Greece, they say, has the best of everything.
The seas are the bluest you’ll ever see. The walls are the most blazingly white, as if just specially painted for a detergent commercial. The priests have the bristliest beards of any priests anywhere (even Russia). The women are the most beautiful. The philosophers are the most philosophical. And so on.
Now, these are all stereotypes – which isn’t saying they’re not true. (Personally, I agree with all of them). But generally, they’re seen as arguable.
However, there is one ‘Best Of’ that is surely uncontestable, and it’s this: Greece has the best snack bars.
Now, take the “breakfast bar”.
Excuse me while I flinch.
I blame flapjacks. Which means I blame oats, and ultimately blame the whole agrarian revolution in the Levant around 10 millenia ago. As long as I have someone to blame for the glut of sticky, claggy, overpriced rectangles of unfulfillment that litter our supermarket shelves these days, I’m a happy man.
At some point a few decades back, some entrepreneurial wretch realised that money was to be made if you mass-produced flapjacks dotted with the occasional raisin and labelled them “breakfast bars”, with the promise of a healthy replacement to your breakfast meusli with none of that tedious ‘interacting with your family’ or ‘enjoying your food’ nonsense that wastes all that precious early morning time that could be better spent secretly surfing the Internet at work.
Then the raisins became bits of apple core, and then flecks of coconut husk. Snack food had never been so good for you! It was like a 6-week health farm, taken orally! Making your breakfast from ingredients? That’s like so prehistoric.
Now they’re all doing it: McVities, Kellogs, you name it, they’re machine-gunning the world with little bars of sugary gunk at remarkably ambitious prices. In some cases, “sugary” doesn’t even get close: take Kellogs’s Coco-Pops Bar, which was found to contain proportionally more calories from its sugar than milk chocolate. For breakfast. And all those fats. And all that corn syrup, all that wheat. But the worst, the very worst thing about these bars is that they’re junk food almost always claiming undeservedly to be examples of healthy eating. Junky snacks: fine. We all like. But let’s not pretend about it all.
So, Greece: the best breakfast in the world? Well, no. In fact they have the most non-existant breakfast in the world. This is a minor Greek tragedy in itself, because the best breakfast in the world is fresh fruit slathered with yoghurt – and Greece makes the best yoghurt in the world. Missed opportunity, guys.
Instead, Greeks wake their innards up with a mid-morning snack, often a sticky pastry or some kind of sweet pie. This can be forgiven by considering that most Greeks seem to go to bed at the time when the rest of us are irritably batting a hand at our alarm clocks, hoping we’ll hit the Snooze button. There is no “breakfast” because in Greece, there is no “getting up in the morning”.
Ruling the pantheon of mid-morning snacks is the Jannis bar. In 2007, these fuelled my jaunts round Athens, the Cyclades and the Peloponnese. Without a stick of Jannis in my back pocket at all times, I’d have run out of energy and tumbled under the wheels of an Athenian Blue Bus or over the side of a Blue Star ferry, never to be seen again. Jannis kept me upright. And now, these bookmark-sized slabs of pure joy are keeping me sane during my dayjob, ever since I discovered the Costcutter supermarket next door sells four varieties of them.
(Peanut, Almond, Hazelnut and Mixed Nuts. That’s one for every day of the week, plus Fridays for “what kind of nut sums this week up for me?”).
I’m so set in my Jannis-buying ways that today, a Costcutter staff member greeted me with “Do you have specific dietary requirements, or are you just incredibly boring?”
Why are they so good? A host of winning features, including mouth-feel, taste, obvious quality of ingredients and so on. But mainly, they’re just simple. You’ve got nuts, you’ve got some kind of peanut-brittle-like matrix holding them in place, and…that’s it. No hydrogenated mechanically rendered corn-fed pig’s bladder whey mixed with semi-skimmed cow buttock petroleum and vulcanised beta-carotene larding enrichment. No added gunk to keep it fresh until the sun burns out. Fat? Tons of it, but that’s nuts for you.
The main thing is, you eat one of these, and you’re genuinely full. That should be their slogan: “One is enough! No, really! Full!”.
Best snack bars in the world, I reckon. (Allegies aside).
Or do you have a better suggestion?
Images: Jannis, TheKarenD and EuroMagic.
wha they have better bar snacks over Spain??
I reckon so, yes.
Although I’m happy to be proved wrong.
As long as the argument forwarded is detailed and preferably involves a large amount of hands-on product testing.
The clerk’s query made me laugh!
Good post, Mike! I’m especially fond of your run-down of what’s *not* to be found in a Jannis bar.
Ta, Beth.
Good food nowadays seems to be all about what’s not in it.
Which is a bit terrifying, really.
They sell something that looks like that here, but overall we sort of think you should lay off the snack bars. But since I know both cuisines, I gotta tell you we have much better food in Italy. As a matter of fact, we have better food than GB too.
*snicker* Doesn’t the whole world have better food than GB?
My current staple snack bar (no stapler jokes necessary, thank you Mike) is Cliff Builder’s, chocolate — or cookies & cream when I’m feeling fancy — which I discovered late one night in the lab… and by that I don’t mean I actually discovered the formula; I was starving from running uninterrupted experiments for hours well into the wee ones, and that’s all that looked potentially vaguely filling in the vending machine in the basement corridor. It’s got a fair bit of gunk in it but the taste is surprisingly acceptable, the texture is actually quite nice, and its composition is low-fat, medium-sugar, high-protein. Combined with Cliff Shot rehydration drink , it’s carried me through more all-nighters than I care to admit.
Doesn’t the whole world have better food than….
Oh, wait, the Belgian just said that.
You know, from that country that’s really famous for its food, Belgium.
…..
*significant pause while everyone explores that concept*
Italian snacky junk food is superb, I have to say. Half of it is made by Kinder, from what I saw at Bologna and Bari train stations. Being naturally adventurous, I sampled them all, and they were all superb. Also, not the least bit filling. Which means Kinder are geniuses.
Ummm… I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic… Because you know, we are very well known for our good food and drink. If you accept waffles, fries, chocolate and beer as food of course, but who in their right mind wouldn’t?
Well, there’s no arguing that they’re superb foodstuffs (if not exactly propping up the Good Nutrition Pyramid – but they help scale it. Scaffolding, if you like).
Yet I must quote Wikipedia, which it seems is not immune to a little Belgium-bashing itself:
>>”Belgium has been called a nation of gourmands rather than gourmets: a country, in other words, where “big cuisine” comes before “fine cuisine”.”
But you make your point well. I take it all back.
Not that I was being sarcastic in any way whatsoever.
*maintains carefully controlled expression*
Nah, they’re right, to some extent. We’re hobbits. We value food quality but ultimately we want a rather large amount of it, and we’re not snobbish about it.
You know what we like to say? Belgian food is like the perfect offspring of French and German food. It’s got the taste of French food, but in German quantities.
Hey! I loved waterzooie and shtomp both of which may be spelled wrong.
Yes! Waterzooi is lovely (especially the seafood version) and so is stoemp — such a heartening winter dish.
I take it this is what you mean, GG?
http://www.clifbar.com/food/products_builders/
The American equivalent of the Yorkie bar, looks like. Lumberjacking food. But with actual added Good Things in it. Which makes me slightly uneasy. When I’m turning the temple of my body into a fly-tip, I don’t want anything to get in the way.
What kind of gunk is the gunk? (Nutty gunk? Creamy gunk? Lardy gunk?)
Yep, them’s the ones. No lardy, creamy or otherwise nutty gunk. What I call the gunk is the layer of concentrated protein stuff, which I expect is mostly soy. It’s fairly dense and slightly chewy, brown in the chocolate ones and light biscuit-colored in the cookies & cream ones. The other main layer is made of a sort of lightly crunchy beads of biscuity stuff, and the whole thing is encased in chocolate. They’re very filling in a good way, and like I said, the taste is nice enough; at least those two flavors. There are other flavors, and I have tried the lemon ones, but that felt too gunky because instead of chocolate (which is hard to mess up) the encasing layer was the consistency of white chocolate, and the lemony taste was too strong. Felt a lot more greasy as well.
Hmmmm. All the way through I was thinking, “Makes me glad I’m allergic to peanuts.” But then you added the allergies aside, so I feel totally invalidated.
My apologies, Barbara. I didn’t mean to single peanut-allergics out there.
My aim is, of course, to insult everyone equally.
I’ll make sure it never happens again – editorial promise.
A bit off subject here, but the “there’s no “getting up in the morning”-part is tragically funny. It seems part of the Greek “financial feast” has included civil servants receiving bonuses for showing up at work on time!
(PS Just sent you an e-mail)
(Thanks for the mail. Alas that I’m not really qualified to apply – being the Lonely Planet Cyprus guide would be a dream come true….ie. I’d be living there and have an income that fully supports me, which right now certainly falls under the “dream” category. But you never know – one day, one day).
They get *extra* for showing up on time? Not their wages docked for being tardy? Wow.
Back in the mid-90s, Frusli bars were fantastic. Much the same as Jannis bars did for you in Greece, they did for me while trekking in Nepal. Kept in a backpack, they went all lovely and gooey and moist in the Nepalese sun, and kept me going when I felt I couldn’t possibly go any bloody further up any more bloody mountain. (I don’t care that the sherpas called them foothills – they were most *definitely* mountains …)
Nowadays, however, Frusli bars have been stuffed with puffed rice, rather than oats, and therefore have the mouth feel of rice krispie cakes, with none of the joy of oodles of chocolate and caramel. Rubbish.
I agree with Judith that the Italians have great snack food. It’s not really designed for eating on the go, though. Every meal is a feast here, which I think may be why it’s so delicious. I’ve become somewhat addicted to aperitivi, and will judge a place on how well they do them. So far I have winners in Otranto and Gallipoli – the Gallipoli one gaining extra points for being situated right next to the sea and also giving out free glasses of wine. ‘Ma – devo girare doppo … oh, never mind.’
This explains my modern dissatisfaction with Frusli, when I remember loving them when I were knee-high. Puffed rice, eh? Heathens.
There’s also something, I’m not sure what, that has happened to Lion bars. I’d love to know what, but the fact is, they don’t roar like they used to. I’m sure they used to be a bit chewier while being crunchier. Hmm. They also seem smaller, but since all chocolate bars seem smaller these days (including the ones I have personally verified haven’t actually shrunk at all since I was a kid), that’s saying nowt.
At least Boosts still have that wonderful stodge in the middle of them. If Boosts lost their stodge, the very light of Life would be snuffed out. I speak from the heart on this.
“Every meal is a feast….”
Yes, those damn Italians. They seem to think that food is about having fun or some damn-fool notion. As opposed to the British use of it as a form of punishment or penance. “You can watch TV if you eat your greens”. The Italian version being “You can have your greens when you’ve pressed a litre of olive oil and mended my Vespa.”
*mountains
*dopo
See what you’ve done with your talk of delicious food, Mike? Only got me so overexcited that I can’t spell. Tsk.
You’re forvigen.
You went next door to the Costcutter? What will your parole officer say?
I was only there because I was buying him some fags.
Anyway, he’s not worried, I’m fitted with a Total Recall style proximity-armed explosive collar. I’ve got half a mile’s leeway.
Sometimes he leaps on a passing bus, just to see what I’ll do.
Those aren’t good days.
Well, this just makes me fall in love with the Greeks even more.
Can’t say I blame ya.
Even the semi-chaotic reality of modern Athens is utterly charming.
Ever been?
GG –
“Belgian food is like the perfect offspring of French and German food. It’s got the taste of French food, but in German quantities.”
As someone who ate the biggest and best Croque Monsieur of his life at the Louvain-la-Neuve train station, I must concur.
Although I like fruit with my yogurt, I do really like it with honey (which is apparently a Greek thing). I’m starting to notice the theme in your posts, Mike. Like food much? Or rather sugary dessert-y things?