Post Category → onward and downward

Once you’ve had black . . .

When I was a kid, almost the biggest treat at Thanksgiving was olives. Straight from the can. I still have an exploitable weakness for them, bizarre as they are in comparison to the kind sold from bacteria bars everywhere, because they are so junky (really, even Velveeta makes the best chile con queso). So I was actually looking forward to trying the new incarnation of California’s finest, proudly processed without artificial preservatives and water. The good news is that I can’t quote Biff Grimes’ immortal line “give me pesticides and flavor” with conviction, because they taste the same as they ever did. The bad news is that they have lost literally half their appeal. They are no longer shiny black but more matte (the polite way of saying shit) brown. And they certainly don’t gleam as tantalizingly when attached to fingertips. On pizza, they’ll look like mouse droppings. Even if they are labeled Colossal.

You rate it, you buy it

When I started writing for my very first newspaper, the Mingus Spirit in high school in a ghost town in Arizona, the idea of journalists ever going into the wine business would have seemed far less likely than aliens landing. And not just because wine back then meant Gallo, and Gallo was not a good name back then. So I was glad I was sitting down (at my computer) when I got the e-release on the WSJournal’s new enterprise. In some ways the Evil Ozzie has improved the paper, but this is a crossover into treacherous territory. If I had a larcenous soul, I’d be applying for a copy-editing job there, just for the inside information on the wine recommendations. Maybe it’s going to be a completely clean operation, but it’s one thing to have a lame wine column and another entirely to stock the shelves. Next, the health writers open an online drugstore.

But the Hanoi Hilton had no Food Network!

I guess the wingnuts are right. We are now living in a world where up is down and recession is prosperity. How else to explain the realities that the Thai prime minister was ordered to resign for having a cooking show and one candidate for the leader of the Land of the Free is appearing on a cooking show? Maybe he realizes his soulmate is going to fire the White House chef and he’ll need some yummo recipes. The ones his junkie wife passed off as her own. Shouldn’t a wannabe war president have bigger ribs to grill?

Shopping with one hand

Given that food has such a strong porn element, it’s probably not surprising that the Yellow Magazine has started a site with stories and recipes but mostly shopping — native titties are no longer enough. But what a site it is; the Williams-Sonoma catalog has more soul. I assume the recipes come from the purveyors, but there’s no indication of provenance. (Plus the links suck: I am dying to make the “Hamper of Parmigiano” appetizer but can’t connect.) It’s depressing, given how many of my most amazing eating experiences were courtesy of my tagging along with my consort on assignment way back when the bosses were tending the main store: the magazine. We ate in people’s homes; he always had interpreters who led us to the most authentic local foods. The last trip was to India, for caffeine, where we had one extraordinary encounter after another thanks to his fixer, Neha. But click the “explore world foods” button and all you get on the most amazing country, the one where you need all five senses and could use four more, is a bloodless recitation of non-food facts. To see that cornucopia reduced to a $75 basket of rice and sauces is beyond sad. But that’s just me. Anyone looking for tetilla will find plenty.

Spare us House & Home

The front-page news on New Orleans was encouraging, and I enjoyed the dig at the Scourge if not the sloppy copy-editing (poor boys? lower-case Creole?) But it still made me a little squeamish. You wouldn’t know from reading, but more than 1,800 people died from Katrina (actually, maybe many more). That seems a rather steep price to pay for a “culinary correction.” 

Meaty pasta casserole

Other funny things I’ve seen in “legitimate” media: “Homemade honey” served at a B&B. A $15 sauvignon blanc presented as a great value (and it’s not even imported). And the recipe prizewinner in Taste of Home’s “Mangia!” issue: an Italian quiche (not a frittata, but in a crust, with pepperoni). When they do the “Viola!” edition, I’m going to be looking for the French lasagne. 

Press 1 for heart disease

Funny how the Great Black Hope was so thoroughly lambasted by the wingnuts for suggesting a second language might actually be an asset in modern life. I wonder if the “talk English, damn it!” knuckle draggers are now going to boycott McDonald’s, given that a slick flier tucked into two of our newspapers had coupons in both Spanish and a form of English. It should be the end of America as we know it. But a country cowed by tomatoes will never give up its cheap beef, let alone 20 piezas of chicken “nuggets” por $3.49.

Springwater, now with more statins

This same agency, of course, will probably get right behind the insane recommendation to put kids on cholesterol drugs. Kids. Whose little livers have to process whatever is in those pills for decades. I know from my pathetic health-writing years that the best prescription for a long life is to choose the right parents. But cholesterol should be controllable with diet and exercise. I guess that’s just not as lucrative for Big Business as taking the whole family through McDonald’s and then handing out the daily dose before the human larvae sit down to a long night of the latest Grand Theft Auto. If the choice is between hell and reincarnation, I’m going where it’s nice and warm.

Private school’s out forever

One of the funniest (and not ha-ha) things I’ve heard recently was some talking head saying the economy is actually doing really well, it’s just that journalists are getting laid off and crying the blues. Which makes me think maybe that should have started happening in 2004 — we wouldn’t be saddled with a reprise of the worst administration ever if Americans had been clearly informed that the village idiot they wanted to have a drink with had driven the country into a ditch. On the bright side, though, I am noticing this really interesting break between the bloviators who get so much airtime and the serfs condemned to cover them. For every George Will agreeing with Phil Gramm that this is a nation of crybabies you get a reporter recounting living on a food stamp budget, driving less or otherwise cutting back. And while I am no fan of the Svelte Pantload’s desperately unfunny navel-gazing, his piece on what famous chefs could cook for dinner for $10 put the lie to the notion that this is a recession in mind only. The image of Tom Colicchio having to put back a zucchini because it breaks the bank? Priceless.

Switchgrass forever

Only because the soulless Chimp has managed to cow the media into never showing the human horrors of his Operation Endless War, almost the most depressing image I spotted over Memorial Day weekend was the photo op of him promoting American exports. The sad little piles in front of his lectern made his 23 percent approval rating look huge — the only thing grimmer is that rusting old bridge you see from Amtrak with the sorry sign reading: “Trenton makes, the world takes.” If cabbages are our great green hope, we’re down to some seriously slim pickings from the fruited plains.

Licensed to pick

No wonder schools in America now teach nothing but how to pass a test, though. If kids learned math, they would have to be diapered from cradle to Reaganhood, because the future really is the shitz. Just think about the fact that Burger Death recently settled its dispute with farmworkers in Florida by grudgingly agreeing to an increase of a penny a pound for tomatoes picked. One penny. As in: The coin most elitists think should simply be discontinued. And the other half-cent-a-pound goes to the negotiators. Somehow this makes it less surprising to read that fast food chains are struggling to hold the line on dollar meals when the price of cheese is soaring (and — face it — what lies down with Whoppers is about 6,000 degrees removed from real Cheddar). The one constant is beef, cheap as shit (excuse me: as E. coli). And what’s even more wrong with this picture? Already immigrants have solid reasons to be very, very scared. But if they ever stop and think about why they are being rounded up from slaughterhouses so aggressively lately, they, too, will need to be diapered. Halliburton can get away with building unusable detention camps in Iraq. Here they might actually work.

Georgian madness

Speaking of flacks, I kept hearing that stupid country song, “You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille,” while scanning the e-release on how the snootiest of British food purveyors is finally opening an outlet in the United Colonies. Somehow mustard priced like caviar sounds like “with four hungry babies and the crops in the field.” Already I’ve found Zabar’s has replaced the wondrous fresh lasagne sheets from Italy with clunky, gummy stuff made closer to home, apparently for price reasons. Even for those of us fortunate to love subways more than gas fumes, this is now officially a populace under de facto rationing. And a $24 jar of jam sounds as reasonable as a $175 burger.

More, please, Orwell

I’m sure I’ve said this before, but the one mission actually accomplished in the last seven years has been the vanquishing of the English language. I actually heard a newscaster referring to “food insecurity” among the cyclone and earthquake victims. When raging hunger escalates to rampant starvation, will it be “calorie deprivation” on the BBC?

Won’t we always have canned?

At the same time your tax dollars are being squandered on paranoid silliness, the entire salmon season is collapsing on the West Coast thanks partly to federal fuckups in managing the Sacramento River. (Global warming is also to blame, but then Al Gore is fat.) What’s almost more depressing is how the disaster is being reported everywhere, as just another price-of-gas story. All I seem to read or hear is that “salmon is going to cost you more this summer” rather than: “Holy shit, humans are going extinct if this keeps up.” And ethanolized Americans have very little to complain about compared with the rest of the world, which is running out of rice and wheat and, in Haiti, dirt to bake into dinner. (Apparently the chilling term for hunger pain there is “grangou klowox” — eating bleach.) But we’re part of the problem with a society built on at least a car per person — and as a friend on that other coast advised me after my last osteo-incident, things are never so bad that they can’t get worse. Into every calamity a little silliness must fall, though. I also see the potato has been declared “the food of the future” in this, “the year of the potato.” Wasn’t that the original Irish Miracle?