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.
Looks as if the fauxposé of cookbook “ghostwriters” is birthing zombies. The argument just won’t end. But I do wish the original had touched on a rather fascinating ethical issue: ghosts reviewing ghosts. Can you judge an “opus” fairly if you lost out on the gig as collaborator? And would your editor/readers ever be the wiser?
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.
And while I’m increasingly skeptical of the one respectable Murdoch outlet in the world, I did like the front-page story on how adult children of McDonald’s franchisees are pushing for lucrative changes, like staying open later, accepting credit cards, offering free WiFi. Talk about attracting a new generation by listening to that same generation. Imagine if newspapers had the same idea. Instead, they make me think of the Henry Ford quote that’s been bouncing around the Twitter lately: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” And even that vision is not as limited as paywalls around soufflé recipes.
More and more I feel as if I get up on Sunday to find myself back in the late Eighties/early Nineties. A certain slinger just ran a recipe calling for skinless chicken breasts, nonfat milk, low-sodium chicken broth and phyllo dough rather than pie crust. And called it “healthier pot pie” at 615 calories a serving. Trust me: No one who wants to eat a potpie is going to invest time in it rather than nuking a Swanson’s. And anyone who might would just say the hell with it on breaking through toasted toilet tissue to get to the glop within.
Very glad I took my lazy time processing my thoughts on the war story of the “veteran” vegetarian (“nearly lifelong” wouldn’t sound as ruff-and-tuff a struggle at 30ish, I guess). So many other blogs/sites/commenters have laid into the parochialism, condescension and general cluelessness on full display under the most idiotic graphic. What I’m savoring is how it took a silly food story to expose just how under-qualified Dash, Son of Pinch really is for that huge job in an age when no one else invests in standard coverage of “real America.” Way back when, I learned there’s a reason Madame X was hesitant to fall for pitches from correspondents aside from Johnny Rotten: Very few who had not invested the time and forkwork in developing expertise off the “serious news” beat could deliver. Lots of us do it, but food writing is not women’s work. Some heavy lifting is required — if you don’t know it all, you have to find it out.* Over to the national desk they’re probably fine with hiring stringers and throwing emergency ermine over the emperor’s spawn.* But eatin’ and drinkin’ and watching fud teevee is not much to draw on when you get a tossed-off salad of under-reporting and over-padding. You don’t have time to see all the odes to KCMO as the next city destined to conquer stockyard palates. So you go to press with the embarrassment you have, not the one you wish you could kill.
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 . . .
One of the many reasons I’ve surrendered my life to the Twitter is that it can be so useful for recommendations. When I was looking for a liquid option near Grand Central to meet a friend waitin’ on a train, I was happy to see one suggestion twice: the lobby bar at the Roosevelt Hotel, which was touted as right out of “Mad Men.” The bad news: It was full of lumbering ad-duped heartlanders because it was Friday night. The good news: It was straight out of “Mad Men” — we two women were ignored after ordering our first glasses of wine and actually had to flag down the manager to acquire our seconds. At least we didn’t have to report when our last periods were to be considered for secretarial jobs . . .
And I always hate getting suckered into manufactured debates, but I have to say the latest “best food cities” poll was absolutely Maroonish. Florence has its charms, but fud ain’t one of them. Even the great central market is more Faneuil Hall than real Italy these days. And don’t get me started on Rome. You can eat well there, but only if you are very, very selective. As always, absence says more than top ratings. Where were the votes for Torino? To quote friends, the Piemontese make the Tuscans look like peasants. But how would you know that sitting in your Barcalounger reading the travel glossies?
The things you learn when you get sucked into reading protracted attempts to make press releases look like more than press releases puffed out to fill 20 inches: Mayonnaise is a billion-dollar-a-year market. Mayonnaise, I said. I know Hellmann’s is now priced like beluga, but that’s still an awful lot of the white stuff. The mystery is why such marketing is necessary when any sentient being knows a life without mayonnaise is not worth avocados. So I can’t really blame a “celebrity chef” who failed in NYC for signing on to whip up barbecue chicken nuggets while “bantering.” If promoters of an essential nutrient think it needs to spend $30 million a year on promotion, why not take the money and shill?
And I know I’m heartless, but I did laugh at the “no one coulda predicted” tone of the story on the murder in the Vermont food co-op. Haven’t we all been fed no end of tales from the very same publication on how the Park Slope co-op is fascist and full of infighting and right on the edge? (I still remember the JGold Wannabe telling me just the mention of the place made his fingers twitch.) Plus those kinds of shared labor tend to be fraught with scorekeeping of the most dangerous kind. With the post office being pushed out of business despite the Constitution mandating its existence, maybe the new term will be “going co-op.”
I’m pretty certain I will never write for one revamped food magazine, so I can laugh at the publisher for saying food 10 years ago was “stodgy, it was epicurean, it was about being a gourmet cook in your own home.” And today? Fashion designers are opening restaurants! Hate to break it to her, but I believe I saw Armani had restaurants in both Paris and Milan a decade ago. Plus how can stodgy and epicurean be either the same or disses? Someone please commission a poorly conceived and stupidly executed takedown of fresh peaches for not being uniform Fruit of the Loom.
Zabar’s “lobster salad” is becoming the $Palin of food stories. The hometown paper is keeping the fart-reported-as-typhoon alive, but you’d think everyone there would be a bit embarrassed to always be regurgitating others’ reporting. In the old days it would have been the jumping-off point for an investigation into what else might be passed off as luxury fare in tight times. Maybe some enterprising flack should fire off a release — instead of the most expensive omelet, the most un-short-ribbed burger?
Worse was the big story on how the storm hit farmers and farmers’ markets. Apparently Greenmarkets are a weekend indulgence for most New Yorkers, a daily thing only for restaurant chefs. And apparently there’s only one to worry about, the main one at Union Square. And there are no copy editors checking facts — not every farmer of note either can be or chooses to be at Designer-Dog Central. The guys (and women) who truck to the satellite markets stand to get killed. And there are 48 of those markets. Even some near where the new elite retreat, in Brooklyn.
One great thing about the stop-time, eerily silent weekend in Manhattan was that we woke up on Sunday morning to neither of our usual hometown papers on our doormat. No deliveries were getting through; even Famous Famiglia was closed for the first time I’ve ever noticed. Which meant I was spared having to see whatever blithering Panchito engaged in and could instead just watch him get eviscerated all over Twitter and the blogs all day. Happiest part: Finally, after nearly 10 years of me getting ragged on for using that nickname, people have caught on to the idiot who was responsible for bestowing it. Next hurricane, though, should start on Friday so we’re spared 6,000 ways to eat your lobster. How does that fit with sustainable/local/who-will-feed-the-poors?