Anuga food fair in Cologne features unusual eatables (Feature)

Cologne, Germany - The world's top food fair, exhibiting every conceivable form of ready-to-use food and beverage, opens its doors Saturday in the German city of Cologne. Care to eat fish in sausage form? Prefer primeval salt from 280- million-year-old salt formations in the Kalahari Desert? Then Anuga, held every two years, is the place for you. Exporters from 97 nations are eager to catch the attention of European food importers and big retailers. Instant food, ingenious new snacks and exotic new beverages are big attention getters. There is for example the Turkish meat dish gyros in a paper cup that needs just two 30-second bursts of heat in the microwave to be ready to serve. The dip is in a chamber in the lid. A deep-frozen pasta product eases life for those who hate cooking: the plate is freeze-able, oven resistant and disposable. The meal comprises three flavours of pasta. A Dutch manufacturer of spreads offers them in squeeze tubes, which are great for people on the road with no cutlery: just squirt some shrimp or tuna paste or sweet pepper or horseradish dip on your slice of bread and eat. An Austrian manufacturer of cream cheese is now shipping the product to be squeezed out like toothpaste too. Health is, as ever, a selling point. A spokesman for the Anuga organizing company, Koelnmesse, said a remarkably large number of marketing slogans this year begin with 'free from.. .', as in free from fat, sugar, gluten, lactose and so on. Some are aimed at buyers with food allergies, others at people trying to unwind an obesity problem. Natural style also has an ageless appeal, whether it's the salt - Kalahari Desert miners in southern Africa dig up salt that has remained underground through eons of continental drift - or virgin hemp oil grown on a rural English farm. Less natural is some of the food marketing terminology. If 'fresh mango' suggests to you a fragrant round fruit dripping with vitamins, the product - a pot of mango-flavoured jelly - may be a disappointment. Then there is a Thai beverage which seems to promise beauty to all who imbibe it. On closer inspection it turns out the product is actually aimed at regulating the bacterial balance in your gut. Inner beauty, so to speak. Anuga, which runs till Wednesday, features 6,520 exhibitors. Turkey is special guest this time round, giving an extra lift to its exporters in Cologne. The food industry in Germany says it has barely been affected by the recession. 'Everyone has still got to eat,' says the German Food Industry Federation. The tuna sausages come from a Spanish company, which guarantees that the filling is at least 40-per-cent fish. Along the aisle at Little Bear Sausages, it's a relief to discover that the filling is pure poultry and that nothing nasty has been happening to any little bears. The vendor says the brand is supposed to appeal to kids.