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.
Partly because we took the manager’s advice at the Drake Hotel in Toronto and trekked to the Bata Shoe Museum (do not miss the fish-shaped toe ring), news that two tribes in South Dakota are getting federal aid for nutrition education struck me as both good and sad. Of all people who should understand how to eat well, the stewards of the land for tens of thousands (thousands of thousands?) of years should be at the top of the list. Once upon a time they knew how to extract both flavor and color from plants, the latter to dye leathers for amazingly artistic footwear. Now Big Food has done a number on them, too. As I keep thinking, the Mayans must not have taken Daylight Saving Time into account. We could be at 2012 already. . . .
Kinda funny to watch people who were so complacent about the Chertoff-enriching cancer boxes at the airports now freaking out about radiation in food thanks to the Japan meltdown. Hope no one tells them most spices are already irradiated, and a whole a lot o’ ground beef is, too. Even so, it’s kinda sad to see Popeye’s magic green bullet reduced to a wimp in the aftermath of Japan’s megadisasters. What is it about spinach that leaves it so vulnerable first to E. coli and then salmonella and now radiation? You’d almost think it was chicken.
I’m assuming the discovery of E. coli in hazelnuts in the shell is meant as a distraction from the fact that we really don’t know what’s in food these days. Better to fear the filberts than wonder what one company controlling all seeds portends. A Twitter pal had a similar reaction after I mentioned the law Florida is considering that would ban “croparazzi” by forbidding photography of any farm. You know it’s not because of any worries that the cows and the corn will be exploited for stock photo fame, given that we live in an age of royalty-free images. But as my Twitter pal Jen in Oz noted, there is a silver lining — this unconstitutional ban “could prohibit Monsanto goons who trespass/photograph looking for farmers who ‘steal’ proprietary seeds.” Or at least protect the sheep from the randy.
I killed the lunchtime mood on Saturday by mentioning the death of the 575-pound spokesmodel for the Heart Attack Grill just after a heap of French toast, barbecued short ribs, bacon, poached egg, Cheddar and onion rings arrived on one plate, with a huge side of fries. Which was dumb, because the friend who ordered that irresistibly bizarre combination is such a careful eater he can indulge in overkill on any occasion. But you do have to wonder about a country so confused that a restaurant could make international news by proudly promoting killer food while Mrs. O continues to be attacked for suggesting maybe we could all eat better and move around more. As I noted over on the Epi Log, though, lard is the last four-letter villain in the piece. The offending restaurant may have boasted that its fries were cooked in the white stuff, but that’s the least of the problems. Consumption has dropped as asses have ballooned over the decades. Which is just one more reason I wish the Egopedist had been required to do a little more reading before being allowed to step onto the soapbox. A lot happened between the Depression and the Great Backside Inflation. Just Wiki Earl Butz, and not for loose shoes and warm places.
I spend more time on pol porn than following the vacuity in the food world these days, obviously, so I shouldn’t be surprised there’s smarter commentary on the McD oatmeal outrage over there than you’ll get from the Egopedist. It’s as if he never read all those Wells we slaved to make publishable. And as much as I enjoy the old “always exaggerate — it makes life more interesting” cartoon caption, a sausage biscuit is just hyperbole when it contains nearly as many calories from fat alone as the oatmeal does altogether. Still, I’m assuming the designated thinker is paying for all the Twitthelp and research. Unlike a nobler character who’s compiling his next best-seller Arianna-style. (I’m all in favor of crowd-sourcing, but at some point there’s gotta be profit-sharing. Or look out, Egypt, here we come. . . )
In another example of this country’s exceptionalism, the inimitable Charlie Pierce notes that the Mubarak family has big holdings in those sportswriter favorites, Chili’s restaurants. Wingnuts’ heads will explode when they see that chain is not just moving into Moscow but is the opposite of Chick-fil-A. . .
Over at the Twitter, I got some “ra-mens” for expressing my wish for a Super Bowl shelter where I could hide from any mention of that idiotic spectacle. But if I had one, I would have missed the most astonishing concoction for an idiotic spectacle known for astonishing concoctions: “Oreo truffle footballs.” And even the Semi-Ho could not have dreamed this one up — smashed Oreos mixed with cream cheese, covered in chocolate melted with Crisco(!) and decorated with Betty Crocker icing. Forget the fact that even Deen’s gorge would seize up at that mess. USA Weekend was so skinny from so few ads that the actual food story and other recipes only appeared online. Why should Big Food spend when it gets all that brand recognition for free?
And now back to the cynicism: Did processed crap set a world record for exploitation in having a commercial out less than a week after the golden-throated street guy was “discovered”? If he wasn’t on the sauce before, having to intone golden-throated BS about “cheesy noodles” for boxed macaroni might send him straight to the Mad Dog.
Thanks to Obamafoodorama, I see Mrs. O has decked the White House with boughs of cranberries and pomegranates and other edibles. I hope she’s ready for the shitstorm from the kkkrazies who’ll be upset she isn’t using Double Downs and Happy Meals and other real American food. Only traitors don’t need insulin.
I jokingly Tweeted that no one in the food world appears among Time’s candidates for “person of the year,” but when followers started asking who I thought should be I realized it wasn’t funny. I’d been obtusely mocking the silliness that has broken out over the holiday windows at Barneys, with some in the food coven upset that other old legends are not honored with a severed head on display. But why shouldn’t Michael Pollan be considered for the cover? (Aside, of course, from the fact that his last book came out early in the year and fame now lasts 15 seconds on the teevee.) Or why not Mrs. O, who really has stirred up the organic hornets’ nest by going all Jamie Oliver on America’s ass rather than sitting in the White House and smoking and reading as her predecessor did? But maybe the best choice, given Time’s contrarian bent and its inclusion of the Wasilla Snowbilly on the ballot now, would be the greedy fuck responsible for the recall of more than 380 million filthy eggs. Did anyone else in 2010 do as much to raise consciousness of a broken food chain?
And speaking of Pollan, I was underwhelmed by Newsweek’s clumsy take on food as a class issue. But I have been paraphrasing him nonstop since reading it: In this country, wealthy farmers grow cheap food for the poor, while poor farmers grow pricey food for the rich. Of course the story is more complicated than that, so I was glad to see dueling pieces in two newspapers on one Sunday on food as the new culture war. The first, in the hometown daily, took the long view, from the ivory tower, and concluded we just have to submit to the market’s power. Smoking, after all, was wiped out organically, her expert insists — apparently having forgotten the whole Joe Camel push-back to stop marketing targeted at kids. The second essay was much more persuasive because the authors are actually putting their money where their mouths are, having moved to one of the most nutritionally hopeless cities in America and started cooking and eating well, with dinner for less than the price of a McRib even with ingredients from those hopelessly elitist, ridiculously expensive farmers’ markets. Getting a book out of it is smart, too, because I’ll go to the crematorium wondering how Big Food persuaded so many that cheap garbage is a birthright. Maybe they should call it “Stupefy Me.”
Back when burgers were going upscale, I tried to sell a piece questioning where all these many big chefs were going to get beef fit to eat. But of course editors didn’t get the question; meat’s meat, isn’t it? Now I have a bigger question, after the incessant coverage of the “rib” “sandwich”: Where in hell are they getting enough cheap pork to make this latest McCrap? Regular pork is pretty scary, and not just when it’s still on the butter guzzler’s Smithfield-sponsored ass. Judging by the Twitter responses, this may be Soylent Gold.
Apparently I was the only one not stunned by the hometown paper’s exposé of a cheese scandal: An unspecified amount of tax money is spent helping the USDA work with Big Food to use more cheese when more cheese makes Americans fat. My only surprise was that it was the lead story. Really, the most important news of the entire Sunday? With a lede based on a promotion “early last year”? (No credit was given to the first report of this, of course.) And of course my contrarian side was on high alert as I slogged through the acres of type. Question 1: Did the high-fructose guys plant it to distract attention from their contribution to obesity? (This is a paper that got played with Spitzer, not to mention with WMD.) Tax dollars pay farmers to grow the pound-packing corn to excess while the same department warns about fat. Question 2: Didn’t most of the evildoing happen during those lovely eight years when the whole government was for sale? It takes time to root out rot in bureaucracies, especially of the Christian College variety. And we’re supposed to be shocked, shocked that government agencies exist to enrich private business? Question 3: Isn’t the fact that farmers are fucking with nature to produce a glut of milk worth more than an aside? Also, too, would it be better if they just handed out cheese to the poor, as Ireland has started doing? (Neighbors in Arizona who qualified for government commodities always got cheese in a can back in the Fifties and Sixties, when the teabaggers of the time were skinny.) Still, the most serious question is this: Is the American cheese on a Wendy’s burger really even cheese? It has more in common with the plastic encasing each individual slice.
It’s also entertaining to see everyone freaking out over fast food chains starting to serve from trucks. It actually makes perfect sense: What they deliver already arrives on multiple wheels. Why not just eliminate the real estate brokers and dish up semi food anywhere and everywhere?