A Full Belly

"make no mistake: we are animals"

Michael Ruhlman's currently guest-blogging over at Megnut and wrote an excellent post the other day about how all the talk of ethical eating is, well, annoying: It's a Wonderful Life. Anthony Bourdain turned up as requested and left a comment, of which the following is an excerpt:

Extraordinary that in a time when we're force feeding PEOPLE at Gitmo--and when hundreds of thousands of PEOPLE are starving to death in the Sudan and elsewhere, that there is no more burning issue on the minds of educated, well-fed, financially comfortable citizens than whether or not a clam feels pain--or whether a duck can handle what any respectable adult film ingenue considers routine.

On a related tangent, one of my many, many problems with PETA is that they consistently choose to fight the smallest of fights to get attention for themselves, instead of fighting the big battles that would actually advance the, you know, ethical treatment of animals. Augieland, on why the fuss over live lobsters is ridiculous:

At best, PETA and Whole Foods have advanced the idea that lobsters have a central nervous system, equating them with earthworms. Pigs have such developed brains that the common industry practice of weaning them a few weeks early in order to get a head start on their hormone-laden fattening diet leaves them so distraught they develop an oral fixation that causes them to incessantly suck on each other's tails until they fall off, leaving sores that get infected. The pork industries solution? Cut the tails off (tail docking) at the time of the early weaning. But pay no attention to these grievous violations of ethical animal treatment, you can rest easy because PETA has convinced Whole Foods to stop selling the live version of what are essentially bugs.

Batali, Bourdain and Buford, live at the NYPL

I had a great time seeing Mario Batali, Anthony Bourdain and Bill Buford chat at the NYPL last week—if you didn't get tickets before it sold out, don't blame me, 'cause it's not like I didn't tell you about it in advance. I wanted to write a long piece except that I was mostly too busy laughing to take lots of notes. $15 well spent! Here are four of the things I managed to scribble down that I think you'll appreciate:

• Batali, on Charlie Trotter's anti-foie gras stance: "At some point you have to realize you're on the top of the food chain, and that's all there is to it."
• Bourdain, on Rachel Ray: "40 dollars a day? Tip, bitch!"
• Audience: "Is [getting] fat an occupational hazard?" Bourdain: "They just don't smoke enough." (He should know, as he's supposed to smoke like a chimney and is a beanpole compared to the rotund Batali and Buford.)
• Audience: "What's your favorite fat to cook with?" Batali: "Lard, olive oil." Bourdain: "Pork."

My favorite discussion, i.e. the one that made me wish I was taping the entire thing, was Bourdain discussing the culinary tipping point he calls the "sushi barrier". He posted about it on eGullet early last year:

My theory, for some time, has been that the most significant point in modern North American culinary history was that moment when Westerners decided it was alright--even desirable--to eat sushi. That barrier-crossing raised all boats for all chefs of every stripe. Suddenly it was permissable to serve mackerel, octopus, fish roes, sardines and other traditional European seafood that were once largely shunned. What chefs found to be acceptable quality in seafood lept--as there was always a Japanese restaurant willing to pay for the good stuff (hence creating reliable demand for more variety and better quality). And once the bone-deep aversion to eating raw fish disappeared, other barriers fell as well. The dining public became more daring and willing to experiment.

Did you see the three Bs talk? Did you enjoy Bill Buford's new book Heat or Anthony Bourdain's latest The Nasty Bits? Let  us know in the comments!

kitchen secrets: bill buford with mario batali and anthony bourdain

New York City food nerds, alert! Mark June 21st off on your calendar and take out your credit card, you are about to buy a ticket to see former New Yorker fiction editor Bill Buford talk at the NYPL with two of our most favorite chefs ever, Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain, in the latest installment of the Kitchen Secrets series.

I haven't gotten around to reading Buford's new memoir Heat yet but now I'm definitely going to have to before the 21st, because parts of it detail how he came to quit his job at the New Yorker and start apprenticing at Babbo under Batali himself. As for Bourdain, not only is he Amazon's featured guest reviewer for Heat (subtitle: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany), but his latest book The Nasty Bits just came out two weeks ago, so I guess I'll be picking that up too—just as soon as I finish my current read which is, coincidentally enough, his infamous Kitchen Confidential.

P.S. Heat's been getting reviewed left and right, but here are two I particularly enjoyed reading: Will Work For Food (Julia Reed, NYT) and Eating Out (Jason Epstein, New York Review of Books). If you read only one, then for your own good choose the latter as Epstein does a marvelous job with Heat in the first part of the article and an even more spectacular one with Julia Child's My Life In France in the second!

nyc's newest food blogger

Holy crap, look who New York's newest food blogger is: Frank Bruni! And there's a weekly podcast! And comments are enabled! Like, whoa.

no more vegan marshmallows?

Vegan marshmallow scandal! AFB's favorite marathon-running vegan librarians Kate and Jenny couldn't find their beloved vegan marshmallows at Whole Foods or Teany and eventually discovered that the marshmallows weren't vegan after all—it turns out that Emes Kosher-Jel, the popular alternative to gelatin used to make them, contains protein.

new york magazine's 101 restaurants

Where to eat in 2006: New York Magazine's 101 Best Restaurants. Written by Adam Platt, Le Bernardin takes 1 and AFB fave Momofuku comes in at a respectable 101, with 99 great places to eat in between. Platt's introduction explains both the method used to select the restaurants and what each of the stars in New York Magazine's new review system mean.

gas prices affect pizza

Is pizza going to cost more as gas prices climb? "Domino’s has already helped its drivers, who provide their own cars and gas, offset the impact of rising pump prices by increasing the amount it pays them per delivery," but they might have to raise their prices if gas stays this expensive in the long term. And did you know that Domino's drivers cover 9 million miles in a week just in the US? That's a lot of driving in the suburbs!

meat from a vat?

Brave New Hamburger. The Village Voice's Geeta Dayal on cultured-meat production: "The basic idea is this: All meat is essentially muscle tissue marbled with fat. If you grew enough of these cells, you could theoretically make actual meat—without resorting to soy or slaughterhouses. Ideally, you could make thousands, if not millions, of nuggets from a single chicken using this method."

raw foodie flasher?

NYC Is the co-owner of raw food eateries Quintessence the subway flasher caught by cameraphone? Is it him? Is this a case of mistaken identity? All I know is, a) even my hard core vegan friends (hi David) laugh at raw foodies and b) this story makes me want to head on down to Crif*Dogs for a hot dog wrapped in bacon and then deep-fried (then topped with avocado and sour cream).

chinatown ice cream dragon debacle

NYC Chinatown Ice Cream Dragon: There Can Be Only One. David Yee summarizes the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory vs Nolita Ice Cream Factory shebang.

I checked out the Nolita joint two weeks ago and they do seem to serve the same ice cream as Chinatown—the black sesame and mango I tasted seemed the same, as did the coconut I eventually and inevitably ended up getting—so I really don't understand what's going on.

jean-georges vongerichten

Superstar chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, he who reinvented the city's approach to food and dining out (not to mention nouvelle cuisine) over two decades, has the cover of New York Magazine all to himself this week, plus a lengthy piece written by Jay McInerney, author of quintissential 80s New York novel "Bright Lights, Big City".

From Jean-Georges Is Seeing Stars:

The backlash might seem inevitable, from the outside. The guy, after all, has had nothing but hits, and until recently he’s made it look easy. He’s rich: Prime Steakhouse in Las Vegas, just one corner of his empire, did $16 million in business last year. He’s earned not just one but two four-star ratings from the Times and won seven James Beard awards. He just moved into a beautiful apartment overlooking the Hudson in the most talked-about residential complex in the city, a project in which he was a partner. He has a beautiful young wife, former Jean Georges hostess Marja Allen, the mother of his 4-year old daughter, Chloe. He doesn’t seem tortured like Thomas Keller, nor wacky like David Bouley. What’s not to hate about someone this successful and seemingly well adjusted?

If he was ever complacent or distracted, he’s definitely not feeling that way now. One of his most likable qualities—and he is a very likable guy—is his willingness to take criticism to heart. He thinks of himself as a host, and he hates to see his guests unhappy. “Maybe I was stretched a little thin last year,” he says in his melodic, mumbling English, flipping an omelet in the spotless kitchen at Jean Georges while he watches two sous chefs plating an order. “I open four restaurants. But I love creating new things. It’s difficult to be creative once a restaurant’s open. People want the same dishes. For me, the creativity is in opening a new place and starting a new menu.”

Vongerichten is opening another restaurant this week, his eighth in New York: Perry, in the West Village, a 60 seater. According to the piece he's been struggling with his partners in V (the steakhouse he opened in Columbus Circle's Time Warner Center) and will make the decision whether to leave it or stay after this summer. So if you haven't been and have been wondering, as McInerney put it, "Do you need a chef of Vongerichten’s magnitude to cook a steak? Isn’t that like hiring Cy Twombly to paint your house?", this is the time to go.