gastropoda

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?

I slogged all the way to the last word of Time’s cover story on the end of ocean fish and just Tweeted, then sort of gave up. But my first reaction keeps coming back to me. Why would that huge feature (by weekly magazine standards) miss the whale in the newsroom? It kept hammering away at the idea that fish farming is essential because the global population keeps growing. And it never once paused to say, “Hey, you know what? Fewer mouths to feed would solve this problem before nature has to bring out even bigger guns than earthquakes and tsunamis.” On a planet running out of water, multiplying the loaves and barramundi is not enough. But I’m just being silly. I’m sure it won’t be long till they run a huge cover story on advances in in vitro.

In other petrified newsstand news, I’m seeing some buzz over Red Bull starting a magazine. My consort trash-picked an issue from the recycling bins in our back hall, though, and you would need a case of the stuff to get through it. . .

Which smarter-than-thou food magazine is sending out subscription entreaties that could veer vertiginously close to the old Publishers Clearing House? I’m not talking the old nag that has poor saps somewhere in Middle America cheerily calling me twice a week to check up on my subscription, the one I let lapse many years ago. Nah, this is the one that seems to be stealing a page out of the Taste of Home playbook, with its “no distracting ads” and “free gifts.” “Rate adjustment alert” is just another way of saying “bend over — you’re still paying too much.”

Almost as depressing was hearing that a once-unique food magazine has decided to drive down a very potholed highway. Do the car-free Amish really care about eating crab cakes by the freeway lights?

The onetime home of the Human Scratch N Match also ran a silly story, on produce prices rising, that actually quoted a woman stupidly musing that it might be “the economy” to blame. Not bad weather and diminishing water, of course. As I noted over on the Twitter, anyone complaining about the price of tomatoes in March is cooking it wrong — this is the season of “better dead than red” in the produce aisle, at least if you want flavor and fair prices. But then there was the way a protest at the newish Upscale Aldi’s was covered elsewhere. Most shoppers interviewed thought it was all about those softballs next to the flown-in blueberries, not the fact that so much processed crap is cheap because tomato pickers in Florida are paid slave wages. Really, if a chain can’t Shetland-pony up a penny a pound more, you really have to wonder how exploited its grape harvesters are. Two bucks might be more than a price.