gastropoda

No wonder my 200 shares of stock in the hometown paper are now worth about one copy of the weekday edition. On the day of the “Superball,” as a flack dubbed it (I hope intentionally), the top recipe for snacks linked on the home page was for chicken wings. While all I’d heard mentioned on the Twitter and in real life in the whole week beforehand was Momofuku’s pork bo ssam. Having worked there twice, I really hope there’s not still an indebted-to-Columbia U grad slaving away as an intern dredging up cliches. Because algorithms would do the work for free.

I never watch “Top Chef” unless on assignment, but I do read and talk to people. And I’m amazed at how many times it’s been able to jump the shark. If he ever comes back, Jesus deserves a competitive cooking show.

I did insist on Momofuku Ssam for lunch with a friend on my big day, and something else struck me. She and I have been connecting midday for probably 25 years; usually she was the one with the expense account, but I did have my 46 long months with Pinch bucks. When she paid the check on this occasion, and out of her own pocket, she tipped 20 percent on the after-tax tab, which made me realize one more thing that’s been lost in the race to the bottom in publishing. Women have such a terrible reputation as tippers, but today you can point the fingers up the ladder to executives unwilling to pay fees, let alone expenses. Once upon a time, a rising tide really did lift all lunch ships.

Wish I could say I was thrilled to learn access to good food is not what’s holding back Americans without cushy jobs and lots o’ lucre from cooking and eating well. But my unneutered-steer-manure detector definitely went off when I went looking for the methodology on the study. And if I read right, the 1,500 happy respondents were recruited online or by email, then interviewed by landline or mobile. I know the Kkkrazies are busy persuading the not-quite-poors that the serious poors own too many appliances, and have too much gout, to be hungry. But cripes. How many have internet access at home or time to hit the library?

I’ll always think the Big O’s hugest accomplishment has been kicking over the rock and exposing the grubs underneath. The saner he sounds, the wackier the wingnuts look. Now some cretin wants to ban fetuses in food. And why am I certain said cretin had eggs for breakfast?

Relatedly, I’ve long argued that journalism went down the tubes, and not the ones Al Gore invented, once it became a profession for the elite rather than a job open to a college dropout like me who learned by doing. And nothing made that clearer than the sad tale of the pea & the princesses (or, more likely, princes) down to the Taj Sulzberger, whose refined sensibilities are so refined they simply cannot work amid the aromas of meat cooked by those lowly tradesmen in the lobby. They’re apparently actually allowed to work from home while the ventilation is tweaked. In a just world, a Subway franchise would take up residence there; nothing smells more foul to me than that fake yeast. But then they would probably think it smelled like Team America.

And not to get too bogged down in the race to the bottom at a place where I was glad to have worked twice (seeing sausage made does give you insight), but I almost wonder if Dash wasn’t just providing cover for the public editor’s WTF. His smashed beans and lard definition were forgotten once the ugly truth was revealed: Reporters no longer put the truth first. The best reaction I’ve seen so far reaches farther back in time than I understood, since I trace the rot to the Reagan years (“first they came for the air traffic controllers and we said nothing”). That was back when Pinch padded the newsroom in stocking feet, treating us as if we were serfs hunched over keyboards in his den. I know I’ve recounted this many times, but one of the tipping points that tilted me out of that newsroom and into restaurant school* was having an editor storm the desk on deadline and bellow: “We can’t run this. It makes Washington sound like Calcutta.” Up until that very late night, I had always believed journalists operated without considering fear or favor. But if a story about soft-hearted Capitol Hill staffers passing out sandwiches to the homeless in the nation’s seat of power was so dangerous, what else had to be skewed? Whitewater/Coke Can/Yellowcake, here we come . . .

I always feel guilty dragging Murdoch’s WSJournal back to bed along with the hometown paper most mornings, so I’ll blame my consort for insisting we need it as a counterweight. And it does some things really well. Like a feature the other day on how your jawbone’s connected to your lifeline — undiagnosed and untreated gum and tooth disease can kill you. Which got me wondering, again, why dental insurance is sold separately from health insurance, and why it’s so shitty. Alert Blue Cross: Your piehole is a portal.

Just wondering: How desperate for cash/credit would you need to be to take on the job of wrapping text around “Deen Crisco’s” recipes? Or even subcontracting it out? I guess this is proof that industrial pork is the best grease for a slippery slope.

Naturally it’s behind the paywall, but the New Yorker has a great feature this week on the richest woman in India, who made all those rupees developing drugs. One graf near the end is worth the price of the issue: Her company has been working on the “holy grail” for Big Pharma, which would be oral insulin in a processed-crap world where everyone is developing diabetes (50 million in India alone). And Biocon came close until the patients who were given placebos in trials improved because they wanted to impress their doctors. “Suddenly, their control group of diabetics had started exercising and eating better.” Message? Diabetes is both preventable and curable senza drugs. Maybe it’s time for Occupy the Pharmacies. Walk away from the Lipitor. And eat beans.

I do feel seriously bad for everyone trying to maintain a livelihood in the Gulf of Oil these days. But I have to say that I saw a promo Tweet for shrimp, touting them as fat-free, and could only think: Not with added BP they aren’t . . .

I read the WSJournal’s cheery report on the boom in fast-food deliveries in China and just envisioned a worse “Wall-E.” Isn’t getting the diabetes diet to consumers quicker, with no effort, only going to make humans fatter and more unhealthy? Isn’t the use of millions and millions of motorbikes just going to mean more pollution in a country where the air is already pretty near apocalyptic? And I don’t know which detail was more chilling, that two-thirds of McD’s sales in this country come from drive-throughs or that overlords of the evil empire are salivating at the prospect of web orders enabling them to shut down call centers (a k a places where actual humans earn money). Good move in a 99% world. Maybe next they get rid of the workers who pack the crap into the special compartments on the motorbikes. And then ask Henry Ford why they need to move to Pandora.

I’ve been rather sadly entertained by the kale kerfuffle, not least because the wires and the blogs were in a lather at least a week before it became news fit to print. But mostly I think we’ve seen this movie before — you start out bashing teh gays and then head for the hippies. And it’s not a game of chicken.

If the hometown paper had a microgram of self-awareness it would put Panchito on hiatus till next November, or maybe just let him natter on about beer snacks and the harmless characters America might wanna eat them with. As it is, too many readers remember the sweaty bar towel the Chimp snapped across his ass. . .

Given that he wanted to bring his table cred to the column, though, I wonder if he noted that food commercials are held to a pretty high standard. You can’t use shaving cream for whipped cream, or mashed potatoes for ice cream, to avoid having your product melt under hot lights. You can’t claim your cereal is more nutritious than your rival’s unless it actually is. Which makes me think maybe pizza morphing into a vegetable is an unhealthier start than we realized. Food is this close to being declared a citizen.

Until Mayor Billionsberg showed his true-green(back) colors with Occupy Wall Street, I pretty much tuned out all the complaints that he had become the city’s nanny. But the other day we were in a crap-ass cafe for a quick lunch that was arriving slowly when I noticed how many signs are now required on the wall. Of course there is the once-brilliant, now-muddled choking poster. And the No Smoking warning. And the “pregnant women who drink ate so stupid they must be shamed.” But there was also a big scary poster on the risks of food allergies. A notice on the location of the CPR kit. Etc. By the time our dispiriting food arrived, I actually started to worry when a couple came in with two little kids, one of whom they strapped into the grimy communal highchair. Had no one warned them what might happen if the chair tipped over or the strap was too tight or the tray table had peanuts on it? It all reminds me of that old Joe Jackson song about how “everything gives you cancer” — fear is immobilizing. How did we ever eat out before we were warned? On the plus side, though: If a pregnant woman had too many margaritas and her companion started choking her, everyone would know just what to do. Start smoking.