Post Category → petrified newsstand

Lonely Margaret still yearns for Peter

I also was amazed by the WSJ’s story on canning. Isn’t that the house organ of the bailout bonus babies? Do Goldman partners in crime really need to worry about how (in the immortal words of a sly headline writer in my distant past) “you can put cucumbers up yourself”? I’m less worried about swine flu than about the looming epidemic of botulism as Ball newbies go wild with this silly trend. I mean, really. Tomatoes were a disaster this year. Peaches were problematic. Move on — it’s squash and apple season. And if frugality is really the point, newspaper editors need to take a stroll through the Food Shitty in my neighborhood. A 28-ounce can of Red Pack tomatoes was a buck fifty the last time I bought them. The jar alone would consume three-quarters of that price. I can’t wait until they start advising us on how to make our own Joy. . .

For once, don’t blame Rachael Deen

And now we come to the end. Gourmet. I don’t hold a grudge because I only ever managed to sell two teeny pieces, one that was rewritten within a word of its death and another that never ran. Food magazines R not me, obviously. I have no interest in dancing on the shallow grave; any magazine that dies hurts the whole hurting business these days. But I was sort of amazed that no one ever mentioned the title on Twitter until it got whacked, and then suddenly no one could talk of anything else. It says it all that the devoted reader quoted in the NYTimes was so devastated that she was actually going to cook from it for the first time (reminds me of a sin eater). Nearly a million subscribers are not to be underestimated, but no magazine can live by readers alone. Which has been one of my big beefs for years. No one gives a frying fuck about the reader anymore. It’s all about pandering to the advertisers. Campbell’s apparently rules. At the same time, could you imagine the hysteria if Condé Nast had chosen to throw Bon Appétit off the bus in this Bushwhacked economy? The shrieks of elitism would have been more deafening than the gnashing of clueless teeth.

But mostly I am just gobsmacked that so many acres of type have been generated yet so few commentators seem to even realize the online extension of Gourmet was not Epicurious but .com. Everyone blames the internets, but apparently no one ever checks the internets. Story after rant after essay was published all over the series of tubes, and only a couple noted that the magazine had an online presence so strong readers like me let their print subscriptions lapse. NPR actually broadcast an elegy (predictably dull) by someone who said her son gets all his food information online. Well, why the hell wasn’t he reading Barry Estabrook and Francis Lam and Bill Sertl and all the others generating seriously good copy on a regular basis after Ruth seized the reins? The site could have been a contender, a natural extension of the brand from print to cyberspace without any sermonizing by Mr. Cook’s, who really should have been op-eding on how he said the hell with GE Profile kitchens and went straight to readers, rather than trashing the usual e-suspects. Now it’s just fading away.

Two other thoughts: Eater’s offer to run commissioned but unpublished Gourmet pieces for a hundred bucks was crude but at least laid bare how grim things are in the eat-and-type business. That wouldn’t even buy a lede just a week ago, and today contributors would bend over to get that online — a pittance is the new fee. And I did not manage to sell this take anywhere, but all the craziness was really deja vu all over again for me. Exactly 25 years ago, Cuisine magazine was whacked, after exactly a year of the smartest issues under the editorship of Carey Winfrey. I keep all 12 in a binder in my office and drag them out periodically not just in homage but, I’ll admit it, for ideas. Cook’s came back from the dead. Why not Cuisine?

Instant Starbucks gonna get you

Time magazine increasingly seems to be going for the Onion, and not just with that subscription-canceling cover celebrating the Vick’s VapoRub tears of a rodeo clown. The new issue has an ad that outdoes the most out-there parody, with “smart choices” labels on fake butters, frozen sugar water, crappy ice “cream” etc. Whatever you wanna call Country Crock, nutritious is pushing it. It’s all part of this up-is-down, war-is-peace media environment that also allows full-page ads in hometown newspapers shilling for high-fructose corn syrup. Really, at long last, have you no standards?

My kingdom for a magazine rack

I really wanted to spurn the Holy Foods that just opened next to the greatest neighborhood Greenmarket in the system, but my consort dragged me in to check it out and we both slowly realized we have been subsisting in a food desert. We’ve lost our butcher and had no baker, and the only fish to be found except from Pura Vida on Friday is displayed amid brazen roaches. Just the night before I had had to spring for a crappy geriatric Murray’s chicken for my consort at the best bet for food shopping for more than a mile. Now I’m afraid I could get used to having better birds — not to mention Balthazar and Sullivan Street Bakery bread and padron peppers and Illy priced like Zabar’s — only two blocks away. This time of year almost everything we eat comes from 97th or Union Square, but in winter you can’t live on Greenmarket alone. I would worry about the little guys in the neighborhood getting killed, but they are already getting slammed by fast crap I would never patronize (can you say Subway and Dunkin’ Donuts?) The smart among them will upgrade to compete. (I will not soon forget the clerk at the corner condescendingly informing me when I said the baguette she had just sold me was hard as a baseball bat: “That’s what French bread is supposed to feel like.”) And the liquor-free wine shop at HF should also be a serious corrective; as times have gotten tougher, all the other stores have gotten greedier. Guess I should be saying a little prayer to Michael Pollan, who just advised against boycotting HF because its honcho is a health care cretin — better to focus on the support a huge, powerful chain provides farmers. I wouldn’t be surprised if whoever chooses new locations had not scoped out the thriving scene on 97th on Fridays: rich people, regular people, food stamp shoppers, all drawn by producers selling (roughly in westward order) fruit, wine, organic herbs and heirloom tomatoes, milk, Jersey produce, baked stuff, cheese, honey, turkey, NYState produce, eggs, plants, beef, fruit and juice, more produce and incredible fish. If you’re going to stake a tent in a desert, be sure to do it alongside an oasis.

Ham bone’s connected

If I were the industrious type, I’d be working on a tell-all on how Twitter ate my life and made me fat and obliterated my bank account. (One day I expect to have to confess to my consort, Samuel L. Jackson-style, that “I Tweeted the teevee.”) But one reason it is so addictive is that it leads you to shit discoveries you would not have otherwise, no matter how satiated you always felt following 600 blogs a day. And the best sick highs are of MSM sites hanging out down at the corner of Ho and Puta. Could anything be sadder than well-established magazines on the block trying to save their irrelevant asses by dancing to manipulative readers’ tunes? Stop the Publish button, but “food blogs are having a serious impact” —  that’s a story? Planted by a blog that needs hits like roaches need griddle grease? Really. If you want to show just how many years behind the curve you are, run a photo of my biggest fan in a necktie.

Philly Phanatic ice cream

One of the more pathetic stunts in some time was the NYT’s sending “Hungry (for Processed Crap) Girl” to some stadium to assess the edible offerings. All she did was stroll through and check the calorie counts helpfully posted on menus, something I guess the average baseball fan would be incapable of managing. The fresh fruit on offer got short shrift because of course someone so devoted to gorging on fake this and low-fat that didn’t remember the old Yogi Berraism: “You could look it up.” Otherwise she had no critical capability or cred to bring to the field-side table. For a million reasons it was ridiculous but not least because: What fat fool with a beer in one hand and a hot dog in the other gives a pitched fuck what a neurotic idiot has to say? Next maybe those editors can have the saddest woman in Styles, Ruth Madoff, rate Upper East Side banks.

Ladies, start your doughnut runs (only 200 calories)

What’s that old saying? Lie down with Ann Coulter and wake up witless? I would have tuned it out, but my consort looked at the latest Time cover story and offered the obvious: Muscle weighs more than fat. But I only read enough to realize this horse shit was even more dubious as “journalism.” Anyone who doesn’t know you can’t reward yourself for a workout with a half-dozen doughnuts has never gained 30 pounds while running track and field in the first few weeks of college. And the last thing a nation of lumbering whales needs to be told is to lie around and eat less. Bodies are complicated. Exercise is about more than calorie control. Then again, this is a guy who inhaled Batali fumes and exhaled Tiger Beat. I will not soon forgive his editors for putting images of his gut fat hanging over his belt in my head. Bad enough the newsstands have been filled with women upchucking their eating issues for nearly 40 years now. Men should not get equal time.

Did someone say Obamafoodarama?

I wish I could say I will be sorry not to have Panchito to kick around anymore, but of course he is off to the magazine to join the human Cute Overload and retrovirus recipes and other crimes against readers. The bar is set pretty low there, so he should be able to retch in peace. And while my first reaction to the choice of his successor was rather harsh — expect reviews pounded out with penis, judging by the self-consciously imitative  prose in his past and present — I will say that at least the guy has to know food at this point in his career, which is a big step up from being chosen because you’ve eaten at the pasta place next to the McDonald’s at the Spanish Steps. He did, after all, once quote me approvingly at NYP (could anyone ever have imagined that as a breeding ground for NYT talent?) Which of course makes it all the more mystifying that the new Mimi/Bryan/Ruth cannot just step into the job immediately now that his overlords have gotten the “lift” they wanted by naming him (P.T. Barnum would be so proud). First he has to do some eating on the tab while fill-ins kick restaurateurs to the curb in the interim. Can you imagine if Sonia Sotomayor were confirmed to the Supreme Court and then had to rush off to bone up on the law? WTF? Then again, that points to a more fascinating flaw. Even with food, it’s still a white, white, white man’s world.

Fondue-fork futures must be soaring

Meanwhile, I’m half-wondering if I Feel Bad About My Dreck might not be a flat-birther — those loonies are getting almost as much coverage as her latest epic is. The NYT is totally in the tank, with three Sunday promos and one DI/DO shout-out at last count in print alone. (The poor Omnivore did sound when I skimmed as if he had an editor rammed down his throat, though, while MoDo was oddly wan — did the gun to her temple leave an indentation?) And that was on top of the hem-kissing with meatloaf the previous Sunday. Not to point out the obvious or anything, but maybe a certain awed editor should have been minding a different stove while his critic was going on an error rampage with Cronkite. Either that or maybe have illustrated the piece with cobwebs.

And Froomkin was fired because traffic fell?

Maybe newspapers are going to go out with a little “Casablanca.” The LAT and NYT are the latest to be just shocked, shocked that bloggers do it their own way. And so we have to read yet again about the push for a code of ethics. Meantime, of course, the “legit” journalists are hiking the empanada trail and dutifully writing it up while the FTC says nothing about disclosure to them. As news budgets shrink, there will be more and more of that. Luckily, the George V in Paris knows what to do by now. Funniest high-horse line in the NYT story was about the blogger who takes products but writes only about those she likes. Can you say unicorn antler tasting spoon?

No Town Cars required

My thank-you card to Charlie Palmer for his excellent Gourmet soiree was returned by the post office as undeliverable to the new Aureole address, I guess because the place has not officially opened yet. So I’ll just say here that the move west seems to have gone smoothly, although the successor apparently took a run through the witness protection program. It is seriously sleek and different. Hors d’ and copious wine earned an A, too. But high point of the evening might have been listening to Adam T explain the wine windowbox/bucket while handler clearly knew there were far bigger fish he could have been frying. Aureole has location on its side now for sure. But in the aftermath I’ve mostly been thinking about how far we’ve all come from my first assignment for fledgling Allure, when I was sent off to eat at the top of the food chain in both New York and LA for a piece on how restaurants can make women look more attractive (or not). For all our sakes, let’s just fucking hope the magazine business bounces back big time.

Sausage + pepperoni — that’s bruschetta

My in-law equivalent keeps my subscription to the No. 1 Cooking Magazine in the World  up to date or I would be blissfully unaware of how thoroughly big media ownership has destroyed it. Were the recipes always so horribly dependent on processed crap? Was trend confusion ever so rampant (south of the border Caprese? WTF?) Every time I think it is about as cat-messy as it can get, they come up with a celebrity chef feature that must play particularly brilliantly with the Amish, in the land of the teevee-free. Worse, the more they tart up the pages, the trashier the food looks (and, sometimes, the people). I always think there is something masturbatory about over-design. But here it almost makes the reader go blind.