Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 11, 1994 TAG: 9405110065
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: EXTRA EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: almena hughes
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
His wife replies, "While you're there, bring me a glass of white wine ... and you'd better write it down; your memory isn't so good anymore."
"Don't be ridiculous," the husband scoffs.
About five minutes later, he returns with two ham sandwiches. His wife disgustedly says, "See, I told you to write it down. I wanted a cheese sandwich."
The joke, from George Starke of Calistoga, Calif., was among the winners in a recent competition sponsored by a California winery. According to the contest's organizers, the all-day epicurean event aimed to get wine back to its bacchanalian roots of celebrating the joys of life, including wine, art, nature, food, love and laughter.
In other words, no bad news!
The search is already on for next year's celebration, set for March 18 at the Napa Valley winery. If you've got a good gut-buster, or at least a tasteful wine gag, submit it to "Grapes of Laughs" Clos Pegase, P.O. Box 305, Calistoga, Calif. 94515, or for more information, call (707) 942-4981.
It's good news that consumers stand to be greatly aided in making wise product choices by the Nutrition Facts labels that went into effect Sunday. It's even better news that a free class from noon to 1 p.m. Friday will help people wade through any remaining confusion about the labels' categories, measurements and percentages.
Virginia Cooperative Extension agent Jean Vandergrift will conduct the session at the YWCA Salem Center, 1126 Kime Lane, Salem. Bring a brown-bag lunch, if you'd like, and any food labels about which you'd like to ask specific questions.
The new labeling laws produced a product casualty particular to the dairy industry; alas, "ice milk" no longer exists. But even that has its good side.
Borden spokeswoman Veronica Petta explained that the ice-milk category was much broader than most consumers thought, including products with milk fat variances of from 2 percent to 7 percent. The designations under the new laws - reduced fat, low fat, fat free and light - will absorb many of the existing products. But the good news is that the category loss also will generate new products, such as Borden's low-fat ice cream with 2 to 2.5 grams of fat per half-cup serving - not exactly "ice milk," but pretty close to it. Petta says the only way to find out which new entries you like is to taste them. Enforced taste testing sounds like good news to me.
Remember the bad news a couple of weeks back about a medium-sized bucket of movie popcorn, popped in coconut oil and topped with butter, containing more saturated fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, Big Mac, large order of fries and steak dinner with sour cream combined? Representatives say that two years ago Carmike Cinemas Inc., which operates the Salem Valley 8, Tanglewood Mall and Valley View Mall theaters, switched to popping in 94 percent saturated-fat-free canola oil. So, yes, you can have your movie and popcorn, too.
More good news: If water-packed canned tuna is too dry for your taste, you can now have your fish and oil, too. Chicken of the Sea is the first to pack its tuna in canola oil instead of soybean oil, creating a 2-ounce drained serving of the brand's solid-white albacore that's saturated fat-free and only 20 calories higher than its spring-water-packed counterpart.
Even more bliss: One hundred groups of diet experts, including the Council on Size and Weight Discrimination, have concluded that low-calorie dieting as a way to lose weight is futile and ineffective and that we should stop doing it. Last Thursday the groups sponsored a "No-Diet Day," to educate the public about eating and weight loss, including 10 good reasons to dump low-cal diets: they don't work, they're expensive, boring, don't necessarily improve health, don't make you beautiful, they're not sexy, can turn into eating disorders, can make you fear food, can rob you of energy, and you need to love and accept yourself as you are.
This doesn't mean you needn't manage eating habits and weight, though. Virginia Cooperative Extension agent Charlotte Kidd says a sensible approach would include getting away from the diet and deprivation mentality and instead eating for long-term success.
"Avoid eating out of habit, boredom or stress; plan your menus so you'll know when and what you'll eat; give yourself positive, nonfood rewards occasionally; and exercise, which sometimes makes people lose weight even if they continue to eat the same amount," Kidd says.
Another alternative to lowering caloric intake, which has been bandied about for a while, is spreading the calories out over a number of smaller meals throughout the day. "The Food Channel" publisher, Christopher Wolf, in the May-June issue of "The Futurist" magazine predicts that five meals per day, rather than three, will be the norm by the year 2005.
Wolf's forecast eating schedule and meal names for the not-so-distant future are: 7-7:30 a.m. - Daystart (breakfast); 10-10:30 a.m. - Pulsebreak; 12:30-1 p.m. - Humpmunch (lunch); 4-4:30 p.m. - Holdmeal; and 6:30-7 p.m. - Evesnack (dinner).
"The Futurist" is available for $7 from the World Future Society, 7910 Woodmont Ave., Suite 450, Bethesda, Md. 20814.
Shelf Life runs twice a month in the Extra section. If you have an interesting new product, cookbook, contest, gadget or gew gaw, tell us about it. Write to Shelf Life, P.O. Box 2491, Roanoke, Va. 24010.|
by CNB