Rich women don't get fat

Turns out that book is a crock of shit. More interesting: the New Yorker does employ intelligent women (they just have to write for Slate).

Meanwhile, Stanford doctors cure an English girl who's never been allowed to eat. There was nothing wrong with her in the first place. Fucking socialized medicine.

Sign that girl up for the bacon of the month club. Or at least the world's first international bacon blog.

Unrelated: fuck this ugly shirt, I want a Wendy Pepper baseball hat.

update: I forgot to mention that the bacon blog came from kottke, which is noteworthy only insofar as he's now blogging for fun and profit, and therefore wants you to pay him.

media sickness

Do you ever feel like every time you pick up the paper there's an article in it about something you just did, or you're about to do, or are attempting to do at that very moment? It's disconcerting, at best, but always with more sinister implications: you've entered that demographic now, i.e., you're getting old, i.e., you're going to die soon. Not to mention the destruction of that illusory agency we're all so desperate for. A supposedly obscure thing I can never do again, because you just wrote an article about it and told the whole fucking world. No wonder everyone buys SUVs and customized "coffee" drinks at Starbucks.

Anyway, check out Corie Brown's excellent article on Mexico City, featuring choice quotes from Diana Kennedy, who seems to think, as one correspondant put it, that she's the Pope of chile town. Of course, she really is the pope of chile town, whether you call her "La Kennedy" or "pinche gringa."

"When we want to know something about Mexican food, we go to Diana Kennedy. I can't read my grandmother's recipes. She wrote down 'add chiles,' but she didn't say what kind or how many." Now that the anthropological heavy lifting has been done, anything is possible, she says. "Before you can break the rules, you have to know them."

More substantial interviews: Bruce Cole/Jacques Pepin:

Me, I'll take a tomato if it's an extraordinary tomato, even if it's not organic, over an organic tomato that has no taste whatever. People think that because [something's] organic, it's extraordinary. I've had lousy organic food.

Sound familiar? Also, David Leite/Paula Wolfert:

What's authentic? Nothing. I veer away when anyone says the word authentic, because authentic isn't what I'm interested in. I'm interested in the truth. There's a difference between the two. The integrity of the dish is important, but I'll change the recipe to make it work. Integrity is using the ingredients of an area, it's using what people recognize as what comprises the dish, but there's not just one way to make something. Even Bordelaise sauce has seven different ways to make it.

He may be a whore, but Jamie Oliver is trying to do something about school lunch, just like Alice; Asimov on the sideways effect; the first certified-organic restaurant; I fear Georgeanne Brennan is rather too easily astonished, which is a polite way of saying: "what the fuck are you talking about?"; truffles the new tobacco?; veganism = child abuse? cf. David Shaw on people abusers against animal abuse.

I just want to let it drop, but it is profoundly irresponsible to call salmon "tired". It's not tired, Frank, it's gone, because we ate it all. Char is a former junk fish (despite its [austere] pleasures) that we have to eat now because everything else is gone. And please please please take some French lessons. "Aux" is plural. Maybe Michelin will restore order, but it seems unlikely.

ooto

Giving up the internet for Lent. Or at least a week.

microbial soup alert

Here we show that several species of bacteria outside the Agrobacterium genus can be modified to mediate gene transfer to a number of diverse plants. These plant-associated symbiotic bacteria were made competent for gene transfer by acquisition of both a disarmed Ti plasmid and a suitable binary vector.

Wim Broodthaerts et al., "Gene transfer to plants by diverse species of bacteria," Nature 433, 629-33. Nature news story [subscription also required -- should pop up here eventually].

bad mood

It is not that Julia Reed can write of "our first Chanel suit, our first sip of Petrus or Chateau d'Yquem..." etc. as if "we" not only shared these milestones, but are also so, like, over them. It is not that she somehow manages to review a diet book while only discussing the various times that she has lost weight in her life. It is not even the percentage of the review she manages to devote to herself. It is that somehow the Times paid her for this shit when it wasn't good enough for Condé fucking Nast (which apparently needed the space to address the burning issue of the coconut diet [yeah, I read Vogue: Fuck off]).

On the other hand, to judge from Eliane Sciolino's much better article, Reed and Guiliano deserve each other. Less annoyingly:

I thoroughly enjoyed Bruni's discovery that Ono = Chili's, but the alliteration is indeed growing tiresome. The paradox: If your heat source is barely 5% of what is necessary, why even bother with the wok? Go to Chinatown.

Correction of the day: chocolate frothing was not invented by Europeans. The various implements used to acomplish this were (pre-conquest Mexicans frothed by pouring the liquid between two vessels).

Some days, I just love David Shaw:

When she tired of making fashion comparisons in her book -- and she clearly didn't tire of them nearly as quickly as I did -- Sbrocco took what I think of as the supermarket tabloid approach to women readers and began likening wines to movie stars.

Welfare line: Sonoma Saveurs -- foie gras cause célèbre -- to close; lobsters feel no pain [via tfs]. update: read it wrong: Derrick writes that Sonoma Saveurs is already toast.

Not satisfied with knob, Martin Amis has proceeded to forever ruin the word blancmange. (And yes, this reaction does make me a terrible person).

... and he was not afraid to use it

I guarantee you this guy knew what Xérès means [via t-muffle].

These hungarian kids need to take pig slaughter a little more seriously, but it sure does look delicious [via Krucoff's folly "gridskipper"].

In my more charitable moments, I really do believe that people mean well (even Minnie Driver). But, perhaps because of Bruni's description of the revolting excesses at AD, I find myself just a teensy bit sympathetic to the views of an anonymous correspondant:

I am kind of agog at how very wrongheaded this seems... Which do you think goes better with a big main course of human suffering, an Auxey-Duresses red, or Gewurtztraminer?

But I don't think I am in a financial position to donate right now anyway -- maybe I'll save up my money to kick down for a special Darfur menu.

Bruni correction watch

So no one at the Times speaks French?

I thought he justified the star subtraction well enough. I'm actually afraid to see what they're saying over at egullet, where certain prominent people have been spotted repeatedly humping AD's legs. Also, is it just me, or would you remember the name of a delicious $175 wine even if Sulzberger bought it? Perhaps easier if you skipped the martini.

One wonders how the Moto article got banished to "Circuits." More Moto pics here, via eGullet, where the chef hangs out.

more

Even more exciting than Bruni's geolinguistic fuckup: Béatrice de Géa's fucking awesome pictures for the LA Times's

superbowl snack story. Extra credit to Times staff for exhibiting perfunctory knowledge of team personnel. Food: not so good. No ass-kissing here! The Chron takes a more promising tack with cheesesteak, except that the versions you can buy on the west coast are laughable, and the attempt to make them at home is pathetic and doomed. You're better off with steak-ums. As for the impossibility of west coast lobster rolls, the less said the better. Furthermore, I just cannot get behind the local blood orange. First of all, the predominant variety is the moro, because it looks bloodier, but its taste is vastly inferior to the tarocco. Second: terroir. Sorry, they just don't taste as good as Sicilian, whatever variety. Watch David Karp -- fast becoming the NY Times's only remaining redeeming feature -- drop some real citrus science.

While we're at it, I'm going to have to disagree with the LA Times's dismissal of Jumilla, though it looks like Jorge Ordoñez -- whose wines normally rock -- gave them a bad selection. But my mild disapproval pales next to the biblical plague I expect Mr. Huge to rain down upon Asimov when he reads this. (This shit is all way too expensive for me to drink, so I'm witholding comment, except for the Paolo Bea, which, sampled on location, nearly brought tears to my eyes).

Elsewhere, Bruce has an embarassing Paris problem; Josh digs buffalo yogurt; Peter Hertzmann offers an insanely detailed (obvs.?) guide to cutting; Clifford A. Wright seems to know what he's talking about, but it does seem odd to discuss Mediterrannean transhumance without mentioning the Mesta.

Finally: I guess, if I was having a dry spell, or coming down from my midlife remedial college experience, or something, I might, possibly, hit it too. Fo shizzle.

I know we're all tired of Frank Bruni and his shortcomings, but I can't wait to see the Times correction that tries to explain the difference between Sherry and Xérès. Wow.

I also find it amusing that AD has no qualms about serving the Times critic last year's frozen salmon; nor Bruni, apparently, about eating it.