The only thing more appalling than seeing the war president prance around as if he had finally found his organ grinder was hearing what he ate for lunch afterward. Hot dogs. On White House china. Worse, the war president wannabe agreed to have whatever the First Child was having. He is McLame.
Off and on over the last horrific seven years I have been trying to come up with a spoof on How to Cook a Shrub. Now the exemplary Tom Engelhardt has done something far more impressive with his commander-in-chef recipes. Nothing says disaster accomplished like an edible flower garnish.
The McDonald’s translation of feng shui must be “piss into wind.” A franchiser whose mainstay is beef right now is going to need a lot more than Asian touches to keep bad luck at bay. You’ve got the USDA insisting it will not ban downers that might carry mad cow, new cases being diagnosed across the northern border and spinmeisters pinning the problem on the Humane Society, not on a national epidemic of greed. And all this is happening as more news oozes out about where the recalled beef might still be lurking. Anyone who has eaten Progresso Italian wedding soup lately, or those truly scary Hot Pockets, might want to go into denial very soon. Considering that South Korea (and Japan) have long banned American beef, a headline in the WSJ said it all: “Rice and U.S. Beef Lobbyist Offer Reassurance in Seoul.” I don’t know about the professional prevaricator, but I can already hear Kindaliesalot’s defense down the line: “No one could have anticipated. . . .” At least until Jan. 20, 2009, it will always be 8/6 in America.
Anyone still baffled by how we wound up with that buffoon jackassing across Africa has only to consider the coverage of the largest meat recall in American history. The message most clearly disseminated to a “Top Chef”-stupefied audience is that it’s all about animal abuse, that the bleeding hearts won. The reality that waterboarding was needed to force seriously sick cattle onto their feet to pass “inspection” is consistently glossed over, especially with the reassuring line in every story that “no illnesses have been reported” by consumers. As if mad cow disease sets in as fast as the salmonella squitters. But rest easy: Most of the beef has already been eaten. I have to laugh every time I hear a story on the Olympics boasting that we’re going to keep our prize athletes healthy — we’re going to ship American food to China. Yeah, right. I don’t know about the USDA, but the FDA’s budget for a full year is less than we squander in Iraq in one week. Good thing we got the government off the industry’s back. . . .
My friend the aristocrat who has traded homelands after 20-some years says she feels “like I left a banana republic for a Feydeau play.” Even the cheese eaters, though, would never be so silly as to think food stamps should be left out of a “stimulus package” for an economy devastated by greed. After all, what is the one thing you can do with government coupons? Spend them. At the very least our own surrender monkeys could have added wine stamps for the middle class.
Of all the uncountable reasons to hope the tiara-whipped one is sent home from Florida with his shriveled balls sucked back into their cavity, one of the biggest is his insistence that he made New York livable. 9/11 did change everything, but no thanks to that tight end of the alimentary canal. My latest evidence came at the Sido on Amsterdam when I ran in for an O’Reilly sandwich on a time-crunched afternoon. The couple ahead of me had just presented a credit card for $13.96 worth of food when the counterman said it was cash only, and they panicked over where to find an ATM. He kept insisting, “Eat first, pay after,” until they agreed to sit down and enjoy their lunch. My first job out of restaurant school was just across the street in 1984, when it was so scary you took your vagina if not your life in your hands walking in at 6:30 in the morning, and whatever produced this sea change was not a petty tyrant. During the blackout I realized it was more likely to be a populace that understands anything that does not involve bodies hurtling out of windows and air not fit to breathe is really no biggie. The city got kinder and gentler almost in spite of its mayor, even before he balked at leaving. And I’m so glad to be living here rather than back in the relatively small town where I waitressed in college — 36 years later I still cannot believe a regular customer came in one morning, ordered steak and eggs, told me he was short of cash and would pay me the next day and then was never seen again. I can only hope he wound up marrying his cousin.
Wanna know why the Chimp will still be eating his toddler fare at a fancy table for the whole next year? The gutless wonders in Congress are busy aping Marie Antoinette instead of confronting the I word. Nancy Pelosi’s only accomplishment so far is getting the House cafeteria to upgrade the food, even as she sends the clear message that we peons should eat farm-subsidized Twinkies. It’s bad enough our employees have better health care. Now they get the green eggs while we get the salmonella.
Travel is wasted on the incurious, which is why it’s even more depressing to watch the Chimp parade around the Middle East with his usual dazed demeanor, security-blanketed by his monogrammed gift bibs. The only thing that makes it bearable is imagining a guy who eats like a 5-year-old having to take his 45-car motorcade into drive-throughs if he wants his Big Mac felafel and side of fries. Oh, the tantrums he must throw.
I can’t say I’m sorry to see so many seriously bad old-time restaurants dying on Columbus and Amsterdam lately, but it is a little disheartening to see that so many of their glitzy replacements are all following the latest food merger from hell. I call it Glasian — with the first two letters, of course, coming from Gloppy. At a time when Americans are becoming so much more sophisticated about nuances among ethnic cuisines, what’s with this herd instinct to turn out one menu under Thai, tempura, Vietnamese and sushi? It almost makes you long for the good old days when the ubiquitous mixed marriage was China-Criolla. At least that had historical precedent.
My Philadelphia tipster tells me there’s a new restaurant down his way called The Ugly American — which I guess means Yankee Go Home was taken. Apparently the food is as misguided as the name, so it’s no real threat in the long term (especially not with Cheddar ice cream), but I think it is worth hammering what a strange way this is to showcase domestic cheese, beer and wine. Can you believe the South Park movie guys have a better ear for euphony? Their fine dining establishment would surely be called America, Fuck Yeah!
As I always say, my big fear is reincarnation, but lately I’m starting to hope I might come back in a few hundred millennia as an archaeologist in a whole new species. Imagine the wonder-working wisdom to be gained while deciphering cyber-hieroglyphics and realizing that a world tilting off its axis from too many humans needing too many resources actually chose to fuel its cars rather than feed its population (or even expand mass transit). Every day there’s another horror story about ethanol eating up all the grain crops while rice prices are shooting up. Tax cuts were even approved recently for the ethanol eco-disaster. Eat your heart out, Marie Antoinette. People today are too stupid to realize there will soon be no brioche no matter how far they drive.
And, while I have my Mormon underwear on, I also have to sermonize about the chubby kid I saw eating cheese fries with ketchup on the subway the other night. I watched him put garbage in his mouth for several stops and thought: If he had any idea how stupid that was, he would have ordered a cheeseburger instead — and schools would be teaching basic nutrition again. But then I remembered there is no profit in that — an educated consumer is the biggest offense to Big Food. Snapple is juice, no? And Twinkies are now being promoted as ideal eating in the car. . . .
If you like eggs, though, you might want to think about the latest installment in the saga of how foie gras is making certain idiots batshit insane. The food world’s equivalents of the right-to-birth crazies are now talking about petitioning the USDA to declare lusciously fat livers unsafe to eat. Their faux concern is exquisitely timed, just as Eric Schlosser has highlighted how humans continue to be obscenely abused for reprehensibly cheap burgers. It just makes it patently clear how badly these nutcases with no lives want to shove their noses in my plate. No wonder some days it seems we have never evolved out of Eden and that goddamn apple.
On the bright side, all government agencies are apparently so under siege that the chances of foie gras even moving onto the agenda are about as high as bananas all around in the Middle East from the Chimp and his ivory-tickling enabler. The very credible report just issued on the FDA was enough to give any sentient being the E. coli squitters: no money, no computers, no coherence, but more scary food imported and grown and distributed every day. No wonder the nutrition nazis are feeling emboldened enough to propose limiting sodium in processed foods. Everybody knows that’s going nowhere in the age of Big Food and osteoporotic government. Salt on your own private plate would be banned first.
Walking to Pamplona from the B train I was struck, the way I am almost hourly in this city, by how fast neighborhoods are changing. Even two years ago, who could have imagined heading to dinner at an ambitious newish restaurant on sleepy, dusty East 28th Street? Now there’s a hip-looking Asian joint right nearby with a blackboard out front advertising, right below “lobster roll,” “spice girl roll.” You used to have to go to the corner of Park Avenue to eat that. . . .
If there is even a tiny shred of doubt left that everything the Chimp touches turns to guano, this official travesty will dispel it. Poor Bill Yosses appears to have been reduced, as my consort put it, to “sculpting cow turds.” Given that chocolate is lethal to dogs, what were they thinking serving it to a French poodle?
One more reason to regret letting a dry drunk rule: He mucks up the money and now, as the Italian Wine Guy notes, we soon won’t be able to afford booze from Eutopia — the Calvados will cost more than the heritage turkey. As he’s proving with vetoes, the Chimp knows the price of everything domestic and the value of nothing international.