Post Category → onward and downward

Butz logic


And I’m gonna keep hammering who is really getting hurt as Republikan tax cuts for the rich savage SNAP: supermarkets and bodegas and farmers’ markets. There’s a reason Kroger and Walmart sales are way down — by design, those “dollars” can only be spent on food. And when you cut them, you silence the ka-ching. 

Everything but the canned peaches

I’ve probably posted about this before, but when I was a kid we would regularly go visit a relative in Phoenix who had survived the Depression but was so traumatized she kept huge garbage cans in her kitchen overflowing with staples, like boxes of cake mixes. I mean, she had a pretty luxe suburban house and her husband had a good job, but she was terrified they might go hungry again. So it’s kinda sad that my former consort and I now have a set of shelves over the refrigerator that we’ve been stocking for the last 6 1/2 years with backups of everything. We call it the Depression Cabinet, and we aren’t kidding. It was bad enough in Trump 1.0, when we were hoarding during the pandemic cuz even toilet paper was hard to come by. But now we’re stockpiling everything we can — olive oil, flour, hot sauces, tuna, beans, tomatoes, sugar, chocolate chips, cocoa, farro — and marking each package with the date we bought it and the price we paid. It’s bad and getting worse, but we are ready for 2020 times 2029. As someone far smarter than I just said, when you take a couple of parts out of a car, it doesn’t go slower. It falls apart.

Street cart or Trader Joe’s?

Sometimes I break away from BlueSky & venture out into the real world, which is even more unsettling. And how I wound up at the Guggenheim on the closing weekend of a disappointing show but still came home with some indelible images: Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian,” the banana duct-taped to the wall, and one young woman in a “Daddy’s Little Meatball” Epstein-eyebrow-raising crop top and another in a “Make Produce Organic Again” t-shirt. A) It is. B) And if it isn’t, it could be because the cost of certification puts the organic label out of reach. (The banana, BTW, has to be replaced on the regular, and not because it’s stolen like Cattelan’s Trump-prescient golden toilet was. Real food rots.) 

Some call it Donorrhea 

Somewhere there’s undoubtedly a Republikan plotting how to take credit for saving poor Americans from diarrhea lettuce by whacking SNAP. (If you can’t buy the fecal greens you don’t need health care, either.) But given how bare the toilet paper shelves have been at Holy Foods since the outbreak showed Project 2025 turned the CDC into an outhouse, you almost wonder if Big Biz would be diabolical enough to have greens and tissue producers colluding. 

(We went in search of an Aperol spritz after the Guggenheim and wound up at a sidewalk table on the Upper East Side across from a Taco Bell, where the log-in for free WiFi said “you’ll thank us later.” Yes. Everything is shitty right now.) 

A toast to 19 crimes for sure


Martha Stewart’s game-changing “Entertaining” was $50 when my co-workers on the NYT’s national desk pooled their pennies to buy it for me as a going-away gift when I quit to go to restaurant school in 1983. Today I spotted a copy at Home Goods for $39.99 — when inflation shoulda kept it up to $167. Maybe the wrong people go to jail for insider trading? 

Wine steaks

Former consort braved the newly reincarnated Absolute Bagels & bailed when he found 45 people in line, in the cold. One of our oldest friends, who retreated to the Bay Area long ago, always used to say: “The more New Yorkers get fucked, the more they like it.” Now with more Instagram…

And I was worried when I didn’t see a  South Asian pal for a few weeks who works in a swanky bakery known as an Instatrap in a tourist area. I thought they’d been deported. But. Nope. “My hours were cut way back. Business is dead.” How do you bankrupt casinos, anyway? 

And what’s to blame? “Tipped servers”

Everything seems terrible, but sometimes you read a mess of a story in Fox in Print (paywalled at WSJ) & you get a glimmer of hope. This was in a P1 piece struggling to explain how steakhouses are struggling to stay afloat with beef costs ballooning under the guy who won reelection promising to bring down egg prices. And these are restaurants charging $150 for a prime New York strip. Which costs $50 wholesale: “One error in the kitchen, and $50 ends up in the trash.” Overdone is unfixable; underdone & re-seared is gonna piss off someone deep-pocketed. Cuz the most essential ingredient in steak dinners is … a supremely skilled cook. The Latino ones are getting deported, and AI is not gonna replace ‘em. He’s running the food economy like it’s Trump Steaks.

And the restaurant is Greek-Mexican 

My former consort and I watched Eddington the other night, and while it’s a mess, it’s a mesmerizing mess. Especially as a reminder of just how crazy lockdown was early in #Trumpandemic: Masks made everyone nuts as they were trapped at home (while essential workers kept calm and carried on). Along with the uncertainty, everyone was also packing on the L.B.s from stress-eating and boredom and lack of exercise. Which is how I got sucked into baking weekly for a free-lunch program, as a way to scratch the baking itch but not wear the consequences. Every Thursday I would churn out at least two dozen cookies to bag up and seal with “Bakers Trust” labels. I swore I would never quit until I could find someone to replace me, but after five long years I had to acknowledge: Nothing is immune from the saddest COVID-in-America rule — what didn’t kill us made us meaner. 

Let ’em spurn halibut & Champagne vinaigrette

I was actually eating awesome kittybagged naan from the great-addition-to-our-neighborhood Rudraks while reading Fox in Print when I came to this line in the report on Bobby Junior traveling to Alaska to “bring his message of healthy food”: “One idea is letting people use food stamps to pay for gun shells and other hunting equipment.” And I literally had to stop chewing and just marvel: How far gone are we? But then I remembered it can always get worse in this last gasp of white supremacy. He could be prescribing gun shells as health care. Final solution, you could say. 

Brined ferret

Every weirdness is gone in 60 seconds, but the Ghouliani “crash” reminded me the fud life is truly stranger than bad fiction: Rudy’s second wife once interviewed me on the teevee and we talked kolaches. Even before he was sold as “America’s mayor.” And then their son went on to deliver Big Macs for photo stunts in the WH in Trump 1.0. We are living in a simulation…

Sometimes Assassin’s Handbook is just a cocktail 

We had quite a few great eavesdropping experiences on our little getaway to the city where the consortium began. One was overhearing a guy on his phone bitching that “they line up for groceries and then turn around and sell them.” Did no one tell him this is how end-stage capitalism is designed to work? SNAP enriches farmers and grocery stores. As lobbyists intended. 

Posole will set off TSA alarms, tho

 I was only half-joking when I said I hoped we didn’t have to walk home from LA after setting off on a trip to the Southwest around the date Project 2025 called for the felon in chief to declare martial law. Our trip back turned out to be almost that bad, though, and I’m just glad I had “Parable of the Sower” to distract me. Things could be worse than an eight-hour delay just 18 minutes from Newark — no one was eating bodies on the runway, after all. But I’m so old I remember every airline once would provide two meals and a snack on a nonstop from LA to NYC (or EWR). In the year of our hell 2025, United passed out one .75-ounce snack packet and a (nonalcoholic) drink and then, only after we had sat on the tarmac for two hours, a packet of Biscoffs. And the Allentown airport was clearly not prepared for all the diverted business: the vending machines didn’t work. Could have been worse, though: Even first-class passengers couldn’t get extra food or drinks cuz shareholders must drink blood cuz we are living in cataclysm capitalism. Trust me: It was not just air traffic controllers who needed trauma leave after that radar outage. “Doged” is the new “fucked.”

I saw Spitzer outside the produce show venue

High on my “hashtag know hope list” is the notion that enough serfs will finally realize it ain’t immigrants and melanin-superior people holding back everyone. It’s gazillionaires, who pay no taxes while feeding at the public trough. So I’m enjoying everyone making the yacht set nervous by suggesting we just do the obvious: Eat the super-rich. Although I know they will taste terrible, I also know we can both brine & season. (Pro tip: Chelsea Market has a very good knife sharpening expert on weekends. If you catch my drift. Hashtag “C U in the gulag.”)