gastropoda

I confess to wandering over to digital monkey cages on occasion just to watch the occupants smear themselves with their own feces — there’s no entertainment like wingnuts posturing, with flagrant disregard for reality. So I’m quite enjoying the arguments that farm subsidies are inalienable rights for the corporations that really control agrarian food. Aesop had a fable or two for this, but I wouldn’t count out the impact of a First Family who walks the walk. You can’t grow high-fructose corn syrup in a backyard garden.

And if any more argument could be needed that the industrial food chain is seriously slimy, now comes Consumer Reports to document the obvious: There’s shit in the masculine (as way too many grocers spell it). The biggest reason to buy pre-washed salad fixings is that they are . . . pre-washed. Don’t tell me to bring them home and suds them all over again. I could do that with a fresh head of lettuce.

I was also pretty amazed at how craven Fresh Direct sounded as soon as the Blizzard of the Millennium was being talked up all along the Eastern Seaboard: Get your orders in NOW or you all die. Come on, we live in a city that can take a licking and keep on eating. Even after 9/11, when credit cards didn’t work anywhere and no semi-food trucks could get onto the island, I don’t recall people starving in the streets. All the delis in my neighborhood were open during the last blackout, for cripe’s sake. The worst snowstorm is never going to keep exploited immigrants from bicycling to your building with steaming Vietnamese or sodden pizza. But it would keep trucks bearing way too many underpacked boxes off the streets. Plus, everyone hyperventilating about salt should look at what this same hysteria did to the streets and sidewalks: They’re inches deep in white stuff, but it doesn’t melt. How dangerous is inhaled sodium?

I know nothing about frying pigskins, but I do know a story on the whole trend might want to at least mention why you should start from scratch: The crap in stores is pretty fucking scary. Of course that exposé ran in the paper that also reported on the horrible downside to better food in more casual settings at a lower price point: Bedlam R Us. And also ran photographic evidence of what a French friend who doesn’t get fat noted: Houston is home to America’s fattest Americans. It was all almost enough to give the paper a pass on sliding closer and closer to Faux News in print. No wonder its MoDo is guzzling all the gin she can ingest.

The talk of the series of culi-tubes is all about Robert Sietsema’s take on old-versus-new restaurant “reviewing.” I’m kinda weary of the whole debate (although I can still be challenged to rouse myself to start frothing, and I do wonder how much a legit franchise undermines itself in assigning hits to hired guns). I mostly was mystified by the omission of the one guy who always made NYmag worth reading, the inimitable Seymour Britchky, who was, even as RS arrived in town all those eons ago, brilliantly evaluating restaurants serving 23 cuisines, from American to Thai, with some barely seen these days. (Can you say German? And is there a Swiss or Hungarian kitchen left?) Plus I had other issues that just wear me out to contemplate. So I’m happy to report that the outlier actually did the world a much huger service by stunting something I would never even contemplate: Pop the top on one of the Onion-worthy new flavors of cat food and sticking a forchetta in it. No wonder The Cat WCTLWAFW hoovers nearly everything I cook. The alternative is tasteless. And almost more expensive.

One of the most depressing things I’ve read lately is that pineapple upside-down cake was the Chimp’s dessert of choice as he ended the first disastrous year in his reign of error. Once again, it brought home how we were “led” by a rich guy whose palate was as evolved as a death row killer’s. I guess I’m only amazed he didn’t want to save his slice for later. . .

Another sign that we’ll be digging out of that useful idiot’s mess for a good long time is a huge and underreported recall of salami that has people puking and squittering across 80 percent of the country. Amazing how much energy/$$ was wasted scaring everyone about furriners all these years rather than putting cops on the food beat. What’s also weird is that the salmonella may be coming from peppercorns, which once were considered preservatives, not poison. Funny to think that if the spice was imported from China, they’d be on that case like stink on shit. As it is, good luck even knowing more than a million pounds of risky meat-like substance may be contaminated. The media would prefer to keep you more focused on Edwards’ porking than on cured danger in the deli case.

Time Out deserves a fist bump for printing the most self-indicting letter ever, from some bleeding idiot outraged over a photo of a whole pig roasting on a spit: “I don’t want to see visual reminders that my lunch was once a living and breathing animal.” As they say on the political blogs: Teh stupid — it burns. Hot dogs good; porchetta scary. Please. Food does not come from the supermarket. And if you can’t face the artisanal link, you certainly don’t want to contemplate the industrial chain. “Our Daily Bread” should be required viewing for anyone who reacts to a picture of a whole hog by throwing her turkey sandwich in the trash. Tom died in vain.

That kind of denial is exactly what’s involved in one of the most unsettling processes I’ve read about in some time, how processors turn pigskins into chicharrones, aka pork rinds. The story was in the WSJournal, on a dispute over imports of skins from countries with foot-and-mouth, the disease that devastated British farms less than 10 years ago. Pigs there, of course, contracted it by eating imported meat (you don’t even want to dwell). Thank allah for the photos and relatively long text to make it clear just how  processed this stuff is: In one factory, frozen skins are mechanically minced and cooked into pellets, which are then boxed up and shipped off to other factories to be fried. Forget the issue of whether the meat is contaminated to begin with. How many un-health-cared hands touch it before it lands in someone’s mouth; how many chances are there for something to go horribly wrong? And people freak out about lard?

And maybe I’m just cynical, but I thought it was rather amusing to see everyone dumping on the new McItaly while accrediting the Fast Food Diet. Domestic beef topped with asiago cheese and artichoke spread in Italy? Bad. Tacos and Subway processed crap here? Worth consulting nutritionists and other experts on whether you will lose weight. (Few of them, I noticed, brought up what that junk does for your body besides fatten it right up.) Who needs Berlusconi when we have such a free press?

One of the many great things about living in the co-op we took two years to choose is that we get mail delivered to our doorstep, by the staff. Every so often the bean-counting philistines among us propose doing away with that system to save time and labor and instead ramming mailboxes into our gorgeous 1929 lobby. Thanks to Fresh Direct, the argument may finally be over. Apparently it’s going to start installing vending machines for frozen dinners alongside mailboxes. Amazon should be setting up kiosks to deliver Michael Pollan’s “Food Rules” on demand right next to them. Who would care if home looked like a truck stop?

I see people eating on the crud-encrusted subways all the time. Why not “dine” on filthy yoga mats with liquid cumin in the air? A really good trend story would be on all those women who take their Starbucks Big Gulps into the toilet stalls. Then again, I don’t even want to know what they do in there.

And while I’m trying to break myself of “gobbling digital doughnuts” over on Twitter, I do enjoy getting perspective from disgusted readers far from the hometown paper’s shrine to hubris. Brussels reaction to Paris old-timers? Same as ours, all-cap boring. Buenos Aires reaction to yet another ode to Buenos Aires? Who’s in the tank? Unfortunately, one thing leads to another and soon I’m reading a complaint that anyone trashing Ducasse for saying London’s the best food city probably should be eating in London more often; otherwise he/she looks like the left-behind. Which of course made me wonder just why or how well the JGW knows a snooty club there so well, whether from half of Jay McInerney’s travel rule (speculation) or by hanging out there personally. Which would be less surprising given the lede that ran on another guy’s piece on how “everyone” has childhood memories of suffering through cafeteria meals on field trips to museums. Earth to Señor Slim Tower: Not all Americans grow up with either food-equipped museums to visit or money to eat in them. Among the many things destroying old-style journalism, that blatant disconnect between the comfortable and the afflicted is the most corrosive. Lie down with only Ivy League graduates and you wake up believing it’s always morning with steak and eggs in America.

Sometimes people read what I typed and not what I wrote, so I should clear up one thing before proceeding here: Saint Danny got his moniker not because he pretends to be the East Coast Alice but because the press here kisses his hem so slobberingly. He is a nice guy. His restaurants would be the nicest in St. Louis. He’s done both well and good in this town. But he’s no Jesus H. So why in the name of the Maroons does he get so much constant coverage in one particular paper? That museum-trough story actually had a billboard directing leaders to “past coverage” of him, and I didn’t dare click for fear I would not get out before 5,000 stories in the last year alone. Even working there I never quite understood the way he was treated, how one negative review in particular caused ripples of weirdness toward the top. I’d wonder if he’s the McD’s of high-end restaurants, but he doesn’t advertise (unlike the place across from KK’s that gets a review for every chef). So I’ll just move on to a peripheral point: My consort and I were eating chorizo-chickpea soup at one new venue and a friend and I were splitting a broccoli-sausage flatbread at another and we all talked about how Great Performances was upgrading culture fodder all over town. So what company got touted in the Ode to Meyer? Can you say the one catering to the cult?

Thank allah Mrs. O stays on food message, because the whole country seems to be becoming a Failblog on her husband, who has had exactly a year to clean up nearly a decade of tax-cutting, warmongering carnage by that dry drunk and his smokin’-and-readin’ lump in the bed. But partly because one party believes nope is a plan, crucial jobs are going unfilled, and every week brings another recall of meat, and “meat-like substances.” No one seems to understand why health insurance reform was a priority. But right now people are sick from salmonella in at least 38 states. Who needs terrorists when shit is what’s for dinner?

We also forget most of us were in bunkers a year ago, counting the canned food and wondering how to set up apple carts. The economy is still a disaster, but after reading about food banks running on empty and firehouses collecting food I gathered all the crap I’d been hoarding in case “The Road” really did run through our front door. Chief among that was a bunch of rice mixes and seasonings from a press event thrown by a little New Orleans company bought by Big Food. I only ever tried one, and we were first stunned by how salty/fake it tasted and then, over the next few days, by how it had stunk up the joint. Seriously. As much as I mock the Forelock, he did have the comment of the week on all this salt insanity going around: “If you eat natural foods, you don’t have to worry.” I would feel a little guilty about handing off all that sodium and MSG to the poor, but after we left the firehouse where they were not collecting food (thanks, Daily News), we passed a family unloading even worse stuff from a car, with not a fresh vegetable to be seen. People in the Depression probably ate better. At least they had apple carts.