With the ’21’ Club back in the news thanks to the cretin in chief, I do have to note that the toilets there have all been elevated for the comfort of old asses.

I kept the end flap of a box like this on my desk for a full year, fully hoping to type about how scary fud like this can be (the flight attendant last July responded to my Italian seatmate’s rejection of the wake-up meal with a chortling “Oh, you’ve had it, have you?”) And here I am, home again. (In AA’s defense, though, the Italian dressing was made in Germany.)

I’ve only been back in the home of the brave for less than 72 hours, so maybe I’m missing something on the latest outbreak of food hysteria over burrito bowls. Do Americans shun cruise lines when norovirus wipes out whole shiploads of passengers? Or does social media make it easier for squitter reactions to spread fast? I’m so cynical I always wonder about industrial sabotage — factory fud is not gonna give up the fight kindly. Even as chefs clamber onto the dying burger train while basketball stars see the future is round and cheese-y. And made to your order by human hands.

And I probably should be nervous that the DHS (that would be the agency with the Deutschesque middle name) is now sending me releases on an expansion of visas for ag and hospitality workers. Why me, who can’t even keep a cat employed, let alone myself? Couldn’t be that I have noted that a certain orange shitstain benefits most from waivers of immigration laws at “his” vineyard and sanitation-challenged private “club,” could it?

Apparently there is no T-free zone in the world. And there should not be. It would be like ignoring typhoid when Mary is your cook. Still, the trouble with traveling while wired is that it’s too easy to stay obsessed with the insane clowns and the posse after them back home while blissfully exploring a favorite city for the fourth time on your fifth* trip. Even away from the computer there is overlap. One day I picked up online outrage over the dismantling of regulatory agencies, then passed a marker in the Piazza delle Herbe, once Torino’s most important market square, where full centuries ago “city authorities had to guarantee supplies of foodstuffs and check weights and trading.” The free market can never be trusted to be free. Now every time I start to think this bogus regime is going medieval on America, I’ll realize that might be an improvement.

*The food here is so uniformly good I can even vouch for what they serve in hospitals. 

And I have also realized the Italians know exactly what to do with an orange jackass. Make something that would intimidate Bobo Brooks.

One night I spotted a couple eating at the vegan cafe whose slogan is “eat with head” tossing scraps to their dogs. Who were gobbling. I didn’t know if I should alert the Italian version of the FDA. Or the Torino ASPCA.

You can always tell a city is changing in the best way when liveliest neighborhoods are not on the tourist map. // On my third walk through an open-air food market in Torino I thought: “They all have the same stuff.” Then: “Oh. Yeah. Cuz it’s all seasonal.” // Even Ray Bradbury never envisioned Cryovaced octopus. // Only travel writers can see the Po from a table at Porto di Savona on Piazza Vittorio Veneto. // An important distinction at a farmers’ market: You say “due” and they ask “chilo or numero?” // Chest of quail is a pretty great translation. // Why you run through cash so fast in a foreign country? Every time they announce the check, clueless you reaches for the biggest bill to avoid misunderstanding. // I also saw a produce vendor wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with “nice people make nice things.” So that’s my problem. . .

I am such a conflicted loser that I refuse to even approach the WSJ with story ideas cuz I don’t want to support it (#deportallmurdochs), but I have still been complicit for many years in subscribing to the print edition cuz it does such great stuff, on both food and books (the Saturday reviews are like coulibiacs compared with the NYT’s Hot Pockets). So on this most recent Saturday I was treated, having enriched Rupe’s pockets but unable to share, to a smart story on the “fast-fine” trend in dining and an exquisite essay on T’s ICE brownshirts killing apple towns. The former made it clear that workers will be the first expense tossed off the ship on the brave new sea of RestoWorld (let the paying customers and the iPads do the heavy lifting). The latter lyrically spelled out how fear is crippling a town that had been revived by immigration. “Oaxaca in a Wyeth painting,” indeed.