THE GURGLING COD

Poverty is not droll

As reported in Eater, a new spot for the Dockers and ESPN set on Bleecker St. Oddly, nothing seems to rouse the passion of commenters like a downtown sports bar. But this one serves forties! In paper bags! How droll! The Other Side, an old haunt in TLOTB&TC used to offer 40s of Schlitz, but they catered to a hard-working thrifty drinking bike messenger crowd. Here, to judge from the photo, the crowd skews a little bit more white collar. Still, I could live with the 40s in this context -- there is a recession on, and all, were it not for the bags. You'll notice when you get the bottle of Chateau d'Yquem at a place with tablecloths, they don't give it to you in a bag, because they expect you will drink it indoors. 40s conversely, are often consumed outdoors, and often in places where the consumption of alcohol is illegal. The bag is a nod to the law, in that one might be drinking something non-alcoholic out of a bag. Or so it went in the pre-Giuliani era. To elaborate, the people who consume 40 ounce containers of beer or malt liquor outdoors frequently do so because they do not have the convenient access to the indoors that comes with a lease or a mortgage.

Still with me? Good. The flourish of the 40 in a bag at a restaurant is thus a cute way of nodding to the beverage format's popularity with the poor and dispossessed, who do not, as a rule, frequent Village sports bars. Get it? Me neither.

Also, viz the thread on PX This that inspired the visit, one is left wondering if Gawker commenters are the "creative underclass," what do you call people who put this much effort into hating on Eater? If Jurgen Habermas were dead, he'd be spinning in his grave.

And speaking of Habermas, some rational critical discourse from back when Chuck D was calling rap music Black America's CNN:  Public Enemy:_"1_Million_Bottlebags" - Apocalypse '91

A Stroller ain't nothing but a sandwich*

Anchower, again. Actually been going places and eating things, rather than say, hanging around the office, hitting refresh on Chow.com scanning for imprecise usages of "deconstruct." And deets TK! For now, Portland is pretty much like you would figure, and in San Juan, large multigenerational families eat out at all hours! The latter point is interesting, as the stroller wars are heating up again. If you could get these folks on the same page, the combined force of the huffy indignations would be enough to free Tibet. For now, I'll observe that this whole strollers-in-bars contretemps is a classic example of unintended consequences, in that the whole issue would go away if they re-legalized smoking in bars. At the Cod's local, you'd only bring in an infant at a busy time if you wanted to cure it, Jamon-steez, so it's really not an issue. One of America's Park Slope's  great social ills solved before nine on a Monday--you're welcome, Brooklyn.

*Baby Watson, whut whut -- The Garage, circa 1982, hollerin atcha!
**Image from the Chronic's baby blog, "The Poop." The debate plays out a little differently in SF. What the fuck do they put in the water out there?

The assivore's dilemma

Is anyone really going to change their diet based on Alicia Silverstone's bare ass?

Good question.

Away from my desk

Holed up at Yaddo, working on my  Alice Waters/Grace Jones fan fiction:

While many of you think of San Francisco as the temple of Alice - farm driven, local sustainable, worshippers of seasonality, slaves to the rhythm of ingredient purity - SF is also about transformation and challenging established ideas of food.

In Episode One, the gals team up to make a delicious salad of mizuna, almond blossoms, and cocaine.

ps- Is there anything to eat in Portland, OR? Should I pack a lunch?
pps- If you can't tip, you can't eat out. It's not that fucking complicated.

You feed the Catzingers to the Ratzingers...*

Bruni reports that Bastianich will be cooking for the pope when he visits NYC next month.** If it were the regular kind of Pope, the Italian kind, a daunting challenge, possibly, but this one is Bavarian, so one has to imagine that it's mainly a question of thawing out some wursts.
*Allusion to a little bit of Lutheran liberation theology -- see below.
**A comment thread that delivers like it drives a big brown truck, or was a recipe on Epicurious.

Achtung, Baby

Zoe Williams comes through and grabs the coveted Guiteau Monday tag with a blistering takedown of food culture, ca. 2008. To  wit:

Just take one example in this week's news - medics are, apparently, worried about "drunkorexics", which is to say people (generally young women) who offset the calories they imbibe through booze by not eating during the day. Now, people with eating disorders frequently suffer from other addictions - among them, to alcohol - but that has been common knowledge for decades. There is no new evidence here at all; a story like this is simply an example of this persistent urge we have to pathologise our relationship with food.

Obesity only ever comes in "epidemics". "Orexia", I believe, will soon be an umbrella term for any life-threatening disease that only exists in the imaginations of cultural pundits. It will be very annoying for actual anorexics, but they will be too busy not eating to notice. We aggrandise simple things - greed on the one hand, dieting or even plain calorie-counting on the other - because we cannot otherwise justify the feverish seriousness with which we approach this straightforward business.

The whole thing, is pretty much like this, reminding me simultaneously of the noise a grenade makes in the old school Apple 2e version of Castle Wolfenstein, and when Rakim slams it when it's done and makes sure it's broke.

Bottle half empty

Seattle bans bottled water at municipal events. In the wake of similar actions in San Francisco and Chicago, one has to wonder if the inevitable blizzard of plastic water bottles wherever two or three are gathered -- think of any footage from an NBA/NFL "war room" on draft day -- will join the Styrofoam clamshell as an icon of environmental backwardness. The challenge now, it seems, is not so much to find a way to encourage people to drink water, like what's in the toilet, as Frito points out, but to monetize drinking water like the water that's in the toilet.

This half-empty outlook may be the result of spending some time with Althusser, and trying to persuade the kiddies that there might be something to this ideology thing of his. My pessimism in re getting folks to drink tap water comes out of a recognition about the bleeding edge of green consumerism these days, namely Whole Foods' elimination of single use paper or plastic bags. This is a good thing, I am pretty sure. Plastic bags suck.* As a large scale retailer, with a brand linked to green values, it behooves Whole Foods to do things like this. However, there are any number of things  like this that would have a similar, or greater impact on the environment. If WF limited its parking lots to cars with two or more shoppers, or introduced bike valets, that would make a big difference. (Gurgling Cod World HQ is 30 miles from the nearest WF, so when I make that trip to get local produce, I ought to force myself to listen to Alanis over and over. I do not, but I do digress.) There are other things, I am sure. However, the front where this war is being fought is in terms of the material of the bags we use when we shop. The very thing that denotes our green-ness, or environmental conscientiousness, also reinscribes us as  consuming -- the choice between  paper/plastic and reusable is a binary that does not readily permit us to imagine not having a bag at all. I'd expect no less from a chain that festoons its kiddie shopping carts with a "Customer in training" flag.

*What Poly Styrene said bears repeating.

Occupational hazard?

If you write about food for a living, and you've seen your feet this year, throw both hands in the air! That there are several food pros I can think of who do not buy their pants in the Mr. Creosote section suggests, just maybe, that corpulence is not to food writer as black lung is to miner, or as RSI is to slaughterhouse worker.

More good news...

Anchower, I know. The cinetrix and I were in San Juan, getting our mofongo on. Deets tk, but in the meantime, news that an animated  Rachael Ray-as-kid chef learning to cook cartoon is in the pipeline. I was hoping that Bourdain and Dora the Explorer would drink fingernail moonshine with Cambodian river pirates, instead, but I will point out that such a program would be unthinkable with G**dia, and leave you to wonder if that is an implication of Rach, G**dia, the Cod for thinking it, or you for recognizing the truth of the statement.

Not so fresh...

Thanks to the Bourdain/Richman contretemps, the word "douchebag" is on the lips of more food blogs than usual.  I think it's a damn shame that Richman gets associated with this product. Unlike Alan Richman, your Summer's Eve or Massengil Disposable never took a shit on a dining mecca struggling to get back on its feet after a disaster. And, a douchebag can be useful if you are feeling not so fresh:

Hormel Foods and Cargill are expected to begin labeling meat sold at Target stores that has been treated with carbon monoxide in order to make it look bright red and appear fresh. Essentially, the label will warn customers against trusting their eyes to assess the freshness of meat which has been doctored to appear fresh by fooling the eye. Wha? The label will read: "Color is not an accurate indicator of freshness. Refer to use or freeze by" date.

Perhaps some of those meat judging wizards from the WSJ could sort out some solution to a situation where you treat meat artificially to make it look fresh.  Back in the day, prostitutes would wear merkins to conceal scarring resulting from venereal disease. Caveat Target Emptor.