Too skinny? Eat salad.

This week was probably the nadir for food coverage. The Huffington Post started what has to be a parody, and the end of the Craig Claiborne line did KFC’s dirty work. The vendors whose fish has to be eaten the same day you buy it were touted as selling the freshest in Manhattan. Airline food was reported to be “striving to be tasty” (and Francisco Franco is still dead). The WSJournal pretty much declared wine coverage will now be only about wealth-worshiping and name-dropping, as Dr. Vino put it. (But that ridiculous adjective “delicious” will live on.) And I seem to recall some nonsense about ramps being the new arugula, hold the fiddleheads. But on the bright side, a new generation (of wide-eyed bloggers) has just learned a sobering and essential lesson: The Pillsbury Bake-Off is about nothing but crass commercialism, a relatively cheap way for Big Food to gauge what Americans are stuffing into their pie holes and an even better way to inspire those same suckers to consume even more processed crap. The only thing I’m curious about is whether the editors gathered from “real” media to cover the charade were any slimmer than the ones I reeled at the sight of 20-some years ago. (Those broads could pack it away; breakfast was always like the descent of a plague of very large locusts. And they uncritically, even gushingly, wrote up the gruesome results of Poppin’ Junk topped with raspberry and spinach and dipped in chocolate.) Personally, I think any cook who can turn a canned biscuit into a fish taco is going places. Nowhere I’d want to go, but still.