by Holly Hughes
I should mention that our server did delete the calamari from the bill. That kind gesture, however, barely dented the total tab: $90, for a dinner for two. Unless you’re content with a minimalist selection of nigiri, a meal at Takaya will cost you. Maybe there was a time in St. Louis when merely opening a sleek new restaurant aping a played-out culinary trend was enough to serve as one of the cornerstones of splashy new downtown development.
In 2013, though, it comes off as a load of horse—well, you know. Rhymes with bung.
I ATE MY FIRST MCRIB, AND I REGRET IT
By Katharine Shilcutt
From Houston Press
In a boom city like Houston, fine dining can be so beside the point. All the better for an iconoclastic voice like Katherine Shilcutt, who began at the alt weekly Houston Press as a blogger and kept that brash style throughout three years of Press restaurant reviews. She is now features editor at the monthly Houstonia magazine.
I made it through 32 years without tasting a McRib. Over three decades spent tasting and eating all other manner of offensive foods—yet a McRib had never passed my lips, until last Thursday. I can’t say I regret my meal. It goes deeper than that: a sense that I gave in, sheeplike, to a national phenomenon whose promises—no matter how meager—were always going to fall short of my expectations.
I knew I wouldn’t like or even understand the McRib, and was content to go the rest of my life without tasting one. Fast food and I have a strained relationship as it is except for a few soft spots: McDonald’s coffee, Whataburger taquitos, Jack in the Box tacos at 1 a.m.
I respect—perhaps even admire—the technology and ingenuity involved in creating an identical meal across thousands of different chain restaurants 365 days a year, 24 hours a day in many cases . . . but the product is rarely something I’m interested in consuming. And those same massive food systems that are, in part, responsible for creating clone versions of Big Macs or Whoppers every single day are also responsible for the woeful industrialization of our agricultural systems and farms. Those fast food chains are, in part, responsible for our nation’s deepening battle against obesity, hypertension, diabetes and a whole host of other health issues.
And, quite frankly, the McRib always looked simply disgusting, like a flattened condom stuffed with Ol’ Roy-brand cat food and slathered with untrustworthy sauce between two buns that looked like the plastic set that came with my children’s grocery store set when I was six years old.
To a Texan, the concept of barbecued pork is reserved for a handful of items: pork butts and ribs, both left on the smoker for hours and neither coated in sticky-sweet sauce. We don’t do pulled pork sandwiches here, either, so the idea of a pork sandwich—pulled or not—doesn’t appeal to me either . . . especially one from McDonald’s.
But I let curiosity get the better of me last week when I logged onto Facebook one morning.
“I would like to see you write a complete review on the McRib,” read a request on my wall from frequent commenter Fatty FatBastard. “And it should be the cover story.”
“I would like Tard the Grumpy Cat to come and live with me,” was my hasty reply. (Luckily Fatty is battle-hardened by all the years spend in the EOW comments section.) “You can’t always get what you want.” Besides, I argued, I’d never had one before.
Fatty persisted. “See? Then it would be a completely unbiased review.”
Less than 24 hours later, I was hitting my third McDonald’s of the afternoon and cursing Fatty’s real name as I searched desperately for one that still had the damn sandwich in stock. Each one I approached beckoned with a sign heralding the glories of the limited-time McRib, yet a closer look at the signs revealed tiny stickers saying simply: “Sold out.”
Along with a keen sense of irritation, my curiosity was growing still stronger. If the stupid sandwiches are sold out everywhere, they must be at least decent—right? People couldn’t be buying out the sandwiches if they tasted like Ol’ Roy.
Finally, I found myself in the drive-thru lane of the McDonald’s on North Main, where a cheerful-sounding Hispanic woman was imploring me through the speaker to add another McRib to my order for only $1.
You have enough McRibs here to tack them on like apple pies? I wanted to yell back at her. Send them to the other McDonald’s so people don’t have to waste $20 worth of gas driving around town like pork-crazed assholes trying to find them!
Instead, I pathetically contemplated actually adding the extra McRib to my order. It’s only one dollar, I reasoned. I deserve it.
I shook my head and snapped out of the disgusting food-as-reward mindset I fall into far too often—a mindset, I might add, that’s once again encouraged by deals such as these at fast food chains such as this one. (Besides, the brownie bites I’d added onto my 1 a.m. Jack in the Box order the night before had been woeful. And those were only $1 too.)
Back at the office after nearly an hour on the road, I actually tore into my McRib with a voracity that both appalled and astonished me. A growling stomach was making all of my decisions suddenly, but even after the first few hunger-blinded bites I could tell it had been a mistake.
Here’s the thing: The McRib does not taste terrible, except for the fiddly, fleshy little nubbins extruding from the sides that are meant to represent “ribs.” In fact—full disclosure—I ate the entire thing.
I felt so hollow afterwards that it was as if my stomach had shifted entirely outside my body, as though my abdominal cavity was rejecting it in shame. This was a terrible thing to have eaten and I had no real excuse to do so. It contained no nutritional value whatsoever and unlike the questionable tacos and other junk food fare I occasionally consume, it didn’t even have the benefit of being so delicious as to excuse its negligible health benefits.
The “pork” inside the McRib tastes quite obviously fake. It has a curious spongy texture that allows your teeth to slide into the meat with almost no give whatsoever. It’s not like you’re eating real meat at all, but something materialized on the Holodeck of the Starship Enterprise or a piece of food that’s fast-fading in some airport during the course of the Langoliers. It’s just . . . weird.
The pickles and onions, with their very real and very appropriate crunch, absolved the meat somewhat of its off-putting texture. But the bread suffered the same fate as the meat, falling apart in my mouth like dust, as if it had never been real in the first place. I spent the next hour trying and failing to understand how there can be any passion around such a dull, lifeless thing. How is there a clamor for the McRib? In what way is it “epic” or “legendary”?
I am left today with the disappointing knowledge that there is a huge segment of my fellow Americans who look forward to this creepy fake meat every year with a hunger that borders on the pathological. I am not judging their taste—taste, after all, is subjective—but rather judging the quality of the food that people have come to revere. This silly, false thing. This vague improvement over potted meat.
I cringe as much as the next person when I hear words like “organic,” “artisan,” or “craft” overused or, worse, misapplied. But I’d far rather suffer a surfeit of foods in our nation that are leaning towards the real end of the spectrum than the fake. Because there is really no excuse for the McRib, and my life is poorer for having tasted it.
BACK WHEN A CHOCOLATE PUCK TASTED, GUILTILY, LIKE AMERICA
By Dan Barry
From The New York Times
In November 2012, when snack food giant Hostess Bakeries shut down its ovens, junk food mavens nationwide went into a tailspin. (Not to worry—new owners revived the brand in July 2013.) Leave it to Times columnist Dan Barry to catch the guilty spirit of America’s Twinkie addiction just right.
There was a time; admit it. There was a time when, if given a choice between a warm pastry fresh from a baker’s oven and an ageless package of Ring Dings fresh from the 7-Eleven, you would have chosen those Ring Dings. Not even close.
After opening the tinfoil or cellophane wrapp
ing with curatorial care, so as not to disturb the faux-chocolate frosting, you would have gently removed the puck-shaped treat and taken a bite deep enough to reveal crème—not cream, but crème—so precious that a cow’s participation was incidental to its making.
You did not care that this processed food product in your trembling hand was an industrial step or two removed from becoming the heel of a shoe. You already knew that not everything is good for you, and this was never truer than with a Twinkie, a Sno Ball, or a Ring Ding—the Ding Dong equivalent in the Northeast.
To you, they all tasted like, like: America.
Now, from Irving, Texas, comes word of the closing of Hostess Brands, your friendly neighborhood baking conglomerate, the maker of Ring Dings, Ho Hos, Funny Bones and other treats whose names conjure a troupe of third-rate clowns.
“We ceased baking this morning,” Anita-Marie Laurie, a Hostess spokeswoman, said Friday morning. This means Hostess, and Drake’s, and Dolly Madison, oh my.
Though the bankrupt company attributes its closing to a strike by a union with a mouthful of a name—the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International—the truth is that the bad-snack market has been in decline for years. All of a sudden, it seems, nosy consumers want to know what it is that they are ingesting, and that’s not good if you manufacture edible curiosities like SuzyQs and Raspberry Zingers.
Beyond the heart-aching loss of many, many jobs, a Hostess shutdown doesn’t necessarily mean that consumers, particularly the dietetically tone-deaf, have eaten their last Twinkie. Some industry analysts express confidence that as Hostess sells off its assets in this saddest of bake sales, an iconic treat like the Twinkie will be snatched up by a savvy opportunist—perhaps one who might resume production using a novel application for the famously indestructible Twinkie (a loofah sponge you can eat!).
Speaking personally, the news sent me into a panic. A Hostess shutdown would mean an end to certain rare and delicious moments of guilty bliss, those few seconds that come right after devouring a Ring Ding and right before the stomach realizes what has happened.
It would also mean an end to measuring the passage of time by the color of Hostess Sno Balls, those marshmallow-y mounds of cake and gunk that appear to be some kind of confectionary prank. Normally the pinkish color and approximate texture of an eraser, they turn green for St. Patrick’s Day, orange for Halloween and lavender for the Easter celebration of the death and resurrection of Christ. Or maybe the lavender just means springtime.
Hurrying to the nearest food store, I barreled past the fruit and fresh produce section, fully aware of the eyes of potatoes narrowing in disappointment, and the heads of lettuce turning away in judgment. I nursed dark, violent thoughts about making a salad, and kept going.
And there, in the supermarket equivalent of the timeout room, were the food chain’s nutritional delinquents. Your Hostess cupcakes. Your Funny Bones. Your Yodels. Your Yankee Doodles and Sunny Doodles, the ebony and ivory of cupcakes. And, yes, your Ring Dings. Make that my Ring Dings.
I held a package of two Ring Dings in my hands. Reading the nutrition facts, I took comfort in seeing that the word nutrition was not in quotation marks. I skipped past unimportant details—the 310 calories, the 13 grams of fat, the 37 grams of sugar—and found validation in the 2 grams of dietary fiber.
The package says that’s 8 percent—count ‘em—8 percent of your “daily values.” Whatever that means.
Then I turned my eyes to the block of white type listing the ingredients that help to make the “devil’s food cake” resilient enough to be enjoyed in whatever comes after the End of Days. Well, I thought, you can never have too much “sodium stearoyl lactylate,” and I headed to the checkout counter with my single item.
Here is the eat-your-broccoli part of the Hostess saga. According to Harvey Hartman, a food-industry researcher and consultant in Bellevue, Washington, the country’s food culture is rapidly changing. Consumers want less processed foods, he says, and more information about “the story behind their food”—which might not be something that a Sno Ball would want told.
But Mr. Hartman understands the allure. The careful unfolding of a Yodel or Ho Ho, but only after the frosting has been nibbled away. The scraping of teeth against the piece of white cardboard for that last remnant of a SuzyQ. The connection in a Twinkie, or a Funny Bone, to what he calls the “soulful elements of our past.”
That is why, one night this fall, or maybe this winter, or perhaps in the spring—there’s no rush—I will wait until the kids are asleep, their tummies content with kale chips and quinoa. Then, basked in the bluish glow of some black-and-white television show, I will eat my faux-chocolate, crème-filled, Bloomberg-infuriating, chemical-rich, bad-for-me, really-really-bad-for-me, all-but-extinct Ring Dings.
Both of them.
Farm to Table
FORGOTTEN FRUITS
By Rowan Jacobsen
From Mother Jones
As his book titles suggest—American Terroir, Shadows on the Gulf, The Living Shore, Fruitless Fall—Rowan Jacobsen is a unique amalgam of science/nature/food writer, bent on a very particular quest: To underscore the connections between our food and our imperiled environment.
Every fall at Maine’s Common Ground Country Fair, the Lollapalooza of sustainable agriculture, John Bunker sets out a display of eccentric apples. Last September, once again, they covered every possible size, shape, and color in the wide world of appleness. There was a gnarled little yellow thing called a Westfield Seek-No-Further; a purplish plum impostor called a Black Oxford; a massive, red-streaked Wolf River; and one of Thomas Jefferson’s go-to fruits, the Esopus Spitzenburg. Bunker is known in Maine as “The Apple Whisperer,” or simply “The Apple Guy,” and, after laboring for years in semiobscurity, he has never been in more demand. Through the catalog of Fedco Seeds, a mail-order company he founded in Maine 30 years ago, Bunker has sown the seeds of a grassroots apple revolution.
All weekend long, I watched people gravitate to what Bunker (“Bunk” to his friends, a category that seems to include half the population of Maine) calls “the vibrational pull” of a table laden with bright apples. “Baldwin!” said a tiny old man with white hair and intermittent teeth, pointing to a brick-red apple that was one of America’s most important until the frigid winter of 1933–34 knocked it into obscurity. “That’s the best!”
A leathery blonde from the coast held up a Blue Pearmain in wonder. “Blue Peahmain,” she marveled. “My ma had one in her yahd.”
Another woman got choked up by the sight of the Pound Sweet. “My grandmother had a Pound Sweet! She used to let me have one every time I hung out the laundry.”
It wasn’t just nostalgia. A steady conga line of homesteading hipsters—Henry David Thoreau meets Johnny Depp—paraded up to Bunk to get his blessing on their farm plans. “I’ve got three Kavanaghs and two Cox’s Orange Pippins for fresh eating, a Wolf River for baking, and three Black Oxfords for winter keeping, but I feel like there are some gaps I need to fill. What do you recommend for cider?” Bunk, who is 62, dished out free advice through flayed vocal cords that make his words sound as if they are made of New England slate.
Most people approached with apples in hand, hoping for an ID of the tree that had been in their driveway or field ever since they bought the place. Some showed him photos on iPhones. Everywhere he travels in Maine, from the Common Ground Country Fair to the many Rotary Clubs and historical societies where he speaks, Bunk is presented with a series of mystery apples to identify. He’s happy to oblige, but what he’s really looking for are the ones he can’t identify. It’s all part of being an apple detective.
In the mid-1800s, there were thousands of unique varieties of apples in the United States, the most astounding diversity ever developed in a food crop. Then industrial agriculture crushed that world. The apple industry settled on a handful of varieties to promote worldwide, and the rest were forgotten. They became commercially extinct—but not quit
e literally extinct.
Even when abandoned, an apple tree can live more than 200 years, and, like the Giving Tree in Shel Silverstein’s book, it will wait patiently for the boy to return. There is a bent old Black Oxford tree in Hallowell, Maine, that is approximately 213 years old and still gives a crop of midnight-purple apples each fall. In places like northern New England, the Appalachian Mountains, and Johnny Appleseed’s beloved Ohio River Valley—agricultural byways that have escaped the bulldozer—the old centenarians hang on, flickering on the edge of existence, their identity often lost on the present homeowners. And John Bunker is determined to save as many as he can before they, and he, are gone.
The key thing to understand about apple varieties is that apples do not come true from seed. An apple fruit is a disposable womb of the mother tree, but the five seeds it encloses are new individuals, each containing a unique combination of genes from the mother tree and the mystery dad, whose contribution arrived in a pollen packet inadvertently carried by a springtime bee. If that seed grows into a tree, its apples will not resemble its parents’. Often they will be sour little green things, because qualities like bigness, redness, and sweetness require very unusual alignments of genes that are unlikely to recur by chance. Such seedling trees line the dirt roads and cellar holes of rural America.
If you like the apples made by a particular tree, and you want to make more trees just like it, you have to clone it: Snip off a shoot from the original tree, graft it onto a living rootstock, and let it grow. This is how apple varieties come into existence. Every McIntosh is a graft of the original tree that John McIntosh discovered on his Ontario farm in 1811, or a graft of a graft. Every Granny Smith stems from the chance seedling spotted by Maria Ann Smith in her Australian compost pile in the mid-1800s.