gastropoda

Interesting how the McSame approach to advertising is invading the food world, too: all nasty all the time. Campbell’s has some nerve, though, attacking Progresso for using ingredients that don’t sound like food. Why is hydrolyzed corn protein any scarier than dextrin and soy protein concentrate? Why is “naturally occurring” MSG better than regular MSG? Let’s face it: Both chowders are processed crap. But at least we don’t have to live with them for four more years.

Just as ridiculous is Yummo for dogs. Why doesn’t she take it to the obvious extreme and slap her name on toilet paper, too? Cover both ends of the alimentary canal? And do they really think the world is dumb enough to believe she “created” the recipes? That is a job best left to the nutrition experts, not even to developers for hire. She could be scarier than melamine. Most revealing is the description of the line as “charity-driven.” Read the fine print and you’ll see “a portion of the proceeds” will be donated. Paul Newman, with every penny turned over from his products (including pet food), can truly rest in peace.

Say one thing for Hungry Girl and her cult of lemmings: At least she knows her place is in the supermarket, not a heartbeat away from the nukular button. As freaked as I am over the female version of Go-Fuck-Yourself, I am only happy she is not talking about food at all. Otherwise women who don’t know their Manolos from their Naughty Monkeys would be not just drinking the diet Kool-Aid but eating the processed crap.

Why it so difficult for people who are paid to gather and disseminate information to grasp what trans fats are and what the damn things do in food? (Hint: not make it taste better than butter or lard.) I hate to keep pointing out the obvious, but doughnuts and cannoli and muffins were invented long before Crisco was ever perpetrated on the planet. The latest prize for most blatant exhibition of willful cretinism was the inclusion of a quote in the NYPost from a guy who loves him some trans fats and puts “a stick of butter on everything.” To steal from the superb “Passing Strange,” whoever edited that story let his ignorance fuck his stupidity and called the bastard journalism.

After reading cyber-commentary on the “Fancy” Food Show, I’m going to revise my notion that anyone trying to cover it is like a blind person describing an elephant. This year it seems the blind took the elephant on a honeymoon to Niagara Falls. Dicks are the New! Big! Thing! Really, you could substitute anything for herbs there and build a report around it (especially with Bangin’ Blueberry “pesto”). What I noticed was that the last day is the best day; the usually hyper pushers in the booths are too fried and stupefied to harass the hell out of you when they see a press badge. Ask what a coolly packaged drink called Twelve is and the beaten woman pouring it will just say: “Twelve.”

Aside from grits in a tube, the things that jumped out at me were seasoned skewers (much easier than buying grillable chicken with flavor) and energy bars for pregnant women (Baby Needs Chocolate? Right. Baby Probably Also Could Use a Stiff Drink Now and Then). The first booth I stopped at was showcasing GOP and Democratic cookies, and when I asked what the difference was, the sheepish vendor could have been describing the general election: Nothing but the package. I decided not to taste until I saw either something new or something weird and went through two whole long aisles before succumbing to Smoky Mango Barbecue Sauce (which was just as awful as it sounds; all it needed was white chocolate).

Other random thoughts: Crab can be really scary (especially when a bite of dip will send you straight to Paula Deen chemical dressing to erase the taste). Cheese will absorb anything: pickles, olives, Thai curry. But the three scariest words on a cheese label are “no refrigeration needed.” Then again, someone thinks the world needs pasta in the shape of the Star of David. And pumpkin pie fudge, too. Bad riesling makes worse ice cream. (Champagne, however, was made to be sorbet.) “Quality is not an option” is a very strange slogan. And could chocolate possibly benefit from being stone-ground? Stone-washed I could see. . .

Given that it was the last day, the celebrities on so many labels were mostly not to be seen, aside from the suspiciously thin orange-freckled arms on a bag of mixed grated cheeses coming soon to supermarkets everywhere. But one ubiquitous big name I did spot signing autographs made me realize a plastic surgeon is not the best friend a famous face can have. Photoshop is much, much kinder.

Might be time for another story on chefs’ blogs now that I have seen my first shlog. I can’t imagine what reason but huckstering there would be for the “so French” Eric Ripert of Andorra to be devoting “his” first two posts to cooking in a toaster oven. By now I should know you can’t believe everything you see on the internets, though. One of the most persistent search strings for Gastropoda is “Bobby Flay bad-mouthing Hellmann’s.” With Rachaelesque rumors like that going around, he should be very careful about his neckwear.

I know food magazine advertising is meant to get you to stop and stare rather than read what you bought the damn thing for in the first place. But the trend toward portraying meat as the nasty bits left after an amputation gone awry is still unsettling. I saw a really gruesome beef thing showing what looked to be scabs of cow. Why? Your guess is better than mine. And another one headlined “pork & nail polish” made me read every word of copy to try to figure out not just why those words were juxtaposed but what exactly those skinned penis parts above them were. Apparently you can use Smithfield’s frozen finest to fix a run in your stockings. Or something. Bring back the GE Profile kitchens with the chubbies chasing themselves in the stainless-steel mirrors. . .

Consider yourself lucky Joe Nocera is merely wanking rather than flipping omelets at brunchtime in some super-busy restaurant. His take on the downer cows that were ground up and distributed to who-knows-which school lunch or Hot Pocket: One mad cow won’t spoil the whole batch. I am no admirer of animal rights activists who muck around with the food chain, but only someone who has eaten way too many “tacos, Mexican style” in a company cafeteria could seriously think an expose of an undeniable health threat was a simple publicity stunt. Long after Americans are going down with BSE, Nocera and his ilk will be quoting the inevitable Bushism: “No one could have anticipated. . . .” If you think an animal waterboarded to stand upright to pass inspection is going to make good eating, I have a Paula Deen ham to sell you.

Anyone still baffled by how we wound up with that buffoon jackassing  across Africa has only to consider the coverage of the largest meat recall in American history. The message most clearly disseminated to a “Top Chef”-stupefied audience is that it’s all about animal abuse, that the bleeding hearts won. The reality that waterboarding was needed to force seriously sick cattle onto their feet to pass “inspection” is consistently glossed over, especially with the reassuring line in every story that “no illnesses have been reported” by consumers. As if mad cow disease sets in as fast as the salmonella squitters. But rest easy: Most of the beef has already been eaten. I have to laugh every time I hear a story on the Olympics boasting that we’re going to keep our prize athletes healthy — we’re going to ship American food to China. Yeah, right. I don’t know about the USDA, but the FDA’s budget for a full year is less than we squander in Iraq in one  week. Good thing we got the government off the industry’s back. . . .

I could almost see the collective shudder when the WSJ ran its story on rats as the other white meat in Vietnam these days. But the video-documented revelation that a California slaughterhouse has been torturing downer animals to get them up and moving past federal inspectors and into school lunches in this country somehow just warranted another cheap what-are-you-gonna-do? shrug. The same “America, fuck, yeah!” attitude also permeated the NYTimes story on feeding athletes at the Beijing Olympics. If a patriotically obese chef were not brought in to oversee the cooking, the poor fragile flowers might have to eat icky stuff. Maybe even chicken bloated on steroids, something they surely could not get at home in the land of the hyper-conscientious, overly endowed FDA (you know, in the country where workers are, for some reason, getting sick blowing brains out of hogs’ heads?) Ironically, Fred Ferretti got his 15 seconds to have what was clearly a long-simmering say on the same day that bizarre piece ran. Mistaking chop suey for anything in one of the world’s top three cuisines is the least of the sins he could have cited. And why do I assume ground-up cows and pigs will always be on the menu for the champions of the world?

Judging by the dustup over a piece by a Murdoch refugee granted asylum at the Taj Sulzberger, bumper stickers on nutrition nazis’ cars should read: Figures lie and liars figure. The dutiful regurgitation of a “study” finding that “healthy eating really does cost more” prompted literally hundreds of comments, some of which actually made sense. A smarter lede would have laid out the truth that “empty calories cost less,” which is no accident given a Congress in thrall to Big Food lobbyists rather than sensitive to small-scale growers. It’s the same kind of sleight of word that made a Coke seem a better nutritional investment than a small cup of Haagen-Dazs at the height of the low-fat insanity, when crazy studies were flying by wildly. The most amusing part was when the verbal scrum turned into an ode to lentils, which Ms. 401K angrily insisted “no one could eat every day.” Tell that to nearly a billion Indians. . . .

I got a very small laugh out of Irving Mill proudly listing the redundancy of an “organic egg omelette” on its lunch menu (can you make an omelet without breaking shells?) But neither my consort nor I was amused by the $4.49 travesty we tried from the cathedral at Columbus Circle; this alleged bread was all adjectives and no satisfaction. Ten organic ingredients plus filtered water were followed by “dough conditioners,” and they all added up to nasty gumminess. Usually we let a bad bread die a slow death over a few days out of guilt; this one went straight in the trash. And it made me appreciate the fact that Ray Sokolov, in his report on Google cafeterias, coined a pretty good one with “Wholier-Than-Thou.” PC is becoming a terrible rating for food.

If you like eggs, though, you might want to think about the latest installment in the saga of how foie gras is making certain idiots batshit insane. The food world’s equivalents of the right-to-birth crazies are now talking about petitioning the USDA to declare lusciously fat livers unsafe to eat. Their faux concern is exquisitely timed, just as Eric Schlosser has highlighted how humans continue to be obscenely abused for reprehensibly cheap burgers. It just makes it patently clear how badly these nutcases with no lives want to shove their noses in my plate. No wonder some days it seems we have never evolved out of Eden and that goddamn apple.

On the bright side, all government agencies are apparently so under siege that the chances of foie gras even moving onto the agenda are about as high as bananas all around in the Middle East from the Chimp and his ivory-tickling enabler. The very credible report just issued on the FDA was enough to give any sentient being the E. coli squitters: no money, no computers, no coherence, but more scary food imported and grown and distributed every day. No wonder the nutrition nazis are feeling emboldened enough to propose limiting sodium in processed foods. Everybody knows that’s going nowhere in the age of Big Food and osteoporotic government. Salt on your own private plate would be banned first.

Cheese has been one of the last food groups to retain its dignity despite the unstoppable epidemic of Food Network-spread Tiger Beat silliness. Or so I thought until I wandered past the Murray’s in Grand Central and spotted a new Cheddar from the great Rogue Creamery in Oregon labeled Morimoto Soba Ale. Having invested in a quarter of the $14.99 pound, I can only say they really need to rechristen the show “Insipid Chef.” This stuff makes Monterey Jack look strong.

There’s a silly e-joke going around about a drunk who gets caught in a field with his pants down and responds in feigned shock when the arresting officer points out that he’s humping a pumpkin:

“Shit, is it midnight already?”

Unfortunately, worse forms of pumpkin abuse are happening on the commercial level. Trend-obsessed companies are turning an aroma-free kitchen workhorse into massage creams and masques and much scarier stuff — one company is marketing pumpkin pie shampoo, another pumpkin pie syrup to be mixed into cocktails or, more chilling still, coffee. The freakiest is selling pumpkin body oil. Anoint yourself with that and you might want to stay in after dark.