The clear eyebrow mascara of cooking advice

And done. Thanks to some tremendous achievements in the field of not getting out much (except over the weekend, when a modest neighborhood-leaving attempt proved more exhausting than anticipated), I have now seen all four episodes of "Fat, Salt, Acid, Heat." "Acid," the Mexico episode, was by far the most compelling. I should note, however, that I have had exactly one true pregnancy craving, and it's been a second-half-of-third-trimester fixation on tacos. (I watched the consumption of the authentic article onscreen while eating an approximation at home. My dining-out of the past few weeks has been tacos and more tacos, basically.) Also: I've been to Italy and Japan, but never to Mexico, so there was more for me in the way of vicarious experience. Also, also: More broadly, I think citrus probably is an underrated ingredient-type, and one that hasn't had reason to reclaimed post-'lite'-and-low-sodium-1990s in the way that salt and fat have been. The concept felt somehow more original. (Also, also, also: tacos.)

So I was feeling kind of won over. And had high hopes for "Heat," the non-travel-based final episode. At last, all of these trips to get special ingredients were going to culminate in a home-cooking application!

Which... is and isn't where things go. Home for Samin Nosrat is Berkeley, California, but starts off at her former workplace, Chez Panisse. As I ate a defrosted (but - apologies to "Fawlty Towers" - fresh when it was frozen) and toasted bagel with mediocre Canadian goat cheese, I watched as Nosrat and an Alice Waters-esque woman (but not Waters herself) prepared thick steaks over a wooden fire, inside a kitchen, as one does. (Yes, it's the egg all over again.) The narration involves all these tips, assuring that the cooking of enormous steaks over a fireplace fire inside the Chez Panisse kitchen is something that actually has relevance to one's home-cooking techniques. My bagel-fueled skepticism was what it was, but I kept watching.

I should not have continued watching. Next up is the everyday, ordinary trip to the regular old supermarket, to learn how to shop. "One of the valuable lessons I learned at Chez Panisse was that you don't have to use expensive ingredients to make good food. All you need to find are simple, quality staples, and to treat them with respect," narrates Nosrat, as she meanders the aisles of a supermarket in Berkeley that looks like something out of a dream. (She also super-casually tastes some string beans (?) without paying, which I think is meant to seem non-pretentious, charming, and in the spirit of being sure to taste food at every step along the way, but... I don't know.) First, there's the meat. It's not just that this supermarket has a butcher - not standard, but not unheard-of. It's that the meat looks amazing and costs - to my now-Toronto-trained eyes - practically nothing.

But then comes the produce, and it's like, why bother, the viewer asks herself, pouring a bowl of raisin bran a couple hours later. It's like a peak-summer NYC farmers market, but with more - and more brightly-colored - vegetables. But with a layout reminding that it is in fact a supermarket. More narration, this time with Nosrat saying her focus isn't the special vegetables that happen to be in season in California but the everyday items like broccoli and string beans. Then why film in the Berkeley dreamscape supermarket? Anyway. Everything is lush and incredible and the herbs are fresh and bright green and come in bunches for like 40 cents rather than tiny desiccated clumps in plastic shells for like $4 because Berkeley is not Toronto. Further narration urges the addition of fresh herbs to dishes. A later scene involves the preparation of a salad made from roasted (complicated-ish) vegetables and pre-soaked beans (were we expecting boxed or canned? but not fresh, which is something) and then this massive pile of the herbs in question.

So. It makes perfect sense that cooking shows would feature aesthetically appealing food, and that a competent-but-no-more home cook going to a Canadian supermarket in the hopes of finding scallions, only to leave without any because it's not a scallion day, would not make for compelling television. (Downtown Toronto is so not a food desert. It's that Berkeley is exceptional in the other direction.) It also stands to reason that food professionals would gravitate to (or start their careers in) Berkeley, clustering there rather than cities where for most of the year you sort of cut into a piece of fruit and hope for the best. All of that is fine.

The problem here is more specific: If your reference point for grocery-shopping is Berkeley, your advice to home cooks generally is going to be maybe not so applicable beyond there. The thing where you cook so as to showcase the freshest ingredients - simple flavors, not too much in the way of sauces or spices (both of which could well give Toronto the ingredients advantage) - only works in a locale where more can be said of the ingredients than that they're not uniformly rotten. It is - to paraphrase myself from Twitter, sorry - very much like the approach to beauty-writing where you hear about which moisturizer someone with perfect skin uses as their entire beauty routine. Yes, it will send readers running out to buy that moisturizer, but if they were to pause for a moment they'd realize it's not (just) the moisturizer.

And yet. Just as the Glossier approach to beauty has a way of sucking you in and making you buy an actually very good tube of clear eyebrow mascara, watching "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat" has revived my own interest in home cooking. (As, admittedly, has not being much able to leave the apartment.) Did I braise short ribs for about 6 hours the other day, because I'm suggestible? I most certainly did, and they were excellent.

The Soy Sauce 99%

Hello from the land of too pregnant to teach. I am not, shockingly, too pregnant to Netflix. Decided to go with "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat," former Chez Panisse chef (with Michael Pollan ties as well) Samin Nosrat's docuseries, and am currently two episodes in. I will doubtless get to the other two soon, and if they massively change my thoughts, perhaps expect an update.

What's to say about the show? Critic Jenny G. Zhang is right: It is something different for a woman of color to be in the naive-but-adventurous American traveler role. What Nosrat does with that role itself may not be revolutionary — no, it's not a revelation that there'd be good food in Tuscany (the episode "Fat"); and I personally could have lived with fewer remarks about how Americans don't know about dashi stock, or other basics of Japanese home cooking, when... plenty of us have YouTube and Japanese cookbooks, and there's nothing "secret" about bonito flakes or associated techniques (from "Salt") — but Nosrat's physical presence is the difference between something that risks feeling stale or Orientalist, and carefree escapism.

And yes, it's refreshing for a woman-and-food show (or really any US-based show) not to involve a modelesque woman, whether promoting or condemning 'clean' eating. It's not just that Nosrat is bigger than the typical woman TV host. (Imagine the eye-rolls provoked by an episode venerating fat-the-ingredient, with a size-zero host.) It's also that she doesn't look done up in the way generally expected of women in this context. She's there because she's a chef, educator, and writer who knows her stuff (including fluent Italian), and an engaging presence, and that is — as it would be, for a male TV host — enough.

Put another way: that Nosrat isn't a dashing middle-aged white dude sneering at the bourgeoisie while urging regular sorts (women) back into the kitchen has a way of making the show, in this day and age, less distracting.

It's a good show, both as entertainment and in terms of probably making the world a better place. But I'm having trouble interpreting the show as the revolutionary achievement some critics seem to receive it as. I was especially baffled by Malcolm Harris's claim that there's something "Marxist" about the show, with "its vision of unalienated labor." Harris acknowledges that he's talking about a travel-centric cooking show featuring artisanal ingredients, but argues that this quality makes it not elitist: "Her point isn’t to communicate the rarity of these ingredients in a Most Expensivest kind of way — there are few purchases and no prices on the show." Which, technically speaking, sure.

Harris's interpretation of slow food as socialist utopia might make sense in the abstract, but not in the context of food writing/food culture of the past decade or so. Artisanal-fetishization as an aesthetic is always a discreet sort of conspicuous consumption. It's always venerating something foraged in a remote locale over the mundane ingredients available in supermarkets near home. And more specifically, it's venerating being the sort of person who can travel the world for — or, at least, import — those special ingredients. It's an aesthetic that rejects 'gourmet', with all its fussiness, but that effectively reproduces it in a slightly different guise. I mean, read a typical David Tanis recipe. Tanis, another Chez Panisse alum, is constantly advising making sure one buys the absolute freshest this or that, with it taken for granted that you're at the very least shopping at farmers markets and fishmongers, but preferably eating freshly-plucked produce, farmed or perhaps wild. Or think of Alice Waters herself, and her notorious fire-cooked egg. (I had remembered the egg incident, but was just reminded on Twitter of the ultra-pricey spoon the egg was prepared with.)

In other words, the same issues that come up with other food movement... advocacy? entertainment? arise here. There are home-cooking segments, but the gist of the show is that the best ingredients are near-impossible to procure, subtext being, whatever it is you're cooking with is inferior and a little bit tragic. A visit to Japan includes a lesson in how a special seaweed-derived salt is made, but then that seems industrial compared with a trip to the old-methods soy sauce... I don't even want to call it a factory, more like an artist's workshop, where we learn that less than 1% of soy sauce in Japan is produced the traditional way, and that most Japanese people won't have even tried this version. And it's like, is the 1% soy sauce that much better than the 99%, or does the viewer just want it to be, given how majestic the whole thing looks, with the barrels and the very serious soy-sauce producer? A part of me desperately wants to try the special soy sauce, but another is left feeling like, if even spending up at a local Japanese grocery wouldn't be good enough, what's the point, and wouldn't this have been time better spent learning what to do with a bottle of Kikkoman?

The show's thesis statement as it were might be simplicity — the universality of salt, fat, acid, and heat as elements that make good cooking worldwide — but the focus is on sighing over the very best of these ingredients. And there's no way to do this that doesn't implicitly (or at times explicitly, as in Nosrat's Alice Waters-esque references to what the typical American consumer is used to) suggest that the everyday versions of these ingredients are insufficient. The regular home cook — the person (the woman) expected to have dinner on the table each night — might be left inspired by the show, but could just as well be left feeling the usual you're-not-good-enough pressures reinforced.

All of this gets at a problem with the privilege framework for cultural critique. Once it gets decided that whichever new cultural product is — as Lauren Oyler memorably put it — "necessary," that is, that it's making an important social-justice contribution At A Time Like This, the work itself gets at once over- and under-appreciated. Over-, because... it's a travel food show partly about how the true Parmagiano, eaten on-site in Italy, really is that good. And under-, because once you hold the show to a full checklist of wokeness standards, you're asking more of it than you would be of yet another such show by a white guy. Which... if the show is revolutionary, it is in the same way "The Mindy Project" was. And let's allow it to be that, no more, no less. It can be at one and the same time annoying that food-movement preciousness lives on, and a positive development that its public-facing proponents now come from a more diverse array of backgrounds.

'Better not risk it'

Sorry, dear reader(s), but I remain fixated on the bonkers Twitter response to the news story of the pregnant woman who got served cleaning solution instead of the latte she'd ordered at McDonald's. I shouldn't, really, when the entire "story," such as it is, is that three (at least; didn't comb through all of it) people/bots in a substantial Twitter thread objected not to the poison served to this woman, but to her decision to go into McDonald's and order a latte in the first place.

Typing this, I realize it's not self-evident what the issue was. Was it that lattes aren't a choice classically associated with McDonald's? No! It was that pregnant women — according to some tweeterers not up on what medical guidelines actually are about this — shouldn't be drinking coffee. For the link-non-clickers: the guidelines are basically, don't drink coffee like it's water, but a coffee or two is fine. It just doesn't feel as if it should be. Why?

What kept coming to mind when overanalyzing this is what would have happened had this woman been served cleaning solution not in a McDonald's latte guise, but at one of those millennial-plant-filled, Instagrammable juice bars. Juice, so evocative of health and purity! Cold-pressed, of course. Except here's the fun thing: unpasteurized but prepared juice is one of the many (, many, many) otherwise consumable items that are fully off-limits to The Pregnant. It feels as if it would be fine, advisable, even. What could look more wholesome than a fresh glass of (green, perhaps) juice? And yet, the latte was (in principle; not that specific latte, clearly) the better choice.

In the great Before, I'd known that pregnant women couldn't have sushi. (Which may not even be the case anymore in the US, but still is in Canada; as compensation, we don't have to give a moment's thought to paying for maternity care or childbirth.) Ha! It is not only sushi. It's basically a full-on impaired-immune-system diet (no runny eggs, dubious leftovers, etc.), with the added twist that certain otherwise-whatever toxins are deadly to fetuses. Cold cuts, undercooked meat or seafood (or fully cooked fish, if it's the mercury-dense kind), any remotely decent cheese, lox, it's all a disaster waiting to happen.

At which your impulse might well be to go vegetarian, or maybe even vegan, just to simplify matters, and given that all the fun non-vegan foods are out. But that's not ideal, either, since you need to get enough protein, not just regular-person enough but even more. That, and salad is also suspect. If you don't know where it's been or whatever, it crosses over into one of those foods. Not least with romaine lettuce regularly swinging between acceptable salad green and bacterial sewer to be avoided at all costs. Eat vegetables! Just not those vegetables, or those, and oh, maybe not those either. And carbs are good! Just make sure you're having multigrain everything, and not too much sugar (she types, looking down at her almond croissant), because you want to gain weight but not too much, and gestational diabetes could be around the corner.

I read Emily Oster's Expecting Better and nodded along in theory to the idea that what matters is actual risk, while at the same time thinking if even minor risk can be avoided, now's really the time. I went into... this entirely prepared to make all the sacrifices. What's nine months? My lifestyle at 34 didn't require any major adjustments (the upside to losing one's alcohol tolerance around 30), and I mostly eat the vegetarian sushi anyway. I didn't (and don't!) find it all that infantilizing if, for actual medical reasons, I'd have to consume a bit more like, well, a child.

What I wasn't prepared for was the system of rules, akin to kashrut or extreme "clean" eating, that came with. Basically anything you haven't prepared yourself is dangerous, because who knows what's in anything? All sorts of seemingly innocuous foods could have secret raw eggs, secret alcohol. I find myself standing at the cheese section of the supermarket, Borat-style, trying to make sense of which cheeses would be acceptable. Confusingly, the hard cheeses are often raw-milk, while the ones with the reassuring "pasteurized" label are often the soft-rind, forbidden variety.

Not drinking, fine. Not ordering the beef tartare that I wasn't going to order anyway, also fine. But where was the option that didn't involve turning every meal into a research project, and at a time when one is meant to be getting enough nutrients? This is an approach that, as a matter of principle, I object to in my regular life, but that here struck me as all-out dangerous.

And add to this the expectation that all women open to the possibility of becoming pregnant act as though they already were, and not just basic stuff like taking folic acid or not smoking, but, apparently, giving up pizza, because god forbid an actually pregnant woman ate garbage like that. So yeah, while I didn't immediately, I now get why the purity requirements grate, and why Oster's book has such a passionate following. It's not, as I first skeptically imagined, that everyone just wants an excuse to drink. It's not even about that, really. Where everything is risk, and still more things feel as if they would be, there's no obvious 'safest not to risk it' option.

So I do what I guess everyone does, in one way or another: I draw my own lines. Alcohol is out, because I can give or take its presence in my life. Max one coffee a day is in, and is the main hope for me consuming the recommended amount of milk. There's enough that's necessary that I find it hard to convince myself to sign on to the things that merely feel as if they might be. That means the whole organic thing is one I'm giving a pass. (If the organic fruit's the one that looks vastly better, it's what I may go with, price depending, same as before.) I'm not picking now as the moment to start on the apparently effective retinol-based anti-wrinkle creams, since retinol's in the Actually A Problem pile, but have not combed through my existing makeup, tossing anything with parabens. I've very nobly held back from getting a gel manicure, something I'd been contemplating but too frugal-squeamish to get Before, but did get highlights in my hair, which, like coffee, appears to fall into the seems-like-it-should-be-a-problem-but-isn't pile.

Put another way: There are so, so many ways, at every stage of the process, for things to go wrong, and for no known or controllable reason. My understanding of this daunting reality does not make me want to grab pseudocontrol via pseudoscience. On the contrary, it makes me a little bit more live-and-let-live, which honestly, in my sober and cheese-researching state, can't hurt.

Remember the Food Movement?

Sara Mojtehedzadeh and Brendan Kennedy's Toronto Star exposé of a Toronto-area bread factory is great journalism. Great for so many reasons, but here's a less-obvious one: it's about the factory, not the imagined consumer of factory-produced bread. It's not that there isn't any connection made in the piece between factory conditions and consumption, but it's an aside, early on: "These may well be the croissants you eat for breakfast." The point of the article is not to make you, the individual possible-croissant-consuming reader, more closely examine your breakfast choices. It's about labor conditions and - as the headline "Undercover in Temp Nation" suggests - the structure of today's economy. That bread is an everyday item we're all familiar with is a way of bringing the reader in. The essential, though, is what happens in the factory where Mojtehedzadeh works undercover:

No one tells me where fire extinguishers or exits are. Another temp confides she didn’t buy safety shoes, which cost the equivalent of a day’s wages. She makes it through the screening anyway. 

The story is about injury, death, and shady business practices at bread factories. The implicit fix the article demands involves changes to, and increased enforcement of, labor law. There's no suggestion whatsoever that the source of the issue is the modern consumer, demanding bread produced in a factory. No cultural archetype posited as The Bad Croissant-Consumer, to be shamed either for being fancy, bourgeois, and croissant-nibbling, or, conversely, for being lower-class and not getting an artisanal-enough croissant (or for having processed carbs to begin with). Nope, the (correct) assumption underlying the piece is that people of all sorts eat packaged bread; that eating is a necessity; and that the issue is how the people producing that bread are treated. It's a story about consumer products, but not about consumption.

It's my sense that ever since the 2016 election, the food movement - and with it, the more general movement to consider individual (posh) consumer choices the ultimate political act - has been kaput. Yes, food is still political. But the thing where status as a good person hinged on choosing spelt over quinoa, or avoiding winter asparagus, that thing is, for better or worse, over. (Better because it was silly, worse because it's a sign of dire times that silly preoccupations get forgotten.)

It feels like ancient history, but there was a time when I felt a bit guilty about my grocery habits. Not for sometimes overspending on cheese (that I still sometimes do, and still feel guilty about), but for ignoring The Rules. Rules laid out by various prophets: Use only the freshest, most local, most seasonal, or else. Or else what? The concern was always a bit vague, but very much rooted in something ethical.

It wasn't 'clean eating' (which persists, as the euphemism for dieting it always was), but this arbitrary dividing line between real food and fake, where authenticity was measured by inconvenience. Inconvenience, and something a bit more sinister, but always between-the-lines: certain food could be trusted (sourced ingredients), whereas other food - in particular, ethnic food - could not. Everything, to be trusted, had to be served to you by a white, flannel-clad, bearded hipster, at a place with farms listed on the menu. This excluded all dining establishments and grocery options falling under the category once problematically referred to as "ethnic." Oh, but Scandinavian food, that was OK. (Gee, I wonder why the food movement as it once was feels passé?)

While the writing itself would often be in the third-person plural, it was clear that a "we" including food writers weren't buying packaged food at supermarkets - those other people were. "We" were spending 60 hours a week sourcing ingredients at Berkeley farmers markets, at Cobble Hill fishmongers (and to be fair, it is a good fishmonger). Except who were "we," anyway? Much was made of food and privilege - of how not everyone is able to live off kale and locally-sourced squab or whatever. But of those who could, how many ever were?

There was also this eternal pre-food-movement mother, the one who foolishly fed her kids supermarket foods, and who didn't value time-consuming food prep the way her son (there, generally, there was a son) the food writer would. Remember that? That was something.

Individual ingredients were declared problematic, the way individual celebrities (and internet randos) are these days. Everything was scary, in this semi-/pseudoscientific way. Tomatoes sprayed to look red, and farmed salmon treated in some way to be pink! Did you know that asparagus came from Chile? Did you? Exposés about how packaged food was engineered to... taste good, a fact presented as if inherently sinister.

From the prophets trickled down an aesthetic, but an aesthetic you could ignore at your own risk - if properly trained, you would think a Rules-meeting diet was the most delicious. There was no subjectivity to this, no possibility that anyone might actually honest-to-goodness prefer certain packaged foods to fresh, or value time over from-scratch preparations. Genuine nutritional concerns (why is sugar added to so many packaged foods?) mixed with aesthetic ones (much of locavorism), as well as ones that were clearly pointing the way to worse eating habits.

When I thought about this rationally, The Rules made little sense: wasn't it a better idea to eat less (or no) meat, rather than locavoring one's way through traceable steak dinners? Wasn't purism re: local/seasonal inhibiting vegetable consumption, if it left grocery-shoppers feeling guilty for buying the only vegetables actually available to them, for months on end, or at all? But most of all: if there were issues with the food system - there were! there are! - why was the proposed solution a change in individual consumer behavior? I found the whole thing irritating at best, pseudoscientific as well as casually sexist and xenophobic. But it still, somehow, led to this nagging sense of guilt, one I can't say has entered my mind in ages.

The hoagies of privilege

Now that I'm neither blogging professionally nor working on a book partly about internet controversies, I know I can skip stories of the moment. I can see that Lena Dunham (!) rehomed her rescue dog (!!!) and decide to just let that one sit. It's not that I don't have, within me, 7438297423 words on Lambygate. I've just made a conscious choice not to put my energies towards bringing that potential document into existence.

However! I can't let the David Brooks sandwich story be. Short version: People on the left - liberals, leftists, progressives - might be annoyed at Brooks here for the wrong reasons. Or not exactly the wrong reasons - more like, they're only annoyed, I suspect, because it's a David Brooks column.

Before I go further with why I think this, let me backtrack and remind/explain what I'm referring to: David Brooks's latest NYT column is a quasi-endorsement of the Richard Reeves argument that the trouble with America today is that upper-middle class people don't know they're rich. Brooks, like Reeves, is right that the wealthy but not super-rich try really hard to keep their kids at least as well-off as they are. And Brooks has been on the limousine-liberal-hypocrisy beat for ages, one for which there is always a steady stream of material, so he chose wisely.

Where things go wrong: Brooks takes the privilege-awareness aspect of Reeves's argument - the one that was, at least, only a framing devise in his otherwise reasonable op-ed - and insists upon it:

I was braced by Reeves’s book, but after speaking with him a few times about it, I’ve come to think the structural barriers he emphasizes are less important than the informal social barriers that segregate the lower 80 percent.

By "informal barriers" he means cultural capital. Taste, in the Bourdieusian sense:

Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.

This is the passage that led to all the #trending mockery. Haha, said left-to-liberal Twitter, David Brooks thinks it's elitist to eat deli sandwiches! Or: David Brooks thinks elites know what striata baguettes are, when who knows what that is!

Here's Brooks's conclusion, which interests me more than the sandwich specifics:

We in the educated class have created barriers to mobility that are more devastating for being invisible. The rest of America can’t name them, can’t understand them. They just know they’re there.

This is... a "privilege" argument. It is the "privilege" argument. Brooks is saying not just that cultural capital exists (which, yes), but that it is actually the most important form of capital. He's saying that the subtle (ahem) distinctions - "hav[ing] the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality" - are the stuff elite status is really made of. Which is - I believe, and argue in The Perils of "Privilege" - missing the point. In the absence of capital-capital, cultural capital doesn't do a heck of a lot. And insisting upon specific giveaways - especially food and drink - never works, because kale and lattes and whatever came after those have long since made it out of whichever Park Slope or Berkeley corridor of artisanal luxe. It's an appealing argument, because cultural capital is a thing, and feels like a revelation when you first learn about it. But ultimately, money - and race, gender, etc. - matter a whole lot more than ingredient expertise.

Where have we seen this flawed idea before? The left! On the left - except in some newly-prominent pockets of the socialist left - it's been one big mutual privilege-accusation-fest for the past decade. Everyone's secret, not-admitted, subtly-expressed privileges were forever being revealed by people just as privileged. That was blog comment threads! It happened offline as well! Until... I don't know, maybe until Trump, or maybe David Brooks's latest column, progressive discourse often involved fancy people accusing one another of recognizing gourmet ingredients, or making ostentatious statements about not recognizing them, so as to suggest a scrappy past. This certainly also existed on the right - Charles Murray's "bubble" quiz! - but it sort of was progressivism, in a much deeper sense.

So yes, it was some mix of a relief and just bizarre to see a progressive consensus around the notion that structural inequality matters more than cured-meat classification. I can only hope that sticks. I'd like to think this means (my fellow) progressives actually get why the salami argument was wrong, and weren't just mocking a David Brooks column for its own sake.

Stems

If there was ever an issue designed to bring out self-satisfaction, it would have to be food waste. If you'd been simmering with the urge to shame people who throw away broccoli stalks or carrot tops, the NYT is offering not one, not two, but three comments sections where you may do just that. Now's the moment for your Sunday pot of lentils, which you virtuously distribute into your and your family's meals for the week, to make its big-media debut. And the "tips" article is especially... I mean, if your main food waste concern is that you throw away kale stems, you might as well just bask in the Gwynethy green-juice glow of your smug.

Or perhaps what I'm objecting to isn't even sanctimoniousness, so much as the fact that other people seem able to eat foods I think I'd have trouble getting down. A NYT reader: "Every now and then I’ll have a couple of tablespoonsfull of a dish leftover. I’ll pulse it and add it to a sauce or soup for some extra depth and flavor." See, I would not do this.

The sad truth is that I'm responsible for some not-insignificant percentage of the kale that's gone uneaten in this country over the past five or so years. I feel good about myself for buying it, but unless I have a very specific plan for using it (and I inevitably use other vegetables first, because they're more appealing, but I'll defend this as, because kale keeps), it eventually turns yellow and much of it ends up in the trash. Kale-discarding guilt is a special kind of food-waste guilt - and yet it's the very ingredient I'm most likely to toss. I can already hear the recipe-suggestions - garlic and olive oil! sausage! shred it and make one of those City Bakery-type salads! kale chips! - and it's like, you can know all of this, but it's still kale, and the answer's clearly just to not buy it in the first place.

The only way I know of that works to avoid food waste is to treat food the way you treat other household products - that is, to buy the same things over and over again, and use them up. Buy only the things you actually like to eat. Don't expand your repertoire beyond one or two cuisines. Don't assume that because other people (claim to) enjoy defrosted legume puree night after night, you'll do the same. Have a preferred cereal and milk at breakfast, and have dinner be pasta plus (say) arugula, tomatoes (canned and turned into a sauce or fresh and raw), and parmesan. Buy some kind of fruit that keeps (clementines, apples), and... done. You probably won't get scurvy, and you'll definitely appreciate meals out.

I remember snow

-Thought I could be all smug about having missed the East Coast winter. Evidently not. It's somehow March but still undriveable. I'd been so eager to use my newfound highway-driving confidence for, I don't know, a spontaneous trip to Philadelphia. (Working from a Philadelphia coffee shop as vs. a Princeton-area one is a longstanding driving-ability fantasy of mine.) Instead it's more like, maybe it's not worth skidding off the road to go to Wegmans ten minutes away, even though they do have really good cheese. Now might, however, be a good time for me to hate-read articles urging people to investigate the provenance of their vegetables. Produce-wise, I'm working with one bunch of scallions here, possibly one blood orange as well. (I feel like I should be directing the implied recipe dilemma to Lynne Rosetto Kasper.)

-First instance I've seen of this: a journalist attempts to report on her own family, fails to get their approval. This seems, ethically, like a step in the right direction.

-When someone who "coordinates [...] a body positivity group started by fat queer people of colour" speaks out against privilege-checking, people (rightly) pay attention. Read Asam Ahmad here, although I found this via so many people who may well be reading this, so you've probably already read it by now.

-Via Aryeh Cohen-Wade, Lindsey Finn's list of "feminist humblebrags." The McSweeney's website isn't big on telling you when a piece is from, but it is - as they say in journalism - evergreen. Item 4 seems like it might be/have been a little controversial.

-Lisa Miller's anti-minimalist essay suggests that the Marie Kondo's neatness philosophy is the opposite of frugality. I'm not sure I agree, but she makes a good case.

"Of noble provenance"

-Gender parity in the literary world. What can be done? If women persist in painting their nails and watching British glorified soap operas about middle-aged lesbians in a part of England where people drop the definite article (not just a Russian thing, it seems), while men are writing Literature about North American obesity and overflowing toilets, how exactly can one expect 50-50 representation? Can the literary world use the contributions of someone Netflix correctly guessed would give the full five stars to "Last Tango In Halifax," based, no doubt, on our interest in "Waiting For God"? Such is the question some of us must ask ourselves when we open up that Word doc.

-Just as I'd predicted, the fashionability of sneakers was not, in fact, the first sign of a feminist revolution, but a trend. And, by definition, trends at some point start looking dated. The time to look of-the-moment in white Adidas is done, and "more traditional heels" are among the replacements.

-Will I try this David Tanis chicken recipe? Probably. (Maybe not, given my immediate chicken thighs -> yakitori thought process.) But speaking of trends, when will food writing stop having paragraphs like this?:

Of course, you should try to get the best chicken you can. Choose organic, free-range, heritage birds when possible. Even at $4 a pound, that’s far less expensive than other prime cuts of meat, and you are more likely to get flavorful chicken if it is of noble provenance. Free-range birds generally have firmer muscles than cheaper “factory style” birds. If you have tasted chicken in other countries, you know that firm meat and flavor go hand in hand.

I like the nod to what's "possible," in discreet recognition of the fact that some of us live in New Jersey. New Jersey, where a trip to the fancy supermarket yielded a spontaneous free glazed doughnut hole (a product they're now "testing," whatever that means; I survived it) and, OK, some baby artichokes that will be used to make a different Tanis-inspired recipe. And... he's right - chickens shouldn't suffer unnecessarily, and better-quality chicken (like, ahem, what's sold for whatever reason in the Santa Barbara Whole Foods but not the Princeton one, thus posing the ultimate of first-world problems) really does taste better.

But... "of noble provenance"? And a random dig at the U.S., and at the poor souls whose chicken experience (and perhaps life experience) is limited to this country? Must recipe-writers insist on budget-shaming their readers? And from an ecological perspective, should they be encouraging those of us who could buy this special chicken to do so even if it means driving around more so as to track it down?

Or is this more to preempt the commenters who'd see a chicken recipe as inviting a sanctimonious lecture on chicken farming? Is it a disclaimer, so that he can't be accused of encouraging anyone to buy that chicken, even if, realistically, this is a chicken recipe, which people will make with the chicken available to them?

Kale and klezmer

Farmer's market love-hate, the eternal topic. Mark Bittman wants us to feel OK about swapping our checking account for a small handful of really top-notch tomatoes. I want to feel OK about having done so this morning. Current objections, though, are as follows:

-The markets here are either Thursday from 11-4 (tough if you have what South Park once referred to as a jerb) or Saturdays 9-1 (tough if you have any sleep to catch up on from the week, or if you did anything other than anticipate the following morning's produce options on Friday night).

-I do live in a big produce-growing region. But for obvious population-density reasons, the local farms ship their goods to the city. I doubt if lettuce season is actually over (in fact, the presence of local lettuce at the supermarket suggests it's not), but at the market today it seemed to be.

-As Bittman says, "Farmers’ markets are not just markets. They’re educational systems that teach us how food is raised and why that matters." And, indeed, everyone on front of you in line demands copious education. For themselves or, if bringing kids, for the kids as well. If this has to happen at each stand, it can go from convivial to there goes the day rather quickly.

-The number of cars parked near the market this morning in no way matched up with the amount of produce available. This is a thing to do, a place to listen to pesticide-free banjo klezmer music or whatever, but not by any means an alternative to the supermarket.

-Buying kale or chard doesn't necessarily mean going on to eat either. Although I'm now starting to see where that green-juice fad emerged from. Other people probably also had fridges full of uneaten bitter greens, and, in attempt to do something with them, threw them into the blender.

For the farmer's market love-haters among my readers

While assembling my beige, too-tired-to-cook dinner of rice and defrosted (prepackaged) yuba (with scallion, mainly for aesthetics, and with the packet of whatever the sauce was that came with the yuba poured on top), I noticed that the local farmer's market had posted to Facebook (yes, I follow them on Facebook) about a produce recall affecting NJ supermarkets such as Wegmans, Trader Joe's, and Whole Foods. In other words, my fruit! An unsearchable PDF would tell me what this means for my apricots, or, rather, since I'm planning to eat those apricots, what to expect for the next 24-48 hours. (Upon closer examination, I see that apricots are in the clear. And thank goodness for that.)

Anyway! The point of this story was actually the farmer's market's takeaway: "We can't stress enough the importance of knowing your farmer." Because, the implication goes, a farmer's market couldn't possibly sell contaminated fruit. 

And, I mean, I like this farmer's market. I follow them on Facebook! I "like" them and everything! But this seems a bit ridiculous as a way to promote the weekly event. Especially considering that anyone wishing to eat fruit more than a month out of the year is, in this region, shopping at the supermarket. If the farmer's market really believed you're poisoning yourself if you shop elsewhere, maybe they want to find a way to be open every month of the year, even if that means a single stand selling a single turnip.

Groceries are complicated

-I need something called "nigari tofu coagulant." After watching the latest and most compelling Cooking with Dog, where Chef and Francis Host of the Show prepare soft tofu from scratch and top it with scallions, ginger, and bonito flakes... actually, even just once seeing such a video existed, I realized I'm obviously going to be doing this. It's only a matter of time. Well, of time, and of finding this ingredient in a quantity not advertised as allowing one to make 100 pounds of tofu. Where the proper sort of soy milk will come from is its own question. One I've answered before, that time I made yuba, but I'd rather avoid DIY on that part if possible.

-Caryatis, you'll be so proud! I bought eggs at a farmers market and totally checked them for cracks. The farmer or farmer-stand-in selling the eggs didn't seem even a little bit offended.

-I'm not going to defend this, but I'm one of those people who gets two different kinds of olive oil, the regular one for cooking, and the more expensive one for drizzling. I'm not sure I can taste a difference, but I tell myself I can, and even if it's just the pretty bottle, there are surely worse forms of self-deception, and clearly I'm not going through much of the fancy one. I have no brand loyalty in this area, and choose based on which pretty bottle is on sale at a given time. One or another always will be, and the brands seem to rotate quite frequently, rarely being ones I have any familiarity with. This evening, doing so, I was hit by a wave of cynicism: How on earth do I know that the bottle going for $11 (say) is really normally $20? Of course, if it's all the culinary placebo effect anyway...

My raw facialist says hi

-Must find this book.

-I have combed the internet and found the best blog-comment of all time: "I like the idea of making yourself get dressed every morning and putting on makeup." It's in response to some (very sensible, if tough to follow) advice on working from home, but it has a certain out-of-context hilarity.

-ITG never ceases to amaze. It turns out there's such a thing as a "raw facialist." As someone who's in more of the 'should I get this spider bite confirmed by a dermatologist or just let it be?' persuasion, I don't think I'm the audience for it, but I'm also not entirely sure what it is. I'm not sure what it means (in the G-rated sense) when someone says they've gotten a facial, either. Are they normally cooked?

A typical WWPD assortment

-Alexa Chung shares her beauty routine. Read it, enjoy it. The thing to remember, though, going in, is that she looks like Alexa Chung and you don't. Remember this (, Phoebe,) when you're tempted to buy whatever it is she recommends.

-The Onion explains anti-Semitism in a brilliant but hard-to-read article. It's what I've been saying since forever - because we so associate "anti-Semitism" with "Nazism," Jews who call out relatively minor anti-Jewish acts are deemed hysterical. "Anti-Semitism" ends up seeming like a misnomer or overreaction unless genocide is involved.

-First-world-problems-sounding, but hear me out: the eggs from the farmers market (different stands) have a tendency to be sort of... broken. The eggs you can pay more for with the implied assurance that the chickens weren't too miserable end up costing more still, once you realize you can't actually use several of them. The explanation's simple enough - the way the farmers market works, it's all about conviviality and, more than that, trusting, honoring, the farmer. Or at any rate the person selling the farm-goods, who's standing in for the farmer. It wouldn't be done to check the eggs for cracks as one would at a supermarket. The dynamic is such that you feel you should shoulder the cost of any eggs that "nature" happened to crack of its own accord. Why should the small-scale farmer, so burdened already, bear that burden as well? Granted, I suspect the answer is just for me to be a bit more assertive at the moment of sale, and that the farmer/farmer-stand-in would be fine with it.

Pure

Rumors are circulating that a recently deceased young mother and socialite died as a result of month-long juice cleansing. Apparently a cleanse is normally something one does just for a few days, so the results, whatever they may be, are limited. While I have no idea if there's any truth to these rumors, it stands to reason that a liquid-only starvation diet would be maybe not so healthy. Even - yes, even! - if the liquid in question came from kale.

But so goes the pseudoscientific conversation about health. We're told to eat only real foods, and that many ordinary ingredients (milk, white flour, any flour) are unnatural, too processed, not what we evolved to eat. This sort of approach may hold some value for those with specific medical conditions that require specific dietary changes. And whether or not anyone needs to lose weight, there are surely some who, if they did so sensibly, wouldn't be harming themselves. But it seems a mistake to treat one's diet as infinitely perfectible. If what you're eating agrees with you, is it necessarily disastrous to keep doing what you're doing? Could it be that the psychological strain of self-flagellating over use of white rice rather than brown is greater than any physical damage that choice could possibly inflict?

But it really is all so mixed up together, the health and beauty goals in all of this. Into The Gloss, an addictive beauty blog with no significant health angle, profiles a woman whose mysterious (and waistline-expanding) disease improved once she changed her diet. One might think that this woman's advice would be of use primarily to the others suffering from Postural Tachycardia Syndrome, about which I know nothing, and am quite prepared to believe responds to these dietary alterations. But we instead get a headline, "How To Successfully Transition From Junk Food To A Vegan Diet," suggesting that your everyday reader of a beauty blog would benefit from emulating this woman. I mean, "how to"? Why would the general public get instructions on how to eat if you happen to suffer from this rare disease? We do get a mini-disclaimer at the end, that it's great if you just eat more vegetables, but this is all very much presented as, the ideal would be to take things all the purity way.

While yes, transitioning away from an all-junk-food diet is sound enough, universally-applicable beauty and health advice, what you're moving towards might just as easily be a diet of real foods in the common-sense sense, and not a vegan (and, some Googling of this woman's recipe plan informs, gluten- and refined-sugar-free) transformation. Why not, if you do not suffer from a rare disease, consider a diet that allows eating in ethnic restaurants, at friends' houses, etc? Again, but put another way: is the danger greater from an ordinary loaf of bread, or an extreme purity-seeking approach?

Whole, sustainable fish in a barrel

Are Whole Foods customers really that bad? Nils Parker thinks so. And it's certainly the kind of thing you can assert without drawing too much controversy. It's fish-in-a-barrel at this point. Do people who shop at Whole Foods get all defensive and excuses-excuses about it? Yes, even if the excuses, like Wegmans not having a bulk grains-and-legumes section, or the local Gristedes being more expensive, are tough to dispute. It's embarrassing to admit to shopping at Whole Foods, so much so that even legitimate reasons sound like silly excuses. Even if you don't show up in a new Prius (or any Prius) and head-to-toe Lululemon (or any Lululemon), you're in effect confessing to being that guy.

Parker engages in a bit of the ol' assertion of a perfect stranger's thoughts, but it's OK, because the stranger is a Whole Foods shopper, not a human being:

They stand in the middle of the aisles, blocking passage of any other cart, staring intently at the selection asking themselves that critical question: which one of these olive oils makes me seem coolest and most socially conscious, while also making the raw vegetable salad I’m preparing for the monthly condo board meeting seem most rustic and artisanal?

Eh. Perhaps customers are this insufferable other branches. One can infer such insufferableness from my favorite Whole Foods sign, which I'm sure I've posted before but now's as good a time as any to bring it to new readers:

But at the Princeton branch (a good drive's remove from the town or university, deep in strip mall and office park territory), the customers seem quite reasonable, as well as a socioeconomic mix. (These things could well be related.) It's a popular lunch stop for people who work in the area, and not just in the pharmaceutical-company-executive sense. Also for locale-specific reasons, the staff will be, say, preppy blond teens from the area, so between the posher staff and less-posh clientele, there's less of a customer-cashier class divide than one might find at a big-city branch. It's not that this region is somehow devoid of entitlement. The behaviors Parker describes are ones I've seen... in coffee shops. On NJ Transit. Most which is precious or insufferable seems to cluster in town itself, with its no-prices-given food boutiques and tiny seasonal farmers market where the ten interested parties must fight over a bunch of lacinato kale.

But yes, maybe Whole Foods is, as a rule, that bad. But it's too easy a target. It's too easy to write about the cliché, and to ignore the reasonable hordes in favor of the rare few who meet it.

Random food-themed keeping-track-of-links roundup

-I do like David Lebovitz's disclaimer to his recipe for an impressive-looking red wine poached pear tart: "For those who don’t drink wine, there’s no swap out for it in this dessert I’m afraid." You can just see him anticipating the commenters who, despite objecting to wine as an ingredient, see this recipe where wine is clearly an essential ingredient - the first named in the recipe title! - and then insist on asking how they, too, can partake.

-Before I make that, however, I plan to make the Cooking With Dog custard pudding a second time. It came out great the first, but had to sit in the fridge for a couple days before it set. It also had to steam for maybe twice as long as directed, but that may have been that the heat was on too low. Whatever the case, it seems vaguely miraculous to make crème caramel from scratch. Technically I ate these as puddings, but if all goes according to plan, this time I'll actually overturn the ramekins for full effect.

-Mark Bittman's essay about a very down-to-earth jaunt through France and Italy supports or really is the hypothesis of Alison Pearlman's Smart Casual.

-Former food critic Frank Bruni takes a brave stand against pickitarianism. As a commenter points out, Bruni might have mentioned that other food critic's book on the same topic.

On wine whining UPDATED

Wine. Some tastes better than other. If a friend brings or serves a wine that's especially good, I'll probably end up with a photo of its label on my phone, although I'll almost certainly not do anything about it. Meanwhile there's one type of red wine - I wish I knew what this taste was called in wine lingo - that, even when tasting as it's meant to, strikes me as absolutely foul. Mostly, though, it's good enough. I like the idea of wine with dinner, and sometimes actually follow through and have some. I've heard all the usual contrarian-ness about how even experts can't so much as tell red from white in a blind tasting, or about how it's all in the experience anyway, the setting, so the wine you thought was spectacular on some vacation is nothing special when you have it at home. These are, more or less, my thoughts on the beverage.

And I can't say I'm tempted to become more expert, having read Eric Asimov's article about the near-impossibility of tracking down the wines he himself recommends in the NYT. Readers, he explains, complain that they can't find the wines he mentions. And they're right - they can't. Asimov goes on to explain the logistical reasons for this: NYT readers are everywhere, so no article can promise a product available to all readers. And small producers are better, because artisanal, or something, so basically anything you can reliably find isn't worthy of a recommendation in the paper.

As always, with such matters, the answer is a research project. First step, Internet searches. When that fails, as it will, because any wine worth drinking is too obscure: "What can a consumer do when these tools don’t work? Plenty. It begins with finding and establishing a relationship with a good wine shop." But when? One is already meant to have a relationship with a trusted butcher, fishmonger, cheesemonger, and with farmers responsible for every produce item one consumes. But why stop there? "While most consumers are understandably interested in immediate gratification, it’s important to think in the long term as well. Be demanding. Continue to ask good merchants for the wines you want. And remember that what’s true today may not be true in a couple of months."

I can see how this would be the case with wine, and why if there's a particular one you want to try, it's not exactly urgent. But this seems more or less how it goes with the entire dining section. One is often being advised to get some product only available at the fabulous market next door to where the writer happens to live. Or to try a recipe that showcases an ingredient only available in France, or at any rate not in the States. It's reasonable enough that recommendations won't always be for dishes made with pantry items available at the Target nearest each of us, and that a New York-based paper would at times assume readers live in New York, but there's specific and then there's specific. Once it's a level of specificity where even living in the city wouldn't be adequate, I start to have my doubts.

UPDATE

The comments are pretty great. Many point out that this doesn't need to be about universal availability - if Asimov bought a wine somewhere in Manhattan, he might name the store, so that those who live or work in the city could at least potentially find it. But then there's this, now my favorite NYT comment of all time:

"One of the main reasons I choose to live in TriBeCa is strolling distance to Chambers Street and Frankly Wines."

In defense of a cluttered countertop

According to the Guardian, high-end kitchen gadgets have recently (!) become status symbols. Is this new in the UK? British readers, fill me in on this. Johanna Derry cites increased sales of some such items since last year, so maybe? But how about the year before? Derry's nostalgic for the days "when the only kitchen appliances we kept on our counter tops were kettles and microwaves." But when was that the case (and student apartments don't count)? Is this because British people moved from tea to coffee more recently?

Regardless, grumpily complaining about the whosawhatsises that now exist for absolutely everything - asparagus peeler! avocado halver! - has been a thing in the States since I can remember. The ingredient-specific knick-knack devices represent the junk that accumulates in middle-class homes (and, more generally, Western decadence), while the really high-end machines, often in an unused kitchen, offend because they're evidence of the rich, who don't have to cook, playing at domesticity.

For a time, the status symbols were these luxury items, preferably housed in a giant suburban kitchen, or in Frasier's Seattle apartment on "Frasier." Then it switched over, and status became, I don't know, a small NYC kitchen where you prepare Greemarket produce? Or maybe it's always been the same - the gadgets have been like expensive workout clothes - cool to hate, but coveted all the same. It's the same dynamic re: wanting to be hardcore.

But allow me to more enthusiastically defend the having of kitchen implements. What I've found is, the anti-gadget brigade are people who romanticize domestic labor. I'm thinking of a recipe for buckwheat crepes I was looking at (I'm on a buckwheat crepe kick, don't ask), and it called for buckwheat and all-purpose flour (all you'd possibly need, flour-wise) and, because why not, some mortar-ground buckwheat kernels. It's as if home cooking doesn't morally count unless it's been made unnecessarily difficult, with a Luddite flourish.

These same commentators also tend to live in cities... where counter space is particularly scarce, but also, crucially, where restaurant meals and takeout are easy alternatives. If you can't so readily outsource, you want to make a wider range of foods at home, efficiently. I mean, I want to do this. Thus the rice cooker, etc. A significant, if not particularly luxe, "etc." that I won't elaborate on.

Lifestyle roundup

-One of the strangest things about the post-Facebook age, I find, is the way that what was loser-marking behavior in the earliest days of social media (posting photos you've taken of yourself, or being obviously online on a Saturday night or, say, New Years) has switched over into being... cool. I think?Young/cool people, am I missing something? My impression of today's fashion is, if you haven't documented a party, ideally by photographing yourself at it, and posted it instantly, chatting on- and offline simultaneously, you're out of the loop. If you actively choose not to document-and-post your own social life, this is no longer because what's going on is too scandalous or fabulous, or you're too busy having a good time to photograph it, but rather evidence that you haven't been outside past 8pm since 1994. In any case, as with all fashions, this appears to be cyclical.

-Does it tarnish high fashion when models bare all in Playboy? Hadley Freeman thinks so:

It is well past time to call bullshit on this alliance between fashion and Playboy. If women want to make their careers out of glamour modelling, good luck to them, but to suggest that Playboy itself is somehow chic, that to ally oneself with that dud Viagra pill of a magazine is excitingly racy and that women who have achieved enormous success and fame in their fields are proving their self-worth and sexiness by posing for it is just demented.

The eternal dilemma. Which beauty ideal is more democratic or feminist or what have you: the regime of "chic," which is sometimes welcoming of eccentrics, but not of the usual variants of the female form; or the regime of male-gaze, which tends to lean more conventional and not particularly empowering, but which also tends to include virtually all women, what with male tastes (if not the tastes celebrated in mainstream male-oriented mags) being far more subjective than runway-casting requirements?

I'm a huge Freeman fan, and used to be Team Fashion on this one, but the more I think about it, the more I end up, if one must choose, on Team Male Gaze, with the obvious caveat that we'll need to include the lust of women-liking women while excluding that of non-women-liking men. If fashion really were about self-expression, it would be about self-expression for all women, or many women, or, at least, not just a handful of the thinnest and youngest, on whom anything looks Fashion, because that's how fashion's been defined. The typical woman is sexy to some people, and chic to none.

-Mark Bittman suggests, as a resolution, "Cook big batches of grains and beans." I remain unconvinced.

Tracy Anderson's glute(n) advice, and more

-The latest Slate Culture Gabfest takes on viral social-media shaming of public obnoxiousness. A topic near and dear to my heart. The more people who start questioning viral shaming, the better.

-The latest in parental overshare: a parent (with a distinctive name) provides an annotated version of his seven-year-old daughter's Christmas wish list, complete with photos of the "insane" (his word) list itself, kid-handwriting and everything. Given the number of places I've seen this linked to, and the stats visible on the post itself, I suppose it counts as having gone viral. Is it funny? Sure. Is it an invasion of this kid's privacy? Yes, that too.

Parental overshare comes in two forms: tragic-and-exceptional and humorous-relatable. Both are privacy violations, but it might be more obvious why the former would pose a problem. We're sympathetic to the extent to which a kid's problems can deeply impact a parent, but ultimately the information - the relevant medical records, juvenile-detention stints, abuse-victimhood, etc. - belongs to the child. (OK, we as a society are perfectly fine with infinite parental sharing; I, and like three other people, are not.)

It's less obvious why it's iffy to post about within-normal-limits parenting escapades. Lighten up! seems the obvious counterargument. And does tend to be good advice generally.

But imagine you're the kid. It's kind of terrifying to imagine being known for your brattiest/most ridiculous childhood moments. And children - on account of being children - virtually all act in ways that would seem, in adults, narcissistic, impatient, and lacking all sense of proportion. Thus why, when adults make the sorts of fusses that these days so often go viral, we refer to them as acting like children. But your age at the time whichever item was posted will be less memorable than your display of spoiled entitlement. It will be you who threw a tantrum over not getting the right jeans. You who saw it as the world's greatest tragedy when you weren't invited to that sleepover. Should this be exploited for material on a Gawker affiliate? Is it somehow OK if your decompensations were hilarious, or if your parents were clever writers able to make them sound more entertaining than they were?

-Usual suspects Mark Bittman and Tracy Anderson have come to the rescue this (eternal!) holiday season, with tips for not becoming too glutinous or whatever's the preferred euphemism this holiday season. Both advice columns are also, more subtly, efforts to distance themselves from reputations as (very different kinds of ) ascetic extremists. Bittman doesn't tell you to extensively research each ingredient, but rather to eat real foods. Simple! Anderson, meanwhile, manages to admonish without calling her audience fat. She advises against juice cleanses, and also endorses putting food into one's mouth should one be so inclined. Moderation!

Except not really, if one reads between the lines. Bittman's "real food" suggestion is not as straightforward as all that. We get this as an aside: "(Most real bread, for example, is water, flour, yeast and salt, with the possible addition of olive oil or a seasoning or two, and the possible subtraction of yeast. Yeast conditioners and ingredients with five syllables have no place in real bread.)" Yet in this day and age, bread is sweetened. It just is. Even the most basic-looking ones at Whole Foods. Because that's the issue, right? Bittman's audience isn't confused because it's thinking of food as nutrients - that's so 1990s. It's about what constitutes real food, and a Talmudic debate is needed to dig up the answer.

Anderson, though, starts from a place far less reasonable than Bittman does, and thus would have to do far more to soften her reputation. (Relatedly - why do I know this? - she's on a broader campaign to distance herself from a quasi-pro-ana image. It seems to involve juxtaposing insistence that women not focus on skinny jeans with advice on fitting into the same.) She insists on a minimum of "30 minutes, six days a week" for workouts. She finds it dangerous that parents feed their children excessive amounts of... fruit. And laments her own gluten allergy, which I suppose we're to generously assume isn't a convenient allergy to carbs. (I don't doubt all medical gluten concerns, just of those who've made a career of honing and critiquing Gwyneth Paltrow's "long butt.") How could Tracy Anderson not be allergic to gluten?

And then there's this: "If you’re hosting, make sure everything in your house is organic and nothing else." But of course.