After the fashion for French cuisine, Mediterranean cooking, surrounded by much media hype, watered down by northern tastes, given various names like'� nouvelle cuisine'or� Mediterranean aroma' and with lashings of cream on every dish, has�- in a manner of speaking - arrived.

The boom of the Mediterranean diet is due mainly to the Americans, who with their growing obsession about obesity, let us into the secret of the magical powers of some of the products we have here, and all the good they were doing us and how tasty they were into the bargain. All this after their war against our olive oil in the seventies, which they said was cancer producing, so they could sell us their sunflower, rapeseed and soya oil.

Parisian chefs, or Spanish chefs who came to Paris with the Mediterranean recipes they had been cooking all their lives, also brought our cuisine into the limelight. From Paris, the fashion soon jumped the pond to America, as a state of the art cuisine with a luxury tag, and once New York fell under its charm the invasion was complete.

There came a time when even chefs from Cantabria were jumping on the bandwagon , claiming that they, too, were Mediterranean. Of course, nowadays even Lapps are doing Mediterranean cooking.

In Spain this cuisine has suffered from being confused with the culture of rice dishes. Here in Spain, when you think about the Mediterranean, you think about holidays and those enormous pressure-cooked paellas served at the beach bars, the ros� wine that went with it, and the siesta right after that. This image still leads many people to order the house paella whenever they go somewhere to eat on the Mediterranean coast.

The Mediterranean is more than rice, olive oil, pasta, fish and sea food, garlic and herbs. There are also all pork products, goats, sheep, and cows and their milk, plus a host of other things too numerous to mention. Because, really, what is a Mediterranean diet?

The Mediterranean diet is a balanced diet of vegetables, meat and fish, with cheese, cold cuts, and desserts. You can use olive oil or lard. Don' t think I have uttered a blasphemy by mentioning lard, since this was the main source of fat for all the non-Moslem Mediterranean, while the Moslem world used yogurts and fresh cheeses.

What we cannot do is eliminate from our diet every source of fat which is not olive oil, since while it's true that our body eliminates the majority of these fats it does use some of them. So if we don't give our body these fats it will produce them, by transforming other food stuff into the fats it needs. Therefore our body's bad cholesterol level will rise, in spite of not having given it any animal fats. So the conclusion we have too arrive at in the end is that a good diet is a varied diet.
If we can also eat plenty of blue fish, lots of olive oil, and plenty of fruit and vegetables, without depriving ourselves of anything we normally eat, then we will be truly Mediterranean in our eating habits.