Fat Guy

Good idea. Many of us are lawyers, doctors, salespeople of all kinds. Some of us are freelance writers. Whatever we do, most of us are probably not farmers or factory workers. Our livelihoods depend on serving the needs of our clients. I assure you that even lawyers making a million dollars a year feel a little like prostitutes when their clients make demeaning, unreasonable demands. And I also assure you that it's not the slightest bit credible to compare it to actual prostitution.

People cook raw fish all the time. Usually, it has been a few days from the time it's caught to the time it's cooked. There's plenty of fish I wouldn't eat raw that I'd eat cooked, and I'm sure that's true of any rational person who eats fish. The question on the table is: leftover sushi, no food-safety concerns, what to do with it. I understand that nobody wants me to eat the sushi from the picnic. Don't worry about it. It's a red herring. I threw it out days ago. What about the actual question?

Okay, so, the food-safety issue aside, say you've got leftover maki that has been held at safe, cool temperatures. Me, I find overnight-refrigerated maki to be unappetizing. What are the alternatives to throwing it out?

I'm not actually going to do this, because the sushi has already been tossed out, but I was under the impression that cooking to a sufficient temperature does kill the bugs we worry about in these sorts of situations. Putting a light sear on the exterior wouldn't do it, but boiling in a soup should. I don't know about cooking it through in a skillet -- that would probably need to be measured.

I was wondering . . . The other day we had a picnic and we brought a bunch of takeout sushi, specifically tuna rolls and salmon rolls (maki). It was pretty hot out, nobody was terribly hungry, and afterward there must have been 30 pieces of sushi left. Given the amount of time they spent unrefrigerated, I don't think I'd eat the leftover pieces. But I was wondering, what if I cooked them? Like, if I just put a little oil in a skillet and cooked the pieces until the fish got cooked through and the exterior rice and nori got browned. Has anybody tried that? How does it come out? It seems to me that, in theory, you've got some rice, some fish and some seaweed -- all things that taste nice when cooked. So? A possibility, or the worst idea ever?

Some people buy Nikes. Two pair.

And? I'm pretty sure her main influences go way farther back than that, to the 19th Century, and also to her own childhood. But even assuming she was heavily influenced by the Bay Area food culture, and even assuming Alice Waters can take full credit for that, my point was that where Alice Waters is a self-righteous scold Sandy Lerner is an effective, low-key presenter of the humane-farming message -- a mode of interaction that is far more likely to make converts.

Lerner grew up on a farm; farming is in her blood and that's the source of her passion. I have no idea if she's ever dined at Chez Panisse, nor can I imagine how that piece of knowledge would be relevant. The whole Cisco tangent just seems bizarre to me.

So in the year since I started this topic I managed to get hired by the FCI, or rather by the ICC (International Culinary Center, the parent organization), to teach a food-blogging class. (Don't laugh.) They even gave me a title: Director of New Media Studies. (Don't laugh.) Today I had an appointment in the vicinity of the FCI and had to schedule a lunch meeting with my agent for right before that appointment. The timing was a little tight. I asked myself, several times because I'm not very smart, "Where can I eat in the vicinity of the FCI?" Eventually remembering that there's a restaurant at the FCI, I made a reservation for my first-ever lunch at L'Ecole. The L'Ecole dining room gets a ton of natural light at lunchtime. We sat at a table right against a big window facing Grand Street. I'm not sure us two ugly men were the best advertisement for the restaurant, but it was a great perch. I have a vague memory of placing an order but the kitchen sent us so many dishes I can't remember which ones we chose and which were imposed. From the current lunch menu, for appetizers we tried country pate with foie gras and truffles, red beet and mustard seed terrine with sweet onion slaw and spicy baby greens, spring pea panna cotta with crab and pea shoots, and cold poached salmon with cucumber salad, whitefish roe and smoked leek vinaigrette. For entrees, sauteed monkfish with pickled cherry tomatoes, arctic char with white asparagus and paella, pan-seared branzino with artichoke and buckwheat crepes, bouillabaisse, and a special of choucroute garnie based on Andre Soltner's recipe from Lutece. That's for two people. It would be almost as exhausting to describe every dish in detail as it was to attempt to eat all that food (no, we didn't finish everything), so just a few observations: the spring pea panna cotta with crab and pea shoots was by far the most impressive appetizer. I envisioned a ramekin of a flan-like pea substance topped with crabmeat, but the dish was more deconstructed than that, with the pea custard spread in a long strip on a rectangular platter, layered with crabmeat and pea shoots. The dishes at L'Ecole range from traditional French to more contemporary, and this was a dish I'd that would have felt entirely at home at Jean Georges or another restaurant on that level at the contemporary end of the spectrum. It was really, really good. The pate was correct. If you're into stuff like pate and consomme -- the standards -- L'Ecole does those quite well. I didn't get to taste the salmon because my agent is a pig and ate all of it before I could taste it, which probably means it was pretty good. I thought the beet terrine was not particularly interesting, though I did think it was kind of cool how they pressed little cubes (aka dice) of beets into a larger cube for presentation. But it was, in essence, a beet cube. Whatever. Of the entrees the monkfish was the surprise, and clear, winner. I think there were probably three things that pushed it over the top: first, it was simply a great piece of fish to begin with. I don't know much about how FCI does sourcing-- I'm sure I'll learn more -- but this was superb monkfish. Second, it was handled right. Monkfish is one of those ingredients that so many restaurants have trouble with. Tom Colicchio's restaurants, in my experience, are just about the only ones that consistently do a great job with monkfish. I think he once said resting after cooking is an important step. In any event, this was a well-cooked piece of monkfish that reminded me of why monkfish can be appealing (but usually isn't): because it really is like a fleshier version of lobster, with many of the same subtle flavor notes and a luscious texture that few fish have. Third, a brown butter sauce didn't hurt. The dish could have used a stronger garnish, though. The pickled cherry tomatoes didn't do it for me. I'd say the runner up entree was the Soltner choucroute garnie. Not only was it an excellent specimen of choucroute garnie, but also if it had been the only thing on the table it could have been the whole meal -- appetizer, entree and dessert -- for two people. Certainly at lunchtime half that plate of choucroute garnie would be plenty for a normal overweight person. There was a debate at the table about the char, which is cooked in the CVap oven. Some people like the texture of fish cooked this way (in a moist environment that is functionally similar to sous-vide cookery), and some don't. I enjoy it occasionally, my agent does not. The bouillabaisse was correct (when I say that about a dish, I mean it in a good way), and the branzino was forgettable (as it often is). Then the meal got interesting. First, we had a visit from Dave Arnold (we'd actually had some other visitors throughout the meal, because a few of the students in my class also work at the FCI), the FCI's resident food-and-technology guru (Pete Wells, in Food & Wine, called him "The Food Avant-Garde's Enabler"). In addition to a discourse on CVap cooking, interwoven with several other discourses (Dave Arnold is like that), we got to try a "red hot Manhattan," which is a Manhattan-like cocktail set aflame by a thing that looks like a curling iron. There was no way to catch a photo of the actual flaming process, in part because I only had my cell-phone camera with me, but here's Dave Arnold supervising the bartender: Then we had a bunch of desserts: I fear I'm not up to the task of conveying the bizarreness of what happened next. A couple of days ago I got a message on Facebook from Robin Insley, a publicist I've known for a long time, titled "Save Jacques Torres' Champagne Kiss." The message, which I assume was sent to a zillion people, said "Please help us save Jacques' Champagne Kiss by signing this petition! Thank you!" I confess I skimmed the message, never clicked on the link and promptly forgot about it. So there we are, sitting in L'Ecole at the tail end of the lunch service, uncomfortably stuffed, ready to leave, my agent late for his next meeting and me on the verge of being late for mine, and in storms Jacques Torres trailed by a guy with a video camera, a guy with a boom mic, a photographer, a guy with an iPhone (Jacques Torres is now following me on Twitter, by the way) and some additional people with unclear roles. And he starts handing out little chocolate candies emblazoned with Rocky Horror lips while talking on his cell-phone to someone who's clearly interviewing him, and he's saying something like, "Ze Hershey's people zey're trying to screw me!" First things first, I accept a piece of chocolate and then another one. Then I start remembering Robin's Facebook message and realizing that this frenzy of activity must be related. I figure I'll just ask the guy with the iPhone what's going on but, by the time I swallow my second chocolate, Jacques Torres and his hit-and-run brigade have left the building. Finally I was able to ask for the check. But the best part about being Director of New Media Studies turns out to be that I get to eat at L'Ecole for free. I'm going to try to ascertain the parameters of that perk, like, can I eat there for free every day? How many people can I bring with me? Can I get free wine too? Once I figure out what I can get away with I'll let you know. I'm already putting together a plan for Sunday brunch, which the restaurant has just started offering.

A good example of "winning" would be what happened on my recent trip to Ayrshire Farm in Virginia. While I still don't buy into much of what Sandy Lerner, the farm's owner, is advocating, she did manage to convert me -- using a very soft sell and showing more than telling -- on one of her issues: humane treatment of animals. As a personal choice, I'm now spending a little more most of the time to get humanely raised meat. Sandy Lerner "won." An example of "losing" would be when a messenger is so irritating to so many people that they simply reject the message. Or when someone's argument doesn't survive basic factual scrutiny. I have to say, I personally think less of Alice Waters and her positions now than I did before this topic started. If I'd never seen her on 60 Minutes, if I'd never been exposed to the full range of what she says, I'd have considered her harmless and ignored her as I have most of my life. Now I firmly believe she's not only condescending but also wrong, and so I am more likely to reject her beliefs across the board. I put "winning" and "losing" in quotes because I'm not sure the concepts are relevant here. But if there is a loser, for me, it's Alice Waters. I'm someone who listens to arguments and can be converted by compelling ones, and I can be converted by people's inspiring personal examples. In a million years, though, I can't imagine being converted by Alice Waters.

I imagine this is true in season, whatever the season is for a given vegetable. I've seen that in New York City as well: in-season vegetables at the Greenmarket can be quite cheap.

That makes it kind of hard to have a conversation. I've provided the links, both to McWilliams and to peer-reviewed material, I've explained the assumptions at an appropriate level of detail given this format, and your response is that it's a blanket assertion with no proof. Moreover, you refuse to read the material because of your feelings about one author among many who's writing in support of that position. This is known as arguing ad hominem. The criticisms of Alice Waters have sometimes been personal, but not logically false in the manner of an ad hominem argument. I and several others are arguing that, yes, Waters is annoying, but she's also wrong. We are considering and addressing her arguments, which you're refusing to do with the arguments on the other side.

To expand upon that a bit: the story was originally reported, it now seems incorrectly, by the Black Book blog. As I understand it, some people who were eating at Per Se reported that they witnessed Alice Waters behaving badly at Per Se. Black Book printed it. Turns out, Per Se says it was actually someone else who just looked somewhat like Alice Waters (who was in Chicago). So Black Book printed a retraction. Prior to the retraction, Eater picked up the story. All the other food bloggers, as far as I know, got it directly or indirectly from Eater. Serious Eats picked it up. Maybe others picked it up. The Feedbag picked it up from Eater. Black Book shouldn't have printed the item without calling somebody to confirm or deny the report. Nobody else should have republished the item without evidence of such confirmation. But the Feedbag was hardly unique in its approach. So if it is shoddy journalism, it's the shoddy journalistic standard that is pervasive these days. It's nothing specific to the Feedbag. It's also not specific to critics of Alice Waters. These blogs will report anything of that nature, no matter who it's about. That's how they operate.

The thing is, that same prediction (with variants on the actual language) has been made since Malthus argued in 1798 that the world couldn't support a growing population. And it never seems to work out quite that way. No doubt there are things about industrial agriculture that are harmful. Those things should be corrected if possible. But any way you slice it industrial agriculture is the future. It may have to be a modified form of industrial agriculture that's more "sustainable" but the future isn't likely to be one of heritage breeds and locavorism. Those will remain niche pursuits for well-to-do people (like many of us) who have never had to worry for one second about the necessities of life so are able to pursue the next level of choice. And you know what? I sure do wish everybody in the world could have that luxury. But if you tell me, "Not everybody in the world has that luxury," it's not a meaningful response for me to say, "But I wish everybody did!" Because everybody doesn't, and that's the reality we need to be sensitive to. And if I'm going to lecture about how I have a plan to change that reality, it should at least be a plan with a chance of working. Buying local -- that's not a plan that has a chance of working. Not even close.

Were this true, it would change the playing field here. It might even justify some of the hectoring we hear from Team Waters. But it's only true in a very limited sense. Again: That same statement (from McWilliams, who has been attacked ad hominem but not refuted, because most of what he says is irrefutable) has several related variants, e.g., we can't feed the world with heritage breeds, etc. -- not unless we implement authoritarian structures and force people to be mostly vegetarian. It's true that industrial agriculture has some unfair advantages in terms of subsidies and ability to externalize some costs. But when it comes down to it, no matter how much heritage-breed product we buy, it's mathematically impossible for it to compete seriously on price with the industrial product. Quite simply, if an animal takes twice as long to reach maturity, it's going to cost more. Even if other cost savings occur (like perhaps the heritage breed is more disease resistant, or has better mothering skills) they're not going to offset that. A good example would be Murray's. I think Murray's has achieved just about all the benefits of scale that a conscientious local farming operation can achieve. It's a fairly big operation, yet raises Certified Humane chicken without antibiotics etc. You see a whole lot of Murray's chicken around the New York area. I like Murray's and support Murray's. I think Murray's chicken tastes better. But Murray's chicken costs very nearly twice as much as the industrial chicken next to it on the rack. Maybe with an increase in scale and a change in agricultural policy we could get the differential down from 100% to, what? 80? 75 percent? Whatever the exact numbers, industrial mass agriculture is going to produce cheaper food. In addition, can operations like Murray's be extrapolated to provide all our food of every kind? What those of us who think Alice Waters is wrong (to be clear, some find her annoying, some find her wrong, some find her both) are saying is: no. The argument "the more people that support quality, artisanal farms and farming the cheaper their products will become" only works up to a point, because at some point without the efficiency of industrial agriculture we'd run out of space, resources, etc., or we'd need to become a mostly vegetarian society, not to mention a vegetarian society where 45% of the population works on farms.

It is kind of strange that those with the resources to conduct these sorts of tastings never seem to design them with much rigor. Were we to have the power to stage a do-over of this experiment, what would be its general outlines?

It's not hard to eat cheaply if you eat rice and beans, or a mostly vegetarian diet. From the article: Whether you can eat your fill of $4-a-pound grapes is another question. The point being, even though this article was contrived to support a certain conclusion, and written in the most self-serving possible manner, it doesn't demonstrate anything beyond the fact that if your only meat for a month is a chicken, a pound of ground beef and some cans of fish, you can spend the rest of your money on Alice Waters-approved foodstuffs and be fine. It's not that working people can't afford, in the abstract, to eat organically if they too eat only a chicken, a pound of ground beef and some canned fish each month for their animal protein allotment. It's that, in order for them to afford to eat that way, they'd have to be forced to eat that way. They'd have to alter their diets radically, and most people don't want to do that. And to try to gloss that over is, to me, exactly what Bourdain is referring to when he says "there's something very Khmer Rouge about Alice Waters that has become unrealistic."

The dried-pasta tastings I've read about in the past, such as the ones performed by Cook's Illustrated, have never struck me as particularly credible. But New York Magazine recently put together a tasting at the International Culinary Center that seems, on the face of it, to be the best of its kind done to date. The tasters were Marco Canora of Insieme, Hearth, and Terroir; Mark Ladner of Del Posto; and Cesare Casella of Salumeria Rosi; and they tasted the pasta both plain and dressed. When I heard about this tasting, I thought for sure, finally, this would prove the superiority of imported artisanal dried pasta. Trader Joe's won.

During the last kitchen repainting, my mother painted all the cans white. They're still in use to this day.

Today I bought basil at the grocery store and I handled it differently, according to my new paradigm of efficient use of my food purchases. I immediately picked all the basil leaves off the bunch -- all of them. I washed and washed them (they were very sandy), then dried them, then divided them into four sandwich-size zipper bags. Three of those bags went into the freezer and one went into the fridge. I expect to use the fridge allotment within a few days. In the past, I'd often have kept the whole bunch of basil in the produce drawer, used a quarter of it during the week after purchase, and thrown the rest in the garbage. Not only was this wasteful, but also it meant I didn't always have basil when I wanted it. Now I will. When I tested the frozen-basil approach during the Klatsch period, I found (as I'd occasionally found before) that in a cooked dish like tomato sauce frozen fresh basil is not, to me, distinguishable from fresh fresh basil. In a caprese salad, it's probably not the best idea to use frozen. I haven't tested it in pesto -- that's an experiment I'll get to at some point.

One of the things that threw me about the 60 Minutes segment was this: I had no idea Alice Waters was the mother of the slow food movement!

Well, of course everybody will find different things annoying or not annoying. I have a few acquaintances I thought would never get married, but there's someone for everyone. But a lot of people found Alice Waters's comments on 60 minutes annoying, and a lot of people find her annoying in general, and I have no trouble seeing why -- since I found her very annoying in that segment as well. I think specifically the things that rubbed people the wrong way, aside from her general demeanor and manner of speaking (which to me are annoying in their own right), were: Not horrible, but she does come across to me as out-of-touch, condescending, unrealistic, finger-wagging, etc. -- all the things that have been said here and in many other places. I thought Anthony Bourdain, with whom I certainly don't agree on everything, really nailed it here: http://dcist.com/2009/01/chewing_the_fat_a...ny_bourdain.php

Sure, of course, and McWilliams (and I) think those are valid and worth weighing. However, the big public argument in support of locavorism has for a while been food miles. The better thinking on that issue says that, when it comes to energy and the environment, food miles are not a big deal and, indeed, many local foods are wasteful of energy and more damaging to the environment than foods that travel. So that all should be weighed when discussing which purchasing decisions are better for the world. I will say that, for myself, I started out somewhat buying into the food miles argument, and the more I've learned the more I've realized how flawed the food miles model is. I also feel the same way about organic. And I don't think we should be moving back in the direction of an agrarian society, unless people want to be farmers, in which case that's their choice. I'm currently more concerned about humane treatment of animals than about food miles, organics or farmer's markets. So yeah, there are a lot of issues to weigh. But Alice Waters doesn't come across as weighing anything. When she goes on TV and proclaims that she couldn't imagine having a microwave, that she doesn't go to supermarkets, that she cooks eggs in a spoon over an open fire, and she starts going on about gardens and such, and you look at the lists of things she's pushing in her book (which I linked to above), she comes across as an out-of-touch absolutist who's saying "shame on everybody who doesn't live like me." I have no problem with her living the life she lives, but when she starts sending out the message that her lifestyle is morally superior to everyone else's -- and that is very much the message I get, and that a lot of people get (thus the backlash) -- then it's a different story.

Yes, many found Waters's comments in the 60 Minutes piece, and Alice Waters in general, to be condescending, unrealistic, etc. I thought that was clear, because so many people said just that. But I can say it again just in case. In addition, Waters is advocating all this expensive, time-consuming food during a punishing recession, so she comes across as insensitive to the needs of working families. She says she's sensitive to those needs but her comments come across as unconvincing. Finally, she's wrong about some of the fundamental assumptions of her argument, which is basically locavorism. Locavorism, which gained traction with the whole "food miles" concept, is currently not holding up under the more rigorous assessment of life-cycle assessment. So while in the past it was possible to excuse the lecturing and apparent condescension by claiming to be saving the planet, that doesn't have good factual support. It seems, based on the best of what has been written, that a full-on shift to local production would actually be a planetary catastrophe both environmentally and socially. Please let me know if that's not entirely clear.

Ad hominem attacks aside, McWilliams's work is just one of many examples of life-cycle assessment, which is clearly the superior way to measure energy and environmental impact. The reality is that when viewed in the context of life cycle assessment, locavorism often simply fails as a matter of mathematical fact. http://www.salon.com/mwt/food/eat_drink/20...iles/print.html http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es702969f Dubner is also worth reading on this, in the Freakonomics blog: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008...lion-locavores/