I’ve lived in several Toronto neighbourhoods and the complaint was always the same – if only we had a decent resto here. We didn’t mean we wanted Splendido next door but a small bistro flying below the radar of restaurant critics. The local joint has a different imperative from the flashy binge destination or corporate chow down or an artist’s steely idiosyncratic plat de jour. It’s the equivalent of a pub in England, a casual meeting place for a drink and something to eat. How then to fairly judge neighbourhood restaurants, the place where discerning diners cut their teeth without being intimidated?   more »

If you heat olive oil, which is a monosaturated oil, to smoking point it turns into TRANSFAT.

Zoe Williams in The Guardian says the record sales of Rachael Ray's EVOO last year are not the sign of Britons eating healthy Mediterranean diets. More likely they're using olive oil for cooking -- a bad idea. Substitute polyunsaturated safflower oil. Fact is that EVOO should be used sparingly and preferably cold.

Further warning: canola oil is also a monosaturated fat and turns into TRANSFAT when it''s heated to smoking point. and Health Cooking Oils website says canola is "healthy, but not for cooking. But what else would I use it for. Obviously EVOO or walnut oil is much better in salads. Canola tastes of nothing.

Current favourite healthy oil: Coconut, which has lots of health benefits and doesn't turn into TRANSFAT and loads of pacific islanders have lived off coconut oil for centuries without ever getting a heart attack. Sounds like olive oil all over again.

Wait coconut oil is a saturated fat and haven't we been told for the last thirty years by the Food Police that the very worst thing for us was animal (saturated fats)? 

Er that's under revision. As is the promotion of soy oil after the noise about soy's effect on hormones.

I return to eating my bread and butter: the new health food.

Four weeks ago I tried to take a Celiac pal to a well-reviewed Toronto restaurant, and now I read today a  terrific NYT story today about Celiacs eating out in that city.  http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/25/dining/25glut.html

Andrew Yang in the NYT (http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/travel/22surfacing.html?8dpc) reports that  waiters in a Beijing resto are outfitted with military-grade night-vision goggle so they can serve diners in the unlit room.  The trend to dining blind started in Zurich in 1999 with the aim of giving jobs to blind and handicapped people and Blindekuh, as the resto's called, has been sold out ever since. Since then, a moderate enthusiasm has built in other cities like Paris. Other restaurants, on the grounds that if you're deprived of one sense,  you sharpen the others, are going so far as to blindfold patrons or seat 'em in the dark. Only drawback. You can't eat steak because understandably no knives are allowed. 

Toronto's yet to er see its first all-dark eating experience. But it seems a natural seque from the dark nightclubs where patrons can neither hear each other or see each others' faces.

All the Best makes little loaves of fresh ginger cake but what makes it scrumptious are the filaments of ginger running through it.

Just when many people are determinedly eating fish to boost their Omega-3 levels, word comes: cut the lines, throw back those fish.

A quarter of New Yorkers have mercury levels at or slightly above reportable leves so the NYC Food Police aka  health department urged moderation.High mercury fish include orange roughy and Chilean sea bass which you shouldn't be eating anyway because they're endangered, and grouper, king mackerel, marlin, shark, swordfish, tilefish, tuna steaks and sushi grade tuna. (Health Canada advises Canadians to limit  their consumption of fresh and frozen tuna to one meal per week.)

Wait a sec, don't worry. The mercury levels present no danger! But now the worry's there, nagging away. Dr. Mark Klein posted to the NYT's City Blog:  "I’ve stopped eating all sea food because of the contamination risks. Certainly no child should be exposed to mercury."

A warning's been sent to pregnant women - again. Already it's taboo for North American women to eat sushi. Not that there's any research showing that unborn children have been damaged by sushi, writes Steven Shaw, author of Turning the Tables on Asian Restaurants: The Insider’s Guide to Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Korean and Southeast Asian Dining, in a July 15 op-ed piece for the NYT ."You can be sure that, were there documented complications resulting from pregnant women eating sushi in Japan, there would be swift government intervention."

But paranoia persists. The public imagination, Shaw says, is gripped by fear of foodborne illnesses, particularly parasites. That fear was behind Toronto's aborted effort to ban fresh fish sushi which might contain the sushi worm -- extremely rare.

Shaw points out that  85% percent of seafood related illness is caused by bivalve molluscs, oysters, clams etc raised in fecally pollluted water. Remove shellfish from the seafood statistics and the risk of falling ill from seafood is 1 in 2 million serving according to the government - the risk of getting ill from chicken is 1 in 25,000. 

Sushi, continues Shaw, has, for the most part, been frozen. I thought that would interest all those who blew up when the Toronto health police tried to order all sushi fish into the deepfreeze.  FDA guidelines require that before being served as sushi or sashimi (or in any other raw form), fish be flash-frozen to destroy parasites. "While the fish you see in the sushi-bar display case looks fresh, it has almost certainly been frozen at some point in the distribution system. This freezing kills any parasites as sure as cooking would." I wonder whether that's also true of fish coming to Canada?

Then he adds that most sushi fish  don’t have parasites anyway. " Tuna  are not particularly susceptible to parasites because they dwell in very deep, very cold water, and sushi restaurants typically use farmed salmon to avoid the parasite problems wild salmon have... Nor does pregnancy increase susceptibility to parasites. Healthy women who’ve been eating sushi are not at increased risk when they become pregnant. The same resistance and immunities function before, during and after pregnancy."

But the Food Police don't buy it.

"“Why take any risk?” they ask. The medical establishment and the culture at large have twisted logic around to the point where any risk, no matter how infinitesimal, is too much. So powerful is this Puritanical impulse that, once a health objection is raised, however irrational the recommended behavior, it’s considered irresponsible to behave any other way."

Whoa!  Forget puritanism. Think litigious population.  Foodborne illness suits are humoungous. While I was researching the FDA's war against raw milk cheese for my book Last Chance to Eat, I was told that no government agency could afford to OK a food that wasn't 100% safe -- think of the potential lawsuits! I have to admit I sadly saw his point.

Dinerout mails "You didn't mention Peter Geary at Pangaea". I shall do so now. Peter Geary is a wonderful Maitre d, cheerful and attentive....

And I should add so is Georges Gurnon at Pastis Express - no doubt who's boss at that restaurant.....

The French have a word for it – accueil. Nothing’s more important than the way a customer is greeted by a restaurant, and the first encounter with the maitre d’hotel, who supervises the waiters and seats the diners, will colour everything that follows. I’ve never forgotten Joe Mandel, who opened The Church restaurant in Stratford: he was a superb maitre d’. He welcomed everyone and although the restaurant was the Stratford Festival canteen, he was never less than charming to the critics who had just panned a show.    more »

We have a mayor and city council, and that means you, Kyle Rae, my councillor, which puts saving a moribund Theatre Passe Muraille ahead of of supporting one of Toronto's real tourist amenities-- restaurants.

Dining out at restaurants is one of the top three activities that attract tourists to Toronto but the Council doesn't care. They just came within a whisker of imposing a 5% city liquor tax. Think of that. I fished out a recent restaurant bill, the one that so shocked visiting Americans, and totted up the taxes. On a subtotal of $210, I paid almost $30 in taxes and another thirty with the 15% tip that added up to  $62.45 with an overall total of $273.  Now I'm facing a further 5% tax  -- because I'm sure the same councillors who won't reduce their own salaries in the current fiscal crisis will grasp at anything taxable. They can always give a little homily on the evils of drink to oil the wheels.

Even the idea of imposing another expense/tax on restaurants is obscene. Restaurants have the wobbliest of economies - everything that happens in the city has impact on them, from raising parking charges, to banning smoking in bars - to the city's unwarranted effort to ban fresh sushi.

Councillor Rae and his allies are paying $1.2 million to save Theatre Passe Muraille.  No one I know and respect has gone near Theatre Passe Muraille for atleast twenty years. 

Forty years ago in the flameout sixties, TPM had a hit called the Farm Show and actors played tractors and chickens to great acclaim. This was a major breakthrough in drama-- ranked alongside Oedipus, Tartuffe and Hamlet by local critics who must have been smoking something. Canada, by god, can think and act -- even if it's only a tractor's inner soul.  The late Sid Adilman once noted in his Toronto Star column that he could smell pot being smoked by actors in a TPM show and made national headlines, more attention than TPM received before or since. 

TPM is being saved because it's part of a small community. What about saving the larger community, Councillor Rae, the one that depends on tourism to flourish? We know theatre don't do it. Remember the $5 million the province and a business consortium lost in the production of the risible Lord of the Rings.

But our good restaurants are among the few quality amenities this city offers tourists. This city is the fifth largest in North America and yet we lag behind smaller cities like Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco in attracting tourists.

Ontario has suffered more than any other province since 2001, seeing a 50% drop in the number of international tourists  while the rest of Canada has seen only  a 24% drop.

Restaurants, the hospitality industry have been hit hard sby the fallout from 9/11, SARS, smoking bans, the loss of a hockey season, sluggish economy, rising Canadian dollar and skyrocketing gas prices  – factors which led to a persistent and dramatic drop in tourism, and less spending by local customers.

Between 2000 and 2006, Ontario restaurant industry revenues fell by an inflation-adjusted 1.8%, which represents a drop in demand of $291 million.  Sales won’t recover to 2000 levels until 2008, according to a new forecast by the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association (CRFA).

Restaurant industry pre-tax profit margins in Ontario are the lowest in the country at just 2.9% of operating revenue. 

Ontario bars (now smoking is banned) have hit a new low, reporting an average loss of 0.5% of revenue.

Real foodservice sales in Ontario are 1.8% lower than they were in 2000, compared to an 8.5% increase in the rest of Canada.

Ontario now has 17.4 foodservice establishments per 10,000 people – the third lowest concentration in Canada and ahead of only Manitoba and Nova Scotia.
(All figures are based on Statistics Canada data)

CRFA is forecasting 1.3% real growth for Ontario’s restaurant industry in 2007 and 2008.  Many restaurant and bar owners will continue to be challenged by rising costs including the new bottle deposit program and a series of minimum wage increases, starting in early 2008, which will put inflationary pressure on all wages and lead to higher payroll taxes for employers.

What I'd like to know Councillor Rae is why you aren't leading an effort to give restaurants in this city a break not a new tax. Restaurants rely on the bar to make the difference between profit and loss, that's why we pay a minimum of 100% markup. In New York, restaurants get a break on buying wine, but here, the restaurateur pays what the consumer pays. Any rise in the price of wine could well lower restaurant sales -- wine is already the breaking point for lots of diners out.

But never mind. TPM's ok. Think how many tourists will flock to the documentary on The Farm Show which celebrates TPM's fortieth anniversary.

Gail Singer:

I am obliged to declare that I consider Alida Solomon's restaurant Tutti Matti among the finest in the city, and I confess to having befriended Ms. Solomon because I liked the food she prepared and the atmosphere in her restaurant so much, that I imagined I would like its proprietor. I even liked the sometimes laconic waiter (the one Ms Mallett was so offended by) who evoked a particular essence of waiter from central casting - one whom one might have enjoyed in Italy, or in a Fellini film.

From the London Times

Fran Yeoman writes.....Vivat Bacchus, the South African-run restaurant in Farringdon, is offering a starter with real bite: rattlesnake, with black-eye beans, lime crème fraîche and smoked chilli jelly.

Rattlesnake costs £60 a kilo. Even then, around two thirds of the animal ends up in the bin rather than on a plate because all that slithering means it has more bone and sinew than meat. It arrives, minus the tail and poisonous head, from Arizona, and several painstaking hours of preparation are needed to turn it into edible fillets.

the cost of a rattlesnake starter? $40. Yawn. I could get a caterpillar starter in a Lancashire resto for less.

"It just takes five fruits and veggies a day to keep breast cancer away " headline in Globe and Mail yesterday.

This is not true, and it is also cruel. So many people are frightened of cancer that they believe any bunk published about its prevention. Years ago, food scientists said that eating fibre would prevent colon cancer. Years later, they acknowledged it didn't. Ditto fruit and veg and breast cancer. This week, the results of a big seven-year study on the effect of diet on breast cancer showed that fruit and veggies did not prevent the return of breast cancer.

Nutritionists -- back off! Nutritionists are particularly guilty of promoting fruit and veg ad nauseum. The latest food pyramid says eat 12 helpings of veg a day -- in fact as much as you like. LIKE? This is ridiculous. Overeating is bad whatever you eat.  It's like the endless promotion of olive oil: no nutritionist ever says that olive oil is just as fattening as butter.

I wish Toronto imported Wall's pork sausages.

They are tasty without being overly assertive, 98 percent pork meat, no whiskers that creep into frankfurters. They aren't overly spicy and they aren't heavy, i think 31% pork belly is what makes them light without tasting unbearably rich. Best grilled until mahogany and bursting then served with shallot mash and Colman's English mustard.

Nutrition Typical values per 100g uncooked sausage - nutrition information (No Gm)
ENERGY    1376 kj / 331 kcal
PROTEIN    11.9 g
CARBOHYDRATE    16.8 g
of which sugars    0.7 g
FAT    24 g
of which saturates    5 g
of which polyunsaturates    4.1 g
FIBRE    1.7 g
SODIUM    0.6 g
SALT EQUIVALENT    1.4 g
Ingredients
74% Total Pork Cuts Pork shoulder (32%), Pork Belly (31%), Water, Pork Fat (11%), Rusk (Wheat), Potato Starch, Ingredients less than 2%: Salt, Dextrose, Yeast Extract, Dehydrated Onion, Stabiliser: Diposphates, Spices, Preservative: Sodium, Metabisulphite, Sage, Antioxidant: Vitamin C (E300), Spice Extract, Herb Extracts. !Contains Wheat, Gluten, Sulphites.

Verlyn Klinkenborg in today's NYT has a terrific piece about the projected population growth in California - 60 million by 2050.  He sums up the pollyanna syndrome that we're now drowning in. "This population forecast is a vivid reminder of the assumptions that make meaningful change so hard. We can’t help believing in growth. We can’t help believing that the way to create change is simply to buy different stuff, so growth doesn’t stop. And we refuse to think seriously about the number of human beings on this planet, a kind of growth that somehow seems “natural” to us. It makes no difference how little each of those 60 million Californians will consume in 2050. The number cannot be negative. It’s nearly impossible to imagine how they could meet their water needs alone.

And then there is the impact of all those people on the other species with which they might have shared the Golden State. In 2007, we remain blindly impervious to the life-claims of almost all other forms of life — to the moral stipulation that their right to life is equivalent to ours. How it will be then I do not know, but if there are indeed 60 million people living in California in 2050, there will be nothing meaningful to be said on the matter, except as a subject of nostalgia."http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/18/opinion/18wed4.html

"A food is not necessarily essential just because your child hates it." Katharine Whitehorn

Weginald -  "I am a West Country Farmhouse Cheddar cheese, handmade down on a farm in Somerset by one of a small group of artisan cheesemakers"  - has his own website www.cheddarvision.tv and I've already logged in to check him mature 7/24. So have more than a million other people. Don't get too fond of Weginald however as he's gonna get eaten come September.

Veronique Perez, the inspired and indefatigable owner of Crepes a Go Go at the corner of Yorkville and Yonge, took over the nabe this weekend in the name of France. To celebrate Bastille Day, Veronique hung little tricolours between lamposts, neighbouring shops advertised her YAY teeshirts, and we locals couldn't get near the place because the lineups seemed endless. I missed out on my weekly fix of Dinamique, a crepe stuffed with basil, tomato and Brie and a glass of GoGo's Limonana, minty lemon refresher.  The French consulate was so impressed with Veronique's gallic spirit that she's been given the job of organizing the official celebrations next year.  Can't wait. I can see it now: the city's French chefs cooking for us and Moet et Chandon providing the Champagne fountain.  Marchons, marchons....

Liberte's Coconut Yogurt, probiotic, as creamily delicious as a dessert, superb with this year's excellent crop of raspberries and has little threads of coconut running through it. 

Imagine going off to sit six-hour exams fortified by brain food such as badaam-ki-golis, small almond balls made by soaking the nuts overnight, grinding them with sugar and cardamom and finally covering them with real silver tissue, varak. A whole culture wrapped in silver paper – why more trouble must have gone into making the delectable morsels described in A Taste of India, by Delhi-born Madhur Jaffrey, than the exams themselves. This was my wake-up call to the sumptuous, complex, seductive flavours of regional Indian cooking and to the breadth and depth of the cooking. Other than France, I can’t think of a country where food is so intimately connected with every facet of life, where food is a resource, a philosophy, a medicine and always a delight.    more »

In 2000,  soi-disant aristo Conrad Black celebrated his wife Marie Antoinette's 60th birthday with a $62,000 dinner at Manhattan's La Grenouille. La Grenouille! How retro.  La Grenouille is only one of two survivors, the other being Le Perigord, of the Frog Pond clique patronized by the ancien regime, the Duchess of Windsor, Babe Paley.  Patrons without decorations weren't admitted.   I remember  arranging to interview Sam Waterson (yes, he of Law and Order) over lunch at La Grenouille, and Mr. W wasn't allowed in because he wasn't wearing a tie! La Grenouille  is one of only four restos in New York today that insist on a jacket and tie, the others are old dowagers 21 and the Rainbow Room and new dowager Alain Ducasse. 

The Blacks and their fully clothed guests were served Dom Perignon, Chassagne Montrachet, Clos Vougeot, the brand names of the arriviste diner,  Conrad hadn't yet bought his peerage, and picked on other socially ok foods like Beluga Caviar and lobster. Not that the rich-rich Kravises were impressed,  Marie Josee Kravis revealed (at Conrad's trial) that they only stayed ten minutes. Quel gaffe! No wonder she turned on Conrad.  It's one thing to put your hand in the cookiejar, quite another not to serve fashionista food.

This week, Kim Severson reported in the NYT that the best candy bars are English. She's right. But when she went on to trash English food generally, she was all wet. (Listen lady, I'll take bangers and mash any day ahead of a greasy burger with all that junk on it). She missed the point. English sweets are the most imaginative and alluring food and designed to enchant. Oldstyle English sweet counters promised a Dickensian pig out. I can remember od' ing on a couple of pounds of Dolly Mixture, little pieces of sweet confetti, the day sugar rationing came off.  When we went back for more, the grumpy old lady in the village shop, whom we often compared to the witch in Hansel and Gretel,  said with schadenfreude,  "Too late, we're all out." It took days for her to restock the empty jars of barley sugar sticks, always a bargain, English Acid Drops that set the teeth on edge,  stripey Bulls Eyes (peppermint boiled sweets),  rich Butterscotch, Cadbury Eclairs, Chocolate Brazils,  Cinnamon Balls, Fizzy Fish, Fruit Drops, Pastilles, Brighton Rock, Jelly Babies, , Liqorice Allsorts, Melba Fruit sweets, Mini Chocolate Eggs,  Golden Humbugs with chocolate centres, Mint Imperials, the subtle Pear Drops, ... along with Mars, an Anglicized improvement over the American original, and  Smarties which were fatter than M and Ms and much more fun, the yellow and reds had plain chocolate fillings, the purple and green were milk....

Nobody but nobody can surpass the English in the blending of peppermint and chocolate - from the Bendick Bittermint, black choc robing a big peppery and crunchy peppermint disc, to After Eights. For years I could still find a Crunchie, my fave, in Toronto. Alas, no more. A Crunchie for those who don't know it is a sublime mouth feel, milk choc and burnt sugar crystals dissolving in the mouth.  I need a care package.

Once again I read a story which pits rhetoric against reality. The Guardian sadly reports on the failure of an ambitious scheme to turn on kids to veggies.

Hey kids! How about some healthy free fruit? No thanks, we'll stick with crisps. It’s Jamie Oliver’s story all over again.  Over three years, the government spent 119 million pounds serving 44 million pieces of fruit/veg to 2 million children in 18,000 schools in Britain – I make that 2.70 pounds ($6.50) per banana. Why a kid could gorge in McDonalds for that. No wonder the muggles just sniffed and went back to Big Macs.

Oh dear, perhaps choice was too limited: “fruit with stones aren’t handed out for fear someone will choke”. Doesn’t this sum up the uselessness of any public initiative today? And then the mandatory blame game: it’s the parents’ fault.

Now a prof has devised the Food Dudes programme to make “healthy food cool and acceptable to kids.” He said "I got into it because of my children coming home and asking us not to let salad be seen in their sandwiches. If kids eat chocolate bars and crisps they are one of the gang."

How about putting healthy dark choc into lunch box? Smart kids might ask for cooked tomatoes so they benefit from lycopene. Smarter kids might question the value of lycopene. Smartass kids might ask why the food isn’t organic. Downright cheeky kids might ask whether the food is sustainable. And schools will have the right to expel any kid who says she isn’t going to eat a banana imported from thousands of miles away.  

It’s crazy. It’s like putting a bandaid on a broken leg. It’s like having a bunch of coked up pop stars give a Live Sustainable Food Concert – and that’s surely coming -- as they jet round the dissolving planet in their private planes stocked with global food.

The world is confused about food and divided. On one side of the chasm is the Food Taliban, enviro-organic advocates who condemn any industrial food and by implication condemn all those who enjoy fast food. And by extension deplore modern life.

On the other side is the consumer who wants cheap available food when they want to eat it. Gosh, only a hundred years ago, millions weren’t getting enough to eat (that’s still true).  Last week I read (in the London Times) an attack on supermarkets by a born-again “fresh’n’local” (atleast the paper got the headline right “Food Fad”). While the writer exulted in exploring farmers’ markets and buying meat from a real butcher, he overlooked entirely the reason supermarkets have taken over. Before supermarkets, and I can remember this, the specialist food stores dictated the hours they were open and the hell with the consumer. If you missed the local tomatoes at the market garden stall, well, too bad.

That is the way it was.

But we don’t live in that kind of elite world anymore. We live in a consumer-driven society. As in every other aspect of our lives, we’ve made a trade-off, shedding exclusive for inclusive.  We’ve changed our values. My parents ate much tastier food than I do, but they paid more for it. Today I’m eating a far greater variety of food and at cheaper prices, and I’m able to shop when I want to. Most North Americans have a choice of food never offered them before in their history.

Turns out it was a Faustian bargain. Here you can have all the cheap food you want but wait for the payback. Now we’re paying.

Obesity is rising, 90 percent of our food is processed with some disastrous results. 70% of our food contains genetically modified ingredients, an idea too indigestible for many people. And now we’re eating cheap Chinese food full of plastic.   

Enter the Food Taliban which advocates a repeal of the industrial revolution, a return to the organic way of sustainable growing, and a diet of fresh, local food. I guess we’re going to have to return to peasanthood as well. I mean who’s going to do all the handhoeing required and for so little money? How’s the Taliban going to turn upside down a society that exists to spend money?

But I’m being unfair: the FT doesn’t want total repeal. I never hear an FT support the sale of raw milk which is so much better for you than the pasteurized white stuff, tastes superior and makes incomparable cheese – and which is sold as an artisanal product in 28 US states and Europe.

The FT doesn’t want to go there. Why? Because it knows we can’t return to the days of unpasteurized milk for the masses. There’s just no way to insure milk’s safety in a standardized industrial system. Nor it turns out is there any way to guarantee the safety of organic produce which is now being produced in bulk,

Another thing the FT is loath to explain is how many farmers are turned off organic growing by the enormously complicated (and expensive) rules that baffle even post-graduates.

But the FT isn’t into debate. It’s really creationism. One farmer told me visitors to his organic farm routinely say “God Bless You.” Those of us who don’t join God’s army are out! Reminds me of the worst of the sixties (the parts I can remember)….

“We are the folk song army,
Every one of us cares.
We all hate poverty, war, and injustice
Unlike the rest of you squares.”  (thanks T Lehrer)
 
Yes, elitism is back. Born-again organic farmer Prince Charles stopped chatting to his delphiniums long enough to call for the banning of McDonald’s. Pierre Marco White, one of England’s starriest chefs, attacked him as “wrong and foolish” and wondered aloud whether the snob had even tasted a Big Mac. Citing the fact that McDonalds offers free-range eggs and Irish beef, White said “McDonald’s offers better food than most restaurants.” And he could have added, Prince Charles’ own organic Cornish pasties which have been found to be less healthy, more fattening than a Quarter Pounder!   

I’m not drinking the Koolaid. My species hasn’t come this far to voluntarily return to the dark ages. I’m not going to wear hemp and eat roots all winter nor am I going to move to California or those parts of the Mediterranean which are the only places where you can eat good food that’s fresh and local year round.

I’m not going to put organic ahead of taste when I shop. I don’t want to pay more for organic food grown by someone driving an SUV when it tastes no better than conventionally grown produce. Same goes for local - last summer I bought a sublime peach flown from Italy that put the local variety to shame but cost exactly the same. (I’m not going into the food miles controversy ‘cos the jury’s out).

As well, overwhelmingly, studies find no evidence that organic veg are more nutritious than conventional produce with its pesticide residue. As for pesticides, well most of the pesticides we eat are natural. All pesticides, natural or synthetic, are poisonous.  Did you know that broccoli is an organic pesticide?  Gives me an excuse never to eat it again.

The worry is that lots of people who can’t afford to pay for the premium organic food – I saw a little box of organic greens the other day for $10! – may reject all greens if they can’t eat the “healthier” ones. And just when nutritionists say we should eat more and more and more greens.

But wait a minute, which greens? Stay tuned. The food wars have only just begun.
 

National Post Review: Arriverderci Pasta The future of food may lie with those who cannot eat it. This morbid speculation is fuelled by Hilary, one of my oldest friends, calling to say that she and her husband Jerry, who live in Pennsylvania, are passing through Toronto and want to eat Italian. She adds, remember I'm a celiac - I can't eat wheat.   more »

 When I was a kid in England,  the edible white muscle of the scallop arrived on beautiful fan-shaped shell -- the Coquille St. Jacques which is the mollusk's French name -- and with its coral (gonad) attached. The coral, either pink or red was unctuously rich. But North American health regs banned the coral and I thought less of the scallop.  Not so, writes Joel Rebuchon in Simply French, "true connossieurs insist that the most flavourful scallops  are those without coral."  I don't know whether he meant that some scallops, which are hermaphrodites, are actually sexless-- Of course we'll never know because the roes are torn off when the scallops are dredged from the deep.

One thing I do know is that coral-less scallops seem to be tasting better than ever and not just  the Japanese Hokkaido scallops, sweet and a little beefy, which are on more and more menus, or the big fat Diver scallops available in the US in the winter.  Rick Blackwood, my favourite fishmonger -  of Mike's in the St. Lawrence Market -  tells me the reason: more and more "dry" scallops are being bought.  I knew what he meant. I learned about "dry" scallops when I was researching my book: Bill Gerencer, a buyer at the Portland Fish Auction in Maine told me that it was common practice for scallops, which have a long shelf life,  to be kept moist and juicy- looking by being soaked in STP, paint stripper by any other name. It's OK, the FDA has okayed STP as GRAS or Generally Regarded as Safe. OMG.

Once my eye was in, I could recognize quickly a "dry" scallop which if it was identified at all was called a "native". It looks beige-to very pale pink and is smaller than the STP or "wet" scallops which are white and shiny -  only if you look carefully can you see the stretch marks.  But how much sweeter the dry one is.  All the difference in the world.

Now Rick tells me that he's trying to phase out "wet" scallops and replace them with dry ones.  He went 100% dry last year but his business crashed. Fact is, scallops are expensive and the drys are twenty bucks a lb compared to $17 for the wets. But a year of tactful scallop education is paying off. Today, he's selling two dries to one wet - he still has a tray of "wets" -  and business is picking up.

More scallop lore. Rick's now selling  fresh Digbys from the Georges Bank south of Nova Scotia. They are shipped to Boston, then packaged and trucked to Toronto. Trip takes about four days but Rick says the scallops have another good week on them.

Memo to Animal Rights people -- Instead of harrassing restaurants that serve foie gras which is produced by gavage, forcefeeding ducks and geese to produce ultra-fatty livers, think of your own species first and stake out the Mauritanian embassies etc......

From the Nouakchott Journal (in the NYT today) : For decades, the Mauritanian version of a Western teenager’s crash diet was a crash feeding program (called gavage), devised to create girls obese enough to display family wealth and epitomize the Mauritanian ideal. Centuries-old poems glorified women immobilized by fat, moving so slowly they seemed to stand still, unable to hoist themselves onto camels without the aid of men’s willing hands.

Girls as young as 5 and as old as 19 had to drink up to five gallons of fat-rich camel’s or cow’s milk daily, aiming for silvery stretch marks on their upper arms. If a girl refused or vomited, the village weight-gain specialist might squeeze her foot between sticks, pull her ear, pinch her inner thigh, bend her finger backward or force her to drink her own vomit. In extreme cases, girls died.

So-called Italian pizza - fuggedaboudid. A friend came back from Italy outraged. "All they have is American pizza!"  Yup, I've heard that too. I haven't eaten pizza in Italy for ages, but I can recall amazingly fragrant pizza in Naples, wholewheat soft crust with loads of tomatoes retrieved from a wood oven....... wonder if that's survived Americanization.

The best pizza in Toronto for my money is French, the provencal Pissaladiere. At Patachou (1120 Yonge St) it's made with tenderly cooked sweet onions, cooked slices of tomato, sprinkled with sliced black olives and dusted with thyme - and presented on angelically light flaky pasty. Takes a couple of minutes in the hot oven to crisp it up.

Strawberries and cream identified June when I was growing up in England. Strawberries and cream were in fact summer, we od'd on them. They were served at the Derby, at Wimbledon, at Henley. There was never a bad strawberry year as I remember things. Of course the strawberries were all English then, Hampshire had a strawberry coast whence came trains of strawberries at dawn to feed the hungry Londoners. Strawberries were so magical that it took me ages to realize I liked raspberries better.

I don't remember when the juicy English strawberry was replaced by the year-round Spanish and Californian strawberry, but I hear all the time how you have to look hard  for a real strawberry these days.

This to me is the true nightmare of free and global trade which has now made January strawberry month as much as June. I don't want to eat strawberries in January. I'd like to go back to the time when the seasons meant something. When I lived in Southern California I never got over its seasonlessness and I remember how happy I was to feel the pinch of fall as I came east.

But now we're all seasonless --- in the worst way. We no longer look forward to strawberries in June and raspberries in July and peaches in August and apples in the fall because they are with us all the time so they've become a bore.

Can I have said that -- a strawberry is a bore?

We need a Gandhi to lead a nonviolent rebellion against seasonlessness.

It's going to be so tough. I imagine supermarket shelves devoid of colour all winter - no yellow pineapple, no scarlet berries -- and I wonder how such fruits as oranges and lemons which never have a season for us will be handled. Some of us are going to need bananas to stall cramp, and I believe papayas are even better.

Perhaps we can simply recreate the calendar the way the French Revolution did and call the months by the names of the fruit we're allowed to eat at that time. January could be orange, February, grapefruit, March, lemon, April, Papaya, May, PIneapple, June., Strawberries, July, Raspberries etc... and then we'd have to have a couple of "open" months where we could eat all the summer produce.....