SaltShaker

A new addition, we’ll see where it goes, as obviously eventually this page will get long and unwieldy. I read a lot, especially in the food press – here, on an occasional basis, the best line I spot… whether humorous or just one of those “made ya’ think” sort of lines…

February 8, 2010 – “…of those people claiming to have an allergy or intolerance, only 2 per cent actually did. That means millions of people wrongly think they have a food allergy. Their condition is not an allergy itself, but the belief that they have an allergy. Of course, some people use food intolerance as a socially acceptable way to say they just don’t like something. It’s posh-sounding pickiness.” – Max Pemberton, Food Intolerance: The New Epidemic?

January 19, 2010 – “The key thing to remember about American food is that it’s not food. Much of it is made from oil-based plastics, volcanic sand and the run-off from copper mines.” – Martin Bishop, confectionery analyst, Will Chocolate Buttons Taste Like Shit?

December 8, 2009 – “What locavores forget, or don’t stop to consider, is that calculating the emissions over the entire life-cycle process is far more complex than counting transportation miles.” – Kevin Libin, Rethinking Greet: Eat global, not local, National Post

September 11, 2009 – “But the campaign for food democracy needs to start with boning knives and cast-iron skillets. A lack of technique behind the stove is, in the end, as complicit in harming human health and the environment as the confinement pig or the corn-fed steer.” – Dan Barber, Why Cooking Matters, The Nation

July 31, 2009 – “Ugly, after all, is only crust-deep.” – Baker’s Banter

July 17, 2009 – “If you have a problem with an ingredient, by all means, vote with your pocketbook. But, don’t waste food because your precious body is too delicate in its sensibilities to poo out anything less than grass-fed, massaged, milk-bathed and thrice-daily masturbated Wagyu beef.” – Jodi Kasten, Trees of the Mind

July 8, 2009 – “We are well aware that we’re not even permitted to call the product wine. No grapes were used in its production, it’s simply a product that is flavored to taste like wine.” – Stefanie Dietrich, in Spiegel Online

June 13, 2009 – “Preached vegetarianism isn’t effective: it fosters a hostile, even adversarial, relationship towards food. This is not how food should be–people love to eat, and sacrificing the joy of food is simply too much to ask. Besides, it’s hypocritical. I’ve always found it amusing that vegetarians can be so concerned about the well-being of animals and yet quite ready to shame their own parents.” – Max Fisher, the Atlantic

May 30, 2009 – “I realised you can do thousands more things by being a cook for your country than you can by being a politician.” – Gastón Arcurio, Chef, Restaurateur, Author

May 29, 2009 – “…the idea of terroir was borrowed from the French. It is that very Gallic thing: a prejudice dressed up as science; epicurean eugenics; simply the belief in sauce and earth. That the food of a place is irrevocably and intimately designed by the land. Terroir is more than mere geology and climate; it is a spiritual, Rousseau-ian ideology that claims the alchemy that combines people and places is made by the connection of food. … Le terroir is food as pride, as jingoism, and, by implication, as xenophobia. Lots of countries have it. “What we eat is better than what you eat. So what we eat makes us better than you.” – A.A. Gill, Times UK

May 26, 2009 – “No one thinks someone on the cellphone can really be paying attention to another person.” – Harry Lewis, Harvard computer science professor

May 21, 2009 – “I remember, back in 1996 or 1997, when you could finish the Internet… You could stay up until two or three in the morning and go to sleep and know, ‘I read the Internet today.’” – Baratunde Thurston, Web Editor, The Onion

May 7, 2009 – “By and large, bloggers do an outstanding job providing sources and details for their information and reporting. If we did not, we’d have no readership. The free market works wonderfully in the blogosphere, because readers are not going to waste time on blogs that aren’t credible.” – Evan Dawson, in a followup comment on the 1WineDude blog (worth reading)

March 23, 2009 – “We are sorry if Mr Wilks has felt let down by our customer service on this occasion, however, if you wake up in the morning and have to apply anti-chaffing cream to your inner thighs just so that you can shuffle up to the fridge in relative comfort then maybe warning bells should be ringing and you might consider easing off the saturated fats and getting some exercise.” – McDonald’s director of communication in response to a customer being refused service

February 21, 2009 – “Chefs work hard to create dishes they’re proud of, and if they can’t vouch for a dish when changes are made, it’s their prerogative not to serve it. If you can’t find anything you like, it’s your prerogative to go someplace else.” – China Millman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

January 14, 2009 – “If we had constantly walked away from the tomato and said, ‘I’m not going to eat this because it’s poisonous,’ we would never have tomato sauce.” – Judd Canepari, Executive Chef, Rancho Bernardo Inn

December 21, 2008 – “Only bad cooks blame the equipment. I can make almost every dish in my restaurants on four crummy electric burners with a regular oven — as can just about anyone else who cares to.” – Mario Batali, NY Times

November 6, 2008 – “If you cook Italian food or French food, you could cook anything after that. You could cook Turkish, you could cook Russian, because it’s the method and technique, the process.” – Michael White, ABC News

September 27, 2008 – “…if she’s a good enough likeness of a loudmouthed middle-American archetype, as Sarah Palin is, John Q. Public will drop his giant-size bag of Doritos in gratitude, wipe the Sizzlin’ Picante dust from his lips and rush to the booth to vote for her.” – Matt Tabibi, The Smirking Chimp

August 11, 2008 – “…it’s more a “homemade means you don’t have enough money for store-bought” thing, which seems to be a leftover credo for many of us forced to eat, say, a liverwurst sandwich made on mom’s homemade rye when our classmates were unwrapping a PB & J on Wonder Bread. Some of us, refugees from the convenience-in-a-can 1950s, learned early that store-bought was cool, and homemade was… well, HOMEMADE. Some of us, unfortunately, have never forgotten that lesson.” – Baker’s Banter

June 25, 2008 – “I have a few other dislikes, but not many. I don’t want salt sprinkled on my desserts, even high-minded pink sea salt from some Hawaiian coast. I don’t enjoy marshmallows snipped off tableside; it’s way too French. Of course, marshmallows roasted over a campfire are exquisite, the only dessert that should be served searing hot. (That’s the second great lesson I learned in the Cub Scouts.) I particularly dislike the custom of plopping cold ice cream in the center of hot soufflés, a perverse practice that ruins two desserts at once. I never cared much for Chuckles as a kid, and I don’t go for gelées now. That’s never going to change.” – Alan Richman, GQ

May 24, 2008 – “The asparagus tips arrived on a slim and perfect little onion tart with two more foams and two of those weird skid marks that seem still to be fashionable, three or four years on, despite looking quite horrid. Here they were sort of khaki, as if a person with a tiny heel had skidded on goose poo.” – Giles Coren, Times UK

May 7, 2008 – “…if you insist on being the aggressive blowhard who takes meatlessness as a personal insult and rails about what fools we all are, you’re only going to persuade me that you’re a dickhead. When someone says he’s Catholic, you probably don’t start the stump speech about how God is a lie created to enslave the ignorant masses, and it’s equally offensive to berate an herbivore. I know you think we’re crazy. That’s neat. But seeing as I’ve endured the hassle of being a vegetarian for several years now, perhaps I’ve given this a little thought. So let’s just agree to disagree and get on with making fun of Hillary Clinton’s inability to operate a coffee machine.” – Taylor Clark, Slate

April 7, 2008 – “You’ve been cooking like an idiot. You press on meat and compare it with the flesh on your hand to guess how rare it is; you throw spaghetti at the wall to see if it’s done; you add an amount of salt that looks pretty when it’s in your palm. If people made medicine this way, we’d all be dead.” – Joel Stein, Time Magazine

March 16, 2008 – “Truth be told, women are seriously misguided about calories. They will shriek if they spy a piece of crackling, yet swallow gallons of coconut milk – one of the most fattening things you can eat. Likewise, dairy products are out if served in abundance, but they will devour an avocado – because it’s green, you see, it can’t be fattening.” – Rod Liddle, Times UK

February 28, 2008 – “It’s the closest thing you can get to eating dirt, it really is. It has that earthy dirt quality to it, it smells like, in the spring, when you dig your hands into the earth and you smell it, that’s like mushrooms. To me, it’s really a way to connect you to the Earth.” – Chef Tom Colicchio on Nightline

February 20, 2008 – “Like a lightbulb coming on over our heads, we realized that the chefs had known the identity of the main ingredient all along, just as they had known ahead of time which Iron Chef would be paired with the challenger. How else to explain the utter nonchalance displayed by the sous chefs, who fetched ingredients and blended them; toasted, fried, and roasted them; then plated them like they were enjoying a relaxing holiday in the country.” – Robert Sietsema, Iron Chef Boyardee, Village Voice

January 21, 2008 – “Pay attention. All diets work. When I taught cooking, people used to say that recipes didn’t work. Well, all recipes work, if you know how to cook. The Kama Sutra works, if you know how to shag. It’s not diets that fail, it’s you, you miserable, spineless, sticky-fingered fridge magnet. All diets come down to the same sentence: more in than out, you get fat; more out than in, you get thin. It’s not rocket science, it’s bicycle science.” – A.A. Gill, Times UK

January 8, 2008 – “[T]raditional cuisines have had a kind of beta testing that the Western diet has not had. The Western diet kind of springs full-blown out of the head of industry and food science. Presumably at various points in time, groups of people ate really badly and didn’t leave very many offspring, and now they’re gone. But the ones that have survived a long time in a given place eating a certain way have a local knowledge that is full of wisdom about health.” – Michael Pollan, Gourmet’s Choptalk

December 26th, 2007 – “It’s a tremendously competitive field, so what we can expect in 2008 is more restaurants going to elaborate lengths to set themselves apart from their competition. That means new heights of silliness and new clichés, doubtless a new smattering of failures, as well as, one always hopes, a handful of successes.” – Paul Adams, New York Sun

December 11, 2007 – “This spring, after 10 months of testing, the aquaculture company HQ Sustainable Maritime Industries created what it calls “sea-flavored” tilapia, the first farmed fish manipulated to taste like a wild fish. “It met 10 out of our 10 taste parameters,” says HQ’s president and C.E.O., Norbert Sporns.” – Charlie Foster, NY Times

November 21, 2007 – “Sushi has become one of those things. Like Cate Blanchett, like a Led Zeppelin reunion, like enlightened anal sex, there is simply nothing else like it, no other comparable cultural experience.” – Mark Morford, SFGate.com

November 10, 2007 – “As well as being incapable of experimenting, women are useless at following written instructions, which in this instance are called recipes. Blinded by a series of numbers and symbols, they get confused, and usually add the wrong amount of sugar or salt, or, more likely, substitute one for the other.” – Sam Holden, Daily Mail

November 5, 2007 – “Chocolate cures all ills that Champagne doesn’t. Anger, depression, melancholy attitudes, reflection, cold. I was already in a perfectly good mood. I just wanted chocolate.” – Shola Olunloyo, Studiokitchen

October 31, 2007 – “Anyone with half a chimp’s brain can see through Nossiter’s transparency easier than a JJ Prum riesling, It is Nossiter and his ilk (call them scary wine gestapo) chanting the same stupid hymn that demand wines be produced in one narrow style.” – Robert Parker

October 27, 2007 – “The survival mechanisms of these places require an unholy level of quality control, minimizing the damage done by universal blights — doped-up cooks, slacker waiters, shoddy purveyors, and the like. And in fact the food is often, if not brilliant or original, at least reliably excellent: Ruby Tuesday’s hamburger is so good that if it were sold by a one-legged Cuban in Fort Greene, there would be lines all the way to Flatbush Avenue.” – New York

October 12, 2007 – “In fact, you’ll find foods in this world that don’t even seem possible. Not just that they could exist, but that people would actually stick this stuff in their mouths without a gun to their head.” – Cracked

October 4, 2007 – “I think Gordon Ramsey is wussy. I’d like ten minutes in the back of a dark taxi with him. (Laughs.) I think reality food shows are made with people who don’t know or have respect for food whatsoever.” – Alton Brown, on The Strong Buzz

September 27, 2007 – “I realise that if I want to cook properly I have to be a complete power-crazed bastard.” – Suzanne Moore in Daily Mail

September 21, 2007 – “Yes, well do I know the brutish libertarian view of all this, which simply goes: If you’re dumb enough to eat this garbage, you get what you deserve.” – Mark Morford in SFgate

September 18, 2007 – “There are maybe two or three decent practitioners of molecular gastronomy in the world, so unless your name is Ferran Adrià, leave the foam on your latte.” – Tony Bourdain in Radar

September 12, 2007 – “The health department does not consider a person’s shoe or boot a proper instrument to use in food preparation.” – CNN

September 11, 2007 – “I’d rather make videos with Barbie dolls . . . than be the next Frank Bruni.” – Adam Roberts (the Amateur Gourmet), quoted by the LA Times

August 30, 2007 – “Government officials,” says Nancy. “Two of them upstairs. They’re having the penis hotpot.” – BBC News

August 25, 2007 – “More boozy prunes, please” – S. Irene Virbila, L.A. Times

August 21, 2007 – “One could deep fry a #2 pencil and have it come out edible.” – Eater

August 19, 2007 – “A French committee wants to convince Rome that God condones expensive multicourse meals; He just doesn’t like us getting extra helpings.” – Atlantic Monthly

August 15, 2007 – “Everyone seems up in arms over appointing this girl as the food critic, when the reality of it is that no one even knew the Daily News had a food critic, until now.” – New York Magazine

August 13, 2007 – “My father’s personal favorite? The kaffir-lime meringue, which contained a mélange of decorative ingredients (basil seeds, pink rhubarb ice) and called to mind one of Imelda Marcos’s more festive summer hats.” – New York Magazine

August 7, 2007 – “You see a McDonald’s label and kids start salivating.” – CNN

August 2, 2007 – “I believe we are what we consume, so I really struggle with bodily fluids, especially sexually.” – The Press

July 26, 2007 – “Just as a bunch of oyster recipes invented in the last century propelled the ingredient to popularity, the combination of two cheap and common ingredients – powdered drink mix and dill pickles – stands a chance to transform our current culinary landscape.” – Gothamist

July 20, 2007 – Overheard on Broadway at 71st Street – “I heard that you can get really good Italian food in New York…” “Yeah, I saw an Olive Garden down near that Times Square…” “Cool, let’s go there.”

July 19, 2007 – More often, though, the dishes were so unsuccessful that I had difficulty finishing them. A pan-roasted salt-and-pepper chicken tasted only nominally of either flavor. Instead, the moist but bland bird was subsumed by a tarlike apricot hoisin that could have been a McNugget dipping sauce. An arid scallion pancake side did nothing to distract from this lackluster main. The equally lame token noodle dish was thick rice pasta with a fatty pork ragú, deluged in a heavy plum goo – reduction of orange juice, soy and oyster sauces. – Randall Lane, Time Out New York

July 14, 2007 – The best party food I’ve ever had, the best spit-roast: it came in great piles on metal trays, warm juicy flesh, and loads of sweet, sweet fat and crispy skin. (Best thing about 25-year-old girls? They don’t eat the fat, so there’s more for you. OK, second best thing.) – Giles Coren, Times Online

July 12, 2007 – “”What’s in the recipe?” the reporter asks. “Six to four,” the man says. “You mean 60 percent cardboard? What is the other 40 percent?” asks the reporter. “Fatty meat,” the man replies.” – CNN Report

July 11, 2007 – “No fancy linens or snooty maitre d’s. No stiff service or dishes that have to be eaten with special implements according to instructions from on high.” – S. Irene Virbila, LA Times

July 10, 2007 – “Biofuel enthusiasts in Italy may have just seen their hopes falter a bit: facing the prospect of mounting durum wheat prices, many pasta lovers in the country will undoubtedly wonder whether it’s worth trading in their staple food for more wheat-based ethanol.” – Jeremy Elton Jacquot, Science & Technology writer, Treehugger

July 9, 2007 – “And while we can all agree that ceviches demand acid, so do car batteries. There should be a way to tell the difference.” – Charlie Suisman’s MUG

July 8, 2007 – “The service was sweet and young, but a slight air of “What are we doing?” permeated the dining room.” – Tom Sietsema Washington Post