gastropoda

Midway through listening to ceaseless remembrances of Daniel Schorr on NPR, I Tweeted that it was almost like hearing obituaries for journalism itself. No one seemed to see him as inspiration to fight back against stenography and the wingnut noise machine, only as “we’ll never see his like again.” And so the world is left with nonsense like the NYDaily News piece on a few old fat white people in Flushing who are bitching because their Key Food shut down for lack of business in an increasingly Asian neighborhood that is thriving with markets selling anything a real American would need if he/she weren’t too “Gran Torino”-threatened to go shopping.

Their gripe is that “other grocery stores that carry mostly American products” will be too far away. Hate to tell the overfed, but sriracha is now as American as soy sauce. The reporter, whose name sounds like someone who would have been brutally discriminated against in an earlier era, dutifully regurgitates the silly fear that Asian markets do not sell pet food (cue the “cats are for stir-frying” meme).

The sickest part of the whole tempest in a handbasket is that, despite the “food fight rages” headline, the last graf quotes the manager of the store that will replace the one they’re bitching about. Who says they will get everything they are whining for. So the News, once a paper that championed immigrants to build a circulation base, is just pandering to Teabagger jingoism. The tape wasn’t even edited and the reporter fell for it. She should be banished to Arizona to explore the state cuisine: Mexican.

Over at the competition, the one that that reports aperitivo bars in Florence come alive after dinner, you could see the whole downsized system rotting from the inside out with the Nocturnalist nonsense on some pretentious potluck in trendiest Brooklyn. As RuthBourdain observed on Twitter, it had to be the best satire going. The triple-threat byline described dicing cilantro, a lip-smacking melting pot, globules of pudding, chefs who became busboys by scrubbing pots, slashes of powdered saffron. And on and on into total idiocy. The second time I worked there I always marveled that other sections of the paper never sent their vulnerable stories through the Dining desk for vetting. Now I know too much about how the sausage is slopped together. Crap destined for the blogs gets published with a click. Once it’s online, it’s golden. And the next thing you know it’s in the paper edition for which some suckers still pay $2 an issue. To filch a cliché from a cat critic, the world will not end with a whimper but with one too many sloppy food references. What in hipster hell is spinach baklava?

Also funny to see the NYTimes magazine is now letting letters to the editor be the new corrections, first with the coconut milk/juice screwup and now with the wart/wort syrup fuckup. If the editors are smart, they’ll post the stories even earlier in the week, before the magazine goes to print, and let readers do the copy-editing. Thus avoiding getting pelted with provincial tomatoes.

When someone is said to be “working in a pizzeria,” I assume he’s hands-on. But the hometown paper didn’t bother to fill the hole you could drive a Domino’s truck through in the Abramoff story. “The Wire” should do at least another episode in Baltimore, on the crook holed up in the back office, and have Tom Waits wonder: “What’s he doing in there?” It could have a second life on the Cooking Channel.

I don’t want to drive any traffic to the atrocity, but a particular WSJ blog post pulled off a pretty impressive hat trick: whoring (blatantly touting a press lunch with sponsor, venue, product); pimping (writers on parade), and boring (despite warnings that the video was horrific, I still couldn’t click on it). The frozen image from the video, though, was rather revealing — it looked like the beginning of a really bad porn film, one involving pulled corks. And the hed only added to that queasy feeling: “A sparkler with that sausage?”  Maybe they should start rating wines with winks?

I was encouraged to see the letters to the editor on salt were smarter than the megaturd that inspired it. Readers get it: The problem is not salt on the table. It’s salt in processed crap. And how do you avoid it? Eat less processed crap. But the media has a really hard time just saying that, without getting the fair and balanced story on Cheez-Its. (Christ on a cracker, does anyone need those? Eat a chunk of really good Cheddar.) And it’s easy to see why. Whether online or in print, newspapers and magazines need Big Food’s ads, these days more than ever. So this is the best of times: They can have their requisite salt freakout and clean up, too, because what’s coming is an onslaught of full-page ads for “new, lower-sodium” junk, just as we saw in the MSG war between rival soup companies. There’s no money in real food and no end to the profits on cheap food.

Ripping off Wynton Marsalis, I always say the best way to make a million in food is to start with 10 million. I tried catering on my own after leaving restaurant school, and it’s damn difficult doing it all by yourself, and help costs more than ingredients. So I found the huge takeout on all the new wannabe Rick’s Picks with their cute concoctions to be naive to the point of sad. And I see I was not the only one. The same day as starbursts were all over Dining, the op-ed page made my point: “Entrepreneur? Or unemployed?” Call it the sound of two sections failing to communicate.

I might not be the only one convinced the hometown paper is killing itself with a 24/365 approach to publishing with no copy editors on board. I read the garbled take on two iPad apps for recipes and went straight to the Google to see if the byline might not be on the take. Instead I saw he had posted that word salad online more than a month before the paper went on sale for $2 a copy. Remind me why I spring for a subscription? (Oh, I know. I like to see the ratio of house ads to paid placements.) But given how stretched everyone appears to be down Señor Slim way, I’m almost saddened to see both the JGold Wannabe and Panchito having to produce even more poorly vetted copy. The former should be able to handle it, fresh as he is to the marathon/megaphone, but the latter is going to be talking to Ralph on the big white telephone on a regular basis. Back to Round One. . .

Okay, I guess I have to address the fact that this has been “if you don’t have anything nice to say about Dining, come sit next to me” week. Holy weed-wacked, did e-correspondents get riled! I had a hard time forging on past the jump myself, but I can tell link bait when I smell it. At the very least the megaturd should have included a recipe or two, given how much money smart entrepreneurs around the country are raking in selling medical marijuana in edible form. Or maybe a tasting box.

All mockery aside, the piece was surprisingly irresponsible. Mexico is awash in blood thanks to Americans’ appetite for drugs, our puritanical attitudes and our absurd gun laxity (not to mention the corporate control of our overlords). This ain’t tacos, Mexican style. Tons of dope are involved, and really ugly shit is happening as a result; Tarantino at his most lurid could not dream up some of the stuff I’ve read. But Señor Slim can’t possibly want that reality check. And surely the very proper NYTimes ran stories on bathtub gin when Prohibition was at its bloodiest?

Coming soon: Cooking pre-oiled seafood.

And reTweeting myself, I also have to say: Christ on a tortilla, Dining! You’d think Rick Bayless had never cooked rubber chicken before. How can you suck your way to the top of Enron on 12th Street if you can’t crank out dinner for 200? It was really the kind of piece you’d expect to see about a hometown chef in the Podunk Crier. And the hed should have been Someone’s in the Kitchen with Access, because the story went nowhere. Unfortunately, of course, that hed was taken.

Because not everyone speaks Twitter, I’ll translate another recycled one. At the Greenmarket on Union Square Saturday, I pointed out a white-haired guy in a sport coat to my consort and said he was an old NYTimes copy editor. “Retired?” Bob asked. And I said: “Aren’t they all?” Next morning I had more evidence, in the obit for the founder of Oldways, which described olive oil as “the principle source of fat” in the Mediterranean diet. This was after a story that lowercased Buffalo wings (when bison fly?). And in one column I found a sentence ending in a preposition, plus “the couple is . . . and have,” not to mention “presumptive” for “presumptuous.” The only consolation is knowing a certain head is also exploding every morning over in the Jersey town where the elite retreat.

Call me cynical, but I also wonder about the slipping standards at The Daily Goliath. I tasted some sparkling tea at the Chelsea Market that was endorsed by the powerful one, and trust me: You would be laughed out of your own cocktail party if you poured it. Most recently the wielder of the unicorn horn touted the food shops at the old Limelight as a “temple for food.” I accidentally wound up on the street where they fester and stopped in, after spotting the “peak season” produce market outside that looked like the Food Shitty compared with the Greenmarket just a few blocks away. (Variety is never a good sign with fruits and vegetables, especially in a region still waking up to asparagus only.) It was a depressing warning of how cynical whoever the rental agent was. I walked in and right back out — the place had a Rouse-to-the-max feel, like one of the many incarnations of the South Street Seaport, and seemed about as removed from the New Amsterdam Market as Smithfield is from Flying Pigs. Someone needs to put down that pinkie. And all the press releases.

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.

And I can’t believe one of my correspondents hit the bull’s-eye when she Tweeted: “Last week: Feedlot beef This week: hothouse tomatoes Next week: Joys of iceberg?” It really is way past time to retire the notion that there is anything fresh to say about the most industrial green in the supermarket. Margaret Visser exhausted the topic in 1986, for Kroger’s sake. Beyond that, the cluelessness in this latest condescending ode was pretty impressive. Anyone shocked by $12 mesclun from far away has not spent the winter resisting the temptation of $20- to 48-a-pound stuff at . . . the Greenmarket. And, just FYI, the smart money is on margarine next.

Speaking of multiple generations, it was nice to see Laura Ingalls Wilder getting some props for seducing yet another age. I grew up loving those books partly because they made my family’s situation seem so privileged by comparison (we had wood stoves for both heat and cooking for a good chunk of my childhood, and what fresh meat we ever saw came off the deer my dad would shoot and butcher). When I was fixing to drop out of college in Arizona, I actually had such a romantic image of the good life in the Midwest that I bought a Continental Trailways ticket to Lincoln, Nebraska, to start over. Fast-forward, as the cliché scripters say, and I’m a new food writer scrambling around for projects in the early Eighties, mining my childhood for material, thinking gauzily about the food described so powerfully in those stories, and I hit on the best idea ever: A “Little House” cookbook. And that, I’m afraid, was my first hard lesson in how competitive this business would be. Barbara Walker had been there and done that. Think it’s too late to prairie-blog my way through all the recipes?