Reflexions

I just finished Richard Olney's Reflexions. It is a puzzling, difficult book of a great man, but I enjoyed it very much. Most interesting to me is how important Olney felt his Time Life series, The Good Cook, was as a legacy. I picked up the collection a few years ago at a rummage sale, completely unaware that it was edited by Olney, and was more and more surprised as I leafed through it at its sophistication and depth. I now understand why.

NY State judges decision

Unrelated to food, but very interesting, a New York judge today ordered the state legislature to raise judicial pay. Of course, New York judges should get much higher salaries (they should be paid sufficently, I would think, such that working as a temp in a law firm is actually a losing proposition) , but I really have to wonder about the wisdom of a judge siding with a lawsuit filed by judges in order to raise judges' pay. I'll have to read the opinion, but this should at the very least make the person sitting in judgment just the tiniest bit queasy.

A hobby as job

From an article about a star-chef booker in this morning's New York Times

“The thing that’s amazing about Lee is you can’t distinguish what’s his hobby and what’s his job,” said Christina Grdovic, publisher of Food & Wine. “It’s all a big blur.”

May we all be so lucky.

The tomato problem

The only positive coming out of the tomato salmonella problem that has the country in an uproar is that it happened in June and not August or late July. If I was kept from tomatoes at the height of tomato season because someone all the way across the country had discovered some bacteria on tomatoes that had about as much to do with the tomatoes I was planning to eat as, say, my firm has to do with a public defender's office, I would be really, super, duper annoyed. It is, though, fairly astounding that our food network is so intertwined that salmonella there is causing tomato-less salsa here. Depressing, to say the least.

The industrial food machine and change

A good post from Paul here. I'm especially in agreement with the last paragraph. Simply put, if there are ever going to be major advances in how we treat animals, Mcdonald's is going to lead the way.

Top chef thoughts

I've taken to watching the TV show, "Top Chef". All good fun, but I've begun wondering whether people are begining to mistake the usual judge's pet criticisms of the food for actual food criticism. Especially irritating is the repeated claim that dishes "don't sing". It's a nice enough turn of phrase once, but not every time that one encounters a disappointing dish, I'd think. More on this later, hopefully.

The Senate dining room

An amazing story here about the Senate's sub par dining room.

It always amazes me how poorly extremely powerful and rich men and women eat at their jobs in this country. Speaking from personal experience from spending a lot of time around a certain kind of the species above, it's really very startling.