I'll Just Have a Salad, Thanks.

It used to be my custom to order a nice blue/saignant petit filet about twice a year, but due to the current subprime perfect storm of red meat in battleground states between enemy combatants on the ground, at the end of the day I think it will likely be some few years before I have the stomach for another one.

Thanks for ruining my diet and my hairstyle, guys.

-'Red Meat with a Side of Mean'
-'Sarah Palin: Red Meat for the Masses'
-'More Red Meat'
-'Minnesota Delegation Gets Red-Meat Talking Points'
-'No Red Meat from Warner Speech'
-'McCain's Ex-Rivals Throw Out the Red Meat'


Et cetera. And just so we're on the same page, that was only the first one of a search for 'red meat campaign.' We still don't know if John McCain hit it out of the park with his Hail Mary Pass when he threw a bone to theoconservatives in an effort to energize the base which may or may not steal Hillary's thunder should the chickens come home to roost.


And, because I do care about the state of your palate but can't pour you a glass of Brunello from here, here's a bit of Myles to take away that bad taste:
''Keats's Irish terrier, Byrne, failed to come home one night. Chapman found the poet playing the violin, and remarked on his composure. "Keats smiled . . . 'And why should I not fiddle,' he asked, 'while Byrne roams?'''

Cat Fights in Cowboy Towns

There is nothing like waking up with a nightmare in the middle of the night and not being able to go back to sleep. There are even fewer things like waking up with a nightmare, not being able to return to sleep, and having a job interview the next day for which one had previously held out the hope of seeming collected, focused, and semi-smart. Oh, well, even if the black circles under the eyes are egregious, I can still hope for 'interesting,' clean, fully dressed, and amusingly small.

The dream, though! I was driving in a car with the neighbor's cat in the passenger seat. I know I was driving the Mazda car, because when we pulled over there was no dome light. We had to pull over because I couldn't find my house keys, keys that belong to a house I have never lived in except in dreams, a small Victorian in an old mining town in NE Washington, Nevada, or Central California. I had to find the keys because I had to give them to someone, and where we pulled over was next to a swamp alongside a highway that was also the road that the megachurch pastor who interviewed the Presidential candidates last week has his church on now, and which used to be across the street from an orange grove. But his church wasn't in the dream; it didn't exist yet, or maybe the dream only existed in a world devoid of megachurches. I don't know, but I was on the side opposite the orange grove, and down the street from a row of saloons, blacksmiths, and rooming houses that I've also only been near in my dreams.

It was hard to find the key without a dome light or streetlights, but then I remembered I thought it was in this pretty green carved box with turtles on it from Indonesia. Naturally, I knew exactly where the box was, but as I started to open the secret compartment on the box that had always worked before, it turned out just to be a a decoration and came off in my hand. At that point, I noticed that there was a cat sitting on the windowledge of the car and trying to get in. The neighbor's cat hadn't noticed the stranger yet, and I was starting to get scared of what else might be lurking on the roadside in the middle of nowhere so, although my fingers were shaking, I figured out how to open the regular compartment of the box to get out the key. I managed to open it, but inside were only hallucinogenic and shiitake mushrooms, the latter of which is of as little interest to me as the former, and as soon as I was realizing that, the outside cat figured out how to get inside, leapt at the other cat, they started fighting, and I woke up.

Now, I used dried shiitakes today, so they were in my head and I don't need to believe my subconscious is telling me to eat more mushrooms. We were also talking at the soup kitchen about people getting addicted to opiates after surgery, and how someone's tolerance for pain might decrease while on them and cause dependence, so maybe that's how the other kind of mushroom got in there. My brain should also not be telling me to replace the dome light, as I already succeeded masterfully in performing that bit of highly technical auto repair. It may have been saying, 'Be sure to take the GPS to the interview, idiot,' and 'If you got another cat of your own, maybe the wandering one would want to stay inside and you wouldn't have to worry if he is okay, since his owners will never care one way or the other.' Or maybe just 'Get copies of your keys made, don't drive around with cats, and don't move to a ghost town.' Either way, I woke up in the middle of a fight between two cats on my lap in a tiny car, with my heart pounding, and sitting straight up in bed.

Four California Farmworkers Dead in Four Weeks

Ramiro Carillo Rodriguez, 48, Thursday became the second farmworker to die of heatstroke in the past week and the fourth within the last four weeks in California, following Wednesday's passing of Abdon Felix Garcia, 42, and before that, Jose Hernandez, 64, and pregnant Maria Isabel Jimenez, 17, whose fiancé had finally saved up enough money and bought a wedding ring.

There have been laws in place in California since 2005, when the state under the leadership of Gov. Schwarzenegger became the first in the nation to attempt to provide heat protection for farm laborers. However, any law is only as good as its enforcement, and so far the past legislation has failed due to lack of implementation and oversight. In the midst of California's current heatwave, Schwartzenegger announced a more vigorous and comprehensive training program for employers. Failure to provide minimal heat protection such as access to water, shade, rest, and a trained first-aid response to symptoms is wanton cruelty and nothing more. If four dentists, politicians, or lawyers had died in four weeks from identical, foreseeable, and preventable work-related injuries, I can only imagine that we would have seen a flurry of civil and punitive action. My hope is that the recent spate of needless deaths - of human beings every bit as worthwhile as dentists or lawyers - will result in more vigorous and comprehensive punitive measures if employers continue to neglect their legal, not to mention ethical, obligations

The last link is to a news story about the new measures; here is the UFW's piece:

Ramiro Carillo was the fourth farm worker in the last two weeks to die of heat stroke and the second this week alone!

E-mail Gov. Schwarzenegger today!

Ramiro Carrillo Rodriguez, 48, father of two, died in Selma, CA on Thursday afternoon after working all day for Sun Valley Packing in Reedley thru a farm labor contractor. Ramiro had complained being sick from the heat. He was taken home by his foreman. He passed out almost as soon as he got in the house. By the time an ambulance got there he was dead on arrival. He leaves behind two children ages 13 and 16.

Ramiro's death makes two farm workers dying of heatstroke last week, four farm worker heat deaths in the last 8 weeks and the 13th farm worker heat death since CA Governor Schwarzenegger took office.

Something needs to be done immediately to prevent more needless deaths. Please help.

Click here to send a fax to California Gov. Schwarzenegger (if you live in California, a cc of your e-mail will also go to your legislators) and tell them this has to stop now.

Ramiro Carrillo Rodriguez's death follows the deaths I told you about on Thursday. 42 year-old farm worker Abdon Felix Garcia, father of three, died on Wednesday after spending the morning and early afternoon working for Sunview Vineyards in Arvin. The coroner says Felix's body core temperature was measured at 108 degrees just 13 minutes before his death. 64 year-old Jose Macarena Hernandez died during a record-breaking heat wave on June 20 while harvesting butternut squash in Santa Maria on land owned by Sunrise Growers. UFW President Arturo Rodriguez attended his funeral yesterday. And then there was the heat death of 17 year-old Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez who died while laboring in the Stockton area grape vines.

Governor Schwarzenegger came to Maria Isabel's funeral and said he would do everything possible to prevent this from happening again. Has he done everything he can? With the recent deaths of Ramiro Carrillo Rodriguez, Abdon Felix Garcia and Jose Hernandez it is clear the state does not have the capacity to protect farm workers.

As California's summer sizzles we must do everything we can to insure that no more farm workers fall victim to the heat because the laws written to protect them are not enforced. Speaker Emeritus Fabian Nunez has introduced legislation which has moved out of the assembly and which is now in the state senate. It will make it easier for farm workers to organize and enforce the laws that the state cannot enforce.

Please take action immediately and click to fax California Gov. Schwarzenegger (if you live in California, a cc of your message will also be e-mailed to your legislators) and tell them something needs to be done NOW. It’s time to put a law in place that will allow farm workers to protect themselves!

Thank you for caring.

Arturo S. Rodriguez
President

http://www.ufwaction.org/campaign/heatdeath13

'Between soup and love,

the first is better.' -Spanish proverb

I couldn't disagree more, but then, other than a couple bisques and chilled consommé with fresh mint and lemon, I tend to find soup a rather terrifying proposition. However, whether we agree or disagree with old Spanish chestnut-writers, or old Spanish-chestnut writers (and I do make exception to my soup exception for a good chestnut bisque, I assure you), the degrees of separation between soup and love are not as numerous as may appear. They involve:


- Belle-Epoque Grandes Horizontales
- guilds
- lesbian thespians
- cured meats
- Jacobins
- gastronomic proto-Taylorism

----and Dominicans.

You think I can't pull these together; you suspect it could be done by no one. And it is a disparate list. But I can and I will, and it will further buttress my argument that just when you let down your guard and imagine it can't possibly happen here, you meet Dominicans in the strangest of places...

The august Auguste Escoffier is the name that unites this strange list. I was reading Kenneth James' absorbing biography of the chef (from which any names or numbers herein are taken), which briefly gives a summation of the state of restaurants and cuisine in France and England before Ritz and Escoffier launched the Savoy in London. There was very much in France (though by no means paralleled in England) by this time a tradition of haute cuisine; Escoffier's revolution on the Continent was the efficiency and systematization brought by his brigade system, and a substantial reduction thereby, in the name of modernization and productivity, of the number and severity of beatings of cooks delivered by chefs. Corporal punishment in a kitchen slows everything down, and Escoffier believed quality and speed could coexist.

Despite there being by Escoffier's time a short history of fine restaurants in France, this development could not have happened without the short history of the guillotine, a more severe form of corporal punishment than that used by successful chefs in their private reigns of terror in tiny, sweaty fiefdoms. The Jacobins had, amongst other things, succeeded in producing a class of ronin chefs, as prior to the Revolution the best cooks had always worked for the best families. Gourmandise took place on estates and in castles; eating out was, as it had been since the time of the ancient Romans, the province of travelers, who had no choice of entrée at the hostelry they stopped at, but rather partook of the same potluck pot au feu as the rest of the overnight guests.

An enterprising Parisian by the name of Boulanger twenty-some years before the Revolution conceived of offering a sit-down meal with a choice of options from a menu to city-dwellers wanting a meal but no room to go with it. The climax of his meal was always a soup, which he called a 'restorative,' or 'restaurant,' getting him in trouble with the guilds, who had continued to operate since the Middle Ages in various formulations and groupings as the sole source of takeaway items such as cured meats, cooked meats, bread, pastry, sausages and sauces. Specifically, the traiteurs (from traditor, one who delivers; from tradere, deliver; surrender; from trans + dare, to give; nothing at all to do with selling state secrets, as these fellows were masters of sealed lips and secret handshakes), or caterers, argued that his 'restorative' was in fact a ragoût, which they alone were licensed to sell. The traiteurs lost, M. Boulanger won, and by 1789 there were about 50 such establishments in Paris (p.26). The Revolution temporarily interrupted the revolution, but within ten years after the bloodletting stopped there were hundreds of the new restaurants in Paris.

Enter Escoffier, England, and César Ritz. The world of dining in Britain changed for the better with the opening of the Savoy: there was fine food, organization, modern menus, ambiance, and personalized service for the guests. All that remained was to coax well-to-do Victorians, with their armies of servants and cooks, out of the house on occasion for epicurean entertainment. While Victorian gentlemen were accustomed to dining out, they did so in the company of other men or with women other than their wives; it was considered unseemly for ladies to be seen eating in public. Thus one prong in Ritz' and Escoffier's campaign was to create an atmosphere that would welcome and enchant, rather than discomfit, wives and other ladies of virtue. To succeed in this would require banishing the other sorts of ladies, such as actresses, singers, and those more skilled in the companionship arts than the domestic. An evening dress-code stipulation eliminated some; barring single female diners left well-heeled-but-dateless demimondaines dining elsewhere.

One celebrity courtesan who lacked neither escorts nor evening dress and thus continued to patronize the Savoy was one-time Folies Bergère dancer Mlle. Liane de Pougy, born Anne Marie Chassaigne and later crowned Princess Anne-Marie Ghika of Romania, who despite two marriages and a Sapphic amour she described as the love of her life, renounced her past life of scandal and splendor and finished her days serving disabled orphans at the Asylum of St. Anne as a Dominican tertiary.

In (there's no way it wouldn't be, is there?) Savoy...

And you thought I couldn't do it.

The Best Laid Plans...

Firstly, today was a long, long day. It was the first day the meal program I volunteer at on Wednesdays was having Tent City on the church premises, in theory adding an additional hundred or so people. That many people, it turned out, were not added, since although most of Tent City came, many regulars stayed away, some perhaps fearing we were not up to the task, and others possibly fearing they would be pressed into duty as dishwashers. As we were prepping and cooking, however, we didn't know what number would arrive, so we had to continue with the largest estimate. And we had a very generous donation of salmon. Very generous. And I cooked it all.

Without belaboring the point, one of our cooks had to leave early, we prepped the full amount but served our normal number, I scrubbed three hot flattops within an inch of their lives, accidentally poured vinegar instead of oil on a scalding hot one, and left with hair, skin, and clothes trailing a rank sillage of garlic cream sauce, fish and vinegar.

I felt inestimably cleaner after a long bath, but I was still exhausted. I lay in bed reading, but my eyes kept closing, which I took to mean I needed to go to sleep. Despite my best intentions and concerted effort, that plan fell through, so I went back out to the living room and did some work.

In time the neighbor's cat climbed in through the screen (which I neatly sliced months ago to allow him to escape bad weather) and brought with him a mouse. At first I couldn't tell if he was alive or dead, but it turned out he was living. I ushered the cat into the bedroom and the mouse into a flexible binder-thing for bills and receipts. In my altered state that was Phase One of a dimly-conceived plan which included an ill-thought-out Phase Two involving asking the mouse to go into a cardboard box from there, and a satisfying Phase Three of him doing so. It should, by contrast, have involved picking up the folder, putting it in a cardboard box, walking down the stairs, going out somewhere, and putting down the folder near an attractive stand of trees.

That was a couple of hours ago. I am still awake, now researching 'humane mousetraps' on the Web. All things considered, the one involving a two litre bottle of Diet Coke should seem the most reasonable, if not providentially revealed, choice. Plan B, that of depositing the neighbor's cat in action poses in various spots likely to contain curious mice and a good scent trail, and then nabbing the rodent once thus detected, resulted in little other than odd sounds, blank looks, and all manner of languourous poses from the uninterested hunter.

Now the cat has left, and I have a wild mouse, about whose state of health or recent conjugal activity I know nothing, in my house! I don't want the cat to find him when I am not able immediately to retrieve him, but I also don't want to wake up and find him in my bed. Or on my head, in my bed! I also very much do not want him to die of whatever injuries he might have, and be unreachable yet foul-smelling in some unfindable crevice post-mortem.

Had I only been able to sleep, the cat would have killed him, I would not have known and tried to prevent it, and although it is distinctly, horrifically unpleasant to awaken to a dead animal or bird on the floor, it is, unlike this, a readily, easily, eminently soluble problem...

'Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.'

So said the epicure Brillat-Savarin, and while an ontological argument based on that aphorism would be hard to sustain in many quarters (or so I pray, at any rate: the idea of my body decomposing into lardons of cured pork and boxes of Good-n-Plenty while the walls of my veins leaked Barolo and Amarone into the velvet walls of my coffin strikes far more terror in me than the normal image which -disturbingly, perhaps - doesn't disturb me in the least), and the more transcendent aspects of his musings on gastronomy and gourmandise are equally unsuited to the realities of our present world, the above quote, read entirely wrongly, of course, and viewed through an ethical rather than aesthetic lens, is what I want to get to here today.

(Update 06.12.08: That was really all one sentence. Someone, save me from myself.)

People like to think of globalism as a brand-new phenomenon. And I will admit that with the population of the world so much greater than ever before, every nation or region has a greater impact on others: I have more people producing more waste over here in country X, so there is a greater chance of some of it reaching you in country Y, for example. But the Chinese have been a global power for millennia, over land and by sea. The silver in Chinese coffers plundered by the British opium trade and subsequent wars and concessions was largely from South American mines, while the tea that the British came to love was, as we all know, an ancient part of Chinese gastronomic culture. Marco Polo brought pasta to Italy, and the cotton plantations of the southern United States arose to fill the growing gap between India's long history of production and current need, while the US is now poised in coming years to become the leader in 'hauling coals to Newcastle' quite literally -- not to mention the huge markets of China, India, Russia, as well as many smaller countries in the developing world.

So.

It may have been the case before, but now that the stakes are manifestly higher we admit it more readily: we are all in this together. Even George W. Bush has come to acknowledge that, at least as far as the ozone layer is concerned, human beings can have some kind of corporate and individual impact on the world as a whole. And I believe that food, our use of it, our approach to it, our taking it for granted or choosing to be deliberate in our choices, can be a significant aspect of living up to our values.

Every left-leaning, bunny-hugging simpleton will recite the evils of McDonalds anytime there is a perceptible lapse in conversation. And, in the Northwest at least, anyone desirous of impressing upon his audience the virtuousness of his life and lower intestine will not fail to (re-) state (the obvious:) his unswerving allegiance to the aisles of Whole Foods for all his home cooking and (natural) grooming products needs.

But in the same way that my sending a check every once in a while to Mercy Corps or the Red Cross does not confer something akin to proactive moral immunity, a lifetime's absolution, or mean I thus have carte blanche to perform human sacrifices or set the neighbor's house on fire because I did good elsewhere, trusting a preacher, or a friend, or - for heaven's sake! - a retailer, as gatekeeper for all our individual, specific ethical choices sells our own conscience and powers of rational contemplation short. There simply is no one guidebook containing every possible moral conundrum an individual can face in the moment. And I think that before we can get to 'we are what we eat' in its moral sense, we have first to accept that we are what we do, overall. We are the choices we make, the mistakes we regret, the issues we feel compelled to stand for, and the hand we do or do not offer a suffering soul.

How this all ties in to food, not to mention my enduring and recurrently proven faith in the human voice coming through miles of wires and anonymity and preconceptions, and not forgetting, as well, my own well-deserved humility and willingness to put crow in cream sauce on my own dinner menu when appropriate, will have to wait until next time, as this preamble to what I intended to say is already too long without even having a body yet!

Lesbian Flavored Yogurt: The Sixth Horsewymyn of the Apocalypse?

In Greece, when you go to a regular neighborhood market looking for yogurt, you choose between the texture/thickness of the yogurt, and the type of milk. Perhaps at a chain supermarket you can get some wacky sugary ones from Sweden with berries in them, but there is not a whole aisle devoted to 533 different varieties as there is here.

And I for one am sick of yogurt. I am sick of there being 533 kinds, I am sick of wanting the taste of yogurt and then being unable to find a yogurt-flavored yogurt, and I am sick of the ads with the poorly-substantiated claims for the yogurt that makes your bowel movements 'regular' and likewise for the other yogurts that make you lose weight.

But I am utterly at my wits' end with the ostensibly unending, years old series of ads for yogurt in which two vapid bints staged in various social situations attempt to one-up each other in tiresome encomia to their favorite bacteria-laden dessert brand. Throughout the years, after a first unwitting encounter with this ad, I have taken what precautions I can not to hear any version of it. However, like so many others, I am human, too, and I recently heard and saw what I imagine to be the newest incarnation.

Here the hideous duo are kitted up in over-the-top stereotypes of the Bad Bridesmaid's Dress. After looking this ad up in an attempt to find some of the actual dialogue (in lieu of watching Lifetime programming for days on end hoping for a chance to see a commercial I don't want to see), I learned that the African-American component of this unctuous couple is famous for being, and playing, a lesbian, and thus some of her lines can be read as in-jokes to those in the know.

I am neither in the know nor in the care because these ads are wretched and unwatchable. Extradiagetical biobits cannot redeem their inspidity. I would still know nothing after seeing one of them about what sets this particular yogurt apart from similar brands or styles except that a lesbian who plays a lesbian on television got paid to wear a puffy dress and say vapid things about it. I do not surround myself exclusively with lesbians, to be sure, and I have not attended an unusual amount of weddings, I confess, but my (admittedly limited) experience and keen intuition tell me that lesbians are no more likely than any other subset of wedding guests to sneak away from the festivities with a friend to eat yogurt.

I realize it is just an ad. I realize the point of the ad is to make me want to eat their yogurt, not to present an accurate 30-second snapshot of American suburban reality. And I further realize that 99.9 percent of all catered or preplated food little resembles, in taste, texture, or even color, the freshly-cooked dishes it vainly attempts to duplicate or evoke (take that, Herbfarm, you pretentious, hideously-decorated, lukewarm-food-serving, taco truck without wheels!).

I know all that. When I went to a music conference in BC for the arts council in my town I lived on Pellegrino, Diet Coke, minibar Jelly Bellys, vodka gimlets and sourdough rolls for four days, because the thing went on all day and all night and there was no way to leave the hotel. And whether it is a conference or a wedding or funeral, I would never eat my one-of-three-thousand tepid chicken breasts over stale brown rice with a day-old shallot-dill sauce. However, I would also not tuck two yogurt containers and spoons in my purse so that I could invite my best friend out to the veranda for curdled milk with high-fructose fruit compote while everyone else was drinking enough and having a sufficiently festive time dancing and congratulating the happy couple not to trouble themselves overmuch about the realities of catered food.

But let's say I were the sort of person destined to find the hidden pain in every experience. I know the food is going to be wretched, I know I'm going to be petulant, and I don't want to risk ruining yet another social occasion for my significant other. The hosted bar alone may not suffice; perhaps I'll get violently drunk like the last four times and tell the hosts just what I think of their elastic chicken breasts and scorched sauce.

No, this (ridiculous and entirely implausible scenario) calls for forethought. I eat a bit in advance and tuck a tiny treat into the handbag, perhaps. A treat, ladies and gentlemen, not a one-cup serving of nonfat bacterial cultures. Yogurt is not a treat. In this country it is punishment food for people who think they are fat.

The risible point of this and other equally cloying ads is that by adding loads of sugar and a portion of denatured fruit, the punishment food becomes a pallid - but good enough when you're starving yourself! - simulacrum of the sort of foods that always have a lot of sugar, as well as flavor, texture, and fat. The consumer buys the 'lemon meringue pie' yogurt because she has resolved to deny herself lemon meringue, and all other pies, cakes, tortes, and pastry, until she has lost a certain number of pounds. Not to put too fine a point on it, but for those of you who hadn't realized it up to this point, there is no transubstantiation involved. It's really still nonfat sugared yogurt - and it's really still crap.

Nonetheless, here are some of the sighingly orgasmic, fatuous (mmmm, and - hamfistedly ironic! Get it: not catch the bouquet? I'm a lesbian!!!) sighs of the two bridesmaids as they curb their hunger and sartorial angst with spoonfuls of Lactobacillus and Streptococcus:


"This yogurt is not-catching-the-bridal-bouquet good."
"It's burning this ugly bridesmaid dress good."
"It's getting out of these uncomfortable shoes good."


I'm in too much pain to delve into why one of them should be so disturbed by being paired with an usher shorter than she is; clearly the job description must be a more, em, encompassing one that in the past if physical compatibility is such a large part.