gastropoda

Finally, the most ridiculous thing I read all week was a guy filling four screens with type contending 140-character Tweets are boring. Yeah, I was awed by the deep insights on the chicken at Bofuckingjangles, myself. I gave him more than 10,000 Tweets to choose from, and that’s the worst he can dis? I always say writing about Twitter is like dancing about patisserie, but everyone new to it seems to turn out the same stupid macaron, maybe because it’s like stumbling onto a party where you don’t know anyone, or what the drinking games are, or the catch phrases (can you say Gastropoda’s Cat?) Until you’re immersed in it, you’re the proverbial blind person trying to describe an elephant, because everyone uses it differently. You also miss the fact that Tweets, as a smart friend of mine said, are like lightning. What you cull two days before a deadline piece for an increasingly marginal magazine might as well be a year old. If you want to mock, buddy, don’t get out the Bartlett’s. This is how it’s done. In fact, I reTweeted it. Noting that the parody did not even get into the most embarrassing stuff: the fud coverage.

Also, too, anyone mystified over why twice as many Americans now believe a lie about the Big O’s religion must not pay much attention to nutrition coverage in this country. Far more than 18 percent of the public can be sold absolutely any nonsense about margarine or Snackwells, pomegranate juice or gluten. Put the ad- and profit-driven media behind it and you can even get anyone to believe sugar is a vitamin when dissolved in bottled water.

The disconnect between media people with steady paychecks and the real world is getting wider — I got an e-release suggesting a few ways to simplify your Labor Day menu: Just add lobster. And caviar. Oh, what the hell, why not serve Cristal instead of Kool-Aid?

Just back from Buffalo, I’m pretty amazed at how quickly the poison of the wingnuts’ indictment of Mrs. O for vacationing in the land of “gazpacho soup” seeped into the water supply. In the local counterculture weekly, I spotted an ad for a restaurant that showed her face over a Marie Antoinette reference. Maybe it was meant to be so out-there it was in. Or maybe they forgot “let ’em eat organic carrots” is what’s elitist now.

Shrinks are obviously on vacation this month, because the craziness just keeps escalating. Some of the silliest was over Mrs. O’s trip to Spain (where, you know, they speak Mexican) and her daring to eat “gazpacho soup” with the king. I have one suggestion for anyone who worries too many tax dollars were wasted on security for her: Check out the tab for keeping Go Fuck Yourself undead. . .

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.

Meanwhile, old media continues to get played by the few and the noisy white people left behind over in Flushing. Now the WSJ has not only picked up their lament that all the supermarkets are gittin’ too furrin but added the lovely detail that the one that is not Asian “caters to Hispanics.” This is like a sick sequel to “Gran Torino.” When I think of American food, Lean Cuisine is not at the top of my shopping list. (And judging by the photos, those “lite” meals ain’t working.) I guess this is how the dinosaurs went, kicking up a ruckus rather than learning to love new food. Or at least different brands of the same processed crap — Kewpie really is great in a BLT.

No-shit news of the week was the filthiness of the fodder at stadiums around the country. Next they’ll be breathlessly informing us hot dogs languish in dirty water. What it made me marvel at is how many news outlets dutifully send reporters around at the opening of whatever season it is to hype up the fine food on offer. Did Hungry Girl notice anything moving in her tasty turkey sandwich, on either coast?

All my good stuff gets Twittered away, but I’ll repeat that I was amazed at the e-release I got using culinary as a noun. The stupid word should be banned even as an adjective. And I didn’t Tweet this but have thought about it ever since wasting good credit on lunch at an old favorite: You will never get great fries in an empty restaurant.

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?

I broke my self-imposed internet rehab only long enough to connect with the smart guys at Istanbul Eats and learned that not everyone is happy to see the local cooking school training students in soufflés and other “Continental” conceits. My three years without using my passport must have made me more tolerant of globalization, because I could see why those skills may be needed; locals can get tired of local food. But I learned something from our lunch on the terrace of the Museum of Modern Art, where the menu was all over the shower curtain map. We tried to order stuff that at least seemed rooted where we were, and Bob got fabulous lamb kebabs with a warm grain salad and a mound of arugula tossed with herbs while I plowed through a “four-cheese dumpling” salad (not four cheeses but four fried balls on mixed greens). As we walked out, I saw sad pizzas and other travesties on other tables in the shadow of the monstrous cruise ship docked alongside the museum and realized we had ordered very luckily. And before we walked out, my chair faced an American-looking guy wearing a T-shirt reading: Fuck yoga. He wasn’t as ridiculous as the local girl we saw with bosoms behind “I’m not normal,” who clearly did not need a caption. But he made me think a whole style of food could be called Catering to the Fuck Yoga Crowd.

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.

I don’t know what is more stupid, the LATimes having “Hungry Girl” weigh in on the healthfulness of ballpark food or some company dreaming up “Skinnygirl” margaritas in a bottle. One only knows how to combine as much processed crap as possible to produce the lowest number of calories and of course would be afraid of a fish taco — it doesn’t come from the freezer case and is not made with Splenda. The other must know the awful secret of how some girls do stay skinny: drinking the crack cocaine of alcohol and talking to Ralph on the big white telephone.

In the grand oily scheme of things, it should be hard to get worked up about the small stuff these days. But every morning I flip through the WSJournal’s new New York section and despair over the Lunchbox, which must be copy-edited in Chennai (“New York’s Chelsea”?) Most egregious, I saw paninis, and in a headline, no less. Meanwhile, the NYTimes implies that Uniqlo’s new line must be very tasteful — it has a “softer palate.” Also, too, apparently that traditional Muslin concoction hummus is being given the all-American treatment and will soon be available in chocolate-raspberry-ranch flavor. And remember the Angostura bitters crisis? It was the Helen Thomas/ACORN of food hysteria. Everyone ran with news of the scary shortage without walking down to the corner store and checking to see if it might be available. Mani, near me, had it every day I saw dire warnings online. Mostly, though, inquiring minds would like to know why two such offbeat restaurants as a Brooklyn-born Mexican and a bizarro Asian wound up multiply reviewed on the same day. Funny to think there was once a time when what is now the Etiquette Expert could tear flacks new assholes for not giving her exclusives first. . . .

I also was awed by the contest I caught on Twitter for entries in a food publication: Get your work considered. For a mere $20 “reading fee.” This is almost worse than all the competitions for recipes and photographs that acquire all rights just through submission. There’s screwed. And then there’s tattooed.