Who you callin' a Fage?

On to a happier, more likely-to-satisfy theme--food!

I'm not big into shilling, as you might have guessed from my previous post. (Shelling, yes; shilling, not so much.) However, if I find a product I like, I enjoy sharing it with others. Today, I bring you Fage--thankfully pronouned "fah-yeh"--a Greek-styled, strained yogurt that is available in some specialty grocery stores and chain supermarkets, at least in the Keystone State.

I discovered this delight in the "alternative" food aisle at the Giant in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania, earlier this year. (A tip for my friends in the Midstate; the Giant in Dillsburg is surprisingly good for organic foods, recycled paper products, less chemical-based cosmetics and ablutions, and low-sudsing detergents. I know! Dillsburg! Who knew?)

Just the other day, while shopping at the East End Co-op in Pittsburgh, located near where I work, I found a stash of this pucker-up-and-kiss-me-quick nirvana in the dairy case.

I like yogurt and eat a fair amount of it, but over the years, a lot of it has become too sugary (yes, even for me, Mister Two Sugars and a Little Splenda in His Morning Coffee), too sweet (aspartame--right up there with Verizon in terms of diabolical corporate consumer assaults), too fake-flavored (vapid vanilla, caustic cherry, blasphemous blueberry), or just too damn bland. Maybe it's because of the national food supply's skewing toward everything non-fat; simultaneously, it seems to have made everything non-taste as well. Tomatoes are often insipid, even the non-iceberg lettuces taste like iceberg, and the olive bread sold by some purveyors of olive bread is guaranteed "not to taste like olives at all."*

After a while, yogurt stopped tasting like yogurt, but instead more like a type of white, opaque, flavorless gelatin. Or, perhaps, like an overly wet stucco, although I'd bet that the stucco has more flavor and texture.

Leave it to the Greeks to come to our culinary salvation. (They've given us so much to savor already--democracy, philosophy, the Olympics, feta cheese, anal sex . . . .) Fage tastes like yogurt should--tart, puckery, dense, and yummy. The more fat content the better it tastes, but even the 0% tastes more or less like the real deal. Some of the product sold is plain (not in taste but in category); others feature a separate compartment filled with less sugary jam--or better still, honey!--which you can then spoon into the yogurt to your taste.

You can, of course, add some preserves from your own pantry (highly recommended: Bonne Maman or Domaine du Roncemay--expensive, but you'll only need a little) and make your own fruit-flavored yogurt. Or go wild and add cereal and actual fresh fruit. Radical, I know. World Communism can't be far behind.

I'm not going to claim that Fage tastes exactly like it's fresh off the farm, expressed directly from the teat of a cow or goat of your own milking. I've had some fresh yogurts so tart that they could curl or straighten your hair, as appropriate. But in terms of sufficiently mass-produced, fairly regularly available yogurts that don't resemble or taste like spackling, this is one good Fage.

I'm still on the lookout for some of the really tart stuff and plan to scour more specialty shops, ethnic food stores (hello, EcoGal!), and farmers' markets in Pittsburgh and environs until I find the really real deal. I know that will make you believers in the local food movement happy, reducing greenhouse gasses by not relying on yogurt imported in bulk from Greece and instead spending all weekend driving around Western Pennsylvania in my aging, 28-miles-to-the-gallon (on a good day) Subaru to find the perfect product.

Yeppers, I know I'm doing my part to stop stamping my carbon footprint in the face of the planet.

And then taking said foot and inserting it right up the world's gaping hole . . . in the ozone.

The ancient Greeks wouldn't have had it any other way.

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* A proclamation from a clerk at an Au Bon Pain in Washington, D.C., in the 1990s.