Post Category → petrified newsstand

Also, too: Dirty-water fowl

File under Reading the Slingers: At least now I see why so many of those crap food chains have been expanding into supermarkets — better to pour your own pancake syrup, or nuke your own frozen lasagne, than risk pissiness and germs from the uninsured help. Also, too, global warming must officially be here if Dunkin’ Donuts is touting 99-cent iced tea on the cusp of Thanksgiving. And, as always, the most entertaining part of going through the Saturday WSJournal is thinking someone assumed readers being sold $500 blouses might be interested in a dollar off on Grey Poupon.

No reservations for Ai Weiwei

As is probably obvious from my lack of income-producing work posted over to my rarely updated Stories page, I spend way too much time on the Twitter. But not all of those hours are squandered simply trying to point out that someone (many people) could be wrong on the internets. The food links from followers way outside the comfort zone are addictive. As with this photo of exhausted Egyptian women packing lupini beans — in a glossy magazine, they’d be shiny happy people, and right next to an ad suggesting “Visit Cairo,” with no hint that the pork served in hotels comes from pigs fattened on street garbage. Cover line, of course, would be “107 hot new falafel chefs.”

“Chilled soup of the day: gazpacho or tomato”

Not to pick on that one paper too much. We also get the other, self-branded hometown paper on Sundays only, and one of our penalties is USA Weekend, which has decided it’s 1988 all over again on its food page. Not only are the recipes all low-fat this and reduced-sodium that (and without even the payback of any craptastic processed ads), they also seem divorced from how real America eats. At the most glorious time of year for produce, when the hardest part of shopping is resisting buying every piece of bursting-ripe perfection you see, why run a recipe for macaroni and cheese made with frozen squash purée? Yeah. Turn on your oven on one of these 90-degree days, coat your baking dish with cooking spray and open up a box of Birds Eye. I’m a big believer in recycling, but not of tired ideas. At the very least the damn thing could have been freshened up with kale — before that frenzy passes its sell-by date.

Bacon schnecken

I’m half-relieved the “fancy” food show will be in DC this summer, for the first time in my memory, not least because I can legitimately avoid that exercise in temporary bingeing. A bigger reason is that it points up how the center of power is shifting in this country as the banksters reveal themselves to be not masters of the universe but greedy fucking cretins. Both buyers for “gourmet” shops and vendors will be flocking to a different city, eating in different restaurants, now that the money’s moved. So it was good timing for Time magazine to finally do the elephant-in-the-media feature: Why is that backwater now booming? And of course it had to take an ideological bent. Much was written about “government contractors.” But the word lobbyist was never mentioned. You’d think they never bought a Congressperson (dinner).

Lipstick on a diaper baby

Meanwhile, major “news” outlets continue to print “be afraid, be very afraid” stories about all the germs on supermarket shopping carts. Without ever noting what remain the most bacteria-loaded dangers outside the toilets in the store: dollar bills — from the bums’ poop-encrusted bums to your hands, with many unwashed fingers in between. As I will note yet again, they don’t call it filthy lucre for nothing.

@starsbegone

And while I’m increasingly skeptical of the one respectable Murdoch outlet in the world, I did like the front-page story on how adult children of McDonald’s franchisees are pushing for lucrative changes, like staying open later, accepting credit cards, offering free WiFi. Talk about attracting a new generation by listening to that same generation. Imagine if newspapers had the same idea. Instead, they make me think of the Henry Ford quote that’s been bouncing around the Twitter lately: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” And even that vision is not as limited as paywalls around soufflé recipes.

“Pimples happen”

More and more I feel as if I get up on Sunday to find myself back in the late Eighties/early Nineties. A certain slinger just ran a recipe calling for skinless chicken breasts, nonfat milk, low-sodium chicken broth and phyllo dough rather than pie crust. And called it “healthier pot pie” at 615 calories a serving. Trust me: No one who wants to eat a potpie is going to invest time in it rather than nuking a Swanson’s. And anyone who might would just say the hell with it on breaking through toasted toilet tissue to get to the glop within.

Loose meat and Gatorade

Very glad I took my lazy time processing my thoughts on the war story of the “veteran” vegetarian (“nearly lifelong” wouldn’t sound as ruff-and-tuff a struggle at 30ish, I guess). So many other blogs/sites/commenters have laid into the parochialism, condescension and general cluelessness on full display under the most idiotic graphic. What I’m savoring is how it took a silly food story to expose just how under-qualified Dash, Son of Pinch really is for that huge job in an age when no one else invests in standard coverage of “real America.” Way back when, I learned there’s a reason Madame X was hesitant to fall for pitches from correspondents aside from Johnny Rotten: Very few who had not invested the time and forkwork in developing expertise off the “serious news” beat could deliver. Lots of us do it, but food writing is not women’s work. Some heavy lifting is required — if you don’t know it all, you have to find it out.* Over to the national desk they’re probably fine with hiring stringers and throwing emergency ermine over the emperor’s spawn.* But eatin’ and drinkin’ and watching fud teevee is not much to draw on when you get a tossed-off salad of under-reporting and over-padding. You don’t have time to see all the odes to KCMO as the next city destined to conquer stockyard palates. So you go to press with the embarrassment you have, not the one you wish you could kill.

KCMO had some crazy little men, too

And not to get too bogged down in the race to the bottom at a place where I was glad to have worked twice (seeing sausage made does give you insight), but I almost wonder if Dash wasn’t just providing cover for the public editor’s WTF. His smashed beans and lard definition were forgotten once the ugly truth was revealed: Reporters no longer put the truth first. The best reaction I’ve seen so far reaches farther back in time than I understood, since I trace the rot to the Reagan years (“first they came for the air traffic controllers and we said nothing”). That was back when Pinch padded the newsroom in stocking feet, treating us as if we were serfs hunched over keyboards in his den. I know I’ve recounted this many times, but one of the tipping points that tilted me out of that newsroom and into restaurant school* was having an editor storm the desk on deadline and bellow: “We can’t run this. It makes Washington sound like Calcutta.” Up until that very late night, I had always believed journalists operated without considering fear or favor. But if a story about soft-hearted Capitol Hill staffers passing out sandwiches to the homeless in the nation’s seat of power was so dangerous, what else had to be skewed? Whitewater/Coke Can/Yellowcake, here we come . . .

Only the little people test recipes

One of the many reasons I’ve surrendered my life to the Twitter is that it can be so useful for recommendations. When I was looking for a liquid option near Grand Central to meet a friend waitin’ on a train, I was happy to see one suggestion twice: the lobby bar at the Roosevelt Hotel, which was touted as right out of “Mad Men.” The bad news: It was full of lumbering ad-duped heartlanders because it was Friday night. The good news: It was straight out of “Mad Men” — we two women were ignored after ordering our first glasses of wine and actually had to flag down the manager to acquire our seconds. At least we didn’t have to report when our last periods were to be considered for secretarial jobs . . .

They eat horses in Siena?

And I always hate getting suckered into manufactured debates, but I have to say the latest “best food cities” poll was absolutely Maroonish. Florence has its charms, but fud ain’t one of them. Even the great central market is more Faneuil Hall than real Italy these days. And don’t get me started on Rome. You can eat well there, but only if you are very, very selective. As always, absence says more than top ratings. Where were the votes for Torino? To quote friends, the Piemontese make the Tuscans look like peasants. But how would you know that sitting in your Barcalounger reading the travel glossies?