New rule for processed crap: If it’s nutritionally worthless, it’s got a huge “multi-grain” label on it. The latest is whatever that stuff is that’s packaged in tennis ball tins. If I were a devotee, I’d be annoyed that my junk favorite was being made healthful. No one eats chemicals bound with rice flour for a good reason.
(In other nutrition nuttiness, I liked the study that came out showing industrial sausage is worse for you than plain steak. You think? In other news, water’s wet.)
Given how much ad space soda companies are buying up for all their crap lately, I’m only surprised they have not wangled a neon sign over the Supreme Court’s main door — the one now closed to “we the people” because this land of the fearful seems to want to spend its life in Depends. It would be perfect, given that I am determined to tune out all “Is She or Isn’t She?” coverage until the Coke cans come up.
Encountered my first chip snob the other night: a friend who refused to go near the Tostitos I had grabbed in my rush to get all guacamole ingredients at one corner store when I was late to the Pinetum party. But she’s right. It’s no coincidence that the bag is increasingly cluttered with “whole grains” boasts to distract us from what we’re really eating, starting with genetically modified corn. When your only consolation on the label is “no preservatives,” you know something might not be fit to eat.
Speaking of “food comes from the supermarket,” one of the most impressive feats in food marketing has been the blithe acceptance of beef hot dogs. Untold hordes have been duped into thinking they’re eating something better than pigs’ ears, snouts, anuses, etc. Cows don’t have those nasty bits, do they? But now I’m seeing big ads for “Angus franks” and really have to laugh. I don’t have to try one to know it will certainly not taste like steak. Parts is parts.
And the best part of the outburst by some local news personality about extracted soy liquid being not milk but jism was how few people knew how to spell it. The bigger surprise is how long it’s taken the dairy industry to step up to defend the white stuff. Maybe we should thank the chef who mistook his wife’s breasts for the barn. Key question, which soybean/almond/etc. fail: Got udders?
This week was probably the nadir for food coverage. The Huffington Post started what has to be a parody, and the end of the Craig Claiborne line did KFC’s dirty work. The vendors whose fish has to be eaten the same day you buy it were touted as selling the freshest in Manhattan. Airline food was reported to be “striving to be tasty” (and Francisco Franco is still dead). The WSJournal pretty much declared wine coverage will now be only about wealth-worshiping and name-dropping, as Dr. Vino put it. (But that ridiculous adjective “delicious” will live on.) And I seem to recall some nonsense about ramps being the new arugula, hold the fiddleheads. But on the bright side, a new generation (of wide-eyed bloggers) has just learned a sobering and essential lesson: The Pillsbury Bake-Off is about nothing but crass commercialism, a relatively cheap way for Big Food to gauge what Americans are stuffing into their pie holes and an even better way to inspire those same suckers to consume even more processed crap. The only thing I’m curious about is whether the editors gathered from “real” media to cover the charade were any slimmer than the ones I reeled at the sight of 20-some years ago. (Those broads could pack it away; breakfast was always like the descent of a plague of very large locusts. And they uncritically, even gushingly, wrote up the gruesome results of Poppin’ Junk topped with raspberry and spinach and dipped in chocolate.) Personally, I think any cook who can turn a canned biscuit into a fish taco is going places. Nowhere I’d want to go, but still.
I don’t care who stunt-tastes it, the Double Down is the Special Needs Mom of fud: You’re horrified, but you can’t help looking/yammering. Luckily, it will eventually disappear like every other over-the-top gross-out concoction from the McKFC-type labs that’s designed for buzz alone. While the fame junkie will still be shrieking incoherently after the last Twinkie has gone moldy.
Everyone else can obsess on the supersizing of the Last Supper over the centuries (although I did like “Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me!”’s take: they might need a bigger cross). I was dwelling more on the scary thought that Big Food is developing a “special” salt for garbage we don’t need. It’s a testament to how over-sodiumed most processed crap is that the reasonable amount of salt you would use on your own fresh tortilla chips is way too imperceptible in the stuff that needs to last for months in a bag at an inflated price. Unfortunately, I read about this new sprinkle in the same paper that informed me, by way of a UK restaurant critic, that blue cheese has twice as many calories as other cheeses. This in a piece debating the merits of the calorie accounting on restaurant menus required by the new health reform law. We’re longtime subscribers, but I am really starting to wonder how long we can stay with the Foxes at The Wall Street Post.
And speaking of hysteria, the media obsession with Toyota is turning me into the equivalent of a Prius birther — maybe it actually is all a careful campaign designed to make hybrid cars look dangerous and keep Americans dependent on oil. The same thing inevitably happens with food. If there’s an E. coli or salmonella outbreak in anything relatively natural, it’s always attack of the killer tomatoes, suicide-mission scallions, lethal-weapon spinach, death in an eggshell. But if the government recalls a few million tons of it-will-kill-you-level contaminated processed beef, good luck finding out about it. Worst of all has been the coverage of the recall of hydrolyzed vegetable protein. That shit is in everything (153 products on the FDA warning list alone), and it’s not making tabloid headlines and leading the teevee “news.” Big Food gets to keep its dirty secrets secret. Maybe Cheetos eaters deserve what they get: messed pajamas
After reading another WSJournal story, on the crisis-level tomato shortage, I stupidly expected to see stores looking the way they really should in snowy March, free of flavorless hardballs. But there are big piles even at our neighborhood Food Shitty, and the Manhattan Fruit Exchange had the usual half-dozen or more varieties, if pricier than usual. Once again, it illustrated the disconnect between semi-food, the processed crap delivered to fast food outlets in tractor-trailers, and what most Americans throw into their overloaded baskets. And how the two are covered.
But I have to give the Journal credit for setting the record straight on macarons. They are not fucking macaroons. Buried deep in its late-to-the-meringue front-pager, though, was a funny detail. McDonald’s actually started selling the things three years ago. So all the hysteria online and off over the fast-fooding of high-end patisserie was actually driven by ads, the ones that only recently started showing up in the Paris metro. Guess I’m only amazed we aren’t seeing more MSG-free “soup is good food” pieces as winter winds down.
Hellmann’s is the Rachael of the processed food world — its name is 98 percent likely to be misspelled every time. It’s equally good at catapulting the propaganda, too, garnering huge publicity merely for switching to “cage-free” eggs in one of its several lines of mayonnaise. Not to be all unappreciative or anything, but wouldn’t it send more of a message to save up a few extra million dozen until you can promote a switchover for the non-lite stuff? Otherwise, clean-conscience eggs are squandered in fud Michael Pollan would not advocate eating. But at least it’s not as silly as Chipotle hyping its change to “vegan chicken” for its burritos. I mean, really — those poor birds are sentenced to live without natural worms in their diet, only to wind up as mega-meals for meat eaters? Why not just keep them gluten-free and wrap them up in flour tortillas?
After a day last week when our faucets ran mud, I shouldn’t be complaining about new regulations. But I am astonished that local governments so strapped they’re cutting fire and police protection are rushing to put on nanny uniforms that will not and should not fit. NYC is apparently banning home-baked stuff from school bake sales, so kids will be protected from some strange mom’s bacon-chocolate chip cookies but be able to tear right into processed crap (yeah, go ahead and blame calorie counts, as if Big Food lists them accurately). Out in California, there’s a crackdown on cocktails made with booze infused with other ingredients — nice to think inspectors will be deployed in the consumer protection racket while students are freaking out over high tuition and fees in a college system that was once the country’s best and most accessible. After eight years of national anarchy, I’m half-happy to see “authorities” seizing the reins, but not behind the bar. In all other cases the best thing they could do to keep junk out of innocent mouths is very simple: Tax the junk. People adjusted to a nickel deposit on soda cans that most never redeem, judging by the recycle bins in our building. They could adapt to a few cents more for sugar water. Instead, confusion reigns. I heard an “expert” on Brian Lehrer the other day saying no kid ever got fat drinking pineapple juice. He was right that juice has nutrients that tax-ready soda does not. He was wrong about obesity. One of the earliest lessons when I spent a week studying “nutritional cuisine” at the CIA back in the last century was that juice poured like water was going to turn little kids into Fat Alberts. Given that Coke owns Minute Maid, it’s no wonder a product once rationed in special glasses is now a Big Gulp, and a protected one at that. If there is a hell, let’s hope it’s full of tiny airline seats.
I’m starting to think every day is Groundhog Day, most recently because of the hysteria over hot dogs. Didn’t we already go through this “OMFG, kids can choke on tube steaks”? What’s really ridiculous is that any parent would let a Baby Jesus ingest something so suspect in any form. If the stuff came in a Spam can, no one would ever think it socially — let alone nutritionally — acceptable. Anyone who spurns food with a face has to know this is face food, and not of the trendy nose-to-tail variety. Over and snout. . .
Next time the arugula-addled wingnuts want to go faux-populist ballistic about food, they really need to check out what liberals love to eat in this country. Hint: It hasn’t been Brie since Reagan was asleep at the Iran-Contra switch. That’s nothing more than albino Velveeta in a brave new world of Epoisses/Taleggio/MtTam. Forget saltines. We are all water crackers now.
Funny to see news outlets scrambling to be sure Mrs. O’s huge anti-obesity movement is covered by all the wrong people (“eat as I say, not as I do,” in one case). But at least the Time Tool was not unleashed on the anti-Big Food beat. Following in the sordid tradition of the Coulter/Molto blow jobs, he let the fastest food take him for a royal ride. Did you know the Big Mac has a chef behind it? Yeah, and so does all the shitty airline food. He actually swallows the catapulted propaganda and mentally transfers a high-end lunch with celeriac and salmon to the crap wraps the “most influential chef in America” claims to have innovated. And believe me, the reason the flack freaked when the chef mentioned poached pears was not fear of copycat competitors. She had to know the chance of something like that winding up on the diabetes menu was about as likely as a frequent flier ever tasting Todd English’s food in steerage.