gastropoda

I like clean water and nonlethal drugs too much to want the government totally off everyone’s back. But the more the short-term bosses of us muck with diet regulations for our own good, the more nervous I get. I used to live on Coca-Cola but now have one maybe every couple of years, so a tax on the stuff would not be a biggie. But letting Tab off the hook is the bureaucratic equivalent of empty calories. I always thought there was something to the studies that found people who drink diet sodas tend to eat far more because their appestats never get the “full-up” signal. Given that coffee and tea would not be covered by this silliness even though they can rival Pepsi when sweetened, it’s a slippery slope to taxing french fries and letting the 8,000-calorie taco “salad” slide. Where there’s a law, there’s a loophole.

I guess the wingnuts are right. We are now living in a world where up is down and recession is prosperity. How else to explain the realities that the Thai prime minister was ordered to resign for having a cooking show and one candidate for the leader of the Land of the Free is appearing on a cooking show? Maybe he realizes his soulmate is going to fire the White House chef and he’ll need some yummo recipes. The ones his junkie wife passed off as her own. Shouldn’t a wannabe war president have bigger ribs to grill?

Who needs terrorists when we have the FDA? Now there’s salmonella in raw tomatoes. In 16 states. I’m notoriously bad at math, but I think that’s close to a third of the country? The NYTimes helpfully points out that the problem is with “raw, uncooked tomatoes.” Whatever that means, it is clear that whoever catapults the propaganda for the fruit eaten as a vegetable has been super-careful to manage the message. Rather than admitting most of the cottonballs being eaten out of season are at risk, every story dutifully reports the types considered safe. I know I’m sounding beyond monotonous, but can someone remind me why we are spending $500,000 a minute in Iraq when the bigger threat is a gutted agency charged with overseeing so much of the “homeland” food supply? And to think idiots worry about eggs anymore. Of course, sentient minds might wonder why the FDA is wrestling with what is clearly a USDA problem, but that might be unpatriotic. Maybe Obama can set up a new agency regulating only arugula.

An email with “hell has frozen over” in the subject line could not have been a more appropriate arrival in the same week one of the more insightful reviews was published under a byline old gray ladies probably would not recognize. I guess we will not be eating well anymore. Unless we do it at places like The New French, which really struck me both times as being the closest thing New York has to Le Comptoir in Paris. We are living in interesting times with food, and an analytical mind is as good as 40 years of eating for a living. Of course, the same was true 25 years ago this year, but the coven was much nastier and more insular back then. All that said, though, I have to admit I will never forget my first day back at the NYTimes after 15 years of eating for a living on my own. I later learned that Atexian instant messages were bouncing all around the Style department wondering “Who is that?” but only one person stood up, strode over, introduced herself and welcomed me warmly. Obviously she knows there are limitless second acts in American lives. Big fist bump to her.

Speaking of flacks, I kept hearing that stupid country song, “You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille,” while scanning the e-release on how the snootiest of British food purveyors is finally opening an outlet in the United Colonies. Somehow mustard priced like caviar sounds like “with four hungry babies and the crops in the field.” Already I’ve found Zabar’s has replaced the wondrous fresh lasagne sheets from Italy with clunky, gummy stuff made closer to home, apparently for price reasons. Even for those of us fortunate to love subways more than gas fumes, this is now officially a populace under de facto rationing. And a $24 jar of jam sounds as reasonable as a $175 burger.

Of course there’s ingredient abuse and then there’s ingredient abuse. I generally ignore the foie gras whack jobs outside Fairway, but next time I pass them I hope to be packing a few printouts of photos and stories on force-feeding at Guantanamo. It’s one thing to shove corn down the throat of an organism genetically programmed to gorge before migrating and another altogether to snake yards of rubber tubing up the nose and into the stomach of a helpless guy in an unlawful prison. Ensure sounds nasty enough, but true torture would be having it forced upon you “Titicut Follies”-style while strapped into a “restraints chair.” Someone needs to remind PETA that humans are animals, too, and this is a long, long, long way from ethical. Not to be uncharacteristically flip, but ducks at least get to be organ donors.

Anyone still baffled by how we wound up with that buffoon jackassing  across Africa has only to consider the coverage of the largest meat recall in American history. The message most clearly disseminated to a “Top Chef”-stupefied audience is that it’s all about animal abuse, that the bleeding hearts won. The reality that waterboarding was needed to force seriously sick cattle onto their feet to pass “inspection” is consistently glossed over, especially with the reassuring line in every story that “no illnesses have been reported” by consumers. As if mad cow disease sets in as fast as the salmonella squitters. But rest easy: Most of the beef has already been eaten. I have to laugh every time I hear a story on the Olympics boasting that we’re going to keep our prize athletes healthy — we’re going to ship American food to China. Yeah, right. I don’t know about the USDA, but the FDA’s budget for a full year is less than we squander in Iraq in one  week. Good thing we got the government off the industry’s back. . . .

My friend the aristocrat who has traded homelands after 20-some years says she feels “like I left a banana republic for a Feydeau play.” Even the cheese eaters, though, would never be so silly as to think food stamps should be left out of a “stimulus package” for an economy devastated by greed. After all, what is the one thing you can do with government coupons? Spend them. At the very least our own surrender monkeys could have added wine stamps for the middle class.

Judging by a survey that turned up in my email one morning, Michael Pollan has his work cut out for him in trying to persuade Americans to eat primarily from the perimeter of supermarkets. Of the top 10 sales categories, only milk, bread and eggs are showcased in the healthful real estate. Cereal, cookies, canned soup, chocolate candy and potato chips were the other “foods” on the list, and I just read that and heard Fat Albert hey-hey-heying his way toward the deli. Why do I suspect cloned meat is the least of the threats to the food chain?

If you like eggs, though, you might want to think about the latest installment in the saga of how foie gras is making certain idiots batshit insane. The food world’s equivalents of the right-to-birth crazies are now talking about petitioning the USDA to declare lusciously fat livers unsafe to eat. Their faux concern is exquisitely timed, just as Eric Schlosser has highlighted how humans continue to be obscenely abused for reprehensibly cheap burgers. It just makes it patently clear how badly these nutcases with no lives want to shove their noses in my plate. No wonder some days it seems we have never evolved out of Eden and that goddamn apple.

On the bright side, all government agencies are apparently so under siege that the chances of foie gras even moving onto the agenda are about as high as bananas all around in the Middle East from the Chimp and his ivory-tickling enabler. The very credible report just issued on the FDA was enough to give any sentient being the E. coli squitters: no money, no computers, no coherence, but more scary food imported and grown and distributed every day. No wonder the nutrition nazis are feeling emboldened enough to propose limiting sodium in processed foods. Everybody knows that’s going nowhere in the age of Big Food and osteoporotic government. Salt on your own private plate would be banned first.

Eberhard Muller has had my vote ever since the summer day I trekked out to the family farm with a bunch of chefs and saw the “village in Texas missing an idiot” bumper sticker on his truck. But his and his wife Paulette Satur’s beat-back against Immigration overreaching makes him look even more like a true American patriot in a country unwilling to feed itself through its natural-born labor. With Halliburton busily building private prisons, this German emigre clearly knows that first they come for the farmhands. . . . The NYT played the story well enough that you could almost forgive them for giving the Jodiator front-page real estate on one of the hoarier campaign “stories,” rife with cones and corn dogs. But then they had to go and screw it up in the slide show by referring to one of the action hero’s “popular” clients as Union Street Cafe.

Given that her husband repeatedly flat-out lies about trivia like torture, it should not be so crazy-making that Mrs. Chimp continues to prevaricate away about cookies. Sure, she can tell the Gullible Times she doesn’t touch dough, but the Google doesn’t dissemble. Old campaign BS fed to the country doesn’t disappear just because simian wranglers need a new distraction. It figures that her famous recipe had cowboy in the title. They should have called the fake cookies compassionate. Or conservative. And made them with s-chips.

Give the Chimp points for timing. He could not have chosen a better week to veto more health insurance for kids, just as a huge burger producer had to actually shut down for good because there was so much shit in so much of its meat. And who would be most likely to be eating cheap frozen beef, and most at risk of getting mortally sick? The same kids he thinks can simply go to the emergency room. For the record, my recent seven hours at St. Vincent’s cost $2,386. Multiply that by 3.4 million  and imagine how many federal inspectors it could send into slaughterhouses. The torture never ends with this sociopath.

Once again, I have to thank Islamochrist that crooks and liars installed the first CEO president (or was he supposed to be the first MBA?) I went to buy another nearly quart-size jar of Maille’s Dijon mustard and it cost $1.50 more than the last one, just a few months ago. Talk about feeling like an American in Paris. Now we can’t even get a taste of Eutopia without paying a premium, and it’s only gonna get worse. We’ll be priced out of extraordinary olive oil, Parmigiano, balsamic vinegar, great olives, Maldon salt, Calvados — everything, come to think of it, that King George has never experienced for all his money and opportunity. Merde, as they say — even the stoned wheat crackers from Canada are going to cost like Carr’s. I’m all for eating locally, but I never thought it would be rammed down my throat by a government that couldn’t shoot straight.

Another party, at a new restaurant, left an indelible image. They were serving whole roasted (and stuffed) suckling pigs, sliced to order in the center of the dining room. Given that the chef is French and a tete is just a tete, the head of each little guy was displayed right on the carving board under the heat lamps, complete with either grin or grimace, depending on how each had gone off to curse its maker. And the second one I saw whacked off was so fresh from the oven its ears were literally steaming. It reminded me of those brains my consort once ordered in France, the ones that, when the waiter whisked off the silver dome, were actually quivering. Even Bob hesitated to slice into them as he said, “They’re still thinking.”