gastropoda

I know I insulted Helen Keller and Curly and Moe by Tweeting that the first must have designed and the second two have edited the latest fud section. But jeebus, was it ever bad. I mean, really, are we not living in the most exciting food city on the planet at the most exciting time in history, and we’re spoon-fed Woman’s Day? Break out the funeral potatoes. Even worse than the inch-deep, mile-wide lede was the surreal pairing with an out-of-town expedition to a deep-fryer, followed by the absolutely cretinous “investigation” into which is fattier/grosser, fried chicken with macaroni and cheese or sausage with polenta. Only someone who listens to the real Dean (that would be Jimmy) would be that dumb.

Idle thoughts: I’m guessing Holy Foods bagels are not really “hearth-baked.” Red Waddle would actually be a better name for a heritage breed (especially if we’re talking mandrills). Plus it turns out “a new way to eat a burger” is not with your toes; it involves trying to turn beans into a Reuben sandwich and confusing the headline writer, not to mention the reader. And please alert the Page One editors: A hero may be just a sandwich, but it isn’t made with a bun.

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.

Wondered this last night over to the Twitter: Meatballs or melanomas? And it was even more gruesome in print. That sauce splotch looked like a pulled scab.

Speaking of the New Yorker, did the hometown editors think no one gets both publications? Faux News attack aside, that lead story read like deja vu all over again.

File all this under “no wonder the stock is down 85 percent”: The new routine in this consortium involves me trudging to the front door to pick up our two newspapers (and The Cat off the dining room radiator) and returning to bed to listen to my consort rattling off all the fresh news he’s picking up on the iPad. But as accustomed as I am to moths flying out of gray pages, I was still pretty amazed to see a cover feature on a restaurant attraction I wrote about in . . . 2005. This was pre-permalinks, so I’ll excerpt from Older Trails:

The Disneyesque: Gradisca, where we wound up after the Greenmarket thanks to all the press the mamma making the ravioli has been getting. Walking in to see her in all her ample glory, rolling out the dough and spooning ricotta and herbs into it, was like Italy, but the prices were definitely New York. I think there were eight little square ravioli on the plate for $22 at lunch. They were good, and the butter-sage sauce was extraordinary, but that is not exactly comparable to many lunches at “Mamma’s” in Costigliole in Piedmont a few months ago. ETC

And then, where do I begin with a piece with potluck in the hed and the archival photo but bake sale as the apparent point? I guess with this:

Memo From the Bake Sale Police:

–Rice Krispie Treats will continue to be acceptable; baking store-bought cereal with store-bought marshmallows proves you truly care.

–Naked Oreos will not be tolerated. Please enrobe them in melted 85 percent cacao chocolate, preferably single-origin from the smallest plantation in Madagascar. If the chocolate seizes, it’s the pastry gods’ way of saying you’re a terrible mother.

–If you must bring Munchkins, please be sure to turn them into a towering croquembouche first. Cooking sugar to the crack stage is no bother; candying fruit for the garnish is a snap. (Please start with hand-harvested heirloom fruit, however.)

–When we say homemade, we do not mean Duncan Hines or Betty Crocker. Brownies from a box are an insult to all true moms slaving over Rice Krispie Treats.

–Poundcakes are definitely encouraged. Your one-hour, 45-minute investment in all-time-high-priced butter and free-range organic eggs and special cake flour will pay off when we sell slices for $1 apiece to cover toilet paper for the kiddles’ bathrooms. Do not think about why bakery cupcakes would cost you less in time and shekels.

–Also do not do the math on flour and sugar versus Chips Ahoy. King Arthur goes for more than a buck a pound. Chocolate chips will run you $4 a bag. You will need butter (now at an all-time-high price). And brown sugar.

–We will not, however, suggest any reasonably priced, non-time-sucking alternatives to Oreos. You’re on your own, bitches.

And I Tweeted this earlier, but someone really needs to come up with a “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster for Thanksgiving. It’s just a big chicken dinner, although you’d never know it from the hometown paper. The whole year is spent sanctimoniously sermonizing about how easy and fun cooking is, and guilting anyone who prefers to fix food or eat out for convenience, and now it’s time to switch messages and freak everyone the fuck out?  Also, too, if so many readers apparently want to kill their families rather than just find nice friends to eat with, why warn them about the stuffing?

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 take maybe too much pride in being a college dropout who somehow managed to get jobs on five newspapers across America and even wind up as a reporter-reshaping editor for most of them. I also remember two stints of long and miserable days crafting crap into readable stories for the hometown paper. So it kills my soul to see a brilliant idea squandered as fucking mush. Even on my high school paper, for Zenger’s sake, Rule No. 1 was: Nut graf before the jump! Beyond that, I just read the stupidity to take it apart the way some overpaid/overcompensated editor did not. Can a scale really replace a set of measuring spoons, as the photo-illustration implies? Are there not rules for measuring? My mom always said “a pint’s a pound the world round.” And one cup of whole nuts yields one cup chopped. Plus there are dozens of scales on the market, and I use one probably 15 years old. Does digital matter? Ounces equal ounces. But five ounces is five ounces. Not “are.” No wonder the scale “has failed to become a must-have tool.” Even its advocates cannot communicate why it matters.

Speaking of this Beardshit, though, I can’t be the only woman stunned by the bizarre coverage in the hometown paper — not in the party pages but in the food and under-advertised-wine section — of two restaurateurs who won a big award. Readers learned almost nothing about their Basque boardinghouse (note: one fucking word) and everything about what rubes these Bakersfieldsians be. Christ on a Continental Trailways. Probably three-quarters of the “winners” were just as new to the rotten apple. Why shit all over women with what appeared to be an authentic “heartland” story to share? Besides: Either one could undoubtedly write a more sophisticated wine column. Even though probably neither “loves” barolos. The new reefer should be “are you sauvignon-savvier than a fifth-grader?” Mme Ami has carved out a wonderful new life. But oh, the wine columns she could have done. . . .

While I await that correction on “dumpling holes,” I’m joining the hordes scratching their pates over the hit job on one of the good guys. How do you say “what was the point?” in WTFese? Of all the chefs in all of this overcheffed country, why pick on this one? Or at least: Why pick on this one without pegging the pick-on to any news? And there is very definitely a back story. Or two. Bring us the head of Larry Forgione. Or Patrick O’Connell. (No Vegas outlet? Loser!) Or just find us a guy selling his soul in a spa in the desert. . .

Quick thoughts: The Forelock’s review of the memoir of the decade really should have had spoiler alerts — some of us might have wanted to lean back and enjoy the read. If doughnuts were the biggest deal in the section, reefered on the front page and showcased online, maybe they should have been a real story? And any time homage to a rich fucks’ destination gets huge play, maybe a little attention could be paid to how real Americans are getting by, and not even the 43 million whose idea of food fun is of the EBT variety? But the biggest embarrassment was the piece I slogged through on New Mexico’s move to require labeling for chilies — it couldn’t seem to differentiate between the pepper and the sauce and went back and forth between Webster’s spelling for the former and the Spanish word, muddying the issue even more. Sometimes a dictionary is not a copy editor’s best friend. It could lead right to addled in Middle English.

Speaking of which, the big exposé of stars and their show food also revealed more than it intended: “Journalists” just write from the scripts they’re handed. And it’s a slippery slope from interview clichés to front-page WMD. Did you hear the one about oysters going extinct?

I’ll admit I’m a skimmer not a careful reader, but why in the name of Edna Claiborne would you run a story about devotion to Southern ingredients with a single recipe calling for miso paste, soy sauce, yuzu juice etc.? Talk about burying the lede — who knew the South has risen again with farro? At least I could identify with the ode to slave cookin’, tho: I’ve been on too many gigs where the best food is always at little joints off the feed-the-advertising-beast list. Kabocha, kombucha, let’s call the whole thing off. At least by the time we get to Brooklyn.

If I were into weird juxtapositions, I’d be contrasting the discovery that the first domesticated dog was also dinner with the WTFness of the hometown paper’s celebration of hand-crafted organic dinners for companion animals. I know how removed you can get from the real world when you make over a hundred grand a year, but did anyone in all the story meetings ever bring up the inconvenient reality that 43 million Americans are now on food stamps? Blog after blog is challenging readers to try to live even a week on a food stamp allotment. And the paper underwritten by ads for $3,000 shoes and bags puffs up kibble from scratch. Hope no one tells the poor they can’t burn wood. . . The only good news is that this gives me an excuse to dust off the bulging can of Whiskas on my desk. I bought it on my first trip overseas, to Cornwall in 1986, when I had the crazy idea of collecting cat food from every country to which I traveled. And almost every one of those two dozen-plus countries came through, including Cuba, where people were so poor kids begged for gum (and soap) wherever we went. The only place I was ever stymied was in Bangalore, probably the most Western city in India. My consort’s fixer for National Geographic indulged me with a trek to a supermarket, one where a guy dressed up as Uncle Sam was even waiting at the door. So I mustered my courage to ask about local Friskies. And will never forget how flummoxed everyone was. Not food made from cats but special food for cats? What planet are you from?