losing my appetite

september 14 was a big red letter day for one miss juniper pearl, ladies and gentleman. on that day, she woke up rather late, made herself some coffee, and sat down in her living room to read a chapter or two of some book or other before she got to work proofreading the copyedited chapters of some manuscript or other that was on its way to being a book. and that was that.

perhaps you are wondering which of the above letters struck her as so big and red, as they all look rather small and standard here on the page. but it's a trick, you see; the big red letters are not up there. there is a small sign pointing in their direction, and my most loyal and observant readers may have noted it, but then again they may not have, so let me help: miss pearl took her coffee and sat down to read a book.

do you see? DO YOU SEE????? a book! she read a book! it's been months and months, so many endless and interminable months, since she even considered reading a book! but she was able to do it that day, my friends, because

she did not have an unread issue of the new yorker in her possession.


woohooooo!!!!! woooooo!!!!!!!! hooray!!!!!!!! and let me tell you, folks, it was a good thing. see, the issue she had finished the day before was the september 3 food issue, and some of the articles in the food issue were about as tasteful and tantalizing as nineteen-day-old beef lo mein, slick with heavy lubricants and and packed with colorful but bland and oversteamed vegetables, all of it laminating the tongue and throat with its swampy bilge, leaving the eater quite certain that he or she is going to deeply regret having eaten it in an hour or two . . .

well, it was a much needed break. and no one is sadder about that than miss pearl, because she hasn't needed or wanted a break from the new yorker since 1995. she is so sad about it, in fact, that she is having some trouble accepting it and has been driven to speak about the incident in the third person. but she's coming to terms with it, and i think that maybe taking a moment to discuss some of her grievances will help everyone move on. so.

nauseator #1: calvin trillin on the street food of singapore. there would have been nothing wrong with this article if calvin had happened to be in singapore and decided, while he was there, to sample some of the local vendors' fare. in fact, that would have been a delightful article. i like asian food, i like street vendors, i like things on sticks, and i am passionate about noodles. i'm also fond of calvin overall. what i do not like so much is the idea of anyone, anyone, in this age of rampant pollution, impending fuel shortages, and the vast and relentless publicity surrounding both of those concerns (some of it spewing forth from the new yorker itself, hype whore that it is these days), hopping on a jet and flying to the other side of the planet for the sole purpose of sampling the local vendors' fare. the thought of it makes me crazy in all kinds of ways. of course the blind self-absorption of the act hurts my heart, but i think trillin's choice to write a gleeful six-page article about the act as though it were worthy of global notice and commendation hurts it more, and the new yorker's decision to run that article positively breaks it, since it means they have decided that they are catering to a readership that wants that kind of article. now, by "that kind of article" i don't mean food writing; lots of people love that, and i am often one of them. but while reading this article, one gets the feeling that trillin thinks he is a crazy, crazy rebel, eating food on the street while standing up like some kind of rough-knuckled, down-to-earth anydude, even though we all know that a round-trip business-class flight from new york to singapore costs somewhere around $7,000 and the quantity and variety of food he crammed into his oblivious, bottomless gullet while in singapore could easily have rung in at something similar. he may have said some intriguing things about singaporean cuisine, but the premise of the article was so ludicrous that i could just barely hear them. does anyone really go on vacation to eat? in all of singapore, there was nothing that trillin wanted to see more than the country's food courts? and he's planning his return trip before he's even landed back in the u.s., that's how natural all of it seems to him. well, it seems grotesque to me, and i am tempted to start up a "keep trillin fat in nyc" fund and buy the man some cooking lessons, so he can learn how to make char kway teow in his own home. i might love to read about his successes and follies in the kitchen. it isn't his style that's jogging all those greasy burps loose from the murky depths of my roiling bowels.

swerve from this to judith thurman, who chose to spend her vacation eating nothing at all. this is an endeavor that could, potentially, have some merit; alas, "could" is as close as we come. all promise is negated by her choice to (a) fast in an elite spa; (b) fast for only three days; and (c) attempt to draw correlates between this experience and the highly significant, often world-changing hunger strikes of various historical and religious figures, including gandhi. she speaks with great authority about the giddiness and energy some long-term fasters, including anorexics, can experience after many days without food—something i question her right to do, since "many" in this case means many more than she spent sipping juice in the swank california courtyard of We Care. i don't know who she thinks she is to lecture anyone about ramadan or christ's forty days in the desert, but after reading her piece i do have a new understanding of and empathy for job, who "got too depressed to eat." if anyone is interested in a writerly account of a non-"ultra-lush" fast, i recommend david rakoff's in don't get too comfortable, which describes a twenty-day diet of strange and intricate teas that the writer brews up in his own apartment. no facials, no core radiance breathwork practitioners, no yearning to achieve more highs by struggling through three more days of nectar-fueled pampering and therapeutic colonics in an isolated, high-end resort; just one hungry writer explaining that sometimes the things we think will build character by teaching us to endure suffering do build character, but in a completely different way—by showing us how dumb it was to think that what we were enduring was the kind of suffering that builds character. i think there is a very good chance that darling judith has not read this book.

but the star of the show, the mystery container on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator that has been leaking something sinister and cloudy and freckled with small mobile clots for the past three weeks, is adam gopnik, for his hopelessly and infuriatingly backwards foray into local eating. i have loved adam, i have, for many many moons, i have loved him with an everlasting love—but no more and never again. he has proven himself an insincere jumper of other people's trains, the very worst kind of ersatz environmentalist: the narrow-thinking, narrow-acting self-congratulator. and now he is my enemy. what a crying shame.

the idea of eating locally is a fine one, and the idea of defining acceptably local food as that grown within the confines of the five boroughs of new york city is about as extremist as local eating can get—even if you are only doing it for a week, as gopnik was. but the generally accepted point of local eating, as gopnik explains, is to "encourage sustainable agriculture by eating things . . . that don't have to be shipped halfway around the world, guzzling fossil fuel, to get to your table." gopnik claims to have been motivated at least in part by a desire to further the movement, to prove that city folk can hug trees, too. but how does he go about obtaining this local food, in a city with one of the most extensive and accessible public transportation systems in the world? why, he gets in his car, of course.

from somewhere on the upper east side, gopnik travels to the decker farm in staten island, reachable by subway and bus but only "fifteen minutes across the verrazano-narrows bridge." he heads to the red hook community farm in brooklyn, nine miles away and easy to get to by subway if you aren't afraid to walk a few blocks, which i can't imagine any long-time new yorker being. but he and his kids and his greenmarket-guru guide tool on over and back in their own car. he drives to the bronx—a distance of five miles, a little less than the distance i commute to work every morning—to try to bully some kindhearted man into slaughtering one of the beloved egg chickens he has been raising in a carefully and determinedly maintained city coop. and at the end of all this he has the balls to refer to his toe-dip in the pool of conscientious living as "M.T.A. localism," even though he mentions having made use of the m.t.a. over the course of his week-long experiment exactly once. you do not get to make up for the food miles you have spared by buying locally, adam gopnik, that is not how the plan works, and if this flirtation with the hip new shade of green were more than a fleeting whim for you, you would have realized that. at the very least, you might have felt compelled to leave the references to your car out of the article. but you didn't mean it, did you? it was just something to write a story about. one week, to prove that it could be done, even by someone like you, and then everything could go back to normal. because "normal" has, obviously, been really great for everything so far.

he got his chicken, you know; not from that decent man who read him the riot act outside of the bronx's garden of happiness but from a different place (also in the bronx, between ten and fifteen blocks from the garden, and which he also drove to) that seems to have suited him better, where someone was happy to butcher and bag a chicken that had been "born elsewhere, arrived in hope, lived in cramped quarters, ended its New York existence violently and unexpectedly at the hands of someone with a fatal amount of money." of course, it isn't the money that's fatal, is it? it's the mindset; it's the choice of the person with the money to use it to do whatever makes him or her happy, the rest of the world and all that's living in it be damned. some of these people have children who seem like spoiled brats, by the way, and i'm fairly certain that isn't a coincidence. when your parents can't understand that local eating is a tiny corner of the vast landscape of environmental action, not a trendy new ribbon to pin to their suit jacket, of course you're going to wind up guzzling snapple on your central park safari. did he not bring his kids along in an attempt to teach them something? did he simply think his story required a cynical foil for his own pureness of heart? the trek through the urban pasture with wildman steve brill is something that was also done by david rakoff and recounted in don't get too comfortable. i think it is wholly possible that gopnik has read the book, but i'm not sure he read it right. in any case, it is disappointing that rakoff doesn't have some kind of byline in this issue. its writers appear to owe him tremendously for reminding them of their station.

ohhhh, sick, sick, sick. is this what the new yorker is going to be from now on, snooty blather interspersed with masturbatory jaunts into common living and faux deprivation? i read the september 17 issue; i have no recollection of it. i'm halfway through the september 24 style issue, but the only strong thought i've had associated with it is, "didn't they just put out a style issue?" i'm pretty sure it hasn't been a full year since the last one, and what's that all about? the new yorker isn't supposed to be about style, it isn't supposed to be stylish; it's supposed to be smart. i thought i could count on the better part of its staff to refrain from being pompous blowhards between the pages, at least. maybe someone is giving them too much leash. maybe someone is setting a poor example. (*ahemREMNICKahem*)

and yet, like a battered, co-dependent lover, i can't say good-bye. i believe that everything could still be turned around, if we both want it enough. be it optimism or delusion, it's led me to purchase a ticket to gladwell v. gopnik at this year's new yorker festival. i trust my malcolm to make a case i can get behind, or at least appreciate. he'll never offend me so much as this last batch of vainglorious twaddle did, and he'd have to work awfully hard to top his highest offense to date: the "talk of the town" piece on student discipline, in which he tried to convince me that the world would have been far worse off if robert oppenheimer had been expelled after trying to kill a teacher with a poison apple, because if he had been we'd never have been able to melt the faces off of all those women and children in japan. ohhhhh, i was very angry that day, and the day after that. but i forgave him, because his heart was almost entirely in the right place, and because he was thinking about sports. he gets a little irrational about sports. sadly, even when he isn't thinking about sports at all, sometimes he doesn't think his arguments through from every angle. it's sweet, in its way, that he thinks everyone must see the same shades of good and bad as he does, because they tend to be sweet shades. but it's also naïve and a substantial soft spot in his armor, and i hope that it doesn't create problems in the upcoming debate, because if he doesn't mop the floor with gopnik, i will, and i will not do it in a polite, parliamentary manner. i will rush the stage and roll his fool ass. and i'll take the subway both ways to do it.