TracyFood

Monkey Monday: distracted by visiting parents edition 20 August 2007 8:19 am

Posted by Tracy in : advice, agriculture, eating, friends, garden, local food, news, restaurants, vegan, vegetarian , trackback

I’m going to do my best to keep the posts coming this week, but my parents are visiting from New Jersey and among other things we’re going to be painting the house (and celebrating my birthday and a badass lunar eclipse, eating a family-style dinner at Iraila and seeing Ratatouille again, but definitely not in that order) and in general that means I’m going to be a bit distracted, to put it mildly. But Monkey Mondays are fun and easy, right? I can just blather one off in no time at all? (She said, writing from New Jersey on Friday afternoon, not knowing when she’d get the chance again what with most of the weekend jet-setting across the country for a very dear friend’s 70th birthday party, and back again with parents in tow… yay for scheduled posts, I tell you what!) Here goes….

I love Miss Manners! Liz (who came and hung out and rocked like a hurricane on Saturday) pointed me to Miss Manners’ answer to the question of special restaurant requests, to which I am proud to say I gave a similar answer, albeit in a considerably ruder fashion back in the day. Here is why Miss Manners rules the world with an iron fist: she can say “don’t be a jackass” with every kind of style and flair imaginable, which is to say she has powers I can only dream of, oh yes.

Next! I was happy to read The Eat-Local Backlash by Tom Philpott’s fantastic “Victual Reality” column over at Grist, which asks, “If buying locally isn’t the answer, then what is?” for a number of reasons. The good news is, if there’s an eat-local backlash, then the idea must really be getting some mainstream traction. The bad news is, lots of people are still missing so many points entirely about this issue, like how there are some crops that just can’t be produced everywhere, period. Here is the simplest way I can phrase this issue, without any of that food miles hoo-hah, which reminds me entirely too uncomfortably much of calorie counting, in a very similarly shortsighted and oversimplified way: If the environmental cost of producing something locally is greater than the cost of importing it, then for frack’s sake do the math, y’all. It isn’t hard. And better still maybe, ask yourself if the darn thing’s worth importing, period. Next up: pondering whether you live in an area that’s actually, y’know, ecoologically capable of supporting your life (and um, for me, that includes worrying about the whole planet because who’s down with OCD? you know it.) The food security geeks of the world are seriously freaking out about how there’s like maybe a day or two’s worth of food in any given city if its transportation gets all cut off, so maybe there’s something to be said for local food production (ahem, gardens, hint hint!) I could go on and on in a manner quite unbefitting a Monkey Monday short attention span, oh yes.

Finally, a little bit of the surreal life for y’all: on our Sunday flight from Newark to Oregon, Mom got upgraded to business class and traded me her seat. Holy cats. Did you know there’s legroom up there? And the food comes on actual china but not before you’ve perused, honest to green beans, a freaking menu? No, really! Here’s a scan of the menu for proof (as always, click your way to bigger versions of the image):

Yes, I saved it. When am I ever going to fly business class ever again? The fresh fruit was every kind of awesome (except for the cantaloupe, because I wasn’t going to risk tainting my hilariously luxurious experience with my usual “melon makes me gag” reaction). Mom had requested the (strict) vegetarian (i.e. vegan) meal option, which meant I got the potatoes with some kind of mystery grain-and-veggie dish and two little bitty samosa-like spicy potato fritter thingies because Continental is all up on serving their passengers to India. And it was so crazy and I’m still not over the lady in 3A who got a Bloody Mary at 7 in the freaking morning and talked her seatmate into some drink that got the young’un carded, total way. And then I left my Moleskine on the plane but it was found and rescued and we retrieved it and now I want to bake cookies for all the Continental crew who worked that flight and that gate and the ticket counter where they sent the lost and found items. So much relief, I tell you what.

And that’s everything that happened to me this weekend, only not, as I remember it after being awake for, oh, over 20 hours unless you count sleeping on the plane. Whee!