gastropoda

I did my spleen-venting on the Butter Guzzler elsewhere, but I guess we’ll never be “Deaned” out. One thing that got lost in all the bloviating is that diabetes is no joke. And for all the knickers-knotting over the Photoshopping of an amputee who really isn’t, that poster says more than 500 magazine pages of ads for a $500-a-month treatment that may not even work. But it is amusing that the same paper in high dudgeon would run clearly Photoshopped photos of the poor, poor celebrity victim.

Very glad I took my lazy time processing my thoughts on the war story of the “veteran” vegetarian (“nearly lifelong” wouldn’t sound as ruff-and-tuff a struggle at 30ish, I guess). So many other blogs/sites/commenters have laid into the parochialism, condescension and general cluelessness on full display under the most idiotic graphic. What I’m savoring is how it took a silly food story to expose just how under-qualified Dash, Son of Pinch really is for that huge job in an age when no one else invests in standard coverage of “real America.” Way back when, I learned there’s a reason Madame X was hesitant to fall for pitches from correspondents aside from Johnny Rotten: Very few who had not invested the time and forkwork in developing expertise off the “serious news” beat could deliver. Lots of us do it, but food writing is not women’s work. Some heavy lifting is required — if you don’t know it all, you have to find it out.* Over to the national desk they’re probably fine with hiring stringers and throwing emergency ermine over the emperor’s spawn.* But eatin’ and drinkin’ and watching fud teevee is not much to draw on when you get a tossed-off salad of under-reporting and over-padding. You don’t have time to see all the odes to KCMO as the next city destined to conquer stockyard palates. So you go to press with the embarrassment you have, not the one you wish you could kill.

All the Twinkies hysteria has made me understand, yet again, how easy it is to fool nearly all of the people all of the time in this new age of endless infotainment. And how easy it has been for Trump to gull cretins into believing he’s a huge success even though bankruptcy is not his bug but his feature: It always gets him out from under the crushing debt he invariably racks up, so he can go forth to rampage another day. This Ho-Hos “crisis” has nothing to do with Americans craving whole grains and spurning artificial pastries and everything to do with how capitalism works, especially in Bushwhacked America. Going into Chapter 11 is just a nice end-around with pension plans. The processed crap will keep being processed. But for 19,000 screwed-and-tattooed employees counting on retirement benefits, it’s “let ’em eat Ding Dongs.” Or Friskies.

Even I get weary of picking on Panchito, but he really should take that huge target off his posterior. Didn’t he help keep the Lump in the Bed’s fatal distraction off the national radar until the Chimp was duly installed? And at least he could be gracious enough to address the dissing her successor is taking from the KKKrazies. He is, after all, a guy with his own twisted relationship with pretzels.

I’m starting to think I may have to start my own campaign against duck abuse. And I don’t mean against putting birds on the equivalent of a fast-food diet to keep us in foie gras. I’m more concerned with using duck fat to bake cookies that make you crave Crisco for its neutral flavor. And, even scarier, turning roast duck into ice cream. Young chefs, get a slippery grip: Just because the luckiest peach uses it does not mean one fat fits all. Bacon hogs the spotlight for a reason. It goes better with everything.

I’m sure I’ve ranted before about how clueless the hometown paper has been in its coverage of how Washington evolved from brown-liquor backwater to serious food scene even as the country went down the Bush tubes. Exhibit A was the DI/DO piece back in the reign of error that went on and on about all the new restaurants but never mentioned the scarlet letter: A for Abramoff. Once lobbyists moved in, the food scene changed. My first plane ride was to Dulles in the mid-Seventies, and I’ve been back more times than I can count thanks to my consort’s connection to the yellow magazine. Through all the fat years the Alzheimer’s patient and then the cigar manipulator were in power, Washington  was what it was; prosperity somehow passed it by. Now I see it’s the wealthiest city in the country, and of course restaurants do very well on expense accounts. But one thing has apparently not changed. Kal Penn told USA Weekend he was mugged there shortly after going to work for the Big O. Bloggers I follow often have similar scary stories you won’t read in the papers. So basically the elephant in the room never gets covered. The nation’s capital is America’s Jamaica, where the super-rich are prey to the desperately poor. You’d think they’d do something about it, but they’re too busy trying to figure out how to cut Social Security to enrich the cat food companies. Jean-Louis never knew how easy he had it.

And the silliest thing I’ve read in donkey’s years was advice from a psychologist in the hometown paper, warning parents it’s risky to take their Baby Jesuses down to Zuccotti Park. “There are kids who can go to a shelter at Thanksgiving and help serve a meal,” she said, “but there are kids who are traumatized by it.” Sorry, lady. Trauma would be seeing hungry hordes in the streets with pitchforks. Which is what happens when 400 people control all the food.

All that said, half of me hopes some wingnut really does get elected, just to have his faux family subjected to the under-the-microscope treatment accorded the current occupants of the White House. Did an internet outlet really send someone out to food-stalk Mrs. O? And am I the only one a little queasy after eight years of booze-and-cigs unexamined under the former occupants? I guess we’re just lucky the intrepid “reporter” was not required to check the contents of the toilet bowls, too.

Huge points to the hometown paper, though, for the photo of the come-hither chicken. If ever a Rorschach test was designed for the “animal rights” wackos, this was it: The sane saw a visual joke; the loons saw a “get out the Nivea and head for fapping privacy.” A sick/smart photo editor would showcase a different meat next week. And a simply clever copy editor would work into a headline that old joke about Oz: where the men are men and the sheep are nervous.

I’m with Shakespeare on the lawyers, but I still have to say they are doing some good for restaurant workers in NYC despite the bluster from Molto Ego’s partner. If you screw people, you should have to pay, not blame overregulation and whine about moving jobs out of New York (that should build loyalty here!). It’s ironic that this pro-biz story would run the same week a guy who may have been innocent of a murder was put to death; from the sound of it, restaurants just hand over mega-bucks rather than even try to prove they did not commit the crime. The ultimate irony, though, is that a newspaper that squeezes blood out of its turnips has a rutabaga out taking up the cause of the exploiter rather than its own readers. You’d think the tits-and-ass underclass would empathize more with the beaten-down. Someone should start advertising pitchforks.

You have to give the Italians credit. They’re no happier with their corrupt government, but they always think food. And so they dumped mussel shells in Rome to protest politicians who are insisting on austerity while “clinging to their privileges like mussels cling to rocks.” Could you imagine the Teabaggers doing anything like that here? First they would have to know a mussel was not anything gay, despite its beard. Then they would have to know where their shellfish come from. Hint: Not Walmart.

Speaking of which, I could not believe NPR’s report on how food stamp demand is way up in the US of We’re-No.-1 A. I listened to it thinking yet another hack from a Kochsucker think tank was hammering home talking points, only to learn it was a staffer whose salary is underwritten thanks to liberals (step away from the “sources,” reporters). My desperately poor, over-kidded parents were too proud to take “government handouts” and would trade with the Mexican neighbors to get commodity peanut butter and mystery meat, so I can sort of understand the wingnuts who think this is an every-cook-for-herself country. But really. We can afford $75 billion on “homeland security” but $68 billion on something that returns nearly double that to the economy is going to break us? Most disgusting was the “some say” assertion that food stamps discourage recipients from growing their own happy meals. You can’t buy a hot roast chicken with food stamps. But you can damn sure invest in bean plants.

And speaking of American stupidity, not much can top the zaftig young blonde in sausage jeans and designer sunglasses on the ferry back from Kadikoy in Istanbul who succumbed to a vendor’s tout for packages of what looked to me like rice paper rounds. She handed him a Turkish lira, tore open the plastic and pulled out what could have been a styrofoam waffle. And, after two bites, took it over to the trash can. When the vendor came by again, she stopped him and started railing: “That was not pita!” He just looked at her and kept walking, so she continued ranting to the women in headscarves on the opposite bench: “That was not pita.” Yeah, and you’re not in Kansas anymore.

Finally, there’s something beyond ironic in the Germans of all people stepping up to declare foie gras a product of such unspeakable cruelty that it can’t be sold in their homeland. Of course, the fact that the Israelis have mastered mass production of the stuff is also unsettling if you think about it too much. But how can a country that tortures cabbage be passing judgment on any food?

And this is almost enough to make me wish sheeple could be put to good use with mint sauce. I came home from Italy and read a great story in the Guardian about a new study showing a severely restricted diet could actually cure diabetes. Cure, not control. Sure, it was one study, and the results were beyond dramatic. But the potential could be game-changing in the middle of an epidemic. When I linked it on Twitter, though, I started getting kickback about what a flawed study it must be. Which made me despair. A drug company, or a food importer, can invest millions to produce the desired result, and people will run out and clamor for Fosamax-for-life prescriptions and pomegranate snake oil. Let someone try to inject some science into the debate and skeptics are all, “Where is the video?” Too bad the same rigidity is not required when it comes to things like virgin births and resurrections. Then again, if it were, we would not have Christmas and Easter candy. . .