Foodies, Friends & Sustainable Fish

 We began the evening on my Cheyenne Mountain back porch toasting the end of a challenging academic year with a lemony-crisp flute of Napa Valley (Carneros district)Schramsberg champagne. We moved into the dining room for small plates of chilled shrimp and a colorful variety of slightly-steamed mini (baby) vegetables with homemade guacamole.  That course was served with a French, steely-dry and mineraly Alsace Riesling.

 

The riesling was recommended by my former Sausalito next door neighbor, Karen MacNeil, author of The Wine Bible and Wine, Food and Friends.  Karen is also Chair of the Culinary Institute of America’s Professional Wine Studies Program in St. Helena, CA.

 

We followed with a perfectly-grilled rack of lamb and oven-roasted rosemary/garlic sweet potato wedges, plated on a bed of spring-green spicy arugula. A meticulous old-world-style Syrah, from a very special four-acre vineyard/winery up on Mt. Veeder called Lagier Meredith, accompanied the main course.  

 

FYI: Carol Meredith was a professor in the Department of Viticulture and Enology at the University of California at Davis for more than 20 years. Besides being a most accomplished winemaker, Carol’s passion is grape genetic research using DNA typing methods to discover the orgins of some of the greatest old wine varieties.

 

Back to the dinner party: we finished with a sinfully-rich, no-flour, very dark chocolate cake, served on top of pureed fresh raspberries – slightly thinned with a dash of Grand Marnier.

 

Over after-dinner decaffeinated expresso, we laughingly discussed the possibility of our 21st century obsession with ‘food as entertainment’ being responsible for some of the obesity and degenerative disease epidemic in this country. We noted that the BMI of many of the leading food show hosts, and a lot of their followers, suggests they eat and drink like we just did way too often.

 

 

I received a collective ‘thank-you’ email for the dinner party this morning, “Your dinner and the wines you served were hedonistic.  What a special treat to eat and drink like that one more time.”

 

 

Without exception, this group of science-head foodies all said that they take a multiple vitamin/mineral/antioxidant supplement every day as an insurance policy because they don’t grow all the fruits and veggies they eat in their own back yards, and they resort to too-readily-available empty-calorie processed food more than they know they should. They also said they take about 500 mgs of EPA/DHA every day to balance their junk food intake.  This is the amount recommended by the Institute of Medicine and the American Heart Association for disease prevention.

 

These scientists, as well as many health-care-reformers believe that agriculture subsidies for crops linked to empty-calorie foods and degenerative disease (think corn) should end immediately (saving taxpayers billions of dollars). They also agreed that a substantial tax should be placed on all overly-processed junk foods that contribute to silent inflammation and degenerative diseases (similar to the tax we put on cigarettes and alcohol).  

 

It dawned on me that all this newly-found money could go a long way toward paying ourselves back for some of the recent ’bail-outs,’ as well as addressing the ”omeganemia epidemic” being promoted by fish oil sellers, without depleating the seas of oily fish they claim are sustainable.

 

This straight-forward plan would involve no cost to taxpayers, or to our great-grandchildren who deserve not to have to pay our debts, and to  have access to fish in the sea. “

 

 

Ellen Troyer, MT MA

Biosyntrx Chief Research Officer