Lured by a newly validated relative, I went back to the “fancy” food show again for the first time since the dispiriting “revival” after lockdown. And came away convinced that one way to track #TrumpSlump would be to measure attendance at conventions like the Specialty Food Show. Seemed quite sparse to me. & all the booths hyping international deals looked just sad with a serial bankrupt running tariffs.

One good thing I learned, though, was that caviar producers are turning all those egg-bearing fish into other products, like smoked sturgeon and smoked sturgeon paté. Which is eco- and economically smart. But I just keep hearing the drunk old at a press lunch like 30 years ago who stood up after too much Champagne in the middle of the day and started singing “caviar is virgin sturgeon.” At least that fish is not getting fucked over anymore. (And if you think too hard, you really start to shake your damn head over how all the pro-lifers will pay megabucks to consume certain eggs.) 

We were just on an another eating expedition to the city where our consortium began and got a good lesson. Rittenhouse Square was mostly blocked off for our first two days while workers installed a tent etc. for a big, rollicking fund-raiser, but when we walked through to the farmers’ market on Saturday morning there wasn’t a trace of the ritzy venue to be seen. Which was an excellent reminder in these terrible times that it’s so much faster and easier to destroy than to build. As anyone would know who has watched a meal they’ve labored over all day be gone in 30 seconds… 

As always, we learned more history in Phila than the Founders intended, not least from the great street signs everywhere documenting where it all began. One of two illuminating exhibitions at the African American Museum of Philadelphia was on Pearl Bailey, who, it turns out, was also a cookbook author and once attempted a cooking show on the teevee (which was not picked up). What we also learned was that even Richard Nixon had more class than the white supremacist now squatting in the house built by enslaved people. He had Bailey and her husband, Louis Bellson, perform there — and he appointed her “ambassador of love.” Clearly he was hammered, tho: Signage on the wall sez he started playing “Home on the Range” and she stopped him with “I want to sing a song, not ride a horse.” 

While dry-brining a turkey breast the other night I could only think about both how Kamala Harris is right about the proper technique and how we could not even have Thanksgiving four years ago, cuz people were dying in droves in #trumpandemic. I was gonna boycott Squanto Day in despair this year. But it might be our last. And eggs will never be cheaper with avian flu. 

This insane campaign has me daily remembering the IRL friend who, way back in the Bushwhacking, would joke that candidates are “always promising chicken or beef when we’re all gettin’ tofu.” This year, to be serious, the choice is between beef and Boar’s Head. And we don’t need no FDA…

We get Fox in Print, aka the Murdoch Crier, so I read krazy people. Saturdays are true treats, because Ginny Noonan is given half a page to spew her Boodles. Most recently she was going on about crime and immigration and people sleeping in tents outside train stations. But I was just in her Upper East Side neighborhood twice in three days for medical appointments, and it was as sterile as it ever was. Maybe it was the sandwich board outside Eli’s that freaked her out: Breakfast burritos, touted in Spanish. 

Kinda doubt this farmer (Amoon, at Union Square) spends much time reading NYT/watching CNN.

You never realize how lame your food photos are until your phone collates ‘em in a “taste of Italy 2024” slideshow. Oy. Chihuahua… 

Now that we’ve started eating outside at restaurants again, I keep flashing back on our last meal inside one before we went into lockdown for what was supposed to be two weeks and is now in the sixth month. We went to the Tang for lunch after the Sunday Greenmarket on March 15. It was slightly surreal — the few other patrons were spaced well apart, but this was weeks before everyone was warned to wear masks, and we were hoping the three cooks making our eggplant and dumplings in the open kitchen were okay, and it was impossible to enjoy the food without worrying we had made a big mistake risking it. As we walked home, we kept passing bodegas where I had tried to interview the Yemeni owners/managers three years earlier, when the nascent fascist’s travel ban was announced and shopkeepers were mobilizing against it. My story never went anywhere, but in retrospect I can see we were witless to believe he would only come for the Mexicans and then the Muslims. Eventually he would hurt us all because, as Adam Serwer perfectly put it: The cruelty is the point. 

To think we were promised taco trucks on every corner and now can’t even eat inside a restaurant. Let alone in a foreign country. 

One thing about eating in the street outside NYC restaurants now: You really come to see cars as multi-ton killing machines barreling past. And those beautiful planters delineating the “dining room” start to look as if they were modeled on IED fortifications in Kabul.