Anyone still baffled by how we wound up with that buffoon jackassing across Africa has only to consider the coverage of the largest meat recall in American history. The message most clearly disseminated to a “Top Chef”-stupefied audience is that it’s all about animal abuse, that the bleeding hearts won. The reality that waterboarding was needed to force seriously sick cattle onto their feet to pass “inspection” is consistently glossed over, especially with the reassuring line in every story that “no illnesses have been reported” by consumers. As if mad cow disease sets in as fast as the salmonella squitters. But rest easy: Most of the beef has already been eaten. I have to laugh every time I hear a story on the Olympics boasting that we’re going to keep our prize athletes healthy — we’re going to ship American food to China. Yeah, right. I don’t know about the USDA, but the FDA’s budget for a full year is less than we squander in Iraq in one week. Good thing we got the government off the industry’s back. . . .
Post Category → big food
All-natural Froot Loops
For reasons I don’t want to get into (except to say I missed Tamarack Hollow on Union Square on a rainy day), I had to patronize Holy Foods on deadline and noticed something interesting. Michael Pollan’s great advice about shopping the perimeter is not so valid in this supermarket-as-healthy-theme-park. Sure, the produce section is outlying, but much of what otherwise lines the walls leans toward the industrial. Half the meat and fish cases are tricked up, the dairy aisle is loaded with ready-to-eat stuff, another wall is all frozen meats with hefty ingredient lists on nearly every package. I guess it’s not so surprising given how health food stores long ago gave up the bulk notion in favor of organic Stouffer’s and whole-grain Cheetos. Who would ever have suspected the revolution would be processed?
FDA to the China courtesy phone
As the oceans die and fish prices go up, I’m noticing a fascinating phenomenon in environmental reporting on the food supply. Call it “look down in comfort.” The NYT story on how Jamaicans are poisoning their main river to catch shrimp and fish faster was certainly disturbing, but it had that ignoble-savages tone to it, that “see, they’re so shortsighted they don’t even understand the evil they do and it certainly doesn’t affect us.” Meanwhile, who knows how many millions of gallons of antibacterial crap are flushed into the water supply in this country every day. Somehow I don’t think a little Airborne is going to save us, either. Especially when you hear that Topps, the beef producer shut down after lethal shit was found in the meat, is now selling off the contents of its many freezers for pennies a pound. Somewhere a Bubba is going to ingest a burger and the feces it rode in on and never know what greed hit him. All while the high-minded journalists are worrying about what’s rotten in the third world. . . .
Whoppers of mass destruction
Mississippi is taking its share of crap for a proposed law prohibiting restaurants from serving the obese, but I kinda like the whole idea. By the same logic, drugstores should have to cut off whatever pharmacopia gets Mrs. War Criminal through the night. And Congresscritters should be banned from cutting any more checks to military contractors until they slim down big time. Supersizing them is what got us into this 100-year siege.
Out of the shoe box
Judging by how Earl Butz was verbally ushered off this mortal coil, I’m starting to wonder if the Chimp’s obit will obsess on phrases like “put food on your family” rather than any actual evil he ever did. I was living in Louisville when the agriculture secretary got outed for making his crude joke, and it really resonated there because the city was under court order to integrate its schools and race was, to put it mildly, a touchy issue (the newspapers, whose editorial pages supported busing, got bomb threats). Even so, all you have to do these days is amble through a mall — or get squished in an airplane seat — to see that words could never hurt as badly as misguided policy. As Greg Critser documented so damningly in “Fat Land,” good ol’ Earl’s legacy is high-fructose corn syrup and other cheap happy meal excess. With luck he has gone off to a very warm place to shit.
And it comes in provorella
Artisanal is a word now so thoroughly debased that an industrial cheesemaker is selling shredded stuff under that label. So you would think a flack would know how to spell it when naming a restaurant she also described as one of Manhattan’s “most coveted.” Once again, I have to wonder if the Human Scratch N Match is moonlighting.
The Whopper phone is ringing
If I were the cynical type, I would wonder about the latest flavor of an overly packaged breath mint. In “Juno,” the thoroughly repugnant accidental sperm donor is addicted to the orange, and now the beneficiary of the product placement comes in “Cherry Passion.” This is all teenage virgins need when the only government-sanctioned birth control is denial. Next thing you know SunnyD will be advertising on Clearblue Easy.
Paving the road to Wellville
I can’t imagine surimi is any better for you than the steak of the sea even with mercury in it. But I’m no expert, and the one Time magazine found said it best: Readers are done no favors by single-food scare stories. On a petty level, I did wonder why the store next door was, yet again, given a pass in the testing; it only is about the biggest seafood retailer in town. And it should not have taken a listen to Brian Lehrer to hear from a real authority how the dangerous stuff actually gets into the tuna to begin with. Phyllis Richman predicted many years ago that sushi would become the new hamburger. If we can swallow the reality of mad cow and E. coli, what’s a little industrial spillover? We do like to leave the lights on and the microwaves humming in this country. . . .
In other nutrition nuttiness, let the “consumer advocates” rail against NYC’s new rule requiring certain restaurants to post calorie counts. As I must have said a thousand times, I have not eaten a Mrs. Fields cookie since learning back in the last century that each one contains about 260 calories. And I was, back then, a scholar when it came to the back of Fritos bags. So all those defenders of the public’s right to be stupid, the ones who say anyone can easily discern the difference between a bucket of chicken wings and a salad, should be sentenced to Southwest-salad-with-crispy-chicken hell. With Big Gulp cholesterol drugs for the ride.
By contrast, I was happily surprised by the junk brochure from the College of Physicians of Philadelphia that my consort dropped off on my desk the other day. A promotion for a health web site, it included not just a notice of a “dark chocolate and red wine reception” but a photo of and recipe for a salad made with warm goat cheese in a panko crust. We’ve come a long way from the “pasta makes you fat” attitude toward healthful eating. I’m not sure, though, I would want a tour of the Mutter Museum after that reception. Elephantiasis is a terrible petit four.
H/T pack journamalism
Wanna know why the Chimp will still be eating his toddler fare at a fancy table for the whole next year? The gutless wonders in Congress are busy aping Marie Antoinette instead of confronting the I word. Nancy Pelosi’s only accomplishment so far is getting the House cafeteria to upgrade the food, even as she sends the clear message that we peons should eat farm-subsidized Twinkies. It’s bad enough our employees have better health care. Now they get the green eggs while we get the salmonella.
But the Butterfingers are vitamin-enriched
Judging by a survey that turned up in my email one morning, Michael Pollan has his work cut out for him in trying to persuade Americans to eat primarily from the perimeter of supermarkets. Of the top 10 sales categories, only milk, bread and eggs are showcased in the healthful real estate. Cereal, cookies, canned soup, chocolate candy and potato chips were the other “foods” on the list, and I just read that and heard Fat Albert hey-hey-heying his way toward the deli. Why do I suspect cloned meat is the least of the threats to the food chain?
Choking on chicken
A more clever writer than I had the perfect take on DI/DO’s bizarre take on food allergies in children: Someone looks to have been poached in the crazy sauce. And if Mr. Sneaky Food gets away with saying worse than that on national teevee, why are we all so hesitant to call a pignoli a nut?
I had actually dropped $6.95 on a copy of Harper’s in December after spotting a cover line on how hyped that “trend” is, and I had actually thought the debate was closed after reading that taut takedown. Fear is America’s most lucrative industry anymore, though, so it’s no wonder the next allergy item I read was on Slashfood: Some delis in Wegmans supermarkets will no longer allow unaccompanied minors to order food for fear of the big A. As if it wasn’t bad enough that you can no longer get a peanut on a plane and have to suffer pretzels that would choke a Chimp. Forget the nanny state. The crazy mommy state is going to be the death of all of us.
Shades of McStarbucks
Speaking of misguided markets, the newish Holy Foods on the Bowery is easily a lower level of hell. I wandered in to warm up on a brutally cold afternoon and wound up almost weeping trying to get out — the place is ridiculously huge and Pan’s labyrinthine in its layout. Not to mention scarily empty. I had stupidly thought I might be able to at least pick up some fish for dinner while thawing my digits, but the surprisingly understocked case was looking rather ready to meet its mortician (marked-down Dungeness crab in particular struck me as rent-a-meal). Clearly, what this city needs most is the neighborhood-wrecking fifth St. Peter’s going in near me.
No wonder pizza is BFD
Before Pakistan, my consort had been starting every day for the last two weeks railing that there was no news on the front page of the NYTimes — it was all puff pieces and thumbsuckers; one morning the “lead” was actually a picture story that could have run in July, or next February. Given how craven the paper has gotten in pandering to advertisers, maybe it was all a ploy to get readers to turn to the back page of every section. That’s where I learned about a “100 percent juice blend” being marketed to “help nourish your brain.” And if you think flavored sugar water is going to keep Alzheimer’s at bay, you might enjoy Sunday Styles. Whose back page carried a full-page ad informing the gullible that Diet Crap has been pumped up with vitamins and minerals. To paraphrase a British tab’s headline after the Chimp was selected a second time: How can 300 million Americans be so stupid?
99-cent fossils
As I always say, my big fear is reincarnation, but lately I’m starting to hope I might come back in a few hundred millennia as an archaeologist in a whole new species. Imagine the wonder-working wisdom to be gained while deciphering cyber-hieroglyphics and realizing that a world tilting off its axis from too many humans needing too many resources actually chose to fuel its cars rather than feed its population (or even expand mass transit). Every day there’s another horror story about ethanol eating up all the grain crops while rice prices are shooting up. Tax cuts were even approved recently for the ethanol eco-disaster. Eat your heart out, Marie Antoinette. People today are too stupid to realize there will soon be no brioche no matter how far they drive.
And, while I have my Mormon underwear on, I also have to sermonize about the chubby kid I saw eating cheese fries with ketchup on the subway the other night. I watched him put garbage in his mouth for several stops and thought: If he had any idea how stupid that was, he would have ordered a cheeseburger instead — and schools would be teaching basic nutrition again. But then I remembered there is no profit in that — an educated consumer is the biggest offense to Big Food. Snapple is juice, no? And Twinkies are now being promoted as ideal eating in the car. . . .
But I saw it in the litter box underliner. . .
Another 400-or-so days of government by Big Business and we won’t have to worry about drowning in sea water in landlocked Omaha — food poisoning may do us all in. The dutiful stenographers in the press have just dutifully disclosed that the FDA has gotten China to agree to “eventually” allow U.S. inspectors in its food factories. Right. That gutted agency can’t even keep shit out of the spinach here in the homeland, and it’s going to stop the flood of fish farmed in sewage? Anyone have a bridge to the 21st century left to sell?