gastropoda

Orwell should be glad he’s not around to see what buzzwords are doing to human intelligence. I got an e-release last week touting “local” Dover sole.  Sounds good, but those white cliffs are not exactly on Long Island. (Of course, the same menu boasted “farmed” foie gras. As opposed to free-range, you think?) And then there was the poor trendoid I overheard at the meat case  while I was scouting Holy Foods for national sausage indicators. He wanted “organic, grass-fed brisket.” The guy behind the counter said they were out just then, but he could order either organic or grass-fed. He chose the former, I guess because cows raised on unnatural food are fine if the chicken byproducts are pesticide-free. Let’s hear it for fair-trade Doritos.

The NYC study on the incredible shrinking supermarket was disturbing even to someone who gets depressed walking west and looking north at the Holy behemoth about to invade her own neighborhood, which now has almost equal numbers of food shops and drugstores. But it occurred to me that two ailing industries could be healed with one merger. Just turn all the spaces rented by Wachovias, WaMus, Chases, North Forks and First Republics into something useful. Call them food banks.

Maybe I finally have to agree foie gras should be banned. No duck or goose should ever have to give up its bloated liver for a promotional stunt like the one Burger Pretender was briefly reported to be running. Thanks to my new addiction, I heard marketing geniuses had cooked up a fecal patty topped with foie gras plus blue cheese (activists should shut the chain down for that dairy offense against taste alone). The too-perfectly named European blog of People for the Harassment of Carnivores (Fish & Chimps) extracted a strange denial, but not before the Wonker-Outer noted that pricing the thing at 85 pounds was brilliant because it sent a quality message so strong not a single one ever needed to be sold. And now that the behavioral economists’ reasoning has been exposed, can we please declare a total media blackout on $1,000 omelets and other gold-plated bullshit?

I forget whose original thought I’m stealing here, but the great food shortage is really less about quantity and more about greed — there’s plenty to eat if you can afford to pay whatever the extortionists ask. Already it’s becoming clear that the capitalist fools are going to take every advantage of a bad season for the poor, and nowhere was that reality starker than in the Guardian story on Britain’s plans to go back to feeding cheap pork byproducts to chickens, a disgusting practice that was stopped once scientists started connecting the dots between unnatural-food-in and mad-cow-disease-out. I stay as far away from chicken as I can, having been raised with them in the backyard in Arizona, where their filthy habits were impossible to ignore. But I wonder at a world that still believes nature is going to roll over and do whatever avarice wants. Which is why I read the WSJ story on protests in South Korea against American beef with special fascination. Consumers there are informed enough to know our suspect supply is potentially tainting even things like sanitary napkins. No details were provided, but I don’t even want know how they put the cow in the Kotex. And would that lead to Mad Cindy Disease?

And speaking of rice rationing, call me cynical, but I’m starting to wonder if all the food shortages are not being pumped up by Big Food just to make genetically modified crops more inevitable. None of this happened overnight, but it’s being covered like a hurricane. And so that ridiculousness of People for the Harassment of Carnivores’ offering a reward for the development of in vitro beef got way more press than it warranted. I remember the international media ejaculation over the first test tube baby and suspect that if they manage to replicate the “miracle” with meat they’ll give it a name. Which of course will bring everything full circle, judging by the cute-animal brochure a vegan handed me at the Greenmarket. One quote: “If I knew you, I wouldn’t eat you.” I guess that’s why cannibals have no friends. And MoDo is bitter.

I owe my grocer friend with the unfortunate wingnut tendencies a big favor for steering me to the most brilliant food piece in donkeys’ years: Nathanael Johnson’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Pasteurized” in Harper’s. Whatever you think you know about raw milk, this will take you to about 14 higher levels. We spend all our time treating bacteria as WMD when they clearly exist for a good reason. Two great quotes from fully drawn characters: “Cheap food makes for expensive health care.” And: “Nature is dangerous, yes. But I can’t control it, and I can’t escape from it. I can only learn the best way to live with it.” Suffice it to say, that doesn’t mean with “probiotic” yogurt. Herd cows away from the grass they are intelligently designed to eat and before you know it humans are ballooning on corn converted into syrup. . . .

Now that the NYTimes expose on spokesPinocchios has made it sickeningly clear why we’re staying in Iraq — to launder money for GoFuckYourself’s contractor cronies — beef is looking even scarier than ever. The WSJ, whose new owner should be covering up the E. coli, actually ran this headline: Meat Inspectors Can’t Keep Up, Official Says. As the story elaborated, the USDA is “so understaffed that some inspectors are assigned to as many as 24 plants.” And worse. Meanwhile, we have billions and billions to squander far from the land of cheap food. Don’t get me started on the whimpering for the poor children separated from their moms in a wacko religious cult in the Chimp’s wacko state while not a word is heard about the offspring of illegal immigrants rounded up in raids on slaughterhouses and packing plants. When the roll is finally called wherever it’s called, America is going to have some serious ’splaining to do about 99-cent burgers in a drive-through world. But to paraphrase the Language-Mangler in Chief, who cares about hell? We’ll all be dead.

At least the Big Homme was gracious enough to let me be invited to his meet-the-staffs lunch, and I’ll be base enough to say they were best new chefs of my year. I was mostly glad I went for the opportunity to ask some questions I might be intimidated to blurt out at a real party, like: How hard is it for a foreigner to get a visa to work in an organization that clearly prefers foreigners? (Answer: Harder all the time.) Mostly I came away feeling glad I had a couple of dollars to tip the coat check girl: Our currency is worth less than pesos. The BH rep at my table said everyone at late dinner at Daniel the Saturday before was either French, Spanish or British, and some had flown in just for the weekend because America is now the 99-cent store of countries. I guess that explains the boom in $40-and-up entrees even in restaurants in my neighborhood. Which is great: The Cubans get iPhones and Americans get Chili’s.

“To be immortal you have to be dead” is one of my favorite sayings (the third clause in “drinks at 5, dinner at 6 and . . .”) But immortality is being granted for lesser and lesser achievements lately. The founder of Popeyes at least led a life worth reading about. But national obits for the guy who invented the EggaMuffin? WTF? They all dutifully regurgitated his inspiration as eggs Benedict, but how do you get from a freshly poached egg with hollandaise to scarifying yellow rubber with fake cheese? The attention paid would be annoying if not for another great saying: “Success has a million fathers, failure but one.” Dude, you got it.

In other fast food “news,” KFC is wallowing in tons of press for switching to grilling from frying. A Philadelphia friend said the headline in his tab was “What the cluck?” And that would apply as well to the group suing the company for allegedly raising a cancer risk (apparently we now know what wiped out the dinosaur grillers: charcoal). Another friend sent me a release on it, noting that the benevolent “concerned physicians” name is really just a front for animal rights crazies. To which I have to say: If your cause is so noble, come out and fight like real doctors. You might actually win. The WSJournal just ran a good story on the pork crisis unfolding in Britain as hog farmers’ expenses have gone up while income has dropped. Although the key graf was buried on the jump, it’s clear that the trouble began when the government started banning cruelty on factory farms. Raising bacon humanely does cost more. But then hell is forever, and pork should never be cheaper than rice. Let alone chicken.

Unlike at least half a dozen other neck-snappers in the audience at the Asia Society, I managed to stay awake through a long discussion of China’s environmental crisis and came away with one clear thought, offered by the moderator at the beginning: There is no such thing as a national issue these days — everyone everywhere is in this mess together. (Although, as one panelist noted, China is in much better shape than America simply because “their leaders believe in science.”) And so everything that seems like a distant “Darwin’s Nightmare” is just disaster moving closer to us: the Chilean salmon industry collapsing from the lethal combination of antibiotics and greed; rice running short; dioxin in the buffalo mozzarella. (Hey, was that garbage strike ever settled in Naples, or did a shiny new object just get waved at correspondents?) Reading how the U.S. “farm” bill is shaking out was the pissiest part of the week, though. Crop prices are heading skyward, average people cannot afford basics, but still the handouts are unceasing. Beneficiaries can have income of up to $2.5 million a year, the WSJ reported — and it wasn’t talking about the mesclun producer at Union Square whose greens go for $48 a pound and had a passer-by marveling: “The salad is more than the meat?” Big Agribusiness will inevitably prove the Rolling Stones wrong: You can always get what you want. Just let lobbyists give Congresscritters more than they need.

I guess the only surprise in the hugest beef recall ever is that the federal government didn’t rush to the company’s rescue. Big business is obviously top priority these days, and when you look at the just-released list of products containing that funky beef it’s not hard to see why. A lot of companies can buy very little regulatory oversight: Beef possibly scraped off downer cows wound up in everything from spaghetti sauce to frozen breakfast burritos, 466 products in all. And if that doesn’t make you queasy, start wondering how sickening salmonella leached into the water supply in a Colorado town, and turned up on cantaloupe imported from Central America. (Or, as a clueless wire service reporter put it and endless outlets repeated, from “a Honduran manufacturer,” as if melons grew on assembly lines.) Too bad our protectors cannot clean up a problem as fast as they can convict and deport a Mexican for abusing cows. Or bail out crooks who shit where they bank.

While one coast has been whipping readers into a frenzy over mercury, news is filtering out from the other about something really scary. There may very well be no Pacific salmon season this year. Apparently the whole species is not going to surrender the pink when the world is heating up, melting down, trashing itself. Could no fish be better than tainted fish? Good thing we will always have cheap beef.

Since we’ve gone from Simian “don’t worry, be stupid” coverage of the economy to “holy guano, the milk/egg/flour sky is falling,” I am waiting for the first smart reporter to take a stroll through the Greenmarkets while toting a reliable memory. Every day I read a story wailing that prices are going higher than poorly monitored construction cranes, and at least twice a week I notice my locally sourced eggs and milk are holding steady. I have been buying tons o’ apples, too, and they are the same price or cheaper on 97th and Union Square than at Citarella. All these years I have had to listen to bitching that farmers’ markets are too expensive, and now they represent the real price of what we eat. My budget allotted for unleaded years ago.

Turns out the Chimp and I have something almost in common. He had no idea gas prices had hit latte levels. And until I saw a news item on pizza inflation, I didn’t realize how expensive flour had gotten. Now I see the Food Shitty flier has it at $2.49 for five pounds, which is exactly two and a half times what I last remember paying on sale. I don’t have an MBA for Harvard to revoke, but I can at least enjoy the fact that the Skank Twin’s wedding cake will eat up a little more of the ill-gotten oil gains than it would have if she were getting married under that guy who inspired “Love Story.” The one you wouldn’t want to have a beer with.