gastropoda

Way, way before the food world jumped onto the kids&obesity bandwagon, I was bitching that advertisers were routinely using chubbies&huskies to subliminally send the message that it’s normal and acceptable to eat and eat and eat some more. Apparently a certain ice cream chain has not gotten the message that thin is in again. An ad in my favorite part of the Sunday papers — the coupons — promotes sundaes made with Girl Scout cookies by showing a young’un and the doctor she’s grown up to be, each holding a honking huge cone. All you need to know is that it hid more in the first photo. The After had me looking for the insulin.

I guess Mencken is going to have to posthumously retract his famous assertion that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. Nutella just settled a suit for $3 million after a woman lost her batshit on learning that the first three letters did not lead to nutritious. Sure, who among us has not looked at a jar of chocolate-colored nut-and-sugar paste and thought: Low calorie! But my cynical side started to wonder if the whole thing had not been a click/comment trap when I saw the company is not just giving refunds to anyone who asks but also printing coupons for a buck off on a fresh jar so smart moms everywhere can “turn a balanced breakfast into a tasty one” by adding fruit and a glass of milk. Ask the cuckoo woman: Doesn’t that work with Cocoa Puffs, too?

Way behind on posting, distracted as I am by all the KKKraziness out there on the series of tubes, but I can’t resist responding to the pitch I just got. The one that was only slightly less Onionesque than yesterday’s promoting a weight-loss “cleanse” as a Mother’s Day gift (talk about shitting where you birthed). This is for a chain whose name will not be mentioned, hyping a new chef transforming its sandwiches (lemon aioli and lemon dressing!) He can layer all the “blank” Angus onto all the “ciabatta bread” he wants. I will still read “all natural chicken” and see the counter guy at LaGuardia one morning responding to my sad request for an egg sandwich by grabbing a round of yellow rubber from the prep bins, flapping it in the air and asking: “You wanna eat this?”

In related silliness, I’m not sure how I got hooked up with a Facebook group that debates cookbook issues, but it has proven useful in one case if way too revealing in many others. Did anyone ever make a living producing a recipe-with-headnotes collection a year? In my nearly 30 years in this business, all I have ever heard is whining. We eat for a living. It beats working. If you want to make a million, start putting the Rose’s Lime in the Coco Lopez. Or, as Wynton Marsalis famously said, start with $2 million . . .

Which brings me to the grotesquerie that is the doughboy Bake-Off. I see the winner is “ravioli” made from crescent roll dough teamed with whipped cream spiked with caramel syrup and dusted with cinnamon sugar. How “ravioli” can be baked-not-boiled things is never addressed, although my suspicion that these are really empanadas was countered by the fact that some other diabetes-inducing travesty won with that name. I’m sure I’ve written before about going to the bake-off back in the last century and being horrified at how much processed crap could be combined into new weirdness — those contestants made the Semi Ho look like an fantasy-deprived amateur. But I’ll have to reprise what I learned: A million-dollar prize is pretty cheap for a business most interested in getting a sense of how America gorges. The cagey company reveals only that “tens of thousands” of entries are received each year, but no consultant could map the territory as effortlessly as letting the sheep herd themselves into the pen. And now, with the internets, the contest can probably cut the prize to nothing more than publication online (shades of the hometown paper’s payoff for its “ethical meat-eating” contest, which I will not encourage by linking): Dreamers of the industrial dream are giving away all their flavor fantasies in “the community” it has created online. Black garlic ice cream, indeed.

I sometimes feel guilty when letting my fingers do the walking in reporting these days, but if you try sometimes you can get what you need online and in books. Take my take on the Oreos centennial — judging by James Trager’s “Food Chronology,” those iconic black-on-shortening wonders originated as a knockoff of the now-long-gone Hydrox cookie. That was the “biscuit bonbon” that came into stores first. And it’s the dark secret you won’t find anywhere in the expanded press releases and blog blowouts everywhere on the anniversary. Instead, look, over there! It’s a factory tour.

All the suggestions (often bizarre suggestions) for Oscar-themed party food and dinners made me wonder why, if Hollywood is having such troubles, studios aren’t making more movies set in kitchens or restaurants or around tables. Look what that did for “The Help,” and apparently it featured a shit pie. Other nominees missed the whole food boat (witness the struggling for good “Hugo” or “Midnight” homages). Americans are obsessed with food on any and all screens, and the huge overseas audiences keeping the film industry afloat would eat it up, too. Imagine the tie-ins: “The Artist II” Wheat Thins, “now with no audible crunch.”

I wonder if Taco Bell hasn’t misunderestimated the stupidity of the patron (lower-case, BTW, is not the tequila in the contract rider). “Live mas” sounds like what hillbillies who are not being raised by their grandparents have.

Just as Twinkies can never go stale, neither can my ranting about how clueless the coverage of the Hostess Brands scumbaggery is. When news broke about one of the all-time icons of processed crap, food writers everywhere scrambled to whip up puns as if supermarket shelves were about to be wiped clean. Then as now, though, the real story was not about the death of unkillable junk. It’s about the same Pony Express horse shit involved in willfully bleeding the USPS dry. The Bread Wonders just want to magically erase benefits for the human beings they happened, so unfortunately, to acquire along with the assets of a limping company. Ho Hos, indeed.

I’m also trying to tune out the Clown Car because I know it’s only going in reverse, but sometimes teh stupid just has to be noted. And this week that would be the photo of the wearer of the magic underpants (and of the ill-fitting, oddly weathered Everyman Brand jeans) making yet another peanut butter and honey sandwich for the benefit of the press corpse. I’m sorry. If a guy bottle-fed on liquefied gold ingots really prefers to eat like a kid, he doesn’t deserve a White House chef. As much as the KKKrazies deny evolution, palates should improve with exposure to serious food.

Despite the fact that my next-older sister died of breast cancer when she was younger than the age I just turned, I’ve never been exactly comfortable with the whole beribboning industry. I wouldn’t say I feel vindicated in seeing the lid blown off, but I am very glad to see endorsements like the KFC “bucket for the cure” subjected to some disinfecting sunlight. And I’m totally not surprised to learn the organization is run by wingnuts. I just love that all the Kkkrazies who attacked Mrs. O for her promotion of healthful eating and exercise have to see the Choos are on the other feet now.

Wish I could say I was thrilled to learn access to good food is not what’s holding back Americans without cushy jobs and lots o’ lucre from cooking and eating well. But my unneutered-steer-manure detector definitely went off when I went looking for the methodology on the study. And if I read right, the 1,500 happy respondents were recruited online or by email, then interviewed by landline or mobile. I know the Kkkrazies are busy persuading the not-quite-poors that the serious poors own too many appliances, and have too much gout, to be hungry. But cripes. How many have internet access at home or time to hit the library?

The latest evidence the backfield is on life support at the hometown paper, though, was the report on the model whose leg was amputated by Photoshop for a Health Department ad warning of the diabetes risk from supersizing both sodas and physiques. The hole awaiting the truck to drive through was: How could a photographer sell a photo for that use without knowing who the subject was? No release? But of course it took the followup to answer that, without acknowledging that maybe running the poor guy’s face blew his cover. (I assume that was fair use because it was a news story?) At least he was a good sport and signed off with a great quote about singing and dancing and not charging an arm and a leg if the sugar-water companies wanted to hire him for their own campaign. Not gonna happen (only anorectics guzzle in ads), but here’s a thought: NYC should hire him for the next set of save-yourself ads. Who would ever order a Big Gulp again?

Idle thoughts: I’m guessing Holy Foods bagels are not really “hearth-baked.” Red Waddle would actually be a better name for a heritage breed (especially if we’re talking mandrills). Plus it turns out “a new way to eat a burger” is not with your toes; it involves trying to turn beans into a Reuben sandwich and confusing the headline writer, not to mention the reader. And please alert the Page One editors: A hero may be just a sandwich, but it isn’t made with a bun.

One zombie myth just can’t be beaten back, though. And that’s the cretinous insistence that crappy eating is a class thing. Props to these guys for acknowledging that everybody goes to McD’s. But whenever I cross the park I think about how similar both the 1 percent and death-row convicts are when it comes to food. The average last meal of either would be exactly what they grew up eating. A palate that never evolves is obviously a sign of a sociopath.