Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

The willow is too close to the house.

We still have time to mess this up!

“That’s what the insurrection act is for!”

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

We’re not going back!

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Not all heroes wear capes.

Joe Lieberman disappointingly reemerged to remind us that he’s still alive.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you don’t.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Glad to see john eastman going through some things.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

You are here: Home / Food & Recipes / Food / Open Thread — Versaille Foodies: Let Them Eat Exquisitely-Sourced, Ironically-Redesigned Cake!

Open Thread — Versaille Foodies: Let Them Eat Exquisitely-Sourced, Ironically-Redesigned Cake!

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It’s amazing what one can learn on the internet, however pure one’s intentions. L.V. Anderson at Slate reviews Alison Pearlman’s Smart Casual: The Transformation of Gourmet Restaurant Style in America:

… It used to be that human ingenuity was valued in the kitchen. Now, what matters more is chefs’ knowing the right producers and buying the right products. Culinary excellence can no longer be achieved simply by learning the right technique; it can be acquired only by knowing the right things to buy—and by, it needs hardly be said, shelling out however much money it takes to buy them. In this way, modern foodies’ materialistic definition of refinement is more exclusive than that of yesteryear’s dogmatic French cooking. What appears to be a celebration of the natural and the simple is in fact more constrictive and less attainable, because it depends not on talent but on means and access…

Materialism and agricultural name-dropping have not snuffed out all appreciation for skill—indeed, as Pearlman chronicles, the ascendance of ingredient worship has paralleled a polar-opposite trend, that of modernist cuisine. Born in Ferran Adria’s elBulli in Catalonia, Spain, and raised in American outposts like WD-50 in New York and Alinea in Chicago, modernism utilizes laboratory chemicals and equipment to give foods surprising appearances and textures. Modernists chefs are often hailed as avant-gardists, but the pieces Pearlman highlights in Smart Casual reveal a troublingly reactionary attitude. Deconstructed, disguised, minimized reinterpretations of Heath bars, doughnuts, cheesesteaks, and burgers simultaneously mock anyone unhip enough to prefer the original version and applaud their eater’s advanced palate and dainty appetite. On the topic of these self-congratulatory simulacra of populist favorites, Pearlman is far too forgiving. Of a modernist bite-sized dessert that is made to look exactly like a tiny McDonald’s cheeseburger, she writes:

“However good the illusion, would anyone really mistake Moto’s BURGER with cheese for the fast-food familiar? No more than one would confuse an Andy Warhol silk screen of Campbell’s soup cans with Campbell’s soup.”

But it is not 1962, a petit four is not a silk screen, and McDonald’s burgers are not merely a symbol of commercialism. In 2013, fast food and junk food are heavily burdened with class connotations: They have become practically synonymous with poverty and its attendant aesthetic problem, the so-called obesity epidemic. To target them for artistic critique is to take a potshot at the proletariat. To put that “art” on plates and serve it to upper-class foodies is to flatter their sense of deserved social superiority. At best, modernist chefs’ fake fast food is a lazy, meaningless rehashing of pop art tropes; at worst, it’s an ugly manifestation of foodies’ deep-seated disdain for the poor…

A “bite-sized dessert… made to look exactly like a tiny McDonald’s cheeseburger”! I envision the McArdle-Sudermans anxiously ransacking their Theromix reference guides, searching for a knockoff recipe to serve as the climax to their dream dinner party for Pete Peterson, Charles Koch, David Brooks and Tom Friedman. (Which will never happen, but even a couple of Village-embedded Kochsuckers need impossible aspirations to boost their shallow aspirations through the dreary wastelands… )

Apart from conceptual eating and hipster fantasies, what’s on the agenda for the start of the weekend?

Reader Interactions

86Comments

  2. 2.

    lamh35

    So let me see if I understand whats going on right now, let me get this straight, Israel decides to bomb Syria while POTUS is out of the country? Wow, to whom is this a good move?

  3. 3.

    Ben Franklin

    Senior scientists have criticised the “appalling irresponsibility” of researchers in China who have deliberately created new strains of influenza virus in a veterinary laboratory.

    They warned there is a danger that the new viral strains created by mixing bird-flu virus with human influenza could escape from the laboratory to cause a global pandemic killing millions of people.

    Lord May of Oxford, a former government chief scientist and past president of the Royal Society, denounced the study published today in the journal Science as doing nothing to further the understanding and prevention of flu pandemics.

    “They claim they are doing this to help develop vaccines and such like. In fact the real reason is that they are driven by blind ambition with no common sense whatsoever,” Lord May told The Independent.

    “The record of containment in labs like this is not reassuring. They are taking it upon themselves to create human-to-human transmission of very dangerous viruses. It’s appallingly irresponsible,” he said.

    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/appalling-irresponsibility-senior-scientists-attack-chinese-researchers-for-creating-new-strains-of-influenza-virus-in-veterinary-laboratory-8601658.html

    Then there’s this….


    Abstract: Autism is a condition characterized by impaired cognitive and social skills, associated with compromised immune function. The incidence is alarmingly on the rise, and environmental factors are increasingly suspected to play a role. This paper investigates word frequency patterns in the U.S. CDC Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) database. Our results provide strong evidence supporting a link between autism and the aluminum in vaccines. A literature review showing toxicity of aluminum in human physiology offers further support. Mentions of autism in VAERS increased steadily at the end of the last century, during a period when mercury was being phased out, while aluminum adjuvant burden was being increased. Using standard log-likelihood ratio techniques, we identify several signs and symptoms that are significantly more prevalent in vaccine reports after 2000, including cellulitis, seizure, depression, fatigue, pain and death, which are also significantly associated with aluminum-containing vaccines. We propose that children with the autism diagnosis are especially vulnerable to toxic metals such as aluminum and mercury due to insufficient serum sulfate and glutathione. A strong correlation between autism and the MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) vaccine is also observed, which may be partially explained via an increased sensitivity to acetaminophen administered to control fever.

    Keywords: autism; vaccines; MMR; HEP-B; glutathione; sulfate; cholesterol sulfate; aluminum; mercury; acetaminophen

    http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/14/11/2227

    VAXXBots take note.

  5. 5.

    lamh35

    Ok guys, I’ve got my Samsung Galaxy 4S, now I need advice on what apps I should get or what bells and whistles I should look for. I plan to add the usual ones from my Iphone, but just wanted some suggestions for a novice Android user.

  6. 6.

    schrodinger's cat

    Last week I saw the 2009 reboot of Star Trek, every one else seemed to love it, but it left me cold, am I missing something?
    I hate these stupid food fads, in my opinion the best food is usually street food, almost anywhere in the world.

  8. 8.

    DarrenG

    To the Pearlman article I say: nonsense, and double nonsense.

    There has never been more emphasis on technique in fine dining kitchens than there is now. Sourcing has certainly become a large factor, but hardly at the expense of technique.

    And playful interpretations of common foods and/or childhood memories goes back a long, long time. Hell, the dish that put Keller and The French Laundry on the map was a play on a Baskin-Robbins ice cream cone fer-cryin-out-loud.

  10. 10.

    Mnemosyne

    @Ben Franklin:

    The best part is that those same authors proposed three different possible mechanisms for the increase in autism in the same journal:

    Impaired Sulfate Metabolism and Epigenetics: Is There a Link in Autism?

    Empirical Data Confirm Autism Symptoms Related to Aluminum and Acetaminophen Exposure

    Is Cholesterol Sulfate Deficiency a Common Factor in Preeclampsia, Autism, and Pernicious Anemia?

    The poor dears just know that vaccines cause autism, but they just can’t seem to make up their minds on how it happens, can they? So they just keep coming up with different reasons why no, really, it totally was the vaccines, I swear!

  11. 11.

    NotMax

    Don’t get me started on deconstructed foods, nor on portion sizes more suitable for pygmy anorexic mice.

  15. 15.

    Comrade Jake

    @trollhattan: I just love the fact that the twitterverse will be trolling Trump with calls of Fuckface von Clownstick for years to come.

  16. 16.

    Mike in NC

    Watching “Silver Linings Playbook” which is an extremely strange movie.

  18. 18.

    Mnemosyne

    Drinking a margarita while sitting out in the 90 degree heat is fun, but holy crap is it tiring. I need a nap and it’s not even 7 pm.

  21. 21.

    Mnemosyne

    @Ben Franklin:

    Wait, sorry, I was wrong — they actually wrote FOUR separate articles with different explanations for the supposed link:

    Is Encephalopathy a Mechanism to Renew Sulfate in Autism?

    Their thesis would probably be helped if they could restrict themselves to, I don’t know, one or two possible mechanisms that other scientists could study rather than gish galloping around throwing out multiple ideas about how it might work.

  22. 22.

    DougJ

    @DarrenG:

    I tend to agree, and I don’t think that playing on familiar dishes is typically done ironically. For example, Keller did his donuts with coffee sauce dessert not as a wink-wink but because he had coffee and donuts one morning and realized they tasted better than any of his desserts and would taste better still given the full restaurant treatment.

  23. 23.

    Joel

    So, uh, both Alice Waters-style farm to table and El Bulli inspired molecular gastronomy are class signifiers? How is this different from traditional French cuisine?

  24. 24.

    4tehlulz

    @Mnemosyne: I’m sure that’s it’s merely a coincidence that Stephanie Seneff is an author of seven of the nine articles in the journal.

  25. 25.

    raven

    Final push on the demolition. The addition is laid out and the grading and footing work will start monday. I’ve taken down 2/3 of the deck and tomorrow I tackle the 10 ft 2×10 joists and the rest of the decking. It supposed to be rainy and cool and I can hack that.

  26. 26.

    Lyrebird

    I’m more into basse than haute cuisine, so I can’t illuminate this thread, but I’m still basking in the glow of Odie Hugh Manatee’s and Just Some F’s marvelous Levenson-inspired humor!

    Thanks BJ!

  27. 27.

    NotMax

    @Redshirt

    Foam is for shaving.

    Prefer having my food served without it looking as if a mad dog has drooled on it.

    There’s a restaurant right nearby which is always lauded as a top drawer example of contemporary fine dining.

    Frankly, the food is humdrum, and when I get home from dining there, have to make a sandwich as am still hungry.

  28. 28.

    trollhattan

    Can someone ignite the Betty Crocker batlight?

    On the last day of its annual session, the [Florida] Legislature is expected to pass HB 999, a bill that would bar local and county governments from setting their own standards for water quality and wetlands construction—assuming those standards are higher than the state’s relatively lax requirements, that is.

    The proposed law would also severely limit “testing, sampling, collection, or analysis” of state waters. And it would make about two dozen existing regional water districts “exempt from further wetlands or water quality regulations.” One of its key sponsors, Rep. Jimmy Patronis, is the state chairman for the conservative, pro-business American Legislative Exchange Council, and his family owns a swath of Northwest Florida that it pimps out for water-bottling and clear-cutting.

    The bill could obliterate the already-threatened Florida manatee, which subsists on quickly disappearing river grasses. In fact, 582 of the burly mammals have died so far in 2013—as much as 19 percent of the entire adult population—thanks to a shrinking supply of food and the proliferation of deadly algae blooms like red tide in state waters.

    http://gawker.com/manatees-are-dying-off-and-florida-is-determined-to-sp-489114098

    Ugh.

  29. 29.

    raven

    30 years ago I went to the New Orleans school of cooking. The chef came out and said “this is Escoffier, the Bible of classical French cooking”. He then dropped the book on the floor and kicked it across the room, “this is what I think of classical French cooking”! I leaner my jambalaya that I have cooked for 1,000 people and a gumbo that never fails to slay.

  31. 31.

    Mnemosyne

    @Redshirt:

    It was a party at work. It’s a tough life I lead, to be sure.

    I brought one of the margaritas home for G in a travel mug. Fortunately, I did not get pulled over, because I think that would be pretty hard to explain.

  33. 33.

    Anne Laurie

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    Last week I saw the 2009 reboot of Star Trek, every one else seemed to love it, but it left me cold, am I missing something?

    Well, I didn’t expect to like it either, but my inner 14-year-old Trekkie was thrilled. (If only because Chris Pine finally made James T. Kirk believable, as a case of pediatric PTSD with severe ADHD, caroming from one self-inflicted crisis to another in exactly the way that many people consider ‘leadership’.) I think it works best for those of us who remember first-gen ST as a fond childhood/adolescent memory of a universe both exciting and infinitely tweakable.

  35. 35.

    p.a.

    The half-full viewpoint: lots of upper class trends trickle down filter down the social ladder. If well produced foodstuffs follow this trajectory, it will be good thing.

    Half-empty: IF…

  38. 38.

    J.W. Hamner

    I certainly think there is a lot to the idea that, for many, being a foodie is just another way to look down on people. I also am concerned about how the locavore view of what we should be paying for food doesn’t scale well to the family of 4 on SNAP. But on the other hand it’s hard to see how supporting local farmers and worrying about whether your meat was ethically sourced is a bad thing. It’s progress even if it needs a lot of refinement.

  39. 39.

    Persia

    @lamh35: Get a battery saving app. I use JuiceDefender and it’s great. They drink batteries, it’s unbelievable.

    Other favorites:
    The official Facebook app is probably the best of the lot. They also have an app called Pages that will help you manage any pages you have. Handy for me, as I have to update the work FB page at trainings sometimes.

    Your local favorite TV station and/or public radio station may have an app. Good for school cancellations if you have kids.

    I love Stitcher for podcasts. TuneIn Radio is good if you like listening to internet radio, it’s an absolute bonanza of streams.

    If you travel, TripIt has a great mobile app that helps you keep track of your reservations, etc. TripAdvisor’s pretty good for restaurants.

    AllRecipes has my favorite food app. Google Sky Map is amazing.

    Shush! is a new one I have that will mute/unmute your phone according to schedule. Handy.

  42. 42.

    Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS)

    Anyone who’s watched Kings of Pastry or any Gordon Ramsay knows that the premise of that cooking article is stretched.

  44. 44.

    Mnemosyne

    G just got home and poured his margarita. I said I didn’t realize until I was getting into the car that what I was doing was probably illegal, and he said, “Yeah, I thought of that when you said that was what you were going to do, but I really wanted that margarita.”

  45. 45.

    trollhattan

    @Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS):
    There’s something to pick fun at with any food trend (or all of it WRT Guy Fieri) but by gawd I’m not apologizing for loving every second of my pilgrimage to French Laundry. If somebody can teach me a new way to appreciate the familiar, to try something I’ve never eaten before or to introduce a taste or fragrance or texture, then I’m there.

    Of course, I now have a twee portion of corn flakes in a comically oversized bowl for breakfast. The milk is from a cow named Beatrice Hastings.

  47. 47.

    Francisco the Man

    “In 2013, fast food and junk food are heavily burdened with class connotations: They have become practically synonymous with poverty and its attendant aesthetic problem, the so-called obesity epidemic.”

    Interesting. No foodie here. Even though I mostly left shift work for the professional class a few years ago, I still maintain one foot in the shift work world through a part time job. It’s primary after working this job late at night that I find myself occasionally eating fast food. When I do, it’s good, and I enjoy it (in the moment if not necessarily the next day). What I never do, however, is find myself eating at Applebees or the equivalent. Nothing against it – just too expensive to pay for deliberately and not cheap enough to pay for thoughtlessly – like taco bell after a shift.

    I mention this because I guess there really are class preferences with respect to fast food.

  48. 48.

    lamh35

    @Persia: thanks, I’ll check all those out this weekend. I just got the phone Thursday evening. So this weekend, I’m gonna spend time playing around with it when I’m of for on break from workd.

  49. 49.

    Yutsano

    This is why I hate food snobs. The simple fact is there is no such thing as a true authentic recipe and there is no such thing as one real technique to cook. Cooking is really the true statement of IDIC in practice. But it’s really about what tastes good to you. And that has infinite variations.

  50. 50.

    sm*t cl*de

    @Mnemosyne: I’m sure that’s it’s merely a coincidence that Stephanie Seneff is an author of seven of the nine articles in the journal.

    The journal’s publisher itself is one of the griftiest in the whole predatory-open-access scamdustry.
    Let me outsource the ridicule to Respectful Insolence.

  53. 53.

    scav

    Anything can be taken to cultish extremes, including the real proles only eat Supersized Chik Fil A Heart Attack Burgers and a token salad at Applebees tribe-marker. Foam, everything in a Jello Salad with Pineapple and Creme Cheese Elegance, choose your silly. Once in a while, either is fun.

  54. 54.

    sm*t cl*de

    The best part is that those same authors proposed three different possible mechanisms for the increase in autism in the same journal:

    It emerges that the first author (Seneff) wandered off into the long grass of woo years ago, and before switching to the vaccine conspiracy, used to be convinced that autism was caused by the twin scourges of diet and sunscreen:
    http://stephanie-on-health.blogspot.co.nz/2008/11/sunscreen-and-low-fat-diet-recipe-for.html

    The second author (Davidson) is if anything more of a loon:
    http://www.blogger.com/profile/02380439230640182632

  55. 55.

    Gin & Tonic

    I don’t mind agricultural name-dropping if I know the chef has gone out of his way to buy sustainably raised food from local producers. The small lamb or pork or vegetable producers around here will never make it to Dufresne’s kitchens, but when their stuff is cooked in a good restaurant 15 miles away from the farm, or when I can put a name and a face and a story to they guy who supplies the fluke or the oysters I’m eating, that’s a good thing.

  56. 56.

    Chris

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    Wasn’t just you. More than a few people I’ve read or talked to think it was dumbing down Star Trek, which used to have a nice cerebral side to it, into regular loud-and-dumb action sci-fi. I tend to agree, but then I’m one of these people who enjoyed The Motion Picture.

  57. 57.

    lamh35

    Watching Lethal Weapon 3 and just SMH, cause even though I still like it, all I can think is about how Mel Gibson has fallen from all the crazy.

  58. 58.

    Sophist

    They have become practically synonymous with poverty and its attendant aesthetic problem, the so-called obesity epidemic.

    How big of a douchebag does referring to the obesity epidemic as an “aesthetic problem” make you? I vote for “huge”.

  61. 61.

    scav

    @Sophist: They also betray their shallow understanding if they think marking status using food stuffs and provenance emerged recently. They’ve thrown in all the proper vocabulary markers though and whipped it up into a fine airy intellectualish froth.

  62. 62.

    Persia

    @Joseph Nobles: He explained that Keynes had none because he was a homosexual and was married to a ballerina, with whom he likely talked of “poetry” rather than procreated.

    I….

    What?

    What?

  63. 63.

    karen marie

    Materialism and agricultural name-dropping have not snuffed out all appreciation for skill

    Sounds to me like Pearlman discovered “the help” have been spitting in her food before serving it.

    (edited for clarity)

  64. 64.

    NotMax

    @Yutsano

    Friend of mine’s step-mother had some sort of surgery that wiped out entirely her sense of smell and most of her sense of taste.

    She provided some unusually hyper-seasoned (or else totally bland) items at the table whenever she did the cooking.

  65. 65.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Persia: I concur completely with your analysis. Also, taking a shot at a guy for marrying a ballerina? Traditionally, ballerinas are considered hot – limber and all that.

  66. 66.

    Villago Delenda Est

    These fucking people WANT to ride tumbrels.

    It’s the only explanation for all this.

  69. 69.

    scav

    Room for another? Look at this Repub Party Boy, David Cole / David Stein Hollywood conservative unmasked as notorious Holocaust revisionist

    To those who knew him, or thought they knew him, he was a cerebral, fun-loving gadfly who hosted boozy gatherings for Hollywood’s political conservatives. David Stein brought right-wing congressmen, celebrities, writers and entertainment industry figures together for shindigs, closed to outsiders, where they could scorn liberals and proclaim their true beliefs.

    Over the past five years Stein’s organisation, Republican Party Animals, drew hundreds to regular events in and around Los Angeles, making him a darling of conservative blogs and talkshows. That he made respected documentaries on the Holocaust added intellectual cachet and Jewish support to Stein’s cocktail of politics, irreverence and rock and roll.

    There was just one problem. Stein was not who he claimed. His real name can be revealed for the first time publicly – a close circle of confidants only found out the truth recently – as David Cole. And under that name he was once a reviled Holocaust revisionist who questioned the existence of Nazi gas chambers. He changed identities in January 1998.

    couldn’t hold myself to two paras. it’s a real gem.

  70. 70.

    hamletta

    @sm*t cl*de: Ugh. I used to work with a real autism researcher. It isn’t an epidemic; it’s only recently that we’ve had a means to diagnose it, much less treat it.

    And developmental-behavioral pediatrics only emerged about 40 years ago, once vaccines had knocked out most of the diseases that used to routinely kill children.

  71. 71.

    Jebediah

    On account of open-thread-ness:
    Did anyone see this example of Tucker Carlson continuing to cover himself in glory?
    Daily Caller Pushes Invented Psychological Disorder To Silence Victims Of Gun Violence

    The “work” they are relying on claims that victims of gun violence suffer from “hoplophobia” and it’s totally unfair that crazy crazypeople get to influence politics. You know it is totally legitimate sciencey stuff, because it includes gems like this:

    Not coincidentally, among Jews, Blacks and women there are many “professional victims” who have little sense of identity outside of their victimhood.

  72. 72.

    Chris

    @lamh35:

    Mel Gibson, definite case of “like him on screen, just not off.” Knowing how rightie he is, I always wonder how he felt doing the Lethal Weapon movies given the liberal undercurrent in all of them. Supposedly he and Glover still get along fine.

  73. 73.

    lamh35

    @Chris: def the case with his earlier work before he sent crazy after Passion of The Christ. I find it, not funny, but weirdly disturbing that the beginning of Gibson’s meltdown seems to be traced to round the time he was filming/released Passion

  76. 76.

    Chris

    @scav:

    David Stein brought right-wing congressmen, celebrities, writers and entertainment industry figures together for shindigs, closed to outsiders, where they could scorn liberals and proclaim their true beliefs.

    It’s amazing the extent to which that’s become the glue holding conservative associations together. Get together and bitch about how much the meanie liberals hurt your fee fees.

  79. 79.

    Scamp Dog

    Tomorrow I’m heading down to Colorado Springs for iOS Devcamp. Many of the leading iPhone and iPad developers will be there, along with Yours Truly and Miss Biscuit. I’ve always half expected to be told I can’t have the dog there, but she behaves herself and people seem to like her, so I’ll bring her again.

  80. 80.

    Joseph Nobles

    @Persia: I know! I had to look at that link to make sure it wasn’t some parody site. And, Omnes, it’s possible to see Niall as implying exactly that – “total waste of a ballerina” being what he was saying. What an utter, contemptuous asshole Ferguson is!

  82. 82.

    Jebediah

    @Mnemosyne:
    So Tucker’s got company… not good company, mind you. I think that’s got hoplophobia beat, though. I’m surprised that anyone, at any time, could suggest fleeing bondage is irrational. Shit, folks in the Bible fled bondage, and no one called them mentally ill, did they?

  83. 83.

    cyntax

    The essay makes some good points. The degree to which diners expect to see Frog Hollow peaches or oysters from Hog Island can get a little out of hand here in the Bay Area, but the article lacks a certina context. It seems that the reason boutique suppliers reached an ascendancy was not initially because of issues of class but because of the desire to reconnect with where the food came from. Chains like Safeway bring you prepackaged cuts of meat and avocados from Peru. Somehow that seems like a not completely good idea. Here’s Meathead from Amazingribs.com explaining why you should get to know your butcher and he’s not operating in any exclusive foodie context:

    In my blue-collar neighborhood in a suburb just west of Chicago there used to be many butcher shops. The big grocery stores and the big department stores that carry meat, like Walmart, have put them all out of business…

    Many grocery stores get their meat shipped to them pre-cut and packaged from a central warehouse. But some still have butchers on premise. Find them. The head butcher is usually on duty early morning through early afternoon. Stop at the counter and ask for the head butcher or the assistant. Don’t be surprised if they are women. Introduce yourself. Chat them up. Swap recipes. Tell them about AmazingRibs.com. Get the direct phone number of the butcher department. Ask them about their favorite cuts and what they think are some of the best meats they get. Ask if they can special order USDA Prime grade beef or less popular cuts like beef tri-tip or whole packer briskets. Set yourself apart from the crowd.

    Now when it comes to eating at a James Beard award winning restaurant and what not, the patrons have outsourced the work that Meathead recommends you do yourself, and that’s probably where things get a little sideways. The boutique suppliers become brands that denote exclusivity, being in the know and material means, when simply getting to know a butcher, going to your local farmer’s market would actually accomplish what’s needed. But for Anderson not to ground his critique in the legitimate desire to be better connected to the sources of your food seems a bit careless.

    Wait, I think my ribs are done…

  86. 86.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Jebediah:

    Not coincidentally, among Jews, Blacks and women there are many “professional victims” who have little sense of identity outside of their victimhood.

    My God, it’s like the Octoplex on Memorial Day weekend, the projection of shits like Carlson is so strong.

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