For those of you who attended high school in Camas circa 1971, you might have known Robert Carmack, grandson of a late-19th-century Camas homesteader and son to a father who was born on a Camas kitchen table.

Despite those formidable Northwest roots, Carmack, 51 and nattily dressed, is having a lot more fun these days than he did in high school. When he's not food-styling for giant companies like Domino's Pizza, Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's anyone who can make those foods look delicious has talent or writing cookbooks, he's leading worldwide food tours.

Living in Sydney, Australia, Carmack's traveling alias is the Globetrotting Gourmet. (Check out his Web site at www.globetrotting gourmet.com.) He and partner in life and in travel, Morrison Polkinghorne, a designer of classic 18th-century tapestry-like trimmings, take groups of curious tourists to such far-flung places as Thailand and Bali, and show them countries through food's wide-angled lens.

They sample home cooking, eat street food and take a cooking class or two, but there's much more to the excursions than eating, insists Carmack. He believes that introducing people to culture through food "the guiding light" is a natural starting-off point to stepping more deeply into other countries' ideas and ways of life. His next tour to Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia is Nov. 5-19, and there's still room.

Carmack has the credentials as well as over-the-top energy to create a business from his lifelong wanderlust. After time at Washington State University in the early '70s and reading an Esquire article that argued he could live in France for a year on $1,000, he picked up and moved to Lyons, France.

Later, he studied cooking at Anne Willan's La Varenne, and worked on the Time-Life "Good Cook" series, as well as briefly for James Beard. He began writing cookbooks 20 years ago and has several to his name.

    His latest, "Vietnamese Home Cooking," which he wrote in conjunction with Didier Corlou and Nguyen Thanh Van (Periplus, $19.95), is packed with fresh, vibrant-tasting recipes most of us can do, as long as we can put our hands on the ingredients, a task proving much easier in Clark County than 10 years ago.

Carmack says he hasn't "done puff pastry for 10 years" since devoting much of his time to Asian cooking as well as to touring, but he is never at a loss for opinions about dining, eating and cooking. His advice for staying healthy is to "eat widely. Eat a varied diet. The more processed food is, the worse it is."He argues that we should eat at least 37 different foods a day, an idea he picked up on his travels.

Count it up. Most of us are lucky to taste 20. "Diets should add to you, not subtract."

One of Carmack's recipes from "Vietnamese Home Cooking" for a green papaya salad with beef (nom bo kho) is in today's Recipe du Jour on Page 6.

Angela Allen writes about food, wine and nutrition. Reach her at 360-759-8005 or by e-mail at angela.allen@ columbian.com