‘WAITER, I’ll have the os trich filet and a side of seaphire, please.”
Implausible as it seems, someday you might find yourself actually saying this – as you order a prime steak sliced from the leg of an ostrich and a new asparagus-type vegetable irrigated with yummy sea water.
That’s just one of the conclusions you can draw from this year’s International Fancy Food and Confection Show, the annual trade fair of the specialty food industry that fills the Javits Center.
From Sunday through today, more than 1,600 food companies, from one-man barbecue- sauce factories to global food producers, have been trying to sell hot sauces, sweets, olive oils, jams, cheeses, meats and nuts to restaurants, specialty shops, departments stores and mail-order companies.
First there’s ostrich, which Tony Consiglio of Pokanoket Ostrich Farm feeds you in the form of a sausage. “It’s the healthy red meat,” he explained.
Meanwhile, Roy Hodges is upstairs pitching the perfect side dish: seaphire – the vegetable for all of you who’ve ever asked the question, “What if I tried to grow asparagus, but only irrigated it with sea water?”
Not only is seaphire tasty (if a little salty), Hodges thinks it will save the world.
“You grow it on the coast, where there’s plenty of salt water and not too much other agriculture going on,” said Hodges, whose father helped develop seaphire a few years back.
And the best part is that its byproducts can be turned into moisturizers, oils, gluten-free flour and particleboard.
Then there’s the yucca – which is going to replace the potato as the thin, fried chip of choice throughout America – that is, if you believe John Sorace.
Sorace said that yucca chips have 40 percent less fat than potato chips because the yucca’s dense flesh does not absorb nearly as much oil.
But, as Sarah Cohen, of Route 11 Potato Chips in Middleton, Va. – a gourmet chippery that exhibited a few rows over from Ritz Foods – pointed out, Americans like their greasy potato chips. “He’s wrong,” she said. “Potatoes have been around for 100 years. They’re not going anywhere.”
But to get noticed at a 1,600-stall trade fair, you have to have more than a good product. You have to dress up like a sideshow attraction in a three- ring food circus.
That’s how Nigel Wood, a white guy dressed up in authentic African garb, hawks his new line of four sauces called ukuva (the Zulu word for “the five senses”).
But, outlandish as they are, his clothes cannot surpass his stories about his adventures of 18 years scouring the undiscovered country in search of sauces (and material for his still-unfinished book “Recipes from my Rugsack”).
Down in “the northern corner of Zululand,” for example, Wood came upon a village where “a wizened old man” named Timbo prepares “intoxicating” grilled chicken and water-buffalo steak, basted with Zulu Fire Sauce, the recipe for which he “reluctantly” divulged “after a feast of flavor and wine.”
True or false, who knows? I guess you just can’t sell a sauce anymore without a whole song and dance.