Prick With A Fork

Organic food is overpriced, often of dubious quality, and, as it turns out, potentially deadly as well:

Despite what the organic industry may tell us, a quick review of the academic literature shows that E. coli is a serious problem in organic produce.

This 2004 study found significantly higher levels of E. coli in some organic produce, although the claim that E. coli can find its way into the fibres of vegetables and thus cannot wash off seems to have been discredited. This study found a slightly higher amount of E. coli in properly managed certified organic produce, but not at a level that was statistically significant. However, in produce that used manure compost aged less than 12 months, the prevalence of E. coli was 19 times greater than farms that used older materials.

E. coli was also found to be more prevalent in organic lettuce and, frankly, I would not be putting that stuff on my shopping list in a hurry.

Put simply, most organic vegetables, if properly managed and washed are okay, but vegetables grown with the evil synthetic fertilisers are less prone to causing a shutdown of your kidneys.

As Gavin Atkins points out above, more people died as a result of eating organic food in Germany in one incident recently than did in Japan as a result of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Yet we are scared of clean, green nuclear power and embrace dirty, poo-covered organics. Thanks, hippies!

So last night I’m riding home in a taxi from the pub in Surry Hills when what do I spy as we cruise down Devonshire Street but an honest-to-God food truck! It looked really popular, and for a moment I considered asking the driver to stop so I could check it out.

Then I realised the customers were too authentically shabby to be hipsters, that there was no money being exchanged for what I realised were hot drinks and sandwiches, and that Salvation Army logo looks nothing like that of any Sydney Food Truck I’d ever seen.  

 Whoops. Sometimes I really am a Prick with a Fork.

The shape of things to come at the SMH

One upon a time, when the Prick was a young journalist, there was an imperative that practitioners of the craft try and get both sides of the story. Then, a few years ago, all that seemed to change: now all one has to do to be a journalist is call up a rent-a-quote source, take a few notes, and get the subs to pull together a headline saying your man either “supports” or “backs” your pre-conceived point of view, or that he “blasts” or “condemns” someone who had the temerity to take the opposite tack.

Take yesterday’s Herald: the paper reported (“Today the Herald can reveal”, the paper wrote, a healthy tip that they were the beneficiaries of a selective leak) that NSW’s teetotal police commissioner, who has vowed  to crack down on the demon drink, is pushing to limit the number of bottle shops around town on the theory that more booze means more bogans thumping their missus.

Then today, the followup: “Police backed in singling out bottle shops”. On what basis, you ask?

Michael Livingston, a research fellow at the Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre in Melbourne, studied the density of all types of liquor outlets in Victoria and found bottle shops were key.

”As you increase bottle shops in a neighbourhood you increase rates of domestic violence and rates of chronic disease,” he said. ”We know that they’re concentrated up to eight times more in poor neighbourhoods than rich neighbourhoods in Victoria.

The “Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre”? If that sounds to you like the sort of place you’d go to dry out, you’d be right. To put it another way, he would say that, wouldn’t he? And let’s not even get into the odd logic at work here: You could go to some of these “poor neighbourhoods”, close down all the bottle-o’s save for one little independent joint that sells nothing but boutique Tasmanian pinots, trade everyone’s old bombs in for Audis and Volvos and guess what? You’d still have a bunch of povvo deadshits whose reasoning skills begin and end at the end of a fist. I exaggerate slightly, but the middle-class sociologist worldview, which holds the very backwards notion that if you give the poor the trappings of the middle class they’ll magically start acting middle class has informed a good seven decades of social policy and been found wanting every time.

But nevermind, by running the story the Herald gets to keep its good relationship with the government press offices, and the nannies get to chip away a little further at freedom.

When you order a smoked salmon bagel, that kinda implies that you’re going to get both halves, doesn’t it? Not according to the folk at Caffe Cino in the Hilton downtown:

Something’s missing here…

You can imagine how crestfallen I was to open the box when I got back to my desk with this little number the other morning. Especially as the bagel itself was $8.50, before coffee. The smoked salmon, however, was delicious.

An interesting little factoid from the Sun-Herald‘s new “Loaded Dog” feature, which this week tackles the eternal and eternally vexed subject of racism:

By international standards among major immigrant-receiving nations, Australians are pretty tolerant. About one in eight is avowedly racist. This compares with one in three in western Europe and one in five in the US.

Factoid courtesy Jim Forrest, associate professor of human geography, Macquarie University, so I presume he knows what he’s talking about. Now there’s no doubt Australia still has troubles in this regard (as the recent high-profile bashings of Indian students in Melbourne and Chinese in Sydney have demonstrated). But it also puts into perspective the whole “Australians should stop being so redneck and instead be more sophisticated, like the Europeans” canard so beloved of certain commentators. Heaven help us if we are ever as sophisticated as some in Western Europe.

I’d also be curious to see Prof. Forrest’s research broken down by state. Years ago I was driving around Auckland with a business associate, and a woman called into the talkback radio the car was tuned to. She proceeded to detail her plans to move from New Zealand to Queensland, “where I’d feel more comfortable, because it’s more racist like me.” Predictable hilarity ensued.

Mr and Mrs Prick are off to Melbourne next weekend: We’ve got a table at Cutler & Co Saturday night, but that leaves a lot of other meals undecided. Where should we go? Readers with better knowledge of such things are invited to drop us a line or comment …

A very tongue-in-cheek dish…

“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.” So said the ever-quotable Winston Churchill lo those many decades ago, and it remains a good principle today: Don’t be afraid to piss people off on general principle. Wednesday night I had occasion to think of this as Mrs Prick, myself, and a few friends ate just down the road at Stanmore’s Sixpenny.

Now Sixpenny has quickly become one of the hottest diners in the inner-west thanks to chefs Daniel Puskas and James Parry who have collectively done time at everywhere from Sepia and Tetsuya’s to Noma and Alinea. Sixpenny took a hat from the Herald almost as soon as it opened and a strong 4 out of 5 from the Weekend Australian Magazine’s Jonathan Lethlean – who for my money is best working restaurant critic in the country. And I would attribute this in no small part to an all-degustation menu that, like Churchill’s aphorism, is not afraid to stand up for something, even if it puts a few people off-side.

By, for example, opening the batting with poached duck tongues on gem lettuce. This is not a middle-brow dish for the masses: When I rhapsodised about it to workmates the next day, half thought it sounded fantastic, half squealed, “Ewww!” And that was just the guys. In fact, it is quite surprising. Like so many other activities that sound at first blush odd or unpleasant, eating duck’s tongue is not half-bad. They have far less resistance or give than you expect, melting in the mouth, tasting like nothing so much as soft duck fat with a bit of greens as a foil. Along side the  tongues are tiny little sandwiches – “knuckle sandwiches”, to be exact, made from pig knuckles on house-made bread. Yum. Again, this is not food for everybody. But it turned out it was food for us.

To be honest, I was prepared to not love Sixpenny. I have at least a mild allergy to hype, and having heard about items like the above-mentioned knuckle sandwich I worried that it all might be too cute by half. It wasn’t. The quickly-earned hat (and hey, is that Terry Durack or just a dead-wringer lurking in the opposite corner?) also raised eyebrows. But nevermind. Seating about thirty in the old Codfather restaurant, lately relocated to the lately-dejunkyfied Glebe Point Road, in what could be any minimalist inner-west dining room (save for the fantastic service bar in the middle of the room, and no, Mrs Prick said, we cannot install one at Stately Prick Manor) the place is all about The Food.

Because everyone has the same thing, no one worries about cheese and onion breath.

Snacks give way to plated dishes. Replacing their advertised garden beans with soft cheese comes another dish, onions served with a cheddar oil extracted by some laborious and time-consuming process now forgotten. Indeed, every dish seemed to involve some element that just took a ridiculous amount of time, and given that they’re only doing one seating four nights a week  these guys must be flat out  making very little money per hour. The cheddar oil stars, and all agreed we’d like to see it take a more prominent role in another dish.

Then: the mud crab, with macadamia and camomile, what is shaping up to be the joint’s signature dish. If Sixpenny’s chefs, God help us, were ever promoted on Masterchef, this is the dish that the contestants, in all their ethnically-balanced western-suburbs glory, would spend an episode flapping about attempting to re-create. Stunning in flavour, it just captured the absolute essence of the muddy. Silky, luxurious, with the odd but in fact absolutely right addition of macadamia and camomile flavours to both balance and accent the flesh. Our only qualm was the presentation – and has anyone else noticed that chefs, having spent years making sure there was plenty of white space between elements of their composed plates for so long, are now clustering and interfolding them back together again? Well, not to get all AA Gill on you, but the table agreed that this was not to the best effect. For myself, it reminded me of the night I’d had an unpleasant slip and fall some hours after letting the dog finish my bowl of fettucini alfredo.

Clear as mudcrab …

But really, these guys have a way with seafood. One couple in our party had recently been to Quay; they said that kitchen has nothing on Sixpenny when it comes to fish. A sweet potato dish with whey and John Dory roe doesn’t quite work but is redeemed by a plate of the sweetest, tenderest snapper, with pumpkin seed cream, pumpkin sand (trust me, it works) and soft, sharp leeks. Better than the mud crab, and a joy because despite the seeming simplicity of the plate the quiet behind the scenes work to make this sort of thing happen does not leave you thinking, “Well, great, but I could probably knock this up at home just as well.” This is not haute dinner party food by any stretch of the imagination.

A little piece of Coorong hangar steak arrives with a smoked cabbage cream (yep, they smoke the cabbage out the back, making me wonder how they coped during our recent rains) and mustard greens compressed with the resultant ash shifted gears and textures, and was with a nebbiolo-primitivo blend from Grove Estate. (Did I mention the wines, almost all from NSW, were spectacular? I’d like to see the boys eventually add an a la carte  option so we could try a bottle of some of the gems on their wine list.)

Hangar steak: Bold yet balanced flavours and textures

It was not all roses, of course, though the day-lillies were  an absolute treat. There were things I didn’t like: the sour lemon was just too much for me, though everyone else nommed theirs up. And there were dishes that others didn’t like which I adored: Mrs Prick didn’t have her world set alight by the honey mead sorbet, which I thought was rich and sweet and unctuous and complex and yet very finely balanced all at the same time. The Jersey milk ice cream, however, was insane, and by the time the bill came we were drawing up papers to buy ourselves a PacoJet as a cooperative. Jars of lamingtons and other treats round out the menu; good, but perhaps a bit of a tack back towards the cuteness that kicked off the meal. By now I am perfectly full and instead sit on a slug of Armagnac. No matter. An awesome night. And to bring us back to Churchill, the next morning I was sober, but these guys keep turning out greatness.

I’ve noted before the tendency of lazy Sydney journalists to deem anything east of Parramatta short of Central Station as “inner-west”, but I’d say this is worse:

The Western suburbs have that bohemian élan, with the endless rows of charming terraces, markets selling scented candles, and the fact that its got the market cornered in “cuisines of the world” (be it Portuguese, Thai, Italian, Lebanese etc). Hence, no one ever dares accuse them of being “cosseted”.

Western suburbs? Endless terraces? Portugese cuisine? Ahem.

No link available until next week, but if you’re in Australia, why not pick up a copy of the Spectator and check out the Prick’s piece on food blogging, “Happy Meals”, including a manifesto and plea for fellow bloggers to stop being so damn nice all the time …

… is this new biography of pioneering New York Times restaurant critic Craig Claiborne:

“He saw himself as a critic on a par with the paper’s critics of books, art, music and drama, and he was determined to bring to his work a rigor and gravity equal to theirs,” writes Thomas McNamee in “The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat” (Free Press, $27), a biography of Claiborne that is being published this month … 

Decades before it became fashionable to ride the No. 7 train in search of the cuisine of recent immigrants, Claiborne was prowling the streets in search of Filipino, Armenian, Lebanese, Mexican, Hungarian and Czech menus. He alerted readers to the rise of Japanese restaurants and praised Chinese food that was relatively un-Americanized. When Shun Lee Dynasty came along in the mid-1960s with its menu of Sichuan specialties, he gave it three out of four stars …

Claiborne’s reviews were just one part of that model. He wrote about changing tastes in the White House kitchen, stood by the stove with home cooks who showed him how to prepare tortillas, and reported on the rise of nouvelle cuisine in France. He traveled, most famously to Paris for a $4,000 dinner that he wrote up on the front page, but to more far-flung locales, too.

“I think people were sort of astonished when he did things like he went to Vietnam during the war and sat there within the sound of gunfire, and discovered things like shrimp on a stick,” said Mr. McNamee, Claiborne’s biographer. “He was able to go to Alaska and eat blubber and moose liver and write about it in this strange trance. He seems to take everything in stride. I think this sort of nervelessness helped him bring people around to just trying anything.”

If every meal could be critiqued, even a doughnut at the counter of Chock Full o’ Nuts, then everybody could be a critic. Followed far enough, this road leads to Yelp. But it also leads to thousands of Americans treating each meal not as mere nourishment, and not as a reinforcement of social status, but as a chance to taste something new and wonderful.

I’ll have some thoughts on the state of restaurant criticism in Australia – both professional and amateur – in tomorrow’s edition of the Spectator Australia, available wherever fine periodicals are sold.