The Mediterranean's Edible Sunshine

Research has implicated an immoderate diet in such 20th-century ailments of abundance as diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and even certain cancers. In response, experts warned us to shrink our allotment of rich, fatty foods. However, a new food pyramid, one based on a Mediterranean diet, has emerged. An alternative to the USDA’s Food Guide Pyramid, it suggests that we needn’t sacrifice satiety to the gods of good health. Instead, perhaps our surest strategy for fighting modern society’s chronic illnesses may be to abandon fat-free deprivation and resume eating the way we did before those illnesses became so chronic — which, in many respects, is the way they still eat in the Mediterranean. The news has proved music to consumers’ ears, and manufacturers who manage to weave authentic Mediterranean flavor and nutrition into convenient products will find themselves singing the sweet song of success, as well.

Discovering a new pyramidIn 1994, a joint body made up of the Harvard School of Public Health, the United Nations World Health Organization/Food and Agriculture Organization (WHO/FAO) Collaborating Center, and the Boston-based Oldways Preservation & Exchange Trust (a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to promoting the discussion of food, traditional diets, sustainable agriculture and related issues) presented The Traditional Healthy Mediterranean Diet Pyramid. The result of an ongoing conference series that examined the public-health implications of traditional diets, the Mediterranean pyramid took “the dietary traditions of Crete, much of the rest of Greece, and southern Italy circa 1960,” and structured them in light of current nutrition research, according to Oldways’ website (www.oldwayspt.org).

Why mid-20th-century Crete, Greece and southern Italy? For one, research revealed some of the world’s lowest chronic-disease rates and highest adult life expectancies within the region’s population at that time, despite medical services trailing those in the United States, and Northern and Western Europe. Additionally, when researchers compared records of local, mid-century eating habits with contemporary nutritional understanding based on epidemiological and clinical studies, they couldn’t ignore the diet-to-health links.

Building a baseThe pyramid emphasizes daily consumption of bread, pasta, grains, potatoes, fruits and vegetables — the hearty, locally available staples that flesh out the traditionally rural Mediterranean pantry. Their fundamental position in Oldways’ schema echoes the USDA’s decision to rest its own pyramid on a similarly starchy base. The Mediterranean guide also resembles the USDA version in giving the go-ahead to daily doses of dairy, specifically the cheese and yogurt common to the region.

But thereafter, resemblances thin. The Mediterranean pyramid proposes consuming poultry, fish and eggs — the diet’s principle sources of animal protein — on a weekly basis, rather than at the USDA’s recommended rate of two to three servings per day. It includes tree nuts and legumes in the fruits-and-vegetables sector, instead of with the animal-based proteins as in the USDA pyramid. The starkest disparity, however, appears in the guides’ pinnacles. The USDA dedicates its top — and smallest — section to fats, oils and sweets, which it advises we “use sparingly.” In contrast, the Mediterranean apex contains red meat, accompanied by a “monthly” consumption suggestion. Sweets appear in the sector directly below, where they rank with poultry, fish and eggs as weekly indulgences.

And whither the lipids in the Mediterranean diet? They’re found on just about everything, from grilled fish and fresh cheese to roasted peppers and eggplants. The people of Crete, Greece and southern Italy don’t skimp on the olive oil, and the Mediterranean pyramid reflects that liberality. Oil gets pride of place in the “daily” sector, sandwiched between fruits, vegetables, beans, legumes and nuts below, and cheese and yogurt above. In other words, go ahead and consume oil a bit less than you would those oranges and chickpeas, but a little bit more than you’re inclined to enjoy feta curds or tzaziki sauce. The pyramid doesn’t translate that into percentages, but Oldways suggests keeping total fat calories to between 25% and 35% — by no means a Spartan decree, particularly to Americans conditioned to treat fat with caution.

The benediction comes with a caveat, though: The Mediterranean diet pyramid, in mirroring the region’s kitchens and cooking practices, focuses on olive oil, which geography, agriculture and tradition have made regionally ubiquitous. In fact, olive oil provides the region’s average diet with its greatest contribution of fat calories. But even as the Mediterranean diet welcomes olive oil, as well as fish and nut oils, its proportion of saturated fats from red meat tops out at around 7% to 8% of daily calories. And traditionally, the diet derived little, if any, trans fat from hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils.

By differentiating “healthy” oils from saturated fats and processed trans fats, the Mediterranean pyramid exhibits a nuance that the USDA’s lacks. Oldways notes that prevailing nutritional understanding, based on such studies as the 1989 Diet and Health Report of the Washington, D.C.-based National Academy of Sciences, links heart disease to saturated fats, and trans fats in particular. Oldways points out that there is “no evidence suggesting that the monounsaturated fat found so abundantly in olive oil and some other plant foods, such as nuts and avocados, needs to be curtailed in the diet, absent concerns about obesity and activity levels.” A study conducted in Greece during the 1960s found that although subjects obtained up to one-third of their calories from olive oil, “typically olive oil cooked with vegetables and legumes, which were the core of the diet ... (t)heir heart-disease rates were a fraction of what Americans experience, and rates of other chronic diseases were similarly low.” The organization also cites research confirming that diets high in monounsaturated fats control insulin-dependent diabetes more effectively than other dietary regimens. If nothing else, the emphasis on monounsaturates nudges saturated fats to the dietary margins, giving them less room to wreak nutritional havoc.

The Mediterranean guide further breaks from USDA precedent by taking into account the region’s habits of daily physical activity and moderate wine consumption. Nobody denies the former is important to good health, and mounting evidence has associated the latter with reduced heart-disease risk. And lest it give the impression that the nutritionally minded need look only to Crete, Greece and southern Italy for dietary cues, Oldways is quick to explain that cultures throughout the Mediterranean practice eating habits consistent with its pyramid. Not surprisingly, all share ages of olive cultivation, as well as the geography, climate and history — the lifestyle, really — that shaped the diet and the culture. Only by understanding that lifestyle can American manufacturers bring the locale’s foods to the table in authentic, healthful and appealing form.

A sum greater than the partsAmericans’ love of one-stop solutions makes them keen on all those studies that reduce all questions to an easy answer. Problem is, an easy answer rarely resolves the thorniest questions, particularly those concerning diet and health. Even so, when studies identified fat as a culprit in chronic disease, most people tended to ignore the details and footnotes, and adopted instead the mantra that “fat is bad, period.” It may not have given us the full picture, but at least it was tidy enough to wrap our brains around.

After decades of living by a fat-phobic credo (or at least knowing about it), Americans still suffer the same chronic diseases, in some cases to a greater extent than before. So maybe the reductivist approach to health doesn’t work after all. The key to the Mediterranean diet’s success may be a complex of factors, and distilling its health-improving potential down to a specific ingredient or dish — as occurred when fat was tagged with a scarlet letter — misses the point. “It’s kind of a whole package working together,” explains Jackie Newgent, R.D., C.D.N., a nutrition consultant based in New York. “We call it ‘food synergy.’ All these nutrients taken out of the foods and consumed in isolation, or added one-by-one back to other foods they weren’t part of originally, lose that synergistic effect, which really may be what’s creating this tremendous advantage for heart health and cancer prevention.” Aside from stripping Mediterranean cuisine of its nutritional might, mining it for one easy-to-swallow nutrition solution makes it a lot less fun to eat, too.

Much of what defines the Mediterranean diet only tangentially concerns the diet itself. Paralleling Newgent’s “food synergy” is a powerful relationship among Mediterranean eating habits, activities and cultural values that shapes the whole cuisine nutritionally and aesthetically. While product developers can’t blend the Mediterranean lifestyle into their formulas or include them as part of the finished product’s preparation instructions (Step 1: Boil 2 qts. water. Step 2: Live as they live in the South of France.), they can benefit from the creative insight that comes from understanding Mediterranean cuisine and culture.

Coming togetherLucien Vendôme, senior executive chef, Kraft Food Ingredients Corp., Memphis, TN, says: “The first thing you need to outline when considering Mediterranean cuisine is what you mean by ‘Mediterranean.’ What countries are we talking about? There’s quite a difference between the South of France, Italy and Greece, versus North Africa or the Middle East.” In general, “Mediterranean” refers to countries or parts of countries ringing the eponymous sea: coastal Spain, southern France and Italy, Greece and her islands, parts of Turkey and the Balkans, North Africa (particularly Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) and, in the Middle East, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Egypt.

It’s hard not to appreciate how this region transformed a welter of nationalities, ethnicities, languages and religions into a culture so cohesive that people often consider themselves Mediterranean first, and Moroccan, Turkish or otherwise second. The regional allegiance plays out in the food. The fare in southern France resembles more what you’d find in Algiers or Naples than at a Parisian bistro. Such kinship comes with the historical territory, though: Mediterranean peoples were, at some point in their history, all subjects of the same ruling empire, be it Phoenician, Grecian, Roman, Byzantine or Arabic.

As those classical societies flourished in their sunny Southern climes, already planting the seeds of the civilized cuisine we know today, Northern Europe still hunched over its trenchers, bare-handedly tearing apart joints of meat. No wonder the Mediterranean is known as the “finishing school” for Western culture. And in cradling the three Abrahamic religions — Christianity, Islam and Judaism — the region nurtured the dietary laws and ritual feasts of each, fostering an appreciation for food’s symbolic value and an acceptance of dietary diversity.

Nothing encouraged ecumenism in Mediterranean cuisine more than its role as a hub in Asian trade routes. Millennia of commerce in precious Eastern spices left an indelible mark on the food that, over time, bled from one end of the region to the other. That mark changed as it spread, covering a wide range of tastes and terrains, but the overall edible impression retained a uniquely Mediterranean continuity across its spectrum, from Seville to Syria.

Trade also spurred migration, particularly within the Mediterranean’s Jewish population. Migration further spread cultures and foodways east from the Levant to Spain’s western shore, from North Africa to France, and back again to Turkey and Palestine. Thus, dozens of dishes reappear throughout the region, tweaked slightly according to local tastes. “They give and take from each other,” Vendôme explains. “The French do a great risotto in the South — and we call it risotto, as the Italians do. We make good pasta, too. On the other hand, you’ve got bouillabaisse in southern France that, when you go into Italy, is called a cacciucco or brodetto. But they’re all a basic fishmonger’s stew.”

Speaking of fish, the Mediterranean Sea looms so large that it defines the region, providing a livelihood for its inhabitants, and making fish and seafood recurring themes in the diet. Mediterranean cultures also share a hot, dry climate, and inhospitable topography burdened by craggy outcroppings in the North and slim, sandy shores in the South. Thus, large-scale agriculture is a bust. But while land for cattle-grazing is scarce, sheep, goats and poultry require little room, and nut, olive and citrus trees, along with modest backyard fruit and vegetable plots, hang on stubbornly where amber waves of grain won’t.

So, behind the tourist-tempting images of sun and sea, the Mediterranean is actually a hotbed of hardship that, coupled with a lack of pretension, fashioned a cooking style exalting simple ingredients, bold flavors and uncomplicated techniques. Peppering that rusticity with the remnants of empire and Eastern trade, Mediterranean cooking hints at a worldliness that mixes thrift and ingenuity with an appreciation for the finer points of taste.

Above all, Mediterranean cuisine celebrates foods in their local, seasonal glory, and takes its own sweet time in doing so. Says Vendôme: “The weather allows you to sit in the café, drinking a glass of pastis, nibbling olives and watching the sun glint off the water as beautiful people walk by. The great French chef Roger Verge called it cuisine du soleil: the ‘cuisine of the sun.’ People have beautiful gardens with almond and olive trees, and they sit there and eat, and the meal lasts three hours.” What harried American mom or overworked middle manager could refuse that?

Less is moreAs a throwback to slower, simpler times, Mediterranean style instinctively appeals to Americans whose longing for leisure battles modernity’s daily grind. Maybe, we tell ourselves, if we eat the way they do over there, we can relax the same, too. “It’s emulating the lifestyle; it’s an aspirational attempt,” says Vendôme, “which is so typically wonderful about America. We look ahead. We don’t look back. So I think that Americans are looking toward Mediterranean food for the sun, the weather and the leisure time. We think, ‘I wouldn’t have to rush for 15 minutes with a corned beef sandwich and then go back to my desk.’ We read a lot of wonderful magazines and we see beautiful television programs, and we aspire to something like that. And I think that food can give us that.”

There’s no arguing that the food is easy to prepare. For Americans who associate classic European cuisines with fussy recipes requiring skills and prep times as extensive as their ingredient lists, a Mediterranean meal’s laissez-faire simplicity is a breath of fresh air. Says Vendôme: “When you talk about cuisine Parisienne, cuisine Lyonaisse, or cuisine Milanese — all Northern cuisines — you’re talking about complicated cuisines. In other words, adding A and B doesn’t give you AB; adding A and B makes X, something completely different. You put together thyme, bay leaf, rosemary and mustard, and you cook them for so long that by the time you serve the dish, it ends up tasting like a whole new concept.”

Not so in the South. “The flavors are very simple, but very powerful and identifiable. When you put olive oil, basil and tomato in a dish, that’s what you taste. It’s very well-defined,” Vendôme adds. The cuisine oozes honesty: What you see going into the pan or onto the grill is what you get on the plate. You don’t have to be a culinary expert to appreciate it. Mediterranean cooks live by the policy of “less is more” because, as he says: “What you may have less of still has so much value. The ingredients do not need any more support. A perfectly ripe tomato does not need long cooking or truffle oil or foie gras. The tomato speaks to you, and it speaks for itself.”

A mealtime philosophyVendôme muses that “the perception of Mediterranean food as healthy is in part because it’s less processed, less changed from its natural state. That’s key.” Undoubtedly, a plum plucked right from the tree is better for you than a batch of frozen french fries. But not everyone has access to an orchard full of fruit trees — least of all, not food manufacturers located in the Great Plains. So it’s nice to know that the pristine freshness that gives Mediterranean foods so much appeal isn’t the only thing that makes them healthful.

Again, to get the full picture of why the Mediterranean diet is so good for the body and the soul, factor philosophy into the equation. Vendôme explains that the Mediterranean culture doesn’t look at food through the prism of nutritional merit. Rather, “We see it as a pleasure,” he says. “We eat because we love it, because it looks great, it smells great, it tastes even better, and because when you share it with friends and family it’s so much fun.” Something about this almost Dionysian abandon sets our Puritanical instincts on edge. Our national obsession with weight doesn’t make unfettered feasting more acceptable, either. The media’s steady stream of nutritional screeds — studies warning that too much of this brings certain death or not enough of that knocks a year or two off our life — makes it hard to stomach an unqualified enjoyment of food.

But forbidden foods are hard to resist. Thus the midnight binges on potato chips and the empty promises never to do it again. And empty they are, because few things bewitch us more than the transgressive appeal of breaking rules, even rules we’ve set for ourselves.

So why not get rid of the rules? That’s what they’ve done in the Mediterranean. The region’s cooks pay little mind to what’s healthful or lowest in fat when planning meals. Instead, they focus on what’s in season, in ample supply and tastes best.

Then there’s the serving size. “The problem is not the content, but the portion,” Vendôme says of the American diet. “The average serving of meat in Europe would be about 100 grams of beef. When you eat at a steakhouse here, they give you a 26-oz. steak. That’s almost a kilo.”

The Mediterranean philosophy provides no food taboos; its meals often present such satisfying variety that there’s no need to overindulge in one item to make up for the deprivation of another. By trying a little of this and a bit of that, the body signals that it’s had enough before you know it. “When you’re eating foods that are satisfying and flavorful, and you enjoy them, you tend to reach satiety on smaller amounts than when you try to get your fill on a pound of fat-free cheese,” Newgent says. And in the meantime, you’ve sampled so many fruits, nuts, vegetables, grains and fish, there’s no way any necessary nutrient could have escaped notice.

To experience small-serving satisfaction firsthand, visit a Middle Eastern teahouse or a Spanish bodega, where patrons indulge in mezze and tapas, respectively. These appetizer-sized portions of snacks — hummus and pita bread, fried almonds sprinkled with sea salt, or skewers of grilled calves’ liver and shrimp, for example — evolved to give patrons something to chew while they quaffed glasses of mint tea or sherry. But they have the fringe benefit of conforming to the “grazing” movement that many stateside consumers have embraced as a way to curtail over-consumption without going hungry.

The Mediterranean pyramid tackles the serving-size issue by not tackling it, suggesting rough frequencies to include a food in the diet — daily, weekly or monthly, for instance — in lieu of recommending specific quantities or numbers of servings. This was by design, because Oldways intended its pyramid to present a holistic impression of a healthy diet, not a prescription for strict portions or tight ratios of fat, carbohydrate and protein calories. Pointing out that “good health has been associated with considerable variation within the overall (dietary) pattern,” Oldways considers its open recommendations an asset.

Besides, by liberating the nutritionally concerned from the tyranny of food scales and caloric charts, the organization believes it’s doing them a favor. Oldways reminds us that “researchers suggest that it is better to exercise or simply walk more often, than to spend time with a calculator worrying about the exact number of grams of olive oil in our pasta in a healthy Mediterranean-style diet.”

How are we doing?After almost 10 years on the scene, the Mediterranean diet has left an undoubtedly favorable impression on cooking-magazine subscribers, world travelers and viewers of television’s Food Network. But how has America at-large embraced both its healthful lifestyle and the dishes in its repertoire? “Unfortunately, we keep going in the wrong direction here in the United States,” Newgent laments. “I think there are so many different factors contributing to that, and I think we just have different segments of the population, with some people who are truly committed and others who aren’t.”

We could start improving by reconciling our dysfunctional relationship with fat. Newgent notes that when she travels the Mediterranean, her stops at local grocery stores remind her just how dysfunctional that relationship is. “It’s really amazing: You can’t find diet sodas and fat-free snacks,” she says. “You can’t find anything that’s engineered to be fat-free, really, in these Mediterranean countries, and I think that we in the U.S. have gone to an extreme with that fat-free philosophy and that fear factor. Even though we look at fats as ‘bad,’ we’re often still consuming too much. We’re really not focusing as much as we should on the different types of fats. Although we hear that we shouldn’t be eating as much saturated fat and that we need more monounsaturates, there’s still a lot of misinformation” about the nutritional value of a diet rich in the right fats. “That is where the emphasis is in the Mediterranean diet: on those foods that are high in monounsaturated fats,” such as nuts, seeds, seafood and, of course, olive oil, she notes. The progress olive oil has made as an ambassador for the Mediterranean diet, and for healthful fats in general, encourages Newgent: “It used to be a foreign concept a few years ago, but now most Americans use extra-virgin olive oil. And that’s a positive change.”

Nuts, which supply the Mediterranean diet with another dose of healthful monounsaturates, deserve a similarly healthful reputation. Pine nuts, pistachios, almonds, hazelnuts and walnuts all have a long history in the Mediterranean as signs of wealth and hospitality. According to Bonnie Gorder-Hinchey, director of culinary services at the Hazelnut Council, New York, “There are some traditions of having bowls of dried apricots and hazelnuts set out for your guests as a sign of affluence and graciousness to your guests.”

Yet they’re everyday foods, too, sprinkled on rice pilafs or couscous, enjoyed as snacks, or ground into buttery pastes perfect for giving Mediterranean desserts an unctuous richness. It’s a richness we can live with, though, thanks to the nuts’ fatty-acid profiles and their high concentrations of protein, fiber and vitamin E. Given Americans’ fascination with slimness, intriguing new studies linking nuts to weight loss might prompt even more positive attention. “In fact,” notes Newgent, “there have been several studies connected to this and to the Mediterranean diet being more beneficial for weight loss. Researchers found that it wasn’t that the loss was any different, but that the weight loss was easier to maintain and for longer. The subjects were just more satisfied with the foods they were eating because of that little bit higher fat content that comes with them.”

The Mediterranean diet could teach us a thing or two about produce, too. “So many Americans look at their diets and think, ‘Well, we only need our five servings (of fruits and vegetables) a day,’” Newgent says. “But most Americans aren’t even getting that much, and that’s something that the Mediterranean diet really pinpoints as being a key.” By focusing so much on macronutrients — fat, protein and carbohydrates — Americans give short shrift to the crucial micronutrients.

In the Mediterranean, where fresh fruits and vegetables are a matter of course, the macronutrient ratios work themselves out naturally while including all the requisite vitamins and minerals. “The diet is just so nutritionally dense, and I think that’s another issue that we’ve gotten so far away from,” Newgent says. While she notes that there’s nothing remiss in taking a multivitamin (she even recommends it in some cases), she stresses that it needn’t become a nutritional crutch. “People don’t realize that we can get all these wonderful nutrients if we really just put more focus on our diets themselves,” she adds. “And it might just take one more minute of planning a week, not an hour,” or maybe less, thanks to the more “enlightened” crop of convenient prepared foods filling today’s supermarket aisles.

Making it MediterraneanHistorically, convenience has not been a high priority for Mediterranean cooks. The foods’ freshness and inherent bold flavors favored simple preparation, and a daily trip to the fishmonger or greenmarket — sometimes multiple times a day — never raised any eyebrows. What else were you supposed to do when your refrigerator was the size of a Nixon-era television set and functioned about as reliably? Besides, as Vendôme recalls: “In my time, mothers didn’t go out to work. I remember my mom spending the whole day in the kitchen.”

People find that difficult to do with today’s hectic schedules. Even in the Mediterranean, the pace of life is revving its engines and people’s dining habits are evolving to keep up. About 20 years after Americans discovered convenience, Vendôme observes that it is changing the way Mediterranean inhabitants eat, too. “Now you can go to a butcher shop and find a piece of meat that’s already marinated, just like you have in an American supermarket,” he notes. “Yes, it’s marinated with local olive oil and fresh herbes de Provence, but the marinating is taken care of for you, and it’s ready to cook.”

That the olive oil and herbs are both local reveals a deeper truth about modern Mediterranean dining; even as it adapts to a busier lifestyle, it refuses to sacrifice the freshness, simplicity and locality that give it its charm. That’s why it still succeeds. The region’s residents still hold out on the daily marketing, for example. But the average American consumer “doesn’t stop off at a market in downtown Chicago, buy a few vegetables, stick a baguette under his arm and go home for a little dinner with the wife,” Vendôme says. “Instead, he goes to the big-box store on Saturday morning, loads up the truck with food and then freezes it.”

Luckily for him, he can do just that and still color his diet with the same variety that Mediterranean consumers do. Even in the depths of a Midwestern snowstorm, global connections among growers, distributors and manufacturers bring the Southern Hemisphere’s summer harvest to American tables. “I was visiting a part of Minnesota that’s about two hours north of Sioux Falls, SD, in the middle of December,” Vendôme says, “and I went to the supermarket. They had fresh raspberries; fresh blackberries; a dozen different kinds of tomatoes; yellow peppers. It was wonderful. America has, absolutely, the best ingredients out there, no question about it. The question is, just how are we going to go about presenting them? And how are consumers going to go about consuming them?”

How about as frozen entrées? The frozen-food concept never quite gained a foothold in Europe and the Mediterranean, but it’s long been a standard in American kitchens, and the results get better with each passing year and each advance in technology. Fruits and vegetables can retain color and flavor when subjected to the deep freeze. Their nutrition is often better off for the experience, too, with vitamin integrity superior to the fresh equivalent after it spends a few days in the produce bin. Handled properly, Mediterranean cheeses, nuts and dried-fruit garnishes make the journey through the freezer unscathed, and the vegetable purees that are synonymous with the locale’s fresh flavors are often more amenable to frozen storage and reconstitution than thick starch- or dairy-based sauces and gravies.

Crafting creative combosProduct developers can tap the cuisine’s starchy staples, such as pasta, rice, couscous and dried lentils, for creative dry-mix bases. Combining pasta or grains with herbs, spice blends, cheese powders, and dried nuts and fruits makes instant Mediterranean flavor easy for manufacturers and consumers. “Again,” Newgent says, “I don’t think these foods are that different from what we’ve been eating or producing all along. We just need to make a few changes. For example, if we did a boxed couscous product, we’d just want to focus more on starting with the couscous and then adding the vegetables and legumes — letting those be a larger component of the mix — and we might want to focus on adding more dried fruits and nuts in there, too.” This can give the ensemble the color, flavor, texture and nutrition that speak Mediterranean.

“It behooves food manufacturers, be they of ingredients or finished products, to deliver those authentic Mediterranean flavors,” Vendôme points out, and to deliver them in ways that consumers recognize immediately. Fortunately, with the kind of bold profiles we’re dealing with, that’s not a high hurdle to scale. One whiff of herbs like rosemary, thyme, sage, tarragon, basil, mint, oregano and parsley identifies something as hailing from the Mediterranean’s Northern shore; salad dressings, marinades, seasoning mixes and sauces could all benefit from receiving that kind of passport stamp. The bold flavors found on the region’s Southern side come primarily from dried spices, such as cumin, coriander, cinnamon, allspice, paprika, peppercorns, cardamom and cayenne pepper. A sprinkling of ras-el hanout, a sort of North African curry powder, or a few dabs of the harissa chile paste found in Tunisia and Morocco, are sometimes all the Mediterranean flavor a formula needs. That’s not to say that a hint of citrus essence, toasted sesame paste or the tang of fresh yogurt — all card-carrying Mediterranean flavors — couldn’t do the same trick.

“Mediterranean cuisine isn’t only the ingredients,” adds Vendôme. “It’s about the method of cooking, too. So think about those techniques. They’re very simple: a quick sauté with light olive oil, grilling with wood fire outside, and roasting.” By adding an authentic grilled or roasted flavor to an entrée or sauce, you translate a bit of those sunny cooking techniques to whatever you’re making.

Simplicity of ingredient and technique is a hallmark of Mediterranean cuisine, but it’s a simplicity that allows the bold, colorful flavors to take center stage on the plate. In a way, that makes the product developer’s job easier by obviating the need to recreate a laundry list of complex, hard-to-imitate flavors. But at the same time, it requires a keen palate for subtlety and authenticity, because if you don’t nail that single, featured note right on the mark, the whole effect crumbles. “That’s why major food manufacturers need to rely on ingredients manufacturers with an understanding of both flavor and the cooked flavor notes created during the cooking process,” Vendôme says, “because that’s our expertise: giving you that flavor note, that cooked note, that will deliver authentic taste for your application.”

For her part, Newgent thinks the best way to bring Mediterranean flavors and foods to America’s kitchen is “to focus on one food at a time. And it might not mean, necessarily, eliminating anything. In fact, I’d not eliminate anything. But just how much and how often we’re eating certain foods can be changed around a little bit.” That means knowing what makes something Mediterranean, and staying true to those guidelines.

Kimberly J. Decker, a California-based technical writer, has a bachelor’s degree in consumer food science with a minor in English from the University of California-Davis. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

Back to top