gastropoda

My new word for what I’m looking for at press events is blodder: Anything to feed the series of tubes. And so I found myself at the kids’ table at a very lavishly underwritten event where two of my seatmates were genuinely mystified at how a relatively high-profile columnist of sorts for a holier-than-thou outlet can live on what are now described as “food media trips,” those little skid-greasers that old-timers like us would call junkets. Sinking stocks must drag down all standards. As always, though, it was a lot of gavage for a little gossip. My payoff came afterward, when I swung by Union Square for milk, eggs and asparagus and saw a bunch of half-nekkid, very buff guys in cowboy hats holding up signs promoting whatever that silly show is about marrying a farmer. Coincidentally, a pouter pigeon from the soiree passed by and I overheard him saying with great outrage: “Those are so not farmers.” Takes a Village Person to know one, I guess.

As for the purloined recipe kerfuffle, it looks to have been good for all concerned. With luck, voters will no longer have to be force-fed bullshit cookies now that a chef who would know has pulled back the curtain on the big lie that any amateur cooks once she gets staff. And the Bud heiress was able to distract attention away from that little junkie episode when she stole drugs from her own charity. If there’s any outrage to be had, it’s why a mega-fortune from ketchup was sold as being somehow effetely un-American but one derived from beer makes the beneficiary jes’ folks. I’m sure a consultant could make up a good answer with arugula and granola and get it played big. . . .

I tuned it out, but a friend had an interesting reaction to Panchito’s pathetically dribbled top 10. She saw “Vantage Point,” the film about an assassination attempt viewed through many characters’ perspective, and said by the fourth re-enactment people in the theater were yelling, “Not again!” Johnny Rotten must be spinning in his bath at never having realized high-amortization stories could be milked until they curdled.

Here’s a new psychological syndrome: Attention Whore Disorder. I was amazed that bloggers would be bummed not to be swept into the Phat Phuck corral. They not only admitted it, they posted at length. As I said before, 8 is the new 12. Now I want to add: Obese food writers are so last century. The one time I went to the Pillsbury Bake-Off, in Miami sometime in the Eighties, I was horrified at the herd of lumbering food editors engaging in gavage at the breakfast buffet in our hotel. All of them were women. Today they would be aberrations. Which is just one objection to that silliness in search of a nut graf. It should have been headlined Boys Don’t Scarf and Barf. Only one woman was quoted, and she happens to be one renowned for wrestling with the object of her profession. (I was happy to see the only other one mentioned, and photographed, was not allowed to sell herself as a role Moss, not with a full Olsen left to drop.) The one story no one could ever do would cover the extent of eating disorders among people who eat for a living; I can’t remember how many press events I’ve been to where women (and one particular guy) disappeared into the bathroom after inhaling everything in reach (one was renowned for an accessory worn to cover the external damage she was doing to herself). So I thought this piece was all about piggishness, then I opened my magazine to see the lithe spirit had not moved the Omnivore to reconsider his intake — he was writing for the shape issue. Don’t read it if you don’t want to think about him in “the teensiest bathing suit,” though. I had to go back and brave the photo of the creature from the gluttonous lagoon to flush that image out of my cranial sieve. And that made me wonder: Forget a gut you would have to lift to be able to pee. Wouldn’t skin the color of a Silkie chicken be a sign that all was not well in Whaleville?

A far more educated writer than I has already spotlighted the bleeding-heart embarrassment on the slaughterhouse whose owner finally admitted Downers “R” Us (can you hear him now, Joe Nocera?) While he thoughtfully spun Upton in the grave, I limited my WTF to a river of drivel on pasties by someone who had apparently never had to survive on them for a week and a half in Cornwall because her consort had to shoot sunset every night when in June that happened to coincide with last call in the pubs. You live in New York City. Speak empanada, damn it.

And while I admit to being mystified by the American fascination with horror films at a time when we are supposedly going to be killed in our beds by felafel-eating terrorists any night, can someone still please explain to me how a movie poster wound up illustrating a food story? The readout from “Your Waiter Tonight” should have been “Is Extremely Tired and Very Angry — All Cookin’ and No Bourdainin’ Makes Mike a Very Dull Boy.”

What’s with this ridiculous outburst of “when crazy met narcissism”? People want to spill their twisted guts for publication to the point that the next story will probably be about what foods give them gas and which go totally escolar on them. Sometimes what happens in your kitchen should stay in your kitchen. Otherwise, to swipe from a couple of verbally agile political bloggers, it’s either a trend casserole (Tbogg) or a schadenfreude sundae (Trex). Neither goes down well.

Random phrases stuck in my cranial sieve: Ghostwriters in the meat. If you feed them, they will blog. The Freaking section. Shafer for sheriff. And, in honor of the report finding the underfinanced, overextended FDA could not find shit in spinach if you handed it to it in a bag: Take the sushi. Leave the Chinese dumplings.

With no help needed, I can find infinite reasons to cringe at what has appeared under my byline in the last 24 years in this peculiar  business. But I always rather like the lede I came up with for a little feature for Metropolitan Home eons ago: “Fondue is like Danish furniture — always on the verge of a comeback when it really never goes out of style.” But you know how kids are today. They think everything was consigned to the junk heap of food fads just so they could rediscover it. And so I was almost pleased to see great minds at both a sophisticated food section and a dumber-by-the-issue food magazine both running in the same gutter. At least the latter was aware that teak rules.

And, much as it pains me to admit this, the home of the Human Scratch N Match clearly knew that queso fondue is not “fundido” but “chile con.” The operative verb is dip, and the melted cheese should be a coating, not a filling. Somehow I suspect Velveeta would push a lot more buttons than a $20,000 coffee machine at the same time Starbucks has decided things are so dire in Chimpville that its surname is the way to go. But no, let ’em drink flowers in their Champagne.

A more clever writer than I had the perfect take on DI/DO’s bizarre take on food allergies in children: Someone looks to have been poached in the crazy sauce. And if Mr. Sneaky Food gets away with saying worse than that on national teevee, why are we all so hesitant to call a pignoli a nut?

I had actually dropped $6.95 on a copy of Harper’s in December after spotting a cover line on how hyped that “trend” is, and I had actually thought the debate was closed after reading that taut takedown. Fear is America’s most lucrative industry anymore, though, so it’s no wonder the next allergy item I read was on Slashfood: Some delis in Wegmans supermarkets will no longer allow unaccompanied minors to order food for fear of the big A. As if it wasn’t bad enough that you can no longer get a peanut on a plane and have to suffer pretzels that would choke a Chimp. Forget the nanny state. The crazy mommy state is going to be the death of all of us.

Sometimes the horseshit you read actually makes perfect sense. For a developer contemplating a Ferry Plaza-esque market in a city that has Greenmarkets, Grand Central, Chelsea Market, Fairway, Zabar’s, even Dean & Deluca, not to mention Chinatown and Curry Hill and E.B. White’s reality of myriad small towns all connected on one island, of course the right consultant would be a guy who thinks that what this city needs is a biscuit purveyor in the most remote location imaginable. Batali on a tripe truck has a certain appeal, but really. The whole project reeks of Bridgemarket. Which means it will end up as a Food Emporium at best. And next they’ll be telling us little plates have supplanted big-ass steaks. . . .

If someone gave me a choice between 101 Dalmatians and one smart Siamese, I’m afraid I would have to grab the latter. Even if it didn’t mean being spared having to slog through acres of minuscule type to find the couple of grains of spelt in a mountain of chaff (unfortunately, I lack that Reaganesque ability to look at a barnful of manure and think there must be a pony in there somewhere). It all did make me wonder when a byline stopped meaning anything, though — or when exactly the elves were allowed to take over for Mr. Claus. You also gotta wonder about the systemic breakdown when obvious free rides on the truffle train are written up in advertising brochures by columnists at the most holier-than-thou publication on the planet. But the funniest find lately was the comment in the FT by Gordon Ramsay, confirming he had once tricked an American “journalist” shaking him down for a free meal by sending her to his restaurant for lunch on a day when it was closed. To quote a master of the fine phrase:  “The amount of bullshit in this industry really is extraordinary.”

Even knowing firsthand how the Jimmy Dean’s is made, I was still surprised to see a honking huge ad for Maker’s Mark smack in the middle of a section largely devoted to the pride of Kentucky. Closer readers than I emailed me to note that the same overexposed brand was mentioned in no fewer than three of the stories. I remember the good old days when the production editor would throw a fecal fit when clean copy got too close to dirty business. (Thanks to cost cuts, has that job been made redundant, as the Brits say?) And even then the purists were not as adamant as one of the first newspaper food editors I ever freelanced for, the one who would not even allow a brand like Tabasco into recipes on her pages; it had to be “hot red pepper sauce.” Now the genie is clearly out of the bourbon bottle. No wonder the stock I bought into at more than twice the price is now selling for almost less than Heaven Hill.

As scornful as I’ve been toward food porn in all the glossies, with their impossibly perfect whole roast turkeys and forbiddingly gorgeous cakes, I find the new trend even worse. Showing a slab of beef carved up, or a turkey being taken apart, just leaves way too little to the imagination. Blood congealing, greasy fingers in the flesh — it’s Hustler when Playboy would do.

Wordpress’s oversized headlines are really making my pathetic observations look even thinner, so I’m just going to line up a bunch of offenders for a small-bore firing squad. Is Borat talking about a certain mighty mutt when he refers to “cake made of smashed cow”? (Even he might hesitate to top it with bacon that managed to look both raw and burned, though.) And now that “mighty appetite” is being thrown around down in DC, too, I wonder who deserves more credit, Christopher Guest or Marianne Pearl; transferred to food, either of their titles makes you think of breaking wind. And considering the first small-screen cooking teacher was James Beard, followed by Dione Lucas, both way back in the mid-1940s, should the obit of Chef Tell really have touted him as “an early television chef”? Strange for such a vintage reporter to think the 1970s were ancient history. . . . And, really, if only Jules would resurface on a week when Panchito has the gall to complain about lazy language. Never having gotten past the jump on his own prose, I always assume it starts: “Hi, I’m a Chimp enabler, and I’ll be your Ambien today.”

On the LOL scale, kale ranks right up there with emphysema. So why was half of New York chortling on a certain Wednesday morning? A fraction was amused by the idea of cheddar kraft. Others, like the friend I met for coffee before we both headed to the Greenmarket, wondered where the green was hiding. Finding small zucchini would take more work when booths A, B and C in Union Square had the lacinato variety, and if they didn’t, Garden of Eden, Manhattan Fruit Exchange and untold other outlets sell it probably more routinely than other kale. What’s fascinating is that people read the damn thing, jaws dropped or not, although another friend I ran into at the fabulous market on 97th Street on Friday pointed out that the drivel does make you long for the good old flip-flop recipes, which she said were superb. But the best comment came from my other friend, who pointed out that egos published side by side are combustible. Maybe Muslim terrorists were not responsible for the California conflagration. . . .