I confess to wandering over to digital monkey cages on occasion just to watch the occupants smear themselves with their own feces — there’s no entertainment like wingnuts posturing, with flagrant disregard for reality. So I’m quite enjoying the arguments that farm subsidies are inalienable rights for the corporations that really control agrarian food. Aesop had a fable or two for this, but I wouldn’t count out the impact of a First Family who walks the walk. You can’t grow high-fructose corn syrup in a backyard garden.
Post Category → processed crap
Olive oil is 1% worm
Time Out deserves a fist bump for printing the most self-indicting letter ever, from some bleeding idiot outraged over a photo of a whole pig roasting on a spit: “I don’t want to see visual reminders that my lunch was once a living and breathing animal.” As they say on the political blogs: Teh stupid — it burns. Hot dogs good; porchetta scary. Please. Food does not come from the supermarket. And if you can’t face the artisanal link, you certainly don’t want to contemplate the industrial chain. “Our Daily Bread” should be required viewing for anyone who reacts to a picture of a whole hog by throwing her turkey sandwich in the trash. Tom died in vain.
That kind of denial is exactly what’s involved in one of the most unsettling processes I’ve read about in some time, how processors turn pigskins into chicharrones, aka pork rinds. The story was in the WSJournal, on a dispute over imports of skins from countries with foot-and-mouth, the disease that devastated British farms less than 10 years ago. Pigs there, of course, contracted it by eating imported meat (you don’t even want to dwell). Thank allah for the photos and relatively long text to make it clear just how processed this stuff is: In one factory, frozen skins are mechanically minced and cooked into pellets, which are then boxed up and shipped off to other factories to be fried. Forget the issue of whether the meat is contaminated to begin with. How many un-health-cared hands touch it before it lands in someone’s mouth; how many chances are there for something to go horribly wrong? And people freak out about lard?
Drive-through all night
And maybe I’m just cynical, but I thought it was rather amusing to see everyone dumping on the new McItaly while accrediting the Fast Food Diet. Domestic beef topped with asiago cheese and artichoke spread in Italy? Bad. Tacos and Subway processed crap here? Worth consulting nutritionists and other experts on whether you will lose weight. (Few of them, I noticed, brought up what that junk does for your body besides fatten it right up.) Who needs Berlusconi when we have such a free press?
Famiglia pizzaBreathalyzers
One of the many great things about living in the co-op we took two years to choose is that we get mail delivered to our doorstep, by the staff. Every so often the bean-counting philistines among us propose doing away with that system to save time and labor and instead ramming mailboxes into our gorgeous 1929 lobby. Thanks to Fresh Direct, the argument may finally be over. Apparently it’s going to start installing vending machines for frozen dinners alongside mailboxes. Amazon should be setting up kiosks to deliver Michael Pollan’s “Food Rules” on demand right next to them. Who would care if home looked like a truck stop?
Beggars and choosers and foie gras gluts
We also forget most of us were in bunkers a year ago, counting the canned food and wondering how to set up apple carts. The economy is still a disaster, but after reading about food banks running on empty and firehouses collecting food I gathered all the crap I’d been hoarding in case “The Road” really did run through our front door. Chief among that was a bunch of rice mixes and seasonings from a press event thrown by a little New Orleans company bought by Big Food. I only ever tried one, and we were first stunned by how salty/fake it tasted and then, over the next few days, by how it had stunk up the joint. Seriously. As much as I mock the Forelock, he did have the comment of the week on all this salt insanity going around: “If you eat natural foods, you don’t have to worry.” I would feel a little guilty about handing off all that sodium and MSG to the poor, but after we left the firehouse where they were not collecting food (thanks, Daily News), we passed a family unloading even worse stuff from a car, with not a fresh vegetable to be seen. People in the Depression probably ate better. At least they had apple carts.
Grains of (HFC) syrup
I have to admit I felt more than a pang of regret on seeing Francis Lam, over at his new gig, write a good takedown of NYC’s well-intentioned but misguided assault on salt. I should have been jumping to the defense, given that I learned from my dad that salt is best ingested from a mound off your palm, and my blood pressure is low enough to unnerve technicians. Unlike trans fats, the last bugaboo for our Daddy Mayor, salt is an essential ingredient; humans would die without it. I’d be all for regulating sodium content in processed crap if the WSJournal had not just reported that Big Food is already cutting back on it (I think it sees the nicotine rulings on the wall). But get the government out of restaurant kitchens — salt used early and judiciously does so much more for food than a shakerful at the table. Telling chefs, even chain chefs, how much they can use makes about as much sense as having David Chang dictate how to run a business magazine. Or a city.
First they came to bastardize the cappuccino
I’m not going to blame Julia for this, only Julie for alerting Big Food to the new potential for old French standards since the crazy success of the movie. But thanks to my favorite part of the Sunday papers — the coupons — I see Jell-O is now marketing “chocolate” “mousse.” And it looks just as scary as you might imagine, sort of like Cool Whip crossed with what a coal miner coughs up after a hard day in the pit. Still, it could be worse. For all the discontent right now, we’ve come a long way in this country. Not so long ago they would have had to have sold it as Freedom Flan.
Taiwan: Yes, we have no US mad-cow beef
I guess I missed the most important class in fright school because I really do not understand the hysteria over a flame on a plane when no one else was hurt. If the Big O had ignored an explicit warning and 2,700-plus people were killed a little over a month later, I could see freaking out. But every day I wonder where the outrage is over the bigger threat. You are more likely to die from salmonella than terrorism. And a potential killer that was once only in eggs, then in cantaloupes, is now in half the crap in the supermarket. Too bad you can’t strip-search a scallion.
Or Seal-a-Meal by another name
Then again, Americans have been so thoroughly indoctrinated into the falsities of food that there’s actually a debate online over whether butter can be successfully substituted for shortening in xmas cookie recipes. For Crisco’s sake, butter has been around since the first udder squeezer realized you could whip cream into a solid state of bliss. Of course spritz cookies can use butter. Once upon a time whole squadrons of home economists had to be enlisted to convert all those time-honored butter recipes to use oil chemically converted into a scary solid. And now here we bake, baffled about the basics. The funny thing is that there is actually a fear-free substitute for shortening, the very ingredient it was invented to replace. It’s a four-letter word, but lard makes amazingly crisp cookies.
Guar gum with cauliflower glop
Of course, look what fantasy has gotten “Top Chef” viewers: frozen dinners. Time magazine had a pretty good look at them, including the fact that contestants surrender all rights to recipes (shades of so many cook-offs that are not competitions so much as cynical trawls for marketable ideas). And with countless cookbook authors also selling processed crap, why shouldn’t a fake show jump on the honeywagon? I still haven’t recovered from the Thomas Keller fried chicken kit. And I’m awaiting the Ferran Adria Fizzies.
Carrywater.blogs.nytimes.com
Having had no problem procuring the canned pumpkin that was supposedly in scary-short supply for Turkey Coma Day, I quite enjoyed reading the real reason the ridiculous frozen “waffles” vanished from stores. Yep. Listeria. And I wasn’t even surprised that the manufacturer was able to get the country worked up to the level of Colbert over the shortage without mentioning either the bacteria or the recall. With everyone in the media so easily manipulated, it’s all Faux News now. Next: Stock up on Land O Lakes or no cookies for you.
For sale: Researchers
Speaking of processed crap, I can only guess at the obscene amounts of cash being funneled into rescuing high-fructose corn syrup’s reputation. Not only are producers running full-page ads in the highest-priced newspapers. But the sweetener realm’s equivalent of what Christopher Buckley called the MOD Squad (Merchants of Death) is now hounding me over an online piece that ran so long ago I don’t even remember what it said. And I wrote it. Naturally, they want to have it both ways, denying there’s any problem with the stuff while pointing out that many foods contain very little of it. It all pretty much proves the awful truth of eating in America: One of the cheapest “foods” has the most money to throw around, and your tax dollars help. We’re a country too strapped to pay for Medicare Part E (for Everybody), but corn subsidies will continue until all Americans have diabetes. Then we underwrite the insulin — if we aren’t already. Have a Coke and a coma.
Monetary Jack? It’ll cost you
Twice lately, at Zabar’s and at Holy Foods, I have passed tasting tables where slices of cheese were being offered under something fruity and have felt rather sad. How quickly a brilliant concept devolves into typical American raspberry-chocolate-ranch-Dorito panini. It’s not just fast food that has fattened this country. It’s bastardization and trend mashups. A great cheese is great on its own. It doesn’t necessarily need frosting. But tell that to the people who will wind up schmearing Smucker’s over Kraft’s best. . .
Smart for dummies
Then again, this nonsense seems part of the new media drive to bring back the Clinton glory days, with all trumped-up scandal all the time. One surly cretin in the LATimes of all papers even attacked Mrs. O for promoting eating right and exercising (something the Chimp wife he worked for never did while idly smoking and reading for eight miserable years). We the readers are left to discern from heritage sheep’s entrails that the reason Big Food had to pull back on its up-is-down, war-is-peace, Froot-Loops-R-nutritious campaign is that there’s a new sheriff in town. The crap those processors got away with doesn’t fly anymore.
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?