THE GURGLING COD

Lifestyles of the local and sustainable

I am not a fan of industrial meat, remain pro-carnivore, and generally support artisanal food endeavors, but something about this offering* makes me uncomfortable:

Fleisher’s Grass-fed and Organic Meats carries premium beef, pork, lamb, veal, poultry, dairy, cheese and eggs from regional farmers who have raised their animals on a primarily grass-based diet or according to organic standards. These animals live natural stress-free lives and are not treated with antibiotics, hormones or fed animal-by-products, therefore they produce healthy, great-tasting meat.

"Primarily grass-fed or organic" is a bit more amorphous than one might wish, but the kicker is later --"These animals live natural stress-free lives..." Here, we seem to get dangerously close to imagining that these animals have lifestyles,  which is an anthropomorphic bridge too far for me.**  It is  hard not to imagine subsequent pitches like this:

The mass of livestock lead lives of quiet desperation, but not the ones that become Fleisher's Grass-Fed and Organic Meats!

The quotation above I made up, but not the one below:

“We wanted to create a place where people can come and feel good about what they eat. Not solely because it is delicious, but because they know that the animals were raised and slaughtered humanely; that they are buying a product that doesn’t contain antibiotics or hormones.”

 

I realize that I am occupying a narrow peninsula between The Gulf of Meat is Murder and Why Else Would They Make Animals Out of Meat Bay, but it just might be possible to put too much emphasis on this issue of how good we can feel when we eat meat. For one, there are the related questions of the welfare of the animal, and the healthiness of the product for humans, and then there is the question of slaughtering. An abbatoir is not a hospice. There is no slaughtering facility in the country where Elsie and Wilbur and Foghorn sit around, listen to some Elliot Smith tunes, and quitely overdose on barbituates. Meat requires the violent death of animals. It is better if it is more humane, but the difference between an outfit like this and Tyson  is  one of degree as much as kind. Ethical carnivorism requires an awareness of Fred Shero's famous analysis of the difference between bacon and eggs -- "the chicken makes a contribution - the pig makes a commitment." Conceiving of meat, whether you choose to eat it or not, as wholly humane or stress free, dishonors that commitment. Make no mistake: I am all for businesses like Fleisher's. I wish there was one down the road from me. I dream of the day when a significant proportion of our meat comes from places like this. I do think, however, it is possible for the cloak of righteousness to fit a bit more loosely than it does here.

*I learned about this farm, because they are sponsoring a showing of "The Meatrix 2 1/2." Call me cynical, but I had a hard time getting past the idea that the film in this iteration was essentially using the suffering of factory animals, and meatpackers, to market artisanal foods.

**I mean, personally, for me. If you, like, want to send emails to Barbaro, that's totally cool.

No truckers were harmed in the making of this brunch.

Brunch is not usually the most thought-provoking meal of the day, but the what I encountered this Sunday at Little Giant has had me musing all the way home to the Upstate. The brunch menu includes the Trucker's Breakfast:

Soft-scrambled eggs, hand-sliced slab bacon, andouille sausage, wild mushrooms and tomato gravy, all atop grilled Texas toast, side of housemade molasses baked beans. $15

I did not check for Teamster cards, but the clientele seemed to be about what you would expect for Sunday around noon on the corner of Broome and Orchard -- likely to be employed in sectors of the economy other than transportation. The food, also,  is not what you might expect to find at a truckstop, or similar establishment. Thus, we have people who are not real truckers sitting down to eat food that is not what real truckers generally eat.* The point here is not to suggest that this is somehow inauthentic or misleading, because no one actually expects to be able to toast an actual knight of the highway with a Grey Goose screwdriver. And yet, this idea of an actual trucker eating his actual breakfast is critical to the experience of eating a fancy brunch on the LES. Indeed, the specter of Waffle House haunts the entire proceeding, and that factor is critical. The management serves food that it knows is much better than Huddle House or 76 to patrons who know it is much better than Cracker Barrel or Bob Evans. But pretending that it is a trucker's breakfast, by subtraction, works to highlight the aspects of the meal that one would not encounter at a truck stop. Thus "hand sliced bacon," "wild mushrooms" and suchlike take on an additional cachet. The ghost of the trucker makes the $15 plate of scrambled eggs make sense.

The biscuit and gravy proceeds through a similar logic:

Buttermilk-chive biscuit, two poached eggs, thick Canadian bacon, roasted garlic-herb gravy. $12

This dish actually has more in common with some curious offshoot of Eggs Benedict than with biscuits and gravy. For the sake of comparison, Chick-fil-a's biscuits and gravy, pictured at left. Little Giant's B&G is real food with real ingredients, Chick-fil-a's is chillingly monochromatic. Again, presuming that the LG clientele has some vague notion of normal biscuits and gravy, labeling this dish thus signals its superiority through its inauthenticity. "Delightfully inauthentic" might not seem like a quotation to clip and save, but it is not damning with faint praise.  Need another bloody, Jean?

*Based on a recent and fortuitious conversation the cinetrix had with the long-haul trucker who hangs out at our local, I gather that the corner of Broome and Orchard is a location that inimical everything a trucker might seek in a restaurant.

A holiday fairytale: or of shit and scallions

It is not hard to snicker a little bit at the thought that people who eat at Taco Bell might experience some digestive woes. I mean, isn't that the point? But the Post has an angle that might arrest the chuckles:

"Basically, a lot of people have been cut; it's really unfortunate," said a manager at a Long Island Taco Bell, who asked not to be identified because of a gag order the food chain has put on its workers.

"For example, I have a single mother who has two kids. I had to cut her because I don't have any hours - and it's right before Christmas. I just feel Taco Bell is being punished for something they had no control over."

I'm with LI Taco Bell Manager right to the end. It is at least a debatable question whether Taco Bell has any control over its ability to purchase green onions not tainted with e. coli. If memory serves, a probe of a recent tainted salsa at a Chi Chi's revealed that scallions were the culprit there as well. How does shit get on scallions? Evidently, the kids who pick them do not get bathroom breaks, so they are reduced to shitting in the fields from which they are harvesting. It might be possible for an organization the size of Taco Bell might be able to prevail upon its vendors to allow their employees bathroom breaks, or to patronize vendors that already do. To review: barbaric labor practices at one end of the supply chain cost single moms jobs at the other. Yay, capitalism.

But nobody shat on these green onions, I guarantee you:

Booker T & the MG's,  "Green_Onions" Stax, 1962

I walk the line between good and EVOO; or Ray/Kimball II

When last we looked in on the adorable twosome of Chris Kimball and Rach Ray, I made the mistake of working directly from the Grinder callout from the Kimball article, rather than savoring it in all its printed glory. Big mistake. To review, Grinder had, and I boosted:

In cooking, there are folks who are fundamentally curious as to process … and sympathetic toward the notion of culinary education…. Others are content to believe that cooking is about no more than positive attitude—anyone with sufficient enthusiasm can cook a great meal. This golden age of the American amateur has been a long time coming.*

But it gets so much better. The very next sentence:

"In the 1959 movie Some Like it  Hot, Jack Lemmon joined an all-girl band and ended up in a sleeper car with Marilyn Monroe all through sheer bluster, boundless comic energy, and a borrowed dress. Now there is a guy who could have had a successful cooking show."

To reiterate, the entire  paragraph reads thus:

In cooking, there are folks who are fundamentally curious as to process - why bad things happen to good recipes - and sympathetic toward the notion of culinary education. Readers of this publication fall into that category. Others are content to believe that cooking is about no more than positive attitude—anyone with sufficient enthusiasm can cook a great meal. This golden age of the American amateur has been a long time coming. In the 1959 movie Some Like it  Hot, Jack Lemmon joined an all-girl band and ended up in a sleeper car with Marilyn Monroe all through sheer bluster, boundless comic energy,  and a borrowed dress. Now there is a guy who could have had a successful cooking show.

Exactly. Even without the preceding rabbit-hunting vignette, or the lede where he describes telling his eleven year-old about the "birds and  the bees,"* this shit is bananas. To begin with, Kimball pisses on his own shoes with the Jack Lemmon reference. He is, as far as I can deduce, attempting to malign Rach and her ilk by comparing her to Jack Lemmon. Considering that most sane people would rather flip through stills of Jack Lemmon's colonoscopy than watch Christopher Kimball on TV, the insult is somewhat reminiscent of the famous incident where Jim Rome kept calling Jim Everett "Chris." Person A cannot insult person B by comparing them to a far-superior person C.  Is Kimball saying that the only difference between him and Rach is bluster, comic energy, and a borrowed dress? I have a dress he can borrow, anyway.

More concerning, and this is where you see Chris circling the wagons, is in the claim that readers of his publication know that it takes more than enthusiasm to cook a good meal. The category, you will recall, is "folks who are fundamentally curious as to process - why bad things happen to good recipes - and sympathetic toward the notion of culinary education."
Three points:
1) This business of using words like "folks," pretending to live in Vermont, etc.** creates the impression of a Garrison Keillor manque, and I'd get out of showbiz or look for work as a safari fluffer before I aspired to that particular role.
2) Curiosity about process = "why bad things happen good recipes." Again, the guiding premise of CI is most cooks fuck up most dishes most of the time.
3) "Culinary education":  There is very little education in CI, or at least very little evidence of an effort to release us from our self-imposed nonage. By presenting their rigorously tested recipes as little atolls of okayness in a sea of failure, CI offers none of the confidence that acutally learning to cook might provide.

This notion of enthusiasm, of amateurism, as inimical to good cooking is essential to the CI enterprise. Enthusiastic, amateur, cooks, like Rach or her followers, might well dare to attempt such risk feats as pound cake, without resorting to the CI apparatus.***

*Too late.
**Actually, there is a gracious manse in the South End, rendering Kimball a reverse faux Silas Lapham.
***By my count, that's two posts from me sticking up for Rach. On second thought, the Rach's team  may well have commissioned Kimball to be a total asshat, thus generating positive buzz for her.

New York Times out of my uterus!*

Or, more specifically, DI/DO readers out of my uterus, which, come to think of it, is not an organ I happen to own or operate. But the point remains. As a followup to last week's booze and pregnant ladies article, a not unpredictable flood of letters. Several focused on the question of risk, summarized by this dude from Seattle:

The risks of drinking while pregnant are akin to drinking and driving. Some very drunk people make it home; the occasional person with just a little alcohol and under unpredictable conditions has an accident.

Women are free to make their own decisions. But without question, if they drink they place their fetus at some level of risk for harm that they could also choose to avoid.

True enough, but since I pay for this space, I'll branch out a little from the normal content here and argue that this line of reasoning presents a dangerous bit of ideological sortilege under what appear to be fairly normative assertion. Usually, one thinks of risk in a reciprocal relationship with reward. We make thousands of these calculations every day -- accelerating on yellow will get me home that much sooner -- the pleasure I get from whole milk on my cereal outweighs the harm it does me. Some like the lottery, have a fairly legible structure of odds, while others are harder to quantify. In the letter quoted above, there is risk, but there is no reward. This letter's author, Douglas M. Bowden, recognizes the risk to the fetus, but fails to give any credit to the utility, in the form of pleasure, that the expectant mother might gain from the odd glass of wine. It may be that the rewards are not worth the risk, but to ignore the rewards is to suggest that the moment of conception extinguishes the life of the mother as a human, and renders her an incubator. The argument of this letter is hard to refute, as it is irresponsible to argue for more drinking by pregnant mothers, but it is important to recognize the ideology at work in assertions like the one this letter makes.

*Post title boosted from the Onion.

Apologies to Emily Litella

Does New York  need a ban on trans fats? I mean, is Divine even still alive?

Jesus...

An actual flyer in my actual mailbox. (Click to enlarge to enjoy this revolutionary theological innovation in all its glory.)

Reubens and the Rye Indifference Curve

Indignant over the aforementioned 37.50 reuben sandwich, I conducted an experiment. The result is to the left.  The math:
Rye: $2.39
Sauerkraut: $1.79
Corned Beef: $3.30
Swiss Cheese: $2.50
Total: $9.98
This was enough for a sandwich for me and for the cinetrix, indeed with enough left over for a third sandwich. I had mayo and ketchup and the other Russian dressing* components on hand, but I did not use all the bread or kraut, so I call that a push. Even factoring out the third sandwich, $9.98 for two sandwiches represents a savings of $65.02 over the Zingerman's kit. Granted, these figures are for Boars Head-level ingredients at a regular unfancy supermarket. Granted, one could make a better sandwich if you used better ingredients, but within a finite range. Like a good offensive line, the reuben is a series of components that blend into a cohesive whole. You could use cave-aged Emmenthaler, but that cheese is still going to be slathered with Russian dressing. It creates a situation of ingredient quality asymmetry. So in my opinion, in this context at least, the marginal utility of the Zingerman's ingredients is incommensurate with the increase in cost. And, with the $65.02 burning a hole in my pocket, I can treat myself to that fancy Old Portreo Rye, and have two cents left over.!

*We won the cold war. Can we abandon this "Thousand Island" charade?

49% to 51% good

It seems like just the other day that this very blog was joining the chorus of voices blaming the Rachael Ray for the decline of Western Civilization. Now, less than a week later, I am moved to come to her defense. Not because her self-fashioning of a  MILF-sans-kids  persona has become any more comprehensible to me, but because of her new antagonist:

In cooking, there are folks who are fundamentally curious as to process … and sympathetic toward the notion of culinary education…. Others are content to believe that cooking is about no more than positive attitude—anyone with sufficient enthusiasm can cook a great meal. This golden age of the American amateur has been a long time coming.*

It is telling that Kimball sees "enthusiasm" as the problem, considering that uniquely among publishers of food magazines, Kimball seems to view eating as a necessary burden, and one that only occasionally ceases to be part and parcel of the crushing burden of daily existence:

Finding good nachos can be difficult. The worst combine chips that taste like cardboard with squirts of unnaturally fluid "cheese" and watery jarred salsa. If you're lucky, a miniscule portion of guacamole is served on the side.

Mushroom risotto too often consists of bland, gummy rice and watery, flavorless mushrooms.

The typical backyard burger is tough, chewy, and dry, with at least half of the crust torn off and left stuck to the grill.

The receipts that solve these otherwise intractable problems are behind a sub-only firewall, natch. The problem/solution approach Cook's takes with virtually all of its receipts has its advantages, and there are certainly CI** receipts I enjoy making. However, I fear that this notion that receipts must be relentlessly tested creates scared cooks. I have to think that those who swear by the CI approach are unlikely to bring home an unfamiliar green they see at the market, or have the courage to improvise when it turns out there is, in fact, no cornstarch in the house. It is not all good, despite what Rach might insist, but I like to think that more of it is good than Kimball is willing to admit.

*I have to wonder just what role Kimball's Cook's Country in general, and the Maple Sausage and Waffle Casserole in particular, play in arresting this rising tide of amateurism.
**Apologies to my friends  in the Journals Division. I trust which mag is  which is clear from context.

Call me old-fashioned

But 37.50 seems like a lot of money to pay for a sandwich you have to make yourself.
On the other hand, a Reuben does sound like just the thing to set me up for a truly grueling day.