Transcription of Summer Fare #45
Male: You are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland, Maine. Show summaries are available at doctorlisa.org. Download and become a podcast subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle through iTunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details.
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Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast number 45, Summer Fare airing for the first time on July 22nd, 2012 on WLOB Radio, AM, Portland and now on WPEI 95.5 and 95.9 FM radio Portland which is kind of new and interesting. Isn’t it Genevieve Morgan who’s sitting in front of me?
Genevieve: It’s really exciting for us. Now, people have two ways to listen to us which is twice as nice.
Dr. Lisa: Yes, it’s wonderful. We’re on the AM. We’re on the FM and we’re also at both sides of the morning on Sunday mornings. We’ve moved our time.
Genevieve: Tell everybody what time we’re airing now.
Dr. Lisa: We’re now airing at 12:00 high noon on the AM station which is 1310 also streaming WLOBradio.com for those who aren’t in the area and we’re also airing at 7 AM on WPEI which is it happens to be a sports related station out at the Portland area. The nice thing is that people are recognizing the value of our content.
Genevieve: I was just going to say we’re 45 shows in and thanks to you all listening. It seems as if our reach is growing and our audience is growing and I think you and I have both been talking about how we love to hear more from our listeners about the next year to come because everything is happening so quickly and our reach is just growing so let us know what you guys think out there.
Dr. Lisa: Absolutely. I think it’s important for people who are listening, if you are out there listening right now, to know that you do have a voice, that we listen to you. We’ve had multiple shows that have included guests suggested by our listeners. We spent a lot of time communicating with people on Facebook, in e-mail and really building this community so that has been part of what we are doing on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast and clearly it’s working because our show now has an extra hour and we’ve moved to high noon and we’re going full force into the future and thanks to our sponsors too.
Genevieve: Yeah. We wouldn’t be nowhere without them.
Dr. Lisa: That’s absolutely true. This have been a group of literally dedicated individuals who have shown up and they understand the importance of health and wellness and its larger place in the world so if you’re listening and you know one of our sponsors, please be sure to tell them that you heard about them on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast.
Speaking of it, we have three really interesting varied guests today for our Summer Fare show. I think you were listening and really going to like these interviews. They’re quite varied. The first one is Chef David Levi who is opening up a new restaurant. Isn’t that right, Genevieve?
Genevieve: Yeah. I think he’s planning to open it up in Portland in the fall and he’s got a lot of unique ideas and interesting concepts.
Dr. Lisa: He talks a lot about foraging which is something that I like doing. I like going out into the wild and looking at the types of plants that possibly could be edible as long as they’re safe.
Genevieve: Lots of berries this time of the year.
Dr. Lisa: That’s true, lots of berries. We also have Rafael Adams of South Portland Paddle Shop otherwise known as SOPOSUP and Genevieve, you know him well.
Genevieve: I do. He was in the surf article that I wrote last summer for Maine Magazine and I actually went out as a first-time paddleboarder with him and it was a great experience and I know that he and I both want to get you out there this summer.
Dr. Lisa: I’m looking forward to it. I love the water. I love being out there and we also have Anita Demetropoulos who is coming in from Island Treasure Toys in Yarmouth. They now have a second store. It’s really an inspiring story. They’re 10 years in a whole decade in and they have two toy stores in Yarmouth and Freeport and they’re just such a great couple, the Demetropoulos couple.
Genevieve: I know people out there might be thinking what do these people have to do with health but I think you can speak to the fact that they are all aspects of what we consider a healthy community.
Dr. Lisa: Their healthy community and there are also all people who offer a kind of a sense of play that health and wellness doesn’t always have to be about working out or being on a diet. It’s about going out there, enjoying the woods as we’ve done our Into the Woods show just last week. It’s about going out there and playing. It’s about seeing what you can eat from out there in the environment so really health and wellness does not have to be a bad thing. It doesn’t have to be a hard thing.
Genevieve: That is so true. In fact, probably, the less effort and the more fun, the healthier you’re going to feel particularly in the middle of summer.
Dr. Lisa: Especially if you’re out foraging, paddleboarding or playing with toys so those of you who are listening, thanks for doing so and thanks for becoming part of our world. We really appreciate it. We hope you enjoy our guests today.
Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is pleased to be sponsored by the University of New England and as part of our collaboration with the University of New England, we offer a segment we call Wellness Innovations. This week’s wellness innovation has to do with pharmaceutical research and that is that South African daffodils may be a future cure for depression.
Scientists have discovered that plant compounds from a South African flower may in time be used to treat diseases originating in the brain including depression. At the University of Copenhagen, a number of these substances have now been tested in a laboratorial model of the blood-brain barrier. The promising results are then published in the Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmacology.
Scientists at the University of Copenhagen have previously documented the substances from the South African plant species Crinum and Cyrtanthus akin to snowdrops and daffodils have an effect on the mechanisms in the brain that are involved in depression.
This research has now yielded further results since a team based at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences has recently shown how several South African flowers contain plant compounds whose characteristics enable them to negotiate the defensive blood-brain barrier that is a key challenge in all new drug development.
For more information on this wellness innovation, these South African daffodils, visit doctorlisa.org. For more information on the University of New England, visit une.edu.
Male: This portion of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast has been brought to you by the University of New England, UNE, an innovative health sciences university grounded in the liberal arts. UNE is the number one educator of health professionals in Maine. Learn more about the University of New England at une.edu.
Dr. Lisa: Today on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, we’re talking about summer fare. With us we have Chef David Levi of Vinland. David’s been out teaching classes. He’s doing locally-sourced food. There’s so many exciting things that he’s doing and you’re going to actually tell us that right now, Vinland is a concept but it’s an exciting concept and is related to summer fare. Welcome to the show.
David: Thank you. Hi, Lisa. Hi, Gen. Vinland is my upcoming restaurant and it does not exist yet although hopefully will exist here in Portland by around the middle of this coming fall and it’s a restaurant where I’m going to be using all local ingredients and a lot of wild ingredients. That’s actually a major passion of mine foraging wild food especially mushrooms and herbs.
Actually, we have delicious and nourishing wild things all around us and I find that incredibly exciting that you go into the supermarket and so many of the things are coming from California or Mexico or God knows where but right on the side of your building here is purslane and it’s popping up through the bricks. Purslane is the richest plant source of Omega-3 fats. It’s absolutely delicious.
It was Gandhi’s favorite food. Purslane is one of my favorite summer greens for salad or to cook with, incredibly nutrient dense, a little bit mucilaginous and it’s a little bit slippery in the mouth. It’s a succulent plant. If you have a garden, you probably seen it. Chances are good you’ve weeded it out so nice to know it’s safe when you pluck it and put in your salad.
Some of the other wild plant you’ll just see growing everywhere would be lamb’s quarters close relative of beets and spinach, more nutrient dense than either of those two. Chickweed is absolutely everywhere at this time of the year, wood sorrel with very, very bright acidity. Sheep sorrel as well, unrelated plants but both called sorrel. Both are high in oxalic acid, also high in vitamin C and so they have a very bright citrusy flavor and that’s really just the tip of the iceberg.
We have all these exciting plants growing all around us that are just coming up. We don’t have to actually do anything to bring them forth and they’re often much more exciting than what we can find in the supermarket. See nothing in the fact they’re growing with no inputs, with no fertilizer, no pesticides. In fact, you don’t even have the carbon footprint of transporting or packaging the goods.
Dr. Lisa: How did you get interested in doing this type of cooking, cooking with foraged foods and wild foods?
David: When I was a kid, I lived in Upstate New York, the New York side of the Berkshires. My folks still live there today and my mom would take me and my little sister out to pick strawberries and black berries, blackcaps, red raspberries and so I really love doing that from the time I was a little kid. There was always something kind of special about finding something sweet and delicious out there in nature.
My sister and I also loved picking what I later find out was wood sorrel. I think they called it lemon clover but we would just eat tons of it and our mom would say that we would get a belly ache. We never did actually. I was drawn to the way I think a lot of little kids are drawn to it but I didn’t actually start foraging in a serious way until my mid-20s when I start coming to Maine and went on to Deer Isle and was invited to go out to the woods to pick some chanterelles for dinner which kind of blew me away.
I was not working professionally as a chef yet but I was very serious about my cooking and the fact that chanterelles were just there we need to be taking in the woods was a real eye opener. Something that you might pay $40 a pound for it in DeLuca if you’re lucky enough to find it and here were far superior ones. It hadn’t been like riding on a store shelf or in a truck for a week or two, incredibly delicious, such intense flavor. It was right there and so I thought, “All right, I need to find every chanterelle in this island.”
Thankfully for the chanterelles and the wild life, I didn’t but found plenty and then really started getting into learning mushrooms so I’ve now very confidently harvested probably two to three dozen species of mushrooms, none of which have poisonous look-alikes by the way. There are only a small handful of wild mushrooms that look anything like dangerous so we have a bit of mycophobia, fear of mushrooms in this culture which is a little fascinating. We inherit it from the English. You go to Europe and all the Europeans love the foraged mushrooms except the English. You go to Scandinavia, Russia, Italy, France, Czechoslovakia, everywhere, the woods are just full of foragers at every time of the year that you could possibly find mushrooms.
Generally, it’s a pretty fundamentally safe thing to do once you take that basic step of learning what you’re looking at and again, this opens you up to a whole range of flavors and textures. Even the physical beauty of some of these mushrooms like black trumpets or chanterelle is really pretty astonishing and it can totally transform a dish.
Dr. Lisa: Where did you get your training? Where did you learn about mushrooms and foraging and is this something that’s standard to chef training in the United States?
David: Absolutely not standard, and that’s unfortunate. That’s something I’d like to be changed. I think that culinary schools, which are so valuable in so many ways for so many people, are like many institutions of education relatively conservative and so they haven’t for the most part really caught up with this raging new interest in wild food. I mean now you’re seeing Rene Redzepi from Noma and Magnus Nilsson from Faviken. I see nothing of Thomas Keller here in the States who have been such proponents of using wild food. You see him on the cover of all the culinary magazines.
That’s really where the attention has been these last few years in fine dining moving on from molecular gastronomy that previous movement which was very focused in really scientific techniques, a valuable movement but this is kind of a reaction against it looking back towards nature now.
In terms of my own education in foraging, it’s never really true to say that you self-educated because you’re always learning from others but I was learning a lot from books, from the internet, from my friend Giles who is not a professional chef. He’s an abstract painter but he and I got fascinated with foraging at the same time and just started tearing through books and teaching each other and foraging together. I learned from Wildman Steve Brill, this incredible forager down in New York and then took it a step or two further when I did my stage, my culinary apprenticeship at Noma, which I then followed up with stage at Faviken in Northern Sweden.
Both of those restaurants are using such an incredible array of wild foods and these have just such great effects too. It’s not just they’re there on the plate but they’re incorporated into these magnificent dishes so that was an incredible experience in so many ways but one of them was broadening and deepening my own knowledge of wild foods and how to use them.
Genevieve: Also, I think in those cultures in particular, the growing seasons are very short so you have a very particular idea about agriculture and how it’s come to play in our evolution of nutrition. Do you want to speak to that for a little bit?
David: Yeah. That’s a big one. Agriculture is a tricky word. I love small farms and I have some great friends in this area who have small farms and are really doing right by their plants and their animals and the lands. That said, I think the agriculture as such is defined from say horticulture or pastoralism is generally not good for the land and that’s a tough thing for us because our a whole society, Western civilization is founded on agriculture which I would define as the monocropping of the annual grains in the West primarily wheat but there are the other grains too, barley, rye, millet, whatever and certainly corn and rice would fit into that model as well.
When you take a piece of land and you clear every living thing and then plant rows of identical monocrops, that’s bad for the soil. It’s obviously bad for biodiversity. It leads to erosion. It’s why the Fertile Crescent is now old desert and it’s not like historians just have the weird sense of humor and they decided to call Iraq and Egypt and Syria the Fertile Crescent. That land used to be incredibly rich and abundant.
We live in a land where agriculture as such in terms of extractive, large scale monocropping of grains is a little pretty recent thing and yet there’s already been very serious toll on the Great Plains plus two thirds of its original topsoil. What’s left is denuded of many of its nutrients. The Ogallala Aquifer which is the world’s largest aquifer beneath the Great Plains is now at least half empty, maybe 60% empty nothing the fact it’s becoming polluted and it’s replenishing microscopic array. We’re talking about water that now it goes back to the last Ice Age actually. It goes back quite a bit further and replenishes over the span of millions of years. We expected more than half dying in a hundred years and are accelerating.
All of that is kind of a long way of saying that it’s not a sustainable model and nor is it particularly good for us because these grains are calorie dense but nutrient poor and also often loaded with what is called what’s in price circles or some circles anti-nutrients. This is a chemical defense mechanism from the seeds that can block mineral absorption and do other things to basically convince the animals to not eat them which is obviously in the plant’s synthesis.
I think that we really need to look at ways that we can live in balance with the land as the indigenous cultures of this continent did since time immemorial which might involve growing a certain number of plants in a horticultural setting which is to say a polyculture of plants and not all annual plants, perennial plants are better because it disturb the topsoil but some annual plants grown at small scale, you can do that and not destroy the land. The Abenaki did it. A plenty of others did it and they also hunted.
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Dr. Lisa: You mentioned Noma and Dario Cecchini. Where is that and who are they?
David: These are two places where I staged last year and so Dario Cecchini is by many people’s estimation the world’s greatest butcher. He’s an incredible butcher, no doubt about that but there are a lot of great butchers in the world so what really sets Dario apart is his enormous personality and also his fears, love of the artisanal way of life and opposition to industrial food.
He’s an eighth generation butcher in the small town of Panzano and Chianti, this little village right between Florence and Sienna. It’s an incredibly beautiful place and he loves what he does maybe more than anyone I’ve ever met and he does it with nothing else. He works seven days a week. He works every single day usually 14, 15 hours a day but he never tires and that’s such a labor of love and he truly loves meat and he takes great responsibility for the need as well seeing if that’s coming from really good small farms and that he’s doing the absolute best that he possibly can with it that he’s turning into extraordinary food.
He now has a couple of restaurants in that town of Panzano so I worked with him doing the butchering then also in the restaurants and it was just incredible experience learning a little bit of his craft and even more so, kind of threw us in Mozza’s from being in the presence of his tremendous love for his way of life, I come to love it myself and see the enormous value in that.
I actually moved from there to Copenhagen where I did my two-month long stage at Noma. Noma is maybe the world’s best restaurant on San Pellegrino list which is the big and prestigious list out there for avant-garde restaurants. It’s been number one for the last three years. Noma is a restaurant that has redefined fine dining. It pushed it away from the old molecular gastronomy movement and moved it towards wild nature which is something that is very beautiful in my estimation.
The other great thing about Noma from my point of view is that they’ve done this all with Nordic ingredients. While it was amazing working with Dario in Tuscany and we certainly have access to great beef here and that’s primarily what Dario works with, beef, I think if I stayed in Tuscany and really immerse myself more in the Tuscan cuisine, that would be pretty tough to do with local ingredients because we’re never going to have olive oil or lemons or so many of the things that are just quintessential to Tuscan cuisine.
Our bioregion is actually very, very much like Denmark’s so pretty much everything that grows there grows here. In fact the difference is that we have somewhat greater bio diversity so there are things that we have that they don’t have. Really, we have of course a broader palette to work with but already Rene Redzepi from Noma, the head chef at Noma has shown that what you can do with that Nordic palette is almost limitless and so incredibly refined and so I look forward to bring back just a little bit of that to Maine.
Genevieve: The trend these days is again Forks Over Knives. There’s a bit real bent again towards cutting meat and meat products out of people’s diets to consider it healthier but you really have a different take going back even further which has to do with eating meat.
David: Yeah, that’s absolutely true and it’s a tricky subject to get into. People care very deeply about what they eat and when you’re talking about vegans or most vegetarians or people on the flip side following the Weston Price style diet or a Paleo diet, something like that, these are people who have put a lot of thought into what they’re eating. They generally have strong nutritional grounds for what they’re doing.
Often also there’s a moral imperative based on their understanding of what the ecological consequences are of their food choices so I think it’s absolutely essential to begin any kind of investigation that kind of thing by acknowledging that people have these positive motivations. They’re trying to make the right choices and to not pretend that I or anybody else has the absolute correct answer so I could just say that my way of thinking about how we should eat, how we can best nourish ourselves while also protecting the lands, we can start by looking at cultures that have lived in equilibrium with the land for eons, for many thousands of years.
When you look at indigenous cultures, I’m defining indigenous as opposed to societies based on cities which is really … if you look at the etymology of civilization, it’s all about cities so we’re looking at non-urban societies, non-agricultural societies, societies based on hunting, foraging, pastoralism, small scale horticulture. You see that no matter where these people were in the world, most of their calories were coming from fat and mostly highly saturated fat and it’s generally animal sources. The one being exception would be people who had accessed to coconuts so you look at the coconut in cultures and often, coconut oil accounts for 50% or even more of the total calories and then much of the rest is fish.
You can look at the Maasai or the Samburu in East Africa living near the equator on their traditional diet getting virtually all of their calories from cattle. They’re semi-nomadic cattle herders. They do drink the dairy from the cows and also they drink blood from the cows. They keep the cows alive and they tap them for blood like the human being giving blood. It’s not particularly painful or traumatic or anything and they do also of course eat meat of the animals and these people have extraordinary health. They have virtually no incidence of heart disease or stroke. They have unbelievable strength. Some of the greatest distance runners in the world are from these tribes.
Then in different of climate as you could possibly find, you go to Greenland and you see the Inuit before colonization, before being switched to a Western diet were getting over 80% of their total calories from fat and virtually 100% of their total calories from animals and they certainly ate and to a large extent still eat a lot of fish although really the staple are marine mammals and they had no incidence of cancer.
Danish doctors who live there for the better part of their lives never saw a single case of cancer until they started finding Greenlandic Inuit who had been switched to a Weston diet who are starting to eat flour and sugar and bingo, just like that, they started getting cancer and heart disease and stroke, none which have been present before.
I think when we look at the diets of indigenous people and it’s true also for the Abenaki, also for the Lakota, well, for most of the indigenous people of what’s now the United States, you see a diet based heavily in animals and when you look at the exceptions, you look at the more agricultural society to the desert Southwest, very beautiful societies in so many ways but you actually do find obesity there whereas you don’t find it in the other cultures. You do find tooth decay and evidence of cancer in the remains of these agricultural people.
Again, again, again, I think that we can see that indigenous people having an animal based diet, a diet very high in fat and very nutrient dense tend to be taller and stronger, much more cancer free, much more cavity free as well, larger bone mass and I personally have found it since I switched to that kind of diet. My health has improved enormously. In fact, when I went off grain three years ago, I was able to tackle asthma. I had had severe asthma for 30 years. I was on three daily medications and it was a huge encumbrance in my life and just getting off grain wound up solving it for me.
Dr. Lisa: For people who are interested in foraging, interested in finding the purslane along the building and getting out into the woods for the chanterelles, what steps can they take? How can they learn more about foraging? How can they learn more about the type of eating that you’re describing?
David: There are a lot of great resources out there. It’s well worth getting at least one guide really preferably a couple of books you can use as a reference point so when you see a mushroom, you’re wondering what it is, you look it up in one book. Once you’re pretty sure that you can … and preferably get a book with really good pictures, with not just the Latin names but also the common names and then cross reference it. Look it up in a few other places. See if it has any dangerous analogues. That’s the word that’s often used for look-alikes or you can just type in to Google dangerous look-alikes.
If you type into Google dangerous look-alikes for chanterelles, you’ll probably find Jack-O-Lantern but the Jack-O-Lantern really does not look very much like a chanterelle at all. If you’ve ever really seen a chanterelle, you’re not going to mistake them. If you’ve never seen a chanterelle before, then based on description, you might wonder if a Jack-O-Lantern is the right thing so you need to look at the pictures closely. You need to be sure about what you’re picking. Jack-O-Lantern by the way is a bioluminescent mushroom so take it into a dark closet.
There are so many wonderful things that you can harvest where there’s just no confusing them. There’s just no way to confuse a hen of the woods or an oyster mushroom or a black trumpet or anything that’s going to do you any harm at all.
Dr. Lisa: Do you teach that in your class as well?
David: I do. Actually one place that you could learn these things would be to come to my classes and so I guess I’d like to make a little plug and my website is vinland.me for Maine and I have this ongoing series of classes, Portland Food and Cooking Class. I say food and cooking because while I do love to actually cook, so much of the food that I eat and that I promote is not cooked so that’s away from the idea that food is something that is inherently cooked or 99% of the time cooked. Actually, I love raw food, fermented foods.
I’ve already taught one foraging class. I’ve often incorporate wild ingredients in my cooking classes. I’ll be doing another foraging class before too long. Now that we’re getting into summer, we’re starting to get into primetime for mushrooms, chanterelles, black trumpets, boletes, Porcini will be one of those bolete mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, shaggy mane, all kinds of great things.
Then the array of wild greens is far greater and again, many of them are really pretty easy to ID. The internet is a great tool. Wildman Steve Brill, he’s a legend in the foraging community so I’d recommend going to his website and it’s very, very user friendly and look around for foraging tours. David Spahr is a wonderful mycologist, mushroom specialist here in Maine and I believe he gets tours.
Dr. Lisa: Thank you so much for coming in and talking to us today. We’ve been talking with Chef David Levi of Vinland and we hope that you’ll come back and talk to us more about some of the exciting work you’re doing with your upcoming restaurant and all of the things that I think our listeners are eager to hear about.
David: I’d be really happy to do that. Thank you so much, Lisa. Thank you, Gen.
Male: A chronic ache, sleepless nights, a feeling of something being not quite right. Treat the symptoms with traditional medications. Feel better for a little while and continue with your busy days but have you ever stopped to consider the what that’s at the core of a health issue? Most time, it goes much deeper than we think.
When we don’t treat the root cause, the aches, the sleeplessness and not quite right come back. They don’t have to. You can take a step towards a healthier, more centered life. Schedule an appointment with Dr. Lisa Belisle and learn how practice that combines traditional medicine with eastern healing practices can put you on the right path to better living. For more information, call the Body Architect in Portland at 207-774-2196 or visit doctorlisa.org today. Healthy living is a journey. Take the first step.
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Dr. Lisa: As part of today’s Summer Fare show, we have with us Rafael Adams of SOPOSUP. What does SOPOSUP stands for, Rafael? Welcome.
Rafael: Thank you. SOPOSUP stands for South Portland Stand Up Paddling so we are a shop in South Portland. We’ve been open for about a year and a half now and we teach stand up paddleboarding to people. We do rentals. We have a lot of fun classes too, things like yoga. We do fishing on stand up paddleboards. Everyone who works at SOPOSUP also does a lot of surfing on paddleboards and we sell paddleboards.
Genevieve: I first went paddleboarding with you about a year ago for an article in Maine Magazine. I think it was the July issue of last year on surfing and I wanted to put in a piece about stand up paddleboarding because it’s something that a beginner can do. Actually, anyone can get on a paddleboard. What was the youngest and oldest person that you’d …
Rafael: I’ve had people I think anyone as young as even two or three on a paddleboard with an adult. I’ve had a woman take her mother who is 86 out on a paddleboard so they did that together. I had a woman just call back before I came in here today and she said, “You know, I’m older. I’m 65. Can I do this?” I asked her if she could clean her kitchen basically. If you can clean kitchen, you can probably stand up paddleboard so she could do it.
Dr. Lisa: Why are older people or younger people, why are people drawn to stand up paddleboarding?
Rafael: I think when people first see somebody paddleboarding across the water, they’re just like, “Wow, that looks amazing. It looks like that person is literally just gliding across the surface of water.” It looks like something that just doesn’t seem possible in some way and then when they find out how easy it is and how healthy it is, how simple it is, they think, “Well, maybe I should try that. Maybe it’s something that I could do.”
Dr. Lisa: Is this something that is unique in Maine? Is there stand up paddleboard …
Rafael: No. Stand up paddleboarding really started probably about 10 years ago and it started in Hawaii and it was done by more or less Laird Hamilton depending on whose story you listen to but the easiest way to explain is that it started by Laird Hamilton who’s a big wave surfer who a lot people know about and especially people who are into fitness and health issues.
He started it as a way to just take advantage of flat waves basically in Hawaii. Maybe without riding the big waves, he wanted to still get out there and then some of his friends realized that it was actually a really great training way to practice for big waves because you ride a paddleboard and surf in very similar fashion to when you ride a really small board in big waves. You have to do this big, carvey type turns. You’re not riding it like a really small surfboard slashing back and forth. When you’re on a small board on a big wave, you can’t make very fine sharp turns. You have to take advantage of this giant massive size of water that you’re riding.
So the moves translate between paddleboarding and big wave surfing really well and then I imagine he was just taking it out on flat days. He’d probably take some of his kids out on the boards on the waves that are only one or two foot and it was just a lot of fun.
Then when he did it, other people started seeing that and like, “Wow, what is Laird doing now?” They started getting boards and then it went from Hawaii to California really quickly. I haven’t been to California since it’s taken off but I think it’s pretty crazy in California where as if anywhere near the water and looking at the water, you’re pretty much always going to see at least a handful of people doing it. It’s taken a while to come here. I think probably maybe four years ago, five years ago is when you might have seen the very first paddleboards in Maine.
Genevieve: Rafael, when you took me out, I was wearing a wetsuit and you were laughing at me because you say, “You’re going to just be so hot.” I thought how can I be hot? The water in Maine is cold and I think this was in June and it turned out you were right because you’re actually not in the water as much as you would be if you’re surfing or swimming.
Rafael: Right. A lot of people ask me, “Oh, am I going to need a wetsuit to go paddleboarding?” Generally speaking, now all of June, July, August and deep into September, you really don’t need a wetsuit. A wetsuit is only going to help you out if you’re constantly in the water so if you’re in the water for half an hour or more, even in July, you can be in the water here without wetsuit for half an hour but after half an hour, you’re going to start losing that body heat. It’s just the water doesn’t penetrate the wetsuit. By the time you get back onto the board and the sun hits the wetsuit and you’re basically like cooked, like you’re in a microwave.
That’s another great freedom of it. You’re just in board shorts, a hat. I wear a hat when I go paddleboarding. Some people even get away with just regular street clothes and go paddleboarding once you get your confidence up and feel proud water paddling.
Genevieve: Why did you choose to open a shop that specializes in this?
Rafael: I was a furniture maker before this. I make custom furniture over 15 years, high end custom furniture and when I had free time on my hands, I did quite a lot of fishing and I’ve always wanted to explore some of the other spots, some of the islands that are close to shore and go fishing so I got a paddleboard as a means to do that. I tried fishing on a kayak and I was never really happy of the thing. Canoeing just kind of seem unsafe to me and I was a surfer when I was younger so it was sort of an obvious choice.
Then probably like within a week or two, I explored all these islands that I’ve always been dreaming about going to but pretty soon, I started leaving my fishing rod at home just because I didn’t want to fish anymore. I just wanted to paddle, just the actual act of having the paddle in my hand and moving across the water and three-quarters of the water surface is suddenly basically open to me that wasn’t open before and that’s what really captivated me.
Then maybe about six weeks after I started, I took it into the surf and at that point, I was completely taken with it. I realized that there’s just so much potential there.
Genevieve: Are you from Maine originally?
Rafael: I grew up from Long Island in New York and then I lived in Boston for six years before going to Maine. I’ve been in Maine now almost nine years.
Genevieve: Are there things that people should be aware of before they go out on a paddleboard from a weather standpoint or again from a safety standpoint?
Rafael: Yeah, absolutely. Anytime they go paddleboarding, anytime you go any boarding activity but especially paddleboarding, you want to pay attention to the weather, get a really good forecast. Things like waves or more significant waves and I should say waves and maybe the tide is something you want to pay attention to.
What you really want to pay attention to when you’re on a paddleboard is the wind. You want to pay attention to the wind direction and how strong it’s going to be blowing because when you’re on a board, there’s no resistance under the board which means that it moves really effortlessly above the water and even in things like current, you can negotiate really well because the current literally just slides under the board without affecting it very much but the wind also blows you and when you’re standing up, you’re basically a sail so that wind is going to blow you all over the place.
Anything over maybe like 10 or 12 knots of wind becomes a significant factor. Anything over 20 knots of wind is something that you would really only go out if you wanted to be blown by the wind.
Genevieve: You mentioned classes that you teach at your store. I think paddleboarding is interesting and that it’s a good workout. I was sore after I did it but it also can be very social because you’re on this board and so you can talk so Lisa and I could go do it together and be working out but talking to one another.
Rafael: Yeah. I mean it is what you bring to it. I planned since last summer I’d be on the water probably anywhere from three to five hours a day every day just about whether I was giving lessons or demos or just out if I didn’t have anything going on and know somebody else was in the shop and I have some free time, I’ll be paddling.
That was really sort of casual years paddling whereas if I’m giving lessons, I’m not getting tired. At this point, my balance is pretty good. There’s always sort of this under level of balance issues that you’re working with almost subconsciously but it’s easy. I could do it all day.
There were quite a few races last summer and it wasn’t until probably September that the shop was quite enough that I had an opportunity to take part in one of the races and I had thought to myself I’m on one of these things four or five hours a day. I’m going to enter this race and I’m going to win it hands down seemingly then. It’s going to be like this glorious moment for me.
I did some training maybe for about a week before the race but I guess that’s the equivalent now that I look at it, it’s the equivalent of like training for a marathon for maybe a week beforehand. It’s not going to work. I entered it race. It was in Newport, Rhode Island. I entered myself in the elite division which is the appropriate that I think because I’ve done a lot of paddleboarding. I would have started in sort of like the open division.
Within about 50 yards of the race, I was winded. I had five more miles to go and I realized that I hated racing. In the back of my mind, I was seriously thinking like can I just drop out of this race right now? I didn’t want to do it because I wouldn’t have been able to lift myself in there again so I stuck it out but it’s a really competitive sport already so you can get a serious aerobic workout or if you’re doing what I was doing during the summer four or five hours a day, I’m not really ever getting tired.
Dr. Lisa: We appreciate you coming in and talking to us today. We’ve been speaking with Rafael Adams of SOPOSUP in South Portland. How can people learn more about your shop?
Rafael: We do a lot of work on Facebook so you can check us out on our Facebook page and we’ve got a pretty nice website that details lessons, rentals. We try to do probably two or three different activities a week. We do yoga on paddleboards on Monday evenings and Thursday mornings. We’re on a fishing tour on Wednesdays. We operate our paddle birding tours. That’s another exciting thing that we’re offering so we’re going to be bird watching from paddleboards. I have Mike Windsor, the naturalist at Audobon running that with me.
Just check us out on Facebook. Check out our website. You’ll see a lot of cool events. Events are actually great ways to just try our paddleboarding.
Genevieve: Your website is?
Rafael: Our website is SOPOSUP.com.
Dr. Lisa: Very good. Thanks so much for coming in today.
Rafael: You’re welcome.
Male: We’ll return to our interview after acknowledging the following generous sponsors: Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists in Falmouth, Maine. At Orthopedic Specialists, ultrasound technology is taken to the highest degree with state of the art ultrasound equipment. Small areas of tendonitis, muscle tears, ligaments, instability and arthritic conditions can be easily found during examination. For more information, visit orthocareme.com or call 207-781-9077.
Dr. Lisa: As part of today’s Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast Summer Fare show, we have with us Anita Demetropoulos who began a toy store in my own hometown of Yarmouth called Island Treasure Toys 10 years ago this year so she’s quite well versed in summer play and now has a second store in Freeport. Thank you, Anita for coming in and speaking with us.
Anita: You’re welcome. Thank you for having me.
Dr. Lisa: I’ve been in both of your stores and there is a heavy emphasis on hands on, doing things that are tactile and really being involved in play. Why was that so important to you?
Anita: I think it’s important for children to use their imaginations while playing. I think that being able to just put everything aside and just go out there and create whatever comes to mind is really important so we buy toys that encourage them to do that. Stay away from electronics, battery operated toys and our focus is on imaginative play and being creative.
Dr. Lisa: You’re a mother yourself.
Anita: I am. I have four daughters.
Dr. Lisa: Did this enter into your decision to have a store of this type?
Anita: That’s correct. My youngest daughter is now 13 so when she was three years old, we decided to start our own business. We were having a hard time finding really simple basic toys even things like wooden blocks. Everything was plastic. Everything was electronic. You push a button and it talks back to you. It just all started out of our home. We decided to start an online business.
Dr. Lisa: What are some of the big sellers this summer?
Anita: It’s hard to explain on radio. OgoSport is this really big round disc that has, I think you’ve seen those discs, has a little compression area in the center so that it’s almost like playing a volleyball and you toss this little Koosh ball looking ball back and forth. It’s a lot of fun and every day we sell them.
Dr. Lisa: is this specific to an age group or do different aged kids like different types of toys?
Anita: This particular toy is appealing to five on up. I have a daughter who is 21 and she’s like, “Oh, we need to have this at home.” I think it appeals to all ages.
Dr. Lisa: What other toys are for younger kids do you have available that are something that kids could use and are great outdoors?
Anita: One of the things that I really love is the Zipline and as long as you have two large trees that you can attach it to, children as young as four, again, can get on the Zipline and pretend they’re flying, pretend they’re superheroes. It’s all in the imagination but flying through the air, having your feet off the ground is a thrilling experience for children.
Dr. Lisa: You have the Ogo that you described. You have the Zipline. I was in the store and there were adults in there who were kind of basically big kids. What types of things do they seem to gravitate towards?
Anita: Exactly. Hula hoops, good old fashioned hula hoops. I have two suppliers. Both of them are from Maine. They’re hand made in Maine. The hula hoop appeals to a lot of women. It’s a great way to do exercise. It’s nice core strengthening. My daughter, Amelia and I, we both use our hula hoops.
I would say the newest item that’s come out that the men like, again, hard to describe, a football that looks gray but when you wear these special glasses, there’s a little laser light and if you turn it to red, your ball will be red. It will glow. If you have the green, it will go out in green and that way you can play at night. I think that dads are really, they’ve been buying a lot of those for the kids saying it’s for the kids but we all know they’re going to play with them.
Dr. Lisa: How about kites? Do people still fly kites?
Anita: Yes. We have lots of kites. People love to buy them and go to the beach and fly their kites.
Dr. Lisa: First of all, I know that your store has been very successful despite the economic downturn. Now, it’s so successful you’ve moved from one location to another location and you’ve doubled yourselves in size. Do you think there’s something about toys that helps you put a maintained hope in the face of maybe not so ideal circumstances like a downturn in the economy?
Anita: I would agree with that. Many people during this time turn to games, puzzles, those types of activities that they could still do in their home as an activity with the family. Have game nights. I spend a lot of time choosing games because it’s really important. I feel it’s important for everyone to get together of all ages and to be able to sit down and play games from cards to strategy games to dice games and again, the puzzles.
Dr. Lisa: What you’re describing really it’s a toy store. We think of toys and children but you’re describing really toys as a family tool, as a way to get everybody together doing something that’s not video based.
Anita: That’s correct. We believe in play. We play with the toys. Our employees play with the toys. We’re happy to open up anything and show our customers. It is a family event. This is not about buying something and sticking your child in the corner with a toy.
Genevieve: You also have a lot of craft and drawing supplies for the more perhaps introspective child who doesn’t necessarily want to go out and throw a football. You do cater to them as well. What are some of those?
Anita: One of the things that we have coming in shortly, it’s this new line called Red Box and I’m so excited about it. They are craft kits that contain all the wood and the screws and nails and hammer and everything that you need, even some paint to create your own toolbox, go-karts with wheels that kids can’t get on the go-cart and being able to create something from your own hands makes children feel very satisfied. It’s so nice to be able to see a bunch of materials just fitting there and you put it together and then you get to play with it or ride on it. It’s a very satisfying feeling for a child just like sewing. My daughter is now sewing. You just have material and boom, now you have a skirt. It makes them feel really good.
Dr. Lisa: I’ve met your husband Jimmy and I’ve met I think two of your daughters maybe. Has this contributed to the strength of your family having two toy stores in Yarmouth and Freeport?
Anita: Absolutely. We still play games. They still come to the store and take things off the shelf to bring home. When Gabriel was away at college, she just graduated from college, when she went to school, she would come home on her break and take games back up to school to play with her friends. That felt really good to think that here are these kids who are 19, 20, 21 years old and playing with a game from Island Treasure Toys.
We recently brought home a water balloon toy where it pumps up your balloon for you. Do you remember when you’d stick a water balloon on the hose and they always break because the hose is too big. This is the perfect size. Amelia was 13 and she had a ball. Her sisters were coming with their boyfriends and she got those water balloons all ready to throw at them and get them wet so we’re still playing with toys.
Dr. Lisa: You seem to sort of increase the size of your family because from what I can tell, the people who come to work for you, they like it so much that they keep coming back to work for you again. Is that right?
Anita: This is true. We are one big family. I have many employees that keep coming back. Another gentleman I’m thinking of is Pebe and he just graduated from college and sure enough, he wanted to come back. I know that he’ll find his way and leave us eventually but it is definitely thrilling to have him come back.
Dr. Lisa: How do people find out more about your store?
Anita: We are located on Route 1 in Yarmouth and we also have our store on 20 Bow Street in Freeport. You can visit us online. We have a website, islandtreasuretoys.com. We do stay really active with our Facebook and Twitter so there’s many ways to reach us. When you come to the store, you can talk to anybody. Everyone is very well versed in the product and happy to help you.
Dr. Lisa: Good. Any other thoughts on Summer Fare, anything else you would like to share with our listeners?
Anita: I think just getting outdoors with your kids. It’s kind of strange probably coming from a toy store owner but I always say less is best. Honestly, mud pies and beach balls really are it. The toys are great and they will encourage a lot of creative play but really children just need time to be.
Dr. Lisa: We’ve been talking with Anita Demetropoulos of Island Treasure Toys in Yarmouth and Freeport. We thank you for coming in and having a conversation about summer fare with us.
Anita: Thank you for having me. I appreciate the time to come in and talk to you.
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you have been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast show number 45, Summer Fare airing for the first time on July 22nd, 2012 on WLOB and WPEI Radio Portland, Maine. Today’s guests included David Levi of Vinland, Rafael Adams of SOPOSUP or the South Portland Paddle Shop and Anita Demetropoulos of Island Treasure Toys.
We hope that you are listening out there in listener land have enjoyed our show. We appreciate you helping us build a healthier, brighter community. We hope you’ll take the time to connect with us. Send us a message on Facebook. Send us an e-mail at [email protected]. Be sure to thank our sponsors and become a bigger part of our world.
This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. Thank you for being a part of my world. May you have a bountiful life.
Male: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine, Michael LePage and Beth Franklin at Re/Max Heritage, Robin Hodgskin at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists in Falmouth, Maine, Booth, UNE, the University of New England and Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is recorded in downtown Portland at the offices of Maine Magazine on 75 Market Street. It is produced by Kevin Thomas and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Editorial content produced by Genevieve Morgan, audio production and original music by John C. McCain. Our assistant producer is Jane Pate.
For more information on our host’s production team, Maine Magazine or any of the guests featured here today, visit us at doctorlisa.org. Download and become a podcast subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle through iTunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details.