RTing & TweetLongering my note to those sorry flacks who have to compose eye-catching subject lines for e-blasts: Mouth-watering always makes me think of dogs drooling. Are they part of the 12 days of xmas? After geese a-humping?
I wrote this over to the Twitter, but it’s amusing to see stories touting the accessibility of Eleven Madison Park’s cookbook that all run the same recipe: the granola. And I did not write this, but the macaron trend is officially past its sell-by date when Sur La Table is hawking ornaments shaped like them. Which would, however, be less cheesy on your pagan tree than the “chef” ornaments in the form of jacketed pigs. Even more WTF was the slinger in the Sunday papers emblazoned “give thanks this Veterans Day — receive these valuable coupons,” for the likes of Hormel and Hungry Man and Duncan Hines. Why not just say: “Support the troops: Buy processed crap”?
One more reason I know I was born at the right time: got to travel France and Italy before Mayle and Mayes. // Not a good feeling when you realize that faint odor of sweat is not cumin. // So hot you could bake pide on the dashboard. If you were a weather idiot. // Name fail: Titanic resort. And Spoil restaurant. // Why were chocolate Easter bunnies for sale at the coffee/wine bar at the Richmond Hotel? // Can they make baklava with yak butter? Or does it just taste that way? // Tourism slogan: Come to Turkish beaches. You’ll look skinny. //
I did manage to Tweet that the best thing about Turkey was the lack of fucking Americans. (In Alacati a restaurateur told us they rarely see foreigners at all; it’s mostly wealthy holidaymakers from Istanbul.) And I would say the mystery is why the country isn’t overrun, given how cheap and how fascinating it is, but I guess I know the reason why. Take it from me, though: It’s a trip being awakened by drumming at 4 in the morning during Ramadan. Otherwise the country, again, struck me as more secular than our own. It’s a drink-and-let-drink society.
One reTweet because I can’t think it enough: If there really has to be a National Tequila Day, it should be followed by WTF-An-Ambulance-Costs-$500? Day.
(I also had to respond to one of those reflexive “rich farmers feed poor people, poor farmers feed rich people” Tweets by noting that more and more people are using food stamps to shop farmers’ markets. The situation can’t turn around overnight, but it’s willfully stupid to promote the meme that only the prosperous can buy local quality. And not least because food is not overpriced or out of reach in farmers’ markets. You also have to think of longevity. A $1.99-cent head of red-leaf lettuce is geriatric by the time you fish it out of the water in a supermarket, while a $2 head of red-leaf lettuce harvested the day before will last weeks before turning to the same slime. Odd how some of the same people advocating ending farm subsidies continue to mock the little guys out standing in their fields.)
Some things I Tweeted: You should never need to Wiki a celebrity chef. Here’s where I stop in a review: When a restaurant no longer open is described as successful. Bad restaurants could clean up by offering $12.03.5 deals, priced right. Thursday Styles sees black people, doesn’t note they’re now outnumbered in Harlem. Water-packed tuna is the chickenshit of the sea — worst legacy of the fat-fearing frenzy. And David Sedaris goes there, on grossness in China.
For all the wailing about the death of print, I’m pretty amazed at how huge controversies online go unnoticed. Or maybe it’s just that when you’re Twittering away your life, it’s easy to forget not everyone is keeping up with all the important stuff. Like the provocative column Salon ran on “hipsters” using food stamps to buy good food, which provoked other sites to rage back, pointing out the obvious: People who buy junk with food stamps get slammed, and those who try to eat well get slammed. And it’s really no one’s business how those benefits are used. A commenter at one site noted that she was an Americorps volunteer whose salary was so low she qualified for food stamps. Perspective, much? So of course I set off an Orson Welles-level war of words by Tweeting about the well-dressed older woman I saw buying extra-virgin olive oil at the Food Shitty and by mockingly adding, “For shame.” Instantly I was slammed with outraged Tweets from people who thought I was serious. Didn’t they realize I was off in the kitchen by then, boiling babies to feed the homeless?
Usually I think writing about Twitter is like cooking about photography. But more often lately it seems like a blind person trying to describe an elephant. When a friend’s singular consort died the other day, I heard he was a trending topic — but not in my Tworld. The degrees of separation there can range from one to a milllion. It’s like the days before the Google, when you would type in “tortillas” and 5 quintazillion references would pop up. Suffice it to say that the chefs who were covered struck me as not just small potatoes compared with those I see RT’d. They’re fingerlings.
And while I’m trying to break myself of “gobbling digital doughnuts” over on Twitter, I do enjoy getting perspective from disgusted readers far from the hometown paper’s shrine to hubris. Brussels reaction to Paris old-timers? Same as ours, all-cap boring. Buenos Aires reaction to yet another ode to Buenos Aires? Who’s in the tank? Unfortunately, one thing leads to another and soon I’m reading a complaint that anyone trashing Ducasse for saying London’s the best food city probably should be eating in London more often; otherwise he/she looks like the left-behind. Which of course made me wonder just why or how well the JGW knows a snooty club there so well, whether from half of Jay McInerney’s travel rule (speculation) or by hanging out there personally. Which would be less surprising given the lede that ran on another guy’s piece on how “everyone” has childhood memories of suffering through cafeteria meals on field trips to museums. Earth to Señor Slim Tower: Not all Americans grow up with either food-equipped museums to visit or money to eat in them. Among the many things destroying old-style journalism, that blatant disconnect between the comfortable and the afflicted is the most corrosive. Lie down with only Ivy League graduates and you wake up believing it’s always morning with steak and eggs in America.