Fat Guy

We are embargoed until after dinner but the article begins "Italians are wrong."

I'm writing to you from my home away from home, the number 6 subway, en route to an historic event: the blogger preview party for Alan Richman's forthcoming pizza feature, to be published in GQ magazine imminently. I'm not really a blogger but that doesn't stop me from being invited to blogger preview events, teaching about blogging, appearing on blogging panels and being called by reporters when they need quotes for their blogging stories. This is because, lucky for me, the relevant decisionmakers comprehend everything online as a blog, and also probably because it would be inefficient to host a whole additional "guys who aren't bloggers but post a lot on message boards" event. As I've mentioned elsewhere in my oeuvre, Alan Richman and I are best friends. Or at least, I'm his best friend on account of being the one person with whom he's not feuding at the moment. We're also professional colleagues at the International Culinary Center (parent entity of the French Culinary Institute), where he is Dean of Food Journalism and I am Director of New New Media Studies. As a result I always 1- refer to him as Dean Richman, and 2- tell people that Director is a higher rank than Dean. Both of these things have started to irritate him more as I've repeated them over and over. The event and article have been shrouded in secrecy and mystery. The person at GQ who handled the invitations said only "At dinner, Alan will be discussing and answering questions about his new Pizzas article, which will be appearing in the June issue of GQ. Sorry that I can’t tell you more, but we’re trying to keep this under wraps!" (The event is being held at Lucali, in Brooklyn, by the way.) Needless to say, I know more about the article than that. After all, Alan Richman and I share not only the bond of best friends but also that of Dean and Director. Much of our pillow talk over the past few months has consisted of Dean Richman making pizza confessions, each preceded by "I shouldn't be telling you this but" and followed by "I shouldn't have told you that." I have kept the faith. Until now. Tonight the embargo ends, or at least I think it does. We will catch a glimpse of Dean Richman's pizza follow-up to his legendary 20 Hamburgers You Must Eat Before You Die feature, in which it was alleged that he traveled 23,750 miles and consumed more than 150,000 calories evaluating 162 burgers across the land. Will the pizza feature be a worthy sequel, perhaps exceeding the original as The Empire Strikes Back did for Star Wars? Or will it be the Back to the Future II of iconic food roundups? We'll find out.

I'm not sure who has been unable to do that. Most comments I've seen have disagreed with one, the other or both. But the sort of convergence of message and messenger you speak of is to be expected when you have an offensive messenger, no matter what the message is.

I'm saying it's what Alice Waters and locavores advocate. Do you have reason to believe they advocate something different from that, or from each other? If so, let's better define her lofty goals so we can realistically appraise just how lofty they are.

That's a distribution issue, though. The industrial agriculture system is producing more than enough food to feed every person in the world. But due mostly to politics, that food isn't reaching some populations. That's a tragedy. There are plenty of changes to industrial agriculture that would be welcome from a sustainability perspective, though I'd be reluctant to embrace anything that increases the price of food for poor people unless it's based on a real cost-benefit analysis as opposed to precautionary-principle mumbo jumbo. But let's ask what locavores like Alice Waters are really advocating. I think we should be clear on that, so as not to be setting up any straw men. My understanding is that the Alice Waters vision for the world involves local, small-scale agriculture providing for 100% (or 90+% if you allow for the chocolate and other probably imported items in use at Chez Panisse) of our food supply. This is simply impossible without large-scale reorganization of society. A substantial percentage of the world's population would need to be compelled to either: 1-labor in the fields, 2-become vegetarian, or 3-die. Or, most likely, a combination of the three. Today, many parts of the world are already at their carrying capacities. Like most of Europe. These areas can't grow enough food to feed themselves. They need to import it, or they need to not eat. In addition, even the places that potentially can grow enough food to feed themselves may be inefficient at doing it. It may be more environmentally destructive, more fuel consumptive, more carbon intensive, etc., to grow it locally. Likewise, it's simple math that if a large agribusiness farm grows 100 times as much food as a small family farm, then for each large agribusiness farm you need to add 100 family farms to the world to grow as much food. That means 100 families need to quit whatever they're doing and become farmers. How many limousine locavores are actually willing to do that? It's easy to wax rhapsodic about the joys of farming, but not everybody wants to go out and actually work the fields. Going back to a society where most people are engaged in farming would require an upheaval of unimaginable proportions. And it could not be done without lethal coercion. That's all assuming small farms are anywhere near as efficient as large industrial farms. If they're less efficient, we may need 200 families to compensate for every lost industrial farm. And more land may need to be used.

It's not possible to read people's minds, though. You may be right in this instance about this guy's motives, or the lack of ulterior motive on the fruit lady's part, but we can always be wrong about other people's motives. And in the internet era, where everyone's a potential source of PR via blogs, discussion forums and other web outlets, many if not most restaurateurs and vendors of all kinds are keenly aware that any given kindness or unkindness may be reported globally that evening. In addition, from an ethics perspective, it's not clear that the other person's motives matter at all. Rather, what matters is the writer's ethics. So once something is accepted for free, regardless of anyone's motives (which aren't really determinable anyway), the code requires a corresponding disclosure.

I also don't personally care if a comp is disclosed so long as the assessment is honest and accurate. A lot of people, however, do care. They feel betrayed if they've read someone's assessment of a product or service, and it then comes to light that there was a comp involved. They see it as dishonest. So the code reflects that. In addition, the disclosure requirement may, it is hoped, help keep authors extra honest.

Everything I bought is pictured above.

I imagine the linguine will perform the same as the spaghetti. The farfalle looks smooth through the bag but I'll have to open it up to be sure. Maybe later this week.

Look what I got yesterday in the suburbs: I made the spaghetti tonight for dinner and felt it was utterly unremarkable. Upon opening it, I saw right away that it was smooth-surfaced, and as you might expect from hearing that it was a poor holder of sauce. I tried some plain, some with butter and Parmesan, and some with tomato sauce. The sauce problem was only evident with the tomato sauce, which just didn't adhere well to the surface. I guess my impressions aren't as reliable as a comparative tasting -- a blind one no less -- but this just didn't seem like particularly good pasta. I'm certainly not about to make it my house brand. (P.S. In case it's not clear from my signature, I teach at the International Culinary Center, which is where this tasting was conducted. But I had nothing to do with it.)

We're close to 50 legitimate-seeming ones (plus a bunch of attempts to sell us Viagra) and will post a signatories roster some time soon, once we go through the submissions more carefully.

I think you're continuing to reduce the whole code to the disclosure requirement for restaurant review comps. That's a single provision of the code. Do you think the nature of a given blog matters vis-a-vis the prohibition against plagiarism? Doubtful. So you're really just talking about a few code provisions at most. But the code assumes those few provisions do indeed apply to anybody offering judgments about restaurants, products, trips, events, etc. A blog that offers no expressly or implicitly evaluative statements of any kind might be an interesting case, but such a blog might not be very interesting to read. In addition, the code presupposes that any non-fiction blog is a form of journalism, even if the author doesn't think of it that way. Online writing is published instantly and globally. Online writers can be held accountable for copyright violations, defamation, etc., and it's no defense to say "but my view of what a blog is means I don't have to follow these rules." If you write a personal diary and stick it under the bed, disclosure isn't necessary. If you publish it to the world, that's a different story. And unless someone is writing haiku it's not difficult to include disclosures in a way that doesn't break up the flow. As mentioned before, when we put together the code we felt the burden of disclosure should fall on the author. The burden is not placed on the reader to find some other post or page that contains disclosures. If you write about a free product or service, under the code you need to make a disclosure when and where you write about it. All of us who worked on the code are fully aware that in mainstream media comps are both common and commonly not disclosed. Ditto for online. We're trying to do better.

I don't really follow that argument, however one clarification: the code is emphatically not a code for restaurant reviews only. For example, comp disclosure is required not only for free restaurant meals and dishes, but also for free attendance at events like food-and-wine festivals, free product samples (wines, merchandise, etc.), free travel, etc. In forming the code, we read all sorts of blogs, message-board posts and other online media extensively over a period of years and found countless examples of probable comps that had nothing to do with restaurants. Indeed restaurant comps were the minority, probably because restaurant writing is such a small part of food writing. We also found scores of examples of relationships between bloggers and providers of goods and services, some disclosed, some rumored, some suspected. Without going through every provision of the code to demonstrate all the possibilities, I'll just say that the code is not a "restaurant code." For someone whose primary interest is restaurants, the code is of course primarily going to provide guidance in that area. For someone writing wine reviews, it's going to be about wine. It's not surprising that someone might see mostly what is relevant to his or her area or areas of focus. But the code is one of general applicability. It was conceived that way and written that way.

There are certainly arguments for various levels of specificity. What we settled on when drafting the code was one disclosure per series, thread, topic, string, what have you. The main reason for this is that a significant percentage of the readers of any blog post, discussion-forum post or online article have come to it through Google or an outside link, and many of those people are one-time visitors. Disclosures should be sufficient to put those people on notice We decided that it's reasonable to expect them to read an entire discussion topic or blog post plus comments. They may not do it, but it seems reasonable to say, look, if you don't even read the whole topic we can't ask authors to make repeated disclosures in the same series. At the same time, we don't put the burden on readers to become familiar with an entire blog, a member's entire collection of posts or any larger body of work. For example if a blogger has 1,000 blog posts, it's not reasonable under the code to say, well, I disclosed in post 235 that I take comps, so I don't have to disclose in post 982 that my meal was comped. It has to be disclosed. As for the level of specificity required in the actual disclosure, it hardly seems necessary to list every free plate of food. A general disclosure -- "we received several comped extra plates of food from the restaurant" or the like -- is sufficient to put a reader on notice. It doesn't have to specify that the asparagus was free. It doesn't have to go on and on like the Saturday Night Live "Happy Fun Ball" parody. Just whatever is sufficient to put the reader on notice that you took free stuff from the restaurant, manufacturer, etc.

Again, the comp/freebie distinction is not one the code acknowledges. The code says "Where a free or discounted product or service has been accepted, a corresponding disclosure is made." So while it's interesting to talk about that distinction as an intellectual matter (and I hasten to add I think the distinction is clearly nonsense), it's not relevant to the code. And while some may be altogether opposed to comps, or writing about comps, I hope it's clear that the decision on that issue has already been made. The code, and the Society, are not banning comps or writing about comps. So, with that decision as a given, the question is: should comps be disclosed? Does anybody think the answer is no?

How would you categorize a blogger who does it for pleasure but includes Google AdSense Ads and Amazon Associates purchasing links on his or her blog and makes money from that? Amateur or professional? Would it change your view if you learned that 20% of the eGullet Society's members were full-time professional journalists? 5%? 50%? 95%?

Yes, everyone has to eat to live. So the bigger difference is that if we switched worldwide from pop music to classical music then nobody would be hurt by it. We'd just have better music. Whereas, if we switched worldwide from industrial agriculture to small-scale farming we'd probably have to kill off a significant portion of the world's population to make that work, or at least compel global vegetarianism at gunpoint to prevent widespread famine.

If you know about a potential conflict of interest, you should disclose it. If you don't know about it, it's not likely to present a conflict of interest. There's no need to conduct FBI-style background checks on all your close friends. Also, a domestic partner owning some stock in a restaurant company, as part of a diverse portfolio, doesn't seem to present a potential conflict of interest except maybe for Wall Street Journal reporters. Now if that person owns half of Darden, and you know about it, it may be a different story. I have some close friends, though, who are so rich they could very well own half of Darden and I wouldn't even know about it. We wrote the language because it made sense to us. Most of the code is original language, precisely because we found existing codes designed for print journalism to be not terribly useful. I hope we've been able to provide clarification. As for changes to the code, unless we uncover some bizarre error, we'll probably allow the code to bed down for several months before issuing a revision. At that point, if there seems to be widespread confusion on the friends-and-family disclosure language and it seems that changes will help then we'll of course refine it.

On the evening of 14 May there was a panel in Hartford that included Waters, Bourdain and Duff the Ace of Cakes guy. I haven't seen a lot of detailed reporting on it, but here's something from the Hartford paper. Did anybody attend, or does anybody have access to a transcript or something?

To be clear, the code is not just for eG Forums participants. It's for anybody -- blogger, discussion-forum participant, online writers of all kinds -- who wants to become a signatory. In addition, the code doesn't really acknowledge a professional-amateur distinction. That distinction probably doesn't even make sense in the world of new media, where so many people are hybrids of what used to be called professional and amateur. Were there such a distinction being made, though, it's hard to see why professionals and amateurs would be held to different ethical standards anyway.

I think the place this reasoning is most obviously flawed is with repect to events. Are you really suggesting that press attendees at events like food and wine festivals -- who in my experience are nearly always comped -- should never write about those events? Do you really think it is never appropriate to write about a product sample provided by a manufacturer? I think if you review the general output of the mainstream food media and apply that standard, more than a few magazines would need to shut down. The world of food writing, especially online but also in mainstream food media, is quite diverse. A minuscule percentage of food writers have traditional restaurant-reviewing or consumer-advocacy roles where it might make sense for them to keep entirely at arms length from the industry. But the overwhelming majority cover a variety of subjects that sometimes involve free stuff. So, for example, I was just reading this in Food & Wine magazine's "Mouthing Off" blog. Kate Krader, the magazine's restaurant editor, penned a post titled "Just Another Monday at Joe Bastianich’s House." Restaurateur Joe Bastianich hosted an event at his home in Greenwich and invited some media. I believe he provided transportation too. Mario Batali grilled the steaks, etc. Kate Krader went and wrote about it. Presumably, she didn't pay to go. Big deal. The "Mouthing Off" blog is full of stuff like this, as are tons of other blogs, discussion-forum posts and other pieces of food writing both online and in print. It's the norm, easily demonstrable by citing a near-infinite number of examples. The eG Ethics code simply looks at that norm and says the best way to deal with any potential appearance of ethical ambiguity that might be introduced by taking comps is to disclose them.

What the code says is "Where a free or discounted product or service has been accepted, a corresponding disclosure is made." It would seem that what you're calling a freebie is a "free or discounted product," unless it's something customarily given as part of a package, e.g., the bread and butter that come with a meal at a restaurant, or the customary "buyback" at a bar.

It's not necessary to name your friends. A disclosure such as "One of my closest friends is a manager at the restaurant" will suffice. The code speaks of "close friends, associates and family members," so that wouldn't include everyone in your Facebook or LinkedIn network, unless everyone in those networks really is a close friend or associate. It wouldn't include your eleventh cousin Bill who you've never met. The idea is simply that, if you have a close relationship with someone who has a financial or employment relationship with a restaurant you're writing about or some other subject you're covering, you should say so. Again, you don't have to name the person. Just explain the potential conflict of interest and move on. The distinction between family and everyone else is, especially in this day and age, not terribly useful. Many couples live together for years before marriage -- before becoming family -- and plenty of couples aren't even the type of couple that can get legally married. Business partnerships can often become extremely close relationships. The issue isn't genes, it's closeness. This needn't be complex. As I mentioned on another topic, a reliable quick test for yes/no on disclosure is "If I don't disclose this and tomorrow the whole world learns about it will it look bad in the eyes of the average hypothetical moderately well informed reader?"

After class this week I had a free dinner at L'Ecole in the company of the school's esteemed Dean of Food Journalism, Alan Richman, as well as two of the departmental coordinators. I feel compelled to note, having now dined at L'Ecole twice with Dean Richman and twice without him, that his presence is a net negative in terms of how much extra stuff the kitchen sends out. When I go without him, many extra plates of food hit the table, so much so that it requires conferences among the food runners to figure out how to fit everything on the table (Will they remove the bread plates? Consolidate side dishes? Allow 40% of a plate to hang off the edge of the table? Set up an auxiliary table?). Last night, though, not one extra item. The presence of two high-ranking officials of the institute also did nothing for us. Though I enjoyed their company very much, I'd have eaten better alone. Most every dish we had was something I've reported on already, but there were two new things to report: First, L'Ecole is currently offering a stellar tasting of three cheeses from Jasper Hill Farm in Greensboro, Vermont. (If you're a reader of the Art of Eating you may remember a cover story on Jasper Hill Farm a little while back.) It's the first cheese course I've had in a long time where I've perked up and taken notice. The availability of retail cheese in New York City is now so good that I rarely go to a restaurant anymore where I don't feel I could have just picked up the same or better cheeses at Murray's, Artisanal, even Fairway or Zabar's. But this tasting was both intelligently composed and based on cheeses in such amazingly good condition (supplied directly by the producer, I was told) that I couldn't stop eating the cheese and was seriously tempted to eat everyone else's cheese too, which I would have done had there not been two ladies at the table. Just three pieces of cheese on a plate, no condiments, plus a basket of FCI bread. Minimalist and spot on. Here's the literature on the tasting. Second thing of note: we had three excellent wines. I hadn't had the chance to test the free-food perk with respect to wine, but we must have ordered a couple of hundred dollars worth of wine and nobody seemed to care. We had an Alsatian riesling from Albert Mann (Cuvée Albert, 2007) that was, not surprisingly, an archetypal dry, high-acidity riesling. This is the one they can serve up in a wine class in order to teach what a first-rate riesling is supposed to smell like, look like, taste like, be like. We also had a Turley Zinfandel (Juvenile, 2007), which was surprising in what, to me, seemed like a very mellow, subtle, Merlot-like character -- it wasn't at all what I expected but wound up being delicious in a different way. Finally, we had a half bottle of Rombauer cabernet from Napa (2004). This was my first Rombauer but, I hope, not my last. Anyway, the reason I mention the wines is that in looking at the wine list I got the impression of an extremely well-chosen list, not huge but big enough to occupy my interest over the course of 40 or 50 free meals, and the prices seemed quite low by New York restaurant standards (though I didn't do an extensive analysis). The meal was free but for you it's $42 for five courses: appetizer, fish course, meat course, salad, and dessert. A $10 supplement for cheese. Of course wine costs extra. I've linked to the menu but there's some complexity as to which menu is available on which nights at which times, so read the menu overview page if you require specificity.

I totally understand your point, however we are not able to control the user-friendliness of, for example, Wordpress.com. It's a mystery to me why there isn't simply a tool on Wordpress.com that says "add an image to my sidebar and link it to X." You need to take a bunch of steps and use the "Text" widget in a non-user-friendly way. No matter how dishearetning it is, no matter how much it impacts the willingness of people to display the badge, there's nothing we can do about that except offer personal support within our abilities. Even if we had the resources to do it, we simply couldn't design a widget for Wordpress.com blogs. Only the included widgets are allowed, and plugins are not allowed at all. For privately hosted Wordpress blogs, we could in theory create a plugin, but for people with privately hosted blogs posting an image with a link may already be second nature. And I'm just using Wordpress.com, one of the most popular services, as an example. There are quite a few, each with its own challenges.