The things you learn when you get sucked into reading protracted attempts to make press releases look like more than press releases puffed out to fill 20 inches: Mayonnaise is a billion-dollar-a-year market. Mayonnaise, I said. I know Hellmann’s is now priced like beluga, but that’s still an awful lot of the white stuff. The mystery is why such marketing is necessary when any sentient being knows a life without mayonnaise is not worth avocados. So I can’t really blame a “celebrity chef” who failed in NYC for signing on to whip up barbecue chicken nuggets while “bantering.” If promoters of an essential nutrient think it needs to spend $30 million a year on promotion, why not take the money and shill?
Post Category → petrified newsstand
Kale, addling
And I know I’m heartless, but I did laugh at the “no one coulda predicted” tone of the story on the murder in the Vermont food co-op. Haven’t we all been fed no end of tales from the very same publication on how the Park Slope co-op is fascist and full of infighting and right on the edge? (I still remember the JGold Wannabe telling me just the mention of the place made his fingers twitch.) Plus those kinds of shared labor tend to be fraught with scorekeeping of the most dangerous kind. With the post office being pushed out of business despite the Constitution mandating its existence, maybe the new term will be “going co-op.”
No contagion cuisine?
I’m pretty certain I will never write for one revamped food magazine, so I can laugh at the publisher for saying food 10 years ago was “stodgy, it was epicurean, it was about being a gourmet cook in your own home.” And today? Fashion designers are opening restaurants! Hate to break it to her, but I believe I saw Armani had restaurants in both Paris and Milan a decade ago. Plus how can stodgy and epicurean be either the same or disses? Someone please commission a poorly conceived and stupidly executed takedown of fresh peaches for not being uniform Fruit of the Loom.
Vegan cane sugar
Zabar’s “lobster salad” is becoming the $Palin of food stories. The hometown paper is keeping the fart-reported-as-typhoon alive, but you’d think everyone there would be a bit embarrassed to always be regurgitating others’ reporting. In the old days it would have been the jumping-off point for an investigation into what else might be passed off as luxury fare in tight times. Maybe some enterprising flack should fire off a release — instead of the most expensive omelet, the most un-short-ribbed burger?
Oh, that old Lancet study on obesity?
Worse was the big story on how the storm hit farmers and farmers’ markets. Apparently Greenmarkets are a weekend indulgence for most New Yorkers, a daily thing only for restaurant chefs. And apparently there’s only one to worry about, the main one at Union Square. And there are no copy editors checking facts — not every farmer of note either can be or chooses to be at Designer-Dog Central. The guys (and women) who truck to the satellite markets stand to get killed. And there are 48 of those markets. Even some near where the new elite retreat, in Brooklyn.
Isn’t it Rich?
One great thing about the stop-time, eerily silent weekend in Manhattan was that we woke up on Sunday morning to neither of our usual hometown papers on our doormat. No deliveries were getting through; even Famous Famiglia was closed for the first time I’ve ever noticed. Which meant I was spared having to see whatever blithering Panchito engaged in and could instead just watch him get eviscerated all over Twitter and the blogs all day. Happiest part: Finally, after nearly 10 years of me getting ragged on for using that nickname, people have caught on to the idiot who was responsible for bestowing it. Next hurricane, though, should start on Friday so we’re spared 6,000 ways to eat your lobster. How does that fit with sustainable/local/who-will-feed-the-poors?
Now, beef irradiated naturally
I slogged all the way to the last word of Time’s cover story on the end of ocean fish and just Tweeted, then sort of gave up. But my first reaction keeps coming back to me. Why would that huge feature (by weekly magazine standards) miss the whale in the newsroom? It kept hammering away at the idea that fish farming is essential because the global population keeps growing. And it never once paused to say, “Hey, you know what? Fewer mouths to feed would solve this problem before nature has to bring out even bigger guns than earthquakes and tsunamis.” On a planet running out of water, multiplying the loaves and barramundi is not enough. But I’m just being silly. I’m sure it won’t be long till they run a huge cover story on advances in in vitro.
No canned peas + butter recipes
In other petrified newsstand news, I’m seeing some buzz over Red Bull starting a magazine. My consort trash-picked an issue from the recycling bins in our back hall, though, and you would need a case of the stuff to get through it. . .
Consort doesn’t bake brined fish, thanks
Which smarter-than-thou food magazine is sending out subscription entreaties that could veer vertiginously close to the old Publishers Clearing House? I’m not talking the old nag that has poor saps somewhere in Middle America cheerily calling me twice a week to check up on my subscription, the one I let lapse many years ago. Nah, this is the one that seems to be stealing a page out of the Taste of Home playbook, with its “no distracting ads” and “free gifts.” “Rate adjustment alert” is just another way of saying “bend over — you’re still paying too much.”
Vincent Price had a cookbook
Almost as depressing was hearing that a once-unique food magazine has decided to drive down a very potholed highway. Do the car-free Amish really care about eating crab cakes by the freeway lights?
Dehydrated pintos
The onetime home of the Human Scratch N Match also ran a silly story, on produce prices rising, that actually quoted a woman stupidly musing that it might be “the economy” to blame. Not bad weather and diminishing water, of course. As I noted over on the Twitter, anyone complaining about the price of tomatoes in March is cooking it wrong — this is the season of “better dead than red” in the produce aisle, at least if you want flavor and fair prices. But then there was the way a protest at the newish Upscale Aldi’s was covered elsewhere. Most shoppers interviewed thought it was all about those softballs next to the flown-in blueberries, not the fact that so much processed crap is cheap because tomato pickers in Florida are paid slave wages. Really, if a chain can’t Shetland-pony up a penny a pound more, you really have to wonder how exploited its grape harvesters are. Two bucks might be more than a price.
Mayonnaise sandwiches, hold the onion
Apparently I don’t get out much, because I’m way too obsessed with print fud. So I noticed the erstwhile Mr. Cutlets’ ode to margarine in Time magazine omitted a key detail. Sure, the other yellow stuff is still hugely popular even after the trans fat hysteria. And you know why? The shit is a lot cheaper than real butter. Five bucks for Land O’Lakes or $2-something for suspending disbelief? Your food stamps decide. . . But at least no Spam was harmed in the nostalgia fest.
“First you make a rue”
I’m reTweeting myself to say magazines should be ticketed for running recipes calling for blueberries in February. Especially when they’re for “chilled gazpacho” while the snow’s piled high from Minneapolis to Manhattan.
Serve with “lite” sour cream, of course
Over at the Twitter, I got some “ra-mens” for expressing my wish for a Super Bowl shelter where I could hide from any mention of that idiotic spectacle. But if I had one, I would have missed the most astonishing concoction for an idiotic spectacle known for astonishing concoctions: “Oreo truffle footballs.” And even the Semi-Ho could not have dreamed this one up — smashed Oreos mixed with cream cheese, covered in chocolate melted with Crisco(!) and decorated with Betty Crocker icing. Forget the fact that even Deen’s gorge would seize up at that mess. USA Weekend was so skinny from so few ads that the actual food story and other recipes only appeared online. Why should Big Food spend when it gets all that brand recognition for free?
Nog abuse, continued
No one is more aware than I am that 90 percent of food-world success is just pretending to show up. But I still find my jaw dropping every time I read anything about “Hungry Girl.” For the longest time I didn’t believe this corporate tool actually existed. Now it doesn’t matter. Print-age media has been so thoroughly co-opted that the original hometown daily can run a huge recipe piece without ever stopping to think how many ads it lost by giving away all those brand names for free. I’m so old I remember writing for a newspaper editor in Norfolk, Virginia, who would not even allow us to use “Tabasco” in a recipe; it had to be “hot red pepper sauce,” so we didn’t appear to be shilling. But I guess there probably is no substitute for Jell-O Sugar-Free Fat-Free Vanilla Instant Pudding Mix. And thank the food gods for that.