gastropoda

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.

It’s starting to feel like the summer of 2001 all over again, but instead of shark attacks and hoof-and-mouth disease we have botulism and hoof-and-mouth disease. Oddly, everyone seems about as worked up over the fatal toxin as they were over Osama the last go-round. Two big producers issue recalls, and stores apparently keep stocking those cans of chili topping for hot dogs. The compassionate thinking must be that anyone eating canned green beans this glorious time of year deserves to get poisoned. Or is it just that everyone knows the FDA is doing a heckuva job?