What goes in ... ?

RECENTLY I HAD dinner with friends visiting from London, and the talk turned naturally to Iraq (they are unhappy about the war, disillusioned with Tony Blair) and just as naturally to how fat so many Americans seem to be these days.

"We have big people in Europe, of course," one of them said, lowering her voice slightly and glancing toward the next table as if worried about giving offense, "but nothing like what you see here. And so many of them!" Nods of agreement from around our table.

What the Londoners were noticing is that America's default setting has been turned to "fat." If you are not careful, if you pay no attention, if you buy what the ads tell you to buy and eat when they tell you to eat – which is constantly – you are sure to thicken. Heritable qualities of metabolism provide some protection, exercise is indispensable, being young can help for a while – but the only real strategy for not growing overweight is to pay attention to what you eat.

This is a particularly urgent issue with respect to processed, packaged foods, and it means reading labels, whose defiantly fine, don't-bother-to-read-me print is a big clue that the information contained therein matters, often in a disheartening sort of way. If, through your squinched eyes, you see the word "hydrogenated" on some ingredient label, you are looking at trans fats and must run for the hills. Other offenders are less sinister; corn syrup, for instance, is just a form of sugar – but it's cheap, industrially produced and overused, and a vast sink of empty calories.

To find real sugar – brown sugar! – in a commercial chocolate sauce is a rare experience, but you do find just that in the set of sauces made by Fudge Is My Life, a small San Francisco concern whose recipes were developed over decades by founder Lillian Maremont. (Could she be the new Alice Medrich?) Other FIML ingredients include cream, butter, salt, sugar, and cocoa powder – not diet food, certainly, but preferable to maltodextrose and other such factory-made unpronounceables.

I found Fudge Is My Life's orange-chocolate sauce to be wonderful, though it did not strike me as notably better-tasting than the many mass-market fudge sauces I have sampled on occasion. One would buy it because it isn't full of chemicals, and that is reason enough. La Tortilla Factory's new extra-virgin olive-oil wraps, on the other hand, with the marquee fat being substituted for the more common (and cheaper) lard or shortening, are unmistakably more supple than the regular tortillas, smooth and soft like high-end glove leather. They're thinner, too!