gastropoda

All the misinformed hoopla over the USDA’s hyping cheese seems to have died down, so no one seems to have noticed the latest insidious development. I succumbed to supermarket “cheddar” on sale and noticed it comes with a new tag: “3 a Day — milk cheese yogurt — for stronger bones.” I could live on dairy, but I really don’t think a nation of cows really needs to be prodded to ingest more fat. If calcium is the goal, the “5 a day” campaign should be upgraded to promote kale and other less-caloric sources. Considering every extra five pounds puts 25 pounds of stress on your hips/knees/ankles, it’s a lose-lose situation.

I know I’m easily outraged, but the New York Observer nearly sent me around the bend with its column “written by” a Four Seasons co-owner. It was bad enough he was allowed to produce what was essentially an advertorial. Worse was that he got to spew the lie that the Republicans are back and frisky since the election, as if a mere two weeks since the election created a surge. He described $14,000 lunch checks, people springing for a $1,500 bottle of Bordeaux — why, “it’s almost Reaganesque.” Hate to remind you, pal, but the guy who tanked the economy, the one whose name cannot be mentioned, was a Republican. But worst of all was reading that horseshit the day before Bloomberg announced huge cuts in city services because times are so tough. As someone on Twitter observed: “If only there were a way to charge people who can afford $1,500 wines to keep fire departments running.” Guess they really should restore the tax cuts for the obscenely rich. Screaming Eagle trickles down faster in a golden shower.

Thank allah he’s safely off on the booze beat, though, or we’d be sold the Wasilla snowbilly as just an affable sort with an unexamined past who couldn’t possibly wreck her own country and two others to boot. She’s trying to prove she’s not just stupid but willfully cretinous by insisting grocery prices are going way up. No matter that the hopelessly elitist bean counters say the average cost of the traditional dinner this year is all of $43.47, up pennies from last year, for SIXTEEN. But that’s with supermarket ingredients. And at that price, you probably get the salmonella for free.

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.

On Halloween I saw a girl dressed as a box of McDonald’s fries and wondered where Child Protective Services was hiding. The company is really a national security threat thanks to the way it indoctrinates the gullible. And that includes the media as well as its patrons. Bad enough that the WSJournal was taken in by its insurance steer manure.  Now, while everyone’s chortling over the court decision to make the chain pay for making an employee fat, the company is off breaking electioneering laws. Message: They don’t care.

Which is why the ad I came across for an insidious new product was so disturbing. Years ago Harper’s ran a great story connecting the dots among dollar meals, diabetes and the potential for drug companies to cash in beyond their craziest dreams if the whole country could be made insulin-dependent. And now here’s this chilling little pen being marketed like a watch, as essential as the air you breathe around a sunflower. I was worried when ads starting showing the portly as if they were normal. Now diseased is the new healthy. If there’s enough of our “civilization” for future archaeologists to excavate, I hope the ads survive. Just to give the diagnosis.

As always, someone misconstrued my Tweet when I linked to the Slate-esque confession by a novelist that she was responsible for Gourmet’s demise because of its indulgence of her free-spending ways. My take was that failure has a million mothers in this situation — who hasn’t been blamed besides the real culprit: the enthusiasm gap? (As I’ve hammered repeatedly, this was a Joni Mitchell line in action: No one missed it till it was gone.) But I’m so cynical I realized the come-to-Jesus moment occurred for the most craven of reasons — I read it only a day after a big House & Home feature and just thought: Someone has a new book coming out. It’s link bait, formerly arboreal media- style.

The big story on all-American McD’s threatening to cancel its health “insurance” for employees is the new zombie. Even after it was debunked, it keeps getting dragged out as a warning on “Obamacare.” This is the deliberate opposite of Upton Sinclair aiming at America’s heart with “The Jungle” and hitting its stomach; there’s nothing like fear of no more Cheap Macs to get idiots riled. The fact is that what a mere two or three employees per outlet are privileged to enjoy is virtually no benefits for absurdly high premiums. They, and their underlings, would be much better off under the plan slowly taking effect. But I guess this country would rather wither in the state of denial. You can’t have your 99-cent burgers and be served by healthy employees, too. Would you like shit with that?

The suspiciously timed “terror alert” for Americans traveling in Europe made me realize what the best definition of an ignominious end is: Meeting your maker at a McDonald’s with a bunch of other poorly dressed tourists too timid to eat foreign food.

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.

Almost as chestnutty is the “McDonald’s has a classically trained chef” script handed out for “journalists” to dutifully regurgitate. Inevitably, that one winds up quoting some VP for chemistry more than The New Escoffier because, really, what the chain serves is anything but creative cooking, burgers du jour. And I would believe the catapulted propaganda more if just one Pierre Franey or Jacques Pepin ever emerged from those corporate headquarters.

I’m sure I’ve written about this before, but one of the best classes I took in high school in Arizona was required: General Business. We learned stuff as simple as how to make change and as daunting as how to “buy” stocks, which involved translating the tables and tracking our paper profits and losses. But one exercise must have helped make me a total cynic: We had to analyze a few advertisements (then only in print) to decipher what the company was and was not telling people. Among the ones I went after was Pop-Tarts, then the cool new breakfast but a total disappointment to my family — my mom baked, and we could tell whatever was sealed in those foil packages was anything but food. I don’t remember the specifics, but I got an A for picking the BS to pieces.

So why am I surprised that “real” media should have gone batshit over the opening of a store promoting the processed crap in Times Square? These are the same people who think any edible grotesquerie is worthy of front-page real estate, that an inventor who calculates chemicals+chemicals=profits is worthy of a cheesy, puffy obit. Thank you, internets, for doing the ultimate mashup: Blog-Google Pop-Tarts and you’ll get something on all trending topics: Homosexual Pop-Tarts Tampon.

We’re also getting awfully close to drowning in bourbon coverage very soon — with the Kentucky Derby coming, the clichés always win. So I half-admire the booze reps who are trying to pitch a reinvention of the mint julep. Ill-advised as it is, at least it’s something different. (Gin or vodka would be far, far worse, and absinthe scariest of all.) But given what a hard sell juleps are every year at our party, I think the hoariest advice might be the best. You know, muddle the mint in a silver cup, add the ice, pour in the sugar syrup, shake it all up, then throw it out and drink the tequila.

I know I rant too much about the predictability of holiday food stories (if this is Easter, these must be Peeps gags . . . ) But it’s still funny to see how the kitchen goddesses of Ireland get cycled through every spring. One St. Patrick’s Day it’s the daughter-in-law, the next Easter it’s the mom herself. And every sprigging year editors fall for it.

This is a bit of a re-Tweet, but it was odd to see ramps suddenly being touted for Easter on a day when everyone was bundled to the max looking at the sad remainders of New York winter at the Greenmarket. Some flack must have told the producers to hop to it.