Sorry, but I just couldn't resist that headline.

Paula Deen's cooking show is not one I usually watch on Food Network. The few times I've seen parts of it, the food she was making was so nauseating I simply had to turn it off. As soon as the Crisco or the Cool Whip starts coming out, I'm done. It isn't that I'm only willing to use hand-rolled, hand-shaped macaroni and three types of reduced-fat artisanal cheese and truffle oil to make MY macaroni and cheese, but chemical-laden frankenfood just doesn't do it for me. That isn't to say that I won't eat anything that doesn't come from an organic garden in a pastoral landscape tended by golden-tressed earth mothers singing Big Yellow Taxi, but I do recognize the difficulties of being someone who has to be in a large building for eight-to-ten hours a day combined with a commute that can be an hour or more, and that unless you want to have dinner at eight PM and then go to bed an hour later, your weekday dinners are going to often consist of heating up something from Trader Joe's.

And then there's Paula Deen, who has made a fortune giving the people what they want -- dishes laden with butter and chocolate and sugar and shortening -- the kinds of food that perhaps were acceptable when everyone did hard physical labor on the farm all day but that are deadly in today's sedentary desk-job world. It's not surprising that people in the TV chef world such as Anthony Bourdain would get their high dudgeon on about the kind of crap Deen whips up on her cooking show. But let's not claim that haute cuisine chefs completely eschew the artery-clogging stuff either, not after the episode of Chopped I saw the other night in which the centerpiece of an appetizer was marrow bones.

Remember the episode of The Simpsons where Homer is drooling over a commercial that advertises something like "Two full pounds of ground beef, soaked in rich creamery butter. Topped with bacon, ham, cheese, and a fried egg"? Well, meet the "Lady's Brunch Burger."

The legitimate beef (so to speak) with Paula Deen is about the frankenfood more than even the fat content. Let's face it, folks -- anyone watching television who thinks that a cheeseburger topped with bacon and a fried egg and served on a glazed doughnut is a great idea has bigger problems than Paula Deen.

What's surprising is the schadenfreude coming from so-called progressives. At a time when discrimination on the basis of health risks is increasing, that a side of the political spectrum that's often (Dan Savage notwithstanding) associated with fighting discrimination based solely on girth. How can you attack the right for saying that women who get raped deserve it because they dressed provocatively and then say that Paula Deen deserves to be trashed because she ate a high-fat diet and developed Type 2 diabetes?

It seems to be at least somewhat about the diabetes drug endorsement deal she's received:

Deen knew she had diabetes for three years and still pushed doughnut burgers on her fans. Then she waited to tell people until she had an endorsement deal with a drug company. It’s hard to see that choice as anything but shabby. Deen could have spent three years talking about “moderation” without making any money off a pharmaceutical company. Like Bill Clinton, who slimmed down on a mostly vegan regimen, she had the potential as a Southerner and a food lover to teach her fans new strategies for eating and living — and she could have done it without shilling for the pharmaceutical industry. She looks like a calculated opportunist today — when, she could have, for those millions of fellow Americans with diabetes, been simply sweet.

First of all, how often do you hear Bill Clinton talk about veganism? Almost never. Bill Clinton doesn't travel the country talking about veganism, and nowhere in the mission statement of the Clinton Global Initiative does it talk about diabetes. It's something he did, and good for him. (It also helps that he can no doubt afford a spectacular vegan chef to prepare delicious vegan meals for him.) But the biggest problem with the paragraph above is its implication that there is no gray area at all between the Lady's Brunch Burger and a vegan diet, when in fact there's a great deal of gray area. To imply otherwise is enough to make your average overweight person just decide "The hell with it."

Amanda Marcotte, who blogs for a living and so doesn't have to sit in an office for eight-to-ten hours a day and then sit in traffic for an hour, joins the pile-on, though she makes some valid points about managing diseases after we have them rather than preventing them in the first place.

The problem is that there are no hard-and-fast rules about prevention. I come from two fat parents. Both have lost a bit of weight recently, but are still overweight by any objective standard. Both have health problems, one related to lifestyle (smoking), the other unrelated to lifestyle. Mom is 84 and Dad is 86. Neither one has diabetes, despite being overweight for as long as I can remember. I have a friend whose husband has high cholesterol, despite a diet of lean meats, fish, grains, and vegetables, and a two-mile run every morning. Sometimes smokers don't get lung cancer and nonsmokers do. Sometimes thin people get Type 2 diabetes and fat people don't. Christopher Hitchens smoked cigarettes and drank like a fish and died of esophageal cancer. Winston Churchill started each day with a cigar and a snifter of brandy and lived to be ninety. Julia Child was the queen of butter and was similarly bashed (NYT link) -- and lived to be ninety-two.

Look, I recognize that people who eat crap, and those, like Paula Deen, who glorify crap food make it more difficult for those of us who try to eat right to convince people that we don't sit around eating doughnuts and Chicken McNuggets (or Lady's Brunch Burgers, for that matter); that we eat egg white vegetable omelets with just a sprinkling of cheese (non-artisanal, alas) for breakfast and vegetable-laden soups with salad for lunch and a small bowl of chili for dinner -- and we're still fat. Tonight I am going to dinner with some colleagues who are in town from overseas. They love, love, love Cheesecake Factory. I hate, hate, hate chain restaurants like this because it's so difficult to find something to eat that isn't fried or covered with cheese. Yesterday I spent a full fifteen minutes perusing the menu in advance to try and find something I can eat that isn't huge, fried, covered with cheese, or drowning in dressing. This is what life is like every single fucking day for Your Humble Blogger, who is a 4'10" size sixteen anyway. And it doesn't involve doughnuts, fast food, or these days even chocolate, as I've mostly lost my taste for sweet stuff. I suspect I'm not the only one.

Mary Elizabeth Williams, who wrote the Salon article excerpted above, is battling Stage IV melanoma that started on her scalp. This happened despite wearing sunscreen all these years because who puts sunscreen on her scalp? So I suppose we should cut her a cetain amount of slack and not say she brought it on herself by spending too much time in the sun without a hat. Because even though lifestyle factors might bring on a serious disease, blaming sick people for their own plight after they're sick seems a little bit like blaming rape victims for being assaulted.

None of us is perfect, and there's no one in this country who hasn't deluded him/herself at one point or another that s/he is immortal and will never get sick and never die. Those of us who have seen parents live to what is old age by any measure are especially susceptible to this delusion. But you can do everything right and still get cancer. You can do everything right and get wiped out on the highway tomorrow. You can do everything wrong and outlive everyone you know. The universe is random like that. Of course it's better to eat a moderate portion of chicken sauteed with fresh organic vegetables over a bit of brown rice than it is to eat a Big Mac. I don't think even the most ardent red-stater would deny that.

Now, I'm not a Paula Deen fan, so I can't say for sure. But I can't imagine that she has been out there advocating eating two pounds of fried macaroni and cheese topped with butter at every meal, every day, for your entire life. If I'm wrong about that, let me know. But I suspect that Paula Deen is not that much different from most of us -- she never believed it would happen to her. So-called progressives who would never advocate discriminating against the 22-year-old who's paraplegic because he drank a six-pack and then drove his car into a tree because his disability is "lifestyle-related" have no business being selective about who they'll bash for having a life-threatening illness. Even if it did come from Velveeta and doughnuts.

Labels: double standards, Fast Food Nation, pop culture, weight

Ew.

Japanese researcher Mitsyuki Ikeda has come up with perhaps the greenest alternative to the livestock industry yet: he's engineered fake meat from human feces. Ikeda's artificial meat is made from extracting lipids and protein from "sewage mud," combining these lipids with a reaction enhancer and putting the whole thing in an exploder to combine it. Steak sauce and soy sauce add saltiness and a dash of umami to the fake meat.

Mitsyuki Ikeda's fake meat from human feces may not float your proverbial boat, but it's an innovative form of food production that reuses one of the most renewable substances on the planet. Ikeda notes that the "burgers" are low in fat and, because they don't rely on livestock, won't raise carbon emissions or waste.

Labels: disgust, Fast Food Nation

With Sarah Palin having declared vegetables as traitors to America and s'mores as the food of choice for Real Muricans Lovin' Faith Family 'n' Flag, let's take a look at the favorite new state fair foods of Snowflake Snooki's constituency (no blockquote tags because of commentary; the source is linked above):

10. Hash Brown Hot Dog – San Diego County Fair. This is ground-up gore, guts, and animal parts wrapped in shredded potatoes and deep-fat fried.

9. Deep-Fried Cheddar-Bacon Mashed Potatoes…On a Stick – Minnesota State Fair. Because regular mashed potatoes with their butter and cream just don't have quite enough saturated fat.

8. Garbage Burger – Indiana State Fair. It's a pork patty topped with pulled pork, but perhaps the nickname is more fitting.

7. Deep-Fried Frito Pie – Texas State Fair. As near as I can tell, this is batter-dipped chili-topped corn chips.

6. Deep Fried Klondike Bar – San Diego State Fair. Because all the palm kernel oil used to make the chocolate coating just doesn't coat your arteries enough all by itself.

5. Chocolate Tornado Potato – Minnesota State Fair. Now you know what to do with that spiral-cutter from Telebrands that you got for Christmas. Spiral-cut a potato, deep-fry it, then dip it in chocolate.

4. Deep-Fried Cheesesteak on a Stick – Wisconsin State Fair. Now OK, I admit to having tried the Bananas Foster bites at Wing Zone, which is probably sort of what I imagine deep-fried cheesecake tastes like. What? That's "cheesesteak"?

Never mind.

3. Sweet Potato Dog – San Diego County Fair. See #10, but because this is California and they watch their white carbs, substitute sweet potato for hash browns. It's Beta-Carotineeylicious!

2. Corn Dog Pizza – Minnesota State Fair. This HAS to be from Michele Bachmann's district. Just please tell me Franken doesn't eat this.

1. Fried Beer – Texas State Fair. If you've ever fantasized during halftime about how you could combine your beer and fried ravioli, this snack's for you. It combines the comfort of a pastry pocket with the all-American goodness of beer.

I guess fried butter didn't make the list because it's from 2009.

Now what was that about Texas' Medicaid expenses?

Labels: Fast Food Nation, You can't make this shit up

I've driven to North Carolina a few times. I go by myself, to visit family. The main reason I don't plan to drive again, at least not for a few years, is because our NEWER car is seven years old with almost 70,000 miles on it. Our OLDER one only has 75,000 miles on it, but the interior fan died the other day and needs repair. It would not be fun for this to happen, say, in the middle of a driving rainstorm. So that's why I don't like to make that long drive once the cars get older. I'm also a bit older than I used to be, and 10 hours is a long time to drive by oneself.

But when I've done the drive, highway rest stops are a lifesaver. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's looked at those signs along interstates promising a gas station at the next exit, only to find that when you're on the exit ramp, the sign directing you to the one gas station within 20 miles has "15 mi" on it. My rule is that if I can't see it from the interstate, I keep going. This is really only an issue once I get on I-85 in Virginia, because north of there, you have service area rest stops in New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland, where you can get a cup of Starbucks, pee in a reasonably clean bathroom, and even buy that comb you forgot to pack. But once you get into Virginia, you're limited to the Welcome Center when you get in, one when you leave, and a couple of sinister-looking but actually quite rest stops along the way. Now even these are endangered, thanks to state budget crises and fast food industry greed (emphasis mine):

New Mexico is the most recent case in a rash of rest-stop closures that has affected states from Vermont to California. Facing enormous budget deficits, many states have raided transportation funds, forcing them to shut down all but the most necessary of operations. For Arizona, Louisiana and Virginia, the shuttering of roadside rest stops has become one of the most visible signs of the current budget crisis.

[snip]

The disparity is due to a 1956 federal law aimed at protecting restaurants and gas stations located just off the exits of a growing Interstate highway system. The federal law bans the selling of food or fuel — or anything not sold from a vending machine — at rest areas on Interstates built after 1960. By that time, states in the Northeast and parts of the Midwest had already built turnpikes and other major highways with commercialized rest stops, which were allowed to continue operating.

Today, the issue reaches far beyond the number of restrooms on the highways. It’s also a matter of safety. Money spent on keeping rest stops open can mean less money for snow plows, road maintenance and highway crash response. Additionally, rest areas serve as a place for weary drivers to pull over and take a break from time behind the wheel. If many of them are closed, that means more tired eyes on the road, and for longer periods of time.

Millions of dollars at stake

States that aren’t allowed to lease rest-area space to businesses have to pay millions of dollars each year to clean and maintain the facilities. Georgia, for example, spent $4.5 million in 2008 to run 17 rest areas and nine welcome centers. Last summer, the state closed two stops to save $300,000 on each of them. Now, the state is looking at more creative alternatives: Transportation officials announced plans this month to seek a private partner to maintain the rest stops in return for rights to sell advertising space and sponsorships.

In Virginia, rest stops have played an outsized role in the past two years’ budget debates. Following the budget crisis of 2009, the Virginia Department of Transportation closed 19 of the state’s 42 rest stops, saving nearly half a million dollars on each of them. The move caused such uproar that Bob McDonnell, then a Republican candidate for governor, campaigned on a promise to reopen them all in the first three months of his term. As governor, he made good on that promise this year, but critics noted that rest stops got more money at the same time that K-12 education, health care and safety-net services were seeing cuts.

[snip]

Increasingly, states subject to the 1956 ban have been lobbying the federal government for permission to commercialize rest stops and turn them from a cost into a revenue source. California, Oregon and Washington State have appealed to the U.S. Department of Transportation for help. The latest effort came from Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, who in February wrote a letter to U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and Arizona’s congressional delegation asking that they work to repeal the federal restrictions. “This law exemplifies how an outdated federal regulation places a heavy hand on states,” she wrote.

But the states haven’t gotten much traction in Washington. A bill in Congress that would have lifted the federal ban, introduced last year by U.S. Rep. Frank R. Wolf of Virginia, was defeated amidst heavy lobbying from the fast-food industry. The topic has come up in the much larger debate surrounding the reauthorization of the nation’s surface transportation program, but that bill is stuck in Congress and has little hope of moving anytime soon.

In Delaware, however, the story couldn’t possibly be more different. Last month, Delaware unveiled a sparkling new 42,000-square foot welcome center on the busy Interstate 95 corridor. Not only did Delaware not spend a dime constructing what amounts to a $35 million mini-mall in the highway median. The rest stop actually makes Delaware money. The state’s contract with HMSHost, a company that runs retail operations at many airports, gives Delaware a percentage of revenues from sales of gas, food and other goods — at least $1.6 million per year for 35 years.

There’s always been a difference between the highly commercialized highway rest areas in the Northeast and those in the South and West, where the stops often are little more than parking lots with bathrooms and perhaps some vending machines. But the contrast has never been more stark than it is now. The states with commercialized rest stops like Delaware are free to find ways to milk them for more and more revenue. Meanwhile, the states without commercialization are coming to see highway rest areas as a financial drain they might just as well do without.

Of course most of the restaurants located just off of interstates are fast-food outlets. But then, so are the restaurants located IN service/rest areas in those states that have them. So I fail to see why this is such a roadblock, other than the fact that you can fit about a half-dozen eateries in a rest area, whereas you can fit miles of strips of nothing but fast food and gas stations on roads intersecting interstate highways.

So the next time YOU'RE driving in Virginia, and your bladder is about to burst, and you're a woman so you can't just pull over, head down the bill and whip it out, thank Republicans for spending us into oblivion, and thank every legislator who takes money from the fast food industry to keep the rest areas desolate under the BEST of circumstances.

Labels: economic death watch, Fast Food Nation

If Lucky Cow walked into a therapist's office, it'd be diagnosed as having “Dissociative Identity Disorder”. This frustrating comic strip by artist Mark Pett plays Hyde ‘n’ Seek with itself daily because it doesn’t know what it wants to be.

Usually, it’s mind-numbingly awful. Set in a generic fast food restaurant, it’s just another mediocre comic strip taking up space in the newspaper. When the characters aren’t being irritating, they’re dull. The jokes are predictable. As a cartoonist, Pett couldn’t get a job sharpening Gary Trudeau’s pencils. Lucky Cow is so bad, I’m surprised it hasn’t been made into a sitcom.

But I swear to God, just when I’m ready to give up on Pett, he turns into a genius. On those rare days when he dumps his idiotic characters and decides to be an editorial cartoonist, Lucky Cow is smart, nasty, funny, and disturbing. It’s an savage condemnation on fast food culture and how it dehumanizes us and ravages the earth.

That’s the Good Pett. The next day, the Bad Pett will be back.

Science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon once theorized, “94% of everything is crap.” And as crappy as Lucky Cow most of the time, it’s that 6% that keeps me coming back.




(click on images to enlarge)

Labels: Fast Food Nation, Lucky Cow, Mark Pett, Supersize This