gastropoda

Of all the silliness in this country right now, the way the Teabaggers are taking offense at being called what they named themselves ranks right up there with no-mierda stories on how cheese has turned trendy. If they don’t like their chosen label, maybe they could find a new way to attach tea to their ridiculous hats. I guess the problem is that loose tea is elitist, and Teaballers would sound worse. But really, they’re as laughable as that Asian soup company would be if it changed its name to Rooster and attacked anyone for calling it Cock.

Maybe because I happily pay whatever dollars the government wants to tack onto wine prices, I honestly do not understand the resistance to taxing soda. Apparently NYState has just caved on that perfectly intelligent plan, and it makes no sense. Carbonated high-fructose corn syrup is already dangerously cheap. And it’s not as if it’s as essential as salt. What but benefits could be accomplished in adding a few pennies to the price of half a gallon and applying it to the general good? Are they worried the poor will suffer? That would be a first.

Just as insane was a report that the Legislature is backing off on letting grocery stores sell wine, as they do in civilized places. So New York, one of the leading winemaking states, is going to remain a backwater. To know how ridiculous this is, just take a walk up Columbus or a plane to Buffalo. Holy Foods sells wine, but only in a store with a separate entrance. Premier has one of the best wine selections for states, and the door to it is separated from the food side by maybe six steps. Neither is putting the mom-and-pops out of business. Both are just inconveniencing customers. This is the new Prohibition, because the same sorts are cleaning up with it.

Then there’s the salt insanity. Some ignorant pol (or is that redundant, too?) has proposed banning an element necessary for human survival from all New York restaurant kitchens. Even as pickles are becoming as essential as offal. This is what happens when the ill-informed are empowered to regulate the lives of others. Or is it just that everyone’s a grandstander? If so, the fool should know that no one remembers who was responsible for getting the trans fats out of NYC food. And that guy was on the right side of food science. Only idiocy is forever.

Given how bamboozled the media was about the Iraq war, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that reporters were so flummoxed by the Big O’s medical checkup. Suffice it to say: Pie does not equal elevated cholesterol. Burgers, neither. It could just as well be all the stress of trying to steer the Titanic as the icebergs melt, but the stenographers just heard and typed. Without noting that a doctor never once advised the Chimp to “continue to use alcohol in moderation.” Bottoms up, indeed.

One of the many things that amazed me in my second stint at the NYTimes was how often tacos and tortillas were confused, by people who were paid to inform themselves by eating. So I guess I shouldn’t be astonished that a compromised locavore study has been flying around the series of tubes with no brakes on one weirdness. It professes to trace the global impact of a taco, but it scornfully reports that “the rice comes from Thailand.” Rice? In a taco? From Twitter, I know such a thing has been sighted. But it’s just bizarre. Having grown up in a Mexican neighborhood in Arizona, I think it’s sick enough that people enfold rice into a flour tortilla to make a burrito. And I wonder how seriously anyone would take a similar study that tracked back the rice in a hot dog. Or pastrami sandwich.

A big mystery of the snowpocalypse week was why Americans will bow to weather forecasters and run out to strip supermarkets bare of milk and toilet paper at the first hint of flakes that may never arrive but then sit idly by as the same combination of science and intuition points to certain global meltdown. All those extra groceries cost bread, too. As always, my big fear is reincarnation. See you on Pandora. . . .

Time Out deserves a fist bump for printing the most self-indicting letter ever, from some bleeding idiot outraged over a photo of a whole pig roasting on a spit: “I don’t want to see visual reminders that my lunch was once a living and breathing animal.” As they say on the political blogs: Teh stupid — it burns. Hot dogs good; porchetta scary. Please. Food does not come from the supermarket. And if you can’t face the artisanal link, you certainly don’t want to contemplate the industrial chain. “Our Daily Bread” should be required viewing for anyone who reacts to a picture of a whole hog by throwing her turkey sandwich in the trash. Tom died in vain.

That kind of denial is exactly what’s involved in one of the most unsettling processes I’ve read about in some time, how processors turn pigskins into chicharrones, aka pork rinds. The story was in the WSJournal, on a dispute over imports of skins from countries with foot-and-mouth, the disease that devastated British farms less than 10 years ago. Pigs there, of course, contracted it by eating imported meat (you don’t even want to dwell). Thank allah for the photos and relatively long text to make it clear just how  processed this stuff is: In one factory, frozen skins are mechanically minced and cooked into pellets, which are then boxed up and shipped off to other factories to be fried. Forget the issue of whether the meat is contaminated to begin with. How many un-health-cared hands touch it before it lands in someone’s mouth; how many chances are there for something to go horribly wrong? And people freak out about lard?

One of the many great things about living in the co-op we took two years to choose is that we get mail delivered to our doorstep, by the staff. Every so often the bean-counting philistines among us propose doing away with that system to save time and labor and instead ramming mailboxes into our gorgeous 1929 lobby. Thanks to Fresh Direct, the argument may finally be over. Apparently it’s going to start installing vending machines for frozen dinners alongside mailboxes. Amazon should be setting up kiosks to deliver Michael Pollan’s “Food Rules” on demand right next to them. Who would care if home looked like a truck stop?

I guess I missed the most important class in fright school because I really do not understand the hysteria over a flame on a plane when no one else was hurt. If the Big O had ignored an explicit warning and 2,700-plus people were killed a little over a month later, I could see freaking out. But every day I wonder where the outrage is over the bigger threat. You are more likely to die from salmonella than terrorism. And a potential killer that was once only in eggs, then in cantaloupes, is now in half the crap in the supermarket. Too bad you can’t strip-search a scallion.

For the record, I have never referred to the Cheney puppet who Bushwhacked the country as “Chimpie.” I always gave him the proper honorific — The — before Chimp. Not for fear of libeling him, though. Get your darts in a row, pls.

In the grand scheme of things, one nut with a condom’s worth of flammability on a plane sounds a lot less scary than the 248,000 pounds of steak contaminated with it-will-kill-you-level E. coli that was recalled in six states. But which one gets nonstop coverage? Maybe we should invade Oklahoma to whip bacterial terrorism.

Never was determined American stupidity in starker evidence than in the reaction to the brilliant Natalie Angier column on the secret defense systems of vegetables. No one whose knuckles do not drag on Applebee’s floors could read it as an argument against eating everything in the produce aisle from avocados to zucchini. But of course the kind of cretins who take everything as a personal insult went bonkers. Me, I still remember a guide on Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands, pointing out the tiniest growth of algae on lava as: “This is the beginning of life.” Nowhere was it written that we cannot eat stone soup. Eggs, after all, are unborn chickens.

Call this the buyout that was heard around the world. After I Tweeted that Ferran Adria would not be weeping over the ashcanning of a certain silly reporter who abused his paper’s power for a cretinous stunt, I got a DM noting that the news had indeed been mentioned to him. And “the barest smile crossed his face.” His cooking may be over the top, but his restraint is admirable. I’d be breaking out the cava.

With all those buyouts, though, I really do wonder if any copy editors are left down at the glass house of hubris. Not only is Drew described as a chef, but his Sunday special is lowercased as buffalo wings. What state are we in? Good Enough to Eat is called a sandwich shop. Sentences that would not hold up to diagramming wind up in the restaurant review. Then again, maybe the bought-out ones are now writing restaurant menus. My writeme inbox was graced with one mentioning “butter filet of beef” and “farmed Vermont goat cheese,” not to mention “creme fraiche light as a feather.” The killer, though, was “pan flashed” duck. Which I could only assume was the skillet exposing itself to the breast.

Then again, Americans have been so thoroughly indoctrinated into the falsities of food that there’s actually a debate online over whether butter can be successfully substituted for shortening in xmas cookie recipes. For Crisco’s sake, butter has been around since the first udder squeezer realized you could whip cream into a solid state of bliss. Of course spritz cookies can use butter. Once upon a time whole squadrons of home economists had to be enlisted to convert all those time-honored butter recipes to use oil chemically converted into a scary solid. And now here we bake, baffled about the basics. The funny thing is that there is actually a fear-free substitute for shortening, the very ingredient it was invented to replace. It’s a four-letter word, but lard makes amazingly crisp cookies.