Prick With A Fork

Apologies for the extended absence; the Prick has been down at the snow this past week, learning – painfully – how to (and how not to ) ski. Regularly scheduled programming resumes tomorrow.

In the very first episode of Mad Men, a show which by all rights I should love because it is all about arch capitalism and bad behaviour and smoking and drinking and screwing too much (but yet I don’t, and this essay in the New York Review of Books does a better job than I could of articulating my objections), our anti-hero pitches his cigarette company client with the tag line, “It’s toasted.” Now, the joke is that every other smoke-roller’s leafs are toasted as well, but by highlighting this point, the Lucky Strike folk are able to pull ahead of the pack – so to speak – just as health concerns around smoking are hitting the press. As a set piece, it’s a clever idea that feeds into the conventional wisdom of the clever set that free will is an illusion and of course big corporations and their marketing henchmen are pulling the wool of false consciousness over the eyes of a public kept docile by fatty foods and plasma TVs.

But what if things went the other way? What if the little guys adopted Don Draper tactics? That’s just what’s happening in the Australian milk industry, which has lately been the scene of pitched price wars between small producers and the supermarkets. Cleverly, small dairy farmers have banded together to market their milk as “permeate-free”, permeate being a “natural milk waste produced in a separate cheese-making process after ultrafiltration” (yum!) added to the stuff to ensure consistency (and, no doubt, make the cow juice go farther). And this has got Big Milk off-side, according to the Weekend Australian:

Victorian dairy farmer Marian Macdonald yesterday accused small milk processors of unfairly damaging the reputation of milk and risking turning consumers away from a healthy and affordable family food staple in their quest for market share.

“This has been a morally corrupt debacle on so many levels,” Ms Macdonald said.

The reason, of course, that this is seen as “morally corrupt” is that those brands advertising their product as being “permeate-free” are gobbling up market share forcing, according to the same account, major supermarket brands to “drop permeate additives from their milk early this month.” But so what? It’s true, and if big bad advertising can be used by corporate giants, why not by small producers as well?

I’m agnostic on the subject of permeates, though in general I like to think the products I buy are not thinned out with the waste products of related processes. Call me crazy. In any case, the only supermarket milk that’s consumed anywhere close to straight out of the bottle here at Stately Prick Manor goes into morning coffees (all other dairy is consumed either in the form of heavy cream or cheese) and when I finally get around to purchasing an ice cream maker I’ve got a couple of lines on pure Jersey milk that will get reeled in. But I do have a quiet admiration for those who, instead of sniping from the sidelines and complaining that the competition is too big and powerful for them to have a go, decide to beat them at their own game.

Prediction: “Noise Control” will become the next front in Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s long-running fight to stomp, smother, and regulate the fun out of New York City. Having first come for the smokers, the salt-lovers, and the soda slurpers, this piece in the New York Times defines the battle:

Across New York City, in restaurants and bars, but also in stores and gyms, loud noise has become a fact of life in the very places where people have traditionally sought respite from urban stress. The New York Times measured noise levels at 37 restaurants, bars, stores and gyms across the city and found levels that experts said bordered on dangerous at one-third of them.

It never occurred to the correspondent that maybe people like to unwind at venues with a bit of life. But as any good Times reader knows, the free will and the free market are illusions, and background music is in fact part of a greater capitalist conspiracy to keep the masses fat and drunk:

Some research has shown that people drink more when music is loud; one study found that people chewed faster when tempos were sped up. Armed with this knowledge, some bars, retailers and restaurants are finely tuning sound systems, according to audio engineers and restaurant consultants.  

Indeed. We should ban this sort of thing because what New York needs right now is for those remaining people with money to spend less of it.

The Prick doesn’t particularly like noisy venues, nor does he like smoky ones. But just as forcing smokers out onto the street has hurt nightlife, so too will forcing venue owners to turn down the volume, which is inevitably where this is headed. This has all the hallmarks of another public health beat-up in the making and as such must be fought vigorously: How long before bar staff are forced to wear industrial ear protection (think of when Bloomberg’s nannies attempts to make sushi masters and Michelin-starred chefs wear plastic gloves as if they were lunch ladies)?  I can already see the “Inside Voices!” public health campaign and hear the “experts” claiming that hearing damage “costs the economy $36 billion a year”.

It seems Fairfax journos want to make everything more expensive except their employers’ share price. Take the case of “Econogirl” Jessica Irvine, who once again takes up the topic of weight loss – a subject she considers important, because it happened to her, and related to economics because she once read a copy of Freakonomics, and hey, that really made her like, think, you know?

On one level, it’s just a typical Irvine effort: the re-hashed press release, the casual Gen-Y phraseology betraying the lack of any grown-ups in the Herald newsroom (“Why do we eat so much crap?” “How’s that working out for us?” “Competitive group sports … sucked”), and so on. But then this:

A green paper released this week by the federal government on its National Food Plan hints at one reason. Obviously we eat lollies, burgers and chips because they taste great. But we also eat them because they are readily available and, wait for it, cheap.

”Analysis of Australian food expenditure data suggests a substantial proportion of the Australian population is severely restricted in its capacity to make healthy food choices and achieve a healthy lifestyle. Compounding the situation is evidence that the cost of healthy (low energy-density, high nutrient-density) foods are increasing disproportionately when compared with the cost of higher energy-density, relatively nutrient-poor foods.”

Too much cheap food: a problem every generation in history prior to ours would have – and in many cases did – kill for.

And the solution?

One obvious solution from economics would be to increase the cost of fatty, sugary or excessively calorie-dense foods. In Britain, the opposition Labour Party is considering a policy of taxing sugary drinks. Last year, Denmark became the first country to impose a ”fat tax” of about $3 per kilo of saturated fat, levied on producers and sellers and passed on to some degree to customers through higher prices.

Could the hip-pocket nerve be the solution to our expanding waistlines?

You betcha! Irvine hedges her bets a bit…

All taxes impose some cost on society in terms of administration. Can we prove that the benefits through improved health would outweigh those costs?

No, nor can we even be sure all this nannying would save us money. In fact, some studies suggest just the opposite. Irvine then goes on to shoot her argument squarely in the foot (hey, if her panic-mongering is to be believed, diabetes would have gotten it eventually) by saying such a tax could be modelled on the (wait for it!) carbon tax:

Governments could use the revenue from a fat tax to compensate the low income earners, who would still find fatty foods relatively more expensive. Sound familiar? It’s the same logic as the carbon tax. Even if you compensate people for the full effect of higher prices, by raising the relative price of a good, consumers will want to consume relatively less of it. That people respond to prices and incentives is one of the most basic concepts of economics.

Is Jessica Irvine the last person who believes the carbon tax is anything but a big, bureaucratic engine to move money from the relatively prosperous to the poor? Apparently.

Of course, virtuous St Jessica never needed such a fat tax to drop her extra baggage:

Having battled the bulge myself, with some success …

It’s a shame we’re not all as smart and wise as Ms Irvine.

A bad photo of tonno tonnato

Some people have nervous breakdowns in anticipation of birthdays; in the Prick’s experience, such crises seem to come in their wake. Crossing over into definitively into the land of the late-thirties earlier this month wasn’t hugely traumatic, though forty might see me on the campaign trail for a little four-wheeled Prozac to help ease the pain. Probably the worst thing to occur in my slough of despond happened when I stepped out of my office onto George Street and bobbled my HTC right onto the pavement, rendering it just another useless piece of plastic and rare-earth metals. As a result, I’ve been busted down to my old Nokia phone, which doesn’t take photos anywhere near as well, especially in the discreet confines of a nice restaurant.

An even worse photo of a piece of duck

Which is a shame, because I’d love to share some proper photos of a lunch I had at Pendolino recently. It was a Friday and workmate and I, having spent the previous five hours on a hiring panel listening to HR banalities (“…so can you tell us about a time you worked as part of a team to achieve a positive outcome…”), decided we needed a long lunch, a rarity in our parts. We wandered down to Pendolino in the Strand which, for my money, is still serving up some of the best high-end, old-school Italian in town. In a city full of flashy flash-in-the-pans, Pendolino, despite being only a few years old, has the feel of a classic. The dining room is long, dark, and high-ceilinged: At lunch it’s got a certain New York power vibe that says this is a place where deals are done and affairs (of all sorts) consummated. Although it’s in a shopping mall, the Strand is a far cry from the Westfield and one doesn’t need to walk through hordes of EAs and teenyboppers to get through the door – something that surely could not have helped Becasse’s predicament. And whereas other Italian power joints simply phone it in (Machiavelli, I’m looking in your direction …) the Pendolino kitchen still gets it done. I’m talking Tonno Tonnato – an all-tuna version of the classic veal-based dish, light and bright and sublime. A very more-ish roast leg of duck, also gorgeous, though my tablemate reported his controfiletto was ever so slightly overdone. Nevermind, we washed it down with a lovely bottle of Il Falcone, an interesting mix of 80% Nero di Troia rounded out by a remainder of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo recommended to us by a sommelier with the coolest pair of glasses I’ve ever seen: if you go, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Don’t ask me where my tasting notes are, though I diligently took some, this lunch was weeks ago and I have no idea what stack of paper they’re living in. Very bright fruits turned, over the course of the hour, to some very jammy, roasted berry flavours, held together by lush, earthy tannins with a distinctly Italian flavour that somehow reminded me of Sophia Loren.

Snag Stand “American Classic”, photographed in situ on desktop

In food, simple pleasures are often the greatest joys. And short of a fat slab of torchon de foie gras or a well-fed, piping-hot ortolan, for this former New Yorker’s money nothing comes close to a proper hot dog for pure Proustian pleasure. Yet for too long Australians were denied this simple pleasure, having been told for decades that those cirrhotic-orange sausages with cases as thick and rubbery as Brezhnev-era prophylactics were “hot dogs”, when in fact the real thing is anything but. Thankfully, the arrival of the Snag Stand chain, as well as any number of small bars devoted to vague Americana themes, has begun to remedy this: Snag Stand’s “American Classic” is the closest thing I’ve had to a proper dog outside the US, right down to the mustard and relish. The fancy brioche roll, while not exactly traditional, gives a bit of fancy-ballpark vibe and justifies the $6.90 price tag. I’m just not sure where they get off calling ketchup “tomato sauce”, but even this can be forgiven, and their other sausages – the Toulouse and the Kransky are quite tasty as well.

Clock Hotel Chili Dog: There’s something missing here…

Still, not everyone has gotten the memo as to what constitutes a proper ‘dog. Tuesday has, for reasons lost to the mists of time, been pub night for the Prick for almost as long as the Prick has been in Australia, and this week’s venue was the Clock Hotel in Surry Hills. Now the Clock is undergoing rolling renovations, so they’ve only got a “canteen” menu going at the moment, but nevermind: Last night’s special was (allegedly, it would turn out) a “chilli dog”, and I just couldn’t go past that.

Unfortunately, it appears the dog slipped the lead. What arrived looked good at first. Big fat bun, lots of chilli, jalapenos, cheese, sour cream, the works. But taking a bite, the realisation quickly dawned that something was missing: The sausage. Yes, the chilli was pleasant, a nicely crafted affair of pulled pork and beef and spices with a well-rounded hear. But there was no “dog” in this chilli dog. Instead, the dish was a bowl of chilli with a bun where the bowl should be. Nor is the Prick’s insistence on a sausage a question of standing on ceremony or tradition. The Larousse Gastronomique, the bible of cooking,says any hot dog must include a sausage and a split roll. Simple physics demands it as well: with nothing in the bun to give resistance, biting down just creates a massive, mushy mess.  This is one case where science and religion stand in happy agreement, with no need for a Thomas Aquinas to square the circle.

With deep historic ties to the US, the gang here at Stately Prick Manor has watched with increasing dismay as America – and specifically the once-great engine of freedom, creativity, and prosperity (funny how these things tend to go together) known as California – has slid into a torpor of slowly-hardening statism. Which is why I am happy to see the sparks of liberty have not been fully extinguished with one San Francisco restaurant exploiting a loophole to allow it to continue to serve  foie gras, recently banned in California, at its Bastille Day dinner:

Housed in a converted infantry barracks on a former U.S. Army base, the Presidio Social Club never attracted much attention from San Francisco’s avid gourmets — until Saturday night.

That’s when foie gras lovers descended on the restaurant to have their first taste of the delicacy since California imposed a ban on July 1.

Animal rights activists fought for the law because they detest the way foie gras is made: farmers force-feed ducks or geese to fatten their livers. Some fans of traditional French cuisine find the ban just as hard to swallow.

The restaurant owner, Ray Tang, and its general manager, Maureen Donegan, reasoned that the restaurant can legally ignore state law because the Presidio, now managed mostly as a national park, has remained federal property even after being decommissioned by the Army. Businesses on federal property must adhere to federal regulations, which trump state ones, they say.

Of course, “activists” are urging officials to shut the loophole, because G-d forbid people should be allowed to eat what they want. Three cheers for Tang and Donegan, and to hell with all those who would use the law to enforce their own middle-class morality. Conditions at any factory farm would be far worse than your typical foie gras operation, but foie is an easy target because it’s expensive and people enjoy it. Much harder to rally a class war when your target is bland skinless chicken breasts.

To coin a phrase, if you think the government should stay out of your bedroom but peek in your fridge, you might be a liberal.

It also says something that an American restaurant is using the French national day rather than the 4^th of July  as the hook for their delicious act of rebellion.

Via reader s_dog, food related misquotes …

Very sad to read this news:

Sydney’s Becasse restaurant will serve its last dinner tomorrow night. Chef Justin North announced his fine diner will close along with other businesses owned with his wife and business partner, Georgia.

It includes Quarter 21, also in Westfield Sydney. The couple placed their restaurant and food group into voluntary administration in early June following which Etch, Le Grand Cafe and their cooking school closed. At that time, they expressed hopes of continuing to trade.

I do more than just blog about food, you know.

If you’re near a newsagent, pick up a copy of the Spectator Australia today — I’ve got a column about NIMBYs as the champions of urban freedom against developers and the government.

I’ll also be on Sky News around 2:30pm AEST to talk American politics.