Can I Get Those Vitamins Decaf?

A company called Glen Ellyn Coffee Co. is selling a patented vitamin-enriched coffee. It claims two cups of CafeVit (pronounced cafe-VEET) provide 100% of the RDA of anti-oxidant Vitamins C and E, plus biotin, calcium pantothenate and a bunch of B vitamins. If this sounds like your thing, you can order by calling (800) 261-1424.

Dangerous Dining

Japan has restaurants serving the poisonous fugu fish. The Chinese equivalent is apparently hot pot restaurants, where more than 100 people have been injured this year (30 of them in a single restaurant in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province). The problem is explosions due to gas leaks, not something dangerous in the stewed dishes themselves. Spicy though they are.

The Mouth of the South

The subtitle of “Fannie Flagg’s Original Whistle Stop Cafe Cookbook� (Fawcett; $14) is “Featuring FRIED GREEN TOMATOES and More Than 150 Other Great Recipes.� Yes, it’s that Fannie Flagg--author of the novel that became one of the most food-oriented American movies ever, “Fried Green� . . . you-know-whats.

The recipes in this book are exactly the sort of Alabama comfort food you’d expect: creamed chicken, smothered pork chops, scalloped oysters, butterscotch meringue pie, ambrosia--and needless to say, three fried green tomato recipes, one with milk gravy. Flagg is emphatically pro-gravy (“it hides a multitude of sins�).

Indeed, she’s emphatically oblivious to most current dietary theories. At one point she fantasizes about newspaper headlines she’d like to see: “Doctors Discover: Eating Hot Buttered Biscuits Actually Good for You,� “Smaller Portions Mean Trouble Down the Line,� “Oat Bran: The Silent Killer.� Her advice to wives: “Keep your husbands a little chunky. It keeps them humble and it keeps them at home. Men who go on diets have led to more divorces than you know.�

A Fish Tale

The peril of an international turbot war has been averted.

As you doubtless remember, it all started this spring when the European Union rejected the quotas set by the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization for a fish known as Greenland turbot. On March 9, the Canadian Coast Guard seized a Spanish fishing trawler and arrested its crew. Spain retaliated by sending an armed naval vessel to the area and imposing sanctions (to wit, travel restrictions on Canadian tourists in Spain). The Canadians then unveiled, and several times used, a device to stop unauthorized fishing by cutting the net off the offending boat.

Calm diplomacy eventually ended the crisis. Canada talked Russia and Japan into giving up some of their turbot quota, with the result that the EU will get 55% of the world Greenland turbot catch next year, but the EU vessels will have to carry observers checking that they don’t exceed their quotas or take undersized fish.

The fish in question is not the true turbot ( Psetta maxima ), a European flatfish esteemed by gourmets, but Reinhardtius hippoglossoides , a lesser breed of halibut used mainly for frozen fish sticks. The Canadians are the only people in the world who call it a turbot.