Food Writers and Popes

There was a food radio program I used to guest on, and I'd drive the host - an imperious authority - absolutely crazy when I'd insist to his call-in listeners that my opinions held no more weight than their's. "But, Jim," he'd interrupt, "you can't deny that you're a food expert!" I'd point out that I'm just a dude who happened to get some gigs writing about a subject which tons of people know a ton about (this was shortly before I proved the point by founding Chowhound).

To him, I was calling into question his own haughty expertise. As he saw it, his relationship with his audience was based on the unshakeable assumption that he chewed and swallowed more knowingly than they. This was, of course, completely ridiculous. What attracted them (and, for that matter, me) to him was his umatched ability to clearly explain and describe. He wrote with warmth and flair, spinning tales of cuisine well beyond the surface level of potatoes and crock pots. But in his mind, he was, above all, an expert, and reigning from above his audience was the basis of simply everything.

And so I, a fellow expert, left him gasping by renouncing my expertise in front of his audience. He saw it as a brutal betrayal. For my part, I never understood why he couldn't recognize that elitism isn't a necessary part of a writer's job description, and that he was unnecessarily exhausting himself by flailing to maintain the pretense (as is true of anyone trying to project infallibility).

Meanwhile, we now have a Pope who washes people's feet and displays genuine humility, keying into to the simple essence of a priest's job description, which is about loving service rather than weighty grandeur. And I'm figuring the other cardinals must absolutely freaking hate the guy.

Ranting About Locavore/Organic/Eco Sanctimony

This essay, originally published some years ago, sparked negative response from readers who found it bizarrely aggressive and angry. I've added a postscript explaining.


This morning "Up With Chris Hayes" had chef Tom Colicchio on. Hayes played a hilarious parody clip where sanctimonious diners grill their waiter about the organic and local credentials of the chicken - and of the chicken's feed - until, finally, to everyone's delight, the waiter brings out the fowl's resume, explaining that its name was Colin, and....



After that, Chris asks Colicchio a reasonable question:

"At one level, there's a critique of the current industrial food system that says "we have this huge directory of farms, subsidies, lots of cheap calories, corn gets in everything because we're subsidizing corn, etc." And the reaction is to create something that's more local-farm-to-table. But that can sometimes feel fetishistic. So what is the middle path in-between knowing the name of your chicken...and eating nothing but canned goods and sugary sodas?"

Hayes goes on to mock this "bourgeois hipster obsession", but that's only half right. The style may be hipster, but the impulse itself is pure bourgeois. Since the dawn of humanity, the very root of classism has been the visceral feeling that those beneath us on the social ladder are filthy. It sounds archaic, I know, but don't be sure such thinking doesn't remain lodged in our collective DNA. It plays into this phenomenon, albeit stealthily.

Have you ever observed shoppers at Whole Foods? With their natural fiber carrying bags and their exorbitant wild-caught arctic char and their glossy Yoga Journals and their Priuses, they're living a certain lifestyle, and they are Well. Really really Well. The wellness is high. And they're marketed to, fervidly, along that line. If the messaging was completely explicit, the tagline would be "Whole Foods: Flattering Your Smug Wellness".

It's a type. To recall a bygone vulgarism, their shit don't stink. Remember the Food Emporium jingle? The evil genius who wrote it completely understood this mindset. See how skillfully he gets inside the narcissism and patronization of it all:

"Someone made a store just for me
Someone's got my kind of quality
Someone got the message that people like things better
Even when they're shopping for
The simple things."

Here it is, in fact:



As I explained in my screed about Panera, I don't deny that therein lies an uncomfortable resemblance to my chowhound shtick. Yeah, I'm a picky mo-fo myself, obviously, when it comes to food. But this is a very different sort of pickiness. It's all about self-image.

Whole Foods shoppers imagine themselves as glowing with vitality. That's how the company's marketing attempts to mirror them, and I assume they know their customers. And it's by no means irrelevant that these shoppers are paying through the nose for the Whole Foods vitality experience. But the sanctimonious, eco-conscious, mega-well people wandering around Whole Foods with their environmentally green hued injection-molded plastic baskets appear to be as fat and distracted and grim and messed up and sickly as anyone else. And the deeper reality, never explicitly called out, is that they're all rich.

The experience of pursuing a premium level of wellness and a premium level of eco-consciousness and a premium level of sanctimony is available only to premium people. Poor people are lucky to eat at all. You know...the filthy poor people who eat the sort of shit which a glowing-with-vitality and expensively self-actualized Whole Foods shopper would never touch in a million years.

Same for restaurants catering to fervid locavores. Don't believe for a second it's not just yet another trendy way to indulge rich people in their desperate urge for a sense of elevation. Money, in and of itself, ought to bring an elevated sensation, but doesn't. It's just green paper. So many wealthy people desperately try to consume their way to that sensation. But when it comes to nutrition, it's a fool's errand. We spend our lives soaking in toxins and impurities. That stuff's everywhere, it can't be avoided, and it's absurd to assume you're rising above in any meaningful way via the purchase of eco/organic/local/free-trade wares marketed to flatter your self-image of wholesome purity.

Consider: while the government has no way to track each soybean or spinach leaf, they do know the quantity grown and the quantity purchased, and the inconvenient truth is that way more organic food is sold than is grown. Get it? If you believe you're being told the true story of your food much of the time, I've got some pink-sludge horsemeat hamburger to sell you. And even legitimately "organic" foods aren't what you think. Organic standards were diluted and corrupted years ago. Believe me, your free range chicken is not a healthy chicken. Unless you're prepared to walk the walk and go "back to the land", you're mostly just up-paying for a false sense of confidence and superiority.

So, sorry, sanctimonious wellness strivers. Your bubble is illusory. You will more than likely get cancer, anyway. You're not shielded. You're not elite. You overpay for smug delusion.

But you know what? I myself buy organic when I can (especially with concentrated foods like juices and butters). And I try to buy local when I can. And I even shop at Whole Foods sometimes (for sale-priced produce and a few brands I can't find elsewhere, e.g. Taste Nirvana coconut water). But there's a difference: I don't do so with a prissy sense of elevation. I don't drink the (organic, fair-trade) Kool-Aid. Chris Hayes asked about a middle path, and, for me, that involves stripping away the sanctimony, obsession, and delusion.

I don't delude myself about a bubble of purity and wellness - about transcending the squalor of plebeian existence. I just eat as healthily as I can afford to. That's it! When I eat organic and local, I accept the reality that I'm paying up a steep curve of declining results for the luxury of perhaps doing a scant notch better for myself. All with the wry understanding that I'll likely be run over by a bus on the way home.

Above all, be real. You can't be squeaky clean. You're neither virtuous nor pure. Purchasing fair trade coffee doesn't right your myriad eco wrongs, and organic cotton fiber clothing will not elevate you. And neither will a conventional hamburger and fries nor a slice of corporate white bread defile you. You come pre-defiled, and to imagine otherwise is to be an entitled, rich, narcissistic ninny.

No matter what, chemicals will keep pouring into you (breathe much?). A bowlful of Rice Krispies with milk from Stupid Farms in Ohio won't make the slightest diff. But, if you can, sure, by all means, do your best. Favor the organic; favor the local, favor fresh in-season (lowercase) whole foods. Just don't make it a religion, be grateful you can afford the capricious luxury - recognizing that's all it really is - and every once in a while send a check to help support those who'd be deliriously grateful for a box of Oreos. Because actual hunger is where the real problem lies, and where our money can do the most good.

---

If you think I'm ranting with more anger than is appropriate, then you may not be considering the full breadth of my argument. I'm not over-clucking my tongue at a silly food trend, or acidly judging people for patronizing a retail chain I happen to dislike. What I'm describing is something larger: a creepy pattern in the food world of pandering to the ugliest sort of classism. What's worse, a great many people fall for it.

Classism was, until fairly recently, quite open and acceptable. But nowadays that sort of thing has become taboo, and deeply repressed. So consumers, unaware subliminal buttons are being pushed, fail to notice that messages apparently speaking to their desire for sparkly, spiritual, well-scrubbed shiny good health actually appeal to darker sensibilities, e.g. a sense of sanctimonious superiority to one's social inferiors - those dirty, unwashed, impure souls down the ladder.

We have no idea this is happening because it's all so repressed (political correctness is a dangerous thing; I'd rather have folks warmly calling me "jewboy" than live in a society nervously feigning color-blindness). So I feel obliged to yell a bit to shake folks out of the trance.

For most of human history, people down the social ladder from us were perceived to eat filthy disgusting things. These days, millionaires swoon over tacos and dumplings, but the same prejudice has taken on new forms....all of them walled up in our dark mental recesses. And there's nothing marketers like better than an opportunity to engage a walled-up impulse.

The Ugly Roots of Language Pedantry

In response to yesterday's posting, "Vanquishing the Language Pedants", my Brazilian friend Kita reports:

"Here in Brasil we have the same Portuguese language police...and it is so silly."

Of course you do! This is everywhere, because it involves a faculty as commonplace as language: arrogance. Such people never advanced beyond the silly adolescent notion that spotting flaws in others makes one superior.

But there's a much uglier impulse behind it all. What this really is (and I'm sure it's the same in Brazil and elsewhere) is a form of classism. The "bad" language which pedants decry is nearly always the sort of language used by their perceived social inferiors.

It's always been like this; people of lower classes have always been perceived to use language appallingly (and also to eat filthy disgusting things, exhibit poor hygiene, etc etc.). Since explicit classism is socially taboo these days, this sense of superiority and revulsion has become masked behind a pretense of academic rigor (to the point where most pedants have lost awareness of the true root of their impulse). But the irony is that academics, again, are definitely not on that side, and haven't been for decades. And Stephen Fry has blasted away all pretense that this is about anything but bald snobbery.

It's an ugliness, and thank goodness it's dying. But other forms of classism will pop up to replace it. These days everyone respects the foods of lower classes, but don't imagine for a moment that we don't still find ways to express classism in our eating habits.


Note: I've updated the article at that final link by adding a postscript, and will push that article back to the top of the Slog tomorrow.

Vanquishing the Language Pedants

We seem to have hit a tipping point. Academics have long agreed that language is dynamic and personal, so it's really quite daft for anyone to suppose they have the authority to pronounce what sort of usage is "right" and what sort is "wrong".

Yet there remain legions of citizen pedant/vigilantes who make it their task to indignantly scold what they deem incorrect use. Such people never imagine that few academics would back them up in that sort of thing. As I wrote several years ago , the noxious influence of William Fowler (author of "Fowler's Modern English Usage") has been overcome, and modern lexicographers work descriptively (cataloging the myriad varieties of language use and tracking its continuous revision) rather than prescriptively (telling people - as if they were in any position to do so - what's right and what's wrong).

Well, this is finally beginning to penetrate to the public. And I've never heard the issue tackled as beautifully and eruditely as in this short, entertaining video where British actor and comedian Stephen Fry annihilates language pedants with such logic and eloquence that I can't imagine how any of them could ever possibly pipe up again:



Another sign of the mainstreaming of language counter-pedantry: this NPR page explaining how the substitution of "axe" for "ask" has been standard English for a thousand years - used by, among others, Chaucer.

Personally, that sort of thing makes me completely nucular.

Daily Show Taping

I was in the audience for the taping of last night's Daily Show. I've heard accounts from friends who've been there, and there are plenty of blog articles on the experience, so rather than run it down beat for beat, I'll try to offer some stray observations I haven't seen elsewhere.

As always with TV, the set is crap in real life. The desk is crap. The "newsroom" monitors in the background are cheap, blurry paint-ons. Everything seems small and tacky. I tried to capture the tackiness, below, but via some magic I don't understand, it all looks great in the photo. Chalk it up to lens-versus-eye juju.

Most of the audience followed the beats of the show, swiveling their heads toward monitors to view clips, etc.. I can watch the show at home, so I kept my eye on Stewart and his crew, hoping to see what the process is like for them after so many years on the air. I played a bit with Tony Bennett back in the day, and it was fascinating to watch him approach "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" for the umpteenth time.

As clips play, Stewart positions early for whatever mug he needs to have on his face when the camera returns. He doesn't view the clips - he's spent all afternoon watching them. Instead, he's cupping his forehead with his hand, leaning back apprehensively in his chair, or whatever...and cooly awaiting the camera. It doesn't seem forced or phony, just highly technical and tactical. Like a ballet where all movements have been pre-mapped, and attention's focused entirely on flow and pacing. You feel the pacing much more acutely in the studio than on TV.

Stewart mostly ad-libs; he barely follows his script. It wasn't that he was decorating or riffing off of it; more like he was so familiar with the material (again, he'd been working on it all day) that the script was just a guide. This rang home when, before the final segment, the teleprompter cued up "That's our show. Here it is, your moment of zen", as if he needed that. Stewart seems to do the show mostly by memory, while the script runs for security.

Before the show, Stewart was asked a couple of interesting questions: one was (winkingly) whether he and the staff had gotten together to revamp policies in light of last week's bizarre Jennifer Lawrence interview (which was referenced several times in the show):

.

He didn't have much insightful to say, but it was abundantly clear that he wasn't fazed in the least. I don't imagine much rattles him. This is, literally, a daily show, rolling forward ala sausage production. I can't imagine Stewart often frets on the drive home about stuff he might have done better. At least not with this gig, which he's been doing for a long, long 14 years. It's execution, period. Tactical.

Someone else asked when his movie would be released, and he froze in an uncharacteristic grimace of pain. I figure he's been killing himself with post-production on the film while doing the show - and he's at the agony point. He couldn't crack a joke about it. He just stood there mumbling something about how the film's not funny and he hoped people like it anyway. Bad moment. If you ever run into Jon Stewart, don't mention the movie.

Between segments, production people approach the desk to say serious-seeming things, to which Stewart seriously replies. You'd imagine they're making last minute tweaks to upcoming segments, but the odd thing is the same bar conference occurred before the Moment of Zen throw. There's nothing to adjust at that point - the show's pretty much over - so I have no idea what the conferencing was about.

The staff's still tickled after all these years. Production assistants line up along the side of the room, genuinely laughing their asses off. And the crew, surprisingly, was into the comedy as well. Even the cameramen, who you normally expect to be unflinching, kept chortling. Nobody's grinding it out.

There's very little cuing. Stewart was given one single time cue midway through the guest interview (with Ian McKellen, who, by the way, has a voice like burnished golden velvet chocolate), and guided things to commercial with no subsequent guidance. Having been at this for so long, his internal clock seems perfectly calibrated.

Woops, I missed the boat on that last part. Now that I've seen the show on TV, I understand that the producer was signaling that they had enough. Stewart let the conversation end organically, then they edited it down later.

Stewart never seemed to let up - not after the interview, which essentially closes the show, nor after the throw to Moment of Zen. Straight through, the energy never wavered; focused, clinical, un-stressed yet nothing taken for granted. No change even as he left the studio after thanking the audience. Of course, he was probably headed to an editing bay for nine or ten hours of film work, poor guy.

As I said, the set doesn't look like it does at home. Same for Stewart's body language. Live, he seems like a guy naturally moving and reacting. It's small and it's organic, though carefully timed and poised. Only on TV did it compose into the familiar animated mugging and gesturing. Glancing up at the monitor, I'd see what looked like the standard Daily Show. Quite a cognitive dissonance.

The guest segment was the converse. You can't hear well in the studio (mics are for broadcast only; voices aren't put through the PA), so I mostly watched body movement. And he and McKellen appeared to be moving way too much; like an exaggerated hyperkinetic ballet. On the monitor, though, you couldn't see any of that. It looked stone-cold natural. Though the mugging blows up on TV, the interview dynamics were reduced - which is, of course, why they intentionally overplay. McKellen's such a pro that he effortlessly matched the movement; the two seemed engaged in a coordinated dance; it was mesmerizing - though, on TV, you just saw a couple guys talking on a TV show. I suppose if they'd had a more normal conversation, they'd have looked like boring 1970's PBS talking heads. That certainly wouldn't cut it, so there's effort made to be extra dynamic for the camera.

From fifteen feet away, 74 year-old McKellen appears to have the body of a 19 year old, and I'll bet he works extremely hard to keep it that way. Movie star obligation stuff.

One thought: for regular viewers, it may seem like Jon Stewart draws from a limited - though highly effective - bag of tricks. But watching it happen live, I get the impression it's more that this is simply who he is, and, appearing on TV four nights per week, he has no choice but to be who he is. How many moves could you or I wield night after night, year after year?

All in all, this is a really lousy way to view a TV show (they make you wait forever, you can't hear much, camera men block your view, and it's over super fast), but a fascinating journey into the appearance/reality funhouse.

Oh, I spotted this in the staff kitchen, and I'm not sure if it's a joke or not:

Billions, Millions, Thousands

Billions of people yearn for greatness.

Millions of people do things they hope will make them great.

Thousands of people do great things with nary a thought about where it will leave them.


Most singers become singers because they want to be singers, not because they want to sing. That's why most singers are so awful.

"Challenges"

A "challenge" is an aggravation with an insipid sparkly bow tied around it.

Accounting for Bourbon and Rye Variation

SKU, of the Sku's Recent Eats Blog (a great source of cutting-edge info on bourbons and ryes), was kind enough to post an informative comment to my "Rye Whisky Tasting" post:

Great tasting! As a matter of background, Riverboat is distilled by Midwest Grain Products, a large contract distiller in Indiana which also makes Bulleit, Templeton and many other popular ryes, including the two year old rye used in High West Double Rye. They use a 95% rye mash, which is much higher than any of the Kentucky ryes (though lower than the 100% ryes made in Canada, such as WhistlePig). Overholt is Beam Rye with a bit more time in the barrel.

It's interesting and useful to know what's distilled where, and I thank SKU for the posting. But it offers a good opportunity to share the big lesson I learned from a week spent in Bardstown, KY at the Kentucky Bourbon Festival (where I reported, with photos, in five installments: So Where's the Bourbon?, Barrels, Barrels, Everywhere, The Greatest (Chowhounding) Story Ever Told, Madly in Love with Maxine's, and Bourbon Redux).

The lesson is this: it's all about the barrels. At Four Roses, we had a chance to taste newborn bourbon straight out of the distilling process, and, much to my surprise and dismay, it was indistinguishable from vodka. It's a neutral grain spirit with no detectable aroma or flavor.

As my bourbon buddy JB and I toured lots of barrel houses (and we hit a bunch of them, because there is no greater smell on Earth; I compared it to "angels puffing into your nose...an unearthly aroma of luscious caramel and vanilla which sneaks up on you in an undulating wave of divine consolation"), we learned that the whole game is in barrel selection and placement. Temperature varies by a few degrees between interior-stored barrels and ones closer to the walls. And cycling them between locations as they age folds in another layer of complexity. Tiny aging decisions like these - plus, of course, aging length and grain proportions- account for nearly all variation. The actual spirit is so generic that it doesn't matter all that much who makes the stuff. It's all about the barrels.

Every few months, some media outlet will report how the dozens of brands are made by the same tiny handful of distilleries. The implication is that aficionados are chuckleheads who've been conned into buying the same damned stuff in a range of snazzy bottles. But my blind tasting demonstrates the tremendous variation.

Nano-Aesthetics

I find myself increasingly finding inspiration and delight in the tiniest of things. A mere gesture, a glance, a single word choice, in art or in day-to-day life, can sustain me for hours. At times I feel able to experience the richness and breadth of thick Russian novels within the blink of an eye.

I call it nano-aesthetics, and it's a core tenet of Apprecianity. Sweeping statements and ambitious undertakings are often contaminated by ego and vanity. The raw divinity of human beings is most purely expressed via tiny things, which most often go unnoticed. As an Apprecianist, it's my obligation to notice.

Truthfully, I'm a bit embarrassed about this. In a society where everyone dreams giant dreams of cataclysmic delights, here I am quietly doting upon dust motes, like a hobo greedily pulling grains of rice from the trash. Smallness in America can feel awfully....well...small. But after my revulsion at the bigness of my Chowhound experience, I've gone thoroughly nano. My ego hates it, but my soul loves it.

I'm a big fan of Lindalee Rose and her "Doctor Who Review". She's a five year old who does YouTube reviews of Doctor Who episodes. I found myself losing interest in the series a couple years ago, but Lindalee rekindled my enthusiasm. Not because I get to "see things through the fresh eyes of a child", or because I'm tickled by her adorability. No, I get from Lindalee what I get from any other trusted critic. She makes me see aspects I'd missed, and I find my experience transformed by her perspective. As someone who often looks to his own childhood self for guidance, I'm anything but ageist.

This week, Lindalee traveled to London for the Doctor Who 50th anniversary. And, holy mother of god, she did it: she actually managed to meet the Doctor himself (or, at least, the dude who currently plays him, Matt Smith), and to interview him for her show.



Lindalee is a composed and mature five year old, but, understandably, she was teetering on the verge of losing it throughout the interview. But check out the point at 1:56 where Smith invites her to do a bit of shtick with him. She immediately "gets" what's being asked of her, and she's so thrilled to be totally, utterly on top of what's happening (five year olds, after all, spend much of their time in a state of woozy disorientation) that she actually proceeds to glow. Watch her face. Finally, at 2:27, unable to contain her joy any further, she emits a small squeal of pure, unadulterated delight.

I've lived off of that squeal for a few days now.

The Apple iWatch May Be a Red Herring

I've said before that I don't like the idea of Apple's heavily-rumored under-development iWatch. But here's what I'm thinking now: I don't think it's real. I think it's a fake-out; a red herring. 

I suspect they're fueling these rumors to drive competitors to waste time and money ramping up their own watches to compete, when Apple has no intention of launching any such thing....because, per the reasoning in the above link, it's really quite a dumb idea.

I may turn out to have been embarrassingly wrong on this, but....let's see!