Cutting-edge edibles try to take our fancy

NEW YORK - The menu for your party, should you choose to let the tastemakers at the Fancy Food Show have their say, might read something like this: truffled cheese over gluten-free crackers, piquant bruschetta dips with uncured duck hot dogs, salted chocolates and caramels, fair trade Jersey gelato, ginger lemonade on ice and, of course, plenty of flax.

Well, something's got to help digest the whirling stew of indulgence and virtue that marked the 180,000 specialty food products on display this week in the Jacob Javits Convention Center. And flax has the distinction of being the single unsexiest "it" ingredient to hit the show in years, casting its omega-3 spell onto "Flaxmax" cookies, Thai red rice, and even a Flaxy Cat supplement for kitty.

"A lot of people feed their pets as well as, or better than they feed themselves," said Ron Tanner, vice president of the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade, which added a pet-food category this year to its 54th annual trade show.

"Gluten-free" was this year's new darling. Prize-winners like the addictively seedy Mary's Gone Crackers (Best Cracker) helped push the once-niche category, spurred by awareness of celiac disease, into the mainstream, where the distinction marked everything from Sen-Cha's green tea bars to Twin Hens' beef pot pies, and the meringuelike puffs of garbanzo flour, parmesan cheese and pink peppercorns called Cupola Clouds, from Amandari in Wexford, Pa.

"Fair trade" was another increasingly common modifier to plain old "organic," as noted on the prize-winning raspberry sorbetto from Blackwell's Organic in Red Bank, N.J.

Of course, there were plenty of familiar luxuries to reassure old-school fancy foodies that "good for you" still isn't everything. The decadently creamy Port Clyde lobster macaroni and cheese from Maine's Hancock Gourmet Lobster Co. (deemed Outstanding Pasta) is not only the definition of an online food-order splurge, at $48.95 for two frozen 9-ounce casseroles. One dish, in all its mascarpone-and-cheddar-lobster-strewn lavishness, equals one-and-a-half day's worth of your suggested intake for saturated fat.