THE GURGLING COD

Squeeze my DI/DO, til the juice runs down my leg

A few odds and ends that escaped initial online perusal thrust themselves forward during and actual perusal of the actual fishwrap:
1) With close ties to the pickle community,  I guess I'm happy  that the tide of brine lifts all boats, and suchlike, but seems like the pickle sickle either got a raw deal from Flo Fab or needs to tweak its marketing material. I'll blame the "deconstructed" headline on the Times -- my lonely struggle against retarded misuse of this term is well-documented, but it's not as clear where this idea "fresh-squeezed" pickles come from. To clarify, these are preserved vegetables, (i.e. not fresh) shipped by mail order (i.e. not fresh either) -- "fresh" here is not so much inaccurate as irrelevant.

2) Sort of nit-picky and a little bit trainspotty, but this is a blog after all -- in the print edition, the image accompanying the lamb is the only one without a photo credit. Interestingly, this image also turns up on Dean and DeLuca's site, I imagine this thing happens frequently, but had not noticed it quite like this. Someone with a keener journalistic and visual sense than I would be better equipped to address this question, but it seems at least a tiny bit dubious to run a foto of a food item that was styled and shot by the vendor. Considering that the other 3 items in this week's Food Stuff are credited to Tony Cenicola, would it be that hard to get a shot of the actual lamb, rather than relying on D&D?

3) Finally, and continuing yesterday's gripe -- read the damn Pure Food and Drug Act, the legislation (putatively) inspired by Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. What The Jungle has to say about animal welfare is what the PF&DA has to say about animal welfare, which is what Daniel Plainview has to say about animal welfare, which is to say, sweet fuck all. So if  actually "someone gave Upton Sinclair a video camera and a Web link," the chances are that he would probably use it to find ways to talk about how capitalism sucks balls, that is to say, chews up families, etc.
To clarify, there are things about the meat industry that are bad for its material (animals) and things that are bad for its labor (people) these are not the same. The dude in the video waltzing the downer cow with a forklift might have a sick dental plan, for all we know, and conversely, there could be some poor undocumented soul getting RSI slaughtering heritage turkeys that got to spend a year at Wesleyan before they got shanked by some poor undocumented soul. Ironically, the article concludes with a hint at its own betrayal of Sinclair with its penultimate graf:

With research, legal fees, production costs and accommodations, an investigation can cost as much as $67,000, Ms. Newkirk said. And investigators who work for the Humane Society and PETA say it is getting tougher to get hired at plants because managers are increasingly suspicious of applicants who don’t fit the profile of the typical slaughterhouse worker, often a Spanish-speaking immigrant.

So, its hard to go undercover to help save the cows, because PETA folk have a hard time passing as meatpacking laborers, because all of the laborers are "often a Spanish-speaking immigrant"? Is there not more than one problem here? I care about humanely raised meat, but I also think that Upton Sinclair was onto something when he showed how Packingtown chews up families and spits them out. I care about cows, but I care about Mexicans, too.

Life imitates sports talk radio

It was LA, there were clones, and a Jungle looming in the background, but Jim Rome was nowhere to be seen. Instead:

The cloned steak was served medium rare.

Inside the unusually hushed atrium of Campanile, the guests lifted slices of beef onto their plates. Executive chef Mark Peel had prepared the porterhouse with fleur de sel and cracked black pepper before pan-searing it with a little canola oil — a simple preparation to highlight the meat's natural flavor.

It was the centerpiece of a dinner party convened to taste the future of food.

Fear and food are old friends. Cloned meat, for good reasons or bad, generates a public response not unlike what happens if you put carpaccio of monkey with five asses on the chalkboard as an appetizer special. So, in an effort to combat this reluctance, some folks in LA decided to put together a dinner party featuring a double-blind taste test of cloned and uncloned beef. As the article explains:

The cloned meat, provided by the Collins Cattle ranch in Frederick, Okla., was accompanied by corresponding cuts of conventional beef. All were prepared in identical fashion. Peel's idea was to conduct a double-blind taste test — a 21st century version of the Pepsi Challenge.

This is, as my father was fond of saying, a snare and a delusion, and the Pepsi Challenge analogy clarifies just why. People do not object to cloned food on gustatory grounds, but because the prospect, right or wrong, sketches them the hell out. To suggest that a taste test would allay these fears is a piece of moral sortilege worthy of an experienced three card monte dealer. By way of analogizing the analogy: if you turned a room full of fourth graders on a banana split made with BGH-treated milk, and a Vermonster made with BGH-free milk, you would learn absolutely nothing about the relative safety of BGH milk for children, unless the kids who ate the Sealtest all came in with Elviraesque* racks the next day. This, however, is not a guarantee that BGH is safe.

This  phenomenon of shunting moral questions of production into aesthetic questions of consumption is has been with us for at least a century. Notably, Upton Sinclair wrote a book about how large scale capitalism chews up families and spits them out. America read, then asked for and got rules designed to guarantee less icky sausage. This LAT experiment suggests that our moral horizons remain just about coterminous with the roofs of our  mouths.

On a brighter note, do you know what happens if you try to get Prince Paul, Wise, DBC, Daddy-O, Delite, Bobby Simmons and Frukwan to take the Pepsi Challenge? Listen and find out:

Stetsasonic, "Stet Troop 88" <i>In Full Gear</i> Tommy Boy, 1988

*Elvira + PETA? Who knew?

Jungle Update

I promised myself I would not turn in to one of those tedious bloggers who actually write about their job. For some reason, academics seem to think this is ok, while most of the civilized world understands no one wants blogs about accountanting, or law talking, but rather accountants and lawyers yammering about their obsessions with clog dancing or model railroads, or the Olsen twins. But I will break that rule to share the following. Keen readers will have noted that the Fesser is embroiled in teaching some sort of intensive lit survey that meets 3hrs/day 6/days a week. Two weeks of this count as a regular course, which is a travesty, but they pay you. B/c of the length of the class, there are snack breaks, and the students take turns bringing in snacks. Yesterday, we discussed Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. At the first break, after going over the descriptions of the meatpacking plant, I contributed 1 Slim Jim / student to the snack. They ate them all, I was disappointed to see, but they did read the ingredients. Maybe next time, they will wonder about "snapping into" "mechanically separated chicken." Baby steps. More soon--think the count might have reset the analogy machine for me!

The Publishing Industry Broke My Analogy Machine

The current Signet edition of The Jungle has an afterword by Dr. Barry "Bestselling Author of the Zone" Sears. Quoth Sears: "The Jungle and The Zone have much in common." That's like...wait, that's just real messed up.

We've got fun and games

Do you know where you are?
You're in the jungle, baby.
And you're gonna die.
If the kiddies are good, a cookout with the 'Fesser's homemade boudin blanc* when we read this next week. If not, the boudin noir. Pedagogically sound, in that the whole point of the damn book is that while sausage is icky, capitalism is much ickier. I'll shut up about work now.  Pleased to learn of  a graphic novel version of this tale.
*I have had good luck with the Panisse sausage receipts.