Archive for 2014

Do you remember Mel, from way back in the poop episode? You know, from “And Mel says, that’s because you’re slow as poop!”? Yeah, that Mel. Well Mel makes another appearance this week on LGR, as I relay yet another sparkling nugget of verbal gold that tumbled from his mouth this summer and helped spark the idea for this episode.

And speaking of summer, which it technically still is, this is the season for late-summer vegetables! The best stuff like zucchini and peppers and tomatoes, and eggplant. Especially eggplant. I’ve been eating and therefore thinking about a lot of eggplant this past week, and I’ve come to some very important realizations about it, our history, our political past, and our culture. It all sounds very highbrow and PBS doesn’t it? Well it is, and all that plus even more pops up in this episode! Because where else but on LGR would you ever find a connection between Teddy Roosevelt, eggplant, and not paying for cable.

I was just in Florida for a few days so I’m talking about fish today, or rather the lack of fish in a place like Florida, or specifically in their “fish” restaurants…But I need to start with a few words about Joan Rivers. Having just spent four days locked in a gated senior community in South Florida, where I went to old lady aerobics with my mom and shopped at Publix and listened to poolside chatter about decrepit hips and crumbling backs and cancer and weakening hearts, I have to say one thing. And that is, that I, Erica Wides, for damn sure, will not go gentle into that good night. Like my recently departed idol, Joan Rivers, I plan to rage, rage against the dying of THAT light. Work up until the very end, like Joan did. Boy did I love her.

And that’s good, because retirement as we know is is about to become as extinct as tuna anyway, and my generation and all the post-boomers after me will never know the joy of spending one’s golden years in a gated condo fortress named for a Vatican Librarian…We’ll never be able to afford to stop working, anyway.

We won’t (can’t!) become extinct too soon, like the tuna and swordfish and marlin that show up, overcooked and paprika-sprinkled on so many middling restaurants. I don’t care how many baked potatoes and vegetables and salads come with it, life ends with the early-bird special, and I plan to stay up very late.

Here in the Foodiness™ Fallout Shelter, we’re on a new mission. It’s about exposure, the big reveal. It’s time for a shakedown, for a little pulling back of the curtain and exposing those individuals who are guilty of Foodiness™ crimes against humanity. Actually, no, the food industry are the guilty ones there. WE expose them all the time, that’s our job and mission here on LGR. No, our new mission, The guys in our lineup today, are guilty of Foodiness™ crimes against themselves, or their families. Intelligent, highly successful people who despite my best efforts to set them straight, continue to violate the laws of REAL. Because it turns out, that here in the city of the best and the brightest, the “If you can make it there you’ll make it anywhere” town of super achievement, the town with $1500/hour SAT tutors and $50,000/year pre-schools, it turns out, that even the smartest people in NY, are still duped by Foodiness™. The richest, the brightest, the famous-est, all DUPED. All paying no attention to the man behind the curtain, all buying into the mythology, all paving the way to a life of statins and insulin.
So who are they, and what are they guilty of? Well, I’m not naming any names, ok? I can’t afford those sorts of legal fees these days, as the consulting work really slowed down this summer and nobody wants to book me for their commercials or voiceovers lately. All persons mentioned herein will be referred to anonymously, to protect their guilt. And to protect me from their wrath and their attorneys.

So, in our trial today of “super-smart-super-rich New Yorkers who should know better” (aka, my private clients), vs. The LGR Foodiness™ reeducation camp secret police (aka, me) I present, exhibit A…