Hello, first post here, please be gentle

My document:

I have a Word 2003 document with multiple columns. It is a cookbook.
Each recipe lists the ingredients with some information about the
ingredients. Each ingredient is on its own line(s).

What I am trying to do:

Most of the ingredients in the cookbook show up in many recipes.
Occasionally the text needs to change of many ingredients (for example,
prices). Right now I have to go through and update every instance of
each ingredient with the new text.

What I'd like to do is maintain the data for each ingredient in one
place, then "import" it into all relevant recipes. I've found two ways
to do this, but both have limitations that have left me stuck.

Approach #1: Use subdocuments. Each ingredient has its own
subdocument, and the cookbook is the master. Edit the subdocument with
updated text, save, and all is good. Problem: inserting a subdocument
automatically creates a section break. The cookbook has multiple
columns, and the continuous section break truncates across all columns.
If there were such a thing as an "intracolumn" or "continuous column"
section break, I'd be golden. No luck though.

So next I tried doing a mail merge. Keep each ingredient in a
datasource of your choice. Mail merged data does not force section
breaks, and column flow is preserved. Problem: I have multiple
fonts/formats in each ingredient's text (a wingding or two, some
bolding of the name, etc). When doing a mail merge, it seems I can set
a single formatting, but not preserve the formatting in the data
source.

Which leaves me stuck. Have I missed/misunderstood something, or does
anyone know a way to import multi-fonted/formatted data into a
multi-columned master document?

Any help will be greatly appreciated, as current updating is a killer.
(Oh and yeah it's really a database I'm going for but I need this to
be printed.)

Thanks very much,
Jeff