Archives for the 'jamie oliver' tag
Quick Bites
After an unannounced, unintended, and unacceptable two-week absence, Crispy is back.
British taxpayers buy jihadi cleric’s kebab and Coke. In return, he rants against the West in short news documentary titled Jihadi Milkshake. [The Sun]
Think one-million people dead of starvation during its government-induced famine in the 1990s was bad? It was. But get ready for worse, as North Korea is cracking down on free-market commerce. “[H]alf the calories consumed in North Korea now come from food bought in private markets” that soon won’t exist. [MSNBC]
Government restrictions on fishing freeze out new entrants, resulting in a graying and shrinking population of fishermen in New England. (Though not mentioned in the article, it also results in a bunch of people complaining about how the great majority of the fish consumed in this country come from abroad. Gee. Wonder why.) [MNSBC]
Former vegetarians lash out at the practice after realizing they can “hav[e] their burgers without sacrificing the moral high ground.” [Newsweek]
Liverpudlian tike busted for selling chips at school is growing “sign of pupil disgruntlement over school meal reforms spearheaded by TV chef Jamie Oliver.” [DM]
Quick Bites
Not much doing around these here Crispy environs lately, it seems. At least Kim and I have the bar exam as an excuse. Anyways…
The Midwesternization of custard. [NY Post]
Thief steals eleven lobsters, eats them, passes out, is arrested. [Feedbag]
Psycho Donuts drives National Alliance for the Mentally Ill totally crazy. [Jaunted]
Fat Princess. The video game where you let her eat cake. [Ars Technica]
The most disturbing words from Michael Pollan’s Julie & Julia review: Total douche “Jamie Oliver is preparing a reality show on ABC in which he takes aim at an American city with an obesity problem and tries to teach the population how to cook.” [NYT]
Origins of Rubber Chicken in French Recipe?
Molecular gastronomist Heston Blumenthal of Fat Duck, speaking to the Daily Mail for its food issue, relates the craziest recipe he’s ever come across. And it’s a real doozy.
The most outrageous recipe I found was from an antique French cook book – although I’d be amazed if anyone actually made it. You pluck a chicken while it’s still alive, brush its skin with a wheatgerm-and-saffron dripping, then tuck its head under its wing and rock it to sleep.
Then you put it on a serving platter between two cooked chickens, bring it to the table and wait for someone to try to carve it – at which point this apparently roast chicken wakes up, squawks and runs down the table. You then take the poor bird, kill it, stuff its neck with mercury and sulphur, stitch it up and roast it, and as you bring it back to the table the chemicals in its neck are still making a clucking noise – as if it were alive.
Wow. And wow.
That’s probably the highlight, but there are several other fun nuggets in the article, which features Brit celeb chefs Blumenthal, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Gordon Ramsay, and loathesome crumb opponent Jamie Oliver.
Also this weekend across the pond, Brit chef Antony Worrall Thompson came out against nationwide plans for a menu-labeling scheme in The Sun.
We Don’t Need a Goddamn Secretary of Food
We just don’t. But NYT scribbling head Nicholas Kristof has ordained it.
And lefties who can’t stand unregulated eating–from big-government cheerleaders Michael Ruhlman to Ed Levine to Michael Pollan, who Kristof quotes in the piece–are cheering him on.
Kristof’s reasoning–which he seems to have stolen without credit from British nanny stater & chef Jamie Oliver–goes like this:
A Department of Agriculture made sense 100 years ago when 35 percent of Americans engaged in farming. But today, fewer than 2 percent are farmers. In contrast, 100 percent of Americans eat.
100 percent of Americans defecate, Nick. But by golly we all get by just fine doing so without a government department dedicated to the function. In fact, it should be clear to anyone with an ass and a brain that it’s because there’s no Department of Feces that there’s no shortage of crap in America.
So what’s the need for a department of food?
Besides killing corporate subsidies, which I fully support, Kristof fails to define any new mission for the newly renamed department.
Renaming the department would signal that Mr. Obama seeks to move away from a bankrupt structure of factory farming that squanders energy, exacerbates climate change and makes Americans unhealthy — all while costing taxpayers billions of dollars.
[...]
The farm lobby uses [its clout] to inflict unhealthy food on American children in school-lunch programs, exacerbating our national crisis with diabetes and obesity.
Sadly, we already have government agencies devoted to tackling obesity, doling out school lunches, fighting diabetes, and the like. And look what it’s gotten us: more obesity, crappy lunches, and more diabetes.
If Kristof were really concerned with our health, and the billions it’s costing us to support an ineffective and arcane agency like the Department of Agriculture, he’d call for it to be abolished, not retooled.
Update: This and this are apropos.
Update II: And we apparently need a Department of Sport, too.
This Week in Bacon
England for English snouts! That’s the message the utterly horrid Jamie Oliver is communicating, saying he likes his bacon best when it’s not all foreign and stuff.
…Oliver will go to war with European pork producers in a new television show.
In Jamie Saves Our Bacon, the campaigner will fight for British pork farmers who are being hit by cheap imports.
He said: “Seventy per cent of the pork we import is from countries with lower welfare standards than ours and would have been illegal to produce here.”
More here. Reminds me of the racist BBC presenter who was fired this week because she didn’t want her daughter to have to ride in a taxicab with some “guy with a turban on.” Nice.
Lunch Buffet
Another death by smoking ban, this one in Chicago.
D’Artagnan may have duck dogs, but my friend Veronique goes one better, pointing me to a NYT Freakonomics post on foie gras dog biscuits.
Parents who bring their little devils to UK bars are ruining the pub scene there, reports the Glasgow Herald.
Those alarmists at the Center for Science in the Public Interest are yammering on about the need to ban food dyes, again, reveals the LAT.
The reprehensible Jamie Oliver almost ready to endorse a government Ministry of Food, reports the Times of London.
Jamie Oliver Tells Countrymen What to Put in Their Mouths, Puts Foot in Own
Jamie Oliver, a frequent Crispy target for his nannying ways, is at it again. This time the paunchy mushmouth has seen fit to take on his fellow Brits, calling them drunken laggards who don’t know a good meal from a bad one because, well, they’re drunken laggards, reports the Telegraph:
This time the cook, who made his name as The Naked Chef in the late 90s, has turned his fire on everything from the paucity of British cooking to binge drinking.
In an interview in the latest edition of Paris Match magazine published in French, Oliver contrasts the country with France, where old fashioned cu[s]toms are still observed.
Oliver even claims that he had found a better range of food in African slums than in his home country, where people were more interested in getting “drunk in pubs” than eating well.
Oliver is looking to combat these problems (the ones in England, not Africa) by–amongst other things–launching an effort “to ban pies from football grounds,” an effort that’s earned the ire of punters everywhere. And he’s faring no better in commentators’ eyes, either. In fact, it seems that only the nefariously opinionated celebrity watcher Perez Hilton is unable to formulate an opinion about Oliver’s latest shenanigans.
Crispy on Jamie here. Jamie cracking ill-received Holocaust jokes here. Commentators tired of “being lectured at by a celebrity chef on yet another crusade” here. More Oliver acting foolish here. Still more bad press here.
Jamie Oliver’s Obesity Fearmongering Reaches New Lows
Just in time for Christmas, Atari is set to launch a Jamie Oliver cooking game. It’ll celebrate Oliver, “a phenomenon in the world of food… [who is] one of the world’s best-loved television personalities and one of Britain’s most famous exports.”
But that’s not all Oliver is. He’s also a tremendously wealthy prattling twit whose “woefully” ineffective yet mushrooming anti-obesity hysterics I’ve gone on about from time to time.
But even I was unprepared for his latest export–the docudrama Eat to Save Your Life–which is debuting this week in foodielicious Australia:
It is also tough-love Jamie-style: he calls all the ladies “darlin” – and then makes a particularly rotund one submit to a bath in which she is doused in slithery liquid to represent all the excess fat she’s consuming. The piece de resistance, however, is expert Gunther von Hagens: at Jamie’s request the good doctor cuts up the innards of a 28-stone corpse in front of all of us. It’s very, very tough love – and very watchable.
Jamie, darlin’. I met you a few years back, and I have to say you seemed a pleasant and charismatic enough chap. But, dude, the only autopsy I want a chef taking part in is the slicing and dicing of a cow, pig, chicken, or other non-human carcass for purposes of making me dinner.
If you really want to do something about obesity–and this advice is as free, moneywise, as the change people need to make to lose weight–cut the showboating, stop trying to scare everyone to death, stay away from quacks like von Hagens, stop grossing people out, and remind your fellow countrymen how to go for a walk.
