gastropoda

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.

A blogger at the Houston Chronicle who was allowed to scoop up some White House holiday crumbs had the right reaction to a significantly sugary creation at the media fete this year: What the holy hell was it? I would say that if it’s not a cry for help it must be evidence of torture. Either the poor pastry Fredo is getting into the bourbon his boss claims to have given up, or he really needs Mrs. Chimp to share her Xanax. If there is an allah, ghosts of Christmas are running wild in that mansion.

Mission must really be accomplished for the too-rich-to-ever-spend-it-all in this country. Cafe Gray, I read in a paper that knows from gazillionaires, is charging $500 a head, grownup or human larva’s, for Thanksgiving dinner and distractions during the Macy’s parade. And those are the cheap seats — the 12-chair chef’s table in the kitchen that day is going for 10 grand. And the entire exercise in unseemliness is reportedly sold out. Obviously, the tough go to war. The profiteers go to a shopping mall.

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.

Just back from Eutopia, I’m having a hard time adjusting to life in a country where mojito is now a gum flavor and cheese is a security risk.

But getting off the island made me really understand why passports have gotten tougher to come by and why the dollar is now worth a fistful of pesos. It keeps Americans from being exposed to for-the-people government, of which my favorite example was in the village in Languedoc where we stayed with a friend who said any resident giving a party can borrow municipal chairs and tables for nothing more than a $300 deposit. Her uncle had done just that for a political fete, and it was almost surreal to sit in the courtyard of her centuries-old family compound and watch as two hunky firemen drove in afterward and efficiently loaded everything onto a truck to return to City Hall without expecting even a tip — talk about tax dollars at work. The irony is that the same friend had informed me, when I asked what her family did for Bastille Day: “We’re aristocrats. We don’t celebrate.” Now I wonder if it will take 200-some years for equality let alone liberte to come to this country. Meantime, we maybe should all stock up on brioche.