gastropoda

Everyone’s yammering that JP Morgan Chase losing a coupla billion at the dog track is a reason to rein in the too-big-to-fail casinos, so let’s hope the regulatory flashlight shines toward Big Food, too. I just read about a singer forced to tour while shitting/puking his guts out thanks to the great American combination of no health insurance and salmonella in supermarket sushi, and that was after I read about the finding that the listeria in cantaloupes that killed people in 28 states was caused by new owners of a farm deciding cleanliness was not next to profitability. If you’re seeing more op-eds and other blather about the danger from farmers’ markets and small producers, connect your own dots. Of course they want you to think a manageable flock of chickens eating what comes naturally next to the arugula fields is the equivalent of a bomb in a muslin’s underpants. Corporations are people. With a fiduciary responsibility to investors, not to customers.

Mme Ami had some good thoughts on the sorry state of old-line food writing as a career these days, but I thought she was most right in directing people toward more tangible ways to connect with the third-most essential element of life. So many MFK Wannabes just seem vacuous. Maybe if they did something, they could say something?

A lot of “Dining” sections went unremarked while I was busy and away, but I did save a note or two. The Trotter reprise was a surprise mostly because they ran the same photo as the last time they put him under the microscope, as if there were no permanent digital microfiche. But everything you need to know about the media today lies in the fact that the story actually said our President could not enjoy a last meal at the restaurant because that might associate him with the 1 percent. While the reporter had no qualms at all about boasting about eating there. Again.

And that disconnect helps explain why coverage of how the poors eat is so abysmal. Credit NPR for going to India to scope out how not-the-richest-country-in-the-world manages to feed its schoolkids on pennies a day. But it took the BBC to do a piece on hunger in Las Vegas that was devastating in its graphic descriptions of privation. Not long after I listened to it I was out with a group that included a writer working on a book on Depression eating and heard an anecdote he’d collected about a child back in the Thirties who confessed he had had no dinner because it was his brother’s turn to eat. Um? Guess what’s going on today in the shadow of the most over-the-top restaurants on the planet? But at least fish welfare is covered.

Meanwhile, major “news” outlets continue to print “be afraid, be very afraid” stories about all the germs on supermarket shopping carts. Without ever noting what remain the most bacteria-loaded dangers outside the toilets in the store: dollar bills — from the bums’ poop-encrusted bums to your hands, with many unwashed fingers in between. As I will note yet again, they don’t call it filthy lucre for nothing.

And this trend toward running readers’ inanities in old media has already gone too far. Tip of the week in another waste of trees was jaw-dropping: If you don’t have fresh tomatoes in winter, keep a can of diced handy — for your salad. Because nothing is more satisfying than red mush on your good lettuce.

I keep seeing the union rat in front of food establishments lately and am glad to see some push-back against the race to the bottom, the endless attempts to make workers give up more and more for greedy overlords. If even cashiers have no money after paying for their own insurance and pensions, who is going to buy the groceries? And while I don’t want to jump to judgment on seeing chefs accused in lawsuits of cheating employees, I do keep wondering why the Wage Theft Prevention Act was even needed. Wasn’t that guy at the Last Supper all about “thou shalt not steal”?

One of my friends-through-Twitter has been back-and-forthing about how soon it will be until we see ramps on menus, and I feel even sadder about being shortchanged of winter. Already green garlic is in Greenmarkets, and it’s way too soon (I only recently finished off the last of Keith’s Farm’s amazing hard-neck cloves). At this rate we’ll be through with pumpkins by June. The cherry blossoms are already in full bloom in Washington, I saw geese for the first time among the ducks over in The Pool in Central Park and all the suddenly-trusted climate experts are warning mosquitos will be rampaging within the month. All of it makes me think humans were smarter in the age of mythology, when the seasons could be rationalized and so were respected. The explanation of winter is my favorite, how the ruler of the underworld spirited away Persephone/Proserpina and made her stay half the year for eating six pomegranate seeds while, as Kate McGarrigle lyrically put it, her mother, the goddess of agriculture, “punished the Earth” and “turned every field into stone.” Millenniums ago people understood the world needed a respite. With all the information available to us, we still think we can eat pomegranates all year and not pay a price. No joke.

Finally, my compliments to the typist, but overindulgence in sugar, especially by the subsidized poors, is not “the biggest public health challenge facing the developed world.” That would be denial of climate change as the population keeps growing (and as the kkkrazies try to outlaw birth control). Crops all over the stressed world are being wiped out by drought and floods, hurricanes and tsunamis, freak ice storms and aberrant warm winters. I’ll even list nuclear meltdowns, because it’s 30-some years since the push-back against that energy source, and still we’re vulnerable. (I’ll throw in oil spills for the same reason.) You won’t hear it put this way, but we’re simply destroying our own habitat while refusing to acknowledge the planet will still be here, evolving with sugar cane, long after obese and diabetic humans have gone the way of pterodactyls. I’d also believe less in string-pullers if this screed hadn’t targeted the poorest people in this country. A cake a day was antidepressant for my destitute family; deprivation could equal cruelty if sugar got swept away along with HFCS. If you want to regulate the white stuff, please say you mean the little snots on Carnegie Hill will have no access to cupcakes at any price. Otherwise it’s clear sugar is not the only thing that can be spun.

I tuned in on the Twitter just enough to see potpie was served at some Oscar party where the “stars” gathered. Only one question: Why the fuck? Potpie is one of the most ill-conceived things ever pulled out of an oven: Not only is it underseasoned soup with a crust, the soup is always hot enough to melt the spoon, so you spend half the encounter knowing the thin top is getting soggy while the bottom is bubbling into boring. But I guess slopping it out makes sense — it’s one of those dishes both the super-wealthy and death-row convicts seem to value with their undeveloped palates. Maybe if foie gras were relabeled liverbest they’d go for it.

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.