The latest candidate for most peculiar name for a food establishment: Chicken Cabaret, on 34th Street. Do they sing for your supper?

I see first prize in the Daily News recipe contest was a night at the Beard awards. Obviously, second prize would include a ticket to the after-party.

Probably the most idiotic letter I have ever read in a newspaper came from the soft-headed woman whimpering about foie gras who said she would not want a feeding chute jammed down her throat, therefore ducks should be spared. By that logic, the fact that ducks would not want shoes rammed onto their webs means humans have to give up footwear. Aren’t there online forums where this kind of nincompoopery can go hide?

Pity the poor magazine trying to stage a food & wine festival in soulless Vegas without using the rival’s name. Sympathy only goes so far, though. "Culinary and Wine" would send my old English teachers whimpering into the fallout shelter. Shouldn’t it at least be the Culinary and Viticultural Focus? Or maybe Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off?

I’m starting to think the NYC Health Department should be taking over the Iraq war. Since the rats ran wild and closings accelerated, at least one restaurant has done a preemptive shutdown to clean up just in case the “vicious” inspectors come by. This is proof the mayor is not a real Republican -- it shows government can do good. The surge is working. And the only victims of the fear-spreading are bacteria.

At least once a day a news item makes me think of that old saying, “Figures lie and liars figure.” The latest was the “study” correlating the incidence of obesity in different cities with the recipes run in local newspapers. I admit I have a dachshund in this fight, but really, can this actually be true at a time when everything you read says newspapers are going the way of the Walkman? Somehow I suspect fast junk, microwavable garbage and the obsolescence of walking have had more of an iPod impact than the most calorific concoction ever printed under my byline. Besides, everybody knows reading is good exercise. So, for that matter, is cooking.

Clear warning that you are pouring friends’ wine with too free a hand at a birthday party with a Judi Giuliani theme: You get an email from the cab home from one swearing her driver is named Tran Phat. Right. Noah Smokin must have been off duty.

Gordon Ramsay has done more to redeem his restaurant’s reputation by taking on Panchito without taking out an ad than he could have by giving a year’s worth of free meals to the 800-Pound Gorillas. Every time he trash-talks he gains a reservation, from all I’m hearing. And of course that increasingly makes P. the Fredo Gonzales of reviewers: How long can he hang on, rubbing his bosses’ noses in bad chocolate and worse judgment? Already it looks as if the Phat Phuck is angling to be his replacement, judging by all the NYT ass-bussin’ going on lately. Eventually a bad thing has to come to an end, and we can only hope the screeners read Joe Morgenstern’s review of “Waitress” to get a sense of what a critic should be. Rather than sticking two thumbs up his ass, he gives you all you need to appreciate quality. Not the emotional what. The technical why.

When I left the NYT the first time, in 1983 to go to restaurant school, my partners in misery presented me with Martha Stewart’s “Entertaining” (at a party on the desk where I refused to eat the Brie because it was too funky-tasting -- talk about “’twas in another lifetime”). Maybe that’s why I have a somewhat soft spot for one of the toughest broads in any business, even though I once turned down an assignment because her writer’s contract was so greedy. It really does mystify me why she is the Hillary Clinton of food. People just go batshit insane over her while Turd Blossom walks free. She gets a deal with Costco to produce prepared food, and the flaying begins, despite the fact that she has a golden track record with Kmart. Molto, by contrast, signs on to sell processed Progresso through Costco and Sam’s Club, and not a discouraging peep is heard. I don’t want to make the obvious comparison and say he’s the Laura Bush of food. But really, is it just that redheads have more immunity? Or was “Metropolis” too prescient?

Bill Maher has an entertaining new rule that food personalities on the teevee must stop making orgasmic faces whenever they taste something. But he doesn’t see the half of it. Flit around the internets among the food sites dipping pinkies into video and you will notice something much more disturbing. Too many of those frozen screens evoke Elvis on the throne. Personally, I prefer Giada's moaning to some unknown's straining at stool.

The heckuva-job loyal Bushie paid to promote abstinence has famously said calling in a hooker was like ordering pizza (“one large Central American, please”). It almost makes you long for the good old days of efficient government, when a single intern could do the “massage therapy” and dial Domino’s, too.

Normally a $1,400 Mai Tai would not be worth wasting key strokes on, but sometimes the where matters more than the what in a story. Belfast was one of the saddest cities I have ever slept in, and now it has a hotel that can charge Halliburton prices for a drink. Maybe there’s something to that old idea of prosperity through peace. Even I would welcome a press release touting a $5,000 felafel one day.

But enough about conviviality. My third big outing was a lavish lunch where two people I talked with went bonkers on the Evil Monkey. I don’t want to be accused of misquoting after five different wines, but one said she could drag a mood down 15 levels. The other I do remember said he once shared a cab uptown with “What A Sourpuss!” and was made miserable, to the point where he wanted to say get out and walk if you’re so important. It was the kind of carping you hear about women food writers by women food writers. But this was carpers who could not be accused of mere envy. Funny, since another friend always used to say slyly, italicizing the V word, “She’s a very lucky woman.” What good is power if it doesn't buy you love?

My consort recently sent me a link to a video he and his classmates had produced on the NPPA judging of the best of photojournalism, which gave me some perspective on how the winners of prizes given out at the lunch were chosen. If I heard right, 200 products were taste-evaluated in four hours to select six to gold-medal. That would be like doing the Fancy Food Show on crystal meth. After breakfasting at Applebee’s.

The honeybee plot continues to sicken. David Byrne, linked through the inestimable eatdrinkonewoman, has an interesting conspiracy theory up -- GM producers are killing off promiscuous bees to protect their insidiously evil crops -- but the awful truth is that even worse theories could be at work. If we were actual stewards of the planet, we would all be 86ed. Consider the greedism on display in the maple capital of Vermont. The NYT did yet another story on how warming weather is diminishing sap, but this one, in BizDay, wound up as an ode to the lucrative marvels of technology. Fifteen years ago my consort and I, working on our ill-fated harvest book, spent days in Mapleville waiting for sugaring to begin and developed a serious case of techo-willies. Seeing whole stands of trees strapped up to be sucked sapless was really disturbing; the farms looked like ICU units. No wonder the earth is, as Laurie David and Kurt Vonnegut said, developing chills and fever and trying to shake humans off. People who care about maple syrup will pay whatever they have to for the real deal. But in a world perfectly happy with Aunt Jemima, why rape Mother Nature?

Poor Jean-Jacques. If the health inspector had only held off another month, until after the once supreme Court ruled, he could have had the perfect defense for vermin in the kitchen: The mice were pregnant and the roaches were carrying eggs; he was only protecting the unborn.

One of the great things about the series of tubes is how it keeps a story pumping along. You skip a few pages of a newspaper to avoid the overkill on the local shooting story and you miss the public pillorying of Paula Deen, but the internets soon bring you up to speed. The only mystery for me is why she did her deal with the Smithfield devil rather than Land O’Lakes, which has bought so many smaller souls. Maybe even the super-creamy guys quailed at the sight of her guzzling their melted product as if it were Baileys. I mean, there’s pigging out and there’s pigging out.

A vendor on 23d Street had an interesting name on his aromatic cart: Nada Food. It could be a chain.

This was V for vindication week for me. For years I have been arguing with food writers who insist the Enron-on-12th-Street Popularity Contest is vital “because we have no other way to get recognition.” My answer was always: What about the Pulitzer Prize? Now I hope the laughing has finally stopped. Whatever you think about Jonathan Gold, he and his outlet showed serious chops by both entering and winning. Good on him for proving food does not have to be a ghetto; eating is the second most important thing in life, and nothing else touches on so many aspects of life. So what if the same bunch gave Maureen the Emasculator of Democrats the same award a few years ago. Their punishment will be having to read through the reams and reams of really deadly food prose that is headed their way next year . . . .

Judging by a lively conversation at a lavish press event (the crappier the product, the more resources thrown at it), the tipping point might have been finally reached for the Egotist. Now that he is on the teevee with all his anti-charisma on full display, the long knives are out. (Travel? Clueless. Recipes? Lame. Why so inescapable? Damn good question.) From there the bile flowed to the other B-boy, whose ascendancy puzzled my tablemates even more. I could only wonder why Esca was reviewed for a third time in a city with more than 15,000 restaurants, since I had been there with the last real critic when it first opened and have never understood its allure. But I guess I’m naive. Two blocks from HQ is location, location. And when you’re talking fish, you have all the silly, obvious metaphors in the sea. No wonder brunidigest has gone into hibernation. The parody is running on autopilot.

When I wrote about new jobs in food recently, I did not include media coach. Judging by said press event, the field is not just wide open but demand far outstrips supply. Here was a guy hired to educate a roomful of journalists and he repeatedly talked about “distilleration.” And “charerization.” “And Columbus brang.” (“Soders” for sodas I could forgive.) Worse, a great-sounding cocktail he demonstrated was described as “a good party-stopper” -- which is just what every happy hostess wants. I did write about mixologists, and this guy was clearly a shaking wizard of the cocktail; his twists were smart and smooth. But to all those people who wrote me wondering how to acquire a brave new job in food, I can only advise: No matter how well you walk the walk, you had best learn to talk the talk.

The event was not a waste, though. The food was quite good (with the ingredient du jour showcased intelligently), and I certainly enjoyed hearing how a familiar freelance byline in the Newspaper of Integrity is a total pill on press trips. In saccharum, veritas.

Some other bilious thoughts: The best image I have heard in weeks is from the two political bloggers who described Go-Fuck-Yourself as traveling around the world like a turducken, in an AirStream trailer inside a cargo plane. Then, did the Chimp’s motorcade swing through a drive-through liquor store on his trip to Ohio? Why else would he be talking about “chicken-plucking factories”? Not to mention that the best Dinosaur-in-Denial moments happen anymore when NYT editors have to answer reader queries online. You don’t even need to have your speakers on to hear the teeth gritting. My favorite was the complaint about too much fat in recipes that was answered with “we just ran recipes for brownies and macaroni and cheese and meatballs” -- you could almost anticipate the “you ignorant slut” that followed. Plus did someone say the Chinese poison in the pet food is also in the hog feed now? Grover Norquist may have succeeded in getting the federal government small enough to drown in a bathtub, but in helping to gut the FDA he has forgotten even the rich need their bacon. Finally, if you don’t already want to crawl into your own private bunker in despair, I just got a copy of a Wonder Bread cookbook. I would suspect it is a joke, but it includes balls -- a formula for rolling the gummy gunk into them. Funny, I always thought a recipe was for something you would eat. And a cookbook involved food.

Just back from Middle Earth, I am feeling less depressed about the chaining of Manhattan. At least we don’t have an A&W. Yet. There was one at the Columbus airport, and I actually resorted to it after being almost hauled off to Guantanamo for trying to duck over to the Wolfgang Puck Express in another concourse, beyond “security.” And it sold cheese curds. Deep-fried cheese curds. To 500-pounders. Landing at JFK, I was half-happy to see what is going in at the Delta gates where only Starbucks was open on the outbound flight. You know it’s grim when Todd English looks good.

I’m also seeing Mother Waters in a different light. As much credit as she is due for changing the way America eats, there’s no denying a huge proportion of the improvement has been literally organic -- even she would have been stymied if the counterculture had been wiped out in the food world as it effectively was everywhere else in this society. Poke around southeastern Ohio for just a couple of days and you’ll find no end of people who decided 30 to 40 years ago that they wanted to produce clean meat and pure cheese and pesticide-free vegetables and simply stuck with it, with no fantasies of fame or fortune. (There’s a concept: Iron Farmer.)

For starters, the Athens farmers’ market on a snowy Saturday morning had more variety than Union Square (ramps and garlic chives already), while the Mexican co-op Casa Nueva devoted one page of the long menu to a list of all its local purveyors of beef and mushrooms and herbs and produce. Even the Kroger had an aisle set aside for locally produced foods such as salsa and pasta. And the old rebels who crank it out walk the walk. One farmer my consort knows had just come back from the Middle East, where he goes every year with a Christian group that clings to the absurd idea that peace might be possible. This trip, he said, “Iraq was the worst we have ever seen it -- Baghdad was too dangerous; we had to go to Kurdistan.” (My response: Tell that to John McCain.) Seeing how much good has been done off the radar, you start to wonder if honeybees would be threatened today if America had stayed on the greening track and not gone for the greed. But at least the fat cats can look forward to a last meal at a certain shrine in Berkeley.

Right before leaving town, I had coffee with a friend in from Houston who was still in shock after her dinner at Per Se. For three women, each of whom nursed one glass of wine for the whole nine courses, the bill was nearly $800. Unfortunately, I was not surprised by either that sad tale or her disappointment in the food itself. But I kept my mouth shut, because when she had told me the day before that she was headed to the dread TWC, I had not warned her off, only said mildly, “I’ll be curious to hear what you think.” Why ruin it for her when it was too late to bail?

The joke was on me exactly three nights later. My consort had made reservations at Purple Chopstix in Athens for dinner with his downstairs neighbor and his consort (the neighbor’s), mostly because it was about the last “high-end” place in town we had not tried. And there Bob’s bland red Thai curry was ladled over couscous while my slopped-out “veggie pesto pasta” had plenty of the first and last ingredients and precious little of the main; worse, it arrived with two slivers of parsley-dusted melon and three wedges of pita(?) flopped on the side. Soup and salad were included, and all I’ll say is that Bob’s neighbor described the former as “Appalachian tom yum.” I took no comfort in finding the bill for four was less than one bottle of wine at Per Se -- it was all like hippie food for people who have never done drugs. No wonder everyone we met beforehand had asked us where we were eating and then gone either strangely quiet or wondered, “Have you tried Stephen’s?”

As we were trotting, late, into Purple Chopstix, I suddenly asked Bob: “What if it’s BYOB?” And of course the other couple was waiting with a bottle of red they had brought. Luckily, we’d noticed a liquor store across the street, so he went tearing off to save us. Much polite conversation elapsed before he ran back in, clutching a Rodney Strong merlot and laughing that it had taken so long because “the clerk didn’t hear me come in.” Of course not. It was a drive-through. No wonder every Ohio liquor store you walk into wears a sign warning that carrying a FIREARM around booze is a felony. If you can’t honk for service, you might be tempted to shoot.

The best chemperor-wears-no-clothes moment came late at night at Bob’s best friends’ house when he was trying to get me to shock them by telling how much that dinner at Per Se cost. I never even got to the amount. The wife absorbed just enough to yelp, “Per Se? That is the most pretentious name I have ever heard.”

Which made the NYT’s blithe skewering of a schoolkid who had never heard of Per Se seem all the crueler. But then that whole mess of a story on NYC’s culinary high school was marred by off-hand shittiness, the kind that can only be dispensed by someone with a nice salary, a 401K and a stock plan. I’m no bleeding heart, but I felt for the poor girl whose impoverishment had to be exposed to myriad readers, and in the lede and photo to boot. If the most significant facet of the school is indeed the income level of the students’ families, the point probably could have been made a tad more gracefully. Maybe I’m just sensitive because my father always insisted the difference between “poor” and “white trash” was soap and education. Given that he could barely provide for a family of nine, he would have been mortified to see any of his litter publicly shamed for choosing the latter. And if the snootiest restaurants are really so important, could the piece at least have mentioned where the graduates wind up? Maybe they’re at Zagat, where they only need to know from names and not from cooking.

Did anyone else find Deriding The City Of New Orleans’ choice of phrase while daintily “reviewing” the Egotist-on-Teevee a bit odd? It came awfully close to “choking the chicken.” But then when you start with circle-jerking with these guys, where does it stop?

My metropolitan chauvinism must have been getting out of control in Middle Earth because one happy inhabitant bluntly asked me what was so great about living in Manhattan. I was stopped cold, then started blathering about the gift of privacy and the gift of anonymity. What I really meant only came clear to me when I got back to terra infirma and read my Sunday papers. One party I had gone to in the week before was showcased for an appearance by a teevee star whose newest boyfriend looked like the Anna Nicole daddy, while another was significant enough to be documented by Bill Cunningham. What I remember from each is a sound bite. At the first, a designer paid by the promoters was doing a demo with an ingredient she pronounced “grand marnyer.” And at the second, the Apple-laptop deejay chose to play “Stuck in the Middle With You.” That was at the Four Seasons, where another party was starting to swing as the superb one I was leaving was winding down; on the way out, I passed Dominick Dunne and heard people referring to Kissinger coming in. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, indeed. This little island is the great equalizer, and you get your drinks for free.

On the news front, I don’t know what was creepier among recent WSJ stories, Molto Ego’s hiring on to sell frozen dinners or the fact that the FDA has been so gutted under the C student from Yale that contaminated pet food ingredients are now the least of our worries from China. And then there was the NSS (no shit, Sherlock) item in the NYPost, on Consumer Reports’ finding on which kitchen appliances are most likely to break down. Hmmmm. Would they be the most expensive, the most yuppified? Congratulations. You win a restored Fifties stove. Which at least will prevent you from nuking a Mario Batali Regional Recipe and wondering what kind of “rustic mouth feel” sausage with orecchiette can safely feed five for $10.99, celeb’s payoff included.

Publishers must be as gullible as Panchito himself if he has a contract to tell the world how he morphed from Bush-whacked groupie to not-waving-but-drowning restaurant reviewer. The title pretty much writes itself: “Triumph of the Witless.”

And of the many brilliant aspects of Bill Buford’s extraordinary take on Gordon Ramsay’s rough entry into what has become Hamburger Heaven, my favorite was his casual evisceration of the big paper’s little man at table. Manhattan has never seemed more like a backward colony than in this haunting piece, which gets right to the heart of a celebrity-addled culture. I only had Ramsay’s food at the opening party, so I can only suspect it could be all Buford describes. But I now wonder if everyone would be so enamored of Per Se if Keller cussed on the TV. Certainly the food served at a sit-down lunch during a Spanish wine event the other day was so restrained it would pass for unremarkable if you didn’t understand what went into it. But then a New York chef by way of California (and vice versa) can sing the theme song from “Freaks,” so he gets automatic beatification as one of us even though he may spend no more time here than the guy with the F image. I won’t soon forget the starry-eyed young writer at my table asking if the holy man would be coming out to greet us and being told very snootily by a waiter offering dueling waters: “No, he’s in Thailand.” London or Paris, of course, would cost him fucking stars.

Speaking of colorful speech, I was walking down Eighth Street and contemplating Pio Maya for lunch when a quarreling couple passed me with the man snarling: “What did you expect? It was a fucking Happy Meal!” Maybe she expected to be greeted with flowers?

Sugar does nothing for me, but the Saveur cover still looks particularly tantalizing this April. Right under the “savor a world of authentic cuisine” line, whipped cream is being piped from 12 to 2 on the clock of a coconut cream pie; the glimpse of the filling under all that white makes the photo. So it’s a bit of a letdown to turn to the recipe and see that the “cream” is actually made from a box of Dream Whip. I thought that stuff went the way of bluing. But then that’s what “honest American cooking” is in diners. That and “chicken base,” the essential ingredient in two other recipes. Both are sourced, which tells you even more about the disconnect between GE Profile editors and regular readers anymore. For the record, they also sell cream of mushroom soup at Gristede’s. And Taste of Home don’t need no stinking source box.

Reading the Metro story about rats and their pivotal place in the food chain the other morning, I hoped the Porcine Pantload was choking on his Frosted Rodent Flakes. More likely that scurrying legal mind was already spinning another op-ed out of the revelation of what furry vermin consider a good protein breakfast. To summarize: Rats eat big disgusting cockroaches. Ergo, rats are performing a public service. In closing, get the health inspectors off infested restaurants’ backs. Really, there’s a place in the Justice Department for this guy. Maybe under Turd Blossom.

Given that I was ready to move to Milan after my most recent foray, it says everything that it took a friend’s urging to get me to skim the Travel piece on eating there. Given that this epic was published in a weekly section, though, I mostly wondered why the food was so last autumn. Italians be seasonal, and summering Americans will be seriously disappointed if they clip and eat. I can't forget my first eating expedition in hottest July a few years ago. Our friend Cristina, who is Milanese to the core, chose a garden restaurant for lunch one day and indulged us in the most obvious local specialties, risotto and vitello, but warned: “You will still be digesting at Christmastime.” I guess it’s easier when you’re plodding?

Do the French have a word for formidable? If so, it is the only adjective for Madame D’Artagnan as she learns the K Street shuffle and starts fighting back in Up Is Down/Black Is White style against the crazies trying to ban foie gras. Whatever you may think about the humanity of force-feeding birds that are genetically programmed to gorge, you have to question the sanity of declaring any food off-limits in the alleged land of the free. Ortolans by any name are different, considering extinction is forever. But are we really going to be the first Western country to legitimize a culinary Taliban? Didn’t some other Frenchie say he might not agree with what you eat, but he’d defend to the death your right to eat it?

The Duck Stops Here is very smart to move the debate away from the ingredient and toward the rights of the producers, the artisanal farmers who are so much more well-intentioned than the agribusinessmen lining up to rape the planet to cash in on the ethanol fad by overplanting corn (only obese America would think burning food for fuel is an ethical concept). But then with the Pucks (Wolfgang and Burger) snagging headlines on a kinder, gentler food supply, it’s looking as if this country will soon be treating hogs and hens a little too well, all lives considered. If the hyper-concerned citizens don’t want to eat an engorged liver, they can pass it by. But until scientists certify the dangers of second-hand bliss, maybe these food fascists should start picketing Walter Reed.

Now that the world knows the Chimp calls his own private attorney general Fredo, after the weakest link in the Corleone family, now might be a good time to remind everyone who gave Panchito his nickname. Even a friend of mine suddenly claims to be unaware of their BFF relationship back when a global menace was sold as an amiable cowpoke to a country that just wanted to have a beer with its president. The only encouraging thought is that Leni in a leopard print bathrobe will be too busy maxing out Pinch’s credit cards at the trough to hit the campaign trail next election; otherwise we’d be looking at a first lady in a tiara, and her husband in a dress. Fool us once. . . .

One of my favorite titles (and books) is “Cold Spaghetti at Midnight.” Maggie Waldron’s legacy is a supremely engaging and very useful guide to feel-better food, and if she were alive today I just wonder what she would have to say about hot sausages at daybreak. Someone’s size OOO black dress must be cutting off circulation to her empty cranium -- this stuff makes Nigella Lawson look like Elizabeth David. Anything that takes a couple of hours to cook is not exactly convenience food on a very late night. And why does a deep freezer full of assorted sausages including bangers but no Italians sound like a bachelorette party gag?

The snow had not even all melted before I had already heard enough about the Shake Shack reopening to last me six lifetimes. I cannot believe I fled a tiny boring burg only to wind up in another where the circus comes to town and the rubes all wet their pants. Even in Clarkdale we didn’t get this worked up about the Dairy Queen every summer. Kroc help us all if an In-N-Out ever opens.

On the plus side of living in Manhattan, I had another experience at Fairway that could not have happened anywhere but here. That store really is like no other killing field, but for once the assault was not by the usual Mike Tyson-wannabe old lady/young mom/shrink co-dependent. I had simply reached up to grab some lemons off a stack about three feet taller than I am and found myself Velcroed to the display, with nubbly wool firmly attached to whatever had held the missing price sign in place. I love my new coat, and I was ready to freak before I realized I was not impaled on a nail. You can’t get that at peace-love-and-understanding Wegmans. The next Spiderman movie could be shot in that same aisle. Come to think of it, the “300” sequel, too.

Surreal evening of the year so far was at Craftsteak, at a strange event celebrating City Harvest’s 25th anniversary. I expected a crowd, but probably fewer than 25 people were clumped in small groups in a private room with three tables laid out with lavish pick food and with several waiters pouring wine and passing plates. For once I did not recognize a soul and sort of lurked near the eats until a guy wandered over to grab some coppa and I tried the old, “Is it just me or do you not know anyone here either?” Within two minutes his wife had materialized and we struck up a conversation that drew over a couple of other people, and I got a persuasive good-we’re-doing rap. I forgot to pick up the press packet when I left shortly afterward, but I did hear that what looked to be three tables’ worth of serious leftovers would not be donated to City Harvest, including foie gras, that amazing coppa, other cured meats, roasted vegetables and more. Only what had not been set out could be accepted. Unlike in India, beggars here can be choosers. While cats get poisoned by food you pay for.

Obsessionwithfood tipped me off to the SFChronicle’s stop-the-presses front-page discovery of restaurant bloggers, which did not exactly do much to advance the cause of old media’s dominance. It was just more proof that there are no new stories, only new reporters (and seriously uninspired photographers -- was the best illustration really a woman sitting at a computer? Give that shooter a cellphone.) Plus it did not address what I find most fascinating, how flacks’ sneaky ways of catapulting the propaganda are not going to work for much longer. After seeing Central Kitchen in the Village photographed as if it were turning out seared tuna in a finished dining room, I happened to walk past and looked into a construction site. But at least this case of premature exultation was an equal-opportunity scam. Both the bloggers and the paper press got taken.

Look for Colors to start getting “reviewed” far and wide on the series of tubes, though. A flack is right now beating the blogs trying to drum up interest in a concept that was probably doomed from the git-go. New York may be, as my one wingnut friend insists, overpopulated with bleeding-heart liberal nitwits, but even we draw the line at eating solely for a cause. This place got more opening press than any 25 restaurants, and it is still struggling -- clearly the 9/11 connection should have been the back story, not the raison d’eating. And aren’t “global eclectic” menus with staff to match a peso a dozen here? For once I hate to sound cynical, and I really do hope they can turn the soul train around before it goes over the cliff, but a mission statement makes a damn dry dinner.

I guess I should consider myself lucky: I eat a lot of mediocre food, but I don’t often face down anything truly miserable. The latest exception was at the newest fusiony Asian joint in our neighborhood. My spring-breaking consort in from Ohio tasted his stir-fried udon and said, “This makes the steam table in Athens look good.” My “tofu with double mushroom” arrived shortly afterward, and I knew without lifting my fork that the sauce was the same as his. As for “double mushroom,” it must have meant “from two cans.” Soup and salad were included in the specials, but I didn’t know they still made iceberg. Even at $5.95, slop is slop. The insult added to the injury was contemplating how much the owners had obviously invested in the look of the place, which is very sleek and stylish and almost downtown for Amsterdam in the 90s. It used to be that an ethnic joint would open up here in a low-rent dump and turn out great food, then renovate and expand as money flowed in. Now the trend seems to be throwing all the cash into the decor and forgetting why people with nice big kitchens go out for lunch. Cool light fixtures have no perceptible taste.

Bad enough that the Phat Phuck was allowed to defend his own kind in the vaunted pages of the NYTimes. But it was a tad too close for comfort to see the missus promoting Niman Ranch’s animal husbandry by essentially attacking the competition. I mean, there was no arguing with the integrity of her position -- industrial pork is the real preventable horror in this country, not overfed ducks -- but it would have been even more persuasive presented by someone with no need to disclose the conflict of marital interest. This was like Mrs. Chimp writing, “Es la verdad.” And spies have been outed for less.

My lunch at Pearl was almost literally a trip. Walking in on the latish side, I grab a stool at the counter between an older woman and a couple who are chatting away about New York restaurants, and of course I have to chime in when I realize the out-of-towners’ to-try list is surprisingly savvy. (Naturally, they didn’t compile it from the NYTimes but from Wine & Spirits, a magazine I clearly have to track down.) Turns out they have made their way to Cornelia Street after having been repulsed by surly treatment at Saravanaas, but the conversation is mostly about what a wondrous city they are in (I couldn’t disagree, only say it’s a far better place to live than to visit). And then suddenly a smiling, happy Mr. Billings is snarling, “George Bush is the shittiest president ever.” I almost have to abandon my perfect, perfect fried cod sandwich to get into this. More, please, sir. We go back and forth about Laura’s little accident and how 9/11 never had to happen and etc. He leaves making the peace sign and saying, “Make levees, not war,” and I go back to my still perfect sandwich without a word to the regular who has taken the stool to my left. And to enjoying what E.B. White called so beautifully New York’s queer prize: the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.

Now that Lonesome Dove has skedaddled back to Texas, antelope tail between its shaky legs, I hope the Fort Worth paper devotes the same amount of humongous space to the deluded chef’s packing up his tent as it did to spreading the news that he was going to make it here. It’s a story chefs never read before they hear wine-soaked applause and mistake Enron on 12th Street for a culinary Carnegie Hall. From there it’s an easy slide to thinking the flacks run the show and forgetting that “location, location, location” is the equivalent of “practice, practice, practice.” The poor guy would have been so much better off taking his kangaroo nachos west. From all I read, what sucks in Vegas stays in Vegas.

What do Ann Coulter and Mario Batali have in common, and I’m not talking gender? The same edamame-brain profiler, who has now taken on the local vs. organic debate, undoubtedly confusing a shrinking number of Americans (Time readers, that is). His piece whipsawed through the usual arguments, building his credibility throughout with loving allusions to such admirable food icons as Applebee’s, Froot Loops, margarine and of course the evilest empire, McDonald’s. Holy Foods? But of course. I have no idea what photos ran in the magazine, but I will be scratching my head until July wondering how an upstate New York CSA farm near the Vermont border would have the tomatoes, basil and two kinds of summer squash shown on the web in March. This story must have been in cold storage longer than those local apples he preferred.

In the highly unlikely event Bear Back Libby does not get his pardon, let’s hope he winds up in a jail where Halliburton has the contract for the food if not the soap. And come to think of it, that must be who catered the dinner Turd Blossom gave for his Chimp at which reporters waiting outside were treated to sausages and “quail wings.” Excuse me? There’s barely meat on those birds, let alone on their wings. At first I wondered if they might have been something left over from that other heckuva job by Halliburton, at Walter Reed (rat and roach legs). Then I checked the Google and saw quail wings are what hunters use to train their dogs. The only better snack for D.C. press who dutifully regurgitate whatever they’re told would be yellow cake.

The icky onanism of the latest installment of “Liberace Goes to Hooters” raises a couple of questions, and not just why he ever imagined he could outdo Eddie Murphy. First, why didn’t Rupert Murdoch think of showing tits and asses to pump up his web traffic? Oh. Right. And, given that nothing could be that embarrassing without someone pulling the strings, who is the Turd Blossom of Dining?

Once again, the real scandal was $25 and Under. A chef with a total of four stars from the NYTimes lowers his prices and gets blown off as cheap eats while the food fight with Chodorow escalates to skank level. Funny, I remember some alleged critic had this to say at Dona: “As satisfying as it can be, a strip steak seldom argues for much attention.” So enough already with beating the meat. Meanwhile, I’ll keep picking up the Murdoch rag to see what a grownup has to say about the restaurant capital of America. Who else lately would put these three names in one sentence: Kreuther, Nish and Humm? But I guess the Times thinks we only read newspapers for the butts and burgers.

WIN, revisited: The people who used to swear olive oil was a panacea are now distributing tiny buttons reading, “Just ask for whole grains.” As if anyone is actually going to wear something so profoundly ridiculous when he could be loading up on a “hybrid horrible” like a cheesecake/brownie/pie or bacon-cheeseburger pizza. What’s weirdest is that this “bold new program” requires consumers to do the hectoring. Shouldn’t the buttons be on the other side of the counter? Otherwise, button wearers are going to be harassed at the ice cream case. Too bad Gerald Ford is not around to help, because I suspect the whole silly effort has all the potential of whipping inflation into foam.

Having actually eaten at the filthiest Taco Bell, I should not have enjoyed the rats-gone-wild videos. But I know the awful truth is that “You Sexy Thing” could be playing at many more restaurants than you want to consider, especially any with a basement where rats can reproduce like franchisees. Given how little oversight appears to be applied to new construction in this town under Nanny Bloomberg, the sickening part is knowing the inspectors looked the other way. Maybe the trick would be to let rats smoke. They would be outa here faster than you can say trans fats.

Just when honey is ordained the new salt, the news sinks in that the bees are dying off. The NYTimes asked what is killing them, but the real question is what isn’t: stress, mites, long-haul trucking, the almond juggernaut, all work and no play? And it didn’t even mention genetic modification. This is the worst manipulation of nature since the foie gras burger -- once corn syrup is considered bee food, you’re axing for trouble. And somehow I suspect importing immigrant bees from Australia to round out the worker force is not the answer but a whole new set of problems. Can you say kudzu? Where is Lou Dobbs when you need him?

Speaking of immunity from nature, I succumbed to an excellent lunch at the “21” Club where an interesting exchange ensued (and not one involving the email warning jeans and sneakers would not be allowed -- travel writers need to be told? [Actually, yes.]) A professionally charming Italian representing the Villa San Michele’s cooking school in Florence stopped at our table and started to go on about how the hotel obsessed over local, seasonal food. Someone went off on an ode to Italian peaches, and someone else chimed in: “Our peaches are terrible. They’re hard, and they don’t taste like anything, and they all come from Chile.” Well, it is New York, and it was February. Think there’s a connection?

(Also, among the many nice touches at “21” for this gimp is that even the small toilet stalls have handicap bars. That reminded me of the tourist pamphlet I picked up in Venice that listed all the hotels there, some with a little red heart alongside the name. I thought it designated favorites until I saw the fine print: “defibrillator available.”)

One reason why universal health care might be, how you say, a good idea: A prep cook with Wolfgang Puck Catering was diagnosed with acute hepatitis A after working 13 events attended by more than 3,500 people. All it takes is one Typhoid Mary to make a human WMD. But at least this little story has an uplifting ending. Google the key words and all the news results show what you most need to know: Beyonce went to one of the parties and didn’t get sick. It’s morning in America.

Here’s evidence that the blog fad has peaked: Artisanal claims to have started one. Judging by the first two posts, the only difference between it and a press release is that you have to click through to see it. Which may be the best spam filter so far.

There’s something sad about a guy who really did revolutionize cheese in restaurants being reduced to a stunt like the world’s biggest fondue, even for a noble cause (although given the shelf life of melted Gruyere, I wonder how much actually went into poor stomachs). Is this really what a chef has to do to get attention anymore? I guess a ton of fondue has to be a lot cheaper than a full-page ad. And maybe Chodorow should grill the city’s biggest ass.

It says everything that an ad has generated more buzz than anything Dining has printed in years. But if the world’s most unlikely David had to take on the gray Goliath, he should have ripped a page out of the MoveOn playbook. I’ll bet thousands of readers would have kicked in on an ad for critic impeachment.

The real scandal was $25 and Under, which didn’t even pretend to be about that so-last-century price. Even if you ordered the two cheapest items touted, you would still need bread -- and still not get your money’s worth. (I only went once, but it was a lame ripoff at lunch.) Worse, calling the joint the best option for Indian food uptown is a little like saying the airplane meal is your best bet at 30,000 feet. This may not be a restaurant wasteland up here, but it isn’t exactly Curry Hill.

And while I’m starting to feel like the boss in Dilbert whose underlings gave him a dead horse knowing he would kick it, I have to wonder what kind of newspaper would award a regular column to someone with the verbal skills of a Chimpanzee. “Bone pickers and leavers?” Isn’t that dangerously close to uniters and deciders?

Which two boy bloggers really should get a room? (I mean, it’s one thing to light your own farts. . . .) Which TV food fake literally demands what her brand marketing implies: “Eat me”? (No, the initials are not Rs.) And isn’t showing a certain bloated chef to lure suckers to a magazine’s promotional event taking Year of the Pig a little too far?

I read the Journal’s interview with Kraft’s new honcha with slack-jawed fascination. This airhead is the Condoleezza Rice of CEO’s, completely in over her head. She insisted, repeatedly, that the future lies in packaging crap meat with crap cheese as “Deli Creations” -- “What’s so cool about them is you stick them in your microwave, it takes 60 seconds and it tastes freshly baked.” And that was her example of catering to cooks. Worse, she announced that “we’re about to come out with Jell-O with fruit in it.” Apparently they’re going into the MRE business. But at least that would be following the money.

More likely, someone at Processed Cheese Food HQ has been reading Taste of Home. Once a hokey but wholesome little food magazine, it has come completely undone under newish ownership apparently determined to shove a very square peg into a GE Profile hole. The editors (the real ones, not the “field” editors) used to understand that their readers were interested in cooking rather than just fixing food, and recipes were always built on real ingredients, not shopping carts full of convenience chemicals. Whatever I have made from it has been good. But now, more and more, you get incoherence (a recipe for Buffalo Chicken Dip calls for “1/2 cup buffalo sauce,” and I don’t think they mean bison semen) and garbage (a “good food that’s good for you” cake combines a mix, egg whites, fat-free reduced-sugar yogurt and Cool Whip). I’d sooner buy a microwave and shove a Deli Creation into it. Let Bon Appetit be Bon Appetit. This is putting lipstick on a heritage pig.

One of the mysteries of the food world is why the announcement of the Michelin stars rates so much coverage at the same time everyone insists the Red Guide is over. Even I look at the list, despite knowing my chances of eating at anything higher than two is about as likely as my taking possession of that $10 million that soldier over in Iraq keeps promising me in return for my banking details. And so this year I learned that the place my consort agreed to take me to on a stupidly significant birthday is now up there at the top of the starosphere. Unfortunately, what I mostly remember about that dinner was the cab ride to reach it, deep in the Bois de Boulogne on a frigid night in January. I concede that the four previous days had been an orgy of Champagne, but I could still swear the road was lined with women (many Asian) who were either naked or wearing only open coats, while the driver didn’t seem to find anything unusual about it. Maybe that’s what “worth the journey” means in Paris.

My travel photographer friend who treated me to dinner with his wife at the always-satisfying Chola found one of his pictures printed on the entertaining menu and had no idea how it wound up there. Which would not be worth commenting on except for the fact that the wedding it depicted was not in India. He shot it in Trinidad. I guess immigration mucks up more than red sauce.

If you have $70 to throw away on a class on food blogging, you already have your first post. Save your money and just do it. The fact that there are people who would happily charge for seminars on (heavy) breathing doesn’t mean you have to inhale.

I was blissfully out of the country when it happened, so I missed all the snickering over “Desserts for Dummies” at the White House. But maybe the sweet hire might want to think about borrowing Britney Spears’s hoodie. Judging by Google images, the Chimp has pate issues. And I don’t mean duck liver.

Before you accuse me of being insensitive, consider the flack who sent out a photo of a disturbingly bloated client with the line, “Think a serious (Deleted) on steroids.” The worst part is that the paid buildup to the poor guy’s opening seems, judging by the press kit, to have lasted longer than the average new restaurant.

I guess we’ve lived so long knowing there’s shit in the meat that a little salmonella in the peanut butter just seems like more homeland insecurity. But it is revealing that Peter Pan turns out to be Great Value with a higher price tag; both were made by the same factory. If there is an up side to food poisoning anymore, it may be that it is one of the few things in seriously stratified America that is still equal opportunity.

I have subscribed to the Daily News for almost as long as I have lived in New York (which is so long that I distinctly remember knowing I had reached Gotham City when I first saw two guys kissing passionately in front of the 9 sculpture on 57th Street on a Sunday afternoon -- in 1981). But every morning I get closer to pulling the plug, and not just because the comics have been cut by a quarter, the editorials are rabidly Foxian, the dreadful redesign has left less room for real content and the obsession with diapered astronauts and implant overdoses is such an abdication of civic duty when troops (and democracy) are dying at such a steady clip. Now the disconnect between reality and TabLand has hit an obscene low, with a story blurbed, “Cooking is becoming the new manly art.” Becoming? “Add a side of macho,” it advised, alongside a shot of a notorious crybaby. Twenty years ago, it insisted, men’s magazines never ran recipes (tell that to Esquire, which started buying from me in the spring of 1987). And on the jump, the photo was of another will-o’-the-whisk. This stinker made that ridiculous equine dung in Styles on eating at your desk seem fresh and smart. Oh, and the quote ho they dug up to prove girls are down with this “trend”? Last I heard from her, she was a flack. Even a Metropolitan Diary sold shorts is not that gullible.

Beyond the idiocy, the paper is increasingly clueless about the hometown. A story on the scalping of VD reservations referred to “the city’s top foodie havens: Gramercy Tavern, the River Club, Le Bernardin, Acappella . . . .” Didn’t they mean Cafe Accapella? Maybe the damn thing is being outsourced to India. But even in Bangalore they might think to get out their maroon gazetteers.

Apparently the same pollsters who still turn up even the tiniest percentage of support for the Chimp are now working for Bon Appetit. The new issue cheerily reports its survey found 75 percent of readers “choose locally grown and produced foods.” Granted, maybe the question was asked at the height of tomato season. But it still makes you wonder how an E. coli outbreak in spinach could go national with such enlightened shopping going on. Or maybe people are as likely to lie about eating nobly as they are about voting for a black or woman president. There are no exit polls at supermarkets.

The other message of BA was pretty obviously thanks for the mammaries, if you could decipher it through all the ads designed to look like editorial (or vice versa). A few of the photos reminded me of the video clips a clearly underemployed friend sends me of waitresses using their breasts as creamers. I could see making your own mozzarella, but not falling out of your tight top and starting from scratch.

At a time when old media is earnestly trying to advise the great unwashed online about ethics, I quite enjoyed my taste of how “real” travel writers dine at an exquisite afternoon at Cafe Pierre. An incorrigible hotelier from Biarritz was in town on a promotional visit, and I had the great good fortune to be seated to his right as he held court through the Laurent-Perrier and white Burgundy, the lovely lobster and the shrimp soup/flan and the sea bass. I heard the stealable term “intellectual masturbation” used to describe Ferran Adria’s cooking and got an offer to call Pudlo from his programmed cellphone on the banquette (I passed, my French being even lamer than my Catalan). If his point was the crucial importance of the human touch in hospitality, he was making it big time. And when I got home, I saw that the gray guests walked away with just what I did, none of it anything like the ephemera handed out at food events. So, sure, old media, lecture young bloggers till the sacred cows come home. But at least have the grace to be self-aware.

Speaking of OM, maybe newspapers could revive their fortunes by starting want ads that actually say something. I’m thinking of a category formerly known as Help Wanted that would now be Just Shoot Me. Anyone considering job jumping would read it and stick to the hell he knows, while the unemployed tempted by the military would have an alternative. Given that Outback Steakhouse had enough dough to take out a full-page ad in USA Today boasting the ultimate JSM position, the income potential is unlimited. Could you imagine spending your precious life as the crouton chef? I mean, really. Making croutons and knowing aborigines have no word for yesterday or tomorrow, only that today will be one endless slog of dicing and toasting cubes of bread most people will never even touch, let alone notice? Whoever said hell is other people never understood the hell of other jobs. In a balls-eat-balls world, never forget that Mr. Bad Example will always need a fluffer.

Just back from Italy, I’m happy to report that the only food TV I saw in eight days was a commercial -- the chef of the original Bice happily shilling the bouillon cubes he claimed were the secret of his risotto Milanese. And why did that seem so much more honest than all the bogus competitions Americans obsess on?

The best part of the Identita Golose conference that lured me to Milan was that all the chefs looked and acted like regular guys (only a few moms were there to represent the smarter sex). Except when they were doing their presentations, wearing personalized jackets made by one of the sponsors, they walked around in civilian clothes, egos securely checked at the front door. Maybe I don’t get out enough, but it was incredibly revivifying to be surrounded by people who wanted to talk about changing the world through food rather than strutting their “Iron Chef” schticks around in clogs. Absence made the horse shit clearer.

I tore out Gourmet’s story on eating in Milan and never enjoyed it more than after a bruising at Bar Magenta. The writers were so charmed by the fact that Italian bars now advertise “happy hour.” What they failed to mention is that those two words will cost you. A prosecco that goes for 2.30 euros any other time of day is 5.50 to 7, whether you want the sneezed-on, picked-over hors d’oeuvres on offer or not. Something was lost in the translation of aperitivo.

After very long, very intense days spent watching creative chefs’ ideas fly by, the weird thing was that I had no interest in clever food for dinner. The first night I made my way to a Slow Food special, Osteria delle Vigne, in the Navigli area. My starter was perfection: tagliolini with duck that was swirled into a tidy nest with a puddle of sauce off to the side, so that I could eat awhile, then dip awhile; the overall experience got better rather than boring. But the next course was a lentil soup topped with bacon, bacalao and garlic croutons -- four ingredients in search of an immersion blender. Maybe there’s something to this foam stuff after all.

Some things I saw in Milan: Dentures made out of marzipan. A bar called Old America (presumably the one before the Chimp of Destruction). A guy taking a dump in the street in the financial district. Wine on sale in a health food store. Even dogs in fur coats. Some things I learned: Older Italians go to Cuba for dental work because it is faster and cheaper (message to New America: Keep your hands off Havana). There is something called heroic viniculture (in a valley north of Milan, the terrain is so treacherous they harvest by helicopter). Italians think of everything, including a special biscuit to eat with prosecco called a proseccino. Some places I loved: Biffi on Corso Magenta, for the excellent cappuccino, the great attitude and the extraordinary crowd management; Chocolat, for the macchiato, the scene and the glimpse of the new Italy (hint: it is the color of cacao), and my hotel, Locanda Antica Leonardo, for the service, location and price (95 euros!) One great thing I heard: My friend Diego Orlando, wandering among the booths in the basement of Palazzo Mezzanotte looking for a place to dump his wineglass and lamenting, “An empty glass is always heavier than a full one.” And one thing I should never forget: A quattro stagione pizza in Italy will always be bread soup. They do crust wrong.

Can you kill with banality? F&W is certainly trying with its new “blog.” One ponderous anecdote follows another, with attempted snark far outpaced by product plugs and self-references, not to mention the sense that editors are lurking (who else would not trust a reader to know what an ear trumpet is?) I always remember someone described Sunday Styles back when it began as a grandmother jammed into bike shorts. This sorry attempt at trendiness is Mrs. Doubtfire in a thong.

A friend who would know had the best take on the closing of Cite: You can be sure things are bad at Time-Warner when the canteen shuts down. This may be the first restaurant casualty attributable to the travails of old media.

More than a week of eating in a country where only the semolina suffers made me even less tolerant of the fools picketing a Manhattan institution over foie gras. Given that the “outrage” is overfeeding, these misguided dilettantes would be better off protesting in front of the Dunkin’ D’s in poor neighborhoods all over the city.

I don’t know what was more unsettling to find in my hometown paper: Mary Cheney’s ovaries or Panchito’s proudly bosomless buddy on the airhead beat. The debut was dangerously close to parody (and inaccurate to boot -- grits are grits and polenta is cornmeal); the only thing dumber would be making your own cornflakes. Clearly, she realizes she has some very small flip-flops to fill.

I notice I was not the only cynic who thought the skankier of the skank twins should probably try her hand with a cookbook rather than anything her dad could not read. Despite her endless research, though, how many recipes could she have for margaritas?

A sign posted at Sipan on Amsterdam says it is “closed for reparations.” I can think of about 50 restaurants that should be doing the same atonement.

So my haircutter was chatting away about how much she admires a certain older woman’s cooking shows and asked me what this famous personage is really like. Interestingly enough, the night before I had sat at the same table with her at a Scorcese-esque dinner, and I said she had struck me as extremely nice, which must be why she has done so well for herself. The scissors-wielder was surprised: “My husband knows a guy who worked for her, and he said she’s a real bitch!” So I corrected myself, saying maybe that was why she has done so well. But I also had to point out that her famous partner is apparently a notorious son of a bitch, and somehow no one has a problem with that. If all politics is local, Hillary would be wise to wear crocs.

Having finally caught up to Jay Rayner’s “tastes of things to come” -- starting with Alinea and ending with zein -- I now know where the most ominous term in food right now comes from. Molecular gastronomy was essentially grant-speak that means nothing. But the more important lesson from the other 25 ingredient-manipulating trends is that the goal seems to be the same way of eating the futurists were always predicting almost half a century ago. Rather than indulging in full plates, we will be consuming one pellet a meal, all nutrients in capsule form. Call me a Flintstones throwback, but somehow I don’t think it’s progress.

The most ridiculous thing I have read in donkeys' years was by the Paris Hilton of food news bloggers, who said the Mexican president’s intervening in the price of tortillas saved America’s Super Bowl. Could anyone with access to a mouse really be that witless? No. 1, who makes Doritos from scratch? No. 2, why would the price south of the fence make the slightest bit of difference? And No. 3, does she have even the faintest inkling of the reality that the crisis was a crisis because poor people with no 2-for-99-cent Taco Bells live on nothing but beans and tortillas for protein? Pennies make the difference between life and privation. Maybe if we did more to address the inequity in the world poor beleaguered French chefs would not have to be bothered with Mexicans wanting to move up, literally. And maybe a great reality show would let mothers wondering where their next tortilla is coming from swap places with privileged cretins.

I see the Porcine Pantload has finally solved the mystery of how the whole world knows what Panchito is going to review before the paper even comes out. Is this the same Phat Phuck who presided over endless scurrilous-to-slanderous potshots while making oracular pronouncements on the inner workings of the NYT? No fool like an internationally exposed fool. But I guess when your whole life is devoted to the wrong end of the alimentary canal you have an excuse: It’s gotta be hard to see with your head up your e-rectum.

Even I’m weary of pointing out that the guy who helped sell a dangerous chimpanzee as a nickname-dispensing good ol’ boy is equally adept at representing restaurants. But did anyone else think lumping Eleven Madison with the Bar Room was as intellectually sloppy as trying to review Martin Amis’s latest with a Richard Bachman in one muddled mess? The worst part is that it all had the stink of atonement about it. Who wouldn’t love to get the skinny from Saint Danny?

The Dan who is really working toward beatification is Barber. In his NYT op-ed on government farm policy, he did a stellar job not just of laying out problems but of offering intelligent, practical solutions. With what Jon Stewart has accurately dubbed a catastrophuck going on right now, most of us seem to forget that Congress actually should be doing the right thing by “we the people,” not just for agribusiness with its bottomless pockets and boundless greed. Too bad his piece was turned over to the kind of itchy-cursor copy editor and anal slot with which the NYT is so afflicted, the combined effect creating a syndrome that one cranky veteran on the national desk in my first stint dubbed “Mr. He The President.” Commas followed by long dashes, phrases like “and the food what we grow” and “the rich muck dirt” -- it was embarrassing. As penance, the perpetrators should be sent up to the magazine to do an intervention on a certain editor’s too-good friend. The one who thinks you make pie crust by kneading.

As hard as I try to resist the very idea of molecular gastronomy, I keep getting sucked into it. Most recently I succumbed to blandishments from two sides and found myself in the audience at the International Culinary Center (nee French Culinary Institute), watching as a bright young chef from Padua did things to food Apicius never dreamed of on his wildest and craziest day. Given that I have ranted ever since my first eating expedition to Italy that there is no cuisine there, only ingredients, I thought what he was doing veered treacherously close to French. Mostly it looked like an enormous amount of work to deconstruct a tomato only to turn it into a tomato all over again, with lots of plastic wrap and mechanical assistance. And the sequence where he melted provolone into a wrapper simply conjured what happens at Kraft when they make Singles.

The real entertainment was provided by the translator, who was the human equivalent of that little flag you click on on a web site to turn Kazakhstanese into English. He was so lame people in the audience were calling out the right words, and by the end even the chef was telling his mentally paralyzed mouthpiece “chives” when said ingredient popped up on the screen. He used “greasy” for “grasso” and “last of the beets” for “greens” to cite two of the less embarrassing errors. The sad reality was that I spoke with the chef beforehand and, like so many Italians, he misunderestimated his own agility with English. Surely he would have been better able to describe what was happening with his saffron risotto than “irrigating.”

But the most jarring part of the day came when I was still reeling from seeing shrimp heads go into a food processor and thinking of the wood chipper scene in “Fargo.” Walking down the stairs after the lovely little tasting, I spotted a big sign quoting Escoffier: “The best dish is the simplest.” Put that in your immersion blender and foam it.

If salarymen and minimum-wagers were the only sheep packing the burger joints mushrooming all over the city, I might buy into the idea that ground beef emporia are “the poor man’s steakhouses.” But more and more places are opening to cater to the high end, which means something more insidious is at work. The too-clever names (STK, brgr) also have me wondering why there is so much meat available for either kind of restaurant. What happened to those illegal meatpackers immigration rounded up, anyway? If the B in burger is not pronounced, would you say it's soylent?

Looking for food? Nice? How about Readings? Pick up Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” and think about how much good your bottled water and cash caches will do you. It's not too late to start canning for the apocalypse.

You have to wonder about a culture that simultaneously demands health rules for models and invents diet pills for dogs. As if the Saddam snuff video did not do enough damage to our national image, now there is the news that legal drug pushers are marketing something they admit will turn chihuahua livers into foie gras. I buy canned cat food as a souvenir in every country I go to, and so far I have been stymied exactly once, and it was not in Cuba. At a supermarket in Bangalore, the LA of the Subcontinent, the clerks looked at me as if I were the ugliest of Americans. Food for animals? What a concept in a country where whole families subsist literally on the streets. Unfortunately, newspapers still rule there. And now a billion Indians can read all about researchers squandering resources on fat pugs.

New York is in an orgy of self-congratulation since one guy rescued another from being run over by a subway train and two more snatched a kid from a death dive off a fire escape. Nice stories, both of them, but hardly evidence that the city has changed irrevocably for the better since 9/11 (what happened to the three-makes-a-trend rule?) Walk into Fairway or Zabar’s around the holidays and try to find even a milliliter of that milk of human kindness. In the latter I was merely shoved, jostled and aisle-blocked while dreaming of geriatricide, while the former left me with a big, nasty bruise after some guy pushing past hit me so hard on the hip screws with his basket I nearly puked from pain in the sugar aisle. But this is why I live here. It’s the world capital of go Cheney yourself. And the NYT definitely asked the wrong questions. Forget whether you would jump into the Hudson to save a baby. Would you ever let someone cut ahead at the deli counter?

The food world equivalent of the inflatable lawn Santa has to be the seasonal sensation dreamed up by the mad chemists at Dunkin’ Donuts: gingerbread latte. The only thing worse would be fruitcake cappuccino. And maybe trans fats aren’t all that should be banned there.

When the shit hit the spinach, the FDA immediately blamed budget cuts and “competing demands” for keeping it from tightening up produce inspections. Thanks to the WSJ, it’s now clear what it was busy doing: caving to the manufacturers of one of the creepiest fake foods out there. No longer will the favorite salad bar delicacy of a well-known nutrition writer be known as “imitation crab.” You have to call surimi “crab-flavored seafood.” If the world lasts long enough for the Chimp’s comma to ever be analyzed, the torture of English may be the most haunting chapter. Oops. Make that the “alternative interrogation” of English.

Figuring out what caused the food poisoning at Olive Garden may be even trickier than it has been for Taco Bell. Investigators are asking diners to bring in both their doggie bags and their stool samples. The mystery is how they will be able to tell the difference.

That unsettling sound you heard the day after the NYT’s staggeringly stupid trans fat cook-off was Julia Child, shitting in her grave. The very idea that butter would be inferior to Crisco in a tarte tatin probably came as news to Andre Soltner and Jacques Pepin, not to mention the ghost of Escoffier. How did the French manage for centuries before chemists figured out liquid could be turned into solid for cheap pastries with the shelf life of a Twinkie? The bigger question is how the self-appointed trans fat expert of America could “contribute reporting” without suggesting that maybe using cleaned-up Crisco would make the contest more fair. And that maybe the lard in the lede might be followed up on in the “tests.” The whole thing reeked of typical ICE grandstanding and reporters’ gullibility. I hate to point out the obvious, but a real chef like Francois Payard would at least have given the stunt a whiff of credibility. And even the biggest quote ho in the business would have been a better judge.

For some reason, though, trans fats seem to incite willful idiocy on 43d Street. An otherwise content-free interview with the 800-Pound Gorilla included the bizarre observation that his favorite holiday foods -- roast-beef ribs, vegetables, plum pudding with hard sauce or vanilla ice cream -- involve trans fats. Which one? Do these cretins even know what trans fats are? And what is the obsession with insisting they make food taste good? I guess I shouldn’t even be asking this about the paper that swallowed and regurgitated every bit of BS from the DC crazies to lie us into a bloody mess. Trans fats are just the new WMD’s. Which makes the Chalabi Crier now the Crisco Chronicle.

Young Frankenstein may be dead, but he will not expire in my memory, ever. He didn’t just play a monster; he could be a pretty unfunny one in a restaurant. When his eggs did not arrive as fast as he wanted late one morning, he stuck his vein-bulging head and half his upper body straight into the passthrough and bellowed, Johnny Rotten style. But he actually did me a favor: When I couldn’t bring myself to spit on his plate, I knew I was not cut out for the restaurant kitchen.

If you’re looking for restaurant advice, do not pretend to write to Dining Dilemma (and not just because the name is ridiculous -- anyone check the dictionary?) If you want Scandinavian, they’ll go to norway.com and find some gruesome recommendation and send you there even after they have a lousy meal (sample descriptives: “letdown,” “dainty,” “unavailable,” “less luck” and, my favorite, “only decent”). The honesty is admirable, but you have to wonder if some mole has infiltrated the Daily News to make Panchito look sage.

One of my many slogans has always been: “Once a copy editor, always a nuisance.” And so the only thing that keeps my head from exploding on reading one of my three morning papers is knowing that a far more famous cranium must be shattering in retirement. One day it’s protestors and the next it’s court bouillion. You think “the reason is because” they don’t have spell-check? But even that would not explain “I.V.O.O.” in a dis of Rachael Ray’s show. Uncorrected, that’s Ixtra Bad.

My one objection to the trans fat ban sounds awfully conservative even to me: Get the government off my plate. For every good thing it does, like saving smokers from themselves and us from them, it comes up with something deluded to the point of dangerous. The latest example is the city’s move to battle obesity among schoolchildren by depriving them of whole milk. Turns out the kids have just cut back on drinking milk altogether rather than gag down the watery versions that are deemed nutritionally acceptable. If you can’t even count on newspapers to keep up with science, how can you expect bureaucrats to understand that growing bodies might -- as Nina Planck documents in her excellent “Real Food” -- need the fat in whole milk to absorb the vitamins that are so essential? The only thing worse would be outsourcing. Snapple would do a heckuva job. Wait. I guess they already tried that.

Given that I use my Amex in a restaurant sometimes five days out of seven, it’s amazing that I have only left it behind twice. Both times I have been left stewing over why the onus is on me to figure out where it is. Most recently there was so much crap in the check folder at Bread Bar at Tabla that I collected my receipt and a copy of the bill but missed the gold hidden among a promo for chutney and a comment card and whatever other loving paperwork had been jammed in. Next day I went to get cash, noticed a certain something missing from my wallet and had to mentally retrace my steps. To the restaurant’s credit, the receptionist was instantly able to tell me when I called that “we have it in our safe.” But it feels as if once upon a time a restaurateur would have called me. I’m in the book. Anywho.com has made tracing people even easier. It’s one more symptom of hospitality as a dying industry -- at least until they figure out how to swipe your card into a call center in India that would automatically dial home.

For once looking on the bright side, I have to note that this incident did have amusement value. I schlepped all the way back in the rain, carrying a heavy bag from the Greenmarket, and waited while the hostess seated three parties until finally a young kid in a suit came over to ask for my ID to go fetch the card. He leaned close, made a twitch halfway between winking and cocking his eyebrow and said, “Glad you enjoyed yourself so much last night.” Very funny. It was a one-glass lunch. But I guess that’s why they never call. Card losers have only themselves to blame. And restaurateurs are too busy insisting diners call to confirm the reservations they have battled the phone tree to make in the first place.

As far as I can tell, the cheapest subscription to the Wall Street Journal is about a hundred bucks a year. Its target audience is not secretaries and janitors but the guys raking in bonuses the size of GDP’s of countries in the developing world. Yet when its health columnist set out to give readers advice on “dining out,” the tips were all intended for use in restaurants about one step above fast food. Really, a fat-cat CEO needs to worry about the calories at Panera Bread? Give me a foie gras break.

While the fashion industry wrestles with anorexia, knowing that hyper-skinny models are essential to deluding menopaused Lumps in the Bed into thinking a slipcover will fit like a dress, the food world is about to embrace it. “Bony Like Me” aims to teach women to restrain themselves and consume only “tidbits of yum.” Trust me, that phrase alone will set off an epidemic of barfing if not scarfing.

Don’t ask me why, but I’ve been up to my epiglottis lately in memoirs by the baddest of bad-boy British chefs. For all their big-swinging-dick idiocy, though, they have nothing on a Chimp diddling while Iraq burns, just to protect his SOB ego. But for all their abusive antics, they at least appear to have worked very hard to get to the point where they could kick around the help (and the customers). Forget Barack and Hillary. A prick chef might make a better president.

I was laughing over spotting “homemaid soup” on a big banner outside a deli near the Greenmarket, then came home and saw an eminent ghost nattering on online about writing a “forward.” And not a Jewish one. The old copy editor in me who sees that same idiocy in five out of six food books anymore just has to note that it’s ass-backwords. Make it stop.

One of my many rants has always been that journalism has devolved from a rough-and-tumble profession to a privileged path lined with stock options, and nothing demonstrates that more clearly than the coverage of the Taco Bell shit storm. Even in the tabloids, you would think none of the rarified souls “reporting” had ever set foot into one of those cheap-food-is-for-the-little-people outlets that blight the American landscape. Otherwise, they would know the slimy scallions were always scarier than the truly frightening beef in the two-for-$1 tacos. In my old life, I actually would skulk in for meat-free nachos supreme, just for the self-loathing effect, and the green flecks used as a garnish inevitably looked like a dangerous marriage of chlorophyll and bacteria -- or something that might happen in the Cheney family. But the ultimate symptom of cluelessness was the assumption that the filthy lilies were used in salsa, as they were at killer Chi-Chi’s. This chain is too cheap for salsa; witness the boycott over slave labor a few years ago. It cuts costs beyond the bone, literally right down to the gut level. And I guess it says everything that a reporter was dispatched immediately to try the $55 macaroni and cheese.

Thank the butter deity that the trans fat ban has passed so we can finally stop hearing that it will affect all restaurants, from “McDonald’s to fashionable bistros,” let alone change the taste of doughnuts. This is a cost issue, nothing more. No food needs trans fats for any reasons but price and shelf life. For every can of Crisco, there is a tub of lard that works even better. And no one should forget that the same substance now being outlawed with great fanfare was foisted upon the fast food chains. McD’s, after all, cooked its fries in animal fat until the people now crusading against trans fats insisted it was not healthy. Why believe them now? But if you really want your head to explode, consider the proud announcement from the silly soda company that it will be making its drinks with sugar. Sugar. The stuff we have been warned about our whole lives is now the preferred ingredient. Not for the first time, I’m thinking of giving up nutrition coverage for my health.

I often feel out of it when I flit around the blogosphere and see everyone swarming into the next hot thing when I have yet to pick up on a distant signal from Planet Hip. So I thoroughly enjoyed the breathless coverage of the “opening” of Metro Marche, in the Port Authority. It was everywhere, in print and online, the very morning after my consort and I had eaten there for the second time (after “Fast Food Nation”) and had, in fact, been informed that business was picking up after several weeks. A ribbon-cutting does not an opening make. Neither does a press release.

The shocker in the lawsuit against the Big Homme is not that workers with pigment issues could be treated badly in a taste temple. It is that seven of them actually got up the nerve to take it public. The funny thing is that he probably doesn’t even mind. At least he gets his name in the paper. Too bad it’s in Metro, but you take what you can get in the age of Dining irrelevance.

Halliburton must have won the Christmas catering contract at the Chimp’s. As Slate noted, the dessert list alone is beyond overkill (22? 23?) Maybe it’s reassuring to know the compassionate conservative in chief does not have to worry about food security. But I hope it doesn’t give him any ideas about how the rest of us eat, especially in wartime. Clearly, it’s high time for another Talking Heads anthem. This ain’t no buffet. . . .

Say what you will about the Skank Twins, but the odds are good that they ingested a local thing or two while wilding through Buenos Aires. Their sorry father, by contrast, flew all the way to Estonia and couldn’t (too despised) or wouldn’t (too chicken) try anything but bubble food. Much was made about him being the first sitting president to visit that amazing country, but he really is more the E.B. White-ish definition of a commuter: a guy who travels a million miles and never goes anywhere. Say what you will about Hillary, but they still talk about her dinner at Grandma’s Place in Tallinn, and her almost Finnish taste for the vodka. Oh, for the good old days when we had White House occupants who could drink and not drive the country into a ditch.

You know it’s Christmastime in a globally warmed world of confusion when Hunan Park hangs out its soft-shell crab sign. When the Tribeca Greenmarket offers “finger link” potatoes. And when some forgettable SoHo cafe has a chalkboard special in the window: chicken semifreddo. No hint as to whether you can get it in a cone or just a cup.

Speaking of labeling, the LAT certainly caused a stir with its story of the woman suing Kraft for fraud over the guacamole that contains virtually everything but the ingredient you would most expect. The surprise is not that this concoction is the usual American crappier-eating-through-chemistry but that anyone is surprised. If you bought it at the supermarket, it’s probably processed. My consort is home on break with his ribs protruding attractively and credits his flat belly to eating primarily from his farmers’ market in the wrong Athens. As a friend immediately pointed out when I told her, you can’t get fat eating that food. Because it is food. Not hydrogenated oils and corn syrup and anything but avocado.

Of course the guacamole reporting was larded with reaction from consumers who were shocked, shocked. And that is no surprise, either. The one thing that characterizes the average shopper is cluelessness. Which is also an affliction rampant in the media. One day I both saw in print and heard on the radio that a defendant in a murder case had disrupted his trial by refusing to eat an egg salad sandwich “because he was lactose-intolerant.” At no point did the “reporter” point out that there is no dairy in such a sandwich. Or, as a farmer on Union Square tartly advises his city customers with food issues: “Eggs do not come from cows.” And, might I add, should not come from the same aisle as Kraft “guacamole.”

Oysters and pancakes together would be unappetizing enough, but it was downright creepy to exhume Johnny Apple and then effectively dis him with faint praise. The story of him being solicited for advice from his deathbed was bad enough when the triviality of the request was first disclosed. Worse is seeing what that last effort yielded. Next time, google “kewl pancakes” and let a legend expire in peace.

Now I see why the NYT Op-Ed page was able to run such an excellent Thanksgiving screed on how planet overheating is endangering the traditional turkey trimmings. The opinionator apparently blew off his bigger assignment and filed a grocery list instead. If you were expecting reviews of the best cookbooks for the holidays, you would have been better off checking the authors’ own web sites. Call me old-fashioned, but I like a little meat, not just someone going through the motions. Can you really evaluate a collection of recipes without getting it greasy? Or, as they say in Writing 101, shouldn’t you show, not tell?

One of the many things that makes Manhattan the greatest city in the known universe is that you can head out to a restaurant to meet a friend’s friends and wind up sitting between one woman who has taught a parrot to do math and another who has done health-care consulting in Qatar. Given that one of the two was in a sling with a broken finger, some of the conversation did tend to dwell on the mess the rest of the country is content to live with when it comes to keeping every American healthy. I went into my usual rant about Typhoid Mary having been a cook but at least could freshen it up with a new example. Walking through Grand Central after not enough breakfast to face coat shopping the other day, I stopped at Ciao Bello for a restorative if dainty cup of passion fruit sorbet with a euro price ($4.15 for two little scoops; no extra charge for the ice crystals). As I was emptying my wallet at the cash register, a guy walked by and called out to the woman who had just been up close and personal with my food: “Feeling better?” She sort of flinched and shrugged, and I walked away thinking: “I hope to Islamochrist you are, because what you have I am going to get.” And somehow I doubt owning a private jet would ever do me much good.

I never finished journalism school, but I did absorb enough ethics lessons to make me stop at least once a week these days and think: “In a million years I never imagined . . . .” Thirty-some years ago, if a professor had said a newspaper section would ever run Champagne ads on the cover of a section devoted to booze, I would have wondered how much Boone’s Farm he had drunk that morning. Now I just wake up and confront the ’Horing section and see business as usual. Really, a beer story across from a beer ad? A Maker’s Mark ad across from a bourbon recipe? So much for newspapers trashing magazines for the same tricks. The awful truth is that more people I spoke with that same day volunteered that they had read the “kitchen” advertorial than had opened the section that actually did “involve the reporting or editing staff of The New York Times.” This bend-over attitude may be intended to keep the buzzards circling 43d Street at bay. But I suspect it is actually pouring blood on the water. Next thing you know we’ll be seeing Pinch’s stocking feet on a cracker box.

Interesting creature, the Chimp. He likes his turkeys free range but his soldiers cooped up, in a quagmire costing $11 million an hour. If there was ever a year to skip the ridiculous poultry “pardon,” it should have been this one. And to think they call turkeys stupid.

I suspected I was not the only reader who had to look away from the disturbing lede photo in Dining, and before Wednesday was over I was opening an email from a creeped-out friend wondering why it showed so many hungry kids and so little turkey. Then I realized: It reminded me of home. Not literally -- Thanksgiving was one of the few days when there was actually more than enough to eat thanks to the kindness of whoever secretly deposited boxes of groceries on our doorstep. But I was raised in a litter of seven, and seeing what appeared to be at most two couples with 14 kids between them did bring back memories. I have no idea what the story blathered on about, but the headline should have been: “Pass a drumstick and a case of condoms.”

I had not heard a peep out of the university where I put in 2 1/2 years in the early Seventies until the other day, when I got a promo card addressed to me by my first name and middle initial and my consort’s last name. But I’m less curious about how I was tracked down and married off than how a Tucson alumni group could choose one of the most abysmal restaurants in New York to celebrate “Mexican food night.” It’s a disgrace to the chimichanga. And the Arizona Wildcats must now be serious pussies.

Here’s a trend that should be nipped in the petroleum stage: upscale plastic flatware. I’m starting to see it touted in magazines -- $120 for a 16-piece set in Lucky, most recently -- and there could be nothing more insane. I just went to a world-class birthday party where the most decadent touch was metal cutlery for all 24 of us to tackle the pulled pork and individual apple pies. And now we are being told plastic is preferable, by the same people who assume we would invest in fake lace doilies? It reminds me of a party I went to back in the Eighties where the hostess served a full turkey dinner; when I told a magazine editor later what a great idea it was, she asked, “Was she doing it to be cool, or didn’t she know any better?” I would need supreme self-confidence to set out $10-a-fork plastic shit at a party. And then I would lose it all realizing I had tricked myself into dishwashing duty, defeating the whole purpose of plastic. I’m sticking to those wacky wooden forks from Fairway. Or just giving up magazines for the holidays.

Upscale is downscale seems to be the message of the season, though. The refugee from Gourmet incongruously writing food for the Daily News on Sunday seems to think readers want to throw their maxed-out credit cards at $176 caviar sets and $100 steaks, not to mention crap from Zingerman’s when Zabar’s is so close. This is the paper that condemned the Post for the O.J. orgy and then put the Godmother on its own front page for two days running. Obviously, it knows its sophisticated readers are interested in the finer things in life. It’s enough to make you want to drop $105 on tequila, and not for a gift.

Anyone halfway sentient understands the WSJournal’s editorial page has absolutely no sense of humor, but it was still astonishing to read an apparent attempt at Swift that advocated sending poisoned turkey sandwiches to dictators around the world on the day after Thanksgiving. Under the regime these jokers worship, you could get arrested just for suggesting doing the same to a literal son of a bitch closer to home who deserves even worse. Given that the spy who succumbed to sushi was dead by then, the bad taste really reeked. Maybe for the next big holiday they could hire the Rush Limbaugh of restaurant critics to do a piece on sending radioactive fruitcake to New Orleans. Hilarious, isn’t it?

Call me insensitive, but I just cannot wake up every morning thinking, “Save the ducks!” Maybe it’s my consort’s clock radio blaring bloody news from halfway around the world, but the urgency of passing laws to ban foie gras absolutely eludes me. The New York City “legislator” who is now proposing that lunacy certainly did choose his moment, though, only days after “Our Daily Bread” opened in theaters here, exposing the strong of stomach to the horrors that chickens and cows and pigs go through on their passage to the table. Believe me, ducks and geese are at the Golden Door by comparison. Given that Christmas really is a sad season for the poor, it’s also odd that he would take up the cause of overfeeding right when so much of his own city is afflicted with what those bleeding hearts in Washington call food insecurity. I could live, maybe not happily, without foie gras. But I would be very distressed to live in a country without freedom to eat. Meantime, will no one speak up for the steer? Ducks, after all, die with their balls on.

The season to be dreaming of Uzis is already upon us. If I get one more flacking “deck the halls” email about a restaurant, I’m buying a tree and using it ridiculously early. As a weapon.

Everyone is freaking about the future of print, but I’m feeling much better since checking the ingredients on my cat’s Pounce. Second on the list is “Animal Digest.” We’ll always have kibble. The question is, do we want to know what’s in it?

After a video turned up on YouTube of the Chimp literally screwing America, I had to watch it eight times. On the ninth I couldn’t get it to stop and flipped over to my email, so I had the audio and not the visuals. It was pretty queasy-making, but not as bad as what you will hear if you do the same thing with the Cafe Gray web site. It sounds like a suburban dinner party gone “Ice Storm” bad; with such cheesy music and forced hilarity in the background, wine being poured could pass for pissing. Sometimes technology is not a friend to great chefs. When the web designer orders, “Turn over,” maybe they should just say no.

Talk about a disorienting week. Not only was the true loser in Vietnam at last, but I actually found something for less at Dean & Deluca, the intergalactic capital of gougery. Heritage turkeys from Good Shepherd there are going for $7.50 a pound, about double the free-rangers. When I had a butcher weigh one the same size as I had ordered online, it was only $145. But I’m not complaining. I’m just awed at the speed of change for the better in this country, at least when it comes to food. Imagine the gains if the real turkey were to be impeached. Brining and trussing would just be gravy.

The sad reality is that we have two more years of decisions like the latest one by Chimp cronies, to do away with the word hunger in USDA reports and replace it with “very low food security.” The Washington Post had the sorry story, including the fact that 11 percent of American households suffer from what government functionaries actually insist is “not a scientifically accurate term.” Of course these are the same compassionates who couldn’t define torture and say “internal nutrition” when they mean “force-feeding.” Even Orwell would be slack-jawed. A good punishment might be to lock them all in a room stacked high with the latest People magazine sponsored by Kraft, which has come up with scratch-and-sniff ads (and some editorial). But then given how foul perfume inserts are, a few hours of inhaling white chocolate and cherry Jell-O might make them even less understanding of what it’s like not to have food to put on your family. Let them read “The Pet Goat” in hell with the inventors of processed cheese.

Something really is wrong, though, with a country where so many lack food security while New York City is arguing for special ambulances that can transport patients who weigh more than 500 pounds. Not elephants -- humans packing over a quarter of a ton on their wide bodies. Maybe we need more corn in our food.

Apparently the new Brit in town really does like to live dangerously. When I got to the opening party around 7, half an hour after it began, a few workers were frantically trying to prop up a sheet of decorative glass over the entryway with two-by-fours. If it had fallen, it would have been a guillotine. And the distressing part? It wouldn’t have whacked anyone of much significance. Well, there were a few notables there, including a slimmed-down Martha, but early on the crowd mostly looked straight out of a Mike Leigh movie. The food was anything but Martin Parr-ish, though, and there was plenty of good stuff being passed along with copious Champagne. And I suspect the cooking will definitely go over better here than the chefwear. Short-sleeve white coats make even a star look like either a bad dentist or a liposuctionist. Something you never want to think about over dinner is a back alley.

Pity the poor Gourmet readers who believe all you need to do is make friends with Sirio. They’ll get laughed back to Florida. But lately I’m noticing his warm and welcoming style is everywhere. Reserving at A Voce, I was ordered to call back to confirm the day of (if they don’t trust me, let them call). Mai House offered a table at 7:15 and said it would have to be surrendered at 9:15 (get real). Country seemed cordial until it came time to give my Amex number to hold the reservation (not on a bet). Worst of all was my experience at Public, where I walked in around 2 on Saturday and the woman posing as a receptionist said: “We might have room at the bar. Do you want to check?” I walked the long walk and found one cramped stool unoccupied, in front of the previous occupant’s detritus, while easily eight tables were empty, all four-tops that could be split. I walked out, telling Pretty but Clueless an un-bused bar is not a promising sign. When exactly did host become short for hostile?

This town is getting too small. I walked into the excellent book party for that enviable couple Johanne Killeen and George Germon at Taste and immediately met a woman who introduced herself and then dropped my hand like a fresh turd when she heard my name. You live by the snark, you die by it, I guess. Later, though, she came up to me as I was dunking some roasted cauliflower in good tomato sauce and said, “I see Mario every morning in Washington Square, and he wonders why you hate him.” Once I stopped sputtering red, I started remembering. And then I couldn’t stop. The arrogance, the ego, the faux Italian food, the attitude that Americans are fools to be suckered, the insulting experience with the geriatric anchovies (or whatever little fish it was) at Babbo when the unpleasant partner outdid himself. She insisted he is really a nice guy who doesn’t deserve to be picked on, and I could only say, “That’s not what I hear whenever I mention him.” Later I started to think it’s just me, but nearly every person I told this story to used the same word, one that, suffice it to say, means a certain orifice. Sounds as if the big guy could use some lessons in thick skin from a couple of boldface girls I could mention. Meantime, considering he’s an A, I am extremely glad to be safely down low on the D list for parties. . . .

It doesn’t get much dumber than this: A press release for a new restaurant attempts to tout the food by suggesting, “Imagine a car crash between Provence & Northern Italy.” Okay. I’ll have the blood sausage.

Lately there’s been an outbreak of flackidity, though. Someone keeps sending me releases singing (off-key) the praises of a new restaurant without ever mentioning where the hell it might be. Let alone how to call it. I just hope the client is forgetting to sign his checks. Or getting eater.com-savvy.

Funny how a Thanksgiving taste test could seem so much more authoritative when done relatively scientifically last year by D’Artagnan (although without credit). Funnier still is how the biggest reason for choosing a heritage turkey was not mentioned. Beyond the superior flavor, there is that little issue of sustainability, which is itself a vote against Big Food. Could turkeyness be the new truthiness?

Also to be filed under “Why do I bother reading this horse shit?” are crepes and Derby-Pies. The former, readers are informed, are hard to find readymade. I guess unless you look in most any produce aisle, where Frieda’s has long made them as common as kiwis (and Melissa’s is now doing the same). And the latter, readers are misinformed, was never to be tasted without a trip to Louisville before the internets were invented. Someone has been lost in cyberspace so long she forgets there used to be these useless things called catalogs and 800 numbers, not to mention whole books devoted to buying regional food by phone and mail. And guess what? Magazines like Smart Money even connected buyers with pies back in the last century. Al Gore should be pounding his head on the table over what he has wrought.

I’m slow, but I learn. I now know you should not eat at the bar in a restaurant or drink at a booth in a bar. Twice I have been tricked by the sight of place mats, napkins, glassware and cutlery laid out on a bar, most recently at Rosa Mexicano, where I stopped in for a queso fundido fix and did not want to wait while two groups with dripping umbrellas were seated before me. I got myself onto a barstool only to have the two guys chopping fruit at the other end look over with “What do you want?” disdain. Once I ordered a glass of wine, everything was fine, but I realize I should not have been so impatient. The table is where they want you. Worse was Film Center Cafe, where I went back to meet a couple of friends coming from B&H. They had snared a booth in the empty bar and we held it down for nearly five hours, during which time the waitress approached us exactly twice of her own accord. I guess the $2 she made charging us for a refill on the chips with the copious portion of guacamole with salsa made up for all the wine she could have moved, or real food she could have sold, if she had cared to wander by unbidden at least every couple of hours. My friends insisted we tip respectably, but I left puzzling yet again over a question more nagging than chicken and egg. Which comes first with women . . . ?

I think it was the Gurgling Cod who coined the excellent term “cloggers,” for corporate bloggers. Now he needs to come up with a word for what some of them need. “Bleditors” would be my candidate. Misspelling one of the most famous names in food is not a venial sin, especially when done repeatedly in a single post. Just a hint: It should not rhyme with cloggin’.

The Daily News managed the food section equivalent of blue balls. Its turkey how-to worked itself into a serious lather over the prepping, the brining and the trussing, and never went all the way, to the cooking. But maybe my analogy is not quite right. Instructions were given for carving. This may call for an NYT-quality correction: First the turkey must be roasted.

Last election one of our only Republican friends (reformed Republican, now) summed up the situation sadly: “They’re promising chicken or steak, but we’re all gettin’ tofu.” This time it’s actually a true choice: fresh meat, or what Borat would bring bagged to the dinner table. This is no time to go vegan.

Ducasse must be having a going-out-of-business sale. Three hundred twenty dollars for a truffle dinner for two with wine pairings? I think they call that distress pricing. And the place must be completely empty if that level of hooliganism is encouraged. Reading about it reminded me of the dinner my consort and I suffered through eons ago at Jean-Louis at the Watergate, which actually did cost something like $320 (I had the receipt up on my bulletin board for about a year to remind me that we could have flown to Paris for that price at that time). We had made a pilgrimage to what was allegedly one of the highest temples of gastronomy in America, only to be seated near a couple with a baby. A screaming baby. One that was being raised to scream itself out. But at least it wasn’t packing a digital camera and microphone and regurgitating, to Palladin’s humiliation.

I doubt I was the only reader embarrassed to be a New Yorker on seeing an adolescent had been sent to do an Apple’s job profiling the most brilliant woman in wine writing. What must that quintessentially erudite Brit have thought about the level of depth and wit at what presents itself as the nation’s greatest newspaper? And here I thought crush had a whole other meaning with wine. “Be still my heart,” my ass. Get working, my gag reflex.

Donald Trump is normally beneath comment (except by Borat’s behind, of course). But I have to say the new vodka out under his name does not really look as if it is bottled in gold, which is the effect clearly being attempted. That color makes it closer to urine. Which must be why the T logo evokes a certain statement by Andres Serrano.

The small story was about an outbreak of salmonella in tomatoes in 21 states. The huge one was about all the pandering to germphobes these days. Can no one make the connection between the absurdity of automatic disinfectants for doorknobs and the reality that food harvesters and handlers are among the poorest-paid and most deprived of health care of any workers in this country? All the Purell on the planet is not going to solve that little problem of denial. Lately, with a good friend coming to town, I’ve been marveling at hotel prices in Manhattan, and I just love the idea of someone who can pay $1,000 a night worrying about germs on the remote when the lethal risk could be from the obscenely overpriced strawberries from room service. Can I say it again? Typhoid Mary was a cook.

I’m no believer in the Apocalypse, but knowing a cranberry bog was simulated in the heart of Manhattan, in Rockefeller Center, almost got me seeing naked Christians flying up to heaven. A society (I started to say culture) that can indulge in such absurd excess purely for promotional purposes really is asking for End of Days. Having spent more harvests than I can count up around South Carver, Mass., during what really is the greatest show in agriculture, I found it particularly offensive: all flash, no substance, just nature out of context and balance. As a reality check, I think Butterball should be forced to bring a turkey operation to town next, with miserable birds bred to be all breast crammed cheek by gorgle into tiny cages. New Yorkers might stop complaining about tiny apartments and ass-packed subways -- not to mention about being unable to mate naturally.

So some joint desperate for publicity in Las Vegas is offering a $70 baked potato. The truffles put it over the top. The potato makes it pathetic. I don’t think even in Dubai they would be so blatant about demonstrating their contempt for the losers with cash coming into casino eateries. Rubes tasting the most exclusive tuber in the world for the first time would think -- as I confess I did -- that it was something scraped off the bottom of someone’s shoe. Give them their dignity as you extract them from their winnings. Strew some gold leaf over the chicken nuggets.

I go back and forth on whether the internets are going to revolutionize the news business. For every breakthrough like the hijacking of BLT Burger’s opening you get a “Harold McGee has a blog!” The former demonstrated that restaurant flacks might want to think about looking into whether anyone is hiring in Bangalore. Sites like eater and chowhound grabbed that bone and ran with it, to the extent that anyone who goes online to decide where to eat knew a week ahead of every reader crawling after print that it was not just open but, apparently, not very good. Press releases were anticlimactic to the point of dodo-ish. But then the cyber-hysteria that greeted the discovery that the Einstein of food was posting was relatively ridiculous. The thing has been up since August and, when I checked, had not been updated since September. How do you say “stop the presses” in HTML?

In my indentured servitude I recall eating many times at Burritoville on Ninth Avenue near Chalabi HQ. So how in the name of Siegol did the word burrita make it into print? I guess on the 43d ode to funky food at the ball fields, effete eyes just glazed over.

“A Good Year” may not come in the form of a mushroom cloud, but it is one serious mega-bomb. Russell Crowe should have thrown a big white telephone at Ridley Scott before allowing the director to embarrass him so profoundly, having him play a money-guy asshole (or is that redundant?) who inherits a vineyard in Provence. A friend and I, invited to a free screening through a promising-sounding new group called Women & Wine, lasted about 15 minutes before realizing spit buckets would not be handed out. Maybe the movie will be a hit, though. The evening had started with a reception featuring out-of-season rose and bounteous imported cheeses, and my snobbish side noticed that the Boursin went first. And the asses were still in the seats when we fled.

I used to subscribe to GQ just for the food coverage, but that has been many years ago. Judging by the kerfuffle over the New Orleans story, I don’t think I’ll be re-upping anytime soon. Reading about it online made me remember the dismal day I went to lunch when I was still not weight-bearing and a guy walking out deliberately knocked my propped-up crutches off my chair; my surprised friend thought it was “like kicking a cripple.” Maybe the cooking really has gone completely to hell in one of America’s top five food cities, but now is not the time to blare that thought out, not while the people who staff the restaurants are so scattered and so many problems are clearly still far from solved. But in every debacle there is always a laugh, and mine came when I read the outrage over the outsized trout the poor critic was served. I guess he don’t know nothin’ ’bout no speckled trout. And we should all be glad no one attempted to serve him puppy drum. I can read it now: “Not only was it not a dog, I couldn’t beat it.”

Nice to think Panchito has a second career waiting. After managing to gorge across northern Italy without a single thought any deeper than out-Appling Apple at least on his Visa, he could take up competitive eating. As much as I find that whole “sport” abhorrent, there is something deeply satisfying about imagining him entering the Coney Island hot dog pig-out. And winning.

Also, I have only been to the train station in Bologna, but one of my far-flung e-pals just back from there has an interesting observation: “Via Drapperie is one place in an otherwise untrammeled food town where every shop sells 80-euro bottles of balsamic with labels in English. This writer deserves a tour on the receiving end of Puglia.” Or at least a budget. This had to be spending on a KBR scale. With returns just as rewarding.

WNYC ended its fall shakedown in the absolute nick of time. If I had had to listen to that ridiculous promo for the Zagat Survey one more time, I would have thrown all three radios out the windows of our 14th-floor apartment, and at least one receiver, too. It had every cliche that could be jammed into one too-long enticement (“bad boy chef” -- give me a break), and it struggled to add a veneer of validity to what is truly nothing more than a gazetteer. Which is why, for all the dopiness of the new Michelin, I for one am happy to have it, Dinosaur BBQ and all. The “mysterious inspectors,” as the company’s capo referred to them at the announcement breakfast, at least appear to be trying to impose qualitative judgments rather than letting “democracy” rule in a Diebold world. I can even forgive them the two stars for Molto’s palace because I now understand where they’re coming from. The place feels very much like the wildly ostentatious starred restaurant at Pompeii my consort and I once found through the Red Guide. But maybe I’ve just gone soft because that breakfast, at Bouchon Bakery in the dread TWC, was such a trip. It was the ultimate contrast to the gang-bang at the Guggenheim for the inaugural guide -- there were probably no more than a dozen and a half reporters at 9 in the morning but enough flacks and waiters to take back Baghdad. And the exquisite little pastry I had plated by two servers was definitely worth the journey.

New York City’s move to ban trans fats in restaurants pretty much strikes me as a tempest in a Fryolator, even though I agree with chefs who say letting government outlaw any food is a very oily slope. But this is really about fast food and processed food; the kinds of restaurants that care about what they serve have already moved beyond the latest designated evil. Three of the mid-range places I eat at most often -- Pearl Oyster Bar, Fatty Crab and Chola -- all say they don’t even touch trans fats. And all you need to know about how the proposal affects ethnic restaurants is that this is a decidedly American innovation. Which makes it all the weirder that the industry keeps putting out misinformation and murking up the debate. The latest terror alert was from the head of the restaurant association, warning in the Daily News that the ban will make it tougher to turn out fresh chocolate chip cookies and cannoli and egg rolls. Exactly why is never stated. Not only does every one of those taste worse made with shortening rather than butter or hydrogenated oil instead of canola, but aside from the bottom line not one of them needs to be made with either foul ingredient. And if they are, all I can say about the crackdown is: Bring it on.

I actually found myself sucked into the dread TWC twice in a week, the second time because I happened to be nearby and just could not limp the extra 14 blocks up to Fairway for the large amount of Swiss chard I needed for a recipe. I think this was the day Holy Foods was getting yet another beatification in the press, this time for its support of “animal compassionate” meat, because my spinach detector was on high as I meandered through all that eco-sensitivity on chest-thumping display. And of course the cashier tucks my paper-wrapped loaf of Sullivan Street Bakery bread into its own heavy plastic bag and snaps a rubber band around the plastic box of duck rillettes already sealed so tightly that I will almost have to use pliers to open it. Ever since Vanity Fair said the most immediate thing we could do to save the environment is to cut down on plastic bags, I have been trying to carry my hyper-sturdy Cuba tote everywhere and toss everything I can into it unwrapped. I didn’t have it that day and realized: Walking out with this chain’s shopping bags, you’re just talking the talk.

The most surreal party of a strange week was the one for the Waldorf-Astoria’s new cookbook, in Peacock Alley. I had to take my chocolate cookie and go home after succumbing to the macaroni and cheese served in a martini glass and having some hammered woman at the bar next to me point at it and start half-singing, “This is us. You know what I mean? This is us.” Speak for yourself, lady. And now I won’t be able to listen to Mark Knopfler and Emmylou for a long time. Even more unsettling was that different serving stations were dispensing food from the book, and the longest lines (meaning three or four people) were not for the lobster or the truffled gnocchi or even the slow-roasted monkfish. They were for the mini-burgers. What in the name of Craig Claiborne has happened to taste in this town? Even Laurent Tourondel has succumbed to the siren song of nonthreatening burgers and, I see, now has toddlers to contend with in his newest dining room. I guess it makes sense on one level: He must have a shitload of meat scraps to use up from his other joints. But I still never thought the national capital of food would turn out to be a glorified McDonald’s. It has to be Dining’s fault. As we’ve learned the hard way with Washington, blinkered coverage leads to disastrous situations.

Hometown paper, my ass. One day it refers to Gramercy Tavern in the embezzlement story as “a bar.” And on another it says a Mexican food cart down in SoHo is on “Worcester” Street. Think the copy desk has been outsourced to Bangalore?

This is not a payback to Grub Street, but I have to say New York magazine’s story on extreme dieting was brilliantly done. We were spared all the blow-by-blow of the writer’s experience and simply treated to one devastating dinner with some truly scary characters (although I’ve seen more people in this town licking their plates in restaurants than mooning the A train -- two to one if you’re counting). The writing was quite clever, too. But what I mostly came away impressed with was how much very specific nutrition knowledge these I-wanna-live-forever wackos had at their mouse clicks. People who try to eat right based on what they read in the papers and magazines and hear on the teevee are essentially clueless about anything beyond fat and carbs and whatever Big Food and its stenographers are pushing as the miracle nutrient du jour. And these anorexics by another name are getting their RDAs if not much else. Time for another confusing study on fish!

One of the best signs I have ever seen in a restaurant was in a gay diner in the French Quarter that read, “Watch your handbags and your husbands.” I thought of it yet again after hearing the fascinating story going around right now about the Schnorrer. When I passed that tale along to a friend, I added: “It’s so insane for him to do it -- everyone knows he’s corrupt.” And she just said, “Now we know he’s a corrupt goon.” I guess in this business, you take your moral clarity where you can find it.

I also suppose it’s true no attempted good deed goes unpunished. After seeing a certain restaurant pop up on the Eater deathwatch, I figured I would go drop some money there because the chef is very good and very charming, plus the place is pretty and it is on the way to the Greenmarket when I am late as lunchtime in getting downtown. So I walk in starving at 12:40 and two tables are occupied while the “hostess” is on the phone rattling off all the many rules for some poor sucker who had the temerity to make a reservation. “We only hold it for 15 minutes, and then we have to give the table away, and we cannot seat you until your entire party has arrived” etc. etc. Finally, finally, she hangs up, literally tears at her hair, blurts frazzledly, “I’ll be right with you” -- and promptly takes another call. This is the hospitality business? Lesson No. 1 when I sold shoes eons ago was that a customer standing in front of me was worth 500 on the phone. Ms. Stressed may have thought that sound she heard as I turned around and stomped out was steam exploding out my ears. I would say it’s a death rattle.

A smart friend just back from Rome, Naples and Piedmont spent at least an hour on the phone venting on how unhappily she and her husband had eaten, and for so much money. If I hadn’t been to Tuscany relatively recently, I would have thought the Italian sky was falling. No one knows better than I do that the country has ingredients, not a cuisine, and if they’re not handled exquisitely, you can easily drop 100 euros on pallid pasta and overcooked fish. At least I had a fresh email from my orthopedist pal in Torino to restore my faith; back from what he called an “aria fritta” and I assumed was a boondoggle (fried air), he reported he had eaten in Milan, Rome, Naples and Palermo. “Enjoying respective local cuisines, I was thinking about you; I realized that in almost every Italian restaurant they’re trying to homogenize traditional cuisine and stylish cuisine . . . with not bad results. We had a meeting too at Canale d’Alba, at Enoteca del Roero restaurant, and I liked this wonderful commixture of authentic solid flavours from Piedmont revisited with a touch of French frivolousness.”

Now that is a uniquely lyrical voice you can trust. Especially compared with the reflexive bleatings about the damn Autogrill disseminated even in absentia. Once upon a time that roadside institution really was a guaranteed oasis. But after our last stop this summer, in Florence, I’ll always wait for the Spizzico in the airport. It’s the exact same processed crap anymore, but with Burger King on board. No wonder my frustrated friend is convinced Italians are playing fast and loose with their culinary heritage. They can serve industrial mozzarella with Big Ag ham on a cotton ciabatta and hornswoggle an American critic. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much what Molto realized long ago.

The same frustrated friend, far across the country, had just the right take on the food cart megaturd, too: “People in NY go out for late dinners. Wow.” Wait till she hears about the $40 entrees. How soon we forget the $36 soup. I’ll say it again: They’re defining nadir down.

It’s only happened twice, but I'm convinced it’s a trend. Dogs are getting better service than humans in this town. Once was at a sidewalk cafe in the Flatiron where a guy walked up with a Great Dane bigger than he was and made me think Rick Santorum might be on to something. My friend and I waited and waited to order food while both the hostess and a waiter rushed to bring the dog a drink in a takeout container. The second instance was at another sidewalk cafe, on Columbus, where I got water only on request and bread only with my food but where the waiter positively sprinted to make sure a big boxer was rehydrated seconds after being leashed to the fence. The only redeeming element was what ensued. The owner asked me to watch Buster while he (the owner) went to the bathroom, and almost immediately, with so many other designer dogs prancing past, I found myself in the bizarre position of eating and drinking while watching an absolute orgy of butt-sniffing. It was almost like being at a press party with the Uberomnivore.

I told a friend from Beacon about that episode, at which I also heard there is a Manhattan store that specializes in Halloween costumes for dogs, and she went off on how her town has a “barkery.” “We don’t even have a bakery for humans, and we have a barkery for dogs,” she said. But then freshly baked biscuits and kibble don’t surprise me. The only refugees from Lebanon allowed into this country after the bloodbath were dogs, apparently the only things Americans care more about than blastocysts. Funny how we seem to be out-Frenching the French, who at least keep dogs in their place under the table -- and proportioned for cities.

I keep going out to parties looking for absurdities and actually enjoying myself (yet another validation of my mantra: expect the worst and you’ll never be disappointed). The Chow extravaganza at Bedlam (well, they call it Public) was a revelation. I don’t think I talked with very many guests besides chefs who do not exist largely in cyberspace, and it was a whole different experience from the literally old media events that can be so unpleasant. That classic New Yorker cartoon captioned, “On the internet no one knows you’re a dog,” is so true when it comes to food writing. In dog years I am ready to be put down, but all the pups were astonishingly friendly and open. A day or so later I realized why. On the internet you do it for fun. You compete only with your last post. And when you actually meet the people whose words you admire, you can be pretty confident those are their words, unfiltered. Of course part of the reason I went was to meet the blogger who thinks I am clench-jawed nasty, and of course she looked and seemed like a sweetheart, what the famous David’s sister might be if she didn’t have to wait on peons at that fake fish camp. She didn’t cringe from me, either. But then I did retract my fangs for the night.

Earlier in the week there was an evening at Zarela’s amazing home that I found seductive even without succumbing to the margaritas (the crack cocaine of cocktails), largely because the crowd was so mixed between media types and patrons who have become friends. I really can’t write about her in my other life because we are friends, too (although she once informed me I was becoming a liability precisely because of that separation between personal and professional), but I’m here to say from long experience that she does know how to fiesta. Among the things I learned as Aaron’s caja china was steaming out in the garden in the rain: The pizza at Celeste is best at 10:30 at night because it takes that long for the oven to reach the optimum state; Hallmark has a magazine, and it’s actually not unbearably treacly, and, if you are a smart and personable guy moving into a pivotal position, characters in need will be on you, in the immortal words of James Carville, like stink on shit. Some major-league glomming was going on, but I somehow suspect the attempted victim is more than able to resist the blandishments. Still, why do I doubt the words “when you were hired I got very frightened” were ever uttered?

You know the world is spinning off its axis when a tabloid runs a cartoon of a diner requesting “the House Republican special” as a waitress calls to the kitchen: “One order of toast!” -- and it’s not the NYPost. If he’s lost Mr. Fox, the Chimp really is down to his Lump in the Bed and his real dog as loyalists.

Chills should also be running down the cloven-hooved Rove’s crooked spine now that news of Coke’s allegedly calorie-burning green tea drink has been greeted with more skepticism than the announcement of the last capture of Osama’s 1,900th No. 2. Something’s happened, and what it is isn’t exactly clear, but it’s obviously getting harder to fool all of the people all of the time. Rather than swallowing the notion of gym-in-a-drum, smart papers such as the WSJ did the math and reported that it would take 28 cans of this new Coke to counter one Big Mac. If America is really starting to wake up and smell the guano, it might mean the end of the faith-based flimflams, in and out of the supermarket.

The rumor that Grayz is not going to happen, heard only two weeks after I suffered yet another earnest pitch for the place, is somehow not surprising. The city has gone crazy, but maybe not crazy enough to want the uneasy spawn of a mixed marriage of “21” and a tapas bar. What’s most remarkable is that the pullout is happening after such unparalleled overselling -- the announcement party alone would have put a Nobel soiree to shame. Somehow they always forget what happens when you push too hard and too fast: premature exultation, the most awkward form of birth control for restaurants.

If you want to save your sanity, never read a food piece in the business section of the NYT. On the same day Michael Pollan in the magazine presented his usual brilliant assessment of how we wound up with shit in the spinach, and how more government regulation would make everything so much worse, a stunningly misguided columnist laid out the exact opposite argument, right down to an ode to the great advance of forced pasteurization of milk. Maybe it was satire to praise irradiation, but somehow I don’t think so. When I saw the Chicago Tribune is looking to hire a “food policy reporter,” to be based in DC, it struck me as yet another sign of how schizophrenic old media is about food -- is it women’s pages fluff or is it a crucially important topic right now? Coverage that bridges that gap as Pollan does would benefit everyone. And maybe what the world needs is more food policy editors, the kind who can tell the spinach from the Shinola.

Blogs must be the new Viagra. In one noteworthy case, a keyboard kommando has actually grown an extra ball and taken on the 800-pound gorilla. Maybe one of the duller openings really does represent an outstanding newcomer, but the defense sounds like a Tony Snowism: “Nina and I have never voted in one of our surveys.” But that was not the accusation. As we all learned too painfully in 2000, you can win an election with judges only.

A more telling insight into how the food world works in this great age of the series of tubes can be found in the “reviews” for a new wine book. Authors send copy to blogger, blogger raves, links are exchanged, traffic goes up all around. Spy used to call this logrolling in our time, but even those cynics never imagined how virtually out of control it would get. Maybe it’s not payola, but it’s so much easier than planting eight-thumbs-up reviews on Amazon. Expect a sequel. Call it “Becoming Your Own Flack.”

My sick suspicion that the food pages of the Daily News are preying on 6-year-olds has been confirmed. The latest insult to intelligence was a piece on breakfast “sammies.” That word is even more of an abomination than “veggies.” Do they really think any kid has a $31.60 allowance to subscribe? For that price, though, we deserve better than a full-page feature celebrating artichokes in mid-October. Maybe you can buy them all year round now, but if we have learned anything from killer spinach, it’s that obliviousness can be dangerous. For a publication so rabidly obsessed with the latest fashions, the News seems oddly clueless about the hottest trend in food right now. Just a clue: It starts with an L. And it’s something you would certainly expect in a “hometown paper.”

“Our Daily Bread” is the most devastating documentary food movie since “Darwin’s Nightmare,” and if you can sit through it you will have a very hard time understanding how animal rights ninnies can waste a nanosecond of concern on foie gras. Gavage looks like a trip to the Golden Door compared with the way chickens, cows and pigs are raised to become 49-cent-a-pound fodder. Even my overactive imagination could never have envisioned how brutal it is to take tiny chicks and ram their beaks into a guillotine at the rate of roughly one a second so they can be packed together tighter than excelsior in an Easter basket, let alone how disgusting is it to see them literally vacuumed up and funneled down chutes to the next level of hell. I think chickens are filthy birds but was still oozing sympathy at what industrial agriculture does to living things.

This long, slow, breathtaking movie is both queasy-making and mesmerizing in depicting the antithesis of sustainable. Every shot is as composed as a photograph on a gallery wall, and the camera really never blinks. There is no music, no voiceover, nothing but an unflinching and unjudgmental look at how man has beaten nature into submission, or so we think. It’s like “Koyaanisqatsi” without a Philip Glass score for comfort (there’s a thought I never thought I would have), but while it's beyond life out of balance it presents a staggeringly fair depiction of the true cost of Big Food -- animal, vegetable and mineral. I’m pretty careful about where my food comes from, but even I was repeatedly sickened; the sequence on farmed salmon was as unsettling as the many on greenhouse cucumbers and peppers and white asparagus and, especially, salt. By the end, after watching not one but two cows undeniably in agony after getting whacked while trapped in an iron maiden of a contraption, I realized that if the brisket I had to go home and cook for a story had not come from Niman Ranch, there is no way in hell I could have ripped open the plastic. As it was I had trouble sleeping for two nights and still get queasy thinking of a burger.

If only the dainty bleeding hearts out there squandering their worries on ducks without a gag reflex could hear the shrieks of pain from a piglet locked into a metal brace to have its tail docked before heading to the next stage of confined misery. And are the gadflies really trying to save cockroaches from an eating contest at a theme park? Islamochrist help us all.

I’m not a Democrat, but at least once a day lately I find myself mentally paraphrasing the Frugal Gourmet: Thank heaven for little boys.

A friend down in Texas mailed me the most amazing story from his local food section, a four-page spread on the blow-by-blow opening of a hometown restaurant here in the big city. Not just because of the novelty of print, I read it with absolute fascination, waiting to see how the flacks would get canned. That little messiness was never mentioned, but I did learn that they (or their replacements) provided the chef and his wife with “a fat notebook” crammed with photos of “reviewers, food writers and editors, along with other media big shots.” “Some come with descriptions: ‘a better, younger-looking Woody Allen,’ ‘looks similar to Harrison Ford but more muscular and tan,’ ‘likes to eat large meals’ . . .” Aside from the last, I’m trying to think whom they possibly could mean. Even more telling, the story also notes that “none of the A-list celebrities has made an appearance” at the opening party. Maybe the third PR team will be the charm.

No wonder we’re bogged down in a lose-lose situation in Iraq. There are actually people out there, in the media no less, who do not know how Panchito got nicknamed Panchito. (Big honkin’ hint: Not by me.) Thanks to e-pals who alerted me with reviews ranging from “semi-coherent” to “mean and pompous,” I looked in on holierthanthou.com (or is it circlejerk.com?) What is it with guys who read me and have to take to the fainting couch? It’s only guys, interestingly enough. Women must be more honest about how the food world works -- not for nothing is it known as a coven. At least I don’t let my comment-monkeys fling the feces for me. And while I could never describe what it’s like being me, I can tell you what it’s not: boring.

If the descriptions of one set of American-girl fingers getting grape-stained in a vineyard in the Loire didn’t dull you enough, brace yourself. Apparently Travel has bought the same story. With luck we’ll at least be spared that very French recipe title, “Gruyere puff.”

One guy who would have searched out and insisted on the real name for that dish has just made the ultimate press trip, after one of the most enviable careers ever in journalism. I have to admit I was far more awed and admiring before I had to handle his food stuff, and luckily I did not have to do that very often. It was not just misspellings of fettuccine Alfredo that sent him around the bend (although that early fuck-up in his own obit should have brought him bellowing back to life). I remember once shaking for three days after I had to call him somewhere halfway around the globe to say the copy desk had found a couple of errors in his piece. It was like cattle-prodding a bull elephant. “Must be wonderful to have a bullshit job,” he yelled back, in all caps with exclamation points and a bit of boldface. No wonder I came in one day during the 2000 Republican convention to say I had seen a photo of Johnny Rotten at the solemn assemblage and a co-worker looked at me quizzically. “Why wouldn’t he be there?” she asked, not realizing I was talking about the punk rocker. I give the Times huge points for addressing that aspect of him, although my own evil side wonders if the obit could have gotten through any copy desk in the building without that graf after such a long and legendary career.

Johnny was the last of his kind, though, a consummate pro who knew his stuff and so much more. He sucked life dry, and shared. Even better, for a top god, he could be unbelievably human. I remember shaking for five days after I wrote a profile of Andre Soltner and came in the morning it was published to pick up a voice mail from Johnny, actually saying he was impressed. (On such small shreds we build our nest of self-esteem.) I can’t even begin to imagine how bereft the legendary Betsey feels knowing she will never again be able to deflect an editor by saying, “He’ll have to call you back. He’s in the bath.”

Sad that cookbooks and food memoirs are still issuing from the last horrific chapter in world history even as a craven Congress has officially handed the naked emperor a cat-o’-nine tails to stifle dissent. Maybe it’s time to start thinking of recipes that will work in the Halliburton “immigrant” detention centers that we who still believe in the Constitution may very well wind up inhabiting.

With a depression also upon us if the Chinese ever decide to shut down the pipeline financing this obscene war, here’s a good scam to remember. A guy at a table next to me in a restaurant ate his lunch with great gusto, got the check, stuck a credit card in the folder and handed it to the waitress, saying he was going out to feed the meter and would be right back to sign it. And of course that was the last we saw of him. Considering there are more banks than restaurants in this town anymore, it’s gotta be easy to take out and then cancel all the cards you can eat.

The reality of a kid dying from E. coli is appalling, but if there is one lesson to be learned it is that spinach has its place, and it’s not in the blender. A fruit smoothie made with the stuff is now a certifiable crime against nature. Dog owners tempted by the canned fruit desserts I spotted at the register at Little Creatures might want to think of that, too. The clerk told me people really do buy the idiocies, and then he picked up another temptation he thought was even funnier: A Snozzler, which is a pig’s snout dried into a chew toy. Maybe it’s because I have watched my consort eat the same appendage barbecued in St. Louis, where they go for that sort of thing, but it seems so much saner than berry cobbler and apple “torte” for one of those baby-and-a-boyfriend Chihuahuas women tote around.

Poor W magazine got left with foie gras foam on its trendy face by profiling the new Rocco just as he was being shuffled off to Philadelphia from his lofty perch in New York to “consult.” The kicker was the worst part: “Restaurants come and go. Chefs -- well, I’m still here.” Then again, maybe he’s not the new Rocco but the new Chimp. Whose fault was it that Gilt was struggling? Not his. Blame the flacks and the marketers. I guess he never heard my favorite Yogi-ism: If people don’t want to come, nothing can keep them away.

Curious to see the Union League, I went to a panel discussion put on by a bunch of culinary overachievers that was surprisingly entertaining, if not just for the heavily padded CV’s alone. But my favorite part of the evening was running into a few women at the Champagne hour afterward who were about to be inducted. One, not realizing I was only press-passing through, acted as if I had peed in the punchbowl. “How long have you been a Dame?” she asked with the barely concealed disdain of someone wondering if she has been tricked into slumming. Obviously she didn’t realize any club that would have me is not one I could ever join. Besides, it looks as if it might be hell on your cleavage.

My other amusing party encounter was at Porter House, Michael Lomonaco’s promising makeover of V in the dread TWC. Having partaken of most of the excellent steak and hors d’oeuvres on offer, I was standing talking to a few food notables when a tall guy walked over, introduced himself and shook everyone’s hand, mine last as he announced: “I’m the prick’s scion.” Oops. Talk about words coming back to haunt me. But at least he was a good sport about it, stopping by on his way out to introduce his pretty wife and tell us business is great and his dad is a really a nice guy and we must come in. If one editor’s reaction is any indication, though, the octogenarians will continue to have the place to themselves. Normally the mildest of mannered women, she started insisting, “We’ve met many, many times, and you never remember.” Well, he is son of Sirio. But at least he’s trying. And I’ve long suspected his charming mom’s DNA might be stronger.

So much for arugula conquering America. The WSJ, in a piece on how it’s suddenly the new spinach, calls the green an herb (so does the dictionary, but it modifies the noun with “salad,” and by that definition so is watercress). But then the NYT was just as confused about what a lentil might be, referring to it once as a seed and another time as a bean. And that was not as peculiar as illustrating a story on a crippling shortage of said legume with photos of warehouses stacked high. Still, nothing was as weird as my weekly email from Tarla Dalal, the Betty Crocker of India, suggesting her subscribers give a little pizza party and make a few topped with baby corn and asparagus. Somehow it is hard to reconcile that recommendation with photos of women in peacock-worthy saris digging ponds to collect rainwater in an increasingly desperate country. Not to mention that the idea of the whole world eating like Americans can be leading nowhere good, let alone “gourmet.”

Whatever they’re smoking at the Daily News is even scarier. It insisted readers should switch to soy “milk” in response to the rising price of the real deal. I now see what a bargain $2 Ronnybrook at the Greenmarket is if the Key Food in Brooklyn was indeed selling industrial cow juice for $1.90 a quart “before the price hike.” Of the seven brands featured, five cost more that, substantially more. Either the writer and editor were using Pentagon math, or someone didn’t realize nonfat dry milk is not made from soy. And don’t get me going on the oysters-as-aphrodisiacs-that-aren’t nonsense. One reason we subscribe is for the comics, but the whole paper is turning into the funny pages -- and it’s nowhere near as smart as “Over the Hedge.” Talk about cottage cheese as monkey brains. . . .

It’s too bad Panchito didn’t wake up and smell the sulfur sooner. Somehow I suspect voters before the first selection might have understood there is a big difference between “quit drinking and found God” and “alcoholic.” As more than one sage has noted, the media have been the worst enablers. And now no amount of O’Doul’s can save us.

It didn’t take the WSJ long to give Big Food a chance to spin the spinach fearstorm. I don’t know why I even open the editorial pages, but my latest reward was a piece concluding: “Finally, it is unwise to automatically consider everything organically grown to be safe, and food products that contain chemicals unsafe.” Got that? Eat your industrially grown, virus-sprayed, irradiated, preservative-crammed, carelessly processed, long-hauled supermarket garbage and leave your worries behind. It’s no coincidence that I thought the S on the can held by Popeye in the accompanying cartoon was actually a dollar sign.

Speaking of supermarkets, didn’t Dining feel as if George Bush the elder had hijacked it? “Gosh, wouldya look at this: scanners at the checkout!” I couldn’t read the Jetson piece, but the sidebar intro was good for a few laughs. Since when is Whole Foods not a supermarket? Since when is Zabar’s pricey? (Reach for the snoot oats at even the down-and-dirty Food City near me and be prepared to pay $3 more for a tin.) And is “the Internet” code for the one virtual supermarket in town for so many New Yorkers? The whole notion that anyone could winnow the average quadrillion foods in even a small D’Agostino’s is patently absurd, not to mention tone-deaf elitist. Really, the idea pool has been drained completely dry if this vintage chestnut is the best they can recycle. But then maybe it’s just a set-up. Once when my consort and I were in Barbados or Grenada he disappeared for hours with a bunch of little kids who promised to show him the perfect picture point. I was imagining the worst when he finally came back and said he had stepped out on a rock in the water with his camera bag and slipped and fell. Far and hard. When he resurfaced unbroken, the barefoot boys were all standing open-mouthed and one finally pulled it together to say, in awe: “You are a lucky mon.” Ditto for Pete. After this streak of idiocy, anything will look like an improvement.

This must be the season for geriatric chestnuts. One of the check-back-in lures of Mr. Cutlets’s new berth is a daily feature on the availability of tables for two at various restaurants at 8 that same night. It’s always fun to see the mighty “fully committed” publicly humbled, but you have to wonder why anyone would waste a dial tone on Barbetta. A table at 6 can be hard to come by even at a dive in the theater district. At 8 the joint is yours. But the bigger question is who is choosing which tables to heat-seek. The 800-pound gorilla? Bring us the head of DB.

Everyone’s having a good time yukking it up about the new Hawaiian Tropic restaurant in Times Square, but not, of course, because the chances of the hair in the food being curly have gone up radically. It’s interesting that the coverage seems to mention everything but the chef and food, which is funny because he’s so known for taking a “Jackass” approach to his career, blithely (and endearingly) chortling all the way to the bank. What’s weirder is that at the very same time the new Fort Worth outpost is being treated as a serious restaurant, and all you need to know is that it gave away branding irons at the opening party without ever mentioning what they are used for most often. No, the answer is not to “stake a claim on everything from saddles to farm equipment,” as the promo promised. It’s to burn animal flesh (sort of like what they did in a certain Yale fraternity under a budding torturer in chief). As restaurant decor, they’re about as cute as a noose.

Flacks must be also feasting on and fighting over Goblin Market. You can’t turn around without hearing about it (but not what the name means, of course). What they won’t tell you is that the cramped, awkward space is doomed. I have eaten in three restaurants at that address in the last few years, and I kinda doubt the fourth time will be the charm.

All the style coverage at the NYT has always been mocked as “The Buying Sections,” and the magazine makes it just as clear that the food page exists solely to snare the occasional Colavita ad. Still, it was surprisingly surprising to see how craven ribs could be. The layout was like a Spy magazine parody, and the copy read the way Minnie Pearl looked, with a price tag hanging off every other line. If it was all done to cut costs, with credit given for props borrowed or donated, I really wish that was reflected in my paltry Times stock. But mostly I wonder what Craig would think to see the earliest fumbling attempts to advance American cooking not just ridiculed but reduced to a Williams-Sonoma catalog giving a born-yesterday chef yet another a chance to beat off to his own brilliance.

I don’t know what was more stomach-churning on Patriot Day, the increasingly rabid Chimp parading around with only Republicans to distract from the gore he is wreaking in Iraq or New York magazine landing on my doormat filled with truly gruesome meat photos. This might not have been best week for any body parts, in black and white or color. But these would really put you off your goat.

The NYT definitely picked the wrong headline for the Nora Ephron book promo posing as a pop-ed. Shouldn’t it have been “I Feel Bad About My Dreck”?

Anyone who still doubts the wisdom of eating local has only to consider the reality that not only is there shit in the spinach, but that the shit is sold in three-quarters of all grocery stores in the country. Talk about a monoculture disaster waiting to happen (Natural Selection indeed). It was telling that the LAT report referred to the purveyor in question as a “farming operation.” About the only name it was not doing business as was Engulf & Devour. How easily we forget that clean food comes from a farm. It takes Big Food to dirty it up and sell it as prewashed. I suspected there had to be a price to be paid for baby spinach turning up in salads all way down the food chain. And I would be very wary of “organic” milk at Wal-Mart prices.

I have to say my spinach detector is also up about a certain off-the-radar Midtown restaurant suddenly awash in favorable press. The place is a burnout, but lately it’s hotter than Ad Hoc. As my friends out in Portland always say, free is a very good price. And “check, please” has evidently taken on a whole new meaning for certain diners.

All the New York lemmings also lined up to chorus the praises of the redesign of Picholine. Maybe I’ve had two experiences too many in the last year or so, but to me the place now looks like a funeral home. It was always dreary, but the opening party could have been God’s waiting room. That crowd is old, and that new color/fabric scheme is classic coffin. I stayed for one glass of pink Champagne and one weird blue cheese parfait and split when I saw the locusts around the cheese table; it was like a buffet scrum at a Jewish wedding. Mission Accomplished, though. They got the press, even if it had to be in the Large Type Weekly.

Call this the tale of two Littles. One had seriously good food, creative and beautifully executed, along with interesting wine, a very polished but inviting look and superb service. The other had workmanlike but well-produced food, interesting wine, a diner-crossed-with-a-cafe look and ragged service. When I came home from the second, struck by how overdressed the other patrons were, I went online and looked up their respective ratings from our boy Panchito. Yep, No. 2 was a two-star. No. 1 was rated half that. But this is not about there being no accounting for taste. It’s about how restaurants suffer when reviewers are over their heads, not raving but drowning. The second review was mostly about the food. Well, mostly about a pork chop. The other, published well over a year and a half earlier, was obsessed with what was on the iPod, back in the days when the Little lost boy was really struggling to pad out his essay questions. Learning on the job is fine when you’re swabbing toilets. It’s embarrassing in an archived world.

Congratulations to the Amateur Gourmet. Now that he has been shat on by Sirio, he can consider himself a real New Yorker. Interesting that a mere blog has the scion of Le Cirque all shook up, though. When Ruth returned the dump, it rolled right off the prick’s best side. Business must be booming in the new location if they’re actually worried about the little people.

A spy in the city of the Liberty Bell raises an interesting question about restaurant reporters who tell tales about moonlighting as propaganda catapulters. Is that “ethical” or “acceptable” or just “WTF”?

I can only hope no one else made the mistake of reading the profoundly sad but strangely uplifting front-page piece in the Wall Street Journal, on the Martha Stewart of Cuba, right before turning to the NYT magazine and the self-indulgent whining of yet another privileged white American journalist just overwhelmed by the difficulties of having too much. Compare and contrast. One steeps the water saved from rinsing rice rations with two spoonfuls of dark sugar for 45 days until it turns into something a little like vinegar for salad dressing, or a hair conditioner. The other is just incapacitated to the point of weeping by the stress of having to use up 10 over-bought staples rather than have the movers her employer would pay for box them up for California. One advises that wringing out towels with the grain of the fabric will make them last longer. The other recommends chicken stock over water in her lentil soup and runs out to buy creme fraiche to gussy it up.

The recipe that ran in the Journal was one of the bleakest I have ever seen in print, and it should make every American ashamed to think we’re “sacrificin’, payin' a lot of taxes” while allowing a cruel and insane embargo devastate such a resilient population. The dish is “Syrian rice,” and it combines the ingredient in the title with crushed noodles, a fried onion and precious salt. The last line: “If you have a hot dog, chop and add.” One optional hot dog for four to six people, while here in the land of cursed plenty Ms. Comestible Poseur will be using her lupini beans for pie weights.

As the ultimate annoyance, the silly mewl ran under a headline about a cookout(?) that promised “not a wiener in sight.” Aside from the editor, of course, who should be hiding.

Just wondering . . . What kind of curdiot would think you can substitute Parmesan for Monterey Jack? What kind of Freudian slip is it to write that a chef previously “coked” somewhere? Did I really hear a vendor at the Real Food Market in SoHo say he would hate to be at Union Square because it’s “too cutthroat -- the hustle and bustle would kill me”? (Come on, the Greenmarket can be either the underdog or the pit bull, not both.) And what in the name of Islamochrist were they thinking stuffing all that nutrition babble into a spinach bag so far past its sell-by date? The real news would fit in a tea bag. If it didn’t put you off that practice altogether. . . .

In another case of weapons of mass deception, Cargill is running the most astonishing full-page ads in newspapers lately. They actually contend its “special” cow feed is creating higher milk yields for Parmesan producers and thus “more of the famed cheese for all to enjoy.” If this is really going on, the EU is breaking down already. What makes Parmigiano-Reggiano so distinctive, to use the copywriters’ adjective, is the grass the cows graze on. It's the quintessence of terroir. You can’t strap that flavor on with a feedbag. And as shocking as it is that the consorzio might be buying into good old American greedism, it’s even more disheartening to realize no one has learned anything from mad cow disease. Which also started with special feed for higher yield.

Bon Appetit seems to be mistaking a midlife crisis for a milestone. The unrelenting clutter of ads in its commemorative issue is an in-your-face expression of utter contempt for the poor sucker who pays 15 bucks a year minimum for a subscription. Everything blurs; all the overwrought wordplay and happy-all-the-time features are lost in a sea of selling. No wonder old media is struggling. In a world of Google-ad subtlety, it’s shoving billboards down readers’ throats. Hate to rain on the 50th-anniversary party, but this feels like a golden shower.

Speaking of being old in a young world, I’ll confess to a twinge of envy on learning the It Boys had been on “the culinary journey of a lifetime” for Travel & Leisure. Then I read their Odyssey and positively reveled in my antiquity. I’ve already eaten my way around Piedmont but didn’t have to take American advice on how to do it, thanks to my amazing consort and his TPW connections. As evocative as the piece was, as always with those two, I kept hearing that inimitable sound so many Italians tend to make when you pass along Willingeresque wisdom: Phhhht! And they’re right. Listening to Molto Ego about grub in Italy is like asking one of the Guido brothers where to eat in Denver.

If you can’t think of Saint Danny and “downtown” without hearing the Davy Crockett theme song in your head, you might want to avoid all news outlets for the foreseeable future. He has a book coming out, and the propaganda will be widely catapulted. So far the usually sentient interviewer in the NYT magazine is surprised the masterwork does not contain recipes. (Hint: Neither will Teresa Heinz Kerry’s inevitable memoir. There are chefs, and there are products.) Even weirder, at a publication that seems to think readers will happily swallow four figures on the price tag of a one-season bag, there is outrage that a meal could carry a $125 prix fixe. Maybe instead of that mystifying Key half-tonner (brink-of-crash advertorial, or just editors too embarrassed to compile a masthead?) they should start publishing yet another fat and glossy supplement to reflect the internal wacked-out condition of shock and awe on 43d Street. Call it Sybil. Or, better yet, Bi.

This is not the greatest of times to claim cooking as a career. One pro was just arrested in Maine on charges of killing four people at the B&B where he was staying while flipping omelets at another inn. And, in a truly sad case, another who worked at an IHOP was beaten to death in a robbery on Staten Island, apparently simply because he was Mexican. What’s interesting about both stories is how the papers for once understood the difference between “cook” and “chef” in describing key characters. Maybe it’s class, maybe it’s race, but it’s a huge step forward for semantics. And then there’s the fact that both depressing tales kicked the rock over to expose two realities in this country. First, the people cooking your food are anything but what you see on TV. Second, and most sickening, when the ostensible leader of an allegedly united country sets out to demonize immigrants, hard-working guys from Mexico who are great at their jobs and their families are going to get caught in the crossfire. The fish really does rot from the head down.

Sacha Baron Cohen could not have dreamed up a better ad campaign for the restaurants at a certain free-spending casino in Atlantic City. No matter what the cuisine -- steak, steak, Italian, seafood, Italian, bastard French-Asian -- or who the chef, the message is the same: Stupidly eat, drink and get laid. One spread has a woman wearing nothing but an apron and a cleaver, another shows an airhead looking like the poster girl for feminine hygiene. I can’t imagine a real woman responding to any of it, let alone traveling to a place with a slogan of “when food becomes art, hunger is entirely optional.” (Translated from the Kazakhstanese?) And what were Wolfgang and Flay and Susanna Foo(!) thinking? It’s all so sleazy you know that what happens in the poor man’s Vegas could not possibly stay there. And I’m not talking salmonella.

Some years ago Bob and I were in Trinidad midway between Christmas and Carnival and the music everywhere was mesmerizing, a wild mix of holdovers from the holidays and raucousness for the week-long party to come. I remember one night we went to a huge outdoor concert that was opened by a stand-up comedian who had the perfect rejoinder to someone who had called him an asshole: “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Toilet Paper.” But I will always hear the soca singer who followed him belting repeatedly, “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.” And, unfortunately, that refrain echoes against the great good news that the NYT has apparently finally designated a captain for that listing-to-sunken ship, the SS Dining. Judging by his taste in on-line reading, he is a superb choice. But never forget why “Rosemary’s Baby” was set in Manhattan.

Islamochrist, has it come to this? Rush Limbaugh blaming food stamps for fattening the poor? Clearly he never reads the news or he would have known they’ve found the root cause of the obesity epidemic: religion. And isn’t that what our “liberal” government, to use his epithet, is trying to force-feed us?

What is with the obsession with weenies this summer? First they’re organic and then they’re in blankets and then you have to wonder why Joel Robuchon would think there could possibly be a market for his exquisite food in a town so obviously full of bottom feeders. The only thing stranger is the endless drumbeat for Tony Luke’s. Seven shout-outs for one cheese steak purveyor on Ninth Avenue when Time Out can fill pages with restaurant openings every week? Somehow I smell a gold-plated bidet. A 19th-century French commode would be too obvious.

The Daily News, meanwhile, seems to be going for the gold in the idiot Olympics. What it ran, obviously at the instigation of the lethal combination of a TV flack and the Dublin Devil, was a feature so stupefyingly stupid it almost defies description, but the poor writer tried: “Celeb fare can be yours for less than you think.” So a bulimic walks into a bar and orders tuna tartare for $12. Cost-cuttin’ Dave turns it into shrimp paste for $3 partly by substituting shredded beets for “pricey shiso.” (Beets. For shiso. Why not weenies?) Foie gras teriyaki is allegedly cut down to $4 by using shell steak (beef at that price I would be very wary of ingesting), but would that really cover the sake and yakitori sauce? Even beyond the desperate inanity of it all was the sloppiness. Striped bass is swapped for pricier halibut (on what Pluto?), and the ingredients specify wild cod while the photo looks like none of the above. The New Frug advises buying grape tomatoes rather than regular ones, right now at the height of the season, and the photo is of Greenmarket Sungold cherry tomatoes. For once I think they should have turned the whole section over to Big Food’s “Hungry Girl” and her better eating through chemistry. It’s embarrassing to see grownups trying to mate Food & Wine with Tiger Beat. Even the right-wingers would have to say “abort.”

For all my bitching about fake parties in the glossies, I can see why they think a set-up is the best bet. The new Dwell has a gripping photo feature called Family Meal, stark documentary photographs of Americans eating, and you want to avert your eyes. The more you look at it the more you sense why the editor just bailed. The magazine is as fat as a Vogue in December, and real life does tend to get in the way of the GE Monogram fantasy.

The biggest load of Barbaro droppings in donkey’s years has been deposited on Slate, which apparently fell victim to that increasingly pervasive affliction of the food world, what I call “born yesterday syndrome.” The site actually posted a big story tracing the origins of New York City brunch to Amsterdam Avenue in 1981. As some sports guy said, you could look it up. Forget the reality that the word was coined in 1895 in England. Just Google “Maxwell’s Plum Sunday brunch.” First hit is Fred Ferretti, writing contemporaneously of the lively scene all over Manhattan that my consort and I discovered 25 years ago when we moved north from Philadelphia, where people lined up every Sunday for omelets and better at the Commissary and other Center City mainstays. The only truth in this wispy epic of stenography was the quote about whole families of rats. I remember them well. On boss’s orders, we would set shortbread out for them every night, hoping the filthy creatures would be content with their designated dinner and leave everything else unchewed. (If there were rat turds in the sticky buns, at least they were sugar clean.) What’s scary is that 1981 is not the lost year of Marjorie Morningstar. It barely qualifies as recent history. Next up: Happy hour -- invented at Crobar!

The greatest bar in town right now is the beer garden attached to Spiegeltent at the South Street Seaport. The wine sucks, and it’s poured in plastic cups, and the shrimp roll is scary (it’s from Heartland Brewery, after all), but the setting is the next best thing to being in Sydney. Sitting almost under the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges as the sun lights up the windows across the river while water taxis and cruise boats pass by almost as if choreographed is an excellent way to blow off a Sunday evening. What’s most amazing is that the hordes of waddling tourists packing the mall parts of the seaport seem not to have discovered this oasis, aside from a few who arrive bearing shopping bags from the Bodies exhibit. Think about it: There is apparently a gift shop in the show morgue. Or have another crappy pinot grigio and don’t think about it. Just marvel at being alive in a city where people cross bridges on foot, on bikes, in cars and in subway trains and you can see them all at once from your table in the breeze.

If a food can jump the shark, turducken has done it big time. I walked into a store the other day and found the (over)stuff in a can. For cats. And it gets worse. The same company makes a “California Roll” flavor. Next up has to be “Caja de China.” If not “Molecular Gastronomy.” Which, judging by the way my Siamese hoovers it, is the very definition of kibble.

More proof that you can’t believe what you see on the teevee came when a Republican politician pulled a faux FEMA trailer to Washington for dinner with the farting Chimp and got huge adulatory coverage from the same knaves and fools who always tell us just what Rove scripts. Dig a little deeper into that clumsy photo op and you find something called femagourmet.com. You read that right. Someone, somewhere actually thought there was gold in that disaster. I’m not sure blackened seasoning was the wisest choice for a roll-out product. But you have to admire the slogan: “When no one else will respond.” Next time you need help from your government, order spices online.

Hitler’s Cross may not have been the most ill-advised name for a restaurant, especially in Mumbai. That distinction should go to the new Dodo at the South Street Seaport. Considering the high rate of extinction among eating establishments everywhere, it’s asking for it.

The Daily News seems determined to make Panchito look smart. In lieu of an actual honest restaurant review, it offers up a solution to a “dining dilemma” (back to the dictionary for whoever dreamed that one up) by sending some poor birthday sucker off to Mama Mexico, a warmbed of mediocrity that becomes a true circle of hell once those mariachis get wailing among the baby strollers and the tequila-stupid. The same section treated readers to the sex life of oysters by way of selling clams, but in that round Good Living trounced Dining in its choice of mollusk photos. A stock shot over coals was actually appealing, while the big-budget paper squandered a freelance fee on what looked like something undoubtedly familiar to your average geriatric gynecologist. It’s very telling that the ad-hungry NYT thought it more urgent to hire a perfume critic than a food editor. And to demand deeper credentials of a reviewer of scented candles(!) than of the person charged with evaluating one of the most important art forms, not to mention key sources of income to the city. Thanks to Men’s Vogue, though, apparently what some of us have suspected is true. Panchito is such a lightweight he needs two trainers to keep his mussel-man figure while gorging like a mindless Apple. His predecessors got by with so much less. So who’s the twat?

The saddest evidence that this is the summer of food: Retired generals are speaking in kitchen metaphors. To be specific, one accused Donald (How Does He Keep His Job?) Rumsfeld of serving up “a huge bowl of chicken feces” to the military and expecting them to “turn it into chicken salad.” Unfortunately, given the way this administration polices the food supply, that somehow sounds like eating as usual.

Only the Brits cry for the chickens, though. A good story in the Guardian on the eight most unethical foods to eat lumped broiler birds in with Dole pineapple (labor abuse) and Fiji water (ecodisaster on a plane). So while Chicago nobly jumps in to save ducks from the cruel fate of overeating, supermarkets continue to be stocked with chickens that suffer “breast blisters and hock burns from sitting on soiled bedding” while packed 30,000 at a time into windowless sheds. No wonder McNugget is risking the flu.

The latest sign that the 800-Pound Gorilla’s clout has always been mis-overestimated: Vinnie’s Pizza on Amsterdam Avenue is being auctioned off. For years the rumor had been that it was highly rated for proximity’s sake alone, because the pizza was certainly nothing you would cross the street to try, not with Freddy & Pepe’s steps away (at least back when the latter used real mozzarella). According to the last Zagat’s foisted upon me, from 2003, this sorry little joint was as good as Solera and better than Pastis. I guess you can rig some of the ratings some of the time, but -- to paraphrase Yogi -- if people don’t want to eat crap, you can’t stop them.

The epidemic of shockingly bad managers is spreading, and apparently there is no vaccine. It’s like the CEO syndrome seeping down to food level. My latest exposure came at an otherwise excellent restaurant, up the stairs from Broadway, where we headed after my consort expressed a desire for steak. Given that he was tight on time with a flight to his new life in the wrong Athens the next day, I called to see whether we needed reservations and, on my second attempt, reached a woman who nicely took down his name, the number in our party and the time and even asked if we had a preference for a table. So we show up promptly at 8:30 and are greeted by a waiter who immediately sets off to clear and set a window table for us. While we wait, Humpty-Dumpty before the fall rolls up to ask if he can help us. We say we have a reservation and our table is being prepped and he interrupts: “We don’t take reservations.” “I just called.” “That’s impossible.” “I just called.” “We don’t take reservations because we can’t honor them. This crew just does what it wants.” “Isn’t there a manager?” My consort then pokes me: “He’s the manager.” “Oh, I get it. You’re herding cats.” “What do you mean?” “They do whatever they want, no matter what you say?” Luckily, the cat/waiter signaled us that his setting was done just then, and we could sit down to a perfectly lovely dinner, once I stopped steaming over being called a liar. Double luckily, I faced away from the sight of the fat boy chowing down at a table with friends, as usual, while his hard-working herd of cats ran the restaurant. Long may they run. And why aren’t managers being outsourced, anyway?

I hope the magazine publisher who I heard just dropped $500 on a profoundly disappointing dinner at Del Posto doesn’t happen to read the latest Departures, which my consort trash-picked from the recycling bins in our back hallway. In the requisite homage to Molto Ego, it discloses that he washes his 30 pairs of orange Crocs in the dishwasher and wears them while still hot. It’s a lovely thought to contemplate while chewing a $70 guinea hen and wondering whether what is caught in your teeth is freckle or hair. If only he wore them with the Paul Smith socks he claims to buy.

A friend came up with the best spelling of the name of the newest alcohol-dispensing outlet on Columbus Avenue: Wine & Rose$. One glass on the list of whites is nine bucks, but most are double-digit insults. Which would be okay if not for all the other annoyances. First were the baby carriages, pushed in by desperate couples. As another friend, a mother, said, you can’t relax while waiting for the occupants to start shrieking (“shitting time bombs” is what I call them). The very sweet bartender/waitress reeked of cigarettes from her repeated smoke breaks on the sidewalk. The busboy was hellbent on busing our table whether we had finished our economical bottle of $32 Arneis or not. The nice bar snacks of cheese Triscuits and olives arrived without either cocktail napkins or a receptacle for pits. But the ultimate turnoff was the wraith who materialized partway through our bottle, looking as if she had been tied up in the basement and starved between face-lifts. No wonder one guy at the bar wore his earphones. He needed blinders. Admittedly, it is August. But if this is the new Upper West Side, take me to the wrong Athens.

Just back from joy riding around mid-coast Maine, I was so happy to see Manhattan again I could have kissed the filthy pavement. Turns out that would have been less disgusting than indulging in either Starbucks or Shake Shack while I was away. Workers at the former in Manhattan are claiming the stores are infested with vermin, while the latter is now reassuring patrons that at least there’s no shit in the meat. If both hang on long enough, though, they won’t have to clean up their acts. Our government by and for big business will rubber-stamp some remedy like the spray-on viruses just approved to treat deli meats for listeria. That’s a solution so insane it makes David Burke’s new “lickable body sprays” look irresistible. And come to think of it, those might ward off both bugs and bacteria, especially the “frosting and passion fruit” flavor. Courtney Love should try them.

The London freakout over gels on a plane may have had exactly the effect Darth Cheney intended, forcing people into their cars to burn more overpriced gas to benefit his oil benefactors. But an encouraging thing happened when my consort and I insisted we bypass the shit-in-the-meat chains and find something decent to eat on the long drives north and south with our good but carb-fearing friends: We went a little farther and ate much better. The weakest link was one slow and overpriced futzy breakfast at a peculiar “bistro” in Portsmouth, N.H., where the omelet mucker-upper was a self-mutilated kid whose name had to be Pierce. And I did get exactly what I deserved for ordering an iced cappuccino in a doughnut shop near Worcester, Mass., where the special was blueberry-cinnamon iced coffee. But mostly I realized how easy it is to buy into the notion that you’re a prisoner of Burger King on a highway to anywhere. Funny that this country was settled by people who kept pushing relentlessly westward and now their successors will drive around a McDonald’s parking lot five times looking for a space rather than detour five minutes into the great unknown where real people might be cooking real food. If Laura Ingalls Wilder were writing today, the series would have to be “Big Asses on the Interstate.”

A few forests are apparently being felled to generate enough paper to print all the releases being mailed out about one Texas chef moving to the big city. His flacks are calling him “a bona fide cowboy,” which must mean he’s not like that reckless chimpanzee in the big hat who has driven the country into the ditch. Even more questionable is the claim that his “urban Western” cooking “favors seasonal, local ingredients” and “is heavily influenced by the people who settled the Old West.” I guess I grew up in the wrong West, because I do not think kangaroo belongs on nachos. Everybody knows you use jackalope.

One way this techno-dunce has retained relative mental health over the last four years is by almost never linking. But now the first anniversary of the wipeout of America’s most seductive city is almost upon us, and the son of Barbara Rhymes-With-Rich has still not been shamed into delivering on his promise to bring it back. With luck Spike Lee will get the rabble sufficiently roused with his documentary to make a country mindlessly squandering $11 million an hour in Iraq start asking why the “homeland” is so neglected, not to mention insecure. But in the short term a supremely creative thinker has a modest proposal for a ritualistic Katrina dinner that should give anyone ever smitten by New Orleans hope that its unique gumbo might be salvageable despite the diaspora. And no gefilte fish will be harmed in the celebrating of it.

If you want to know just how badly this country has declined, consider the news that George Washington’s distillery is being recreated at Mount Vernon. In less than two and a third centuries we have gone from a president smart enough to make his own whiskey, and make money doing it, to a failed oilman who cannot be trusted near nonalcoholic beer without blowing up the Middle East. Thomas Jefferson must be spinning in his garden.

Freedom is clearly on the march in Congress, too. The cafeteria has reverted to serving “French” fries. Unfortunately, that flip-flop doesn’t go far enough, given the idiocies being proposed anymore by all those crooked Chimp enablers. Let ’em eat pommes frites.

Looks as if the two tabs in town are ratcheting up the competition. The Post saw the Daily News’ blackout recipes and raised them with a piece on super-cooling restaurant dishes during the heat assault. First up: a Bloody Mary oyster shooter, in the same week 91 people were laid low by a certain raw shellfish the wise avoid in the hot months. And the main course? Steak tartare, of course, another bacterial hotbed only made safer by Hades temperatures. Now the next round is up to the Devil from Dublin, and I suggest she flagellate the staff a little harder and get something really smart out of them. Cooking omelets on the sidewalk, say.

The idea of an obesity vaccine sounds so American you have to laugh: a shot to thwart a self-induced condition. Apparently scientists are working away on it, but if you think about it they would be better off focusing on a willpower drug. When would you get this magic bullet: before you balloon, meaning you waste away, or after, when the cows are completely out of the barn? Gullible media swallowed it all unquestioningly, but the key line in the “news” about tests in mice noted that they lost their weight on low-fat, low-calorie diets. Nah, that would never sell.

I would read the real Panchito rather than the parody before I ever watched any sport but the Kentucky Derby (for old home’s sake). If it doesn’t involve broken bones (Barbaro, Olympics) or destroyed hips (the Testosterone Kid), it just doesn’t exist. So I’m probably not the best person to ask why in the name of OJ anyone would want to see soccer played by chefs. For 75 bucks, no less. It’s being billed as an insider event for groupies, but it’s hard to imagine anything more likely to dispel illusions than seeing two whole teams dressed like Molto Ego and sweating like Iron Flay in his most memorable competition. An all-woman team, however, might be interesting. And that would be true in the restaurant business, too. Just imagine a level playing field.

I can’t believe I have lived in Manhattan for 25 years this month without ever even noticing Prime Burger, directly across from St. Patrick’s. But when a blog stranger offered to buy me lunch there, it didn’t take long to get excited. A good friend raved about “the little desks” and about going there while pregnant with her first son; I noticed a New York eater with a good name ranked it in his top five burger joints. I suspected we would have issues when the menu on the web site noted tomatoes on any order would be 50 cents extra, but I was game. And it was pretty much what I expected, right at or below the level of Corner Bistro’s sorry little pucks even though my benefactor insisted we get them cooked fresh rather than “par-broiled” (what the hell is that all about?) The beef was virtually tasteless, the “cheese” was processed, the bun was the kind that makes you worry your teeth are decaying as you chew, the lettuce was iceberg and the mustard was French’s. The tomato was worth the 50 cents; clearly, they could make a mint charging a dollar for Romaine or Cheddar or Maille. I loved the place and the people; it’s the Sears Fine Food of Saks country. But what it serves is not a burger worth risking mad cow disease.

Note to Sunday Styles: You might want to lay off wine. That rose-is-the-new-Cosmo/frolicking in St.-Tropez story ranks high among the all-time most embarrassing features ever published in the NYT, and that is saying something. Worse, the double byline proved that two heads can actually be emptier than one. What were they drinking?

Dumber things may have been published in newspapers -- a taco is a series of tubes, for instance -- but it was still hard to keep my jaw together on reading the Daily News’ response to a “reader” wondering what to cook with no electricity. It actually printed a chef’s recipe for seviche. I know I certainly had fresh shrimp, calamari, “whitefish” and octopus right at hand in our blackout. Not to mention four kinds of fresh herbs. I’m starting to think there’s a mole 10 blocks south trying to make Dining read less dim. The funniest part is that the “reader” wanted something “more sophisticated than a peanut butter sandwich.” And here I thought that was next up at the plate after the nadir of Old El Paso for Dummies.

Interesting that only two days after yet another faux exaltation of low-end dining Virginia Heffernan would say, in a review of the new Alton Brown travesty, what so many readers are thinking: “. . . that pose: the near-hysterical enthusiasm for diners, drive-throughs, burger joints, pizza parlors, sandwich shops. Haven’t we had enough? Doesn’t anyone want to say that, sure, a grilled cheese can hit the spot, and cherry pie is great, but French food is still harder to make, better balanced, more beautiful and more delicious?” Merde, it doesn’t even have to be French. I’d settle for Mexican discussed intelligently and accurately. Someone could make a fortune accepting corrections for an ad-supported web site, since the elitists seem to keep 90 percent of submissions from ever seeing print. Call it craigclaiborneslist, after a guy who has to be spinning at the thought of so many resources squandered on such inanity week after week. Or, better yet, firsttheduckmustbedead. You know it’s bad when vintage corrections are more clever than current stories.

The straits are also looking awfully dire for Saveur. Colman’s departure is not a good omen, given the penny-squeezing publishers’ track record with once-wonderful Islands magazine (to put it succinctly: they ran it into the sand). Worse is that I just got a menacing letter from a collection agency looking for the $29.97 I paid by check last August. When you’re pointlessly dunning not just a charter subscriber but an infrequent contributor there must not be many bushes left to beat. And that last bit of energy might be better expended trying to find someone, anyone, who will advertise in a husk of a magazine that is driving its last readers away.

Why does the phrase “practically on my knees” sound a little peculiar when it refers to a flack allegedly begging a guy not to name a restaurant the Spotted Dick? (And if you believe that protestation, I have a bridge to nowhere to sell you. No buzz is worse than bad buzz in this business.)

I hope the drug industry did a classier job of buying off Congress on the Medicare bill than it apparently is doing with doctors. Judging by a front-page story that has the naive in a tizzy, doctors are selling their souls for General Tso’s chicken. If they can’t hold out for lunch at Jack Abramoff’s restaurant, the least they should demand is better than Dunkin’ Donuts. And as a reader, I can only wonder why such petty graft gets such huge play when we’re in the middle of an epidemic of pillaging and looting. Business as usual doesn’t sound like much of a scandal when Congressmen are taking real bribes from military contractors while soldiers are getting killed at a frightening clip. Next they’re going to be telling us reviewers get cookbooks for free.

Just because I’m convinced readers are not as dumb as some editors apparently think, I’ve been peeking in on certain online forums and have found easily the best parody of both the Gourmet supplement and most food pages in the NYT magazine. Copy-edited for esthetic reasons, it reads: “I’m writing a novel, ‘The Sausage Zinger,’ about a sausage I ate on the 4th of August 1960 at the Parque Retiro (Coney Island) in olde Buenos Aires. It’ll make you cry and laugh and think a lot.” On second consideration, I hope it’s a parody. Otherwise, brace for the inevitable reviews: “Proust had his. . . .”

I see the Porcine Pantload is about to drop another megaturd on bookstores. You could call it “The Joy of Gluttony,” although he is not so honest. Apparently it’s supposed to be “part satire, part social commentary” (think Ann Coulter with elephantiasis), but I wonder how amusing obesity will sound if he ever has to have surgery and spend months hauling his laudatory bulk around on crutches and he can’t even fit into X-rays. Obviously it’s no laughing matter to me, remembering my orthopedist’s warning that staying thin is the best way to keep my own hip and knowing there is a difference between eating and abusing food. But I do hope some breakfast TV interviewer manages to ask about the “sexual prowess” angle promised in this swinish celebration. I’ve been curious ever since my first newspaper job out of college, in a little town in Iowa where the police chief and his wife were both of a size that back then looked suited for a sideshow but is now the American standard. They had kids, so they must have “done it,” but it was hard to see how the necessary parts connected with such bellies in between. The story going around the local bars was that they used something called the X position to get over, under, sideways, down. A little elucidation from a celebrated overeater and the Pantload could be outperforming “Snakes on a Plane.”

As if it weren’t bad enough to have the Chimp eating like a pig and swearing like a Cheney, he has to go and pander to the fundamentalists who have completely gotten over their wild objections to IVF after raising a shitstorm when Louise Brown was conceived in a lab. If this “culture of life” gets any crazier as babies’ heads are blown off, we aren’t going to be able to eat eggs. Potential chickens will have a right to be hatched so we can fry them.

You know things are grim at Bon Appetit when the most enticing -- and deepest -- thing in the magazine is the “wild salmon Florentine in a delicate sauce with garden greens.” And it’s cat food. Flip through the latest issue and you can halfway hear Gertrude Stein commenting on the absence of there. Unfortunately, the special supplement with the new Gourmet really makes you realize why Fancy Feast ads are so valuable. Unbroken pages of story after story with the same inherent theme leave you longing for some GE Profile fantasy to break up the trudge. Even usually brilliant David Rakoff was unfinishable, and don’t get me going on the Road Fooders dirging along unwittily for miles of type. I slogged all the way to the end of the Trillin meander and realized the problem was the same as it ever was with advertorials versus advertising: Words expanding to fill the space allotted, rather than being distilled to one sharp idea. It’s bad when those bizarre tourism-in-Rwanda sections the NYT runs start looking almost as pithy as Brillat-Savarin.

Gordon Ramsay is going to have his scales full when he crosses the Atlantic. W reports he’s going to force his New York kitchen staff to weigh in monthly because he hates 250-pound chefs. If he feels the same way about patrons, he’d better abandon all hope of opening in Las Vegas.

Classy of the NYT to have a skunk jump out of the birthday cake for the Greenmarkets. I actually read the whole story wondering first what the point was and second why it was in Dining and not Metro or Bizday. Neither question was answered. I guess the stated mission was accomplished, though: They did not print “just another love letter.” And why let reality get in the way? (Or photos, for that matter -- those were mighty withered-lookin’ apples outshining the Bronx cherries.) Between that travesty and the info-lite column trawling in flip-flops, the section may be tortured into being “more accessible to regular readers” (at least those who think Rachael is the new Julia). But hollow victory may come at a nasty price, judging by the rather astonishing back-stories going around the markets and turning up in my email.

It’s more than passing strange, too, that corporate Trader Joe’s gets a love letter while selling primarily processed crap and the Greenmarket with its multi-tier mission gets pecked apart in a piece that -- seriously -- never mentions a big reason it exists: to save farmland from development. An idiot was actually quoted as saying she didn’t care where her food came from. It all made New York magazine look like the local hero with its beautiful and resonant feature on farmers and fishermen and cheese-makers. Somehow I suspect the issue is not the Greenmarkets “searching for a niche.” It’s a section in desperate need of an editor. Aren’t there any warm bodies over in Sports who could grab the wheel before the Greyhound goes over the cliff? Or here’s an idea: Snare someone from the Rome bureau. It worked so well last time.

At the show I ran into an acquaintance who asked if I was working or just eating and I had to respond: “You could write a thousand stories about trends here, and every one would be true and every one would be a lie. It’s just too big.” I did notice that the flavor of a rather substantial chunk of the 150 or so things I tasted would have been impossible to identify without reading the sign, though. And while I did succumb to the fake-roe Anchoviar, some things you wouldn’t try on a dare, like the pineapple margarita cheese ball and the chocolate chevre. After too many indistinguishable “BBQ lasagna chips” and “creme brulee almonds,” I sampled one of David Burke’s bizarre sprays -- smoky bacon -- and decided he may have the right idea: all flavor, no food.

The Daily News seems to have lost its mind in the features pages lately, most notably by replacing its regular restaurant review with a column in which a “reader”asks for advice on where to eat and is counseled by some uncredentialed byline who actually believes, in a city with more than 15,000 choices, that a place called Mumbles would be worth consideration. Apparently everyone knows it’s a nuthouse there although no one is saying why, but I think one hint might be in the new fixation on the word peckish. Maybe in the old country it means “somewhat hungry.” But I read it as the second definition: “cross; irritable.” And that’s how readers who thought the paper could have been a contender are feeling as solid food coverage gives way to In Style-meets-Myspace hysteric inanity.

Even at its most ridiculous, though, the News would be hard put to print some of the Barbaro droppings generated by the deep pockets daily. Forget the stop-the-presses revelation that you can get food with drinks (or not, if the photo is any evidence). Did it really run a recipe saying stick a Dutch oven under a broiler? With a column that gave deep new meaning to the word insipid? Every Wednesday I think of the cab driver in Barcelona when it was torn up for the Olympics, the one who kept shaking his head and repeating: “Es un disastre!”

What if you promised pato negro and everybody came? You serve them anything but the meat that even the Italians are saying is the best prosciutto in the world right now (well, at least my TPW friend from Bologna is saying that). True, the invite did not specify the actual certifiably rare ham, and there were chorizo and other salumi made from the fabled pig on copious offer, but it still felt a little bait-and-switchy. And when the one regular Spanish haunch on display was finally and ceremoniously sliced for what the importer called us “yearnalists,” the pieces handed out were as thick as bologna. No, make that baloney.

In other barnyard news, the Wall Street Journal ran a very long, very thorough examination of whether organic beef is safer and never once raised the strongest reason for buying it: Cows that are not fed ground-up other cows do not get that little disease no one seems to worry about while bracing for bird flu. The piece danced so enthusiastically around the central issue that by the 30th graf, I was wondering if the conventional beef industry had resuscitated Scott McClellan.

The best of many great cartoons lately was the one from the Christian Science Monitor showing a man in a bathrobe picking a morning paper off the lawn with a headline reading: “You’d Better Sit Down.” It could be a banner every day anymore, and not just because we’re on the eve of destruction while the Chimp bangs on his tray for pig (could he have chosen a more tone-deaf obsession than “unclean” pork right now?) First came the sinister news that kids at summer camp eating chocolate chip pancakes and wondering why they’re hyperactive are all ingesting legal drugs that will, of course, be excreted into the water supply, joining all the “antibacterial” pollution being pumped in from a billion unnecessary products. And then you read that tuna in the Mediterranean is so devastatingly overfished that the littlest specimens are being captured and sent to feeding farms on the Croatian coast. The flip response would be to wonder how long before the anti-foie gras forces intervene. But this is seriously unsettling. The planet is going to hell. If there is a Rapture, what will Jesus eat?

A forthcoming cookbook by a renowned pastry chef who thinks vanilla is an invisible essential actually calls it “the underwear of baking.” Sure, it smells. But you never want to take a spoonful of creme brulee and wonder: Boxers or briefs?

Anyone with a last ort of doubt whether honor and dignity would be returned to the White House had to hang it up on the useful idiot’s birthday. Not only did a Glasgow newspaper report the awful truth -- blowing out candles, it said, he “looked more like a primate than a president” -- but the most photographed of his many cakes was something Trailer Park Monthly would be embarrassed to run. I don’t know which was worse, the Gracelandish rhinestone “60” on top or the white chocolate mansion as the finishing layer of what looked like a stack of dark chocolate caskets in honor of Kenny Boy. Forget wars and diplomacy. This crew couldn’t do chicken right.

Speaking of the friendship that dare not speak its name, the death of the Chimp’s “acquaintance”certainly put Aspen in a sinister light. Then Colin Powell took sick at dinner in an unnamed restaurant there and wound up checking into the same hospital Lay did not check out of. Maybe only the altitude was to blame in both cases. But could Food & Wine please invite Dick Strongheart for its next Classic?

Clearly, I don’t get out enough. Riding up to an excellent engagement party in Newburgh, we passed an animal squished flat as a panino roughly every third revolution of the car’s wheels. After about the 50th slaughtered possum and fox and skunk I started worrying again about the poor lobsters. The insect of the sea has to suffer a little before getting dipped in butter for our delectation. It’s so much worse than trying to cross the road to find food and winding up a bloody mess not worth a second thought except for how high the price of gas is getting in a cars-are-king world. If those silly little fawns would only join the Holy Foods chain they might meet a caring end. Or at least get a decent burial under sauce.

The insane rains this summer have also turned factory farms for chicken into deathtraps -- close to 100,000 specimens of McNugget material went breast-up in June in Maryland alone while cooped up awaiting normal slaughter. But through it all the class war continues unabated. An op-ed in an upstate paper actually worried that force-feeding ducks gives them “feelings of malaise.” And in the shrink capital of the world, that is so much more horrific than drowning.

It would be impossible to top Problemdrinker’s take on organic hot dogs on Gawker (no matter whether the udders grazed on the grass, you are still eating offally scary bits). But the very fact that the NYT idiocy saw print, a day late for the Fourth of Nathan’s, should be a warning that we will one day be reading about the happy-animal transformation of another Living perennial: Spam.

Chinatown Brasserie has apparently chosen to live by Page 6. Let’s hope it doesn’t die the same way. The same day I read Bill Gates, Larry David, Paul Simon and Charlie Rose had been spotted “dining separately” there I met friends for dinner and, decor and waitron’s hair aside, could have been eating in Omaha for all the glam factor. Admittedly, it was Fourth of Nathan’s Eve, but seeing that ghostly-empty bar downstairs on the way out quite late I felt a very long way even from Spice Market. Given who the owners are, I can understand why they’re going for the glitz. But when you have steak, why promote only the sizzle?

Evidently I’m the Greenmarket snob. Friends were led into temptation by that silly panna cotta recipe and wound up with 24 ounces of liquid in 72 ounces of ramekin, among other glitches. Maybe their succumbing means an effete dessert is now mainstream American. But I will always have issues with panna cotta because I first encountered it on my first trip to Italy, when my consort’s gastronomic guide (and interpreter/fixer for National Geographic) kept talking about “fish glue” while shepherding us all over Genoa during the search for Columbus. What Massimo finally introduced us to was a rubbery, bland thing we ate standing up in a cafe just to say we had tried it. Its allure eluded me, and I realized why after Massimo sent Bob home from another trip with a box of instant mystery dessert. Translating the ingredients I finally understood he had meant gelatin. No wonder Americans have glommed onto it. You can mix fat with Jell-O and call it panna cotta.

But then I’m so twisted I hear tiramisu anymore and think the worst. I always knew it meant “pick me up.” But during my sojourn between the hospital sheets in Torino, I heard only “tiralisu,” with the pronoun changed to “you.” And that’s what the nurses would say when they brought the bedpan.

If Warren Buffett does nothing else with his life, let’s hope he at least has made marketers think twice before inundating my inbox with touts for the most expensive anything, whether coffee or burgers or leather chairs designed solely for sipping scotch. We now know what unimaginable fortunes are for, and it ain’t one-upmanship. Even better, we're now freed from pitying the poor rap stars dissed out of guzzling Cristal just for the price of it.

Talk about putting out fires with gasoline: With the lobster-welfare issue at full boil, it’s a mystery why a magazine would run a recipe only Rumsfeld would approve, let alone wrap it in a text that lets a hostess trash her guests (shouldn’t it be the other way around on 43d Street?) What would The Ethicist say?

One of the many silly refrains in our house is from some story or book I once read, a cook defending her mole sauce by saying, “There’s got to be half a pound of Cadbury’s Fruit & Nuts in there.” But I still find it odd that the salmonella recall of the British company’s milk chocolate line has produced such a mellow, even jocular response. When cantaloupe had the same affliction, melons were treated like anthrax among the barely informed, and don’t even get me started on the perceived lethal weapon of raw eggs. Now we’re looking at full-bore Montezuma’s Revenge and it’s somehow no biggie. I often marvel that the most germ-phobic people in the world will always handle dollars that undoubtedly have been stored at some point up close and personal with a bum’s jewels. Apparently chocolate is the new cash.

The Wall Street Journal must not value me as a subscriber as much as it claims. The tribute box of caffeine it just delivered included a pack of “pumpkin spice” flavored coffee. The only thing more unnerving would be a container of that new laxative designed to be dissolved in coffee, sent without diapers.

I see Rao’s is finally making its move to Las Vegas, if you can believe all the ads. With so many big-name French chefs opening in the over-fountained desert, maybe there really was a gaping need for profoundly mediocre Ameri-Italian (when your three stars were awarded by Mimi, five critics and many fill-ins ago, it might be way past time to hang them up). I’m sure the place will be just as exclusive as the spaghetti sauce sold in supermarkets everywhere. Without Little Al, though, it’s less than Tom’s Diner.

Brad Steelman should be nervous. Right now he is heading for a record as longest-lasting chef of the River Cafe, and at that landmark it is no point of pride. Buzzy O’Keeffe famously says he likes to launch chefs, not capture them, and hanging around too long might send the wrong message.

But at the beyond-lavish 30th-anniversary party literally under the Brooklyn Bridge, it was easy to see why a chef might want to stick around. The setting is unreal, the restaurant is staffed and stocked to excess and the mood is so genial it was not surprising to find Steelman’s four predecessors producing the decadent but still restrained menu with him (starting with Larry Forgione’s “terrine of three smoked fish with their respective caviars” and winding through Charlie Palmer’s asparagus with duck ham, David Burke’s lobster “steak” and Rick Laakkonen’s roasted rabbit with cannelloni). But it was the wine director, Joseph DeLissio, who offered the most potent evidence of why someone might check in and not want to check out: When my consort and I stepped off the New York Water Taxi, magnums of Veuve Clicquot and Henriot were being poured, and waiters were soon warning us to save room for the Cristal and Dom Perignon. Each course came with some exceptional liquid (the wine magazine editor next to me at a window table was particularly awed by the Silex-D. Dagueneau 2004 Pouilly-Fume), and by the time Steelman’s lamb three ways landed, magnums of various knock-’em-dead reds were being poured almost faster than the excellent waiters could change glasses. It was an extraordinary show of generosity for the motleyist crew imaginable. This was no press mob scene or chef gang bang or even Le Cirque-style freak show (a k a crude customer cultivation). The Soltners, the foie gras queen, a peculiarly camera-shy Gael Greene and an M. Shanken contingent were among the relatively few industry notables; in the ultimate indication of careful culling, there was no Evil Monkey from the NYT. The photographer shooting hard was not the usual Mr. Magoo but a young woman from the Brooklyn Eagle. It was all unsettling.

On the ride back to the glittering island we had looked out on all night, the water taxi took a detour to spin us around the Statue of Liberty. The whole glamorous, luxurious experience felt so far from real life it only made me wonder why no one has ever produced the most obvious series: “Food and the City.” I could even put up with Sarah Jessica Parker as the chef, waiting to launch.

About 10 years ago I spent an entire 12 months cooking only what was seasonal in my small part of the world, developing recipes just for myself while keeping a diary of how hard and easy that all actually was. The most brilliant agent I know then spent another year shopping my efforts around, only to be met with a collective, “Huh?” So I am very happy to see the food world has finally evolved far enough that the NYT has started a cooking-from-the-Greenmarket column. But did it really have to begin with an homage to Marie Antoinette? Fava beans are easily among the most esoteric of local vegetables, sold at a fraction of the markets, and really, who ever comes home from Union Square with bulging bags of still damp and dirty, instantly eatable green things to think, “I know. I’ll make panna cotta!” (Maybe lemon balm brioche was too ordinary.) The great gift of the Greenmarket is that it takes so little to make so much of exquisitely fresh, in-harmony-with-nature ingredients. But for reasons I will never understand after seeing women paying with food stamps at the exceptional market in my neighborhood, something about the idea of eating seasonally and locally brings out the snoot in food writers. It’s not enough that the food is seasonal and local. It has to be tortured into effete. Before the summer is out, how much do you want to bet we’ll be reading a recipe for tomato water?

Just back from Italy, I’m dazed and confused but still not so addled I need pie defined. “The round fruit-filled pastry”? Does that go with the frozen dairy product or just the dark caffeinated beverage?

The good news is that you can get a quartino of decent local wine for as little as 1 euro in a restaurant (Miravalle, in Manciano). The bad news is that the Autogrill has gone to hell, or maybe just to America. I was looking forward to our last stop through the whole week, remembering how wondrous my first experience had been, way back in 1990 on the Autostrada outside Genoa. But the one we tried right outside Florence had the same tired and underfilled cardboard panini you now see in every train station, with the alternatives being a Spizzico counter and more junk food in huge packages than any human should ever have to face. It’s really bad when you leave thinking the Burger King upstairs might have been the better choice.

This is no joke: First prize in a contest would be one night in Florence. Second prize would be a week. My least favorite city besides Rome was even more annoying on my stopover waiting for a flight home, and my dinner dates confirmed my impression that hell is other Americans. As they put it, the place is overrun with 20,000 sorority girls, all wearing flip-flops and bent on getting hammered every night while trying to meet Italians but landing only Albanians posing as Greek. They told me this at the allegedly classy Cibreo before we were serenaded, to their horror, by a couple of street musicians who shook down all the diners after their raucous performance. The city even has Mexican restaurants, serving “dolce” burritos (zucchero, Nutella). I was so happy to leave I got to the airport in time to have the Air France clerks try to persuade me to take the earlier flight just boarding, but I hate CDG in Paris worse than Florence and stuck around for a last prosecco and panini. Imagine my horror when I passed through security, having had my bags dumped out and pawed through by a surly functionary, to find the lovely cafe I remembered from my last trip two years ago completely gone. All that was waiting at the gate was a bank of machines for coffee and snacks. Getting there was creepy, too, through a maze of steel walls with no windows. As I sat there sadly eating a packet of crumbled potato chips in desperation, I could only think yet again of how the war on an abstraction has made the world so much safer. Now instead of airports we travel through maximum-security prisons. Hungrily.

It took serious work, but I managed to stay blissfully ignorant of news for nearly an entire week. Somehow, though, one tidbit did filter through: Gordon Ramsay’s winning his libel case, which was wildly reported. Apparently he learned from a master, Marco Pierre White, who beat the NYT some years back. I’ve always thought the perpetrator of that offense is either lucky or female dogged, but then a headless section will obviously take what copy it can get. Travel sniffs even less.

The Financial Times also yielded a morsel on the flight home: A new wine has been branded Chamarre because it “sounded similar to several other famous French places and products, such as the Champs-Elysees, chardonnay, Champagne and Chanel.” Maybe to the rubes it might. To me it’s the wine equivalent of Accenture: sounds good, means nothing. And somehow I don’t think you beat Gallo by aping Starbucks.

Haagen-Dazs is running a rather tone-deaf campaign for its Mayan chocolate flavor: “Cortez invaded for it.” Hope the same ad agency doesn’t get the Bocaburger account. We’ll be hearing what Hitler would eat.

Foie gras may be over even before the misguided manage to get it banned completely. Chefs seem to be increasingly realizing ducks have much more to sacrifice than mere engorged livers. Along with their vital organs, their tongues and their balls are popping up all over trendy menus. Force-feeding was apparently not enough. Now Daguin wannabes have to go medieval on those birds.

Joking aside, it was hard to read the report that Holy Foods is not going to sell live lobsters anymore out of concern for the crustaceans without wondering why these bleeding hearts are sitting by silently while their own government allows human beings to suffer in cages to the point where the only escape is suicide. Did I really read in a once-respectable newspaper that Americans are worried about the “quality of life” of a softshell crab? On the same day force-feedings at Guantanamo were reported yet again? Watching my Siamese nap 23 1/3 hours a day, I always swear I want to come back as a cat. These days I think a better bet would be as something much farther up the food chain. Never forget the tales of fat lobsters in the wake of Flight 800.

I guess Time magazine deserves credit for devoting much of an entire issue to food, but it was still surprising to see how little news was involved. I felt as if I had read every story 14 times before, except for how Giada and Goin stay thin and, more train-wreck mesmerizing, how the Cheesecake Factory develops its menu. Suffice it to say bastardizing serious cuisine would be an understatement. The magazine does get points, though, for letting Michael Pollan trash what he trashed (Go-Gurt, Twinkies) while accepting an ad for whole-grain Club Crackers, which really taste like Crisco in crunchy form. Then again, the ad sales guys do not seem to have gotten the message: “Pay no heed to nutritional advice.” Every ad in the section that was not for a drug was for some get-healthy-quick food. So disregard what you read and just dress your salads in canola Hellmann’s.

(PS: Marion Nestle is an admirable character, but really: How many times can she feign shock on walking into a supermarket, reporter in tow, to promote her book? Milk in the back? Sugar on the cereal? Stop the presses. At least the failure of imagination makes you want to shoot only the messenger.)

The hometown paper now desperately shopping for a Dining editor has been running some intriguing pieces. The writing in one made me wonder if the Egotist might actually have a shuffle function on his word processor (if it’s June, it must be the misery of the pie plant). And the prose in a couple more, by renowned literary lights in the magazine, was so turgid and forced it reminded me of how Elvis died. Not from eating peanut butter and banana sandwiches. By straining at stool.

A far worse offense by the Chalabi Crier was the Chimp House handout touting “cocktail parties” allegedly thrown by the dry drunk in chief to win Congressmen and influence votes (or vice-versa). Anyone with half a brain -- or anyone who had to suffer through editing “news” stories in 2001 about inaugural food cooked with alcohol -- would immediately ask: Cocktails? With the guy no admiring voter could ever drink a beer with because one would be too many and a hundred not enough? Of course the retyped press release mentions only lemonade and iced tea (and not of Long Island origin). But they had to shove that gullible report into print anyway. It was easier than acknowledging there might be more world-threatening weaknesses than an affinity for blow jobs. Sad that inviting people for alcohol and serving anything but just fits a pattern. Does weapons of mass deception ring a bell?

The cretin who named a new product that sugar-coats the lip of a cocktail glass would have been wise to consult urbandictionary.com before trademarking Rimmer. The Crustini it goes around sounds crude enough.

A wind-up Molto Ego doll, as sickeningly reported on thefoodsection, could turn out to be the greatest idea since burgers in the rat-infested parks. There should be a whole line of these miniature chefs, and not just flipping spaghetti and meatballs. Imagine sales of the one that could fart backward.

The only wonder is that no one thought of this sooner: A bacon cheeseburger with a Krispy Kreme doughnut for a bun. Some baseball stadium is actually serving it, and we can only hope it does not turn out to be the inspiration for the sports chapter of fast food’s “The Idiot and the Odyssey.”

Just how far has television come from Dionne Lucas? Apparently there’s now a chef show that rewards a guy who actually put these four ingredients together in one mouthful: mortadella, grapes, mushrooms and tapenade. Think about it. But not too long. Your head will be spewing like Linda Blair’s.

Lately I can only wonder what historians will think of this miserable era with atrocities to the right of us and disaster straight ahead and buses running half-empty on highways clogged with cars. Even now, though, it is pretty clear that we could never be forgiven for marking Memorial Day, of all days, with hot dog-eating contests. With a couple of wars on, what kind of country would celebrate gorging and gluttony? The only thing worse would be doing it for Darfur. But I guess I shouldn’t worry, just be happy as a Chimp who famously declared: “Who cares about history? We’ll all be dead.” We might as well all drink hemlock to that.

Of all the hallmarks of success, sending in a clone has to be the ballsiest. Unfortunately, it works. At the Brasserie Ruhlmann fete, people were desperately looking for famous faces and kept telling me the Schnorrer was one of them. But I sat next to that guy at a press lunch once and he let me in on the scheme. If only I had a schoolmate who looked enough like me to dress her up and have her grace parties with “my” presence. I could have been spared the sight of Fatter Guy in the flesh, not to mention meeting a certain someone who always makes me check for my wallet after she passes by.

I think chefs with outposts around the world might be overstretched, too, but damned if I’m going to take the word of Mr. Shrimp Shell Stock on it. This might be the first time ever that I think even Jay McInerney might have been a better arbiter of consistency. The Times truly works in mysterious ways when it allows a chef’s collaborator to give what some say is the guiltiest party a pass by just not discussing him.

The new biography of Mrs. Beeton is apparently causing a stir in England because it reveals that she was a plagiarist. A slyer way to put it might be a prototype. As the Guardian reported, “Isabella Beeton was only 21 when she began cookery writing. Her first recipe for Victoria sponge was so inept that she left out the eggs. Seven years later she was dead. How did she come to write the seminal book? ‘The answer is she copied everything,’’’ her biographer Kathryn Hughes said. Sounds like 1983 all over again, when the food coven went into witchy overdrive denouncing a pretty, youngish thing who had had the audacity to produce what was probably the first coffee table best-seller, insisting she “stole” recipes for things like shrimp toast. Change the names and the British historian could be talking American: “We should not necessarily think badly of Mrs. Beeton. ‘Although she was a plagiarist, she was adding value. She was an extraordinary innovator.’’’ Unlike whoever it was who swiped the shrimp toast first.

The price of a soul seems to be dropping. Does Ming Tsai really believe some tricked-up potato chips are truly the “perfect pairing with your favorite wine”? Someone tell him about cheese. Or at least offer him a Singha to sell out in a snack ad.

Emeril, on the other hand, actually appears to be doing something good while doing well. Maybe I don’t get off the island often enough, but on a foray down to eat with friends in New Hope I spotted a new-to-me line of salad greens in the grocery with that overexposed smiling face on the label. Considering a huge reason Americans refuse to eat their fruits and vegetables is the dearth of big-bucks promotion, it can’t hurt to have a little celebrity nonsense in the produce aisle. Imagine what a Sandra Lee could accomplish doctoring up raw ingredients.

I guess the Julia Child bio-pic was inevitable, and I sorta like the idea of Joan Cusack getting the role and sloshing around the TV kitchen. Slashfood takes exception, though, preferring Joan Allen. Forget the reality that she has all the warmth of Pat Nixon. There’s also the size issue. Wouldn’t it be like casting Bob Balaban as James Beard?

Take the two most self-destructive American pursuits -- eating fast food, and eating fast food while driving -- put them together and what do you get? Exactly. A lead story in the same newspaper that actually asserted that Girl Scout cookies will kill you with trans-fats. It’s not surprising that a guy with so many gaps in his own mental map would take the shallow road rather than jump on the opportunity to learn more about what this country is really cooking, regionally and nationally. This is, after all and never forget, the useful idiot who helped put a feces-flinging chimp into power with his voter-deluding stories. Maybe he can drive back through a bunch of bariatric operating rooms and dialysis centers and get a few more laughs. What kind of message does it send when fast food is considered both megadeath and great good fun? But this verbal master of disaster could not have done a better job if he worked for bestfoodnation, the propaganda site the promoters of the stuff that has made America adipose have set up. Then again, considering he’s employed by the best tool the vast right-wing conspiracy ever had, that may be exactly how his story came to be. Eric Schlosser, don’t forget, has already had his NYT takedown, portrayed as just some guy who got lucky while ambling through history. And so far only the WSJournal is telling us why it was no accident. Party on, Panchito. I’ll bet the fast food is really great in Iraq these days.

The Hillary-panty-sniffing paper’s visual homage to Mrs. Kerry, on the other hand, was well worth the reads. Two things jumped out at me. One was yet another uncritical recounting of the restaurant clitic’s exploits. First as a reporter she lay down with a subject, then as a reviewer she routinely schtuped the chefs she was evaluating. Does no one else see any ethical issues there? No wonder it’s taken so long for food journalists to get the time of the Times. The other peculiarity was in Nora Ephron’s review of “Look Back in Indigestion,” in which she speculates about the authors’ home being cluttered with pickled okra and other cutesy vittles they’ve dragged back to Connecticut. I still remember interviewing them for some magazine whose name has long been forgotten, and that house had anything but kitsch in it. I’m starting to think Yalie bluebloods are bizarrely adept at masking their true selves -- consider a certain graduate who no longer goes “home” to his “ranch” because he’s afraid to pass the antiwar protesters camped outside. Oh, well. At least no one got harmed in the making of the two-for-the-road show, despite the python-on-gazelle promo photos of the authors.

In case Per Se was not pretentious enough as a restaurant name, Keller has gone and dubbed his new place in Napa Ad Hoc. It should be In Absentia. And if he keeps emulating Wolfgang and Emeril and other chainsters, he can just start using Ibid. Or Ad Infinitum.

The race to the bottom is farther along than even I had realized. Bon Appetit is now speaking Rachaelese. Twice in one issue. It’s as embarrassing as a menopausal waitress in a Hooters uniform.

Never let it be said Philadelphia does not have its priorities in order. Apparently the most pressing item on its agenda is a ban on foie gras. And they call Chicago the second city. Interesting this goosey councilman is not raising his voice about the profound misery at Guantanamo if he’s so concerned about suffering. I guess torture really does begin at home.

I knew I was safely back home when the local paper ran a big story touting Holy Foods as a bargain basement, just as its new campaign in the City section says it is. Food Emporium should be particularly pissed, keeping Dining afloat all these years only to get thrown over for the new chain in town. Who knew the slogan had morphed into “All the ads fit to print”?

Only her therapist knows for sure what this means, but a friend confessed she saw the reefers on the cover of the Whining section and thought one read, “Frank Bruni Dies in August.”

I would not have wanted to have been the chef responsible for the food served at the lapdogs’ dinner before Stephen Colbert did what no real journalist beyond Helen Thomas ever has. Talk about acid reflux. Apparently it’s funny when the honored guest makes jokes about a situation that has now gotten 2,400 Americans slaughtered. It’s bad taste to ask why. Hope they locked up the vanilla in Mrs. Chimp’s kitchen. Any liquid that is 35 percent alcohol had to look more seductive than an imaginary friend after Truthiness’s verbal bruising.

Hoke. It’s the real thing. 

One of Richard Thompson’s most haunting songs is “When the Spell Is Broken,” and it was ricocheting around my cranial sieve after I met one of the few bonuses for a bad break for a late lunch on the Lower East Side. Charbon, where we had planned to rendezvous, turned out to be closed, so I suggested Schiller’s, where I had not been in donkey’s years and had always loved the look. Visually nothing had changed, but I warned my inadvertently acquired friend that the food would not be as great as the bathrooms. Even I was surprised, though, at what arrived sans the French fries I specifically ordered as insurance against dejection. Her “seared tuna salad” looked to be mostly a mess of onions; my “tartine” was a slab of baguette alongside a mound of vapid portobello slices, Parmesan and arugula. Right as our tiny tumblers of wine were running out, Patsy put down her fork and said: “It’s just a diner, isn’t it?” Funny how Balthazar never makes you feel as if “love letters you wrote/are pushed back down your throat.” To paraphrase Richard Thompson, you can’t cook if you don’t know how.

As the virtual for-sale sign on Bistro du Vent proves, though, restaurant magic is not a patented formula. Friends from the other coast were surprised to hear the news eater reported first, but I had three theories about what led to its demise: That alleged orgy on the bar. The bistro-by-Sears-catalog look. That alleged orgy on the bar. When you walk into a restaurant and the first thing you think about is Clarence Thomas facing down a Coke can, you can’t enjoy your meal. I still remember the time, 20-some years ago, when I took one of my sisters and her husband to New Deal in SoHo and someone had defaced the dessert menu with choices like “Hair Pie.” How exactly do you beat that image off? So to speak, of course.