Nicholas Kristof ‘s foolish columns continue to divert attention from the problems in our nation by focusing on the plight of the poor elsewhere in the World. I swear, it almost seems as if that fool is in the pay of the President and the Congress, who would love to keep the heat off their backs for their continued inattention to the plight of Americans and attention to the suffering in the corporate suites in the USA. Trillions for corporate rescue and only billions for the people.
Meanwhile, Carl Icahn, in his Op Ed today, “We’re Not The Boss Of A.I.G.” lets us know that because of the laws protecting the boards of corporations all over the United States, the shareholders, even if they own 80% as the United States does of A.I.G., cannot control the actions of the boards. Read more »
So, I don’t usually write restaurant reviews, but every once in a while one comes along that strikes a resonant chord. The Grand Canyon Restaurant, 141 Montague Street, Brooklyn, New York 11201, was such a place for me. Why? Well, it’s about hamburgers! You know what they are generally like: hard, compressed and tasteless. This restaurant is different!
When I was a youth we would all squeeze ourselves into someone’s father’s convertible and drive with some young ladies over to a place called Jahns Ice Cream Parlour. There was one in Herricks on Hillside Avenue in Nassau, one on Fordham Road in the Bronx, and one on Queens Boulevard in Rego Park in Queens. In all of those places you would be seated and behind the counter there would be a huge mound of freshly ground meat which would be individually shaped into hamburgers and cooked over a “charcoal” grill. They were delicious. This would be followed up by the best ice cream around at that time. Read more »
Where is the madness that you promised me?
- The Magnetic Fields
Prediction: as we move deeper into the depression sausages will become more popular.
The sausage became the brunt of all jokes during the high of 80s and 90s money. It was peasant food, lumps of meat shoved into the intestinal casing of an animal— we’re in a democracy, why should we eat like Communist commoners?
Some people say they saw the recession coming in through the bubble of the housing market, or the credit sector, or they just had a premonition when they saw a dog take an enormous dump in front of a Citibank. I saw the recession in entrails. Read more »
Whole Foods at Union Square (photo: NYTimes)
I watch Top Chef. Shocking, I know.
Well I just finished watching tonight’s episode and couldn’t help noticing a little TV magic. Now, you might expect a bit of this on a television show about food, especially one where the “challenge” is to cook food for another television show, but it isn’t what your thinking.
What I noticed was that they always shop at Whole Foods, I know this because they show the exterior. That’s the Whole Foods on 14th Street. You can see the Union Square vendors selling their $5 sunglasses outside, and the New York mini mall all around it. And, of course, what kind of plug would it be if they didn’t also show the lovely inside of the store.
And now here comes the magic. Abracadabra, they are inside the Whole Foods on Houston Street. I know this because that is my supermarket. I shop at that fish counter, pick over those same veggies. Oddly they haven’t shown the massive cheese section much. Read more »
Say, don’t you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time.
Say, don’t you remember, I’m your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?
- Brother Can You Spare a Dime. Yip Harburg. 1931.
Back in 1931, people knew that carbs, eaten to excess, would make you fat. It’s common sense. Who thinks they can eat sweets and potatoes and the kind of meal used to fatten up farm animals and that, somehow, this food would make a person lose fat?
The problem came in the 1970s when Harvard researchers, chief among them Jean Mayer (funded by General Mills), ignored all scientific evidence and went with the theory, never fully explored, that dietary fat somehow turned into adipose tissue on the body. This is actually impossible, as I’ve learned reading the exceptional Good Calories, Bad Calories, a book so rigorously researched by science writer Gary Taubes that it kills a number of myths about diet and fat.
I think everyone should read this book and realize that the food pyramid is bunk; that people are sedentary because they are obese, not the other way around, and that overeating can only make you fat when it is overeating of a particular type, because the body seeks to maintain stasis and is a complex mechanism and not a “food bank” in which excess calories are simply deposited into fat cells. Fat accumulation is regulated by insulin which is, in turn, affected dramatically by refined carbohydrates. This book is not meant as a diet book, and reaches no conclusions, except to debunk the notion that “fat in, fat out” is a settled scientific hypothesis, when it has never been accurately tested. The book calls for tests on carbohydrate intake to further establish the more logical conclusion: that some people’s insulin response to carbohydrates is more severe than for others.
If you don’t want to read the book, here’s an excellent presentation by Taubes debunking the myths. Unfortunately, I fear it will be many years before an improperly-trained medical establishment accepts these truths as, if not self evident, than at least correct. The willingness of otherwise intelligent people to believe illogical pap is startling.
The staff of American Madness would like to thank the 