gastropoda

All my good thoughts get burned through first over on Twitter, but even my consort can’t keep up with my Tweets and Retweets. In case you missed: Why was a woman last read bragging about her mega-kitchen renovation and 30 boxes of equipment on the radio nattering about cooking in a kitchen so small you can have no food on hand? (Our last one was half the size of our current foyer, and we did not stock up every day.) File that under friends get friends gigs. Then there was the irony of the Greenmarket opening an outpost in the Port Authority, right across the street from the scene of the amity, only a week after it was revealed that editors are too poor to buy from farmers. And my favorite comparison was between the supremely fresh local blackfish Blue Moon was selling at Union Square and the “previously frozen” basa from Mexico at Garden of Eden. Each was $8.95 a pound. Whatever would Dexter’s dad do?

The good news just keeps coming these days. One day I’m informed that baby broccoli (a k a sprouts) will ward off stomach cancer, the next it’s licorice kicking bowel cancer’s ass. Ever since the Franklin Mint famously went to the Pom land, the first question I have is: Who sponsored this miraculous discovery? And of course I sat right up in suspense the other morning, wondering when the writer of a damning op-ed on “free-range” pigs would disclose who exactly underwrote the study finding animals raised in filth on antibiotics are safer. I jokingly Tweeted and soon had an answer. Yep, it was your friendly National Pork Board. Those guys want you to eat pork like chicken; they certainly will not get fat and happier by promoting meat from small farms where pigs get to live as pigs should, the now-unnatural way. I can’t fault the catapulter of the propaganda. But I do wonder where the backstop was on the editorial side. As the Journal has demonstrated, you lie down with Turdblossom and you wake up with no credibility. If I were the cynical sort, I’d propose a piece on how endangered snapper is the answer to pirates in the Indian Ocean. Hungry Somalian researchers say it’s so. 

And that, of course, was the other big-laugh bonus of newspapers today. The Pollan Wannabe let his carnival mask drop and smart readers suddenly noticed he’s just talking the talk for maximum gain. And I would be bonding with all the alert readers who wondered where his editors were if I had not slogged through the Drivelist in gap-jawed fascination yet again. While she was dragging mollusks all over the kitchen in search of a nut graf, who could possibly look away long enough to wonder what the Google says? No worries, though. A Colbert shout-out is worth lost credibility any day. Just ask a certain new Dallas resident. 

I will eat a raw egg in ice cream or eggnog or Caesar dressing, but a barely cooked one turns my stomach. Turns out just reading about it will almost bring up my breakfast. Yolks “gushing all over” flounder sounds right out of “Eraserhead.” At least we were spared the Drivelist’s pickles and ice cream combo. But I did enjoy the contradiction of having that upchucker run in the same section with a chestnut lede saying there are no super-fresh ingredients to be had in wintertime. Get your bogus ass out to the Greenmarket, Little Sir Echo Pollan. Sickening ideas obviously await.

Anyone wondering who you gotta suck up to down at the Taj Sulzberger these days had the answer in a kitchen renovation. Just please tell me we are not going to be subjected to endless pieces on motherhood and postpartum poop and, far worse, what to feed the Baby Jesus. As I always say, human reproduction is not so awesome when you consider cockroaches do it 40 at a time.

Traveling with Panchito must give new meaning to the concept of hardship duty. Why else would the carrot so outweigh the stick? It’s a sad situation, though, when the reader has to pay the price for the splitting of the spaghetti. Take a grocery list, please, and check it twice — Einstein figured out bigger stuff faster. And he never had to conform to journalism standards, of which the what and the why outrank the who and the when. All those questions, along with the fifth commandment, also went into the sausage grinder for the farmer drummed out of the Greenmarket five years after his integrity was challenged. I have to say, the duck the guy sold was so outstanding he had to have bagged it somewhere else; no one can produce that many farm products that well or there would not be a Union Square. But even the poor headline writer could not summarize what the thing was really about. And kudos for the Mandarin transcriptions, but I think hell would be serving as a line cook in a restaurant where all the non-Asians come in and order the one dish they have been assured is safe to eat. No wonder the mall shut down almost as soon as the papers landed.

The base camp is getting even harder to maintain now that I have been swept into the E-ZPass of the internets, a blog that needs links more than words. But it can be trouble, too. After skimming part of the Drivelist’s latest “and then I did this and then I did that” when the wheel was already invented, I set off to Youtube in search of a postable “toddler makes first doody.” Yikes. If I had any money to invest, I’d be sinking it into pharmaceuticals big time. A whole generation is going to regret that youthful exuberance in a cellphone/video world. But even so, a close-up of a floating first turd in a toilet bowl cannot be as embarrassing as, “Look, world: I made snail butter.”