gastropoda

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.

Worse was the profile of the guy who swears “The Pot Knows.” And not just because of the grammatical errors (you miss badly, not bad). One of the most vital and vibrant voices on Twitter was reduced to a pitiable old man whose ingestion of nutrients was made to seem unsavory. The Esquire profile was, clearly, an impossible act to follow, but why make someone with so many struggles do your standard cook-and-pony show? All my assumptions about the guy were eradicated by the great time suck where we surrender so many hours. I know he’s tough enough, rich enough, in love enough. And he must have thought the same in agreeing to this stunt. Unfortunately, it turned out to be about as palatable as the Chimp running for the cameras with Iraq veterans fitted with prosthetic legs. Readers who had no back-story were probably blown away, but it was telling how many comments elsewhere lamented that “I miss his movie reviews.” Earth to the clueless: He is not now a food writer. He never stopped reviewing. Call it profile fail. Or, “powdered broth.”

One of the hoariest chestnuts in journalism is the “secrets of food stylists” story. It just resurfaced, again, but the spin was how food photography is changing. Unfortunately, the evidence was attributed to the same names who were in all the early pieces I read that revealed the ice cream in the ad is not ice cream. Fossils make strange trendsetters.

The Consort had a field day at his CUNY gig comparing the price of Time magazine by subscription with a Starbucks — you can now get five copies for one cup. Even that might be too cheap, though, given the bizarre Organic v Supermarket piece it ran. Just consider: When it came to beef, organic was not even an option, but a friend snared yet another plug for his feedlot stuff. And the presentation was all Organic Fail when the results were nuanced. I guess something had to wrap around the ad for the the anti-fat drug du jour. But even that was not as bad as the wildly ill-timed op-ed the hometown paper ran against locavorism. Right in the middle of a huge recall of industrial eggs is not the best moment to throw up some lies, damn lies and statistics. Right at peak tomato season is not the best month to compare hothouse tomatoes and California hardballs. Right when everyone has moved beyond food miles to the bigger picture is not the savviest hour to engage in fuzzy math. Smarter people than I, particularly at Grist, seized on the hugest problem with the piece, though. Those of us who choose to buy as much local food as we can aren’t doing it for only one reason. Just to name one, we’re dabbling in real estate. Every perfect $5 heirloom tomato could help keep a farm in business and a Gekko out of a trophy house on the Hudson.

One other reason to buy local food: You can feel really smug when the rest of America is in freak-out mode after nearly half a billion supermarket eggs have been recalled. (Worse than the salmonella was the thought that eggs sold in May might still be in refrigerators — and I thought I was bad at GE pruning.) Nearly 20 years ago I sold an op-ed to the hometown paper on another reason to eat local food: You don’t have to worry about shit in it. Nothing is new today except the scale of the disaster, the fact that one producer can flood the market with literal filth. But my bigger beef is with the hollering machines (formerly known as print megaphones). Just as with the oil gusher and the mine explosion and every other regulatory breakdown, now we’re getting no end of stories breathlessly reporting that “the company had a long history of regulatory issues.” Whatever happened to preventive journalism, to exposing the bad guys before they have poisoned more than a thousand people? Once the manure is out, it’s a little late to be exposing the holes in the barn door.

And I Tweeted this, but will say it again: The hometown paper had to be fucking with us, running a photo of a meal tray at Guantanamo with one item labeled “yellow cake.” The only thing worse would have been a Judy Miller byline alongside it. Sicker still was that the story was all whining about reporters’ not getting access to the real story while another photo showed Ensure and a feeding tube looking as innocent as the Harry Potter books in the library at the hellhole. Anyone who saw “Titicut Follies” knows force-feeding is horrific. Showing the accouterments without discussing the technique is like a spin inside a spin. Can you imagine Upton Sinclair being shown a workman’s boots protruding from a sausage grinder and only whimpering about his obstructed view?

Only bloggers forced all the decent media types write about the trip, of course. Similarly, the story about a little girl getting licensed to bankruptcy for trying to sell lemonade in Oregon was deemed by the hometown paper to be an incident made for the internet. And I where did I find it? In print.

Hate to argue with a paper that is so sure it’s always right (can you say Whitewater/WMD?), but we all really don’t scream about the price of ice cream. Grom would be out of business if “we all” were balking at $17 a scoop. What was most ridiculous about the whole premise is that it’s only food that ever gets nickel-and-dimed. I have yet to read a an exploration of why a pair of shoes advertised on P3 has to cost $700, or a bag $2,100. Still, even that equine excrement was not as silly as the take on vegetarian food at weddings. What wasn’t fit to print was what vegetarians might possibly be served before the cake, although we did learn the mysterious stuff costs more than red-blooded American meat. Anyone worried what Ripert and Boulud would think should invite Charlie Trotter. Vegetarian cooking’s come a long way since Moosewood. Rubber is not a vegetable.

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?