The Mediterranean diet

LINDA HALL

AH! The Mediterranean diet!

Is there anything better? Not if you take in every adulatory word written about it in the international media.

The funny thing is, though, that the Mediterranean diet I read about is rarely the same one that is common in Spain.

What always bring me up short are the whole grains. Olive oil, check. Vegetables, check. Pulses, check. Nuts, sort of check. Seeds, again just a sort of check because the only seeds commonly eaten in the part of the Mediterranean that I am familiar with are sunflower seeds.

But whole grains? I exclude the young from this because they’ll eat anything, but offer whole grains to a no ‐ longer youthful Spanish person and you will receive a polite refusal and what was once known as an old ‐fashioned look.

They won’t give brown rice the time of day and white rice must be coloured bright yellow to be edible. That’s why Spanish home cooks cheer‐ fully use E‐ 102 food colouring as it’s cheaper than saffron and gives a bet ‐ter colour. Incidentally, E‐102 ‐ which can cause migraine, blurred vision, rhinitis, itching and purple skin patch‐es ‐ is already banned in Norway and Austria.

Never mind, probably Mediter ‐ranean Spain has developed immunity to dodgy E ‐ 102 so let’s move on to ‘lean proteins and healthy fats’.

I’ll give you fish and lean protein. Serrano ham has fewer calories than chicken breast and even pork is con ‐sidered white meat these days. Nor is there a great liking for beef outside cocido, apart from fillet steak or en ‐trecote for high days and holidays.

And I’ll give you healthy fats, too, because there’s not a lot of butter in Mediterranean food although those healthy pulses swim alongside fat ‐laden chorizo, morcillas and belly of pork.

What everyone forgets about the Spanish Mediterranean diet is that it was once eaten in moderation by peo‐ple who expected to walk every ‐where, who worked hard and prac ‐tised a frugality imposed on them by hard times.

BILL ANDERSON A PUBLIC SERVANT

WE are well into the pre ‐ election peri ‐od in Spain with the campaigning frenzy due to start on May 12 until May 26. Al‐though I will be presenting on a list, the rules governing this period oblige me to be relatively silent about it. Having said that, I get asked on a regular basis if we are going to win the elections. It’s a bit like asking what next week’s winning lottery numbers will be.

Sure, there are frequent polls flowing in from all directions, which fail to paint a single story. So, what do we do? I guess it’s a little bit like reading the horoscope from the local paper. It is of‐ten more a source of amusement than of real information. If you are anything like me, you read your horoscope and if you like what it says, you feel bolstered and ready to face the world, but if you don’t like the implications, you just laugh and discard it as a load of rubbish because “that’s not going to happen to me.”

I am sceptical at the least about opin‐ion polls: because I don’t know how they have been carried out, how many people have had their opinions extract‐