I learned a new word today: Phenylalanine. It's one of the essential amino acids found in proteins. According to one of its critics, phenylalanine is a sweet poison to people who are sensitive to aspartame, the sweetner found in Coca-Cola's new Coke Blāk, it's new entry in the java-cola market.

"Most consumers don't know that too much Phenylalanine is a neurotoxin and excites the neurons in the brain to the point of cellular death," anti-aspartame advocate Janet Starr Hull says on her Web site. "ADD/ADHD, emotional and behavioral disorders can all be triggered by too much Phenylalanine in the daily diet."

(Note: Starr Hull was not at IACP. I Googled her for perspective.)

Coca-Cola calls Coke Blāk a carbonated fusion beverage. The 8-ounce bottle is reminiscent of Coke's classic 6-ounce glass bottles, but wrapped a swirling black-and-mocha plastic.

The Cattlemern's Beef Association is sponsoring today's IACP hospitality suite. Their after-breakfast spread featured grilled beef bruschetta with feta and kalamata olives. (From the group's book The Healthy Beef Cookbook.)

The rarer slices of beef shone beautifully against red bell peppers and glassine onions. But even the dryer bites were delicious.

All that was missing was a stack of newspapers. Today's breakfast was the best meal I've had all week at IACP:

Rolled bilinis witih a schmear of apple compote, dusted and powered sugar and adorned with raspberries and blueberries
Link sausage
Home 'taters
Ripe watermelon, cantaloupe, honeydew, a strawberry and red grapes
Coffee
OJ
Scones

This was my fourth IACP meal that included potatoes. I still haven't seen any ketchup or Tabasco.

Still, I know I ate better than some of the folks at a 7-11 in Tacoma, where I stopped for a cup of coffee after leaving the office this morning.

Here's one exchange between a man and a woman:

"Get my babies some gum."
"What are we having for breakfast?"
"Get some donuts. We gotta roll."
"I don't want no donuts."

Or my favorite line of the morning, from a woman standing in front of 7-11's new Twistas pizza things:

"I don't think I can put that in my stomach this morning."

“I’m ready to leave now.”

A woman said this as she walked out of the IACP trade show. It was just past 1. The trade show, and lunch, started at noon.

Seen one trade show, you’ve seen ‘em all. From the Fancy Foods Show to Comdex to AdultEx, they’re all fairly dull displays as far as I’m concerned.

Jenn-Air. Cuisinart. Le Cordon Bleu Academy. Coca-Cola. All the usual suspects are here.

Over at the New Orleans tourism booth, they’re handing out beads. But the closest thing to an exposed breast is the processed turkey hanging over the chewy sandwich bun in my boxed lunch.

I, too, am ready to leave the exhibit hall, but not before finishing lunch:

Turkey and cheese sandwich
Wedge of Laughing Cow Creamy Swiss cheese
Bag of Tim’s Cascade Style Potato Chips from Algona
A Red Delicious Apple, from Washington, natch
Chocolate chip cookie
Cup of orzo salad

More than 18 million people in the United States have diabetes. That’s 6.3 percent of the total population.

How many restaurants provide meals tailored to this demographic?

About zero.

And that’s one fat problem, said Jennifer Bucko, associate dean of the Robert Morris College Culinary school in Chicago. In an IACP panel called Cooking for People With Diabetes, Bucko urged chefs at restaurants, hotels and nursing homes to start cooking meals that aren’t just good for people, but taste good too.

She applauded Applebee’s Weight Watchers menu.

“The food’s pretty darn good,” Bucko said. “I just think that more restaurants should be doing stuff like that. It’s really important not to have just the diet plate of turkey breast or the chicken breast with cottage cheese and a peach slice.

“I think restaurants really should have a really nice selection of things on their menu, at least I’d say 5, 6 even 10 items that are healthy and are right there with the nutrition information.”

Easily said, but easily done?

“I don’t know why they’re not doing it,” Bucko said. “You look at fast food restaurants, you can get the nutrition information really easily.”

Bucko offered an enchilada example from the book she co-authored with registered dietician Lara Rondinelli: Healthy Calendar Diabetic Cooking. In her Mexi-makeover, she substituted lean ground beef for sirloin, reduced-fat cheese for high-fat cheese, yogurt instead of sour cream. The result: 200 fewer calories per serving. She trimmed the fat from 27.6 grams to 9 grams. Sodium fell from 2,429 mg to 562 mg.

The enchilada example illustrates an irksome ethnic issue: Hispanics, along with African Americans and Native Americans, are in diabetes’ high-risk category, yet are probably the most reluctant ethnic groups when it comes to changing their diets, Bucko said. Bucko substitutes lower-fat ingredients without diluting ethnic allure.

“We want people to stay true to their cultures,” she said.

She also wants diabetic diners to feel they’re getting their money’s worth at restaurants, whether it’s a casual, mid-range restaurant or a sit-down, fining dining restaurant.

“Everybody’s worried about volume, that they’re not getting enough to eat,” Bucko said. “People suffering from a disease are suffering enough already. Why should they suffer (when they go out to eat)?”

Compared to yesterday, attendance and buzz is sparse this morning. I don’t think it’s the Cuisinart-sponsored breakfast (although the bacon was limp). I’m guessing last night’s round of food fetes is hanging over attendees like a hangover.

Last night’s events included: Food Meets Art at Dale Chihuley’s Boat House; a salute to famed chef Jacques Pepin, for whom IACP has named a scholarship for minority students in the culinary field; and a Liquid Kitchen evening of “creative cocktailing” with master mixologist Ryan Magarian and Seattle uber-foodie Kathy Casey.

That was in addition to intimate gatherings at Dhalia Lounge, Union, Chandler’s Crabhouse, Canlis and The Georgian, the opulent dining room at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel.

Breakfast was a low-key affair (scrambled eggs, bacon, potatoes, bear claws and anemic fruit) but highlighted by Norwegian photographer Nancy Bundt’s slide show of bakers, chefs, home cooks and kitchen gardeners from around the world. I particularly enjoyed Bundt’s numerous photos of men with hams.

Tonight, foodies will fan out at Salumi, Rover’s, Ray’s Boathouse, Earth & Ocean and El Gaucho.

Today is Cookbook and Trade Show Day at the International Association of Culinary Professionals' conference in Seattle. Look for random epicurian effluvia throughout the day...

My last IACP panel of the day was like cultural dinner theater, filled with song and dance.

Historical Food Practices of the Quinault Indian Nation started out like any highly informative slide-show presentation, but once the Quinault Drummers and Dancers Group got started, the room rocked. Men sang and chanted while children performed ritual dances celebrating elk and whale hunts.

A Quinault tribal leader described his people's historic protein-based diet thusly:

Breakfast –- smoked clams and smoked fish.

Lunch –- elk ... and smoked fish.

Dinner –- bear ... and smoked fish.

The repeated smoked fish references elicited respectful chuckles all around.

When samples of smoked razor clams and steelhead were passed around, my mouth was too full of alder-scented goodness to do anything else but chew, especially on the razor clams, which had a deliciously leathery-fatty texture.

To wash it down, we were served rusty Labrador tea, brewed from the Ledum groelandicum shrub, a member of the heath family that grows in western Washington bogs.

One woman in the audience implored Quinault tribal members to market the tea commercially. I'll drink to that. Rusty Labrador tea had sweet wooliness and delicate astringency. I'd like to drink it like some Quinault like it, spiked with dried evergreen huckleberries or fireweed blossoms.

Bob Betz of Betz Family Winery in Woodinville admitted his PowerPoint presentation was “geeky,” filled with charts, grafs and references to “structured integrity” and “fruity intensity” of Columbia Valley vino.

So I’m assuming the real appeal of the IACP panel he moderated, Uncovering the Inspiration Behind Washington Wines, was the intoxicating aroma of the conference room itself.

At least that’s how it smelled from my seat near the back row.

The conference room smelled like the inside of a cask. By my count, there were 9 rows of tables, with 12 chairs at each table. At each place setting, there were five glasses of Washington wines: Januik 2004 Chardonnay, Januik 2003 Merlot, Brookwater 2003 Cabernet, Betz 2004 Syrah and Betz 2003 Cabernet.

I didn't have anything to drink, so I'm pretty sure that was 540 glasses of wine scenting the room.

Fruity intensity indeed.

Starter: Oranges with honey, Spanish olive oil and mint. A fresh balance of flavors.

Entree: Roast pork stuffed with gorgonzola and hazelnuts with sherry cream, with roast fingerling potatoes, corn, red bell peppers and green beans. My pork was on the dry side, although my tablemates cheered their entrees.

Dessert: Chocolate marquis, covered in hazelnuts. Said one tablemate: "Chocolate is to me like heroin is to Keith Richards." Guess he liked it. Not wanting to indulge in too much of a good thing, I managed just one bite of the dense, dark chocolate square. Chocolate filagree, sprayed gold, beautifully offset crushed hazelnuts around the edges.

Before I started writing about food, I was a poet, which meant I wrote a lot of unpublished stuff for free and hung out with a bunch of slackers who considered it a crime to rhyme. One IACP workshop, Unleashing the Poet Within You, held particular appeal.

Gail Bellamy is the managing editor of Restaurant Hospitality magazine and author of “Victual Reality: Food Poems.” She and Karen Bonaudi, a Washington poet and potato promoter, held forth on the history and recent trends of pairing poetry with food – from restaurants promoting poetry dinners to the intoxicatingly rhythmic language of menus themselves.

“Food is a common denominator,” Bellamy said. “It’s a link to our ethnic identities. We eat in ways that express ourselves. It’s the same with writing.”

Bonaudi, the assistant executive director of the Washington State Potato Commission, introduced herself by saying, “I’m not a foodie – I’m the ‘dirt-ie.'” She compared a good poem to a good recipe.

“A recipe doesn’t happen on the page, in the kitchen or in the mind of a chef,” she said. “It happens in the mouths of diners. “

She said both recipes and poems “share history and traditions.”

Metaphor is a key literary ingredient – “the white sauce of poetry,” as she called it.

A consummate potato-pusher, Bonaudi offered this nugget from Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to a French Fry”:

What sizzles in boiling oil is the world’s pleasures
the delicious simplicity of the soil.

Escoffier, the august 19th century French chef, added a poetic twist to his menu when he discovered English diners didn’t have a taste for frog’s legs. A consummate thigh-master, Escofffier renamed the dish Nymphs at Dawn.

Yesterday, one of the owners of Tacoma’s Asado told me he was in Chicago researching Mexican food at Rick Bayless’ Frontera Grill as he and his partners prepare to do a “high-end” Mexican restaurant in Tacoma.

I ran into Bayless at IACP and button-holed him regarding Mexican food and American palates. A gringo, Bayless has a deep appreciation for, and skill with, Mexican cuisine. I told him about my parents’ experience doing upscale Mexican food in their restaurant, which didn’t go over well with 1980s Sacramento diners seeking 2-items-rice-and-beans combos for $4.99 – the typical Mexican fare enjoyed by typical American diners.

Bayless sped into a quick lesson in social-culinary politics:

“It’s a clear way of keeping the immigrants in their place,” he said of diners who take limited views of ethnic cuisines. “Just think about in the 1950s with Italian immigrants. You had pasta plates. You had meatballs. That’s as much as you got from Italian food People said they didn’t want anything else.

“Then Italian immigrants became Italian-Americans and started looking to Italy for all the refined stuff.”

Bayless said he doesn’t see the same trend south of the border.

“Are we looking to Mexico for all the refined stuff that they have to provide? Nobody’s even looking there, but it’s there. It’s just that we don’t look.

“People say that everything I do is not Mexican because it’s not a burrito. We don’t do burritos. We don’t do nachos. We don’t do fajitas. That’s all Mexican-American food. We have people coming in all the time saying this is just kind of a creative southwestern inspired restaurant, even though we’re doing moles from Oaxaca and Puebla.”