gastropoda

I’ve been wanting to write about this for $$$ but will go ahead and spill the legumes here: My consort and I are now eating more meat than we have at any time in three decades together. Neither of us was ever big on the four-letter food, particularly beef, but the mad cow outbreak, which broke out while we were in Hong Kong on one of his shoots, pushed us both over toward ABC — no cows for us. Then a funny thing happened on the way to near-vegetarianism: Better, cleaner, safer, better meat kept  turning up wherever we shopped/stopped. Heritage Foods started marketing great pork, Fairway started carrying organic, Niman Ranch and Chipotle built businesses on non-mystery meat and, especially, the farmers at all the Greenmarkets started offering meat with both taste and integrity. Others may be eating less meat. But I seriously doubt that it’s because the Egopedist is now arguing against the industrial protein he hawked like a Crisco Deen for 13 long years.

Also, too, there could have been no more insidious a juxtaposition than the jump of the hometown paper’s piece on organic milk up against a takeout on the millions spent promoting one small segment of the processed-crap market. All the hand-wringing over whether farmers can be paid more to produce more seemed even more insane as you considered: People will always pay whatever chip makers ask for a bag of genetically modified corn fried in genetically modified oil but balk at a tiny increase for a half-gallon of responsibly produced milk. What was sickest was reading in one story that farmers are cutting back on feed for their animals as a result of rising prices and then seeing with the other a photo from a commercial of a guy with manboobs big enough to milk. If there’s ever a bacon shortage, I know exactly which consumers can solve it.

Naturally it’s behind the paywall, but the New Yorker has a great feature this week on the richest woman in India, who made all those rupees developing drugs. One graf near the end is worth the price of the issue: Her company has been working on the “holy grail” for Big Pharma, which would be oral insulin in a processed-crap world where everyone is developing diabetes (50 million in India alone). And Biocon came close until the patients who were given placebos in trials improved because they wanted to impress their doctors. “Suddenly, their control group of diabetics had started exercising and eating better.” Message? Diabetes is both preventable and curable senza drugs. Maybe it’s time for Occupy the Pharmacies. Walk away from the Lipitor. And eat beans.

I pay way too much attention to the clown car these days, because it really is heading nowhere. So I have to say I was pleased to see the Herb Pizza going down, so to speak. At least once he exits the wingnuts’ three rings, potential voters will stop hearing him referred to as a food bizguy. He was a restaurant lobbyist. Which is a nicer way of saying pimp. Or is it whore?

And I’m happy to see everyone freaking the crust out over pizza being declared a vegetable, but if food had been treated more seriously by the media all these years maybe Americans would have understood how it happened. I’ve written before how the  backwater on the Potomac suddenly became Restaurant Central under the Chimp’s reign of error (thank you, Panchito), but no one ever connected the dots — a consequence of segregating food coverage in the getting-and-spending sections. Stuffy old French places from the Reagan era were still good enough during the Clinton boom, but somehow money started flowing in the streets in the 21st century, especially around Penn Quarter. If you want to keep frozen Freedom Fries on school lunch menus, you have to buy yourself a few congressmen. Over drinks and dinner.

I know the wingnuts are desperate to bring Zombie Reagan back to addled life, so I’m assuming the latest decision on school lunches is bait. Ketchup may have failed as a vegetable. But tomato paste on pizza will now do. Although I almost agree with Big Food: More than a quarter-cup of “paste” would make a slice inedible. Do the bureaucrats mean sauce?

I’m gainfully unemployed, so I’m sharing this tip for free: Jeebus — if you want to know what’s really going down in the food world, do not waste your time retyping off the Twitter or trawling through Facebook, as the pros do. Just pick up a trade rag. I came home from the “Brazil”esque produce show this week with a clutch of magazines and today caught up to the one with the cover story on “food bloggers and their influence on food consumers.” This went on for pages and did advise produce peoples who are interested in hooking up with any blog to “make sure it’s not controversial.” But I’m not sure I’ve ever read a feature that danced so artfully around the burning issue: We know what you are. Now we’re just haggling about the price.

The things you learn when you get sucked into reading protracted attempts to make press releases look like more than press releases puffed out to fill 20 inches: Mayonnaise is a billion-dollar-a-year market. Mayonnaise, I said. I know Hellmann’s is now priced like beluga, but that’s still an awful lot of the white stuff. The mystery is why such marketing is necessary when any sentient being knows a life without mayonnaise is not worth avocados. So I can’t really blame a “celebrity chef” who failed in NYC for signing on to whip up barbecue chicken nuggets while “bantering.” If promoters of an essential nutrient think it needs to spend $30 million a year on promotion, why not take the money and shill?

I’m of course not the suspicious sort, but doesn’t it seem odd that two of the three hometown newspapers we get delivered on the weekend had the same commodity crime story, featuring the same victim? So I’m not surprised that neither delved into the uglier part of the tale: If you lose 150 hogs and don’t notice right away, you’re raising them wrong. The WSJournal had the numbers (and the proper terminology): “The hogs are sequestered in four rooms, about 1,000 in a group.” I could joke that that sounds like the GOP dream for class size, but it’s actually sickening, almost literally. And if the burglarized farmer feels “a little bit violated,” imagine how those animals suffered their whole lives, probably dreaming of the lush lives of ducks destined for foie gras. At least I got out of Iowa in time, before it became a stinking waste pond, from the sound of the coverage. The only hogs I saw there in the Seventies ran free in the mud. And no one was thieving. One little suggestion for the elusive pork burglar: Next time sneak in a camera. Show the true price of cheap bacon.

Finally, where do I even begin with the Egopedist’s latest half-him/half-think-tank tirade? Are we talking junk food? Or fast food? Do we really need to trash organics and farmers’ markets and farmers who care enough to grass-feed cattle the way nature intended? Do we, with our uncredited help, really need to shame the couple in “Food, Inc.” even more for working two jobs and doing the drive-through to feed themselves and their kids? Do we — really? — ever fucking eat bland beans with plain rice with a glass of milk that, at that price, has to be produced with hormones and antibiotics?

No link because I hate to encourage. But mostly what I took away is that readers of a newspaper advertising $900 shoes and touting $245 prix fixes are supposed to reform their slovenly ways and suffer cheap, dirty birds after an hour in the kitchen. I don’t even eat chicken, but there’s no way in hell I would let my consort ingest one that can only be sold for that little because of all the corners cut in its rush to the supermarket. I haven’t fully worked my mind around this, but it just seems like one more disconnect between “journalists” and “real America.”  Do they not know from Taco Bell?

Left out of this whole debate is the minefield the supermarket has become. You go in to buy that cheap dirty bird and you’re going to pass the most amazing cornucopia in the history of mankind in the freezer aisle. Are you really going to bring home poulet perdu rather than nuke a few Hungry Mans? J’doubt it. So, yes, please, keep working the talking points and making it a choice between fatty/sugary/filling McMeals and dreary, bland, time-consuming fodder. That will get the asses onto the kitchen stools for sure.

Oh, and did anyone think to price out the kohrabi slaw? Or the Brussels sprouts slaw with all the exotica? I wonder what the poor folks are making of saffron aioli. . .

After 20 years, I’m about ready to give up on talking seasonal/local with food safety. But this latest outbreak in cantaloupes is rather depressing. Two decades ago the scourge of the day was salmonella, and that was what was turning up in both chickens and melons. Today it’s listeria. If I were the easily duped sort, I would almost think Big Food is just trying to steer everyone toward pasteurized fruit packaged in little boxes that look all the same. Trust in processed food.

Speaking of processed crap, I get most of my serious food information from the coupons in the slingers in the weekend papers (and I’ll add that I will never get used to having them spill out of the Wall Street Journal — how bad is the economy if its readers need to save 30 cents on three cans of Goya?) So now I know that Minute Rice is just too fucking slow for fat Americans with teevee they need to be watching. The new and improved stuff comes “ready to serve.” Which is advertised, oddly enough, as helping to make “nutritious and delicious meals in minutes.” Do low-information consumers understand  that quantity of time is plural?

Which leads me to the most ridiculous brouhaha since, well, the last time food idjits got taken. What fascinated me less than the fact that a bunch of dolts were duped with processed lasagne was how the story progressed, from blogs to the hometown paper and back to blogs again. You’d think no one knew how to get out and report these days. And everyone who jumped up to attack the flacks who did the duping seems to forget that old story, possibly apocryphal, about Winston Churchill asking a woman if she would sleep with him for a million dollars. When she said yes, he asked about doing so for five. She indignantly responded: “What do you think I am?” And he said: “Ma’am, we’ve already established what you are. Now we’re just negotiating the price.” Cynic that I am, I did a little noodling on the Google and turned up no end of bloghos who happily touted that garbage for nothing more than a free sample. The outraged should be glad they got a couple of drinks and a reason to put on their “rig” and get out and mingle. Besides, didn’t Panchito just say this kind of chemicals-and-additive carping is all about class? I’m sure ConAgra just wants to make sure the poors have fud.

The only surprise of the un-Rapture was that the Pom people were not behind the big con. Then again, they spent a mere $10 million to get an obscure juice certified as a miracle elixir. The cult of the gullible dropped $100 million and still couldn’t get naked Christians into heaven.

Speaking of pomegranates, though, I’d been wondering why they’re turning up everywhere on menus and online when this is the season to be eating strawberries (almost) and rhubarb. Turns out they’re coming from Chile, maybe by air. Apparently everyone has forgotten the cautionary myth of Prosperpina/Persephone. And just as we’re losing winter altogether in a tornadic tsunami of melting polar ice caps.