THE GURGLING COD

Add Boulud

Watch out, Holsapple and Stamey -- Daniel Boulud is gonna jack McFly's Delorean, come back to 1977, and sue your asses for starting the DB's.

Whoah, Atlanta

Unlimited food and beer with purchase of a $60 ticket at Braves games. Based on my time in the Atlanta airport, this would be a public health crisis of massive proportions, and time to buy stock in the company that makes that little cart that Paul Prudhomme uses. That is, it would be if anyone actually went to Braves games. I've said it before, but this charade has lasted long enough. The Braves should move back to Boston. A city that cannot sell out playoff games does not deserve a baseball franchise. There are still Braves loyalists in New England.  This is an older fan base, but the Braves would do better with folks priced out of Fenway  than they are now. In time, they could be the Clippers of baseball. Remarkably, the Home of the Braves is still more or less intact. With the demise of BU's football program, and the collapse of women's professional soccer, Nickerson Field is ready to welcome back the Braves. Certainly, the cash-strapped kleptocracy that is Boston University would welcome the rental revenue an MLB franchise would generate. Here's a map for Braves ownership. 

Location, Location, and Location

A recent, disappointing trip to Farmers Diner 2.0 led to  reflections on the vagaries of eating locally. In its original iteration, FD was way ahead of the eat local curve, serving all local produce in a diner setting, no mean feat, considering its Barre, VT location. As one might expect, the all-root vegetable menus of the winter months, and other issues, made it difficult to sustain FD, and it shut in 2005.
In its new iteration, and new location in Quechee, VT, the all-local policy has been relaxed. Local items are in red, and to be sure, the meal you eat here does more to support local agriculture than the meal you might eat down the road.* I just wish the food had been a bit more interesting -- enlisting local local farmers loses some of its charm if the end result is semi-righteous pub grub.* In particular, I was sorry that the only condiment available for my burger was the same high fructose corn syrup-laden stuff from Heinz I could have gotten at Wendy's. I suspect the menu may be a reflection of the new location. FD 2.0 is hard by Quechee Gorge, around which are a vaguely Humbertty cluster of motels, miniature golf courses, and Quechee Gorge Village,** the home  of FD 2.0. The obvious appeal of the new location is that it gets a lot more tourist traffic than downtown Barre, and the folks in the minivans want cheeseburgers, dammit.
But there is the rub. You do not have to be Alanis to see the irony in traveling long distances to eat local food. I am not sure how many folks make special trips to FD 2.0, turn around and go home, but the question does point to a larger one about travel or tourism related to eating locally. Certainly, it takes less energy to get an organic lamb chop to us than it does to get our fat asses to where the lamb chop is. Taken to its extreme, agoraphobics who take all their meals from Peapod would be doing the most to reduce energy consumption related to food distribution, and no one wants that. I do, however, want to point out that the distance the diner travels is an unheralded component of the food miles equation.
More generally, however, it is hard to beat the model of sustainability that Messrs Mould, Hart, and Norton developed in Minneapolis in 1985:

*Curiously, the Google Local algorithm picked up far-off Burger Kings, but did not mention the Mickey D's next to the BK  in West Lebanon. I had not known you had to buy your way onto Google Local, but it seems like you do.
**Formerly a cornfield, by the way.

Another word for pirate treasure?

Why, I think it's salmonella.

The Mondays

I was getting ready to weigh in on some East Coast bias stuff rattling around the blogosphere, but then I remembered it was a Monday in July, and most folks are a) still at the beach b) in no mood for serious beef. So instead, a treat. Apache's thugged-out take on 3rd Wave feminism, with a genius homemade video consisting of still photographs from some sort of South Beach-manque fashion show, emceed by a sweaty guy in a wrestling mask:

Add Mackey

The Whole Foods CEO chatroom story seems to have legs. And Joe Nocera* at the Times takes a very dim view:

It takes a special chief executive to make Patrick Byrne of Overstock.com look good, but the C.E.O. of Whole Foods,  John Mackey, has managed to pull it off. Like Mr. Mackey, Mr. Byrne makes regular appearances on Internet chat boards, and he even uses a pseudonym (“Hannibal” is a favorite) just as Mr. Mackey did. But unlike Mr. Mackey, he’s never hidden the fact that he’s the author of the posts. One of the worst things about the Internet is that it allows people to assume other identities and do and say things they would never do or say in “real life.” For a chief executive to assume a fake name to trash competitors and promote his own company is reprehensible.

Nocera goes on to opine that what Mackey did was possibly worthy of both a pink slip and stock manipulation charges, but I did want to point out that Nocera goes in for shooting the medium.* I'd argue that there are many worse things about the internet than the way it "allows people to assume other identities and do and say things they would never do in 'real llife.'" Not because I want to weigh the merits of this kind of anonymity vs. say The Hasselhoffian Recursion, but because this kind of anonymity is possible with any form of graphic communication. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay were not dumping on a rival supermarket chain, but they wrote under the name Publius, rather than their own. Same thing with Martin Marprelate. Arguably, the United States Constitution and the Reformation are more worthwhile than buying up rival supermarket chains. I'd argue that there are times when assuming other identies than what's on your birth certificate is ethical, and times that it is not -- this is certainly wide open for debate. But it is worth focusing on the messenger, rather than the medium.  It is certainly easier to pretend to be someone you are not thanks to the internet, but it is a function of movable type, not Movable Type.

*Hell hath no fury, I guess -- this is the same Joe Nocera who was extremely pro-Nocera during the Pollan/Mackey dialogue last summer.

WF CEO LJ? WTF!?*

A little bit out of scope, but in case you missed it, the CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey, whom you may remember as Michael Pollan's opponent in last summer's iteration of Tyson v. Secretariat, is in a bit of hot water because of those darn internets. I'd agree with Mark Cuban, who told the WSJ that "It's a huge mistake for a CEO of a public company to post under an undisclosed handle." The WSJ piece was headlined "Executives get the Blogging Bug," and the title points to a subtler aspect of this business -- pretty much everything on the Internet that is not email, cats, or pornography gets called a blog -- it's hard for me to see how a series of press releases from a corporation or its CEO qualify as a blog in any useful sense of the word. Posting about your own company or a rival's anonymously on a message board is a different issue entirely. On the WF blog, Mackey speaks, as it were, ex cathedra, as "Harodeb" on a stock discussion board, he gets into territory that seems pretty sketch.

*The Chief Executive Officer of Whole Foods has a Livejournal? What the fuck?

I'm the Water, I'm the Dishes, I'm the Soap

Yesterday's DI/DO had a piece by a working mother who cooks dinner for her family on weeknights. As it happens, I was raised by a working mother who cooked dinner for her family on weeknights, so I was a bit sad, if not surprised, that this endeavor was presented as being like a solo ascent of K2 without oxygen. On the other hand, in the wake of other recent stories about what working mothers can't manage, it was good to see one focused on positive possibilities. I gave the article a quick skim, and it seemed like a reasonable proposition -- doable, with planning and foresight. However, there was something missing -- her husband. The article did not mention that the author was a single mom -- I went back and read with more care -- he was there after all, having a nice glass of zinfandel, and opting for the works on his pita pizza. Shopping, chopping, cleaning up? No sign of him there. There are as many ways to divide up the housekeeping/parenting pie as there are domestic partnerships, but in 2007, it seems odd to be making this gesture in the direction of the Peg Bracken era.

Sleater-Kinney, "Little_Babies"

Boulud -- in yr Bowereez, disrespectn yr institutionz

I recognize that this actually falls under the category of pissing on the last nail in the coffin, but still, ganking the name of a once-cherished punk rock cradle to sell $29 burgers seems, you know,  kind of a bitch move. 

Remy is an Artist? I Beg to differ

So, it turns out that movie about the rat who cooks is blowing up like a dropped box of Ohio Blue Tips. Bourdain likes it a lot -- Ruhlman looooves it:

My favorite moment, and perhaps the most important moment of the film, is the critic’s embrace of the dish and the epiphany that even the critic's finest work, cannot hold up to the worst trash by an artist. This critic acknowledges, as so few do, that simply striving for art is harder, more courageous, more valuable, than all the efforts of the best critic working at the height of his or her powers.

I've yet to see the movie, but I've read enough criticism and experienced enough art that I must respectfully disagree with Ruhlman. If I had one day to live, I'd rather re-read Samuel Johnson's life of Milton than any novel I can think of. In a more prosaic vein, most of the time, I'd rather read an Anthony Lane review of most current Hollywood films than see the film myself. These are examples where the deck is stacked in the critics favor, and there are cases where Ruhlman's strata apply -- speaking in very broad terms, it is not hard to think of a painter who contributed more to our civilization than Clement Greenberg has -- but the distinction Ruhlman makes points to a larger question in contemporary food culture.

In this context, the implicit assumption behind Ruhlman's distinction between the work of the artist and the work of the critic is that the chef is an artist. I don't think that is the case. Let me explain as carefully as I can -- I do not mean this in any sense as a slight against the work that chefs do, which enriches my life more than the work of painters, poets, or novelists. Our culture's tendency to use "artist" and "poet" as a term of approbation for hairdressers, bakers, and point guards makes it seem that asserting that someone is not an artist is to insult them, but it is a question of kind, rather than degree. Even for the most exalted chef, "artisan" seems more apt. For an artist, creativity, originality and self-expression is the fundamental issue -- for an artisan, these same aims apply, but they have to be balanced with consistency. When it is time to make the doughnuts, the people who pay your rent are expecting them to be like last time, and that applies to Fred the Baker at your local Dunkin as well as to Tom Keller's "coffee and donuts." Obviously, the degree of creativity varies over a range -- there is more art in a meal at Alinea than a meal prepared by a sandwich artist around the corner, but even at Alinea, Achatz, et al, are obliged to produce multiple iterations of the same idea, in a way, that say, Picasso was not obliged to keep banging out Demoiselles d'Avignons for another 75 covers. 

It is precisely because the chef-as-artist formulation is dubious that people insist on it with such vigor. In a similar vein, you do not have to watch much NASCAR before you will hear someone assert that "there is no quesiton these drivers are athletes." You never hear commentators say that during NBA games, because no one wonders if basketball players are, in fact, athletes. I suspect that the idea of the chef-as-artist, inevitable, given their current veneration in our culture, may be at the root of the difficulty folks had in understanding why M. Vigneron is not a plagiarist.