gastropoda

Over at my Dr. Jekyll outlet, I’ve already commented on the idiocy of a cake mix company trying to re-target its crap to Food Network followers it thinks might be willing to put in two and a half hours on a dessert from a box. But in retrospect Ms. Hyde started dwelling more on the apparent naiveté of the reporter who brought the marketing campaign into the Timeslight. His last graf noted that Duncan Hines “began attaching his name to food products.” Licensing/franchising, you mean? I believe that’s called selling out.

ReTweeting myself, but I was pretty amazed that a flack would actually send out an e-release, in this the year of equality 2011, hyping “Mrs. Wolfgang Puck.” My first thought was: Which one? But it got worse. This was actually shilling a profile whose second graf states that “she prefers you not to know her simply as the woman behind the mogul chef.” Then why not show us what she does before you tell us who she is? And how insulting is this? “The Puck family isn’t exactly counting on Gelila’s share of their income to make ends meet.” That’s as far as I got. But I now know a new epithet. It’s the job description of the profiler: content producer. Which is very different from sentient being.

This was a disturbing weekend for readers of newspaper supplements. In one I actually read this phrase about peeling asparagus: “it will look, taste and bite more nicely if you take the time.” Diagram that sucker. Unless you mean “good dog!” And then there was the bizarre correction on a featurette on the most pretentious dinner party hostess ever featured by T for Twaddle, one so dumb it had to be run twice. Seems to me, if a blogger changes her domain name after a piece goes to press but installs a redirect, that’s not an error. It’s a glitch. The real correction should have been on the site itself, which I looked at only to see if there was any there there. “Desperately seeking saffron,” indeed. That’s one way to do a 404.

But I got more annoyed on skimming Useless Weekend and the profoundly stupid Mother’s Day food feature. Note to the daughters attaching themselves to mom’s apron strings: Eggs without hollandaise cannot be Benedict. Substituting salsa went out in about 1995,  when fat was being scorned as the high-fructose corn syrup of its time. What you “created” is just huevos rancheros on an English muffin. And I kinda doubt any mom who was presented that for breakfast on her big day would be flattered to think you were worried about her getting fat. Better to buy some lo-cal chocolates.

Sort of just back from the north, I’m enjoying the tempest in the tofu. Those poor vegans duped into drooling over airbrushed food porn could be straight out of “The Crying Game.” Eat meat and cheese and eggs, guys. It makes you more skeptical.

And did some cretin really name a cereal Monkey Brains? Maybe kids strapped into high chairs will enjoy visions of a saw around their craniums and spoons sinking in?

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.

While everyone’s still hating on “foodie,” I’m really not sure “drinkery” needed to be coined. Although my “once a copy editor, always a nuisance” side does note that it makes more sense than eatery, given that a winery is where the grape is converted while no one churns out diners anywhere.

I know what it was touting is only a content farm, but I was still astonished by the most cretinous story pitch ever: using fast food to save time when entertaining. Great basmati rice takes 20 minutes start to finish, less time than cold crap could be biked to your kitchen. And a branded biscuit is a hell of a way to show guests you care enough to serve the very best; cold fries in congealed grease fries would be even worse. But any reader too stupid to think of ordering in a pizza and laying some prosciutto across it really should have her/his cellphone taken away before he/she hurts her/himself. Ditto for the flack.

The onetime home of the Human Scratch N Match also ran a silly story, on produce prices rising, that actually quoted a woman stupidly musing that it might be “the economy” to blame. Not bad weather and diminishing water, of course. As I noted over on the Twitter, anyone complaining about the price of tomatoes in March is cooking it wrong — this is the season of “better dead than red” in the produce aisle, at least if you want flavor and fair prices. But then there was the way a protest at the newish Upscale Aldi’s was covered elsewhere. Most shoppers interviewed thought it was all about those softballs next to the flown-in blueberries, not the fact that so much processed crap is cheap because tomato pickers in Florida are paid slave wages. Really, if a chain can’t Shetland-pony up a penny a pound more, you really have to wonder how exploited its grape harvesters are. Two bucks might be more than a price.

I know we live in an up-is-down world, with a slothful glutton sermonizing on (fiscal) discipline in Jersey, but it was still astonishing to hear of the obese Capon attacking Mrs. O as overweight. I guess a voice of the people who lives on caviar and porterhouse would not know the difference between a short rib and “ribs.” But my favorite reaction from one of his useful idiots was: “Stay out of our cubbards!” Obviously, if they need no help with readin’ and writin’, they can eat smarter on their own

If any spouse thought long or hard about what he/she would have to put up with from the White House press corpse, only singles would ever get elected. Certainly the questions posed to Mrs. O by the creme de la overpaid creme at a “Let’s Move” lunch were cringe-inducers. What does $Palin think? Or, stupider, how dare you serve Super Bowl food on Super Bowl Sunday? No one ever asked the Lump in the Bed why the Chimp kept turning up bruised and battered while she blathered between cigs about reading. Some days I suspect what goes on in the Imperial Bedroom is not terrorist fist-bumping but good old American face-palming.

Summary of the week’s controversies: Banh mi, eat the Atlantic. The hometown paper might really want to hire some editors, cuz readers obviously can’t distinguish between legit stories and blog filler. And the A-holes really should realize Al Gore set up the series of tubes so anyone could quickly learn a 2007 screed has only been updated to add new insults. Why micturate all over “Omnivore’s Dilemma” when the later prototype for the Egopedist would do?

And in yet another example of why politicians should not come anywhere close to food, I read that some Maine legislator wanted to fight the designation of the silly Whoopie Pie as the state dessert because its “primary ingredient is lard.” If that actually happened to be the case, it would, of course, be one of the healthier choices in the cookie kingdom.

Even acknowledging this probably only encourages the willfully stupid, but a certain heritage hire who will never learn that a Nobel prizewinner won for a reason decided to take him on, yet again, for his smart post saying kitchens really are not the space-age transformations we might have once expected — many more advances were made from 1900 to 1950 than from 1950 till today. Ms. Idjit of the Himalayan Pink Salt, being younger and of course smarter, begs to differ. She owns a 1950 Betty Crocker cookbook, you see, and the recipes therein prove no one had a blender or a mixer or whatever back then. Even aluminum foil was unknown! Start with the Googleable fact that stand mixers were not rarities in American kitchens 60 years ago — you can find models from before 1954 on eBay today. (My dirt-poor mom taught me to bake using hers.) Blenders? More than a million sold by 1954. And crappy cookware pre-All-Clad? Our dirt-poor family did fine with cast iron. Ms. Born Yesterday really needs to get in more. I cook in a 1929 kitchen, only moderately altered: I can stand at the stove and reach the refrigerator and the sink — the cabinets she cannot imagine holding up are doing fine; a stove older than I am, and in better shape, kicks the BTUs out of anything you can buy now. The design abides. What’s saddest is that one of the leaders of the Food Coven hyped this horseshit, just after touting the Julia letters compilation in which Mme. Child and her Cambridge correspondent endlessly document how advanced kitchens and appliances (and ingredients) were even in 1953/4. They even talk about foil . . .

And speaking of the burger blight, the Daily News made it very clear why not every American should be allowed to vote. It’s running “best of New York contests” this year, and the latest was a readers’ poll on cheeseburgers. Which decided Corner Bistro ruled. It’s been donkey’s years since we succumbed to the hype, but I still remember the most gruesome thin patty of overcooked, tasteless ground cow on a supermarket bun with processed cheese. We’ve had better incinerated off a grill by friends who buy the kind of big-box beef I’m sure is cited in the latest recall. All this proves is that you can lead your readers to lapin a la moutarde. But you can’t make them think.