gastropoda

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.

I wrote this over to the Twitter, but it’s amusing to see stories touting the accessibility of Eleven Madison Park’s cookbook that all run the same recipe: the granola. And I did not write this, but the macaron trend is officially past its sell-by date when Sur La Table is hawking ornaments shaped like them. Which would, however, be less cheesy on your pagan tree than the “chef” ornaments in the form of jacketed pigs. Even more WTF was the slinger in the Sunday papers emblazoned “give thanks this Veterans Day — receive these valuable coupons,” for the likes of Hormel and Hungry Man and Duncan Hines. Why not just say: “Support the troops: Buy processed crap”?

Time to start the generational alphabet over and jump to D, for doomed. Some study allegedly found crap, crap and more crap ranked highest among “Americans ages 8 to 24.” Really, they could do no better than Cheerios for top cereal in an age when the oat aisle is all “natural,” all the time? Hershey’s for chocolate candy bars? And Sprite? Sprite? When was the last time that name was heard in a school? At least the study revealed its methodology: conducted online. Knowing how many wingnut polls are skewed once sane people start weighing in, I can only think again of that classic dog cartoon: On the internet, no one knows you’re a marketer.

As all this nattering indicates, I’ve decided all food may never be local but it is already political. Too much is happening lately that overlaps the two worlds everyone always pretended were not entwined. And two stories illustrate this well. Salmonella has now been found in pine nuts, used to make pesto. And a farm in Nevada was raided during one of its field-to-fork dinners. The company that didn’t give a crap (or, more likely, contributed crap) to the pesto will undoubtedly walk away clean; it can point more than 10 fingers to lax enforcement just as the cantaloupe killers appear to be doing. But every small farmer looking for any way to make a few more pennies has to feel a chill over bureaucratic overreach. Someone joked on Twitter that starting #Occupypasture “might lead to regrettable romanticism.” But he was on his way to real change. The fact that pastures are no longer full of manure — while estuaries and water tables are — says everything you need to know about modern agriculture. As the sign said, shit is fucked up and bullshit.

And Jonathan Swift must be very pleased he is not alive these days. Satire is nearly impossible in an age when “eat the rich” is taken as a serious threat. (I mean, come on — there’s no meat on the women, and the men are all gross chin fat.) How would he even deal with what’s happening on farms across America? Thanks to reactionary crackdowns on illegal immigration, tomatoes are rotting in the fields of Alabama, the apple orchards in Washington State are reeking of fermentation and even the tree testicles in California are dropping for lack of avocado harvesters. But now the “authorities” have come up with a solution: Put convicts to work in the fields. So a state can conceivably contract with a private prison to lock up immigrants and then turn right around and bus them to the jobs they were doing before big money corrupted democracy. But now taxpayers will cover the housing and health care. Somewhere Anne Frank is quailing. . .

I acknowledge that we’re living in interesting times, as the Chinese curse goes, but it’s still amazing how little we know in the most amazing age of shared information in all of human history. Thanks to my consort, I had lunch the other day with a woman who knows from Chile and who mentioned just a few of the “Darwin’s Nightmare” things she’s seeing there: pesticides on northward-bound fruits and vegetables overused to the point of poisoning farmworkers, plus farmed salmon pumped with 700 times the antibiotics even the free-dosing Norwegians are using. Which made me wonder about the grapes transformed into the sauvignon blancs I love. Guess I shouldn’t have asked — there’s a reason why they’re cheap. (And why the industry is flying so many writers down to get snockered and snookered [excuse me: wined and dined]). But there’s always a pony to be found in the heap o’ manure: All this made me not at all surprised to read that wild salmon in the Pacific Northwest are now infected by a virus thanks to their penned-up cousins bound for supermarkets everywhere. Americans wanted chicken of the sea. And have they ever gotten Perdue with scales.