THE GURGLING COD

Mark Bittman - your early favorite for the 2014 Streep Award

As you know, the Streep Award is awarded every year to the individual who has done the most to piss all over Julia Child's life and work. The award is named after Meryl Streep and her grotesque and hamfisted portrayal of Child in the movie based on the book based on Julie Powell's blog about Child's book. The Cod will not rest until Streep is brought to justice, AKA forced to spend eternity on a Carnival cruise ship sailing between Tampa and Jacksonville performing a one-woman adaptation of Mama Mia. 

But the Streep is strong in Mark Bittman. Evidently, the way to praise one icon of American cooking is to denigrate another: 

In a way, Hazan was the anti-Julia Child, and Child had a sense of that. In a conversation shortly before her own death, Child said to me: “I don’t get the whole thing with Italian cooking. They put some herbs on things, they put them in the oven and they take them out again.” Exactly.

Exactly. Hazan exists in a universe that Child created, but whatever. It's also symptomatic of a broader problem in writing, which is that women are often presented to the public in pairs w/ some sort of presumed rivalry expressed in some sort of binary. Madonna and Cyndi Lauper, Adele and Amy Winehouse, etc. Meanwhile, men exist in more nuanced and complex constellations. But I digress, The lede is even worse, and does more of the same pairing stuff: 

Marcella Hazan, who died Sept. 29 at the age of 89, never intended to bring real Italian cooking to America. But no matter how accidental her impact, it can hardly be overstated. What Alice Waters did for restaurants, Hazan did for home cooks, demonstrating that the simple treatment of decent ingredients leads to wonderful dishes.

Say what? I have my doubts about Alice, but again, there is an order of magnitude difference, Hazan is the Diana Kennedy of Italian cooking, while Alice Waters has transformed living in Northern California into an ideology. 

Also, it's curious to read this so soon after the much discussed Time Inc sausagefest shitshow, in that Bittman's points of reference for Hazan are other female cooks/authors. It would be interesting to do a more systematic comparison, but for the sake of comparison, this remembrance of Charlie Trotter invokes a whole bunch of dudes: Grant Achatz, Wylie Dufresne, Ferran Adria, Daniel Boulud, Thomas Keller, Heston Blumenthal, Tetsuya Wakuda and Pierre Herme, and not one lady. 

More generally, is food writing really this much like the swimming pool at Bob Jones University, in that it can be occupied by men or women, but not both? 

Edible Schoolyard, the new Cannonball Run?

Now and again, the blog and the day job collide. (With sexy results!) Via the Atlantic:

"This fall at the University of California, Berkeley, a new course surveys the political, social, environmental, and gustatory stakes of modern food production. In his Edible Education 101: The Rise and Future of the Food Movement, Berkeley journalism professor and best-selling author Michael Pollan yields the spotlight to other experts: Though he appears frequently as introducer, moderator, and panelist, the classes are focused on an all-star cast of guest lecturers. Taken together, these food A-listers and innovators provide a compelling, comprehensive portrait of 21st-century eating. Each lecture is available, for free and in full, via UC Berkeley's YouTube channel."

Call me finnicky, but an "all star cast of guest lecturers" sounds like taking the principles used for casting the Cannonball Run, and applying them to higher education.* It gets better:

Edible Education 101 commemorates the 40th anniversary of Chez Panisse, the Berkeley restaurant founded by chef Alice Waters, whose culinary approach -- fresh food, prepared simply and sourced well -- has influenced several generations of eaters. This year, Waters has rebranded her Chez Panisse Foundation as the Edible Schoolyard Project, which will seek to recreate the Foundation's Berkeley-based teaching garden in other school systems throughout the nation. Waters thought that a Berkeley course, taught by Pollan, would be a fitting way to usher in the new era of student outreach.

I know the Cod has a few readers in higher ed. As a favor, send your curriculum committee a course "commemorating" the anniversary of a popular local restaurant, and let me know what your colleagues, chairs, and deans have to say.

*That is to say, getting paid to hang out with your pals. Nice work if you can get it, but you can't usually get it at a university.

Bay Area Bib Bluster. Or, SF restos are rubber, and Mr. Bib is glue?

So, the Eater asked var and sund for an assessment of the impact of Michelin stars on the USA, and Bay Area restaurant critic* delivers the most Bay Area restaurant critic answer ever:

On the whole, I think the Bay Area Michelin Guide has been a force for the good -- for a certain class of restaurants. Otherwise, it's kind of irrelevant.

Both the San Francisco and Los Angeles guides were originally criticized for not getting California's lower-key, informal style of dining. That's still true in SF — the only starred restaurant this year doing simple, classic, California-Mediterranean food is Frances. Others cooking at the same level, like Chez Panisse, Camino, and Range, don't make the cut. People come from all over the world to San Francisco precisely for Cal-Med cuisine. It's what we've been excelling at for 20 years. So I think Michelin demonstrates its irrelevance there.

You read that correctly: "By failing to rate our restaurants highly enough, the Michelin Guide demonstrates its irrelevance." 

*Shockingly, not Bauer. 

You can talk about Nigeria...

Two things on the worldsaving front. Bittman's food manifesto is all laudable, but seems a bit of an eight minute abs thing, and is two years after Michael Pollan's rather pithier take. 

Elsewhere, to return, again to the Freakonomics ish, I did point out that Alice was quite diplomatic about Adria, et al. But! she does get a dig in at the end w/r/t  molecular gastronomy:

"It’s not a kind of way of eating that we need to really live on this planet together."

This is certainly true, but it suggests that the person making the statement is focused on ways of eating that we need to really live on this planet together, and is not, say, a groovier Bay Area version of Sirio Maccioni. Check out that eighty dollar prix fixe at Alice's restaurant tonight and decide for yourself. 

Betimes, BDP can play us off, and explain the post title.

Thanks as always to Penny Pascal for the peerless photoshopping digging up archival photo of Alice's turn for USA for Africa. 

Freakonomics on food, part II, or Where have you gone, Don King?

Breaking this into two posts, but the aforementioned Freakonomics on food thing also included a lazy, half-assed digression that is worth savoring all by itself:

In many ways, Myhrvold’s approach is the opposite of the “slow food” movement that has taken certain quadrants of this country by storm in recent years — at Alice Waters's famed Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, for instance. Whereas Myhrvold arms himself with a vacuum desiccator, a blowtorch and a 60,000 RPM centrifuge, Waters doesn’t even own a microwave. (In the podcast, she tells us about the time — the one time — she ate a Big Mac.) As you can probably imagine, Waters doesn’t love the idea of scientists invading the kitchen, or of molecular gastronomy:

Waters: I can’t say that I care a lot about it. I can’t say that.

SJD: And tell me why.

Waters: Because I’m trying to get back to a kind of taste of food for what it is.

SJD: And molecular gastronomy is trying to accomplish what in your view?

Waters: In my view it’s to, you know, make it into something you can’t imagine, surprise you. That’s not to say that I haven’t been delightfully surprised. It’s not that. It’s that I am so hungry for the taste of the real that I’m just not able to get into that which doesn’t feel real to me. It’s a kind of scientific experiment, and I think that there are good scientists and crazy old scientists that can be very amazing. But it’s more like a museum to me. It’s not a kind of way of eating that we need to really live on this planet together.

There is no shortage of throwing Alice under the bus -- literally almost sometimes -- around these parts, but it's sort of good to see her not take the bait. To describe molecular gastronomy and slow food as opponents is not so much wrong as unhelpful, and getting a soundbite from Waters on molecular gastronomy is almost exactly as useful as getting a soundbite from Mike Leach on the triple option. 

Also, the Times identifies Waters as "the godmother of the slow food movement," which must be surprising news for Carlo Petrini. Maybe they have Wikipedia blocked at the Times.  

A San Francisco Football Treat?

Those of you intrepid to follow the Cod on Twitter may notice a robust subsidiary interest in college football. (And griefing the MLA convention, but I digress.)   I blame it on the day job, and a bunch of smart folks who would be fun to read if they wrote about youth golf. Longtime readers may have noticed an ambivalence about the Bay Area in general, and Alice Waters in particular. These various strands come to a rare intersection tomorrow as the Eagles of Boston College and the Wolfpack of Nevada meet in the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl. Traditionalists will remember that, until last year, the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl was the Emerald Bowl, sponsored by Diamond Foods. Diamond Foods is a West Coast nut concern, so the sponsoring a West Coast bowl made a bit of sense. 

However, we now have a new sponsor -- Kraft Foods, the folks who make the orange mac and cheese, the folks who peddled the crappy fake parm with disposable grater, the folks who lobbied to make it easier for them to call the stuff in green cans "parmesan," the architects of Cheez Wiz, etcetera, etcetera, are the title sponsor for a bowl game in a city that is the home of sustainable and organic, and according to Michael Bauer at least, the citadel of all that is good in American foodways. It's embarrassing, to say the least. 

Like so many problems, it's an easy one to solve with money. A sponsor that fits better with the city's brand, and this momentary hiccup is forgotten. What SF needs is some sort of iconic figure that typifies the city's commitment to culinary righteousness. Through the good offices of the Peerless Photoshopping of Ms. Penny Pascal, we have a rendition of the trophy for the 2012 Chez Panisse Sustain-a-Bowl!

Maybe Alice Waters needs a narcocorrido?

Before going to sleep last night, the Cod read a terrifying NYer piece on Mexico as a "captive state," in that law enforcement, debt collection, etc., in large chunks of the country have fallen under the control of drug cartels. And yet, fresh off his Beyonce/Bayless repast, President Felipe Calderon is eliminating junk food from Mexico's schools. Despite being unable to provide, like, law and order, Calderon appears to be doing a better job of fighting obesity than his compadres north of the border. Alice Waters is all over this issue, right? Is it possible that better PR would help? If Calderon can do what he's doing, even when his enemies have all the good songs, perhaps Alice can fight the forces entrenched against reform with an (organic, sustainable, kale-oriented narcocorrido of her own. (See below for an example.) Can someone write a song like this about the Edible Schoolyard program? 

One of those "N"s is for "News"?

The Cod, heroically, is restraining self from making Alice Waters/edible jailyard joke here at the expense of CNN:

For a crop of Florida inmates, green acres is the place to be. Five days a week, a vanload of inmates in blue jumpsuits makes a 15-minute trip to the University of Florida's West Florida Research and Education Center from Berrydale Forestry Camp, a low-risk satellite facility of Century Correctional Institution. The program took root in 2009, when the 650-acre publicly funded research farm faced some harsh state budget cuts. Short on hands and strapped for cash, the research center decided to reach out to an unlikely source: the Florida Department of Corrections, said William Wendt, the Alternative Crops Program manager at the research farm. As for the inmates, they most certainly reap what they sow. In the winter, it's collards, cabbage and turnips. Spring brings snap peas, sweet corn and tomatoes.

They reap what they sow! Get it? Me neither. Also, this is news? They have been using convict labor to grow crops at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, aka Angola, aka The Farm, for more than a century. But Florida vs. Louisiana? Hey kids!  Let's put some bleachers out in the sun and have an all Ess-Eee-Cee convict 4H show! What? We already do?* Kind of? Cool!

Similarly, the Woodward and Bernsteins at  MSNBC have uncovered evidence of the popularity of bacon. Also popular? Naps. Fucking. Staying hydrated. Baby animals. Stop the presses.

*I'd never wanted to get involved in the hospitality industry before, but seeing these posters suffuses me with a calling: a calling to open a gay bar and decorate it exclusively with prison rodeo posters. Maybe a chain, even? Kind of like a gay Applebee's? I could call it... Gay Applebees!

Alice Waters -- the Axis Sally of the class wars?

For what feels like not the first time, The Cod is sad not to be counted among the varsity Waters-please cadre in the recent LAT story on folks who don't like St. Alice:

"Alice Waters, founder of Berkeley's Chez Panisse, is known worldwide for her unbending fidelity to locally grown food and organic agriculture. So why does she inspire such animosity?"

Alice being Alice, she manages almost immediately to answer the question:

Reporting from Berkeley - Upstairs in the packed cafe of Chez Panisse, Alice Waters is ensconced in a wood-paneled booth, looking at a kumquat souffle. She studies it solemnly, a judge appraising a defendant.

"Is it really as high as it should be?" she asks. "And why is it on such a big plate?" She pauses. "I wonder whether it needs a sauce. Is it brown enough? And why are these leaves under here?" Frowning, she takes one in her hand. "Are they kumquat leaves?" (They aren't.)

Jean-Pierre Moullé, the head chef, heard about it the next day. "She wasn't happy," he said, sighing. "We spent an hour in her office talking about it."

A revolutionary, yes, but unlike Thomas Paine and Che, a revolutionary with an hour to spend discussing a kumquat souffle. Better still, Caitlin Flanagan was "was just out of her depth and being provocative," when she pointed out that intensive agricultural involvement is what many students go to school to flee. The willful disingenousness has got to be deliberate -- the clincher:

Waters herself occasionally chows down on a grass-fed beef hot dog (organic mustard and bun) at Let's Be Frank in Los Angeles, which is owned by a friend. But she takes a dim view of In-N-Out, though it touts fresh ingredients and hand-cut French fries. "It's probably better than any other chain," she said, "but it's not real or authentic. I'd rather eat from a street vendor in Sicily."

I, too, would rather be dining on fresh sea urchins plucked from the Adriatic by my personal Tadzio 2.0, instead of the bagel I just had, but the realities of my life impinge upon me in such a way that I cannot make that choice. Similarly, many of the folks who eat at In-N-Out, as keen as they might be to jet off to Palermo for a mess of sardines, are not able to join Alice for these little jaunts, and are happy that In-N-Out offers something less wretched, and actually tasty, than what is otherwise available. The blithe entitlement makes her a class provocateur on the order of an Axis Sally for the 21st century.

Add Berkeley, or California still knows how to party

 Bay Area shenanigans have been on the Cod radar recently, and that keeps up today: Via IHE, news that Berkeley residents are not happy about having fraternity houses as neighbors. Can't blame 'em, and glad that my 'Fessering self does not have to live next to my Studenting self of some years ago at #5 Fraternity Row. But it being Berkeley, I figured there would be a wrinkle, so I clicked through to the local story, which featured the picture at right. The red Solo cup will be familiar to anyone who has attended an instiution of higher education in the United States, but the caption reveals that this is definitely not a Nashville, (or a Knoxville, or Fayettville, or Madison, or Austin) party:

"Discarded liquor and champagne bottles litter the ground outside a fraternity house on the campus of the University of California, Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2010 in Berkeley, Calif. Neighbors are filing suit against the fraternities, alleging excessive noise and underage drinking. (D. Ross Cameron/Staff)"

Champagne? The lads are just making it easy for us. For those of you who are hazy on undergraduate lifestyles, I'll remind you that the two directives governing the average college alcohol purchase are 1) as much as possible 2) as cheap as possible. As in, say, whole pallets of Busch Light. Not sure if the boys in Berkeley are insisting on grower Champagne, or even senttling for nonvintage, but it's amusing to imagine the lads ordering their pledges down to Kermit's for another bottle.

But lest we forget, it is the flagship university in the state that's untouchable like Elliot Ness*: *Love Tupac, but want to move to a state where a blog can marry this video of Justin Timberlake singing and dancing to California Love.