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Think those New Year’s diet resolutions mean you can’t indulge in your favorite comfort foods–you know, diner-style specials like mac-cheese or frosted layer cake? Think again. The lightened-up versions on these pages have all the lusciousness of the originals, but won’t wreck your waistline-watching plans. So on those cold days in January when you find yourself craving cozy comfort foods the most, have them!

We totally transformed these yummy standards–even blue cheese dressing and eggplant Parmesan–in the calorie and fat departments, yet we promise you can’t tell the flavor difference. We even came up with a creative, nutritious twist on creamy scalloped potatoes by substituting sweet potatoes, for their vitamin-filled goodness. Finally, the icing on the cake is … our iced chocolate cake–a gooey, dense delight that’s surprisingly light. Now that’s comforting!

SCALLOPED POTATOES

Serves 8

There are lots of reasons to scallop
sweet potatoes instead of
spuds. Vitamins A and E–both
good for the immune system–are
two. And since this recipe has only
3 grams of fat (versus the 9
more in many homemade versions),
you won’t have to turn down seconds!

1 Tbs. unsalted butter
1 medium onion, thinly sliced
2 1/2 cups roasted or low-sodium
vegetable broth
1 cup low-fat milk
3 cloves garlic, minced (about 1 Tbs.)
1 1/2 tsp. fresh thyme
1/8 tsp. nutmeg
1 bay leaf
3 medium sweet potatoes (about
2 1/2 lb.), peeled and thinly
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese

1. Preheat oven to 375F. Coat 8 8-oz.
ramekins or 9×13-inch baking dish
with cooking spray.

2. Melt butter in large saucepan
over medium heat. Add onion slices,
and saute until soft, about 7 to
10 minutes. Add broth, mill garlic,
thyme, nutmeg and bay leaf; bring
to a simmer. Cook until liquid is
reduced to just under 3 cups, about
7 minutes. Remove bay leaf, and
season to taste with salt and

3. Add sweet potatoes to liquid.
Return to a simmer, and cook,
stirring occasionally, 5 minutes.

4. Pour mixture into ramekins
or baking dish; bake 30 minutes
baking dish, basting potatoes
occasionally with liquid in dish.
Sprinkle cheese over potatoes,
and bake ramekins 10 minutes;
large dish 20 minutes. Let both
rest 5 minutes before serving.

PER SERVING: 161 CAL; 4G PROT; 3G TOTAL FAT (1.5G SAT. FAT); 30G CARB; 7MG CHOL; 194MG SOD; 3G FIBER; 2G SUGARS

MAC AND CHEESE

Serves 8

This enlightened recipe has 200 fewer
calories than the standard homemade
mac and cheese–yet it’s still creamy-cheesy.
It’s great with a spinach and
mushroom salad.

8 oz. medium-sized macaroni
4 slices whale wheat bread
2 tsp. unsalted butter, melted
3 tsp. olive oil
1 cup reduced-fat cottage cheese
3 cups reduced-fat milk
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp. dry mustard
1 medium onion, finely chopped
2 cups grated Cheddar cheese
1 tsp. salt

1. Preheat oven to 350F. Coat 9×13-inch
baking dish with cooking spray.

2. Bring large pot of salted water to
boil. Cook pasta according to package
directions, until al dente. Drain,
rinse under cold water; drain again.

3. Process bread slices in food
processor to fine crumbs. Add butter
and 2 tsp. oil, and pulse to moisten.
Transfer to small bowl.

4. Puree cottage cheese in processor.

5. Whisk 1/2 cup milk, flour and
mustard in small bowl until smooth.

6. In large, heavy-bottomed pan, heat
remaining 1 tsp. oil over medium
heat. Add onion, and cook, stirring
often, 6 to 8 minutes, or until
softened. Add remaining 2 1/2 cups
milk, and bring to a bare simmer.
Whisk in flour mixture, and cook,
stirring constantly, 5 to 7 minutes, or
until thickened. Remove from heat.

7. Whisk in pureed cottage cheese,
Cheddar, and salt and black pepper
to taste. Stir in macaroni, and
transfer to baking dish. Sprinkle
top with breadcrumb mixture.

8. Bake, uncovered, 30 to 35
minutes, or until bubbly and lightly
browned. Let stand 10 to 15 minutes
before serving.

PER SERVING: 389 CAL; 20G PROT; 15G TOTAL FAT (8G SAT. FAT); 43G CARB; 37MG CHOL; 709MG SOD; 3G FIBER; 8G SUGARS

EGGPLANT PARM
Serves 6

Oven-frying the eggplant slices makes
a succulent dish that has only 9 grams
of fat–instead of 20 or more.

3 large egg whites
I cup fine dry breadcrumbs
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
2 medium eggplants, sliced
into 1/4-inch-thick rounds
1/4 cup fresh basil, finely chopped
2 1/2 cups prepared marinara sauce
3/4 cup grated part-skim mozzarella
cheese

1. Preheat oven to 400F. Coat
2 baking sheets and 8×11 1/2-inch
baking dish with cooking spray.

2. Whisk egg whites with 3 Tbs. water
in bowl until frothy. Combine breadcrumbs,
1/4 cup Parmesan, and salt and
pepper to taste in shallow dish.
Dip eggplant slices into egg whites,
then coat with breadcrumb mixture
and arrange on baking sheets.

3. Bake until golden; turn; bake until
golden again, about 30 minutes total.

4. Stir basil into marinara sauce.
Spread 1/2 cup sauce in baking dish.
Top with half of eggplant, slightly
overlapping slices. Cover with 1 cup
of sauce; sprinkle with half of
mozzarella. Cover with remaining
eggplant, and top with remaining
sauce, mozzarella and Parmesan.

5. Bake, uncovered, 20 to 25 minutes,
or until bubbly and golden. Let stand
10 minutes; serve.

On her pastoral Iowa farm, away from bustling city streets, Simone Delaty Alvarez pursues several passions: cooking; baking artisan bread; raising fruits, vegetables and herbs; and tending goats. In her simplified life, Simone derives pleasure from her stewardship of the land and from sharing bountiful crops with others: She hosts intimate, home-cooked, family-style dinners, enjoyed leisurely at her farmhouse table. It’s no surprise, then, that she has come to embody the spirit of the international Slow Food movement right in America’s heartland.

As the Slow Food story goes, in 1986, founder Carlo Petrini, an activist in Bra, Italy, greatly resented the proposed construction of a McDonald’s restaurant in his favorite piazza in Rome. To Petrini, such a fast food invasion of a historic city–famed for its glorious cuisine and elegant architecture–required some sort of response. Thus, Petrini launched the original branch of the Slow Food movement in the city of Barolo in the province of Cuneo, Italy. In 1989 in Paris, Slow Food went global with numerous grassroots groups, or convivia, sprouting up on five continents. Today, Slow Food members number about 80,000 worldwide. And the movement is growing.

Slow Food’s main tenet–to protect “the right to taste”–appears simple, but in reality it addresses many complex issues. Protecting taste means protecting artisan foods and food products, promoting sustainable agriculture, preserving food traditions, educating people about quality foods and enjoying the “slow” life–good friends, good food, good wine. And enjoying life’s simple pleasures at an unhurried pace. “One of the important things about Slow Food is its educational mandate,” New York-based Patrick Martins, director of Slow Food USA, says. “But it is important not to forget the pleasure side of the movement.”

That’s why, as a founding member of the Slow Food movement in Iowa, Simone with her community dinners exemplifies the Slow Food spirit. “I started these dinners 5 years ago, and I hold them from March to December on Friday and Saturday nights,” she says, noting that she seats her guests–anywhere from 8 to 20 people per meal–at one table. This compact seating arrangement inspires conviviality, free-flowing conversation and a true sense of fellowship. This seating also allows Simone a chance to speak about the food she serves. “I talk at every dinner about where the food comes from and what it is,” she says. “I don’t interfere with my guests’ conversations, but I do introduce each dish.” In season, she gives a tour of her gardens when guests arrive. This gives her guests a real connection to the food they eat and to the land where it is grown and harvested.

A native of the Limousin region in France, Simone (pictured in window) is content in her charming American farmhouse, but she still cooks like a Frenchwoman, and many of her convivial meals reflect her heritage. Each meal is either authentically French or Moroccan, or focused on brick-oven pizza dinners with traditional pizzas from Italy or France, or with those pizzas created by Simone. Like many French home cooks, Simone eschews elaborate cooking in favor of simple from-cratch meals based on good ingredients–seasonal, fresh-picked produce and just-baked breads.

“In my area of Iowa near the Amana Colonies, we talk about the home cooking of the Amish and Mennonites,” she says. “But I cook what I learned at home in France.” For her occasional dinners for Slow Food convivium members, she has served French meals structured in the traditional way: small appetizer courses; a main course; a salad course; an assortment of cheeses served with crusty French bread; and dessert. “A French dinner can go on and on. And here, people linger for about 3 hours. It’s very relaxed with lots of conversation and socializing.”

Indeed Simone’s farmland site has become something of a destination. “I have visitors who come to see what I am doing,” she says. “This is outreach for children and adults who want to see my herb garden, my kitchen gardens and the weekly bread baking in the brick oven.”

Although her land is limited to about 10 acres, hers is a working organic farm, and she is its primary gardener. She started with a small kitchen garden and an herb garden. Over the years, she has added five other gardens for crop variety, including six kinds of tomatoes, four kinds of eggplants and specialty crops such as the French green bean, celeriac and cardoons–a popular vegetable in Europe that is a member of the thistle family and tastes something like artichokes. Her main goal is to self-produce all the vegetables, fruits, herbs and edible flowers for her season of dinners.

Simone attracts attention for another reason: Her brick-oven-baked artisan breads. “I make breads from scratch using organic flour,” she says. But what really makes her bread–a pain a levain, or French country bread–unique is that Simone uses natural leavening. “It is a very slow process,” she says, describing the mixing, kneading and rising of her loaves. Beginning with a starter–a mix of flour and water–held over from the preceding week’s batch of bread dough, she mixes up new dough, sets it aside overnight at a cool temperature, then adds more flour and water in the morning. After that, the dough rises for 1 hour, then is cut, weighed and placed into baskets lined with linen for an additional rising of 3 hours. It is then baked directly on the brick sole of her 400-degree oven.

Our company, Chick-fil-A, Inc., worked with Drs. Chetan Sankar and P.K. Raju and the LITEE team to develop a case study about our decision process to select a new point of sale system. They were understanding of our concerns about ensuring accuracy in the case study and were sympathetic to my limited time to work on this project. The process of creating the case study was iterative and didn’t impose on my busy schedule. First, I went to Auburn and was interviewed by Dr. Sankar and a graduate student. After the interview, they e-mailed me transcripts of our conversation with some follow up questions for clarification. I was able to clarify points and to edit the transcripts for accuracy. Then, the LYME team came to our office and discussed the decision process with Jon Bridges, CIO, and Mike Erbrick, Director of Restaurant Information Systems. In addition, we visited the Chick-fil-A at Piedmont Road in Atlanta, GA to see the chosen point of sale system in the field. The LITEE team interviewed the owner/operator of this store to learn the strengths and weaknesses of this system. Again, summaries of these conversations and observations were exchanged, and I could clarify or correct for accurateness. In the end, we had a case study that framed the key decision factors for a decision involving millions of dollars for us.

In the spring of 2001, I was able to attend the first class presentation for the Chick-fil-A Point of Sale case study. It was exciting to hear the students discuss the challenge of weighing pros and cons of business decisions. I also enjoyed hearing them suggest new ideas or technologies that have matured since we made our decision. The most rewarding result of this case study was seeing that many students mentioned the importance of meeting the business needs, not just picking a technology. Successful IT professionals are successful business people first. IT must align itself with the business. Project success depends on meeting the expectations of your users; not from telling your user, we picked this leading software package-Oracle, Siebel, PeopleSoft, etc. You have to understand the users’ needs, prioritize their needs, and implement solutions based on those needs. Sometimes, it is the best decision to select a hot technology; sometimes, boring technologies are best.

In addition, this case study has helped our recruiting efforts. Believe it or not, Chick-fil-A is not the first company that comes to mind when students think about future technology careers. When students hear Chick-fil-A, they usually think about jobs with the marketing department or owner/operator opportunities. Since this case study has been added to the curriculum, we have interviewed more than 20 students who have worked on the point of sale case study. After discussing Chick-fil-A in an MIS class, students begin to associate technology career options with Chick-fil-A, and they think of us as a company that uses new technology to impact the business.

I am glad that the LITEE team invited us to develop this case study. It seems to help students learn important business concepts, and it has greatly helped us to develop an image of a company that offers exciting technology opportunities. I would definitely be interested in working on another case study in the future.

Michael Garrison, Director of LT. Client Services, is an alumnus of Auburn University, where he received a BS in Finance. Michael earned his MBA in Computer Information Systems at Georgia St. University. Today, Michael works with the Chick-fil-A Computer Help Line,

the windows system administration team, the network administration team, and the LT. recruiting. The Chick-fil-A Computer Help

Line supports point-of-sale systems and back office systems for over 900 Chick-fil-A restaurants. The Windows System Administration team purchases PCs, configures them, rolls out new software and operating systems, and provides laptop/desktop support for more than 500 corporate staff and 900 stores. The network administration team manages our Microsoft Back Office networking systems and network applications. The LT. recruiting team recruits, selects, and hires individuals to work in the LT. department at Chickfil-A. This team also coordinates the performance management system and professional development plans.

The bus stopped on the side of the road where two cars sat waiting for us. In broken English we are told we will now be taken to eat and then to where we will sleep. We have been traveling for over 24 hours at this point. From Atlanta to Milan, and then the waiting around for other delegates to arrive at the airport, the bus ride to Turin, to the Palazzo del Lavoro and then more waiting around for another bus ride to take us to our accommodations. All the waiting had caused some impatience (not surprisingly) among some Americans around me. In response to the invitation for a meal, an American woman announced that none of us want to eat, that we just want to sleep. I watched the expressions of our Italian hosts go from confusion, to hurt-a sad sort of hurt. My friend and I spoke up and said we would eat, that we would be honored. The rest of the group got into the waiting cars and were taken to their accommodations. We remained standing on the side of the road with our two new Italian friends. The four of us proceeded to walk down the road No one spoke; the only sound was the crunch of gravel under our feet. It was dark, and a fog hung in the air. We walked into a seemingly abandoned courtyard and approached a stone building.

Upon entering this building, our senses were brought to life. We were welcomed by long tables laden with pitchers of wine, sparkling water, bread, smiling faces, and warmth. Chef Lucca and his family greeted us and brought out the first course (of many to follow) of cured meat. It became evident with the first taste, that the meat was cured by Chef Lucca himself, that the wine was from his grapes, that he was an artist, and we were sitting in his studio.

What brought me to this extraordinary place-partaking in a meal I will always remember-simple, yet rich with complex intonations of flavor and tradition? It was the vision of one man, Carlo Petrini, whose reaction in 1986 to the opening of a McDonald’s restaurant in Rome’s famous Piazza di Spagna sparked a now worldwide movement known as Slow Food. This movement seeks to link “pleasure and food with awareness and responsibility.” Slow’s Manifesto declares, “A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life.”

While focusing on maintaining the right to slow down to the pleasures of a good meal, in the mid-1990s, Slow Food’s eco-gastronomy took a prominent and intrinsic place in the forefront of this movement. From the Slow Food website, this movement, “opposes the standardization of taste, defends the need for consumer information, protects cultural identities tied to food and gastronomic traditions, safeguards foods and cultivation and processing techniques inherited from tradition, and defends domestic and wild animal and vegetable species.”

In 2003, Petrini sought to honor the small-scale food producer-the small farmer, the cheese maker, bread baker, wine, meat … those of us who have devoted our lives to such endeavors. In October 2004, 5000 of us from 130 countries were brought to Turin for the first ever Terra Madre, a world meeting of food communities. The event was organized by Slow Food in collaboration with the Italian Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, the Piedmont Regional Authority, and the City of Turin. Speakers included Prince Charles of Wales, Vendana Shiva, Winona La Duke, and of course Carlo Petrini, to name a few. One need only to stand in the center of the Palazzo del Lavoro, which housed this event, and look around at all the diverse faces to grasp this incredible endeavor Slow Food has undertaken and to understand Carlo Petrini’s vision of a “virtuous globalization.”

Slow Food’s reach is vast. From New York City foodies to saving corn varieties in Central America, from inner city school gardens to the understanding that the consumer is always right, but that the consumer has the right to be educated about what he or she consumes. Slow Foods is about a different approach to living on this planet.

The Slow Food Manifesto declares that, “We are enslaved by speed and all have succumbed to the same corrupting virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods…. In the name of productivity, Fast Life has changed our way of living and threatens our environment and landscape.” Led by their mascot, the snail, Slow Food strives to overcome such forces.

Farinata

This is an Italian pizza-like dish made from chickpea flour.
Although this is considered somewhat of a street fond in Italy,
it is also considered Slow, as it is a regional specialty, the origin
being Liguria.

2 1/3 cups chickpea flour
3 3/4 cups water
1 tsp. salt
a good pinch of pepper
4 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
1 medium onion
sage leaves

1. In a large bowl pour the water and then add slowly the chickpea
flour, mixing it in with a wire whisk.

2. Add salt to the mixture and let it stand at room temperature for 3
hours or even better overnight.

3. Meanwhile slice the onion thinly and saute in olive oil.

4. Remove foam from the top of the batter.

5. Preheat the oven to 400[degrees].

6. Grease a baking pan, about 16″ x 12″, olive oil, once greased
add another 2 Tbsp. olive oil and put entire pan in oven till oil is
hot. Working quickly, pour hot oil from pan into china batter,
stir and pour entire mixture onto pan-this should sizzle. The batter
will spread out very thinly onto the pan. Sprinkle generously with
pepper, onions and sage.

7. Top the farinata with the onion slices and sage leaves. Bake for
20-25 minutes- until edges brown.

8. Remove from the oven and let it cool off for about 10 minutes
before cutting.

The food industry has taken on some heavy responsibility this year. Literally. Obesity has become a hot topic in the United States, with many consumer activists and others pointing at the food industry and demanding action. Food companies have responded in different ways, some of which involve packaging.

Several companies are using packaging to promote portion control, which has become one of the great bugaboos in the obesity debate. Kraft Foods, General Mills and the Frito-Lay unit of PepsiCo have all come out with package sizes designed to deliver an acceptable amount of calories. Kraft products along those lines include several Nabisco offerings, like Ritz crackers, in packages of exactly 100 calories. Frito-Lay has 75-calorie packs for Lay’s and Doritos chips, while General Mills rolled out Pop-Secret 100 Calorie Pop Premium Microwave Popcorn.

“We’re finding more and more that consumers want it to be easy to know the calorie content, so they don’t have to search for it on the package,” Kathy Parker, a senior business director at Kraft who oversees marketing for the 100-calorie packs, told The New York Tunes.

General Mills also is trying to tout the health benefits of its flagship line of cereals. The company is continuing to promote the presence of whole grain in its cereals–several of which were reformulated to include more whole grain, allowing a prominent nutrition claim on the label.

Health concerns also boosted the growth of diet candy, with sales more than quadrupling between 2000 and 2004, according to research firm Packaged Facts. The total of $495 million is a fraction of the sales for regular candy, but it’s the only segment in the category that’s showing growth.

A few other trends of note in the food industry, some of which carry over from previous years:

* There continues to be a struggle over proper standards for the term “organic.” A federal court in Maine got into the act this summer when it ruled that dairy farmers can’t call their products organic unless they furnish their cows 100% organic feed.

* Sales of food marketed especially to women grew at a compound annual rate of 80% between 2000 and 2004. Packaged Facts predicts that sales of foods and beverages marketed to women will reach $58.7 billion by 2009.

* Hispanics continue their ascendancy as the leading U.S. minority. Hispanics accounted for 50% of the nation’s population growth of 2.9 million in a one-year period, according to a demographics study by the Food Institute. Perhaps more important, the greatest source of Hispanic growth is now births and not immigration.

Here are looks at packaging among major food segments:

Dairy

Milk and other dairy products were whipsawed by a variety of consumer and market forces in 2004.

The price of fluid milk jumped from a 23-year low in early 2003 to a new high in early 2004. Contributing factors included high feed prices and strong cattle prices, spurred in part by the popularity of low-carb diets. A surge in alternative beverages, such as water, tea, soy milk and isotonic drinks, also cut into fluid milk’s share, according to dairy segment observers.

The result was a depression in sales for fluid milk in 2004. Dollar sales for whole milk in most retail venues rose 2.1%, but unit sales fell 3.9%. Sales of skim/lowfat milk were up 1.4% in dollars but down 4.4% in units.

Milk is still mostly sold in gallon and half-gallon containers. An ongoing trend has been the marketing of fluid milk in single-serve containers. According to Kevin Burkum, senior vice president for retail marketing at Dairy Management Inc., single-serve packaging is “allowing us to take milk to places it hasn’t been before,” such as vending machines and convenience stores.

Quick-service restaurants are another venue where single-serve is helping milk penetrate. Both McDonald’s and Wendy’s started selling single-serve milk last year in attractive plastic bottles, as opposed to the gabletop cartons McDonald’s had been using. The program, developed by the restaurant chains in cooperation with the Milk Processor Education Program (MilkPEP), resulted in greatly increased milk sales.

Cheese is a segment that got a big boost from the anti-carb movement. Total sales were up 5.6% from the previous year, reaching $1.85 billion. The sales spike came in spite of an increase in the price of block cheese, which forced converters like Sargento Foods to raise prices in 2004.

Sargento has focused its R&D efforts on snacking and entertaining, using reclosable packaging to make its Sargento SunBursts and Stars and Moons snacks more convenient for snacks. It has also used packaging to assemble an entire snacking occasion: Sargento Cheese Dips! Rolled out late last year, Cheese Dips! are packaged in a dual-compartment tray: one for the cheese sauce, one for a dippable snack (tortilla chips, pretzel twists or bagel chips).

For ice cream, premium and indulgent offerings continue to drive the category, working either within or outside the low-carb fad. The overall category was down 1.8% last year, but premium brands like General Mills’ Haagen-Dazs edged upward.

While Hispanic flavors and foods may have mainstream appeal, the Hispanic demographic is powerful and growing. The group is the largest minority in the U.S. and is expected to account for 24% of the country by 2050. Present-day Hispanics hold a sizable degree of purchasing power (see sidebar “La Energia”), estimated at $700 billion by Hispanic Business magazine (Santa Barbara, Calif.). As such, it may be surprising to some that many categories have yet to tap the potential of this group.

Jim Corcoran, vice president of the National Confectioners Association (Vienna, Va.), believes, “There is no bigger opportunity for confectionery manufacturers today (than the Hispanic population),” and certain manufacturers are responding. While Atkinson Candy Co. (Lufkin, Texas) and Pop Rocks Inc. (Falls Church, Va.) have made tentative moves into Hispanic candies, Hershey Foods Corp. (Hershey, Pa.) has introduced a line of sweets targeting the demographic. “With over 40 million Hispanics influencing all areas of American culture–from food to music to fashion–and with purchasing power of $630 billion, the U.S. Hispanic market represents a tremendous growth opportunity,” explains Thomas K. Hernquist, senior vice president and chief marketing officer with Hershey.

To appeal to the group, aside from a multi-year marketing agreement with Latina entertainer Thalia Sodi, Hershey has developed a line of products tailored to Hispanic tastes. Expanding its Jolly Rancher line, La Dulceria Thalia features Frutas Enchiladas Spicy Fruit & Chili Lollipops in three flavors: lime, mango and tamarind. La Dulceria Thalia Hershey’s Kisses are made with white chocolate and filled with dulce de leche, while the Cajeta Elegancita Candy Bar consists of wafer sticks layered with cajeta-flavored creme and drizzled with milk chocolate.

C What I Mean

The emerging Hispanic influence also is being felt in c-stores, and new products are taking the authenticity seriously. For Lettieri’s Inc.’s (Shakopee, Minn.) line of Buenos Amigos empanadas, “We had food experts take a look at it and try to mimic some of the authentic recipes out there currently,” explains David Poplau, the company’s director of marketing and sales support. “We did a focus group this past summer, which was a half-dozen panels of c-store customers, and it is amazing how sophisticated that customer is. They are demanding that authenticity, rather than a quasi-Mexican type food.” Such adventurous gringos are the primary target for Nueva Cocina Foods Inc. (Miami), though the company hopes to attract second- and third-generation Hispanics as well, assures company president Celeste De Armas. “In many ways, Latin food is where Italian foods were 30 years ago,” she believes, “where everybody knew Italian: spaghetti, lasagna and pizza. It was almost a staple, but the last 30 years has seen a jump from just the basics to the richness of the cuisine and all the variety. With Latin cuisine, we are at the tip of development or maturation of the cuisine in the U.S. and getting much more sophisticated. It will take a little time, but it will be there.”

Cindy Ayers, vice president with Campbell’s Kitchen (Campbell Soup Co., Camden, N.J.) shares a similar forecast. “As a basic cuisine becomes more popular in more mainstream venues, chefs at higher-end foodservice operations begin to ‘deconstruct’ that cuisine, looking for ways to leverage the growing interest of their patrons, while retaining their own uniqueness and creativity. For example, once salsa and tacos and enchiladas were firmly ensconced on America’s tables, high-end chefs were using ingredients like chipotle chilies and huitlacoche mushrooms, and menuing dishes from Oaxaca and Veracruz … but it does take time for these very authentic foods and ingredients to move from restaurant menus to supermarket shelves.”

Keep It Real

Whether due to increased travel or more-adventuresome palates, consumers are looking for an authentically ethnic food experience and realize that foreign cuisines are far from homogenous. Chinese food suffices no longer: now, the consumer wants Cantonese, Hunan or Szechwan varieties and, instead of Americanized Italian, the consumer is seeking Sardinian, Ligurian, Bolognese or Tuscan cuisines, which have prompted several recent introductions.

Companies also would be well-advised to draw inspiration from elsewhere in the region, considering the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet. Various studies have boasted of the cuisine’s ability to help lower the risk of heart disease and cancer, decrease cholesterol and increase life expectancy. The foods of Greece and southern Italy have been of interest to researchers, as these locales have a particularly low incidence of chronic diseases and high life-expectancy rates.

The positive health benefits of the Mediterranean diet were not lost on Campbell Away From Home, the foodservice division of Campbell Soup, when looking to expand its award-winning V8 line of soups, chilis and entrees. Amy Galgon, associate marketing manager with Campbell Away From Home, recalls. “In developing the new soups, we leveraged the creativity of our culinary resources, which led us to explore beyond the expected Italian and French into Greek and other Mediterranean cuisines. The Greek Minestrone variety features ingredients consistent with those recommended in the Mediterranean diet–tomatoes, orzo pasta, red lentils and olive oil, and it fits very well into the nutritional profile of the V8 product line.”

When a friend called to recommend that I read FAST FOOD NATION, she warned that I would find it virtually impossible to work in the industry again. She was right. Author Eric Schlosser presents an in-depth account of the companies and people who make double cheeseburgers possible. However, readers beware. After reading FAST FOOD NATION, you will never again be able to pull through a drive through with casual oblivion to what you eat or who servers you.

While Schlosser presents an excellent account of the stresses of working in fast food from the slaughter houses to the back line assembly, the one thing he fails to emphasize is the stresses on the managers of fast food. In Hardee’s, for example, restaurant managers only get their salary if they work fifty hour weeks. Since managers are required to wear headsets while on duty, that means fifty hours of the drive through dinging in one’s ears, even while serving customers at the front counter. Since fast food also makes up its labor out of management, that also means that the restaurant manager is either bagging food or working the drive through in addition to the rest of her responsibilities. Indeed, one manager and one cook (a total of only two employees) can run the entire restaurant for ten hours a day. Nevertheless, Schlosser does mention a pizza manager who makes $22,000 a year for a fifty-hour week. That’s about the average pay scale, including bonuses, for restaurant managers (not general managers).

Perhaps the most traumatic accounts of the fast food industry do not lie, however, in the endless drudgery of drive through, but in the slaughterhouses across the Midwest. As independent ranching practices give way to major corporations, the displaced lives seldom find voice. Schlosser does an excellent job of combining the facts with the faces that makes this tragedy real. From men who have given their lives or their health out of company loyalty or the need to feed their families, to the women who have sharpen their carving knives while preparing the family dinner, each account springs vividly from the pages.

FAST FOOD NATION is a must read for everyone. With the mobile lifestyle most of us have adapted, eliminating fast food from one’s diet would be virtually impossible. However, if consumers are going to continue to eat those delicious cheeseburgers and calorie defying meals, then they should be aware of what they consume and at what cost. Knowledge is power, and the necessary changes that must come to this industry will only occur if we educate ourselves and make the appropriate demands for ourselves as consumers. Extremely well written, well presented, and impossible to put down, FAST FOOD NATION comes very highly recommended.

Food safety used to be just that — handling and preparing food free of germs and other contaminants and having people trained to embrace the highest standards of hygiene and cleanliness serve it.

But when anthrax was sent through the mail just a few weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, killing five random people and exposing the soft underbelly of the nation’s food supplies to bioterrorism, restaurants added to their food safety procedures an appendage called food security.

The deliberate tampering of food with the intent to kill, injure or wreak economic havoc is light-years different from the accidental or natural contamination of food. Preventing those two occurences was front-of-mind for several restaurant food safety experts who participated in an annual food safety discussion during the recent National Restaurant Association Restaurant, Hotel-Motel Show in Chicago.

Presented by Nation’s Restaurant News and sponsored by Colgate-Palmolive Co., the Food Safety Roundtable included Mike Starnes, vice president of food safety, quality assurance and brand standards for Denny’s Inc., Spartanburg, S.C.; Brad Lutz, vice president of people and learning for Dallas-based Romacorp Inc., parent company of Tony Roma’s barbecue chain; Tom Gribben, director of research and development, Columbus, Ohio-based Damon’s International Inc.; Adam Ashcraft, food safety adviser, Colgate-Palmolive Co., New York; Chet England, senior director and chief food safety officer for Miami-based Burger King Corp.; Greg Hernandez, vice president of food services and purchasing, Ruby Restaurant Group, the Newport Beach, Calif.-based parent of the 25-unit Ruby’s Diner chain; and Aftan Romanczak, director of research and development and purchasing for Steak-Out Franchising Inc., Norcross, Ga.

Milford Prewitt, national reports editor for NRN, moderated the panel.

NRN: Burger King’s Chet England gave an impressive overview of Burger King’s food security protocols at the National Food Safety Summit in March. Chet, could you get us started with a little recap?

ENGLAND, BURGER KING: Well, as many of you know, we’ve had some management changes, and our former management came to us from the airline industry. Our CEO and various other executives were senior management at Northwest Airlines. And I think one of the things that the airline industry, for all of its other issues, one of the things that it does understand, especially post 9/11, is security.

I’m a microbiologist. I’ve dealt with food safety for my entire career, but I’ve never dealt with the threat and the issue of food security that now comes before us.

So one of the first things I did was assemble a team - a multifunctional team of all of the stakeholders around the company — to look at this threat and see what it meant to our business.

Operations people, purchasing people, people from supply management, legal, etc., all came together, and after intense discussion on this issue, we determined there were four areas we needed to focus on.

[First,] the supply chain, to make sure that we are getting secure products moving through our chain, and that’s no small challenge with a company that does over $3 billion of procurement a year. We needed to protect our operations — no small challenge when you’re working with 12,000 restaurants in 58 countries, many in unstable parts of the world. We needed to protect our corporate offices, because back then, before 9/11, we had two offices and were in the process of moving from one to the other. Finally, there was the information infrastructure. This has always been an issue with any major corporation, but we had to pay even greater attention.

We realized none of us were experts in any of this, so we turned to a fairly major law firm operating in the United States with a security division in security consulting. They were extremely knowledgeable in counterterrorism. Antiterrorism, I learned, is different from counterterrorism, and they gave us a lot of excellent guidance.

Our task was to harden what they call in the intelligence field a “soft target,” like hotels, offices and retail outlets.

NRN: Can you tell us some specific things you did on the unit level?

ENGLAND, BURGER KING: Obviously, I’m a bit leery about talking in great detail about something that’s going to get published. We recognized there were limits to what we could do when you are in the business of inviting people into your business. But I would encourage anyone to limit access to the back-of-the-house.

In the front-of-the-house, we looked at employee screening, and that is a monster. But more important, we dealt with things that are accessible to consumers, like self-service drinks or condiment systems.

HERNANDEZ, RUBY’S: The back-of-the-house was a big issue for us, too. One of the things that we were doing is trying to assess who was coming into the buildings, whether it’s delivery people, drivers of trucks and so on.

And one of the alarming things that we realize is, other than the armored-car people, we have really no way to know exactly that the person who’s delivering our produce or our bread is really the right person.

In a town like L.A., where restaurant experiences tend to be remembered more far who ate the meal (and with whom) than for such details as what was eaten, it Is easy to forget that the city is home to plenty of establishments worthy of ink in their own right. Just consider Michael’s, the Santa Monica restaurant credited with the birth of California cuisine, and one that is still, 23 years after opening its doors, giving countless happy diners the chance to experience the culinary equivalent of that famous Southern California sunshine each day, on both sides of the country (the restaurant opened a New York City satellite in 1989). With that in mind, I spent 48 hours in L.A., sampling the cooking at six carefully selected establishments., and ignoring the distractions presented by the not-so-occasional celebrity sighting, all in the name of coming up with a handful of breakout meal moments.

“Let’s start with something old Hollywood,” I suggested to my partner as we began our two-day culinary tour. I didn’t need to say more-within minutes we were pulling up before the red-carpeted portico of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Longtime fans of the establishment may still bemoan management’s decision to refurbish the place seven years ago but even these quibblers seem to be in agreement that for Mildred Pierce-era glamour nothing beats the hotel’s Fountain Coffee Shop. On the morning of our visit the tiny space was already packed, but we spied two open seats at the kidney-shaped counter and lunged. Maybe it was a Pavlovian response to the sight of the room’s conic banana leaf wallpaper, or maybe it was the smell of waffles in the air, but I was suddenly ravenous. in true Hollywood tradition, everything in the Fountain room is cinematic in its perfection–the bowls of berries behind the counter are plump and vivid, the pink linens set out before us perfectly pressed–and it’s a camera-ready quality that exten ds to the cooking as well. No sad, brownish omelettes here–ours (mine flecked with chunks of smoked salmon, Alfredo’s with steamed vegetables) were sunny yellow mounds sparkling with just the right amount of butter. Similarly, bacon was lean, crisp and flat as collar stays, while hash browns, awaiting their turn alongside the griddle, were impeccable, browned-to-golden-perfection patties. But breakfasts greatest moment came at the end of the meal, in the form of the restaurant’s famous pecan waffle-an airy confection dotted with ground pecans and accompanied by small jars of warm maple syrup. Suddenly, L.A. was the capital of breakfast.

1:45 P.M., LUNCH: JOAN’S ON THIRD

8350 W. Third St., 323-655-2285

When an L.A.-based friend (and gourmand of longstanding) tipped me that he often orders lunch from a tiny place that reminded him of the early years of that NYC uber-market Dean & DeLuca, it was all I needed to hear. What he didn’t tell me is that, with just a small number of marble-topped cafe tables inside (and a handful out), anything but takeout during the busy lunchtime crunch requires as much negotiation as driving down Sunset on a Saturday night. Being New Yorkers, this proved less daunting than choosing what to eat–there’s a lot to tempt you here. Offerings at Joan’s change daily, with sandwiches listed on a blackboard in the center of the room, and salads and baked goods announced by their presence in the cases or atop the long marble counter. I chose a sandwich of Venetian coppa, provolone and olive paste, piled with greens on crunchy French bread. Along with a small side serving of curried chickpea salad, it was everything my friend had promised. After hemming and hawing, Alfredo opted for a Chine se chicken salad, somewhat less waistline-conscious (read tastier) thanks to the presence of fried chicken slices and crunchy Chinese noodles. After, there was the temptation presented by mountains of homemade desserts; but still feeling the effects of the morning’s earlier excess, we opted for a small bag of Joan’s own perfect peanut brittle and called it a day. . . until dinner.

10:30 P.M., DINNER: MASTRO’S STEAKHOUSE

246 N. Canon Dr., 310-888-8782

In this time of raw food fascination, word that one of L.A.’s hottest new restaurants was a steakhouse from the old school was something I had to check out for myself. After a short drive and a few wrong turns we pulled up in front of Mastro’s glass awning, handed our car keys over to the valet and walked inside. Given the buildup, anything less than Russell Crowe sitting at the bar would have been a disappointment. I was disappointed. A quick scan of the front room revealed a fairly unimpressive-looking crowd. What’s more, the power-generated sounds of live music from the upstairs dining room and a decor that had all the allure of a Maurice Valency showroom hardly matched my image of where young Hollywood was spending its Friday nights. At Alfredo’s urging we were shown to a table at the quieter downstairs dining room, ready to chalk the evening up to a mistake. My roomy and upholstered seat was promising, however, as were the oversized menus–details that seemed in keeping with the ‘fat cat’ tradition of Am erican steakhouses. The menu options sounded enticing, too; so enticing, in fact, that I turned to our waiter for help. “The Kansas City Strip,” he told me without hesitation. Our starters–the iceberg wedge with fresh creamy blue cheese dressing for Alfredo, a chopped salad dotted with pimento, radicchio and fresh hearts of palm for me–were impressive, as were the king crab legs Alfredo selected. And the steak? Our waiter had not steered me wrong–the generous cut (it could have fed two) was perfectly prepared, with a well-seasoned outer crust and cool, red center. Having found our rhythm, we stepped up to the plate for dessert, ordering slices of pecan and key lime pie, two giant servings that were confoundingly airy, despite ample amounts of butter and sugar. I loosened my belt a notch and congratulated myself on a job well done.

On Saturday, April 2, Brewery Ommegang and The Depot Restaurant of Oneonta will present the latest in the brewery’s 2005 “Great Beer Deserves Great Food” series. The event includes free brewery tours and beer tastings, along with a complimentary lunch.