That's French for sociopath

Foodies are masochists, and this passage from an article in the Jan. 30, 2012 New Yorker gives a good example. The article is about a young-turk chef and restaurateur who opened a seafood restaurant in his hometown of Tijuana -- you're supposed to feel a frisson of danger -- where seafood is the local specialty. Specifically, salmon is the local specialty, and for that reason, young Javier Plascencia refuses to serve it.

But that's nothing compared to the scene depicted in the passage below, about a colleague of his. Pity the poor diner who simply wants something to eat:

At Manzanilla, the acclaimed restaurant in Ensenada that he owns with his wife, Solange Muris, [Benito Molina] has been known to leave patrons waiting for hours, only to emerge from the kitchen with a dish of fish jelly topped with barnacles and seaweed.

I think the only possible response would be that all-purpose line which is said to be applicable to the captions of almost all New Yorker cartoons: "Christ, what an asshole!"

Today's fake: The alleged popularity of 'The Crock-Pot Girls'

A Facebook page for three suburban women offering recipes and calling themselves "The Crock-Pot Girls" blew up in popularity so quickly that readers are suspicious. Not sure (and don't care) whether there really are three such women, but their sudden popularity on Facebook is evidently the work of an SEO hacker. It's not even clear whether the SEO hacker in in league with the women or simply selected them as the vehicle for his artistry; I like to think it's the latter, because then a whole range of slapstick-comedy plots are suggested.

Previously:
The Lonely 'Brinks Stockroom man'
The Desert 'Lost-Love Lawyer'

All you need to know about the early 21st Century bourgeoisie

There's a piece on the Bay Citizen website this morning, Meet Your (Sustainable) Chocolate Farmers. The author, Tara Duggan, opens with this unappetizing lede:

When I hear that chocolate is produced in an unethical manner, I'd rather swallow knives than hear reasons why I shouldn't enjoy one of my favorite foods. But with Valentine's Day approaching, I thought it was time to face up to the labor issues around cocoa farming.

If I may unpack that:

1. She occasionally hears that one of her favorite foods, chocolate, is sometimes "produced in an unethical manner."
2. In order to keep from hearing this discouraging news, she'd "rather swallow knives."
   
   Actually it seems strange that to keep from hearing something one would swallow knives; it would be more logical to stick those knives into one's ears. But I guess that if one swallowed them, the discomfort might be so distracting that one couldn't pay attention to bad news about candy. Anyway:
    
   
3. Valentine's Day is approaching, and as a journalist, she's hard put to come up with a piece linked to the holiday.
4. What better time to face her fears about the conditions under which chocolate is produced?

Here we have the ingredients of the perfect Bay Area foodie post: transgressiveness (chocolate is bad for you), trendiness (chocolate is looked upon by foodies as a gourmet item, at least potentially), liberal guilt, and pop psychology (let's face our fears!). That the fears in question have not to do with facing the rubber truncheons of the Egyptian secret police, or the dank cells of Chinese prisons, or even the comparatively comfortable but difficult decision to, say, put your mother in a "care facility," doesn't make them easier to bear. They are fears nonetheless.

Right, then. How wonderful that the writer is able to assuage her consternation by discovering a free trade grower's cooperative in Ghana, owned and operated by colorfully dressed women (a close examination of the picture reveals they are wearing dresses imprinted with the logo of their co-op). And what's more, they are not wasting their profits on skin-lightening cream or anything Westerners might disapprove of; they are practicing democratic socialism at its finest:

Their fair trade agreement allows them extra money to create additional income generation projects for the villages, such as making soap.

Soap for the villages! It's a win-win for everyone.

As for the internal conflict of eating candy, that's taken care of by the fact that it's a holiday anyway. On Valentine's Day you may eat chocolate, while reading the inevitable newspaper and magazine features that assure you it's good for you in small quantities. And at the prices we pay for gourmet chocolate, small quantities are all we can afford anyway.

Now don't you feel bad about eating those M&Ms in the break room? For shame.

Porn zine dumping near church food pantry equals column

A woman in L.A. found that a distributor for a free gay porn zine was dumping issues of the publication in her recycling bin. The newspaper columnist who picks up the story somehow ties it to a local food pantry at an Episcopal church.

technorati: Los Angeles, food+pantry, columnists

The petits fours of the bourgeoisie

I'm posting on Open Salon a lot, and today's post was one of my typically oblique free-associations that nobody likes but me.

Yuppies know their comforts often come at the expense of others. Those fantastic strawberries at your dinner party, organic though they may be, were raised and picked through an immigrant's back-breaking labor. My comfortable brand-name sneakers protect my middle-aged joints, at the expense of the blighted lives of the Chinese factory workers who made them. Und so weiter. This is what it means to be an affluent first-worlder in a top-heavy global economy. One's pleasures are another's pain; in fact, the pain of not just one other, but a thousand.