gastropoda

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.

I acknowledge that we’re living in interesting times, as the Chinese curse goes, but it’s still amazing how little we know in the most amazing age of shared information in all of human history. Thanks to my consort, I had lunch the other day with a woman who knows from Chile and who mentioned just a few of the “Darwin’s Nightmare” things she’s seeing there: pesticides on northward-bound fruits and vegetables overused to the point of poisoning farmworkers, plus farmed salmon pumped with 700 times the antibiotics even the free-dosing Norwegians are using. Which made me wonder about the grapes transformed into the sauvignon blancs I love. Guess I shouldn’t have asked — there’s a reason why they’re cheap. (And why the industry is flying so many writers down to get snockered and snookered [excuse me: wined and dined]). But there’s always a pony to be found in the heap o’ manure: All this made me not at all surprised to read that wild salmon in the Pacific Northwest are now infected by a virus thanks to their penned-up cousins bound for supermarkets everywhere. Americans wanted chicken of the sea. And have they ever gotten Perdue with scales.

Aside from the miserable dogs, the saddest things I saw in 10 days were the trash cans at Ephesus, the ancient ruins near Selcuk. There we were, surrounded by vestiges of civilization well before Christ, and the artifacts of our time are plastic water bottles. Which will still be around in another thousand years. And I don’t even want to dwell on the cat we spotted that was chasing two boys eating a bag of Lay’s potato chips. . . What would Mary think?

Given my twin obsessions, food and pol’ porn, I am living in interesting times. Half of the links I click/things I read insist we’re on the eve of destruction: “Somalia/’Mad Max,’ here we come!” The rest are blithely advocating making your own Popsicles/paletas. Potential meltdown, either way.

I slogged all the way to the last word of Time’s cover story on the end of ocean fish and just Tweeted, then sort of gave up. But my first reaction keeps coming back to me. Why would that huge feature (by weekly magazine standards) miss the whale in the newsroom? It kept hammering away at the idea that fish farming is essential because the global population keeps growing. And it never once paused to say, “Hey, you know what? Fewer mouths to feed would solve this problem before nature has to bring out even bigger guns than earthquakes and tsunamis.” On a planet running out of water, multiplying the loaves and barramundi is not enough. But I’m just being silly. I’m sure it won’t be long till they run a huge cover story on advances in in vitro.

Also thanks to this trip I have new appreciation for the ridiculously bloated TSA. If not for insane security kabuki guaranteeing a steady supply of airport captives, would decent, affordable places to eat and drink ever have landed so close to runways? (Can you say Vino Volo at EWR?) Now if only the fear factor could spread to airline catering sweatshops. Whatever was on my deezgusting Continental/United tray as “beef pot roast” was too scary to ingest, even before I started thinking I would be eating a dead cow seven miles up in the sky even as the waters around Japan are getting scarier. On my first day in Milan I was in the food hall on the top floor of laRinascente when the most violent storm I have ever witnessed slammed into the city, with sheets of rain and truckloads of hail. A more primitive people would have been scared straight to Kyoto. But everyone under the glass roof just kept calm and carried on eating and drinking and taking snapshots and making videos. Afterward, I went down a flight to housewares and saw eco-sensitive sponges for sale. In the shape of penguins.

And speaking of earth off its axis, I was appalled to come across an ad in a Working Mother that accidentally landed on our doormat. While the Very Serious People are ranting about the risk to future generations from the deficit, the nextest generation is being targeted with Lunchables, easily the most wastefully packaged processed crap in the history of plastic fud. Now, the copywriters boast, they contain “fresh fruit,” in the form of pineapple chunks in sugar water. I’m so old I remember peanut butter sandwiches wrapped in wax paper in a brown bag refolded and used over and over. Now kids generate a 1950s family of nine’s trash in a single “lunch.” But I understand cooking is just so much more difficult these days . . .

And someone should show those evil Big Pharma researchers it’s all happening at the zoo: Gorillas in Cleveland were put on the “eat better” regimen and something amazing happened. They lost weight. But this was about preventing heart disease. Not selling drugs. Where’s the megabucks in that? As my sentimental side always realizes: Without wars, the world would need no MREs.

For once I’m on the side of the animal rights (a k a “no meat for you!”) loons: Porking up monkeys to study obesity seems beyond cruel when it’s so obvious what makes humans fat. The researchers could just spend a New York minute in Real America. I’m sure there are millions of people who would happily stand in for the suffering simians with such a life: eat all day, never move? Knowing every 5 extra pounds puts 25 pounds of stress on your hips and knees, I just felt huge empathy for those poor cousins moping in cages when they were born to run, and climb. Talk about suffering for our super-sized sins. What’s truly sickening is that the misery is inflicted for ill-gotten gains: Big Pharma is torturing in search of the holy grail to market for megabucks. Not for the first time do I want to connect the dots with diabetes — what would be more lucrative than a whole country with an induced disease to treat for life? Maybe ducks and geese are blessed — only their livers get engorged by overfeeding. Plus some pleasure results from it; you certainly can’t sauté a pill. And man can’t get morbidly obese on foie gras alone.

I pissed in the teapot at an impromptu party in our co-op on a snow day by bringing up the awful truth that thunder and lightning are not normal in a January blizzard, and by wondering how we the little people can push back against undeniable global warming. The Guardian ran a pretty good story recently noting that rationing in World War II actually strengthened British society, and by chance one of the guests had firsthand tales of trading kitchen scraps for eggs, surviving on powdered eggs from America and watching her mom weigh out candy once a week. Surely we could do something, anything while our “leaders” dither and pocket checks from Big Oil and “Clean” Coal. While I wait for suggestions, I was happy to hear a report on PRI’s The World on the teacups of Kolkata: They’re made from clay, used once on the street and crashed to the ground, where they dissolve to be recycled into fresh containers. The rest of India is giving in to plastic, but the reporter interviewed a family responsible for baking these eternal-life cups for now. And she had the details down to the little bit of grit in the bottom of each cup — I can still taste the chai we drank one long morning while my consort was shooting there in 1993. I think of it every time I go into some snooty coffee joint in NYC when the dishwasher is (inevitably) broken and the clerks are serving in disposable cups rather than having someone get his/her hands clean scrubbing the china ones. My big fear will always be reincarnation, but if I have to come back, I hope it’s to Kolkata.

And speaking of what a grim world spawners are leaving, my consort came home the other day from picking up movies at our own public Netflix, the NYPL, marveling that he had overheard a woman saying she had a child in a “dairy-free, nut-free, gluten-free school.” While the knuckle-draggers argue about evolution, it’s becoming increasingly clear that this country is breeding the weakest generation. The Ingalls family would have curled up on the prairie.

The week started with a report that sea lice is killing farmed salmon. And ended with news that the FDA has no prob with salmon genetically engineered to grow uncontrollably. Once again, my big fear is reincarnation. I do not want to come back to a world where food reproduces cells the way cancer does. And where nature can’t run fast enough from greed.

I’m starting to think there’s something in the water in this country. And I don’t think it’s fluoride.

And no wonder the antithesis of the Lump in the Bed has set off a shitstorm by suggesting Americans could maybe eat a little better and move a little more. On each leg of our JetBlue trip, my consort and I sat in an exit row penned in by a guy who probably weighed as much as the two of us put together. (The second offender, interestingly enough, was reading “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.”) Wherever we went in between I had to pull my jaw closed at the sights — a mother so huge she had to ride a cart at Target, a young couple so gigantic their super-sized frozen custards at Kone King disappeared in their ham hands, a slightly older couple in shorts at Wegmans who could have commanded admission in a freak show only 50 years ago. (Judging by the astonishing avoirdupois on display, the chain’s slogan should be: “Where giant people push huge carts.”)

Our last meal was typically Buffalo-excessive, with three ginormous softshell crabs in a super-rich sauce, and my in-law equivalent said the problem was portion sizes. But I had to note that very few of the morbidly obese we had gawked at looked able to afford $27.95 entrées. They gorge on the 99-cent crap with Big Gulps. The saddest sight was of the “little” boy wearing only basketball shorts going in for a fix  for his mom at a gas station — he had a gut worthy of a case-of-Bud-a-day drinker and looked to be about 8 but walked like a 70-year-old, his feet and joints strained trying to support his bulk. I was marveling that “that kid is doomed — no way can he ever get that weight off once he grows up” when Big Mama Overfeeder backed her honking-huge truck straight at us. She must have heard me.

I know it’s quite fashionable to mock people who prefer reusable bags, and to indict the bags themselves as being about as clean as $10 bills (no one ever puts it that way, of course). But my favorite detail in the stories about the woman in France who smothered her eight newborns (and not, as some Twag put it, in butter and garlic): The kiddles’ bodies decomposed. The plastic bags they were stuffed into did not.