gastropoda

And just cuz I’m realizing this all makes it look as if I only read my hometown paper and not the other daily and Sunday and many magazines we still spring for, I have to add that David Sedaris deserves a Nobel in political food writing for his take on the media-idolized “undecideds” in this election. No one could have put it better than to say it’s like the flight attendant offering a choice between chicken and shit with broken glass in it. The kicker is worth a closetful of Palinwear.

Speaking of whom, I dragged myself off as I do every year to a certain state tourism event solely to see how badly my birthplace is getting dragged through environmental hell with fountains and spas. This year was even more unsettling than usual because the organizers had decided to downsize the venue, which is, admittedly, a very good way of making a McSame-worthy crowd look like an Obaman mob. I managed to get in and out without uttering the words “state rape,” but it was tough when I saw photos of the hideous hotel that has been installed in what really is a natural cathedral, Monument Valley. Even the salsa trail the same promoter was touting as a way of drumming up interest in a dead zone to the southeast was not redemption enough. Depressing as it all was, I did spot a stealable idea: the incredible shrinking hors d’oeuvre. Waiters were passing out crab cakes and risotto bites the size of nickels. And I mean minuscule. If the pros can get away with that, I’m going with quarters at my next party.

Maybe because we are so close to voluntarily electing a doddering guy who conjures images of state funerals, I’ve started obsessing on death notices. (Actually, it’s because I like to track how long it takes the NYTimes to notice a dearly departed has merited multiple homages over many days and to run an obit.) One ad last week that gave the cause of the demise as CJD was rather chilling at a time when our trusted government by big business, for big business is prohibiting cattle producers from testing their animals for mad cow disease. Even more amazing has been the reaction to the UN official who suggested the planet could benefit from all of us forgoing meat just one meal a week. To call it a lobbyists’ shitstorm would be to underestimate the next hurricane. Never in all of history have so many people had access to so much information, and still the national motto might as well be “in cheap meat we trust.” Beef is not supposed to be as everyday as bread. So my other new obsession is Hamburger Helper. Given how prices of wheat etc. have gone crazy while beef remains  a bargain, shouldn’t someone be marketing Noodle-and-MSG Helper?

This same agency, of course, will probably get right behind the insane recommendation to put kids on cholesterol drugs. Kids. Whose little livers have to process whatever is in those pills for decades. I know from my pathetic health-writing years that the best prescription for a long life is to choose the right parents. But cholesterol should be controllable with diet and exercise. I guess that’s just not as lucrative for Big Business as taking the whole family through McDonald’s and then handing out the daily dose before the human larvae sit down to a long night of the latest Grand Theft Auto. If the choice is between hell and reincarnation, I’m going where it’s nice and warm.

Dinner afterward was one long argument about the quality of the movie-making, but I have to say the new Werner Herzog is a seriously good food film. A few sequences are as slow as an Omnivorish exploration of his own dieting, but I got my fill on the shoe-eater’s quoting “the best description of hunger is a description of bread” and his observation that the base camp of the first explorers now looks like “an extinct supermarket.” It does make you think about dried fruit as the new canned mutton. And the Frosty Boy churning out something that Skimpy Treat would have happily served is richly ironic in the land of hard-frozen ice. Mostly, though, I came away wondering why scientists are searching for the origins of life when death for humankind is rapping at the front door. Those scallops and squid and seals are going to be there long after the last greenhouse tomato has been infected with salmonella.

I always used to say the best steak I ever had outside Spain was a slab o’ buffalo at the Bridge Cafe way back in the last century. Because I’m not a “real” food person,  though, I can also admit that flesh from non-cows does make me queasy, so I have to say I don’t exactly seek out the other red meat. Even so, the Harper’s story on the savage efforts by cattle ranchers around Yellowstone to wipe out the last descendants of the beasts that were here when Columbus landed is sickening. If the argument is not ironclad, the descriptions of the bison themselves and their indigenous world are heartbreaking. Read it and shit (from salmonella and E. coli).

One more justification for hoping we will all be dead when history starts taking attendance: The NYTimes story on privileged kids too busy to eat because they feel compelled to power through to college, defiling the temple at every lunchtime. If they stopped to smell the cafeteria pizza, they might realize this is a race to the bottom. Knock yourselves out, kiddos. Ain’t no jobs out here. Unless it’s going into low-end medicine and taking care of all the children growing up on poor diets right now. Substitute “food” for “feet” in that old saying about complaining about no shoes and see what you conjure.

I owe my grocer friend with the unfortunate wingnut tendencies a big favor for steering me to the most brilliant food piece in donkeys’ years: Nathanael Johnson’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Pasteurized” in Harper’s. Whatever you think you know about raw milk, this will take you to about 14 higher levels. We spend all our time treating bacteria as WMD when they clearly exist for a good reason. Two great quotes from fully drawn characters: “Cheap food makes for expensive health care.” And: “Nature is dangerous, yes. But I can’t control it, and I can’t escape from it. I can only learn the best way to live with it.” Suffice it to say, that doesn’t mean with “probiotic” yogurt. Herd cows away from the grass they are intelligently designed to eat and before you know it humans are ballooning on corn converted into syrup. . . .

One of T.C. Boyle’s best stories (which is saying something) is “Top of the Food Chain,” in which cats are dropped onto an island to eat the rats that took it over after the lizards brought in to eradicate an infestation of insects were wiped out. I get something of the same uneasy feeling reading about the brave and noble women who are going to save an island by baking cakes now that their watermen are looking at an increasingly depleted Chesapeake Bay. It’s the feel-good story of the hour, but somehow I doubt switching from perishable crabs to baked perishables is exactly going to work when flour, butter and eggs are getting more expensive by the minute. The only thing more misguided might be rice cakes. With ethanol frosting.

Unlike at least half a dozen other neck-snappers in the audience at the Asia Society, I managed to stay awake through a long discussion of China’s environmental crisis and came away with one clear thought, offered by the moderator at the beginning: There is no such thing as a national issue these days — everyone everywhere is in this mess together. (Although, as one panelist noted, China is in much better shape than America simply because “their leaders believe in science.”) And so everything that seems like a distant “Darwin’s Nightmare” is just disaster moving closer to us: the Chilean salmon industry collapsing from the lethal combination of antibiotics and greed; rice running short; dioxin in the buffalo mozzarella. (Hey, was that garbage strike ever settled in Naples, or did a shiny new object just get waved at correspondents?) Reading how the U.S. “farm” bill is shaking out was the pissiest part of the week, though. Crop prices are heading skyward, average people cannot afford basics, but still the handouts are unceasing. Beneficiaries can have income of up to $2.5 million a year, the WSJ reported — and it wasn’t talking about the mesclun producer at Union Square whose greens go for $48 a pound and had a passer-by marveling: “The salad is more than the meat?” Big Agribusiness will inevitably prove the Rolling Stones wrong: You can always get what you want. Just let lobbyists give Congresscritters more than they need.

While one coast has been whipping readers into a frenzy over mercury, news is filtering out from the other about something really scary. There may very well be no Pacific salmon season this year. Apparently the whole species is not going to surrender the pink when the world is heating up, melting down, trashing itself. Could no fish be better than tainted fish? Good thing we will always have cheap beef.

Consider yourself lucky Joe Nocera is merely wanking rather than flipping omelets at brunchtime in some super-busy restaurant. His take on the downer cows that were ground up and distributed to who-knows-which school lunch or Hot Pocket: One mad cow won’t spoil the whole batch. I am no admirer of animal rights activists who muck around with the food chain, but only someone who has eaten way too many “tacos, Mexican style” in a company cafeteria could seriously think an expose of an undeniable health threat was a simple publicity stunt. Long after Americans are going down with BSE, Nocera and his ilk will be quoting the inevitable Bushism: “No one could have anticipated. . . .” If you think an animal waterboarded to stand upright to pass inspection is going to make good eating, I have a Paula Deen ham to sell you.

Now that the flour has hit the media fan, it’s fascinating to see NYC pizzerias are not bitching about the price of mozzarella as they jack the cost of a slice to gallon-of-gas level — I noticed they substituted mystery slime for even the most base processed cheese long ago. But the disconnect between front page and Metro was weird, with the latter following the exact script laid out in the home of the Human Scratch N Match. The big picture made it clear that, thanks to Chimp rule, we are eight years behind in dealing with both climate change and overpopulation (don’t tell Africa, but abstinence = trouble  — my mom had two books on the rhythm method and seven kids in 8 1/2 years). And the whole move toward biofuels is going about as well as everything else he’s pushed. What kind of switchgrassed society would think fueling an SUV was a higher priority than feeding human beings? I guess one with people too fat to walk. You know we’re doomed when a restaurant offers a shuttle bus that will clog traffic and spew fumes just to ferry patrons from the East Village to the near West Village. I could limp faster than a rolling drunk tank.

And now we’re learning the awful truth that endless marketing of bottled water cannot drown out. All the overpriced, largely unneeded products of Big Pharma don’t stop with us. They flush right into the water supply. And we drink everyone else’s Viagra/Valium milkshake. A boom business would be selling one-way tickets at funeral homes. Who would want to come back to a planet this befouled?

Off and on over the last horrific seven years I have been trying to come up with a spoof on How to Cook a Shrub. Now the exemplary Tom Engelhardt has done something far more impressive with his commander-in-chef recipes. Nothing says disaster accomplished like an edible flower garnish.