And speaking of mustard and faux French, Grey Poupon accidentally turned up in my kitchen (I am not going to point any fingers here) and it will never be seen there again. Why in the name of Maille is there sugar in mustard? No wonder everyone in this country is either obese or diabetic or both. What’s odd is that the consort who is not going to be blamed picked it up at Holy Foods, where a clerk in the wine shop told us they do not carry liquor because it’s not good for you (despite the latest study on benefits, the one indicating moderate drinking may cut the risk of Alzheimer’s). And processed crap is? Then again, I noticed the new logo for Heinz ketchup is a bright red tomato on the label paired with “grown, not made.” Yeah, the high-fructose corn syrup and regular corn syrup that are third and fourth on the ingredients list were freshly harvested right out in the Back 40. It’s as if they see “Food, Inc.” as a model, not a warning.
Post Category → processed crap
Sushi or salmon mousse?
The most unintentionally LOL story of the week had to be the WSJournal’s headlined “Coach Food Goes to New Heights.” The airlines could probably actually turn a profit if they spent less money hyping their shitty fare and just made it better — either they’re hiring celebrity chefs with huge hoopla (and no perceptible improvements in the crap) or they’re sending out releases boasting of worthless new tactics that the average passenger suffering in steerage would trade for just one plain bag of peanuts. This dutiful roundup had it all: Todd English is whipping up almond-butter-and-grape-jelly sandwiches (the Onion couldn’t have done better); American is selling Boston Market sandwiches and salads to “give passengers assurance of the quality of the food” (ditto on the Onion). Not only is it processed chain crap, but it’s now processed chain crap “prepared by the catering companies that supply American’s food.” You know, the ones who made those old chicken-or-beef mystery meals that were once endless butts of jokes and now seem like fine dining. The great improvements are all junk: chicken gyros and smoothes and Ben & Jerry’s. The most telling quote came from a passenger who said she had brought a Subway sandwich on board because it had to be better than what they were selling. When you can’t beat that faux food, no amount of propaganda can save you.
Ain’t no cherries in August
One of the chapters in my memoir “Born Mean” is going to be a confession that I have actually indulged in Taco Bell. Not in five years, but still. I do understand its allure, although even I had second thoughts early one day in an airport when I saw how the refried beans were made (open bag of dirt-brown dust, add water, apply heat). But the news about its revamped breakfast offerings was even scarier than that sight: Jimmy Dean sausage and Cinnabon? Hope they’re offering a free syringe with every order. What was even more appalling is how the press release was retyped — it actually included the word “mouth-watering” and described the chain as “the beloved franchise.” This would be, some of us remember, the one where rats ran rampant in Greenwich Village for all the world to see. Maybe the wrong tool was canned at the home of the Human Scratch N Match.
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.
The 60-Minute Mark Twain
So much for Michael Pollan’s cred. Food & Wine has just declared this the year of the home cook, even as he is swearing cobwebs are covering American stoves. Hmm Balzer notwithstanding, someone is buying an awful lot of groceries these days. Then again, there’s a whole cookbook coming out on ways to doctor up pre-fab cookie dough — with no ways to take shit out, of course, only to add it back in. Leave it to the Guardian, though, to really put all this in perspective with a story on how “Meryl Streep film starts debate on loss of cooking skills.” Yes, Sophie the Prada-Wearing Devil did it. Apparently the paper is outsourcing its headline-writing to Lahore.
Blame the cat on the keyboard (kitty? kiddy?)
The competition is getting stiffer by the hour, but right now my candidate for the most cretinous new food product has to be “bagel holes.” Maybe I have not been paying close enough attention, but I don’t think bagels have holes punched out like doughnuts; the shape is the thing. So they’re selling either the air in the center or something truly doughy-awful. Then again, they’re marketing this crap to kids, judging by the coupon in my favorite part of the Sunday paper. And kids can’t have changed much since my brothers and sisters and I took such great pleasure in balling up bits of crappy white bread into something bigger than a nostril. So, sure, a mom should feel quite proud to send her progeny off to school clutching storebought gummy dough while depriving of them of the chance to make rosary beads from scratch. All water will one day be fluoridated with insulin, right?
Fried chicken on a sugar cane skewer
Maybe I was wrong about attendance being off at the food show. Either that or figures lie and liars figure. What was more fascinating was reading that a hundred or so tons of leftover products were donated to City Harvest afterward. Which made me wonder what the hell kind of dinner a poor family would get out of raspberry-fudge-coated tortilla chips and bacon-laced lollipops. Gimmicks make a thin gruel.
Put the smoked paprika in the botulism oil
Scariest story of the week was the NYT’s on mid-level chain restaurants cutting menu prices in this Bushwhacked economy. If they’re selling crap for even less, you know they’re investing in even cheaper crap to begin with. And so the race to the bottom accelerates. Maybe we should feel blessed to have cookie dough as hemlock.
Velveeta is not cheese, either
Count me apparently among the very few not shocked that Nestlé’s cookie dough contains shit under a technical name. The only surprise is that salmonella is not the culprit. But why would a product labeled with a warning against eating it raw be immune from contamination like just about everything your friendly supermarket sells anymore? I would ask what kind of parent would feed the stuff to a kid, but I know the answer: the same ones who think 99-cent cheeseburgers are essential to an American childhood. And how’s that working out so far?
Please, sir, more pizza?
Everyone had a pretty good laugh recently at Domino’s for offering pasta bowls: starchy pasta loaded into starchy bread. Didn’t seem so funny when my consort brought home a newspaper food section from Virginia. In an awkward combination of Father’s Day fare and Depression dining, it showcased three AP features on pizza every which way teamed with one headlined “Don’t Forget the Breadsticks.” And with my stomach still recovering, I’m sorry I looked at it closer. It suggested making a sweet version and dipping them in “microwaved purchased vanilla frosting.” Yes, make the breadsticks from scratch and cheat on the frosting. I guess you can’t get that at “the Hut.” At least not without an “insulin not included” warning.
New book: 60-Year Gourmet
I see Forelock is running a challenge designed to make Big Food consumers everywhere feel very smug — they may be eating hog shit off the backs of exploited immigrants, but at least they’re not whacked elitists. I mean, curing your own bacon for a BLT is ridiculous enough. But to promote the notion and dis industrial food alongside the Kraft ad I caught is almost poetic. I just don’t know why he doesn’t expect people to grow their own wheat to make the bread. Maybe mine their own salt, too.
I also see the inevitable backlash against the rather awesome “Food, Inc.” has begun. Never underestimate the power of a few monolithic food companies with so much to lose if Americans start to understand exactly what they are selling. So expect more defense of farmers, only not the Joel Salatin kind, just the ones who have to worry about the “death tax.” Expect more attacks on the messenger, as if the filmmakers and reviewers were the ones forcing poor, overworked moms to resort to dollar meals in the drive-through. And definitely expect the class war to heat up, with cretins everywhere thinking eating well is only about money. I grew up so poor I was toilet-trained in an outhouse, but my mom did an amazing job feeding a family of nine because she learned some basic nutrition in public school in New York City: beans and cornbread make a complete protein. Today an immigrant like her, brought over from Belfast as a baby, would never get any food learning in school, just junk from machines. And while I’m waxing sappy, my dad always said the difference between “poor” and “white trash” is soap and education. Now kids have to get the latter at the movies. But if it liberates them from any notion that they have to butcher their own hog for a sandwich, we all win.
Candy cigarettes & apple fries
Not to belabor the movie, but it does show how fast food has mutated the whole supply system, with consistency etc. dictated by the biggest buyers. So the WSJ story on chains moving their wares into supermarkets now that even dollar meals are looking unaffordable was rather unsettling. Processed crap is bad enough. Now we get California Pizza Kitchen processed crap? Worse, the Dunkin’ Donuts crap coffee is priced at about what my consort and I pay for world-class Illy. And don’t get me started on Taco Bell refries in a can. I will never forget the morning I was killing time in an airport early in the morning, wandering a food court, and saw how they make them: They open up a plastic bag of dried substance and add water. Even Taco Bell doesn’t use canned beans. What’s funniest is imagining the poor fools who buy this stuff. When I was a kid, we used to play “going to California” in the driveway, three or four of us in the car pretending to escape on a road trip. I can just envision a broke BK aficionado sitting in the SUV on blocks, fantasizing about going through the drive-through.
Lesson learned: Can’t compete with tamales
Five of the most foreboding words in the English language are “I’m a registered dietitian and . . .” What follows is inevitably some misguided hectoring based on research just proven flawed or about to be proven definitively flawed. I guess I’ve been in this business far too long, because I can still remember when fat was the scariest thing that could enter the alimentary canal. How many RDs did I have to track down to get them to say what a magazine editor needed to have said before more studies showed it wasn’t just any fat that was problematic? Now I’m getting badgered for snarking that sugar is naturally superior to high-fructose corn syrup. Big Food obviously still has big money behind the latter, because its minions are out hammering its message, Michael Pollan be damned. My story, and I’m sticking to it, is that corn tortured into either oil for shortening or sweetener for soda is far from anything my great-grandmother would have recognized. This is the crew, after all, that sold us Snackwells as lard asses only got lardier.
Like Heinz on freedom fries
Saddest revelation of the week: The best information from a suspected terrorist came not as his balls were being slashed but after someone gave him cookies. Sugar-free ones because he was diabetic. That condition alone should have cleared him, though. Thanks to cheap food and crappy diet, aren’t we all potential diabetics now? (Yes, I do sound as if I have derangement syndrome. If the Chimp and his damage would go away, I could not miss them and go back to mostly fud all the time.)
Where have you gone, S.I. Hayakawa?
We live in interesting times, word-wise. I just saw the absurd euphemism for starvation/force-feeding of suspected terrorists: dietary manipulation. Orwell has to be cringing. And Hormel is apparently too cowed even to use the four-letter word for its meat — you need a magnifying glass to find “pork” in its ads. Instead, they call the swine loins Always Tender Products. Which sounds sort of like something you’d find in the feminine hygiene aisle.