gastropoda

I’ve been researching a story where references to things like reindeer meat at Christmastime keep popping up, so I wasn’t too surprised to see bunnies hopping down the Dining trail just before Easter. As I Tweeted, I don’t think Americans will ever be able to face their food in the fur. But the piece had almost as big a disconnect as Baccarat flutes in the age of dollar-store glassware. I can still hear the horror when Michael Moore dared to present Flint residents raising rabbits as food for cash. Now that old movie looks like the chronicle of America foretold. Still, I sided with the killers in this piece, at least looking at the cover photo over cappuccino at the kitchen counter with my consort. As I reminded him, rabbits may look cute, but watch out. I’ll never forget the bloody mayhem Bob provoked in Piemonte while shooting a special breed of rodents in the Slow Food ark — the poor farmer did as he was told and put the huge rabbit on his lap for the photo, and the tame thing shredded his forearms with its back paws. Those suckers are Glenn Close compared to your average chicken. Boil away.

Hellmann’s is the Rachael of the processed food world — its name is 98 percent likely to be misspelled every time. It’s equally good at catapulting the propaganda, too, garnering huge publicity merely for switching to “cage-free” eggs in one of its several lines of mayonnaise. Not to be all unappreciative or anything, but wouldn’t it send more of a message to save up a few extra million dozen until you can promote a switchover for the non-lite stuff? Otherwise, clean-conscience eggs are squandered in fud Michael Pollan would not advocate eating. But at least it’s not as silly as Chipotle hyping its change to “vegan chicken” for its burritos. I mean, really — those poor birds are sentenced to live without natural worms in their diet, only to wind up as mega-meals for meat eaters? Why not just keep them gluten-free and wrap them up in flour tortillas?

I am anything but soft-headed when it comes to foie gras, but I have to admit Bob Herbert’s column on the exploitation of the farmworkers who make it possible was disturbing. I can never understand why animal rights activists neglect the human kind. Even more mystifying is why fools who don’t know people are apparently dying from force-feeding at Guantanamo are all worked up about . . . dead fish. I guess salmon need their dignity even in piscine heaven, because there’s some brouhaha over Pike Place Market stuntmen throwing them at a veterinarians’ convention. Message to idiots: Stick a cod in your pie hole and be done with it.

My cranky cheesemonger friend forwarded me the release touting Costco’s caving to the foie gras nutcases and I laughed it off as ridiculous grandstanding — how many 50-lobe packs of the stuff could the chain possibly be selling? More important, foie gras really is not a food that ever belonged in big box stores; if it did, Smithfield would be on it like stink on hog shit. But my beleaguered friend has made me see the error of my thinking. Once the most powerful outlets give in to the crazies, the crazies will come after the weaker ones. And this is like the proverbial fight between two elephants — the grass getting stomped is the producer. So far, fattening livers is still perfectly legal. But this is a country where they shoot abortionists, don’t they?

Call this “when the dew is on the tarte Tatin.” In an unnerving week for food phrasing, I saw pate goose. And oxtail beef. And I got a propaganda-catapulting email wondering if I knew quinoa was a plant product (as opposed to what, a funeral wail?) But on the serious side, I wonder if the weird wording of “pate goose” had anything to do with fear of foie gras — you can’t say anything these days without setting off the liver fascists. But I do have to admit I’m even more than normally astonished that a New York City councilman would take up the faux foie cause when kids are getting beaten to death in their foster homes and building inspectors are apparently taking bribes and cranes are falling and hungry old homebound people are getting shafted. Sure, raise our property taxes to send more inspectors out to be sure the hyper-rich can’t have an indulgence. Now that Chicago has given up the ghost of goose pate, do we really want to be the second city?

What’s left to say about the Ping-Pong ball shot straight into the CEO’s office at Dunkin Do Nots? I guess “foie gras.” How’s that Chicago crackdown going? Oh. Right. So well that the original Saucier’s Apprentice jetted straight off to wallow in the resurgence there now that Prohibition has nearly ended. It almost restores your faith in America. Idiots may pull ads when lunatics insist. But banning an indulgence just ramps up the demand. (Or, take away gin, birth a mob.) I’ve only wrangled the raw Hitchens-esque livers once in my cooking life, but even I was ready to run to my nearest dealer to get a couple of lobes to poach in duck stock after reading the Journal. Imagine the stampede if they outlawed felafel in a keffiyeh-print napkin under an anchor baby’s butt.

Maybe I finally have to agree foie gras should be banned. No duck or goose should ever have to give up its bloated liver for a promotional stunt like the one Burger Pretender was briefly reported to be running. Thanks to my new addiction, I heard marketing geniuses had cooked up a fecal patty topped with foie gras plus blue cheese (activists should shut the chain down for that dairy offense against taste alone). The too-perfectly named European blog of People for the Harassment of Carnivores (Fish & Chimps) extracted a strange denial, but not before the Wonker-Outer noted that pricing the thing at 85 pounds was brilliant because it sent a quality message so strong not a single one ever needed to be sold. And now that the behavioral economists’ reasoning has been exposed, can we please declare a total media blackout on $1,000 omelets and other gold-plated bullshit?

And speaking of rice rationing, call me cynical, but I’m starting to wonder if all the food shortages are not being pumped up by Big Food just to make genetically modified crops more inevitable. None of this happened overnight, but it’s being covered like a hurricane. And so that ridiculousness of People for the Harassment of Carnivores’ offering a reward for the development of in vitro beef got way more press than it warranted. I remember the international media ejaculation over the first test tube baby and suspect that if they manage to replicate the “miracle” with meat they’ll give it a name. Which of course will bring everything full circle, judging by the cute-animal brochure a vegan handed me at the Greenmarket. One quote: “If I knew you, I wouldn’t eat you.” I guess that’s why cannibals have no friends. And MoDo is bitter.

In other fast food “news,” KFC is wallowing in tons of press for switching to grilling from frying. A Philadelphia friend said the headline in his tab was “What the cluck?” And that would apply as well to the group suing the company for allegedly raising a cancer risk (apparently we now know what wiped out the dinosaur grillers: charcoal). Another friend sent me a release on it, noting that the benevolent “concerned physicians” name is really just a front for animal rights crazies. To which I have to say: If your cause is so noble, come out and fight like real doctors. You might actually win. The WSJournal just ran a good story on the pork crisis unfolding in Britain as hog farmers’ expenses have gone up while income has dropped. Although the key graf was buried on the jump, it’s clear that the trouble began when the government started banning cruelty on factory farms. Raising bacon humanely does cost more. But then hell is forever, and pork should never be cheaper than rice. Let alone chicken.

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.

Years ago there was a spittle-flecked crazy broad who would stand in front of Zabar’s with blowups of really gross porn and rail about women being exploited. I guess Ms. Introspective went off and cloned herself, because Fairway is now plagued by nutcases all wrought up and frothing about foie gras. At least they spare us the shots of splayed webs, but I always wonder why they give the store next door a pass. And now I know whose welfare they are truly worried about: On a 23-degree Sunday with winds whipping, not one of the livertarians was anywhere to be seen. Why do I have visions of Cheetos gavage in a warm living room?

Talk about a confederacy of dunces — the great WSJ story on how horses are suffering as the economy goes to hell is a telling example of what happens when the Chimp’s incompetence meets the cretinism of bleeding-heart airheads. Letting high-maintenance animals starve because the slaughterhouses have been shut down is not exactly enforcing their rights. There are worse things than butchering Trigger for dinner.

If there could be verbal gavage, every soft-headed opponent of foie gras would be forced to read the WSJ’s amazing piece on piglet castration. I still feel guilty about the gap between my Siamese’s back legs, and he at least was knocked out before we dealt with the feline version of “boar taint.” Now I know about 50 million “mostly unanesthetized” piglets are de-nutted in this country alone every year, primarily to keep the meat from tasting funky. And to me that makes overfeeding look like Thanksgiving. The story said animal rights activists have forced Norway to ban the procedure by 2009, and of course producers there are bitching and producers elsewhere are nervous. And consumers should be queasy as well — the solution being pushed is, naturally, a vaccine that would do the castrating. But hey, what’s one more hormone in the food supply when ducks are gorging?

One more reason I’m going to miss the WSJournal: Its story on “faux gras” was a typical just-the-facts masterwork in covering the general silliness that ensues when the government gets all up in your food. I learned that there are now foie speakeasies in Chicago (and we all know how well banning booze worked) and that there are more and more substitutions (run, chickens, run — but who will save the soybeans?) My one wingnut friend wants to blame those goldurn lib’rls for this insane turn of fatty events. But even I cannot believe duck livers could ever wind up with the sacred status of human embryos. And it could get worse, if Rupert succeeds according to pattern in whipping up the base. You can forget about eating an unborn chicken for breakfast over those enlightening pages ever again.