Also, too, I have to ReTweet my reaction to the star-beat news: Chefs, start your gyros

Just asking for an old-world celebrity: Does going lactose-free stop farting in public? And in other eating disorders, I wonder how many people addicted to sriracha have ever looked at the ingredients. You can’t be “allergic” to chemicals and mainline that stuff.

Whenever we go back to Buffalo, I always wonder if it’s as singular as it seems on the food front. Since airports have become police states with better restaurants, and since both my consort and I seem to get more gigs overseas, I just really haven’t eaten around America as much; I mostly remember the bad old days when we would land in a hotel late at night and be directed to “there’s a Friendly’s out on the highway.” Even so, I have to say keeping in touch with the “Nickel City” chefs has its benefits. One of these guys is apparently serving a whole braised sunflower, something I doubt has occurred to anyone strolling through Union Square on a “weekend.” And even though I have no dog in the “molecular cuisine” fight, this makes me wonder if there isn’t much more to be explored just on the ingredient level. You can sous vide the hell out of salmon, but what about cooking poke roots? They’re as close as Central Park.

And I’m so old I remember when the hometown paper had people whose job description included keeping ads and editorial separate. Food stories are obviously generated to lure advertising, but at least a sheen of a veneer of respectability was needed. So I really never thought I would ever see a feature on booze right next to a full-page ad for booze. Of course that was in the magazine. Wednesday doesn’t have to worry — there are no ads.

Name and identifying details are omitted to protect the guilty, but someone at the contest/show actually posited that chef challenges and/or upscale cooking are boojwah. And if I hadn’t passed out flyers with a union boss for my next-door neighbor last October when he was running for Manhattan DA I might not have objected — that organized father of boys said his kids were cooking thanks to the seduction of all the food on the teevee. But I contend that food is the only area of American life in which trickle-down actually applies. I’ve been eating for a living for a very long time, and I’ve seen how the tastes and indulgences at the top work their way to the masses. If you had told me back when most fish was frozen that sushi would one day be sold in every supermarket, I would have wondered what truffle oil you were huffing.

I forgot last week to bitch about my “happy” hour at the Regency. Power bar, indeed. After waiting just short of forever to order, my friend had to send back her gin and tonic because the tonic was flat, and then the cashews in the mixed nuts were rancid. The waiter was barely sentient, either overworked or not bothering. But the worst part was paying $14 a glass for Rock Rabbit sauvignon blanc and later seeing it in a store for $8.99 a bottle. At five glasses a bottle, $1.80 apiece, that’s a markup of what, 6 gazillion percent? I guess those tax cuts definitely have to stay in effect. Rich fucks can’t squander their money fast enough.

And this sounds insensitive, but one of the high points of my week was the Batterberry sendoff. It really was a memorial that reflected a seriously impressive life with a ripple effect far beyond what he made his name doing. The overflow crowd included lots of boldface food names, but Garrick Utley started things, and Geoffrey Holder did almost a performance piece that I couldn’t quite understand totally in the SRO section but apparently involved Lena Horne and ended with applause loud enough to be heard wherever the two departed are now. Among the many great remembrances was Dan Barber’s LOL recounting of what he went through to write an Adam Gopnik-level introduction for Michael and Ariane when they got a Beard award this year. His Moleskin is a book waiting to be expanded. Another eulogist noted that The Batt (or Bat) was described in the big obit as “puncturing the pomposity” of Gourmet — which was a phrase he would have found to be “a little labored.” He may be unimaginably gone, but he’s still editing. . .

I am, once again, reTweeting myself here, but I really would like to see a forensic editor turned loose on the series of tubes. There is simply no way the hands on the keyboard that banged out ovine blather this week were the same ones that took an unnamed but easily identified Florida chef to the woodshed. Someone must have misheard “get a life” with a W. And, off topic, I have to say it’s also amusing to think back on how Mme Ami took Mrs. O to task for setting a bad example by not cooking. So who had 500 chefs in her yard this week, ready to do her bidding? Link bait has a pretty short shelf life. . . .

Dwight Garner’s review of the Wilbert Rideau memoir in the NYT included a detail I don’t know that I’ve ever read before. Death Row dinners are “ordered for, and eaten by” friends of prisoners — “condemned men usually lose their appetites.” Might be the saddest thing I’ve read since the tale of the about-to-be-whacked convict who saved his dessert “for later.”

One of the most sobering experiences in some time was mentioning a Carolina chef who once brought his young son to my apartment on 72d Street to deliver a recipe when I was just starting as a food writer and then having my e-correspondent note that the “kid” now has his own eating establishment, not to mention two kids of his own. How the hell did that happen when I was not aging at all? The only encouraging news is that so many spawn have been allowed to grow up and choose their own careers without having their every bite/burn documented. Maybe the best advice for life really is: First you dig a pit.