Post Category → onward and downward

F for Feral


Over to the happy place, I keep noting that we had the most American experience ever on our last foray to Philadelphia. We were in the Italian Market and stepped into the crosswalk and a Lexus wasn’t going to stop. My former consort yelled, “Don’t pedestrians have the right of way?” and of course the driver was a jowly white guy who yelled back: “You fucking idiots — If hit you, you get hurt and I don’t.” More proof since Covid that what didn’t kill us made us meaner. But then we walked on, and he was trapped in traffic, inching along, as we looked back and laughed. 

Mayo & TP in same aisle in hypermarket


And I’m certain I’ve ranted about this before, on this website started a year after the Bushwhacking brought us the TSA and public groping for anyone who’s ever had a hip replacement, but one of the most depressing things about “homeland security” “keeping us safe” is what it’s done to artisanal food tourism. You’re walking through a market in Montreal (or Torino or CDMX) and you now just skip the aisles with any bottled products cuz you can’t bring ‘em home if they’re more than half a cup unless you check your bag for $35 or more. So many tastes perdu, so many small entrepreneurs screwed. The Big Food terrorists really did win. 

Turmeric shower

When my no-longer-consort made a sweet little video about my baking 150 different cookie recipes over the last three years for a free-lunch program, he wanted to avoid the political angle: All rot leads to Reagan. So it was rather amusing when he just reminded me of one reason I walked away from the NYT the first time. One night a higher-up stormed over to the national desk to object to a story on Capitol Hill staffers passing out sandwiches after hours to newly unhoused people. “We can’t run this — it makes Washington sound like Calcutta!” Forty+ years on, and here we are… 

Hashtag Eat the Rich

One of my regular updates over to Twitter Dot Com is “‘I’m gonna’ is not much of a plan.” But one of my “I’m gonnas” is to eventually write seriously about all the lessons this atheist has absorbed baking over the last three years for the weekly free-lunch program at a neighborhood church. I got sucked in during semi-lockdown, when everyone wanted to bake but no one wanted to put on the LBs; giving away the sugar-and-butter results was one way to scratch the oven itch. And I almost bailed after my third week when a neighbor/friend told me she used to volunteer in that “soup kitchen” — 30 years ago. The “food insecurity” problem seemed intractable. But I forged on, baking two recipes a week, one I knew would work and another new to me so I could keep learning. And then the other month the church gave a party for the program’s 40th anniversary. Which led me to do the math and conclude, yet again, that all rot leads to Reagan. So many food giveaway programs are marking the same milestone. Before that dog-whistling hater of the poors came into power, everyday people could get by without lining up around the block for a little kindness from strangers. 

A quince a day…

Lately I’ve been starting way too many Tweets with “So old I…” as history just keeps echoing, repeating and sequeling. But it was still both surprising and sad to see the latest news on killer cantaloupes. Salmonella, again, 32 long years after I had the great honor of a cartoon by the awesome Seymour Chwast accompanying my little rant about eating local. Clearly, no one listened. It’s cranberry season, FFS. And maybe one day we can have an honest talk about working conditions in the fields warm enough to grow and harvest melons?

Slow harvesting

Just hit me that 2023 should be a bigger year. I dropped out of college in 1973, quit the NYT (the first time) in 1983 to go to restaurant school, spent 1993 fighting with a publisher over an ill-fated cook/photobook and hit my Gastropoda stride in 2003. (2013? Twittered away…) 

Halloween senza white sheets, too

So the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is reduced to slightly less than zero because the con man in chief bungled the #trumpandemic response. Wait till it sinks in that there will be no Thanksgiving dinners this year, either — all these months on, it is still not safe to gather around a table cuz you can’t eat or drink while wearing a mask. Get ready for sheet pan turkey and trimmings. And sadness. Whatever you do, don’t think about Christmas…