Archive for 2014

On this episode of Let’s Get Real…”And Lisa says, but we’re in Idaho, just go dig one up!”… Oh America, you never cease to amaze me with your ways. You way of producing more food than we can ever eat, your ways of eating more food than we can ever need, and your ways of re-interpreting the classic quote about water…something about being everywhere but nothing to drink? Something like that. It applies to a lot of stuff we do, and produce. Like potatoes. So, on today’s show since it’s fall, and almost Thanksgiving, and suddenly “ridic” cold outside, it’s the potato show! Believe it or not, we’ve never done a show about potatoes, even from waayyy down here, underground in the Foodiness™ Fallout Shelter. We’ve even got our own potatoes growing down here, but don’t tell Monsanto, I think they now own the genes of all potato plants on earth, and they’ll bust me for these outlaw spuds…So shhh. Keep it quiet and I’ll bake a few off, and meet you later in the fallout shelter. Get the butter.

Today, on an all-new Let’s Get Real…So, this cricket walks into a bar…

I’ve dealt with my share of roaches and mice and other vermin over the years, but twenty years ago, when I bought my (mercifully) cheap loft in Brooklyn, I seemed to have found my vermin-free paradise. My theory was that the angry-faced, scary-surly Romanian super who I thought hated me (turned out I just wasn’t tipping enough to get a “like” from him) was keeping the bugs and critters out simply by being his surly, stern Eastern European self. I figured he basically bullied and terrorized them into staying away.

I was so scared of him I thought the vermin were, too. I saw nary a roach for 17 years. One or two big so-called “waterbugs” would scuttle through each summer, but I’d quickly dispatch it with the heel of my chef’s clog.

Then something changed, and suddenly we got buggy. I’m pretty sure it was some construction in the building that caused it because suddenly, we had roaches. Big ones, baby ones, weird-looking ones of a species I’d never seen, it was classic NYC all over again. So we got the exterminator in, since despite my fear and loathing of all things chemical, sometimes you gotta call in the big guns. And now, instead of scuttling, running, hiding roaches, we have staggering, upside-down flailing, dying roaches. It’s pretty. It looks like the civil war battlefield scene from the end of “Gone With The Wind”, acted out by insects. A cast of thousands…of roaches.

Now, as a chef, and person who makes her living screaming at (ok, exhorting) people to eat real food, the irony of killing and discarding these potential sources of protein who were freely roaming my kitchen, like tiny wild-raised game animals, or miniature grazing pastured cattle just there for the harvesting, was not lost on me. I know all sorts of insects are eaten around the world, and they are a valuable and sustainable source of protein for bazillions of people…just not us.

80% of the world regularly eats over 1,600 species of insect. But We Americans, we don’t do bugs.

Oh, we’ll stuff our chubby faces with unlimited farmed shrimp at the buffet, or pay $17 (!) for a tiny lobster roll from a food truck, or spend sweaty summer nights hitting crabs with a mallet and picking out annoyingly small bits of meat and shell (why I love soft-shell crabs, btw) but those are all ok, because they come from the sea. If it crawls across the ocean floor, we call it a delicacy. If it crawls across your kitchen floor, we smash it with a shoe. We discriminate based on evolution; as merely possessing the ability to breathe underwater designates a creepy-crawly thing with a hard shell and buggy eyes and multiple legs a tasty, epicurean delight. Land breathers, we step on you…but not always.

So on this show, come along with me to Ohio, to the Roots Conference at the Chef’s Garden, where I ate all kinds of vegetables, all kinds of underused proteins, and one kind of bug.

One night a few weeks ago I was at some event where I had a few too many drinks, then came home, turned on the tv, and fell asleep. When I woke up the next morning, I noticed that I had drunkenly put a note into my phone to remind my future sober self about an ad I’d seen that hazy night for an iconic, brazenly balls-out Foodiness product. Luckily, in my intoxicated state I’d had the wherewithal to make the note, because in the morning I saw it and had no memory of seeing the ad. Don’t judge, we’ve all been there.

The product, was “Hershey’s Mix-Ins YOGURT”. Yes, hyper-sweetened, industrially produced crappy yogurt with a little cup of tiny candy bars to mix in or dip in, to make your yogurt into just a cup of candy. Now I’ve talked about Trix yogurt before, and Yo-crunch which has little crunchy cookie bits and stuff to add in, but this is really a new low in foodiness, a new frontier, a new BLURRED LINE that we’ve crossed (if you listen to the episode you’ll get the blurred line reference, I’m such a tease…just like the girl in that song apparently is too!). A line that’s become so blurred, that it’s almost totally invisible. It’s the Foodiness equivalent of the 49th parallel. Since now that Canada has crazy gunmen just like us, the line between candy and yogurt is gone too. We may as well just let the Canadians take over, or maybe the North Koreans. Either way, we’re dead