gastropoda

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.”

Somehow it’s not surprising the canned White House chef is being very careful not to dis Mrs. Chimp — he has to know he would wind up with a horse’s head in his bed. And as a former friend once noted, that BFEE payback tradition must be how we wound up with so many horses’ asses in the executive mansion to begin with.

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.

Anyone who gets the Greenmarket gig merely for living close enough to shop in flip-flops deserves to do better than trivializing. Voguish as an adjective anywhere near Michael Pollan? Some grownup really should take the keyboard away. Pigs are dying in vain.

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.

Speaking of editors needed, it gives me no joy to point out the obvious one more time: Friends don’t let friends drone drivel.

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.

Anyway, I suspected braving the party was a mistake when I passed Mimi Sheraton halfway down the sidewalk and she warned: “It’s a madhouse.” It was jammed, but I managed to snare a glass of wine, meet the owner (who actually tipped his hat, something I haven’t experienced since my dad died) and wriggle through to see the whole Jekyll-and-Hydey space. I passed on the kangaroo nachos (tell me again where the marsupials roam?) and heard some gossip. And then I walked straight out and back to the subway, Justin’s to the left and Duvet and Taj to the right, realizing what a fool I had been to think any place on that block would be about food. Hope that sweet chef didn’t think one gig at the Beard House meant Manhattan was clamoring for more. They say that to all the rubes.

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. . . .

Lest we forget, it’s not officially 9/11. Our priorities-in-order Congress and Chimp in Chief instantly designated it Patriot Day five years ago next month. So if it’s gonna be a holiday, it needs a food. I suggest goat. Lest we forget, as Disney apparently did.

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.”

Applebee’s has hired Tyler Florence to beef up its sorry sales with his fairy dust of “celebrity.” (“Who?” I can hear my in-law equivalent asking up in Buffalo, where this is one of the few chains.) I hate to say it, but they might have been better off taking on the One Fat Lady. The religious sorta do like idols in their own image.

File this under “there’s gotta be a pony in there somewhere:” A reader wondering why I am so unforgiving of Panchito actually answered his own question, then followed up with an observation I could not have put better. “With him worrying about the state of affairs of restaurant coat-check prices rather than propagating more Bush lies, the world is a better place.” Now if only they could convert Fox News into the Food Network.

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.

And that made me realize that for so many unevolved experts who obsess on burgers the gold standard is fast food. I’m old, so I can remember a world before McDonald’s was as omnipresent as Starbucks. I care about what I put in my mouth, so I can appreciate the huge advances in American food that have made a burger more than a thin grey slab in cotton. By unhappy coincidence, I had already eaten a burger just days before this revelation. The one at Fairway Cafe is exceptional: a fat chunk of good meat, cooked evenly, in a substantial bun with real Cheddar, mesclun, tomato and onion to add at will, serious mustard if you want and a nice sauce if you don’t. Biting into it, you never think of White Castle. But you do think; you don’t just chew. A quarter of it is perfect, half is more than enough. You would never even consider seconds. Trust me. If you want a great burger, don’t ask an aficionado. He buys them by the bagful.

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.

So I’m waiting for the light at 57th and Lex after PT when I hear a woman behind me going on and on about how she is feeding her dog only carrots and celery because golden retrievers are prone to hip dysplasia, “which they get when they get too heavy.” I turn around to see more and find the concerned owner could use a few carrots herself. She weighs easily 300 pounds. The funny thing is that I spotted a product called Healthy Hips at the Fancy Food Show and thought it was a cool idea until I realized it was not for two-legged species. Maybe humans should be going to see vets.

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.