I do feel seriously bad for everyone trying to maintain a livelihood in the Gulf of Oil these days. But I have to say that I saw a promo Tweet for shrimp, touting them as fat-free, and could only think: Not with added BP they aren’t . . .
A very eloquent Occupy essay by a former poet laureate brought home how easily minds are warped by deliberately warped language: A baton sounds so much more delicate than a truncheon or a billy club. And a Facebook friend subsequently noted that pepper spray sounds less threatening than mace. She’s right — doesn’t everyone love sriracha, even when it’s atomized?
The National Day of Food is coming, and the flacks are getting desperate. Some of these pitches must be parody. We’re really to be convinced that readers would pass up roast turkey for turkey “cupcakes,” frosted with mashed potatoes and garnished with raisins and cranberries? Trust me: This is no time for novelty. I read that and could only remember one of my favorite Maurizio Cattelan pieces. And the squirrel blowing its brains out in the kitchen could be either the pitchee or the poor soul who had to type that.
I’m gainfully unemployed, so I’m sharing this tip for free: Jeebus — if you want to know what’s really going down in the food world, do not waste your time retyping off the Twitter or trawling through Facebook, as the pros do. Just pick up a trade rag. I came home from the “Brazil”esque produce show this week with a clutch of magazines and today caught up to the one with the cover story on “food bloggers and their influence on food consumers.” This went on for pages and did advise produce peoples who are interested in hooking up with any blog to “make sure it’s not controversial.” But I’m not sure I’ve ever read a feature that danced so artfully around the burning issue: We know what you are. Now we’re just haggling about the price.
And I’m blaming the Reagan grave robbers for the disturbing phenomenon of Zombie Gourmet. I would be entirely unaware of it if not for the poor soul tasked with flogging new posts, whose doctor, I really hope, is named Kevorkian. Parisian myths, debunked? The genealogy of eggs Benedict? What is this, morning in America, 1983?
I’m not speaking ill of the dead here, but I did wonder why the hometown paper would run a substantial obit of a guy whose role in the popularization of Mexican TV dinners sounded so peripheral — dad and bro appeared to have done the big enchilada lifting. The other hometowner is always printing megatype-heds over mystifyingly long homages to women who appeared to have done nothing more than give birth, which I assume is payback to some longtime pressman (do they still exist?) But given the popularity of all things food-related these days, this just reeked of link bait.
On the other hand, if you missed the rare laudable NYTimes take, on the no-win salt study, check it out for sure. So much “journalism” seems to be “some say the sun comes up in the east” even-handed nonsense, with total disregard for facts. But this laid it bare: The study was flawed, and no study ever done will be anything but flawed. If only food science reporters had been covering the run-up to the Iraq war . . .
Woke up yesterday morning and something gruesome unfolded in my hometown paper. Something that almost took me back to a certain younger inconvenience. Clots is clots, is all I’ll say. That was it for me with that section, especially given how I did ribs-in-the-oven spin four years ago (parboil/sauce/bake/no beer can required). But then a Twitter nudge made me check out the alleged Brie Syndrome just to the left of it, and I suddenly found myself shoveling Barbero droppings out of my cranial sieve. Having actually lived through the “cold wheel of Brie” era, I wondered where the editors were. Certainly not reading the business press, which has been industriously pointing out that other people’s money is the same as it ever was — selling off assets and digging in deep with debt until the golden goose is damn near hollow. What killed the biggest scam in underripe fruit was not changing tastes, or even a world of Fast Company-anointed chocolatiers. Assholes bought a solid company and bled it dry. Just consider that Pat LaFrieda and a million “Farmer Clarks” have stepped right up to the FedEx scale lately, but it’s a rare week when I walk into the elevator in my building and don’t encounter an Omaha Steaks delivery. Maybe those organ-transplant boxes, though, contain the fixings for another food cliché — as I have written many times, fondue is the Scandinavian furniture of food: always on the verge of a comeback but never really out of style. The real news was in the third paragraph from the bottom.
Also on the Twitter, I got caught up in the lament over the Google skewing results in its new recipe search. Of course there are ways to game the gamers (refine searches by blogs and videos, for starters). But smarter observers than I soon began noting how ironic it was that a site built on users creating content for free, for the profits of others, was up in digital arms over overreach. And that’s why the herd instinct will always pay. Anyone can publish a cookbook today. Or start a successful blog. But it’s more seductive to call it a contest and label it Pillsbury by the Numbers.
The WSJournal just took out a hit on NYC’s Green Cart program, framing the issue through the sad tale of a Korean grocer in Brooklyn whose business is way down but waiting until the penultimate graf to note that both the Bushwhacked economy and construction near her store were contributing as much to her Fail as the competitive price of bananas. A liberal neighbor took up the cause on Facebook, where I had to point out that these carts are going into neighborhoods where bananas are overpriced if they’re available at all, not like the carts of hustlers who commandeer so many corners in our little corner of privileged Manhattan (the one opposite Whole Foods is particularly tenacious, putting the lie to the notion that “no-overhead” vendors have the edge on bricks and mortars). Jay Gould must be reincarnated, because this whole country is proving what he said more than 100 years ago: “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” While the “little people” never notice if Monsanto is paying any taxes at all. . .
Kinda funny to watch people who were so complacent about the Chertoff-enriching cancer boxes at the airports now freaking out about radiation in food thanks to the Japan meltdown. Hope no one tells them most spices are already irradiated, and a whole a lot o’ ground beef is, too. Even so, it’s kinda sad to see Popeye’s magic green bullet reduced to a wimp in the aftermath of Japan’s megadisasters. What is it about spinach that leaves it so vulnerable first to E. coli and then salmonella and now radiation? You’d almost think it was chicken.
National Nutrition Month turns out to also be National Frozen Food Month. And I don’t think they’re talking baby peas, which really are better than fresh. Shouldn’t the former designation get 12 slots on the calendar? And in other flackery gone bad, someone hit me with the big news a chef is “reinventing” shepherd’s pie using lamb rather than beef. I have yet to hear of a crook for calves’ necks. And no one would ever describe New Zealand as a place where the men are men and the cows are nervous.
Also, too, I keep reading fawning “stop-the-internets” features on how drugstores are becoming supermarkets, but not one points out they’re really more 7-Elevens. I priced Illy espresso at the 5,000th new Duane Reade near us, and it was a full 50 percent more than the closest food store, directly across the street. When “Whole Paycheck” is cheaper, by $6, gullible reporters might want to pitch the press release, pick up a notebook and hit the miles of aisles.
And my cynical side always goes into overdrive when staff meal comes up. I know I did a piece on Mexican cooks feeding the “family,” but even that was fraught with deception. I remember what my classmates ate in restaurant school, and it was nothing you’d write a book about — whenever a reporter comes close, the food always improves. Staff/family meal is the “celebrity chef upgrades airline food” BS all media outlets swallow. So I was happy to have a server of a sort validate my negativity. He split for a bit to eat and hear about the night’s specials and returned to say, when we asked: “Family meal is the most horrific part of working in a restaurant.” The best you can hope for is “protein, starch, salad.” The worst you can fear is food poisoning. Especially in this economy, it’s hard to feed staff (or family) for free. But it was pretty funny to ask: “Have you ever had Mexican for staff meal?” and hear: “No. But that would be the best.” Tell it to the Homme.
Of course, I’m such a cynic I suspect Mrs. O let the Lump in the Bed’s holdover chef do the dinner just to make it obvious that the Chimp’s legacy of disaster extended right into the kitchen. The other state dinners, for India and for Mexico, were planned and executed by celebrity chefs who actually cook. This was left to someone who spent years grilling cheese and apportioning pretzels. Asked for “quintessential all-American,” is it any surprise she would come up with goat cheese salad, lobster, steak, baked potato, creamed spinach and apple pie with ice cream (or, as they say in the pure and simple Heartland: a la mode)? What this mostly makes clear is that we’re no closer to defining American cuisine than we were 28 years ago when I got into eating for a living. Even then, all attempts to codify it splintered into regional styles (Southwestern, New England, Cajun, California etc.) Judging by what passes for American today, we’re lucky she didn’t whip up pizzas, burgers and cupcakes. And that makes me almost want to give Cristeta (or Yosses) credit: By serving apples in a crust, she validated all those silly media sorts nattering that pies are the new cupcakes. Too bad Hu wasn’t invited for a sleepover. He coulda had the next lukewarm thing: pizza for breakfast.
Apparently hospitals are the latest to follow the airline model of chefly promotion. I read the NYTimes feature on Sloan Kettering’s tailored food for pediatric patients and was very glad for any extra effort for kids going through hell. But it still seemed a little off. This is a hospital, after all, that has probably the worst cafeteria offerings I’ve ever encountered, and I have eaten Buffalo General’s. There’s a reason McDonald’s and other unhealthy chains have made inroads in what should be bastions of nutritional sanity. Who wouldn’t prefer a heart attack on a tray over steam table crap and overpriced salads on their last leaves? But I should have known this was a planted puff piece, and sure enough, here comes an e-release touting the CIA’s new course on hospital “cuisine.” Why don’t they just hire a few celebrity chefs’ names and call a press conference? Maybe at a Duane Reade with growlers. And, imagine this: sushi.