Flashback: seeing how the sausage gets made
CBC-TV goes north and remembering when Amazon was not yet profitable
Northern exposure
Besides being set in the fictional village of Ice Cove in Nunavut, the new comedy series North of North was also shot in the territory. That posed some complex "logistical challenges," CBC Entertainment learned earlier this month.
The CBC series North of 60 was also set in an imaginary place in the North: the town of Lynx River, N.W.T. But the drama, which aired in the 1990s and starred Tina Keeper (above) and Tom Jackson, was filmed in northern Alberta.
In a behind-the-scenes look by the regional program Rough Cutz in 1994, Keeper said the challenge for North of 60 lay in its filming schedule. "It's the time thing, you know, like, having to get an episode done in seven days," she said.
The path to profitability
Last week, CBC News reported that Amazon has announced it will return to a third-party delivery model in Quebec. It said the e-commerce giant plans to shut seven facilities in the province and will cut more than 1,700 permanent jobs. (Amazon "insists it's not because of new union," reads the headline.)
In a 2001 item for CBC's The National, a reporter said Amazon.com was laying off 20 per cent of its workforce and had lost $800 million in less than four months. But, he added, the company said it would "eventually" make money.
"Everybody at this company wants it to be a profitable company and profitably serving customers," said Amazon.com's founder, Jeff Bezos, in the piece. According to CBC News, Amazon became a trillion-dollar company last year.
What's inside our food
Foodspiracy, a documentary from CBC's The Nature of Things, recently dove into the world of ultra-processed foods (UPFs). British-Canadian medical doctor Chris van Tulleken linked UPFs to a host of health problems, and even early death.
In 1969, a reporter from CBC News took viewers inside a sausage factory to probe charges by American consumer advocate Ralph Nader that hotdogs were, he paraphrased, "more puff than protein" and made with "edible plastic skin."
A worker said opposition to processed meats went back a long way. "During the time of King Constantine the Great, he felt that Romans were eating too much sausage and he put a ban on sausage for a while," he said. "Through history, we've seen so many things that have happened with this product."
Quorn meal
On the subject of processed food, Flashback recently watched an item from the CBC program Venture in 1987 about a heavily engineered British meat alternative called Quorn. Many different food scientists in Canada tried developing substitutes for animal protein in the '70s, too.
Snow problems
Many Winnipeggers protested a plan last month that would have seen the city increase its threshold for plowing snow on residential streets, CBC News has reported. Those who love a blast of snow should watch weatherman Ed Russenholt predict a "bitter blizzard" for the city in 1955.
French miss
This month, the stars of Saint-Pierre, CBC's new cop drama, told CBC Life about the "amazing" restaurants in the little piece of France in the Atlantic Ocean where the show takes place. The dining scene didn't merit mention in a 1980 CBC News report about the expenses of living in the territory.
Star watching
CBC News in B.C. recently recapped the career of actor Pamela Anderson and her work in the film The Last Showgirl. The recap didn't mention much of Anderson's personal life or her animal activism: in 2006, she lent her name to an effort to end the Atlantic seal hunt in Canada.
