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Food

We're feeling a little listless

Cooking Light ranks its top food and fitness cities. We don't rate.

By CHRIS SHERMAN
Published January 24, 2007

This month, the glossy food magazines serve up familiar January fare to get us off to a good start. Their resolutions, lists and steaming bowls of winter soup hit home around west-central Florida even if our chilly days are few.

Sleek and lusty Saveur brags on its 100 foodie favorites and touts a separate story on the comfort soup of Spain. Alert local readers know that warming soup is our beloved caldo gallego. The robust bowl of beans and greens from Spain's northwest coast found a home in sunny old Ybor City and many of its restaurants.

A hearty bowl would warm the soul right now. Wish I could find more.

On the cover of Cooking Light is a bowl of chunky chili and inside a list of the Top 20 cities to eat smart, be fit and live well.

What's that got to do with us? If you guessed "nothing," you're sadly right.

Some nominees are predictable: foodie and fitness havens such as Seattle, Portland, Ore., and San Francisco and privileged college towns such as Boston, Colorado Springs, Colo., and Austin, Texas. The dismaying surprise is that supposedly creaky Rust Belt cities such as Milwaukee, Pittsburgh and St. Louis also made the Top 20.

Tampa Bay didn't make the cut, nor did any city in a state best known for theme parks, suntans, oranges and retirement.

Of course lists are lists, cute and clever yet often unfair and simplistic. But it's difficult to argue that the omission of St. Petersburg, Tampa and Clearwater is unfair. Too bad; this is the kind of list we should strive to be on.

Measuring us up

What would it take to make such a list?

Cooking Light editors did not pick cities based on their hip foodie image, so forget "better marketing" as a solution. The magazine asked an outside firm to find 20 cities using objective criteria.

Tampa Bay is lucky to have shorelines, some good trails for hiking and biking, and fair weather for year-round exercise. Yet analysts looked at a city's health risks surveyed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on diabetes, healthy weights and lack of exercise me included.

They didn't count pedestrian and bicyclist injuries and deaths but looked at broader measurements of livability. Older, more urban cities built with more sidewalks and less sprawl have a break on that.

We could resolve to be more active and healthful, but it will take us longer to measure up on the food criteria.

This study looked at national respect for restaurants by measuring James Beard nominations (Jeannie Pierola at Bern's Steak House is as close as we've come) and Zagat restaurant ratings. The panel compared the number of chefs and their salaries as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (head cooks don't count; that's a separate category). They also counted organic restaurants.

Take comfort, folks

To assess gourmet food shopping, the study tallied farmers' markets (few here) and locations of Trader Joe's and Whole Foods. Sorry again; we have some good independents but only just qualified for our first Wild Oats (in Tampa).

So, for now, we must take comfort in our caldo gallego. Saveur got its recipe from a writer's mother, who is a gallego, as the Spanish call people from that rugged corner. She used a variety of greens in season, such as kale, cabbage and the local grelos (turnip greens), for which the best modern equivalent is broccoli raab. Her mom's recipe is also meaty: a half chicken, chorizo, smoked ham, pork belly, veal shoulder and a pig's foot, in a pot that would feed 10.

Best eat up now, we've got work to do, in the kitchen and on the farm, as well as the treadmill.

Edible cities

'Cooking Light' Top 20

1. Seattle

2. Portland, Ore.

3. Washington, D.C.

4. Minneapolis

5. San Francisco

6. Boston

7. Denver

8. Milwaukee

9. Philadelphia

10. Tucson, Ariz.

11. Baltimore

12. Colorado Springs, Colo.

13. Pittsburgh

14. St. Louis

15. New York

16. Atlanta

17. Austin, Texas

18. Chicago

19. Las Vegas

20. Kansas City, Mo.

[Last modified January 23, 2007, 10:45:27]