I’m slow but get it eventually: Eating at one of our favorite new restaurants again the other night finally made me realize why the owner is always here and not minding the stoves in Greece. When the going gets tough, the tough move their money. And patrons follow.
I sometimes feel guilty when letting my fingers do the walking in reporting these days, but if you try sometimes you can get what you need online and in books. Take my take on the Oreos centennial — judging by James Trager’s “Food Chronology,” those iconic black-on-shortening wonders originated as a knockoff of the now-long-gone Hydrox cookie. That was the “biscuit bonbon” that came into stores first. And it’s the dark secret you won’t find anywhere in the expanded press releases and blog blowouts everywhere on the anniversary. Instead, look, over there! It’s a factory tour.
I also had a sobering conversation over at the best cookbook store, on whether hard times and hard-time Americans cooking more at home have been good for the printed word, as so much old-style media verbiage has indicated. Short answer: WTF? If people have no money for meat, how in Escoffier’s name are they going to be able to come out and buy cookbooks? If they have Al Gore’s great gift of the internets, they’re gonna be clicking . . .
And I shouldn’t mock, because I once had an ill-thought-out letter published in the birdcage liner for wingnuts, too. But the (unlinkable) one from a woman responding to a front-page story on wine at White Castle had me almost ROFL for the lack of self-awareness. If Mom was bringing rebottled vino to McD’s and Burger King 40 years ago, it was not because she wanted to evoke midnight in Paris. She was leaning on mother’s little helper before Prozac and Valium.
Finally, my compliments to the typist, but overindulgence in sugar, especially by the subsidized poors, is not “the biggest public health challenge facing the developed world.” That would be denial of climate change as the population keeps growing (and as the kkkrazies try to outlaw birth control). Crops all over the stressed world are being wiped out by drought and floods, hurricanes and tsunamis, freak ice storms and aberrant warm winters. I’ll even list nuclear meltdowns, because it’s 30-some years since the push-back against that energy source, and still we’re vulnerable. (I’ll throw in oil spills for the same reason.) You won’t hear it put this way, but we’re simply destroying our own habitat while refusing to acknowledge the planet will still be here, evolving with sugar cane, long after obese and diabetic humans have gone the way of pterodactyls. I’d also believe less in string-pullers if this screed hadn’t targeted the poorest people in this country. A cake a day was antidepressant for my destitute family; deprivation could equal cruelty if sugar got swept away along with HFCS. If you want to regulate the white stuff, please say you mean the little snots on Carnegie Hill will have no access to cupcakes at any price. Otherwise it’s clear sugar is not the only thing that can be spun.
All the suggestions (often bizarre suggestions) for Oscar-themed party food and dinners made me wonder why, if Hollywood is having such troubles, studios aren’t making more movies set in kitchens or restaurants or around tables. Look what that did for “The Help,” and apparently it featured a shit pie. Other nominees missed the whole food boat (witness the struggling for good “Hugo” or “Midnight” homages). Americans are obsessed with food on any and all screens, and the huge overseas audiences keeping the film industry afloat would eat it up, too. Imagine the tie-ins: “The Artist II” Wheat Thins, “now with no audible crunch.”
I tuned in on the Twitter just enough to see potpie was served at some Oscar party where the “stars” gathered. Only one question: Why the fuck? Potpie is one of the most ill-conceived things ever pulled out of an oven: Not only is it underseasoned soup with a crust, the soup is always hot enough to melt the spoon, so you spend half the encounter knowing the thin top is getting soggy while the bottom is bubbling into boring. But I guess slopping it out makes sense — it’s one of those dishes both the super-wealthy and death-row convicts seem to value with their undeveloped palates. Maybe if foie gras were relabeled liverbest they’d go for it.
And I can’t keep up with all the wingnuttiness these days, but I do find the growing push for drug testing of food stamp recipients rather bat-guano insane. Not only does it add to costs and bureaucracy (AKA Big Gubmint) and cause needless humiliation. But let’s say you catch one of the little users. You’ll save a couple of bucks a day in benefits. Then you throw her/him in jail and have to provide free meals for years.
Deluded me, I thought the movement in Utah to get some imbibers on the liquor control board made a ginload of sense. But apparently there’s backlash from contemporary Carry Nations (lost in my Twitter stream, or I’d link). Come on — of course you want someone who does what normal people do to have a vote. Otherwise you get teetotalers advising we all hold a grape between our knees at happy hour.
I wonder if Taco Bell hasn’t misunderestimated the stupidity of the patron (lower-case, BTW, is not the tequila in the contract rider). “Live mas” sounds like what hillbillies who are not being raised by their grandparents have.
And this is my TwitLonger on the sad news I knew was coming: That refrain you hear out of LA is “Nearer my God to Thee.” Collapsing the food section into the least-read edition of the week, and then throwing up a drywall? Makes sense only if you think the staff has been warned the beatings will continue until morale improves.
Just as Twinkies can never go stale, neither can my ranting about how clueless the coverage of the Hostess Brands scumbaggery is. When news broke about one of the all-time icons of processed crap, food writers everywhere scrambled to whip up puns as if supermarket shelves were about to be wiped clean. Then as now, though, the real story was not about the death of unkillable junk. It’s about the same Pony Express horse shit involved in willfully bleeding the USPS dry. The Bread Wonders just want to magically erase benefits for the human beings they happened, so unfortunately, to acquire along with the assets of a limping company. Ho Hos, indeed.
And I guess there’s even going to be a war on Little Women. I always thought the Girl Scouts ranked right up there with apple pie as sacred American exceptionalism, but no more. Samoas, show us the birth certificate!
I’m sure I’ve mentioned I venture into the editorial pages of the WSJournal every morning just to see what color/consistency of feces the monkeys are flinging and eating that day. So I’m pretty familiar with the lies, lies and Barbaro droppings printed there from assorted “think tanks” and other well-compensated ventriloquists for lunacy. And what I want to know is how the wires got crossed and the hometown paper ran a classic surging Murdoch screed. I guess everyone’s so busy blogging insanely (or inanely) these days they can’t stop and fact-check. (Cows in the Willie Nelson ad? Really?) Or even ask obvious questions: Doesn’t Chipotle’s wild success prove there’s a market for bacon (or other pig richness) that costs more? I’m so old I actually lived in Iowa when all farmers raised hogs the right way, but of course that was before Earl Butz. Mostly, though, my consort was smarter than I: He just looked at the bio and bailed. And he’s right: A former hog farmer who now grows corn and soybeans knows most about harvesting tax dollars.
Panchito has some nerve coming out as a prohibitionist now, 12 long years after he enabled a dry drunk to take the wheel and turn the ship of state into the USS Titanic. Gullible stenographers are much more dangerous to health and welfare than mere booze.