updates

If the above-mentioned salmon Jamie Oliver is whoring comes from Loch Duart, maybe it is not so whorish after all. Certainly not Burger King level whorish. Judging from Sainsburys website, though, it does not. Sauté Wed. has more, including the ad itself and Jamie's reply to the unwashed who populate his message boards (and rather more patient explanations of why you should care than I can muster at this point), but the funny thing is this: there is, in fact, no mention anywhere of who is farming this salmon, or where, not to mention how. Suffice it to say that the methods are undoubtedly less sustainable than Loch Duart's, but it is really pretty shocking that no one has bothered to ID the source.

And speaking of seafood, it is hardly surprising that even when we manage to regulate a fishery before we wipe it out, someone will still figure out how to fuck it up. (By the way, dinner last night: dungeness. Sides: none. Utensils: hands. Condiments: none. I did try some lemon (no yuzu on hand), but it was, of course, superfluous. I grew up in a lobstering town, and am therefore more impervious to the charms of crustaceans than most people, but until you eat a dungeness, you haven't lived. One will suffice, though [I don't understand why all-you-can-eat-style crustacean gluttony is countenanced in polite society, but the whole thing is distasteful and wrong. They are bugs, after all.])

It's not like my commentary on the food media is really indispensible at the moment, since everyone is obviously mailing it in. (Did the Times even print any articles yesterday? I didn't notice). Everyone, that is, except our beloved Regina Schrambling (and we're not the only ones), who heroically managed to sneak "the internets" into her excellent Christmas article yesterday. Mmmm... bizcochos. (Strangely, she reports that the post-aRoccolyptic Caviar and Banana is pretty good. Whatever you say, honey. I guess it can't be any worse). We're trying to figure out a way to keep her confined to bed for maximum snark output without having to break her femur again...

On the heels of the NAFTA maize report, "Mexican lawmakers approved a new law on Tuesday to regulate genetically modified crops, but opponents said it catered more to the interests of big business than to the protection of centuries-old biodiversity." [Why do no Mexican newspapers have usable websites?] Also in the news: see Mike Lee's article on the UCS biopharming report, replete with choice industry quote.

Lastly, I committed a small injustice the other day when casting aspersions on this year's crop of food books: I forgot about America's Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking by Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald, which is a well-considered revision of some particularly noxious historical pieties... and, it's entertaining. Seriously. Also -- only because it's so obvious -- I somehow neglected Robb Walsh's Tex-Mex Cookbook, which is at least as good as his BBQ book (that is to say: certain celebrity chefs, whether or not of the coffee-table variety, can kiss my ass).

[Between all this talk of knobs and lochs, I (naturally) starting thinking about Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson. Much more entertaining than the usual shit you find on the internets!]

nut lover

According to the interweb, that David Foster Wallace lobster article from the August Gourmet is available here, but I haven't been able to reach the server.

We are told that Jamie Oliver is getting a taste of the Rick Bayless medicine for whoring Sainsburys farmed salmon, "claiming its salmon are 'healthy because the loch is so cold.'" Typically insightful internet commentary on Jamie's site. (Marian Burros summed up Jamie perfectly last week: "Despite the caveats, I can't help admiring what he does with a few simple ingredients." Also, Brits: Can you stop calling a piece of butter a knob? It's just revolting. Thank you.

Speaking of which, the World's Most Retarded Vending Machine™ just squeezed out something called a Limited Edition Hershey's Nut Lovers instead of the Twix I so desperately needed. Merry Christmas.

signature event context

One night, I woke up and understood the trinity. Not in the usual prosaic logical/theological way, but with a kind of natural clarity that had always eluded me. It was both exhilarating and disturbing, in an Isaiah-burning coal way, not least because I do not actually believe in the trinity. When I woke up the next day, of course, I was unable to reconstruct the revelation.

I mention this because there was a period when I really understood (or so I thought), and loved, Jacques Derrida. Having finally unpacked my books, I can confirm that, although longer than the Trinitarian, my Derridean period is over as well. For some reason, I no longer have the intellectual stamina to keep up with him. The mere fact of his difficulty has, of course, always been held against him by the non-believers, as if anything worth thinking must naturally be self-evident. It hardly seems necessary to respond to this kind of logic, except to note that the miracle of Derrida is that once you marshall the resources necessary to figure out what he is saying, his ideas suddenly become self-evident, and you can't imagine that you ever failed to share them.

For me, the chief of these was the famous connection between (identity of?) repetition and alterity. I will spare you any attempt at vulgarizing his argument (if anyone is really interested, take a stab at this, esp. under "writing and telecommunication"). Perhaps even more than writing, recorded music shows how this works, the .mp3 effacing its own origin, context, intention, every time you play it. I have no desire to argue about the radical unknowability of the other; only that, in music as in writing, the reception is structurally divorced from the intention.

And I mention this (stay with me here) because we are about to be subjected to a lot of facile bullshit about the innately violent quality of a certain musical genre, namely metal. But even if this were somehow proveable, one could certainly never show that a guitar solo, say, was capable of producing the effect it intended (if, indeed the latter could be ascertained). And therefore the very very sad murder of Dimebag Darrell is senseless. There is no meaning to it. Like Derrida's writing, Dimebag's guitar was fucking awesome, and I will miss it (all the more so because it remains accessible to my atrophied brain).

At least the Times gave Dimebag a better obit than poor J.D. (on whom, see especially Nathalie Chicha; also, his last interview, courtesy of Liz Penn in Nathalie's comments).

clever and ill -- a combination by no means felicitous

As the USDA turns: one imagines the conversation began as a friendly discussion of how to better accomodate the desires of our nation's meatpackers. You know, like the Sausage King. But, like the composition of those sausages, you'd really rather not know certain things; like how the new Ag. Secretary Mike Johanns has already put in his time whoring GM food to Europe. And so effectively! (this shocking news thanks to the douchebags at CCF).

It is the season when a deluge of lists reminds one how mediocre the past year really was. It was not pretty as far as food books go: the only thing I bothered to buy on this list is an inferior edition of something that should have been published here 10 years ago. For those of you determined to consume regardless, I guess this one might be interesting.

There is something unsettling about watching people cannibalize their own lives for the sake of the muse. If you really love your vacation spot so much, why are you sharing it with the entire world? That said, it is actually quite a good piece, and it is nice to see, "no, really, I'M PUNK ROCK" mellow into "no, seriously, I'm NOT WEARING SHOES." So much less pitiful.

Finally: before you whine about the bad food your family will force you to eat for the holidays, I want you to contemplate whole-clove lasagna prepared by your murder-one parolee uncle. I thought so.

Warning: my earlier endorsement of prophylactic Pepto may have been... premature. Please consult your physician.

please don't be waiting for me

Back from what will probably be the final holiday in the sun ever, I am a convert to the miracle of prophylactic Pepto, now in convenient caplet form. Here's the question: do all foreign countries share an unnatural love of Nescafe, or does the "third world" have a special fervor? Discuss. Also, the term "third world" appears to have fallen into disfavor. Is this because the world has resegregated into the rich assholes, the truly fucked (Africa), and everyone in between? You can mutter something about per-capita GDP if you want, but I'd much rather live pretty much anywhere in the Western Hemisphere than, say, Russia. Or the Ukraine, for that matter. (Excluding Paraguay and Bolivia; sorry guys, I need a coastline somewhere. Oh, and Peru: fuck Peru). Getting back to the point, Nescafe is actually pretty fucking good these days, although the irony of drinking it where the real thing grows is occasionally painful (thanks to the Pepto, not too painful). While I was out, the internets sent word of the power of duck, and some real thanksgiving food. Science identified barrenstalk1 in maize. I'm sure some other shit happened, but I'll never know.

The worst thing is getting back and realizing that 4 more years hasn't even started yet.