gastropoda

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.

Also, too, let’s trash reusable grocery bags. A new study found they’re about as clean as money (well, it didn’t put it exactly like that). As if Americans needed an excuse to give up and go back to wasting thousands of plastic bags on a single shopping trip. Right now every conservation effort with the slimmest possibility of helping should be cheered, not mocked. The earth has a big hurting hole in it, and it’s spewing what we’re so dependent on for a plastic-based lifestyle. As our beef addiction makes clear, bacteria are not that scary at all. You can wash a shopping bag easier than a beach. (Yes, I’m getting sappy. It’s just that my big fear is reincarnation.)

After 9/11, I reread Nevil Shute’s “On the Beach.” Now, with Apocalypse Oil spewing in the Gulf, I’m thinking about picking up “The Road” again — while listening to Carole King’s “It’s Too Late. . .” Because the one thing that comes across clearest in McCarthy’s novel is the futility of stocking up for end times. Which it makes it so ironic that civilization has never been better-equipped for bunker dining into perpetuity. Twinkies are forever.

I spotted crabmeat from the Gulf at Chelsea Market the other week and realized it might be the last in my lifetime. And no surprise who’s partly responsible for this eco-catastrophe. If only the NYTimes had had Panchito on the eats beat in 2000, not ambling after a failed oilman and spinning him as harmlessly affable. The world might have been spared blackened everything.

I think I’ve read about enough about well-paid media types (and chefs) trying to live on a food stamp diet in America. It says it all that they have no innate understanding of how more and more people in this country deal in a bushwhacked economy. Doesn’t anyone come up out of poverty and become a talking head or other media voice anymore? I don’t think a single soul should have to grow up poor enough to understand that a dog and a dozen cats can survive on one can of dog food a day if a mom stretches it with a huge pot of cornmeal mush. But maybe, when all the dust settles on the school lunch program, someone with a megaphone might want to start talking about what kids were once taught: how to feed a family of nine on next to no income. Thank allah my mom was educated in New York’s public schools in the 1930s and learned beans and corn (or rice) make a complete protein. Today, of course, she’d be indoctrinated on Doritos as whole-grain . . .

I can’t remember where I saw the photo spread on all the new kitchen tools being designed for insecure parents who want to raise the next Jamie Oliver, but it was pretty damn depressing. The best way to teach kids is with real tools, not dinosaured-up implements. I baked my first cake when I could barely reach the counter, with my depressed-flat mom calling out directions from her bedroom, and I needed no special measuring spoons or bowls. If I remember correctly from half a century ago, kids just wanna look/act grown-up (never understanding they will be not-kids for such a very long time). Let them wrestle serious whisks, senza handles in the shape of a plane or an outstretched body. And they most definitely do not need their own magazine. Highlights was good enough for me, for Goofus’s sake. But the diapers-down most ridiculous thing I’ve heard in this silly trend is that some mega-enterprise has come up with a name for kids interested in food. And it’s almost as tone-deaf as the anti-tampon iPad. Koodies? Seriously? I’d rather eat cooties.

Everyone else can obsess on the supersizing of the Last Supper over the centuries (although I did like “Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me!”’s take: they might need a bigger cross). I was dwelling more on the scary thought that Big Food is developing a “special” salt for garbage we don’t need. It’s a testament to how over-sodiumed most processed crap is that the reasonable amount of salt you would use on your own fresh tortilla chips is way too imperceptible in the stuff that needs to last for months in a bag at an inflated price. Unfortunately, I read about this new sprinkle in the same paper that informed me, by way of a UK restaurant critic, that blue cheese has twice as many calories as other cheeses. This in a piece debating the merits of the calorie accounting on restaurant menus required by the new health reform law. We’re longtime subscribers, but I am really starting to wonder how long we can stay with the Foxes at The Wall Street Post.

Maybe the nutrition nazis were the useful idiots paid to hack climate scientists’ email to sow absurd doubt about the reality that we humans are shitting in our own nest. A little misinformation is a dangerous thing. Works for sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, trans fats and butter. Why not for global meltdown? Once you know people can be scared into soiling their adult Pampers over carbs, dupe them into denying a fishless future on the Omaha beachfront. Someone must believe there will be very fancy restaurants in hell. . . .

Now my shock meter must be broken, because the news that one in four kids in this country is subsisting on food stamps just didn’t surprise me. I was a little amazed that so many more retirees are having to go to food pantries to get by these days, given that they represent the one sector of our defiantly nonsocialist society that proudly benefits from sharing the wealth (which is a good thing, considering the price of cat fud is going up like everything else). The one thing that left my jaw dropping was the ugliness of the comments on the NYTimes lede story on how many people are now relying on government help for food. If you need any proof that this is not a “Christian country,” wade into that cesspool. The same sort who believe women should die rather than get an abortion, and would ban birth control if they could, are damning parents for producing too many mouths to feed. And that’s the least hateful reaction. At least some commenters noted that the map of the needy was darkest in the “red” states, the ones that elect the con men who talk up the culture wars and fiscally fuck the voters every time. Reminds me of that old saying: Give a conservative a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and you’ll never eat again. . . .

I never thought I would say this, but I really hope all the union-busting going on in the NYC restaurant world suffers epic fail. I always thought unions protected the weak and thwarted the strong — when I was hired by the NYTimes the first time, at 29 and with no college degree, I got less pay and benefits, because of Guild rules, than all the old gray ghosts with their proper credentials. But more and more we’re really paying the price for Addled Reagan’s fantasy of a disunited America. Airline pilots are living on food stamps and sleeping in lounges before reporting for work transporting hundreds of fellow travelers. Too many people in food service cannot afford to take a sick day, let alone see a doctor when they are oozing in agony, and now restaurateurs want to bust the last bastion of protection for them and us? I understand all the problems of an overprotected work force, but I put in five years on our co-op board and know that if you want to get rid of a lame employee, you can do it. It’s not easy, and it is far from pleasant. But it also makes the other workers better; ebbing tides prove all boats can sink. Whoever takes over Tavern on the Green or Cafe des Artistes could even use a union workforce as a selling point: If a chef spits in your food, you can be sure his/her hawker does not carry a virus. Which is so much more appetizing than having it your way to the ER.

When Bob encouraged me to tag along on his photo shoot at the Bronx Zoo, I headed off to the 2 train with visions of Arthur Avenue in my cranial sieve. And our great lunch plus provisioning was definitely vaut the journey. But the real reward was an aside from the PR guy waiting with us at the Madagascar! lemur exhibit, when I asked what the fascinating cat-like creatures eat besides the carved pumpkin they were fighting over just then. As he was talking, I noticed the signage that mentioned the tortoise in the exhibit also consumes “lemur feces.” Talk about nose to tail. Or Kopi Luwak. Then he (the PR guy) added that there’s a tree in the world that can only grow from a seed that has passed through an elephant’s digestive system. And that tree supports 250 other forms of life. It’s chilling until you think that this might be the best negation of Darwinism ever. Americans are consuming more crap than ever, thanks to a seriously compromised food system. Why can’t we evolve to eat shit and not die?

One of the most chilling chapters in Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” has the father and son discovering what is essentially a fallout shelter stocked with canned food. It resonates on about 15 levels, starting with futility. But I guess Costco missed the point, because it is gouging the Beckkk-crazed with a year’s supply of dehydrated food for one for $999, roughly a buck a day more than people taking the Hunger Challenge and trying to eat on food stamps are allowed. What’s funniest is the fatal flaw. In a devastated world with no supermarkets or infrastructure, where in the name of Dasani are you going to get enough water to turn powders into dinner? Better to buy a can opener and a few cases of Goya and leave them around for fictional characters to find.

Paul Krugman asked a smart question recently: What do people on the editorial pages of the WSJournal really believe? They regularly sign off on some seriously crazy-ass shit. And at the same time the paper can run, on the same day, two superb news stories defying all the illogic of the wackos. One was on the virus threatening the farmed salmon industry in Chile — eco end times — while the other was on how the very modest increase in food stamps ($80! a month for a family of four) is lifting all boats — $5 in spending by recipients generates $9.20 in economic activity, the USDA calculates. Facts may be stupid things, but they can be rather useful when you’re dealing with food issues.

And while I’m acting sober, this is one of the most profoundly sad pieces I have ever read, on what is happening to some Alaska natives as the world spins and the salmon disappear. Or, to reverse that, what is happening to the world and the salmon as the natives comes unmoored from nature. Odd how we are flipping off the planet suffering without understanding we are the ones doomed. Earth 1, dinosaurs 0.

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.