gastropoda

Quick thoughts: The Forelock’s review of the memoir of the decade really should have had spoiler alerts — some of us might have wanted to lean back and enjoy the read. If doughnuts were the biggest deal in the section, reefered on the front page and showcased online, maybe they should have been a real story? And any time homage to a rich fucks’ destination gets huge play, maybe a little attention could be paid to how real Americans are getting by, and not even the 43 million whose idea of food fun is of the EBT variety? But the biggest embarrassment was the piece I slogged through on New Mexico’s move to require labeling for chilies — it couldn’t seem to differentiate between the pepper and the sauce and went back and forth between Webster’s spelling for the former and the Spanish word, muddying the issue even more. Sometimes a dictionary is not a copy editor’s best friend. It could lead right to addled in Middle English.

I’ll admit I’m a skimmer not a careful reader, but why in the name of Edna Claiborne would you run a story about devotion to Southern ingredients with a single recipe calling for miso paste, soy sauce, yuzu juice etc.? Talk about burying the lede — who knew the South has risen again with farro? At least I could identify with the ode to slave cookin’, tho: I’ve been on too many gigs where the best food is always at little joints off the feed-the-advertising-beast list. Kabocha, kombucha, let’s call the whole thing off. At least by the time we get to Brooklyn.

Also, too, you’d think with such a dazzling debut on the horizon, various sections would have coordinated their disparate offerings. Was that pepperoni or scabs printed large over the “Italians don’t eat meatballs on their spaghetti, either” WTF? Was it meant to be a zig, or a zag, on authenticity? And shouldn’t grease-on-grease pizza be taxed as “hazardous to health”?

If I were the cynical sort, I’d almost suspect formerly arboreal media had something to do with the Taco Bell lawsuit pointing out the obvious: 99 cents cannot buy you an all-beef anything. What else would sell full-page ads in these desperate days?

Felix Salmon sent one of the best dispatches out of Davos, verifying why great wealth is wasted on the obscenely wealthy. He described a wine gang-bang where the only thing that mattered was price/label/cachet with what was guzzled. It sounded like 1987 all over again. Or 1929. But it figures it ran in an outlier outlet. Newspapers have some Zachys ads to sell.

And speaking of the burger blight, the Daily News made it very clear why not every American should be allowed to vote. It’s running “best of New York contests” this year, and the latest was a readers’ poll on cheeseburgers. Which decided Corner Bistro ruled. It’s been donkey’s years since we succumbed to the hype, but I still remember the most gruesome thin patty of overcooked, tasteless ground cow on a supermarket bun with processed cheese. We’ve had better incinerated off a grill by friends who buy the kind of big-box beef I’m sure is cited in the latest recall. All this proves is that you can lead your readers to lapin a la moutarde. But you can’t make them think.

Finally, of all the sillinesses of the entire week, the Philadelphia story should have been laughed out of the queue. It’s at least 30 years too late to lede off with cheesesteaks. Johnny Rotten must be spinning in that great bath in the sky.

And speaking of “no new stories, only new reporters,” it was rather telling that the hometown paper ran yet another section-front piece on the magic of the Microplane without noting that it, too, had been part of “the press fueled the hype.” I remember the planning meeting well, in 1998. But it took a political blog to point out the creeping crud in the latest feature. Why did the company’s worker-stiffing negativism have to be sold as a positive in the food pages? No one opens a factory in Mexico to benefit the local economy, or America’s. I’m glad I’ve already learned the original grater cannot be improved. Because I’m not sure I’d buy another. To the paper’s credit, though, it was amusing to watch Mimi speak and the JGold Wannabe obey: The food moved to the head of the four columns. And the hed, at least in print, did double duty: Winning by Not Trying So Hard.

Never having been able to rinse “arriving at the table with its legs splayed like the town prostitute” out of my cranial sieve, I do tend to read some stories only to surmise how much work they took to make printable. And so I found myself watching cabbage get bitch-slapped, and not with any wit (or wits). Probably like most readers, I got the message: Move along; nothing enjoyable to see here. Apparently editors at the newish and very slick Saturday competition were in the same blinkered mode, because its gorgeous feature on winter greens, with its enticing recipes, was packaged with an intro that pretty much said “eat kale and puke.” As a Twitter follower noted, though, at least we could be certain the writer was not on the take from either farmers’ markets or the leafy-greens industry. Still, one more lede like this and it’s a trend . . .

My consort laughs at me for wandering into the cesspool that is the WSJournal’s opinion pages, but many times it pays off. You need to know the enemy to see what’s ahead — ugly so quickly accelerates. Take the letter to the editor after a rational column advocating calming the fuck down about butter, cream and bacon. Rather than attacking the writer or the science, the Astroturfer went after a dead icon, noting that Julia Child had breast cancer at 51 and asserting that she had “chronic weight problems.” (Call this anus the jerque who mistook a 6-foot woman for Paul Prudhomme.) “Child Wasn’t a Good Health Model” is a helluva hed when you consider she lived to 91 (they could look it up) and kept her bile well contained. I’m assuming the Murdoch health insurance plan comes with very good drugs.

The WSJournal’s take on the quintupling of onion prices in India was typically clueless. The worry was not that the poor can no longer afford an essential ingredient; it was all about the political fallout. As the hed put it, complete with typo: “Indian’s Onions Make Politicians Cry.” And one sentence actually read: “The government has responded as if it were a national emergency.” Onions aren’t exactly freedom fries. As always when food is involved in the Murdoch Crier, though, more questions were raised than answered. The last graf says a Delhi restaurateur is substituting cheaper radishes for onions. If that’s possible, it should be a separate story.

In the meantime, I despair at the idiocy on display in major publications in the age of the Google. The WSJ, for instance, had a dutiful recounting of a dinner promoting “real Italian,” with a billboard that had buffalo, as in milk, capped. Which was only the least of the ignorance-on-parade glitches. (Funny how the more high-end the ads in that paper, the more carefully vetted the copy is — guess they think the unwashed Palinites won’t notice all the grammar/syntax/punctuation errors.) And the hometown paper ran the most bizarre story on “single-entree” restaurants in the Metro section that quoted a Florida expert on driving for food and included in the sidebar restaurants that offer a full range of seafood. I know we can’t use the sausage cliché anymore, but I’m just glad I went back there to work and understand exactly why one hand doesn’t know the other is stinking up the joint.

The weirdest story I struggled through all week was the convoluted tale of the Greenmarket farmer lying down with Wall Street scum and waking up ruined. It really needed an interactive element to keep track of all the claims and counter-claims. But at least it raised a tiny bit of confused awareness that there had to be far more heritage turkeys for sale than for real this year (free-range alone does not a Bourbon Red make). Still, the most bizarre detail went unremarked: “Three barrels of turkeys went to waste”? Turkeys are quantified by barrels? Maybe the reporter meant what McSweeney’s described as a hillbilly Thanksgiving menu: Wild turkey. Wild Turkey.

Since it’s getting into the saccharine season, I’ll temper all this by noting the WSJ ran an oddly timed (after turkeys have been cooked to jerky) but very enlightening piece on kitchen math. The advice on measuring various salts alone was worth it. But my cranky side also demands to be heard: How can sections as sloppy as (Gr)Eater New York and as polished as Off Duty possibly come from the same newsroom? I read the former to count copy-editing and food mistakes, the latter to marvel at the slickness and genuine hipness. It’s even getting smarter. Slow Food Fast still uses recipes calling for grapes. But they no longer need peeling, only smart roasting. . .

A friend in real life and on Twitter coined another perfect phrase — United States of Amnesia — and it really applies when it comes to beef. Everyone chooses just to forget the last go-round with lethal E. coli. Especially food writers. The WSJournal had a big roundup on — stop the presses! — name chefs going into the burger business, and it included a perfectly stupid graf on how grass-fed beef is “trendy in food circles partly because of a reputation for being better for the environment (although that is a question subject to scientific debate).” Uh. No. Some of us, even we the non-trendy, choose it because the cattle are fed what nature designed them to eat. Anyone who saw “Food, Inc.” saw graphically what happens when the poor animals are stuffed with grain their systems can’t process. Can you say shit (in the meat) happens?