gastropoda

I Tweeted this but will say it again: If the foie gras crazies are so worried about avian welfare, shouldn’t they be picketing BP, not Bouchon and other Keller establishments? I imagine drowning in crude oil would be far more miserable than living like your average fast food junkie. Their spelling may be better, but these misguided zealots are the Teabaggers of food. Whether with food or with faith, those who truly believe generally don’t need to proselytize. Only vegans who are still tempted by a cheeseburger want to keep you from eating one. Maybe someone should invent Taliban-brand seitan.

One of the awful truths of the food world is that honey really is more effective than vinegar. Some serious snakes out there know exactly how to play nice to co-opt if not defang critics. Then they can keep on with their snakiness and be assured no one will call them on it. So I got a pretty good laugh seeing how easily the allegedly riled-up counter-”foodies” were led to the Center for the Removal of Rocky Mountain Oysters. A simple ticket to the prom did the trick, and next thing you know they’re profiling a schtick that would not exist if not for the phenomenon they claim to revile. I mean, I had no idea who he even was. But he said some nice things, so he’s a good guy now. Unfortunately, I can’t be too appalled, because I realize I was hesitant to write about a contest proudly judged by someone I met once and liked. First prize was industrial chicken for a year. Second prize, I assume, was two years’ worth?

Encountered my first chip snob the other night: a friend who refused to go near the Tostitos I had grabbed in my rush to get all guacamole ingredients at one corner store when I was late to the Pinetum party. But she’s right. It’s no coincidence that the bag is increasingly cluttered with “whole grains” boasts to distract us from what we’re really eating, starting with genetically modified corn. When your only consolation on the label is “no preservatives,” you know something might not be fit to eat.

Forget the insanity of a $12 cup of coffee. The way the distributor described the new Double Down was the real mental explosive: “a cacophony of nuances.” As I Tweeted, is that like a dissonance of subtleties? Ask the real Restaurant Girl: Caffeine and thesauri do not mix.

I squander a few minutes every morning railing at my poor consort about the ads on the first few pages of the hometown paper: “Who buys $2,000 shoes/$4,200 bags/$20,000 necklaces? No wonder reporters can’t cover this city. Who are these people?” Well, now I have my answer. Contributors. How else to explain the most tone-deaf thing since Marie Antoinette yammered about brioche? In the same section with a story on homeless guys getting haircuts for free, readers are treated to a straight-faced service piece on where to take a toddler for fine fucking dining. Most people struggle to afford a babysitter. They’re going to drag the Baby Jesus along for $32 spaghetti with butter at Robuchon? At least the offense also addressed the elephant in the dining room: The misery inflicted on people who paid to get the hell away from kids throwing spoons on the floor and demanding special orders from the kitchen. I think I’ve railed before about our all-time worst high-end eating experience, the dinner we suffered through eons ago at Jean-Louis at the Watergate where a couple of universe masters had brought an up-too-late kid and refused to let the shrieking interrupt their evening — screw everyone else. I brought the receipt home and kept it on my bulletin board for years. We could have bought round-trip airfare to Paris for what we wasted on a ruined evening. At least now I know I should have found the accommodating coat check, retrieved a stroller and beaten the narcissism out of the offending breeders with it.

I’m glad to see a chef calling whatever the German is for bullshit on the Lump in the Chimp’s Bed. It would take a killer to know one, but her tale of his food poisoning a whole delegation reeks. If it had been even remotely possible, wouldn’t Go Fuck Yourself have rounded up half of Heiligendamm and tortured everyone into confessing? And how dumb does she think readers are, not to realize it was the Tanqueray talking?

I take a week off and all the fun stuff seems dated, but the idea of bartering chickens for health care still looks beyond satire. Stephen Colbert had the best take, of course (he’s the most underrated food commentator working these days). But there’s just something so bizarre about the same types who don’t know tea doesn’t have to come in a bag presuming everyone would have access to breasts and thighs still in their feathers.

Speaking of “food comes from the supermarket,” one of the most impressive feats in food marketing has been the blithe acceptance of beef hot dogs. Untold hordes have been duped into thinking they’re eating something better than pigs’ ears, snouts, anuses, etc. Cows don’t have those nasty bits, do they? But now I’m seeing big ads for “Angus franks” and really have to laugh. I don’t have to try one to know it will certainly not taste like steak. Parts is parts.

And the best part of the outburst by some local news personality about extracted soy liquid being not milk but jism was how few people knew how to spell it. The bigger surprise is how long it’s taken the dairy industry to step up to defend the white stuff. Maybe we should thank the chef who mistook his wife’s breasts for the barn. Key question, which soybean/almond/etc. fail: Got udders?

One of the most sobering experiences in some time was mentioning a Carolina chef who once brought his young son to my apartment on 72d Street to deliver a recipe when I was just starting as a food writer and then having my e-correspondent note that the “kid” now has his own eating establishment, not to mention two kids of his own. How the hell did that happen when I was not aging at all? The only encouraging news is that so many spawn have been allowed to grow up and choose their own careers without having their every bite/burn documented. Maybe the best advice for life really is: First you dig a pit.

I got myself insulted on Twitter for saying lumpen women make terrible waitrons because they plod (or maybe being called a twit there is considered a compliment). But I don’t care if it makes me weightist. We had to sit through the worst service in a swamped restaurant with two lumbering ones on duty (not helped by a hostess who, when we snared her to say one order of iced tea had not arrived and the other tasted like coffee, just informed us she’d tell our server!) Visual insult to injury, I was seated with the unavoidable view of the pregnant narcissist in the crop top (beer belly or baby bulge: it ain’t attractive). I once had to haul myself around on crutches for months and know too well that bulk slows you down. Some jobs are simply better suited to the fleet. You don’t, after all, see plus-size jockeys at the Derby.

Others were offended when I Tweeted — after having to take a crappy table to avoid having to listen to a perpetrator — that not much looks sadder than a woman eating dinner alone while yapping on her cellphone. It’s not sexist simply because you don’t often see guys trying to prove they have friends in public; they just eat and run. With women, you think: Couldn’t you talk someone into coming out and listening in person? And: Do you have any idea how disgusting it is to listen to someone chewing on the phone? Which brings me back to one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons, of the two angels up in heaven and one saying: “Wish I’d brought a magazine.” Even People solo would be so much less pathetic than the aural charade.

I’m all for new technology, but I’m struggling to see how dispensing with press kits in favor of memory sticks is exactly going to save this beleaguered planet. So you save a few reams of renewable paper. But you send us home with metal and plastic that only make me think of Third World exploitation. (Or is there an Etsy spot that cranks this junk out artisanally?) In reality, all any promoter needs is a link. Or, as I keep ranting, a taste. No press release could ever communicate as well as an airline-size bottle o’ booze.

The latest issue of Time magazine has gone unopened by both my consort and me since we heard the 100 most important people IN THE WORLD include more than a few kkkrazies with nominal followings. That’s like Food & Wine devoting half an issue to vegans breeding with PETA and inciting peanut shock. Which might explain how I got sucked into the online edition of Newsweek and probably one of the most ridiculous stories ever compiled: American cheese, focused on . . . Vermont. I guess it could have been dumber. They could have headed to Wisconsin.