gastropoda

And speaking of hysteria, the media obsession with Toyota is turning me into the equivalent of a Prius birther — maybe it actually is all a careful campaign designed to make hybrid cars look dangerous and keep Americans dependent on oil. The same thing inevitably happens with food. If there’s an E. coli or salmonella outbreak in anything relatively natural, it’s always attack of the killer tomatoes, suicide-mission scallions, lethal-weapon spinach, death in an eggshell. But if the government recalls a few million tons of it-will-kill-you-level contaminated processed beef, good luck finding out about it. Worst of all has been the coverage of the recall of hydrolyzed vegetable protein. That shit is in everything (153 products on the FDA warning list alone), and it’s not making tabloid headlines and leading the teevee “news.” Big Food gets to keep its dirty secrets secret. Maybe Cheetos eaters deserve what they get: messed pajamas

After reading another WSJournal story, on the crisis-level tomato shortage, I stupidly expected to see stores looking the way they really should in snowy March, free of flavorless hardballs. But there are big piles even at our neighborhood Food Shitty, and the Manhattan Fruit Exchange had the usual half-dozen or more varieties, if pricier than usual. Once again, it illustrated the disconnect between semi-food, the processed crap delivered to fast food outlets in tractor-trailers, and what most Americans throw into their overloaded baskets. And how the two are covered.

But I have to give the Journal credit for setting the record straight on macarons. They are not fucking macaroons. Buried deep in its late-to-the-meringue front-pager, though, was a funny detail. McDonald’s actually started selling the things three years ago. So all the hysteria online and off over the fast-fooding of high-end patisserie was actually driven by ads, the ones that only recently started showing up in the Paris metro. Guess I’m only amazed we aren’t seeing more MSG-free “soup is good food” pieces as winter winds down.

Hellmann’s is the Rachael of the processed food world — its name is 98 percent likely to be misspelled every time. It’s equally good at catapulting the propaganda, too, garnering huge publicity merely for switching to “cage-free” eggs in one of its several lines of mayonnaise. Not to be all unappreciative or anything, but wouldn’t it send more of a message to save up a few extra million dozen until you can promote a switchover for the non-lite stuff? Otherwise, clean-conscience eggs are squandered in fud Michael Pollan would not advocate eating. But at least it’s not as silly as Chipotle hyping its change to “vegan chicken” for its burritos. I mean, really — those poor birds are sentenced to live without natural worms in their diet, only to wind up as mega-meals for meat eaters? Why not just keep them gluten-free and wrap them up in flour tortillas?

After a day last week when our faucets ran mud, I shouldn’t be complaining about new regulations. But I am astonished that local governments so strapped they’re cutting fire and police protection are rushing to put on nanny uniforms that will not and should not fit. NYC is apparently banning home-baked stuff from school bake sales, so kids will be protected from some strange mom’s bacon-chocolate chip cookies but be able to tear right into processed crap (yeah, go ahead and blame calorie counts, as if Big Food lists them accurately). Out in California, there’s a crackdown on cocktails made with booze infused with other ingredients — nice to think inspectors will be deployed in the consumer protection racket while students are freaking out over high tuition and fees in a college system that was once the country’s best and most accessible. After eight years of national anarchy, I’m half-happy to see “authorities” seizing the reins, but not behind the bar. In all other cases the best thing they could do to keep junk out of innocent mouths is very simple: Tax the junk. People adjusted to a nickel deposit on soda cans that most never redeem, judging by the recycle bins in our building. They could adapt to a few cents more for sugar water. Instead, confusion reigns. I heard an “expert” on Brian Lehrer the other day saying no kid ever got fat drinking pineapple juice. He was right that juice has nutrients that tax-ready soda does not. He was wrong about obesity. One of the earliest lessons when I spent a week studying “nutritional cuisine” at the CIA back in the last century was that juice poured like water was going to turn little kids into Fat Alberts. Given that Coke owns Minute Maid, it’s no wonder a product once rationed in special glasses is now a Big Gulp, and a protected one at that. If there is a hell, let’s hope it’s full of tiny airline seats.

I’m starting to think every day is Groundhog Day, most recently because of the hysteria over hot dogs. Didn’t we already go through this “OMFG, kids can choke on tube steaks”? What’s really ridiculous is that any parent would let a Baby Jesus ingest something so suspect in any form. If the stuff came in a Spam can, no one would ever think it socially — let alone nutritionally — acceptable. Anyone who spurns food with a face has to know this is face food, and not of the trendy nose-to-tail variety. Over and snout. . .

Next time the arugula-addled wingnuts want to go faux-populist ballistic about food, they really need to check out what liberals love to eat in this country. Hint: It hasn’t been Brie since Reagan was asleep at the Iran-Contra switch. That’s nothing more than albino Velveeta in a brave new world of Epoisses/Taleggio/MtTam. Forget saltines. We are all water crackers now.

Funny to see news outlets scrambling to be sure Mrs. O’s huge anti-obesity movement is covered by all the wrong people (“eat as I say, not as I do,” in one case). But at least the Time Tool was not unleashed on the anti-Big Food beat. Following in the sordid tradition of the Coulter/Molto blow jobs, he let the fastest food take him for a royal ride. Did you know the Big Mac has a chef behind it? Yeah, and so does all the shitty airline food. He actually swallows the catapulted propaganda and mentally transfers a high-end lunch with celeriac and salmon to the crap wraps the “most influential chef in America” claims to have innovated. And believe me, the reason the flack freaked when the chef mentioned poached pears was not fear of copycat competitors. She had to know the chance of something like that winding up on the diabetes menu was about as likely as a frequent flier ever tasting Todd English’s food in steerage.

I confess to wandering over to digital monkey cages on occasion just to watch the occupants smear themselves with their own feces — there’s no entertainment like wingnuts posturing, with flagrant disregard for reality. So I’m quite enjoying the arguments that farm subsidies are inalienable rights for the corporations that really control agrarian food. Aesop had a fable or two for this, but I wouldn’t count out the impact of a First Family who walks the walk. You can’t grow high-fructose corn syrup in a backyard garden.

Time Out deserves a fist bump for printing the most self-indicting letter ever, from some bleeding idiot outraged over a photo of a whole pig roasting on a spit: “I don’t want to see visual reminders that my lunch was once a living and breathing animal.” As they say on the political blogs: Teh stupid — it burns. Hot dogs good; porchetta scary. Please. Food does not come from the supermarket. And if you can’t face the artisanal link, you certainly don’t want to contemplate the industrial chain. “Our Daily Bread” should be required viewing for anyone who reacts to a picture of a whole hog by throwing her turkey sandwich in the trash. Tom died in vain.

That kind of denial is exactly what’s involved in one of the most unsettling processes I’ve read about in some time, how processors turn pigskins into chicharrones, aka pork rinds. The story was in the WSJournal, on a dispute over imports of skins from countries with foot-and-mouth, the disease that devastated British farms less than 10 years ago. Pigs there, of course, contracted it by eating imported meat (you don’t even want to dwell). Thank allah for the photos and relatively long text to make it clear just how  processed this stuff is: In one factory, frozen skins are mechanically minced and cooked into pellets, which are then boxed up and shipped off to other factories to be fried. Forget the issue of whether the meat is contaminated to begin with. How many un-health-cared hands touch it before it lands in someone’s mouth; how many chances are there for something to go horribly wrong? And people freak out about lard?

And maybe I’m just cynical, but I thought it was rather amusing to see everyone dumping on the new McItaly while accrediting the Fast Food Diet. Domestic beef topped with asiago cheese and artichoke spread in Italy? Bad. Tacos and Subway processed crap here? Worth consulting nutritionists and other experts on whether you will lose weight. (Few of them, I noticed, brought up what that junk does for your body besides fatten it right up.) Who needs Berlusconi when we have such a free press?

One of the many great things about living in the co-op we took two years to choose is that we get mail delivered to our doorstep, by the staff. Every so often the bean-counting philistines among us propose doing away with that system to save time and labor and instead ramming mailboxes into our gorgeous 1929 lobby. Thanks to Fresh Direct, the argument may finally be over. Apparently it’s going to start installing vending machines for frozen dinners alongside mailboxes. Amazon should be setting up kiosks to deliver Michael Pollan’s “Food Rules” on demand right next to them. Who would care if home looked like a truck stop?

We also forget most of us were in bunkers a year ago, counting the canned food and wondering how to set up apple carts. The economy is still a disaster, but after reading about food banks running on empty and firehouses collecting food I gathered all the crap I’d been hoarding in case “The Road” really did run through our front door. Chief among that was a bunch of rice mixes and seasonings from a press event thrown by a little New Orleans company bought by Big Food. I only ever tried one, and we were first stunned by how salty/fake it tasted and then, over the next few days, by how it had stunk up the joint. Seriously. As much as I mock the Forelock, he did have the comment of the week on all this salt insanity going around: “If you eat natural foods, you don’t have to worry.” I would feel a little guilty about handing off all that sodium and MSG to the poor, but after we left the firehouse where they were not collecting food (thanks, Daily News), we passed a family unloading even worse stuff from a car, with not a fresh vegetable to be seen. People in the Depression probably ate better. At least they had apple carts.

I have to admit I felt more than a pang of regret on seeing Francis Lam, over at his new gig, write a good takedown of NYC’s well-intentioned but misguided assault on salt. I should have been jumping to the defense, given that I learned from my dad that salt is best ingested from a mound off your palm, and my blood pressure is low enough to unnerve technicians. Unlike trans fats, the last bugaboo for our Daddy Mayor, salt is an essential ingredient; humans would die without it. I’d be all for regulating sodium content in processed crap if the WSJournal had not just reported that Big Food is already cutting back on it (I think it sees the nicotine rulings on the wall). But get the government out of restaurant kitchens — salt used early and judiciously does so much more for food than a shakerful at the table. Telling chefs, even chain chefs, how much they can use makes about as much sense as having David Chang dictate how to run a business magazine. Or a city.

I’m not going to blame Julia for this, only Julie for alerting Big Food to the new potential for old French standards since the crazy success of the movie. But thanks to my favorite part of the Sunday papers — the coupons — I see Jell-O is now marketing “chocolate” “mousse.” And it looks just as scary as you might imagine, sort of like Cool Whip crossed with what a  coal miner coughs up after a hard day in the pit. Still, it could be worse. For all the discontent right now, we’ve come a long way in this country. Not so long ago they would have had to have sold it as Freedom Flan.

I guess I missed the most important class in fright school because I really do not understand the hysteria over a flame on a plane when no one else was hurt. If the Big O had ignored an explicit warning and 2,700-plus people were killed a little over a month later, I could see freaking out. But every day I wonder where the outrage is over the bigger threat. You are more likely to die from salmonella than terrorism. And a potential killer that was once only in eggs, then in cantaloupes, is now in half the crap in the supermarket. Too bad you can’t strip-search a scallion.