Me to Michael Pollan; "You're an Elitist Gas-Bag"

Yep, that's right. The ethical-eating authority, best-selling author, and Food, Inc. star muffed one. And I'm calling him on it. I'm no authority on anything (except maybe Italian Beef sandwiches), but there it is.

I'm actually a big fan of Pollan and his writing. I loved The Omnivore's Dilemma, recently saw Food, Inc., and have kept current by following articles he publishes every now and then. The guy's really well-informed and has a lot of worthwhile stuff to say about how we eat and how we should change our approach to food.

But in his most recent article, published last week in the New York Times, Pollan screws the pooch. Big time. Not only is he just flat-out factually wrong in about six different places, but in his attempt to find a scapegoat for the current sad state of affairs in how Americans eat, he targets feminism. Specifically, Betty Friedan.

(Not that feminism, broadly, or Friedan, specifically, is above criticism. They're not. But neither are they guilty of what Pollan tries to pin on them. More to follow.)

That's not all, though. In his (mostly justified) rants about The Food Network (Lord knows I've made my feelings about the network known), he gets enough details about the shows wrong to allow careful readers to realize he doesn't actually know what the fuck he's talking about. It seems like he had a research assistant watch a few episodes and report back or something, so he wouldn't have to lower himself to actually watching "low culture" like Iron Chef or Triple D. Who knows... maybe he switched the network on and left it running in the background while he flipped through the recent issue of The New Yorker.

And, really, that's where Pollan's article rubbed me the wrong way. The whole thing has this condescending, scolding, elitist tone that really muddies the message. The article is hung on the framework of discussing the recent film Julie and Julia, but he uses the film's subject matter as a jumping-off point to continue the national discussion of our broken, dysfunctional relationship with food and eating that he's been prodding us to have for years. Most of what Pollan's got to say is right on the mark. All his major points are true and, yes, need to be written about, discussed, and changed.

But having a Long Island born-and-bred, Northern California-dwelling Berkeley-tenured ivy tower male like Pollan lecture middle America about why they're morons for watching The Food Network isn't a great way to move that discussion forward or get people to listen. And blaming Friedan's Feminine Mystique for re-framing our approach to cooking causing generations of women to view it as "drudgery" isn't a great way to get feminists, stay-at-home-moms, or working women to take what you're saying to heart.

I'm going to quote liberally from the article and simply respond, since this is what I found myself doing as I sat in front of my computer screen reading it. Overall, it's a thought-provoking piece containing lots of valid points and valuable insights. But in the name of a good rant, I'm going to focus just on the parts that really got the hairs on the back of my neck standing up, starting with the one that's drawing so much ire all around the net:

Curiously, the year Julia Child went on the air — 1963 — was the same year Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique,” the book that taught millions of American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression.

This is the quote that's gotten Pollan into trouble with the feminists and has bloggers and twitterers of all stripes buzzing. I don't take issue with the sentiment behind it--neither Friedan nor feminism is anything approaching a sacred cow with me--but it's just flat-out factually incorrect. Dead wrong. Bzzzzt! Thanks for playing, Mike, you can pick up your parting gifts on the way out.

Saying that Friedan's book "taught millions of women to regard housework...as drudgery" is just drastically, laughably, misleading. The post-war years prior to 1963 saw women emerging as a huge sector of the workforce and factories that had been geared up for the war effort re-tooling as production facilities for all manner of convenience food products. The booming advertising industry was quick to jump in and assist in the food industry's effort to convince women that food preparation was drudgery to be avoided at all costs, and did so with incredible effectiveness. All of this was well-underway by the time The FM was released in 1963. There are entire books dedicated to documenting this phenomenon and what gets me is that I'm confident Pollan is not only aware of them, but has read them.

Which means that his scapegoating of Friedan and feminism is lazy at best. Perhaps he didn't want to stretch an already-very-long article to more fully flesh out the various parties who really were responsible for this negative re-frame of cooking. A less charitable read, though, could view Pollan's choice as a cynical attempt to co-opt negative sentiment towards feminism to bolster his cause, or maybe just as a way to drum up some controversy and get people talking.

Regardless of which explanation is accurate, it's some weak-ass shit from a guy I expect far better from. Incredibly enough, a few short paragraphs later, he says:

Many of these convenience foods have been sold to women as tools of liberation; the rhetoric of kitchen oppression has been cleverly hijacked by food marketers and the cooking shows they sponsor to sell more stuff.

So Pollan acknowledges here that other forces were working to portray food prep as "drudgery", not very long after trying to blame the whole thing on Friedan. But who had more influence in the early 60's? A feminist writer or "food marketers"? Which enjoyed more circulation--The Feminine Mystique or magazines like Women's Day and Family Circle?

I spent an enlightening if somewhat depressing hour on the phone with a veteran food-marketing researcher, Harry Balzer, who explained that “people call things ‘cooking’ today that would roll their grandmother in her grave — heating up a can of soup or microwaving a frozen pizza.”

Another cheap shot in an attempt to make a valid larger point. I admit to having more limited knowledge than this Balzer guy, but I've never heard anyone refer to microwaving a frozen pizza as 'cooking'. It just seems like Pollan is taking the easy way out to make his point.

...you do have to wonder how easily so specialized a set of skills might translate to the home kitchen — or anywhere else for that matter. For when in real life are even professional chefs required to conceive and execute dishes in 20 minutes from ingredients selected by a third party exhibiting obvious sadistic tendencies? (String cheese?) Never, is when. The skills celebrated on the Food Network in prime time are precisely the skills necessary to succeed on the Food Network in prime time. They will come in handy nowhere else on God’s green earth.

This comment misses the mark for me on two levels. First, the shows he's discussing--Iron Chef America, Chopped, and Top Chef--do not claim to be instructional cooking shows. They're billed as entertainment. Although the recipes are often made available online after the show airs.

And second, the ability to improvise and construct a dish or meal from random ingredients *constantly* comes in handy in real life. I do it ALL THE TIME. It's a great skill to have and shows that give contestants a basket of unlikely ingredients and challenge them to compose a tasty dish with them can, yes, be instructional, but--and this is even more important--they can be inspirational, especially to home cooks who find themselves fishing around the bottom of the freezer with a hungry family due to arrive home any minute.

I guess a guy like Pollan, who probably only shops at organic-humane-eco-friendly-localvore farmer's markets hasn't ever found himself in that situation. Must be nice.

We learn things watching these cooking competitions, but they’re not things about how to cook. There are no recipes to follow;

Arrgh! HUGE pet peeve! Learning how to cook isn't about following recipes! Are you KIDDING me, Michael? This statement actually makes me wonder if *you* really know how to cook.

Or as a chef friend put it when I asked him if he thought I could learn anything about cooking by watching the Food Network, “How much do you learn about playing basketball by watching the N.B.A.?”

Um....tons? But besides all that's learned by watching, the more important point is that watching often inspires people to get out there and PLAY. What a dumb, dumb comment.

What we mainly learn about on the Food Network in prime time is culinary fashion, which is no small thing: if Julia took the fear out of cooking, these shows take the fear — the social anxiety — out of ordering in restaurants. (Hey, now I know what a shiso leaf is and what “crudo” means!) Then, at the judges’ table, we learn how to taste and how to talk about food. For viewers, these shows have become less about the production of high-end food than about its consumption — including its conspicuous consumption. (I think I’ll start with the sawfish crudo wrapped in shiso leaves. . . .)

And the hits keep on comin'. It was at about this point in the article that I became really aware of Pollan's insulated bi-coastal sensibility. I'm not saying that he comes off as a totally out-of-touch, holier-than-thou elitist, but...um...yeah...actually, that IS what I'm saying.

Listen, I've barely ever even seen crudo or shiso leaves on menus and I've been a chef for 15 years. I had to go look up sawfish to find out what the hell it is and the first thing I find out is that it's critically endangered and is completely banned from international trade. Where the hell is this Pollan guy eating? What's next? Is he going to drop a reference to the last ortolan feast he went to?

His point here his valid, but it gets completely lost in the underlying messages he's cluelessly broadcasting about himself and the perspective from which he approaches his work.

Sure, Guy Fieri, the tattooed and spiky-coiffed chowhound who hosts “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” ducks into the kitchen whenever he visits one of these roadside joints to do a little speed-bonding with the startled short-order cooks in back, but most of the time he’s wrapping his mouth around their supersize creations

Again, Pollan doesn't allow reality to stand in the way of his scapegoating. I happen to watch D,D&D almost religiously and I can attest to the fact that Fieri almost always speaks with the owner or chef, that he's sincerely respectful of their success and their "creations" and that he possesses a solid enough kitchen background to know exactly what the folks he's interviewing are talking about--something that probably couldn't be said of Pollan. Fieri doesn't usually interview "short order cooks" and his characterization of the restaurant staff as "startled" reveals Pollan's ignorance of how the show is filmed (restaurants featured on the show close down on the day they do the "kitchen shoot" so no one is being caught unaware).

“I love that after a day where nothing is sure — and when I say nothing, I mean nothing — you can come home and absolutely know that if you add egg yolks to chocolate and sugar and milk, it will get thick. It’s such a comfort.” How many of us still do work that engages us in a dialogue with the material world and ends — assuming the soufflé doesn’t collapse — with such a gratifying and tasty sense of closure? Come to think of it, even the collapse of the soufflé is at least definitive, which is more than you can say about most of what you will do at work tomorrow.

Ok, I haven't seen the movie and I assume Pollan has, but I'm not sure how he gets souffle from egg yolks, chocolate, sugar and milk. Maybe that's what Julie Powell was talking about, but soufflés, which do usually contain some egg yolks, are more characterized by the presence of egg whites, which are whipped stiff and then folded into the mixture to give the soufflé its essential poofy rise. I've also never seen a soufflé recipe containing milk. When I hear a recipe described as "yolks, chocolate, sugar, and milk getting thick", I think chocolate mousse, not chocolate soufflé.

I'm telling you, I think this Pollan guy DOESN'T KNOW HOW TO COOK!

Since 1967, we’ve added 167 hours — the equivalent of a month’s full-time labor — to the total amount of time we spend at work each year, and in households where both parents work, the figure is more like 400 hours. Americans today spend more time working than people in any other industrialized nation — an extra two weeks or more a year. Not surprisingly, in those countries where people still take cooking seriously, they also have more time to devote to it.

Oh, but it's all Betty Friedan's fault that women view cooking as drudgery and reach for Rice-a-Roni or canned soup. Gimme a freakin' break!

Shapiro shows that the shift toward industrial cookery began not in response to a demand from women entering the work force but as a supply-driven phenomenon. In fact, for many years American women, whether they worked or not, resisted processed foods, regarding them as a dereliction of their “moral obligation to cook,” something they believed to be a parental responsibility on par with child care.

Gosh, I just can't imagine why feminists like Friedan would portray this sort of mindset as a form of oppression. Uh....maybe because it IS one? Sheesh, Pollan, can you contradict yourself MORE?

Chunks of animal flesh seared over an open fire: grilling is cooking at its most fundamental and explicit, the transformation of the raw into the cooked right before our eyes. It makes a certain sense that the grill would be gaining adherents at the very moment when cooking meals and eating them together is fading from the culture. (While men have hardly become equal partners in the kitchen, they are cooking more today than ever before: about 13 percent of all meals, many of them on the grill.)

Yet we don’t crank up the barbecue every day; grilling for most people is more ceremony than routine.

Ugh. The dreaded use of "barbecue" as a synonym for "grill". A bigger pet peeve doesn't exist in my world. More evidence the guy's not a cook. Attention, fancy, multi-degreed writer guy; "grilling" is cooking food quickly directly over live flames. "Barbecuing" is cooking food slowly with low, indirect heat. They aren't the same. You grill a burger. You barbecue a pork shoulder. Look it up.


Rant over. I'm done here. Read the article and lemme know what you think. My take on it is that Pollan didn't do his normal standard of due dilligence. Maybe the grad students that usually do his research for him are all on summer break.

Either that, or he's trolling.

Valentine's Day Sucks

Ok, just let me preface this by saying that I'm happily married and not entirely unromantic. I like love. Love is nice. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, it does.

Valentine's day, however, isn't about love. No, despite all the hearts and cupids and sexy innuendo, Valentine's day is about selling you stuff.

Most holidays are, these days, of course. But at least other holidays like Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas have some substance beneath the crassly over-commercialized surface. With Valentines' day, there's just no there there. At least, not anymore. The whole thing used to be kind of cool; back in the pre-Roman empire days when it was referred to as Lupercalia. But the cutesy teddy-bear laden, bouquet-bearing current incarnation has strayed so far from its roots that it has rendered itself unrecognizable, doomed to be discarded as a hollow, empty exercise in pressuring people to buy stuff, boosting the sales of greeting cards and cheap chocolates, and filling the reservation books of restaurants during an otherwise flaccid February.

But before it became the fuzzy feel-good Valentine's Day, this Hallmark holiday was a pagan fertility festival known as Lupercalia, where men donned goat skins and employed whips to spank women in hopes of increasing their virility. The festival was traditionally kicked off by a ceremony which included a sacrifice of male goats and dogs, whose blood was used to anoint the foreheads of young men. These men would then strip down naked, covering themselves only with the freshly-skinned pelts of the sacrifice animals, fashion whips out of these same skins, and run around town, delivering lashes to young women who would line the parade route, in hopes of receiving the ceremonial spankings, which were said to prevent sterility and stave off the pain of any future childbearing.

Damn. Now that's a party. Today, we get fondue by candlelight and Whitman's samplers.

As with many pagan holidays, the fun ended when the Christians co-opted the holiday and cleaned it up. The Romans did away with the trappings of the pagan craziness around the fifth century, and somehow the whole deal got latched to some guy named Valentine, a priest who reportedly flouted a law imposed by Roman Emperor Claudius II, which forbade young men to marry, thinking that single men would make for better soldiers. Valentine broke the law, married young couples, and, once this was discovered, Claudius ordered him to be put to his death. The church eventually bestowed him with the "Saint" tag, and the rest is history. Or lore.

Awwwww. Isn't that sweet? Makes me want to go spend a lot of money on mail-order lingerie and cute teddy bears. NOT.

If the whole thing was just about getting a card, a box of chocolates, and having a nice quiet romantic dinner somewhere, it would be bearable. But it's not. It's become this massive industry--Americans will spend about $15 billion this year on V-day related stuff, despite the poor economy--that aims squarely at our insecurities and baser instincts as a means to separate us from our hard-earned cash.

Have you seen (or heard) some of the ads these companies run? One that I've seen repeatedly this V-day season is run by a company in Vermont that sells teddy bears (I shan't link them) and the commercial is so chock full of cheesy gender stereotypes that it almost feels like an SNL skit. The virile-looking, cubicle-dwelling guy pumps his fist after ordering up the $70 stuffed bear that will surely enable him to score! The gaggle of women ooh and ahh over the cute widdle teddy bear as the trampy-looking lucky recipient lasciviously brags about how her man will be getting a "special surprise" later that night.

The cheaply-produced minute-long spot has been running on cable news channels all this week and, frankly, it left me feeling like I needed a shower. Men are all and only about getting laid. Women are all and only about using their sexuality as a means to getting gifts. Not to mention the whole infantilization thing that gifts of sexy leather-clad teddy bears conjures up. Gross.

Our culture already puts enough pressure on us to meet, mate, and reproduce without these companies using this impulse to sell schlocky made-in-China garbage. Although, who can blame'em, I guess? They're just doing what they can to make a buck. The real problem is our "I'm so special" culture which sends out repeated signals that we must all compare ourselves to celebrities and royalty. People watch these gossip shows and read People magazine and see what Brad gave to Angelina for V-day and feel compelled to try and measure up. And the media and advertising agencies are willing, enabling accomplices.

As a married guy with a spouse who agrees with me about this, it's easy enough for me to turn my back on it--the most we do is buy cards and I make a nice dinner. But the folks I really feel bad for is those who are single on days like New Year's and V-day. The buzz over these couple-centric holidays becomes so pervasive in the weeks leading up to it, that it really makes people feel bad about being solo, so it ends up just being a big stressor.

And for couples this is true as well. Expectations are so built up, and there's so much pressure to be lovey-dovey, that what actually happens is inevitably a let-down. Break-ups and fights are all too common. A bouquet of a dozen roses and a few chocolate-dipped strawberries would be a wonderful surprise on most other days, but on V-day, many guys would be seen as not going the extra mile if this is all that they came up with. Too cliche. Yawn. Not enough effort or thought put into it. She just watched on TV about how Tom gave Katie a rose-petal-strewn, chocolate-covered Bentley that releases doves when she opens the moon roof....

Even if things do live up to the hype--what then? Life goes back to its un-romantic, humdrum, bleh normalcy the very next day for the next 364? What kind of weirdness is that? It seems so strange to somehow distill all the symbolic romance and sexiness of our relationship into one officially-sanctioned day where we are forced to compete with all the other couples' relationships and strive to measure up. Wouldn't it be better to spread it out over the longer-term? And to go to the romantic restaurant on a Tuesday night in June when they're perhaps not so crammed full of nuzzling two-tops?

Even worse is the strangeness of selling this adult holiday to children. My kid's pre-school is having a V-day party and has been making construction paper hearts for the last week. What is that about? He's four, fer Chrissakes! Does he really need to be getting messages about romance and love from his school? I realize that adults find it cute to see four year old boys giving cute little chintzy paper valentines to four year old girls all dressed up in their cute little red velvet outfits, but I find it freaky to be pushing these kind of messages about love, coupling, and (implicitly) sex onto four year olds. And I'm not even going to address these creepy daddy-daughter dances people go to. Whoa. I mean, I love my daughter. Just not that way.

Is there a name for someone who's this Grinch-like and Scroogy about Valentine's Day? If there is, I'm it. I don't know if I'm coming off as curmudgeonly or just generally misanthropic, but it is what it is. Think of me what you will.

Our go-to V-day tradition has, in past years, been the heart-shaped pizzas over at Barnaby's Family Inn in Niles. You don't even have to ask for it--all pizzas sold that day are heart-shaped. I happened to stumble onto this one year and we've tended to do it every year. They don't charge extra or anything and the dark, spooky-feeling pub filled with screaming kids running around is somehow a perfect anti-V-day setting that suits me just fine.

That's where we tend to go for V-day, although maybe there's something to be said for trying to get back to the roots of the holiday and embracing the whole Lupercalia gestalt. We'd have to get ourselves some goats, I suppose. And it might get a bit too messy, what with the sacrificing, and the blood ritual and all.

On second, thought, maybe instead of sacrificing a live male goat, we'll just go get some birria, and instead anointing myself with blood, I could, uh, smear some of the broth all over my chest or something. Probably best to not even bring up the whole spanking thing to my wife.

Chicago Food Blogs Reach Critically Redundant Mass

Perhaps I read way too many Chicago-based blogs about food, cooking, and eating. No, not perhaps. I do.

But, have you noticed how, once a story gets picked up by the bloggers, it seems like everyone feels the need to blog about that specific story? Not to mention the blogs that just blog about what they read in someone else's blog. Enough, already, people. I feel like I'm reading the same blog over and over again.

Here are some examples of what I will not be writing about here:

What Barack Obama likes to eat

What was served at the Barack Obama inauguration parties

My opinion about Barack Obama's appearance on Check, Please

Who Barack Obama will/should choose to be the White House chef

Where in Chicago I should go to watch the inauguration

What Chicago bakeries make cute Barack Obama-themed cupcakes or cookies

(Don't get me wrong, here. I like Obama. I supported Obama and worked for his campaign. It's just not a food-related event, no matter how badly everyone wants it to be.)


Here are a few more:

Why Top Chef sucks this season

That new friggin' place that makes meatloaf cupcakes

Food or drink products that people attempt to market by linking them to our corrupt governor

I will not be doing a best-of 2008 piece or re-cap

I will not be doing any New Year's resolution entries

I will not declare that something is "the new" something else. ie, "tripe is the new foie gras".

and, coming soon (you can count on it)....

Where to watch the Super Bowl

What to eat during the Super Bowl

Regional food specialties of Super Bowl teams Arizona and Pittsburgh

Where to eat for Valentine's Day

Super-expensive fancy chocolates to buy your sweetie for Valentine's Day

Gaaaahhhh. Make it stop!


</curmudgeonly rant>





Want to read a great blog that gets updated all the time, that's all about food?

Check out King T's blog.

Thanks, Titus. Thanks for just being you.

The Bacon List--Cudahy Signature Applewood Smoked

For the second entry in my sweeping odyssey of a project known as The Bacon List, I splurged on that fancy-looking pack of pork seen in the picture above. I purchased a 20 oz. package of Patrick Cudahy Thick Sliced Signature Smoke Bacon, which the package touted to be "naturally smoked with sweet apple wood".

I paid $7.49 for the 20 oz. package. That's pretty expensive for a grocery-store bacon.

Now, granted, part of the expense may have gone towards paying for the container, which the packaging seemed to be trying to tell me was one of the more appealing aspects of this product. On the front of the label, right above the name of the product, was another logo reading "FreshLock Containers" Reusable Container.

Further, on the side of the label there's more about the container:

*Disposable*Reusable*Dishwasher, Microwave, Freezer Safe*
CAUTION: Do not cook bacon in this container (follow cooking instructions). * Wash container before reusing * Vent while microwaving * Container might be hot when used in microwave * Use for microwave reheating only * Do NOT use in conventional ovens, under browning elements or stove tops.

Whoa. That is a lot of information to remember about this friggin' plastic box that my bacon comes in. Honestly, I think I'd be happier if they just wrapped it in plastic like all the other bacons and called it a day. They could've saved the money they spent on the team of lawyers who came up with all those disclaimers too. Sheesh. Can't a guy just get some bacon?

Anyway, enough about the damn wrapper. Let's talk about the bacon.

It sucked.

Ok, well to be honest, it didn't totally suck. It was ok. But for what I paid for it, and all the hype on the box screaming at me about natural sweet applewood and "signature smoke", I was expecting something pretty darn good. And this wasn't it. Not even close.

It was average. Or below average, even. Since this is only entry #2 on the list, it's hard to know what average is going to look like. But I think it's a safe bet that this bacon will occupy a slot in the area below whatever average turns out to be. The bottom line is, the stuff has very little flavor at all. No taste. It's not salty. It's not smoky. It's not porky or meaty. And it's not sweet. It was simply lacking in any prominent flavor whatsoever.

Which, given the fact that it's bacon, is kind of amazing in and of itself, if you think about it.

But not the good kind of amazing. The sucky kind.

Ok, on to the rundown:

Designation--Fancy or Grocery Store? Grocery Store This is clearly a mass-produced wet-cured product, despite the fancied-up packaging. One tip-off is that sodium phosphate and sodium erythorbate are listed among the ingredients. These are indicative of a short-term wet-cure. Fancy or artisanal bacons usually don't have any ingredients besides salt, sugar and sodium nitrate. An even better tip-off is the fact that I bought it in a grocery store. DUH!

Price--How much did I pay per pound for the bacon? $5.99/pound. Sold in a 20 oz. package for $7.49 at my local Jewel.

Uncooked appearance--Color, texture, wet- or dry-ness, mushy or firm, etc... Take a look:

I actually had very high hopes for this stuff when I was taking it out of the package and laying it out to cook. It looks fabulous. Seriously, click on the picture above to view the full size shot. It's gorgeous. It's got a nice color, not too wet, a firm texture, and a great-looking fat-to-meat ratio and distribution. They sourced a really nice pork belly to make this stuff. Too bad they screwed it up.

How it cooks--Tendency to curl, how much it shrinks, tendency to spatter... It cooks fine. Very little shrinkage. It stayed nice and thick after cooking, it curled enough to be appealing, but not so much that it caused any problems with cooking it. I need to remember to oil my rack before I cook bacon on it--the stuff keeps sticking to it. You'd think bacon would never stick to pans, wouldn't you? Considering the fat content? But it does.

Cooked appearance--Color, shape, texture. Nice color... Everything looks good. What can I say? See for yourself.


How does it taste--Sweetness, saltiness, smokiness, texture (melting, chewy, flabby, spongy), "porkiness". Zip. Zilch. Nada. I'm trying to think of funny stuff to say here, but I'm disappointed. It's hard to be funny when you're disappointed. This stuff is nothing that bacon is supposed to be. It's not even fair to call it bacon. It's facon. It makes me sad that I wasted the calories on it, and I'm annoyed that I ate it when I could've eaten actual bacon.

Overall rating--All bacons reviewed will be given an overall rating from 1-10, with 1 being practically inedible (I say "practically" since, you know, it's bacon--how bad can it be?), 5 being a perfectly serviceable bacon for use in cooking or on a sandwich, and 10 being....well, let's be honest; there won't be a 10. Overall Rating: 3.0
I'm not even sure why I'm giving this stuff that high of a rating, other than the fact that it looks so damn good cooked and uncooked (not to mention the impressive high-tech packaging). Um....it has a good chew, maybe? I don't know, whatever. I picked a number.

Let us take a lesson from this. This is a perfect example of the type of product that is being put out by huge agribusiness firms like Smithfield (which owns Cudahy) which utilize industrially-produced, pumped-full-of-hormones hogs, rush through the curing/"smoking" process as quickly and cheaply as possible, and then rely on fancy packaging and labeling hype to try and overcome the fact that their mass-produced product has no flavor.

The real kick of it is that they have the gall to charge six bucks a pound when you can get real, artisanally-produced stuff for almost that same price.

Of course, it won't come in a FreshLock™ container.

What Not to Get Me for Christmas

I'm a chef.

For some reason, people, knowing I'm a chef, like to get me kitchen gadgets for gifts. Why? I really have no idea.

Would you get a carpenter tools? Would you get an photographer a camera? No, of course not. You'd assume that: a.) they already have this stuff, and, b.) they have a very specific set of criteria for the tools that they use in their trade.

So it never fails to amaze me when I receive stuff like a "mango cutter" for a gift. I already have a mango cutter. It's called a knife.

Ok, stop right there. Maybe you think I'm being arrogant or ungrateful. I'm not. A mango cutter is just plain impractical. Take a look at the picture in that link. The device is used by lining it up and then pushing down onto the mango. Now, when you eat a good mango, what's it's main characteristic? A ripe mango is soft and almost mushy. If you place this oxo good grips guillotine collar type thing over it and press down, what's going to happen? Are you going to get nice, clean, ready-to-eat mango halves? No! You're going to get a smashed mango.

News flash, people; I get paid because I know how to take apart a ripe mango so that I can get all of the juicy fruit off the pit and skin and cut it into even, pretty pieces.

Here are some more classics:

An avocado cutter, herb snips, a corn "zipper", a $30 electric potato peeler, a garlic roaster (tin foil accomplishes the same thing) and what's got to be the dumbest of the dumb gadgets, a banana slicer. Is slicing a banana even slightly difficult for anyone over the age of six? You've *got* to be kidding me. I already have a dozen or so banana slicers in the drawer. They double as butter knives.

This stuff makes me sad. It attempts to take people's lack of knowledge about how to cook or prepare food and parlay that into sales of stupid made-in-china garbage. If people would just read up and get themselves a good sharp knife, 95% of this stuff would disappear overnight.

So, please....DO NOT get me this kind of stuff for Christmas.

Tru--The Cookbook

I'm not usually one for these kind of vanity tomes--you know, these $50 glossy chef-driven cookbooks that are basically just a big PR piece for the restaurant/chef and have super-complex recipes with 6-8 different days-long preparations that no one will ever make at home.

But I was with my kid at the library the other day and was casting about for something to read while he played at the train table, and this one caught my eye. Should be a fun diversion, I thought...especially since I used to work at Tru.

Wow.

These type of cookbooks are often riddled with pompous arrogance, name-dropping, and narcissistic egotism, but I think Tru: A Cookbook from the Legendary Chicago Restaurant may have set a new standard for vanity.

More name dropping, I have never seen. Tramonto goes to great pains to inform us that he's eaten at all the great restaurants the world has ever known, and that the chef of every one of them is "his good friend". In fact, I'm thinking that he must've created a macro on his word processor for the phrase "my good friend, chef..." when he was writing this book. I counted 28 separate references to world-famous chefs before I even got to the 'entrees' section of the book (I got sick of counting). Barf!

And I guess Tramonto was so busy name-checking celebrity chefs that he forgot completely to give any credit for anything, ever, to any of the cooks or chefs who worked in his kitchen over the years. The closest he comes is referring to when he and "his sous chefs" worked on a fois gras dish together.

Truth is, though, that since I worked in this kitchen during the opening of this restaurant, I know firsthand that at least a dozen of the recipes that Tramonto takes credit for in his book were created by chefs and cooks in his employ. Which is fine, of course. Cooks and sous chefs expect this sort of thing, and anything they create while employed at a restaurant becomes the 'creation' of the guy whose name is on the door. But it would've been nice to at least mention one kitchen employee at least once in the book.

This jives with my personal experience at Tru. When I worked there, as a young cook not too far removed from culinary school, I was idealistic and *very* into learning more about this kind of high-end cooking. I would go to work a few hours early almost every day and sometimes would go to the Borders bookstore on Michigan avenue in order to read these chef-driven vanity cookbooks--as many as I could get my hands on. I didn't have fifty bucks to buy them as they were released, so I'd read them in the bookstore over a coffee before going into work.

Soon, I began to become a bit disenchanted with Tru and Tramonto. "Hey!", I'd think as I read through a cookbook by Jean-Louis Palladin or Jean-Georges Vongerichten, "that's our smoked salmon dish." Or "that's how we plate our beef tenderloin". The more I read, the more I realized that Tramonto didn't create. He copped from the best.

I distinctly remember reading a new cookbook released by Hawaii chef Alan Wong, in which he featured a drink that was served in a fancy "glass within a glass" that allowed the placement of a live beta fish that would swim around within the glass while the diner drank the cocktail. Pretty gimmicky, I thought.

Then, a few weeks later, Tramonto showed up with a few dozen of these gimmicky fancy glasses and--surprise!--beta fish. He did a raw fish dish he then called a 'poke' (a Hawaiian term that Wong referenced in another section of the same cookbook), and he told us--as well as a Tribune reporter--that he was "inspired to create this dish by a visit to the Shedd aquarium with his son, Gio". That dish is called "Live Japanese Fish and Chips" in the book.

Interestingly, in the intro to this recipe, Tramonto does give credit to Alan Wong, contradicting his previous story in which he described how the idea sprung from his forehead, fully realized. Maybe he was worried that his "good friend, chef Alan Wong" would read the book.

In the intro to a recipe in the 'amuse-bouche' section, Tramonto writes "When I was coming up with an idea for a wonderful amuse-bouche for a vegetable collection, I thought of a perfect organic carrot that morphs into this light, pretty parfait." Hmmm. Did you? Is that what you thought of? Were you floating down a consomme river while lying on a truffled brioche raft while you "thought of" that, chef?

Because, see, you must be blurring the line between fantasy and reality, since your sous chef, Cesar Ramirez, brought that recipe with him to Tru when he came over from the Ritz-Carlton, and I can even remember you telling him that the recipe was "money" and that you were "totally going to steal it from him".

That brings us, sadly, to the writing in this snooze-fest. New standards of bad-ness. Tramonto is assisted by his usual co-author, Jill Goodbody, a seasoned 'helper' of chefs for cookbooks, but it appears that Ms. Goodbody's advice was discarded or perhaps she also drank the Tramonto kool-aid, because she allowed this kind of groan-inducing prose to get through the filter;

"When I hear that age-old question, which came first, the chicken or the egg? I say, Who cares? Eggs are so good, what's the point debating the issue? Just enjoy."

"Until I ate at Jamin, chef Joel Robuchon's Michelin three-star Paris restaurant, in 1980, I had used truffles extremely sparingly, if lovingly. My life changed that day!"

"You might be surprised to find oxtail in a chapter on fish and seafood, but I find that full-flavored, meaty, fatty fish such as sturgeon taste fantastic with braised meats. I credit the idea for this dish to chef Jacques Le Divellec of Le Divellec, the famed Paris restaurant that concentrates on seafood, where I first tasted braised meat with fish. You won't be surprised to hear that I loved it!"

Gag me! Did they have a sale! on! exclamation! points!??! Tramonto uses multiple exclamation points in the intro to just about every dish! Way to make your fifty dollar vanity cookbook appear to have been written by a 14-year old girl!

To summarize; the Tru cookbook is laughably bad--an ego-fest with poor writing, a catalog of dishes the chef/author copped from others, an opportunity for him to list dozens of his famous "good friends" and basically sprain his elbow clapping himself on the back for his "creations".

The photography, by Tim Turner, is wonderful and amazing. Some of the best food photography out there. In short, a perfect book for wasting a half an hour at the library idly leafing through while watching your kid. But, good lord, don't pay for it. (oh, for the record, and it retails for $35, not $50!)