From cheeks to collars

The best promo ever for a cooking show was this hypnotic Vine: Put your lips together and blow up ratings. My foie is still in crise from Lyon nearly 15 years ago, but my consort and I had to tune in for the first time. What we watched made me think we were, as is too fucking often, there too soon. We had tacked on a train trip after his over-the-top gig in Paris celebrating the 1 percent before they were so close to being worthy of a new revolution, and we had eaten literally at the top of the food chain, where everything was restrained and cerebral. The home of the silk weavers’ brains struck me as, to steal from Calvin Trillin, all “stuff-stuff with heavy.” But here is the redemptive capability of my biggest fan not in the Loudon sense: Watching all that unabashed food porn, I realized that what had seemed so dated and heavy all those years ago would taste pretty splendiferous today. What I mostly learned, though, is that CNN has been spending so much time on the search for the plane it forgot to find any quality advertisers. How many Big Macs can one viewer suffer?