FLOG: The Foodiness Blog

On tonight’s episode of Let’s Get Real…the truth is revealed! The truth about where I come from, and who or what created me. No, not my very short Jewish parents of Eastern European descent, they barely had anything to do with it. My true ancestor, the holder of my DNA, the source of all of this darkness and doom, turns out to be Howard Beale, the legendary protagonist of the brilliantly dark 1976 film “Network”! I never realized it, but after attending a screening at the Museum of the Moving Image, and a discussion by David Itzkoff and Keith Olbermann afterwards, (Itzkoff just wrote a book about the film), I now know. I get it. The truth has been revealed. Forget being the Jon Stewart of Food, I’m the Howard Beale of food! But with much better teeth…Wow did people have ugly teeth in 1976. What was Fay Dunaway thinking?

And after watching two straight weeks of Olympic coverage, and the endless parade of advertising that enveloped it, I can tell you this. If those guys in “Network” thought the lines between corporations and people, capitalism and journalism, truth and advertising were breaking down back in ’76, they had NO idea what was coming down the slushy half-pipe a few decades later. Athletes eating sh*t for money? That’s nothing new. How about the surreal, rabbit hole-y image of your favorite radio host dressing up as a hungry homeless person for a photo shoot about homeless people and hunger? Confused? All will be revealed in this new episode of Let’s Get Real, The Cooking Show About Finding, Preparing, and Eating FOOD.

And to paraphrase Howard Beale…I’m mad as hell about Foodiness™, and I’m not gonna take it anymore!

Since it hasn’t snowed in at least 12 hours here in NYC, it means I can finally get out of the house and back to business. The superhero business of unmasking Foodiness™ for you! And since we got the marshmallow peeps-biofueled snow plow up and running this year here at the Foodiness™ Fallout Shelter, I can finally get out to the garage. So in this episode of Let’s Get Real, I take the Foodiness™ Time Machine out of storage, and take a trip down the salad rabbit hole. Down and back to where the grilled chicken salads grow, back to the late 90’s and early 2000’s. Back to the place where we’re all fearfully afraid of fat, and a dry, tough, tasteless grilled chicken breast is the supposed answer to our chubby prayers. Especially if it’s served over mixed greens, with fat-free raspberry-balsamic-poppyseed-ranch dressing. And oat-bran crackers.

It lives down there, lurking, waiting for an extinction or an obsolescence that never seems to come. Because it never dies, somewhere there’s someone ordering a grilled chicken salad, and that one person keeps it alive. There’s a whole colony of irrelevant salads living down there, the Waldorf, the iceberg wedge, the jello…they’re all on life support, but the grilled chicken is the strongest.

But once we get down there, to the place where the most unfortunate chicken parts sleep on their downy beds of salad, we’re going to do a little housecleaning, and eradicate the most famous salad of that era, and install a new queen of the overexposed salad world, the gem of the 20-teens, the Kale Salad. Because as overexposed and cliche as it may be, it’s so much better than anything else ever gone as mainstream, as quickly, in the salad column of the chain restaurant menu.

And while we’re in the Time Machine, I’ll show you around the newly renovated pantry and kitchen, and maybe we’ll throw together a winter vegetable salad, sound good? Just because its winter, it doesn’t mean your salad eating has to stop. You just need a little imagination, guidance, dare I say mentoring…perhaps? I’m here for you, I’m your mentor, and if you’ll just listen to and do every single thing I say and pay close attention, you could learn something.

So if you don’t want to eat salad sh*t or look like an un-mentored buffoon, listen to this episode of Let’s Get Real, and improve yourself.

What I’m talking about this week, is Valentines Day. Of course, how could I not? It’s this Friday, and I can’t pass up a Foodiness™ holiday when one comes around, although Foodiness™, in its truest and purest form has no place in the celebration of Valentines day. If your sweetie is giving you Foodiness™ for Valentines Day, like fiber-added high-protein vegan-chocolate truffles or sugar-free red-velvet flavored gluten-free chia cupcakes, then I’d re-evaluate that relationship. Get back on OK Cupid and start shopping around again. Valentines day is about pure, sweet, real-food, non-foodiness sugar. Like, for example, really good chocolate, preferably above 80% cacao, or pink-grapefruit flavored jelly beans for your favorite radio host. Just an example, I’m here to help.

Valentine’s day isn’t the day to worry about the sugar, because technically, it’s one of the few days a year when you should be eating a big pile of sugar. Valentine’s day, maybe Easter, Halloween, Christmas. Not every day, as in; not in a big crunchy bowl at breakfast, not in a bottle of blue-flavored so-called sports drinks. not in a 32 oz Birthday-Flavored coffee-frappachoochoo every afternoon. A few days a year for holidays. And one day a year, to show your love to your love, you give them a special treat. Some nice handmade chocolates in a heart shaped box, a bunch of pink and orange tulips, a new pair of Sorel boots maybe, that’d be nice. Just an example.

Or maybe some homemade chocolate chip cookies? What? No, not from the refrigerated dough aisle at the supermarket, that’s not technically “baking cookies”. Baking involves mixing, and measuring, and time and patience. You’ll have to actually purchase butter and flour and sugar and eggs and chocolate chips. Sorry, love is work, and if you really mean it, you’ll do the work. And once you make that dough, I don’t want to see any raw cookie dough eating going on around here, you better bake that dough, people! Cookie dough is a substance in an intermediate state, it has to be baked to be made into cookies, since when did cookie dough become a distinct, separate food group? Or worse, an industrially produced, single note “flavor”?

I’ll be discussing that, too.

So in this episode, I hop on my new olympic bobsled and go flying down the Foodiness™ rabbit hole, stopping on the way to the bottom to pick up some heart-shaped, cookie-dough-filled donuts to hand out to all my loved ones around the fallout shelter. Because nothing says “I love you” like a sugary, kreamy-with-a-K treat, shaped like the very organ it will ultimately destroy. Because as the famous movie of the 70’s told us, “Love means never having to say I’m sorry I killed you”