, can add images and gifs and files. We could put a YouTube video in here and watch it together. If we like, we can we can draw in here. We can also play tic tac toe. And the thing about this platform and many like this is that you can wander around. So you can if I go away from you, if we go far away from each other, we can't hear each other anymore. So you come here with your family and then you could go in to have a little sidebar with your sibling and your parents wouldn't be able to hear it. Well, I mean, I wouldn't bank on that, but when you go far apart, you can't hear it. And it allows for some of the more organic conversations that people have between each other and the groups. Whereas in Zoom, you know, you're either in the main room or a breakout room, and that's kind of it. But and here you can have as many breakout corners as you like. Right now is a really exciting time for online spaces because everybody is trapped at home and everybody thinks, how do I solve this problem? And I've seen so many interesting platforms pop up. Things that people said were impossible, we found ways to make possible. Like ways of connecting, collaborating across borders, across time zones, across communities like a lot of this things that people said, absolutely not, we can't do that, they became possible in this kind of like a spirit of experimentation. And I hope that we carry that.

MG: That's our producer, Julie Crysler, speaking with Montreal artist Marie Claire Leblanc Flanagan. The sites they visited were: Plink.In, Draw-Chat and Here-Fm and you can find a longer list of ideas for online hangs on Marie's website will post a link to our Twitter feed @TheCurrentCBC. This is The Current on CBC Radio One. My name is Matt Galloway. When we're not socialising online in these tough months of the pandemic, many of us have turned to food for comfort. We're home. We're doing more cooking or baking or canning for refugees. The culinary traditions of their homelands have long been a source of warmth, even in the most difficult circumstances. And now the U.N. refugee agency in Canada is commemorating those flavours and the people who brought them to Canada in a new cookbook. It's called Tastes from Home Recipes from the Refugee Community. I'm joined now by three contributors to this cookbook. Aya Wadi came to Canada as a refugee from Syria and 2017 she lives with her family in Thunder Bay. Yasmen de Leon left Mexico at the age of four, and it took years before she was able to permanently settle in Canada. She's now in Toronto and Rivka Augenfeld's parents were Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe who came to Montreal after the Second World War. Good morning to you all.

AYA WADI: Good morning.

YASMEN DE LEON: Good morning.

RIVKA AUGENFELD: Good morning.

MG: Yasmen, tell me about the food that you grew up with. What do you remember about the food that was around you when you were a kid?

YASMEN DE LEON: Well, it took me a while to be permanently settled in Canada. We were just wandering the world. My mother enjoys cooking and she learnt how to cook the specific dishes for a particular region in Mexico. She comes from a small town and her family, you know, raised the animals plant at the farm and they did everything from scratch when they went to bring the corn to make it into a doll. My mother still used in her childhood [unintelligilbe] just seen the pictures of the women with the Stones. Yeah. So she carried that with her wherever she went. But I remember the difficulties she had in finding ingredients are trying to recreate those dishes with those exact textures and flavours. So our home was always filled with food and my mom doing little experiments. And I think the majority of refugees can relate to that, that being able to find certain ingredients and, you know, having a little bit of this and a little bit of that to try to recreate that flavour and taste that reminds you of your home, of your childhood. Food is tied to our sense of safety as children were fed by our mothers. And I think whether it's a peanut butter sandwich or [unintelligible] or a honey cake or that's why food is so important to an uncertainty.

MG: What about for you? I mean, were you a big cook when you lived in Syria? Was food sort of all around you at that time?

AYA WADI: Before the war started we used to spend all special occasions, time with the family all together, all my aunts, my mom and my grandma cooking all together and sharing like recipes. And it's really nice that my grandma was able to pass all her recipes and share it with my mom. Later, when we had to escape from Syria to Turkey, cooking their food with my family was able to bring us like a good memory.

MG: What did you miss the most? You settled in Turkey first. What did you miss the most after you left Syria?

AYA WADI: I think family gatherings like it was lots of fun, enjoyed time. I really miss the happy moments. And I think now it's very hard for us to do that as all of us broke apart. My aunts are in Egypt, my uncles are in Turkey now. We are here in Canada. And unfortunately, my grandmother passed away last summer. So making the food again with my grandma special touch can bring us like the good memories.

MG: What about for you, Rivka? I mean, the connexion that you have comes through your mother. Tell me a little bit about about what you learnt about cooking through her.

RIVKA AUGENFELD: Well, what I learnt was that I loved my mother's cooking so much that I never really became a cook myself. But just to say I was two when we arrived in Canada. So I was born as a stateless person in a DP camp in Austria after the war. And I think that background has informed a lot of what I've done in my life, not to sound like a Do-Gooder, but to make things better for other people. But I was very moved by what Yasmen was saying about recreating flavours and experimenting, because that's exactly what my mother did. My mother was only six, when the Second World War broke out, and 18 when the Germans actually marched into her. Poland, but her mother, who had struggled for her own education and was a nurse and a teacher, didn't want her daughter, my mother Leba in the kitchen, she wanted her in school and learning and, you know, becoming an educated person. So after the war, when after she had lost everybody, my mother said she tried to recreate the flavours that she remembered to have them taste right. And so when Yasmen talked about that, it really struck a chord.

MG: She brought like this, cracked like a little box that had some ideas or recipes?

RIVKA AUGENFELD: All the years my mother, you know, had a little box where she put her recipes in, mostly in Yiddish. Her English, by the way, was very good, but mostly in Yiddish. But of course, they weren't really recipes. They were a list of ingredients. And you had to know what to do with those ingredients. So my participation in this cookbook is completely thanks to a wonderful young woman called Kat Romanoff who runs that thing called The Wandering Chew. And she is a food historian. And she sat with these recipes. She got very excited and made them in story with the ingredients and made them into recipes. So I'm very grateful to her. And it's wonderful to see that there's interest, you know, in all this food over the years.

MG: Yasmen, how difficult was it for you? I mean, it's interesting in hearing Rivka talk about that and the difficulty in interpreting those recipes and those ideas. What about for you? Was it easy to replicate what your mother and grandmother were cooking once you got here to Canada?

YASMEN DE LEON: It wasn't easy at all, especially since a lot of the ingredients used in traditional Mexican dishes are endemic to Mexico. It's very hard to find those ingredients. And it's true of the majority of cultures that are here in Toronto. Sometimes you do get the ingredients, the herbs, they lose their potency, after an amount of time or it's the wrong type of work. So it's a little bit complicated to find those leaders, to find the things, to make it like, for example, it doesn't make a lot of tradition in [unintelligible]. So to find a Smith who will make a giant [unintelligible] is exorbitant. It's super expensive. And even to buy it in Mexico and have it imported, it's super expensive because we use traditional methods. That's how I find that the flavours get imparted even more. So I'm lucky that I'm able to recognise that taste. And I have I'm stubborn enough to try to recreate it because it's a very particular taste. But maybe other people think, you know, it's not that important. You can just use, you know, the flour. But I know there is different in texture.

MG: I was going say what's the difference when you're being stubborn about it? What are you looking for?

YASMEN DE LEON: I'm looking for a particular smell, a particular texture and a particular taste. And the reason that I'm lucky enough to have that is because I say my mother planted the corn, she brought in the crop and she put it off and she went to the whole thing. What she didn't even use Lateline. They used in her time. They used they still used wood ashes to cook the meal. And then once it was done, they would grind it into stone. So there's a particular aroma that the corn released. There's a particular texture in a particular pieces missing from the corn flour you get from the store. You cannot replicate that. It's even true of fruits and vegetables native to her country that she might find here. But you see them and they look like the fruit, like the vegetable and bite into it or use it for a recipe, it does not have the same aroma or the same flavour. Am I right, Aya?

AYA WADI: For sure. 100 percent.

MG: What would be one of those things, Aya, that would be, to Yasmin's point, difficult to find. And you might find something close, but when you bite into it or you carve into it, it doesn't give you the full taste that you remember living here and send away like a small city?

AYA WADI: We struggled a little bit in the beginning, like to find the particular ingredients and to get the right taste. And that was really hard for us to find all those ingredients and going around from grocery store to other and ask for it. But sometimes, like, you have to find out a way to make it work and try your best to just make a couple ingredients to get a taste that it might bring you back to the good memories. But for later, we were able to deal with a company in Toronto and order all those ingredients. And I'm so happy that now we are able to make our original recipes with all the ingredients that we have right now. And that's really good to be able to share our food with the people with the original piece.

MG: Yeah, and you're doing it through this restaurant. I mean, you've opened a restaurant in the midst of a pandemic, royal Aleppo Foods. What does that been like in terms of opening a restaurant now?

AYA WADI: Well, it was a hard decision to make. And like, we really were scared about failing because it's pandemic. But we did our best just to make sure that we would be safe, our customers would be safe. And I was so happy that in the first day when we opened all the communities and lots of people, they really wanted to try our food and they were really interesting in our food and in the first day, I had to close earlier because we ran out all the food that we made for the people.

MG: That's the best sign of success.

AYA WADI: Yeah. I mean, we weren't able to dive in like people, not especially in the summer, because we opened in June. People weren't able to come inside or just, you know, enjoying the food outside. But they were so excited to take the food and they were more than happy even just to try food by taking out delivery. That was so like, I think a big motivation for us to to work harder and just share more food with the community.

MG: Yasmen, did you say that the same thing had happened to you, that you opened up and people kind of overwhelmed you and that was it?

YASMEN DE LEON: The first thing we opened, we had to close at two p.m. we were left with nothing. And my friend who was helping me at the time, I said, what are we going to do, I doon't know, you should start shutting the wall. We'rel was supposed to be open till 10, no, we have to [unintelligible] nothing. And I'm like, oh, my God. So, yeah, many times at the beginning, we constantly sold out every day which is good for us because our food is fresh food. We make everything from scratch and the food that they eat today was made today. My pet peeves are microwaves and freezers. I do not believe food should be frozen. And I did not believe that you should use a microwave, especially as I think it's a lack of respect for your customers if you're a customer going to a restaurant to pay X amount of money. I think the value should be in the quality of the food. I think one should use quality ingredients and one should try and do your best for your customer on food is very important. I've lived through a lot of food insecurity and I've been feeding people. I started cooking when I was four years old. I fed my brothers and sisters. I had to go to food bands. And so food insecurity, I'm very aware of it. And I know that a lot of refugees suffer from food insecurity because they feel that they're [unintelligilbe] place to eat. So I'm constantly fighting against that. That's why I opened a food bank on Wednesday that I fund through the [unintelligible] of my restaurant. That's why I constantly feed the people who are homeless or, you know, I have to have cooked meals for those individuals as well. Food insecurity is a reality that we still face in 2021 around the world and even in Toronto, you don't have to go to Aya's home town in Syria or mine in Mexico to see food insecurity.

MG: Rivka, listening to Yasmen and Aya, mean, they've both they've they've turned traditional food into a business as part of a livelihood. What is it as you listen to this, what is it that you think is the attraction about food that connects people? Not only- I mean, and you see this in your own life with your mother's recipes connects you to a past, but also for people who have no connexion with that past, gives them that portal into a different culture. What is it about food that's so powerful, do you think, in that?

RIVKA AUGENFELD: Well, you know, when you're sitting down to eat, you can't fight, you know, I mean, you can have arguments, but food and sitting and sharing food is about peace or it's about trying to understand the other person. For me, what's wonderful about this is that, you know, I've been in the refugee resettlement business for a long time. And even when the Vietnamese boat people were coming, some people were saying, well, they'll just have to learn to eat like us, whatever that means. And they weren't even prepared, people who didn't like rice, to buy them rice. And I said, are you crazy? You have to help people in the beginning with something that's familiar. But look, now, Vietnamese restaurants, I don't know what they're doing in the rest of Canada, but here they're a big deal. But what we do, we have to remember and, you know, I say this a lot, so I hope I'm not repeating myself - the cook comes with the food. If you like the food, you have to think about the people who brought it. And the people are bringing us an enormous amount of richness. And we have to respect the people and understand that even people who've been here for several generations, their family came from somewhere as well.

MG: Tell me about the honey cake. Why did you choose this?

RIVKA AUGENFELD: Well, I chose it because I'm very Jewish, but not religious. But Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, was a big family event in our house. And Honey Cake is a traditional food for Rosh Hashanah because at the beginning of the New Year, we eat things that are sweet, honey, other sweet things. Apples dipped in honey and honey cake was a wonderful moment that my mother served at dessert after the meal and everyone just food and odd. And so it created this wonderful feeling of community. And my mother was also had a very open home. And so a lot of people would come to her table and sit and feel really good at her table. And the honey cake for me represents that sharing of something delicious and something that creates family. And what I just wanted to add was because when we came to with no family, family was created by people, affinity groups, people from the same background, people from the same cities, people from familiar political movements, because we had to create family. And even though now, you know, the Holocaust everywhere everyone talks about, it's hard to believe that at the time when all those Holocaust survivors came, nobody wanted to talk about it. So they had to be amongst themselves to be understood even without talking. You know, when you're with someone who has suffered what you've suffered, you don't even have to explain it. You know that you're understood. But in the outside world, it was very, very difficult.

MG: You also get a little pain in your heart when you think about the time that we're in right now and I mean your mother's table and the door being open and people coming and being welcomed. I mean, that's what we miss right now in this pandemic.

RIVKA AUGENFELD: Yes. But we also have to remember that right now we have refugees sitting in different places in the world. Some of them even have visas for Canada and they can't come in, they're suffering and other refugees who will never make it to anywhere really safe. So at least the very, very least we can do is help the UNHCR who's trying to help people and have a mind for those workers who are also putting themselves at risk.

MG: Aya, what's the recipe that you've contributed to this cookbook?

AYA WADI: We contributed with the three recipes, like one of it's a main dish called Ouzie, and it was really popular in special occasions that we had.

MG: What is it ?

AYA WADI: Ma'amoul. It's a dessert and we used to eat it a lot. And when we are celebrating like our Eid after a long months of fasting. So we used to share it with all the family. And I still remember that nice moment when we were all together working and making it. After a long day of fasting for Ramadan and before we celebrated all the family work together with my grandma and my aunts, my mom, and sometimes it was so fun that we were not like share the work, but we were really appreciated and were just sneaking around and just trying and stealing some pieces of ma'amoul and trying it all together and start to judge which one is the best. Was it my mom's, or was it my aunt's or was it my grandma's ma'amoul. I still really remember that nice moment and I really miss it. But it's as Rivka said, that it's really like good to appreciate those people and what they did, what they brought to us, especially my grandma, for this great legacy that she left behind, her recipes that she was able to share with my mom and my mom now is sharing it with me.

MG: And Yasmen contributed recipes for a Tamales. Tell me about that.

YASMEN DE LEON: Yes, I did. Yes, Tamale. It is a very traditional dish, not just in Mexico, but in Latin America. And it's a dish that existsed in particular [unintelligible] times as early as I think seven thousand years before Christ there was tamalas being made. And I chose tamales because it's a dish that is usually for Christmas and special holidays and special events like weddings and births and to my special occasions. And when it's made traditionally it's very labour intensive, so much that it's usually made communally or by the entire family in large quantities. So that is why I included it in the recipe book, because to me it signifies the coming together of people and the welcoming of people. And it's also, I think, a dish that resonate with people all over the world, because all people in every corner of the world a long time ago had some dish of some type of food in at least that was steeped. I think it's sort of like a primordial dish that symbolises that we are all one. There isn't I don't see a difference between me and someone from Syria or somewhere from Europe or someone from Canada or someone from Vietnam. We are all one people. You are I and I am you. So that is why I chose that dish, because for me that it's not just something that signifies or symbolises my family and I love my mom has for us and the special dishes that she recreated for us. It also symbolise the unity of mankind. To me, that simple doe in a leaf reminds me that we are all one. We are not separated by our languages or religions. We really are one. And that's why I chose it.

MG: That's an incredibly important message. I mean, for any time, but especially now when everybody is trying to figure out where we are and who we are in this moment. You've all made me very hungry. And in the perfect world, we would all get together and it would be a dinner party and we would sit around that table and eat this food. Thank you all for speaking with us. I really appreciate it.

YASMEN DE LEON: Thank you.

AYA WADI: Thank you for time.

RIVKA AUGENFELD: Thank you for having us.

MG: Now it's Yasmen De Leon. Refugee from Mexico who owns Coomalie Canela restaurant in Toronto, Rivka Augenfeld is in Montreal and the daughter of Jewish refugees who came to Canada after the Second World War. And Aya Wadi is a refugee from Syria who owns Royal Aleppo Foods in Thunder Bay. If you'd like to get that cookbook, as Rivka mentioned, it's free. You can download it through the link that will post on our Twitter feed @TheCurrentCBC. That is The Current for today. Coming up next on CBC Radio One, it's Q. You'll hear a conversation with New York based artist Tim Okamura. He had covid, survived it and is now doing a series of paintings called Health Care Heroes. The full details coming up in just a moment. On CBC Radio One, I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. Take care. We'll talk to you tomorrow.

Wednesday January 6, 2021 Full Transcript

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