gastropoda

Who could be surprised no one wants to ask Panchito about the Chimp, only about restaurants? It’s awkward for everyone to bring up that epic fail. But I was actually on the side of the Section Formerly Known as DI/DO when it came to the nonsense about covering cheaper restaurants. The embarrassing new public editor is really embarrassing, and not just for comparing the food pages to a moribund design magazine. Smart people without money are probably reading the Village Voice (online) rather than wasting $2 a day on a publication that still thinks $25 and Under has meaning 16 years on. Democracy is no mission for a paper with $4,900 bags to sell.

I ran into a friend the other day who said the flacking biz is tough lately because clients who want placements in the NYT and WSJ can’t understand people don’t read newspapers anymore. (No comment.) So you’d think one who got great exposure in one of those outlets would be smart enough not to boast about using tons of an endangered fish. There is such a thing as bad publicity: Las Vegas has to be the clearest sign of End Times. And another learned you can certainly flog your cheese. Just don’t say the words “raw milk.” Dance around for a few sentences. . .

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.

For some reason I cannot convince my in-law equivalent she’s wasting her money buying me a Christmas subscription to the world’s highest-circulation fud magazine. So it looks as if I’ll get material to mock for yet another year. But I really am not sure how much sillier it can get as it aspires more cravenly to the GE Profile level of ad. Of all the things Champagne is made for, basting a goddamn turkey ranks pretty far down the wine rack. And “the secret is to use lots of fresh parsley” only adds insult to injury to reader intelligence. If you’re going to bust out the big booze, at least reach for sage. And hold the canned consomme. The funniest part is that the idiotically pretentious recipe comes with a “test kitchen tip” to buy a full bottle of the fancy sparkler to have some left over to sip (I presume they needed at least a case to ease their consciences). And it has a prayer printed alongside. I do hope the mercy it asks from God our loving Father is destined for the editor who chose it. Because Champale is not quite Pol Roger.

I forget where I heard someone on the radio noting that it’s the anomalies that now make news — the old three-is-a-trend rule seems to have fallen by the spent-teabag wayside; the lone wingnut always gets the spotlight before three sane minds. But it was still sad to see the new game played with Halloween candy. A few cretins with issues hijack a holiday, and a foodstuff, and get the kind of coverage someone who discovered a new meat or a cure for the oyster die-off deserves. It’s almost enough to make you quit wearing deodorant. No matter that the stranger-danger-is-a-myth take gets even less coverage than what’s actually in candy corn. Me, I’m looking forward to all the gluten-free Thanksgiving stories.

Gourmet has become the zombie of the food world — there’s no way to keep the damn thing buried. The latest ghoulishness comes in the form of a cookie cookbook rounding up 68 years’ worth of recipes paired with easily the most disturbing photographs I think I’ve seen outside “The Gallery of Regrettable Food.” Maybe it was meant to be arty. But it made me wonder if the missing ingredient might not be Zoloft.

I was trying to ignore the kkkrazies’ boycott of Campbell’s for making halal soup in Canada, but apparently the ugliness is only spreading. Wonder if anyone thinks about the slippery slope — after they come for the “muslins,” will good cooks one day be denied kosher salt?

So I guess I have to acknowledge the big issue, that the hometown paper’s Sunday magazine finally decided to emulate the New Yorker and devote nearly every page to fud. I tried to slog through it, but even for me it was just too much, too close to fetishizing rather than enlightening. Apparently all artisans are young hipsters too constipated to crack a grin. Every CSA experience has to reflect the same arc, from scorn to worship. (I read backward, obviously.) Self-promotion is now acceptable if you include your boss. Etc. Etc. What was most fascinating was that this should have been the fattest issue of all time. Even back when I contributed to the Food column, in those halcyon days when it was more recipes than plodding prose, I knew the only reason it existed in such a “serious” publication was to lure advertisers. This month I think skinny Relish sucked in more. Still, one commercial appeal worked: By the end, I was ready for a shot of Patron.

And even that is not as obscene as what Taste of Home has become. A magazine that most subscribers loved for the lack of advertising is now one blurry mess of editorial and promotion. I was stopped cold by an ad for liners for slow cookers, with a “Cook Smart” feature on the facing page on using your slow cooker. Last tip, for an easy way to clean your crockpot? Use a liner. I guess the oceans are not fully clogged with enough plastic crap yet; why not start selling something a nonstick gadget should not even need? And at least the all-white, all-female, deliberately naive “field editors” have been retained for comic relief. One, in Smalltown, Texas, submitted “Fire Island ziti.” Obvious missing ingredient in her heartland intro: Teh gay.

Taking a short bile break to restart my wit engine. But first have to wonder if anyone knew you can grate shit in a Cuisinart. Everything but a whole snapper, apparently. And last I read, the iPad was the Typhoid Mary of tech — touching one in an Apple store would give you serious cooties. Now it’s the greatest thing to caress before eating? I need a drink. Or a week’s worth.

I reTweeted a link to a news story on a dog park in Boston that is turning scooped poop into energy, enough to power one streetlight. If only someone could do the same with all the horseshit generated over a single restaurant opening in Manhattan, one 99 percent of a certain paper’s readers will never experience. The place should have been named Arturo, for its biggest media benefactor.

Speaking of which: Years and years ago we met a filmmaker couple at a dinner party who said they hated Sunday Arts & Leisure because it was nothing but promo pages for whatever movies/plays/concerts were opening that week. But at least it made sense for that section to do a huge fall-season blowout every year — Broadway gears up after touristy summer, and the Film Festival kicks into gear, and music venues have their schedules set for cold nights. But restaurants, let’s be serious, are a different sort of animal, not least because people gotta eat no matter what month it is. So it’s always sad to see Dining reduced to whipping up excitement for a bogus phenomenon as if it were just another weekly magazine (before the internets, I used to keep copies of fall preview issues just to see how many restaurants opened way past schedule or, too often, not at all). I guess you can fool some of the readers some of the time. And it did manage to sell four times as many ads as usual. As in exactly four.

And speaking of rotten eggs, it’s both amazing and not really surprising that wingnuts have decided the real culprit in the great half-billion-egg recall is not the factory owner who extracts maximum profits with minimal sanitation. It’s the “illegal immigrants” who are paid very little to tend the many, many hens. So give their overlords more tax cuts. And wonder why you order a burger and never get to specify whether you want shit with that.

I used to justify continuing our subscription to the WSJournal by saying my consort prefers it to the NYTimes. But I’ll admit I’m addicted not just to the feces-flinging  monkeys on the opinion pages and the slovenly copy-editing in the local section but to the increasing transparency of how the paper’s overlords perceive the other 98 percent of America. One piece, on Restaurant Week, carried a hed referring to “the great unwashed.” Yes, only the little people go out for bargains. Another focused on the wines in first class (not even business class) on various airlines. There’s news you can use while swilling box pours back in steerage.

Lately I’ve been thinking and Tweeting a lot about Richard Thompson’s prescient song “We’re All Working for the Pharaoh.” Who could ever have imagined pennies would wind up as the new dollars, if you were damned lucky? Food aggregators are apparently offering $12 a post, which is $12 more than the Huffington Post is paying as its founder flogs the Big O to do more about job creation. But things could be worse for the gainfully unemployed: We could have big jobs.

In both my stints at the NYTimes, the restaurant critic was always a protected species, a creature devoted mostly to one vital gig, finding and rating the best places to eat in a city with more than 15,000 choices. I’m still stinging from the acid flung the morning I had to call the PS to plead for a critic’s notebook when we were light on copy. It was way too much to demand (although we got it). So I guess it’s no wonder the JGold Wannabe appears to be so overstretched he’s cranking out stuff for the magazine that would take the Bulwer-Lytton trophy. That may have been the most pretentious lede in the history of food writing. Obviously, you can’t answer readers’ questions, chuckle over your fud and round up recipes without something having to give. Straining at stool can be lethal. Ask Elvis.