Bay Area Bites » Meghan Laslocky

Ken Burns discusses his new documentary “The Dust Bowl”

Meghan Laslocky — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 16:03:12 +0000

On November 18 and 19, KQED will broadcast the premiere of “The Dust Bowl,” a new two-part documentary by Ken Burns that explores the most severe, man-made ecological catastrophe in American history — one that resulted in dust storms that raged for years, destroyed crops, and still haunts its survivors. Meghan Laslocky sat down with Burns to talk about the film.

Ken Burns discussing The Dust Bowl in KQED’s green room. Photo: Wendy Goodfriend

Q: Were there specific recent events or environmental policies that inspired you to make “The Dust Bowl”?
A: Actually no. I’m a historical filmmaker, so I’m drawn to what the word “history” is mostly made of, which is “story.” We understood that the Dust Bowl had receded into a conventional wisdom; people think it’s just the The Grapes of Wrath, the John Steinbeck novel, and that’s it, when it’s really a much more complicated story about the worst man-made ecological disaster in all of American history, if not world history. For us it was a chance to get to know the few remaining survivors, people who were children and teenagers at the time, and try to bring this cataclysm — this ten year apocalypse — to life. The fact that that apocalypse was superimposed over the Great Depression, which is the greatest economic cataclysm in our country, just gave it resonance, as if it was hurt squared. We just dove down deep into the story to try to understand the reasons why it happened, why it was a man-made event, and how people survived it. The Dust Bowl killed not only [people’s] crops and cattle but their children. [We also explored] what the government did after helping to sponsor the foolish land rush into this area that should never have [been plowed], how the government began to heroically help the even more heroic people who stayed in the Dust Bowl.

But I’m not unmindful of the fact in any film that I do, it will, like almost all subjects, resonate with things of today. But we are not specifically trying to point arrows at them, we are not trying to have a neon sign saying “think about global warming,” “think about sustainability,” think about this theme or that theme. We just know that when you tell good stories well, there is a collision between these narratives that sets off some free electrons, and those free electrons resonate with things that are happening today. I’m thrilled in a way that “The Dust Bowl” has promoted so much contemporary conversation, but I’m also just incredibly disappointed that the film is so topical, because we’re in the middle of another drought, farm families are suffering again, and that’s not a good thing.

And the worst storm of all hit on Palm Sunday, April 14, 1935—a day remembered as Black Sunday. Here the storm sweeps over a farmstead on its way toward Boise City. Credit: Courtesy of Associated Press

Q: I was astonished by the enormity of the disaster, how little I knew about it, aside from the tangential The Grapes of Wrath. I even asked my parents, who had grown up in the 30s, my mother in even in the Midwest, what they remembered, and they didn’t know much about it. Why did it recede so quickly?
A: Almost everything in American history recedes after the passage of time, and things fall out of fashion. George Washington in the 19th century! School kids could recite his speeches by heart, and it was important to know where he had spent the night. Now that’s a joke, and we know very little about him generally. So if George Washington, the most important person in setting our country in motion, could be lost, than any subject could be lost.

Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath is about tenant farmers from eastern Oklahoma, who have to leave because of the collapse of the cotton crop caused by the Depression and the drought, while our film focuses on the landowners of the Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl was called “No Man’s Land” originally because it was quite correctly understood to be not a place for human habitation and certainly not human agriculture. While our film travels to California, where most of The Grapes of Wrath takes place, to look at the Okies, the diaspora, the “exodusters” as they were called in California, [it’s important to remember] that more than 75% [of the population] stayed in the concentrated area of the panhandle of Oklahoma and nearby parts of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado and Kansas — the parts of the five-state area that made up “No Man’s Land” and the heart of the Dust Bowl.

Even though during the 1930s, 46 of the 48 states were suffering some kind of drought, I think that for most other people, those memories become like PTSD. They just get locked away, and we tend to forget. Generations don’t ask about them. But everybody experienced the dust storms because they went all the way east and deposited dirt on Franklin Roosevelt’s desk and covered ships out at sea in the Atlantic. That got everybody’s attention. It wasn’t just one storm or two storms or even a dozen storms, it was hundreds of storms over ten years that were killers. Some were a mile and a half high and a hundred and fifty, 200 miles wide. “A big mountain range,” the writer Tim Egan says in our film, “moving toward you.”

Q: But do you think there’s something particular to American culture though that turns its back on these stories?
A: I think it’s probably partly American culture in so far that we are still a relatively new nation. We tend to burn our history behind us, like rocket fuel, as if we’re always going forward, and that’s not always the best thing. As we get older, though, we begin to understand the centrality of history to understanding not only where we were but where we are. The past is gone, we will never get it back, but history is the set of questions that we in the present ask the past. It is informed, however unconsciously or subconsciously, by our own wishes and fears and desires and hopes. So very strangely, history very quickly becomes about our future. We use history to give us guides, examples of leadership and heroism and perseverance, but also these incredible stories that remind us how very much like then was to now, and how very much like now is to then. And that is a hugely important and liberating thing. We can arm ourselves with the tools we’ll need to take care of these problems.

Q: Have you always been a serious reader of history?
A: Oh, I’ve read history all my life, and not seriously, just for fun. I never knew that I’d be involved in history. I’ve wanted to be a filmmaker since I was 12 years old, but I had the greatest harmonic convergence in college where the interest in film intersected with an interest in documentary and then an interest in history and it all came together. I’ve been so fortunate to passionately know what I’ve wanted to do now for 37 years and have done it. Making films exclusively on American history and exclusively for public television, I consider myself extraordinarily lucky. I feel like I have the best job in the country.

FSA photographer Dorothea Lange came across Florence Thompson and her children in a pea pickers’ camp in Nipomo, California, in March 1936. Credit: Courtesy of Library of Congress

Q: Do you remember when you first read about the Dust Bowl?
A: My dad was really smart, an anthropologist, and so it’s hard to say that I learned it first at school, but I do remember mentions of it in school. Maybe it was Dorothea Lange’s famous photograph of the migrant farm mother, maybe it was a picture of a dust storm. But it’s almost never taught. People remember the Depression and the New Deal with a much more clarity because the argument about big government or less government is a perennial conversation. But for me, this project was brought to life by my production partner, Dayton Duncan, whom I’ve worked with for more than 20 years. He’d written a nonfiction book called “Miles from Nowhere” about those counties that still have fewer than two people per square mile, which used to be the definition of the frontier. Some of those were Dust Bowl counties. He encouraged Tim Egan, who is the great writer who did “The Worst Hard Time,” which is an extraordinary book about the Dust Bowl. He is in our film, and was an advisor to our film. As we saw light at the end of the tunnel after a very long multi-year project on the history of the national parks, and coming off another experience I had working with a different producer on the history of the Second World War, Dayton and I decided we needed to go see if there were enough living folks who could narrate our story to make it worthwhile to dive deeply into the Dust Bowl. Fortunately we were able to find folks who were kids and teenagers then, but their memories are no less reliable and no less powerful.

Q: This might feel like a stretch, but characters in “The Dust Bowl” honestly reminded me of Holocaust survivors who are in their eighties. This the last opportunity to capture their stories.
A: We are beginning to understand that war almost necessarily creates post traumatic stress, but we have come recently to understand that many other things do too. I lost my mother to cancer when I was 11 years old, and there was never a moment when I was aware that she wasn’t desperately ill, which is a kind of traumatic experience. Everyone has traumatic experiences like that. The Dust Bowl must have been a ten-year apocalyptic event — I won’t call it a holocaust because we need to honor that event — but you’ll see people in the film who break down and cry, remembering in their late eighties and early nineties, about the death of a sibling who had not reached 2 1/2 years old, a little sister who died early in 1935, which is an awfully long time ago. They break down as if that event had happened yesterday. It begins to tell you how present memory is, and how important it is for us to ask these questions and try to access these memories, however painful that might be. There’s a healing that can take place in the talking about it. We found it with World War II veterans and we find everywhere. These traumatic events live on inside people, and I think we have an obligation to hear them out.

Q: The film does have so many deeply tragic, and occasionally violent, moments, like the scene with the jackrabbits, and the stories about shooting the cows. Did you rein that in or temper it a bit?
A: All editing is a centering process. I come from New England, where we make maple syrup, and it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. So what we do [in filmmaking] is a distillation process. In any given scene, you have a lot more [material] that you can use, and some scenes you want to do more, and sometimes you want to do less. It’s always a careful calibration, particularly in the film with what were called “rabbit drives,” when the ecology of [the Dust Bowl] had become so out of balance because of the plowing up of the grasslands, the drought that had come in as a result of the normal climate there, a new wave of hard times, and then the dust blowing because the crops were failing. Jack rabbits would swarm and eat everything that was remaining — family gardens and lawns and grasses and trees — and [people] would have these grisly rabbit drives that would beat them to death. It’s very carefully modulated in the film. There was a lot more that we could have put in and didn’t just out of the fact that this is already a sustaining tragedy in which heroic perseverance is an important value, but you don’t ever want to overload it. That’s what I get paid to do: decide how long certain stuff goes on. We found this in the World War II series where people are describing horrible things, and you need to balance that with other things.

Q: So a film like this can makes one feel fearful and powerless. What do you suggest that say consumers in California do to help prevent in another Dust Bowl?
A: Well, I’d like to take the word “consumers” off and just say, “citizens.” I think that human beings and maybe particularly Americans — I don’t know enough about other people to make a categorical judgment — don’t plan for the long term. The Dust Bowl is the greatest man-made ecological disaster in American history so far. What makes us fearful is that we see all of the ingredients for other disasters, like the fragility of our oceans and their potential collapse and other droughts that are bringing new dust storms this year. And while we have technology that is bringing up ancient water from the Ogallala Aquifer and drenching our crops [in the Great Plains] to keep the soil in place, that water will run out. We are mining that water. It’s not a sustainable source. So one hopes that a film like ours will be part of a conversation about long term planning, about sustainability, about asking the very basic questions that we often don’t ask, particularly in urban areas, about where our food comes from. Now the good news is that for the last 30 or 40 years there has been an amazing movement about whole and organic foods, about eating sustainably, about eating local foods, about respecting the environment, and so there is within our larger, mostly ignorant culture people who are striving to live better lives in relationship to the land and their food sources. The Dust Bowl will come as no surprise to them even though the information might be utterly new, just because they have a sensitivity to nature. Now the question is: How do we bring it out to other folks who might change their ways. I live in a little rural town in New Hampshire and in recent years the nearby farmers who hay our open fields have switched to organic farming, and they need to make sure that I don’t do anything to the field and that they don’t do anything to the field that would jeopardize their ability to certify the hay that they harvest as organic. [That’s an] amazing change for farm families that have been there in some cases in our town for more than 200 years.

Q: Speaking of the Ogallala Aquifer, which is now used to irrigate the area that was once the Dust Bowl as well as much of the plains, can you tell us more about its future?
A: There are some places where it has run out. It’s a big vast underground cistern that is irregular in size and basically collected a lot of water as the last Ice Age retreated, so it’s not being replenished by rainwater. It’s down too far. And some people — the Cassandras who worry about it — think it has 20 more years, and others are saying it has 50 more years. But it’s a finite period, and it will run out. I’m not suggesting that the Dust Bowl will immediately reappear. We do have time to plan for that eventuality. We do have time to moderate our use of [the water]. We are spending an awful lot irrigating incredibly thirsty crops. Wheat is relatively easy to grow and requires minimal moisture, which is why it was possible in those slightly wetter years to have good wheat crops in a place where they shouldn’t have been planting at all. They’re still planting down there, and they’re not just planting wheat. They’re planting feed corn, and corn is just incredibly thirsty. This is part of the bargain we have to make: What will we use our resources for?

Q: Are there any policies that are in the works that will help deal with the eventuality?
A: You know, planning long term is a political football that is so difficult for anyone to exhibit any courage with. There are so many interlocking things. The government pays a great deal of people on the plains and elsewhere in agriculture not to plant crops. It’s a subsidy that doesn’t appear to them like welfare, but they look in disdain at social programs that help the poorest people just rise up from starvation and real abject poverty to a livable poverty. So you have great conflicting interests in the country about dealing with these things. That’s where the real fear ought to come from: the fact that we find it very difficult to reach compromise and consensus about long term planning that would help to obviate the impending crises and help to mitigate the ones that will inevitably come up.

Ken Burns being interviewed at KQED. Photo: Wendy Goodfriend

Q: Are you at all optimistic that progress will be made?
A: Of course! I make history. History is all about the future. You don’t make history unless you think that we can’t take something from the past and transform it into action in the present.

Q: There are dust storms on the rise in the southwest. What can you tell us about those?
A: They are very few and far between. There are always dust storms. This happens when you have loose stuff on the ground and winds. You get dust storms under certain weather conditions, so that will always be happening. Phoenix, for example, had a dust storm in 2011 that was quite significant and dramatic, but nowhere near the size, length, scope, duration and frequency as what happened in the Dust Bowl. And they’re in a desert, so it’s not inconceivable that dry air and cold air from the north and winds combine to make a dust storm. What we are now seeing though is the possibility that with the combination of drought, winds, and crops that have failed, some of that exposed top soil will blow again. A lot of people are doing stuff. I met a farmer from Iowa who is a “no-till” farmer, that is to say, a lot of people do “clean-till”: they get all of the organic material out of the last season’s crop and have that big moist dirt, but that’s also in drought susceptible to blowing. And it doesn’t retain the moisture; the moisture just seeps through. So if you leave a lot of organic material in [the dirt], it traps and captures the moisture, and the yields are just as great. So I think we are learning, and struggling, but inevitably it is always slow to find consensus. It’s interesting that the Dust Bowl, the crisis that it was, precipitated relatively quick action: These independent farmers who didn’t want anyone, particularly the government, telling them what to do, within a couple of years are going to the government and saying, “Tell us what to do.” The soil conservation service, in the form of Howard Finnell — one of the great heroes of this story — started instituting extraordinary measures about how to plow differently, [as with] contour plowing, and how to rotate crops, how to save as much moisture as you can, how to return some land to grassland. Lots of wonderful restoration that is still in place and farmers are still trying to practice in the Dust Bowl area.

Q: One thing I didn’t understand in terms of the mechanics of the Dust Bowl and subsequent recovery was how any recovery was possible if the top soil all blew away? What was left to work with?
A: Sometimes nothing, and that was the ecological disaster. There are still some places that are unfarmable because of the sand dunes there. A lot of that land has been bought up and is being returned to grassland, and a lot of it has been remediated. You can bulldoze the sand level, and you can add organic material, and you can begin to develop replacement top soil, but the hard pan, just below the top soil that was exposed, you can’t break it up with the heel of your boot.

Q: What does No Man’s Land — the epicenter of the Dust Bowl — look like now?
A: It’s still heavily agricultural. They’re drawing on Ogallala water. There are places that look exactly like a desert. The grasslands are within that area that the United States has bought and created national grasslands. They are very arid. They don’t seem to us exactly what we would think grasslands would be like; they seem almost at the edge of a desert. And they are plagued by the contemporary droughts right now, and fires that go through, and lightning strikes. All of a sudden a stand of cottonwood trees that line a dry river that only runs for a few short weeks in the spring after the snow melt looks like charred stumps. It’s a forbidding place, but you also see where the irrigation has come in and people are growing all sorts of crops, not just wheat.

Q: What has been the reaction in the community your film?
A: I think it’s been almost uniformly positive. There are a few people that would want to make a little bit of an argument about whether this is truly man-made, but they really don’t have a leg to stand on. It’s interesting that in Boise City, which is the geographical center of it all and the county seat of Cimarron County and the far western tip of the Oklahoma panhandle, there’s still a little godforsaken sign in the middle of the town square that says, “Pray for Rain.” It’s always, “If it rains, if it rains, if it rains.” “Rain follows the plow” was one of the most ridiculous, completely bogus theories that the very act of plowing would bring more rain. It was invented by real estate speculators who were trying to make a killing selling farm land to people who couldn’t afford other, richer, more viable farm land.

Q: Are there particular communities that you’re doing a push in with the film to try and change attitudes?
A: We aren’t trying to change attitudes. What we’re trying to do is make good films, and good films hopefully are good stories. We want to share those stories, and what people do with them is what they do with them. We inevitably have a promotional campaign for every film, and we began last April, on the anniversary of Black Sunday, the worst storm of all, April 14, 1935, we assembled in Goodwill, Oklahoma, a tiny, tiny town as many of the survivors that we interviewed as possible. We’ve already lost a few and have lost some since then, and then we go around to major American cities, but also in Oklahoma and Texas and other places and show them clips of the film and talk to people and show them. We see it as a human drama and an oral history. And then what people do, and the kind of conversation that will be promoted all remains to be seen. But part of being in San Francisco is to take people, and there are very few farms in San Francisco, and talk to them about a farming subject. Because it is always an important stop along the way of promoting our films.

Q: What does the companion book, “The Dust Bowl” have in it that the film doesn’t?
A: Well, Dayton Duncan, who wrote the film and conducted most of the interviews, and is really the author of this project, is a writer in addition to being a producer. The book affords him the opportunity to re-present the story in a different medium and allows him to expand the things that editing necessarily, because of the exigencies of film, require us to take out. He could add more detail that might bog a film down but doesn’t bog a book down. So it’s a thrilling thing for him that after we lock the film, he has this creative outlet that expands what the film has. At the same time, the film will reach many millions more people than the book will.

Q: Do you have any opinions about Prop 37, the proposition about labeling genetically modified foods that did not pass in California.
A: I have a child who has a peanut allergy, and we’re beginning to wonder whether in fact many of these allergies that are cropping up among kids that didn’t exist when I was growing up are the result of us genetically modifying various things like soybeans, or other products. So I am very much [in favor], as a concerned parent who has this terrible Damocles hanging over a beautiful little girl, very much for the accurate labeling of what has been genetically modified and what hasn’t. We’re finding that the human immune system is not necessarily equipped to handle these slightly modified molecules from the original substance that they may be completely tolerant of. For that little girl’s reasons, and a million more, I’m sorry it didn’t pass.

Information:

Website: The Dust Bowl
Facebook: Ken Burns (PBS)
Twitter: @KenBurns
KQED airtimes for The Dust Bowl

Related Stories:

‘The Dust Bowl’ Unearths American Values from Greed to Grift to Grit (KQED Arts)
Ken Burns Teaches Mission Students Lessons From the Dust Bowl (MissionLocal)

Q & A with Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic, author of “Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate”

Meghan Laslocky — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 18:42:15 +0000

For picky eaters worldwide, longtime Bay Area Bites and Grub Report blogger Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic’s first book, “Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate,” will generate a collective fist-pump. “See? See? We’re not crazy!” I can imagine them shouting, slamming the book down among doubters at the dinner tables where they’ve been made to feel like freaks for their whole lives.

Then, for a non-picky eater like me, reading “Suffering Succotash” is a necessary, if guilt-inducing wake-up call: all those picky eaters I’ve known and rolled my eyes over are not necessarily passive-aggressive control freaks who enjoy wielding power at the dinner table, nor are they xenophobes or any of the other horrible things I’m sure I’ve subconsciously assumed about them. Rather, they are just like anyone else who is not in entire control of their own body.

Fortunately, Stephanie delivers the news with such aplomb and humor that I didn’t wind up self-flagellating with a garland of raisins for too long. There are many laugh-out loud moments in the book — only Stephanie could write a diatribe on her mother’s nose for cat pee, after all — but just as important, there’s more than a little something for everyone in the book (after all, everyone eats), including an introduction to the little known “sixth taste”; what tests are necessary to maybe identify a true “super taster”; useful differentiations between “lying picky eaters” and “honest picky eaters”; why from a bio-evolutionary perspective picky eating might well be advantageous; and how many a picky eater, Stephanie included, can wind up morphing into a full-blown foodie. Oh, and some kick-ass recipes (I’ve already made Stephanie’s standby roasted broccoli, originally from Food 52, and I’m moving on tonight to her sautéed okra.

What follows is a Q & A with Stephanie. Full disclosure: I’m mentioned in her acknowledgements due to a quick allusion in “Suffering Succotash” to just how vain I am about my bookshelves, a characteristic I hope at least I gain points for at least being honest about it, just like an “honest picky eater.”

Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic. Photo: Sam Breach

The title of your book, “Suffering Succotash,” is so perfect and so smart. Did you struggle to come up with that title, or did it just come to you in a flash one day?

I was simply brainstorming titles and subtitles one day, and among other less inspiring results like “Confessions of a Picky Eater” and “From Picky to Foodie, My Painful Journey of Food Waste,” I scribbled down “Suffering Succotash.” It was just working title for a long time, totally a placeholder, and I didn’t want to get too attached to it. Given that it is the trademark expression of Loony Tunes’ Sylvester the Cat, I really didn’t think we’d be allowed to use it for the book. Luckily for me, it turns out that not even the Warner Brothers folks can lay original claim to “Suffering Succotash,” because it’s a minced oath, which is an expression that the devout came up when they needed to swear but didn’t particularly feel like going to Hell. “Suffering Succotash” is the de-brimstoned version of “Suffering Savior” — just as “Gosh” or “Golly” subs in for “God.” Other lesser known minced oaths include “Cheese and rice” for “Jesus Christ,” “Gadzooks” for “Gods hooks,” which refers to the nails on Christ’s cross, and “criminy” for “Christ’s money,” aka the thirty pieces of silver Judas pocketed to betray Jesus. You know, good fun.

You take such care in the book to make clear that for picky eaters, it’s not so much that they won’t eat certain foods, but more that they can’t — a very important distinction and one that takes non-picky eaters like me by surprise and leaves us feeling a bit like we’ve been horribly insensitive and ignorant. What are other important “takeaway” messages about picky eaters that you think non-picky eaters really must know?

Being a picky eater is not fun. In fact, it really sucks. It sucks to be scared of restaurants, it sucks to get anxious when traveling in foreign locations, it sucks to avoid family gatherings, but what sucks the most is the shame and embarrassment picky eaters carry. Picky eating is not a choice. Picky eaters are not being whiny or high maintenance or xenophobic, they are reacting to their instincts, their biology, their genetics, and their past experiences.

Also, people have varying success when it comes to “getting over” picky eating. Just because some people do doesn’t mean all can. I’d really like non-picky eaters to think of foods they really hate and imagine what life would be like for them if those foods were the only foods out there. Food preferences are subjective, just like music preferences. You wouldn’t call me whiny, high maintenance, or tween-o-phobic just because I don’t like Miley Cyrus, would you?

No one would choose to be a picky eater.

What about picky eating in other cultures, specifically in ones where there is far less variety in terms of diet? Are there picky eaters everywhere, no matter what the choices and culture, or is it possible that picky eating is something of a reaction to abundance?

I can only hypothesize since it’s not my area of expertise, but statistically speaking, it stands to reason that when you have a large variety of choices the chances are pretty favorable that there are going to be some things you don’t like. It used to be that grocery stores carried one kind of cheese or one variety of tomato, but today we theoretically have access to a larger variety of food than we ever did before, so it makes sense people aren’t going to like every piece of fruit or slice of cheese out there. This is also why I question the idea that picky eating is on the rise among children or if it’s simply that we now have so many more foods that have the potential to be disliked.

I think it’s also safe to say that there are people all around the world who like some foods and dislike other foods; that’s just biology, access, or life experience. Whether those dislikes translate into “picky eating” as we define it is not something I can say definitively. Anecdotally, my father grew up poor, and it never occurred to him not to eat the food that was put in front of him. He may not have liked everything, but he ate it anyway.

To non-picky eaters, until they read your book, it seems strange that an entire book could be devoted to picky eating. At what point did you know that you had an entire book’s worth of material on picky eating?

I always knew I had a lot to say and many stories to tell but what I didn’t know was the sheer amount of information I’d be able to dig up that could explain so many things, like why always defaulting to “let’s talk about Supertasters” when talking about picky eaters is often inaccurate and a dead end. The deeper into my research I burrowed, the more information I found and the more fascinated I became with the topic. There were so many instances of, “Yes! This explains SO MUCH!” Like how the horror some picky eaters have of foods touching can be related to the Borgia “We Live to Poison” Family and extended to the idea that picky eaters will inherit the universe. Or how a chance encounter with Hare Krishna beliefs combined with something Jacques Pépin once told me turned into a quick and painless session of family therapy that would probably resonate with other picky eaters. I could go on and on about lemonade and skunk smells and picky eaters in the Bible being killed off by plagues, but I’ll save space and encourage people to just read the book.

Your book is in some ways a manifesto for picky eaters, and you even suggest that picky eaters “stand proud.” Tell us a bit more about what you mean by that.

Hah! I originally thought of my exhort to “stand picky, stand proud” as a battle cry, but I like the idea of writing an entire manifesto. Makes me sound like I”m holed up in a bunker somewhere plotting mass raisin deaths.

What I mean by “stand picky, stand proud” is to not be ashamed of who you are. If you are picky, so be it. Own it. Realize it’s not your fault, that it’s out of your control, and that anyone who hassles you can read my book to educate themselves on the facts of picky eating and hopefully gain a modicum of empathy.

“Suffering Succotash” is the first book written by a picky eater for picky eaters, and part of my mission in writing it and getting all this research, information, and shared experiences out there is to, as I say in the book, give picky eaters their day in the sun. It’s time someone told their story and put a kibosh on all those “picky eaters are sooooo annoying” articles that get written every holiday season.

Imagine for a moment that you are sent off to a desert island for three months, and your only food supplies to keep you going for those three months are the foods you’ve declared in “Suffering Succotash” you hate most: raisins, bananas, oatmeal, cream of wheat, grits, polenta, the skin of tomatoes, caviar, offal, cooked green peppers, cooked green beans, particular fish, figs, dates, particular melons, stews, braises, gelatinous desserts, rabbit, veal, dill, black licorice, tarragon, lemongrass, coleslaw, mozzarella cheese, mayonnaise, rice pudding, particular leafy greens, cooked cherries, fruit flavored chocolate, fried rice with peas and carrots, tapioca, cream sauces, and grape leaves and seaweed. What would you do?

Starve. No, I’m kidding. That’s the list of foods I prefer not to have in my mouth if I had the choice. However since I’ve overcome my hatred of so many other things, I’m pretty confident I would do okay on a weird-ass island that managed to produce cream of wheat AND mayonnaise with minimal gagging. But not raisins. Raisins are pure evil.

I guess I would just have to get myself in “I eat this or I die” mindset. It would be a far more powerful motivator than trying to impress my boyfriend, which was my original impetus for getting over certain food hates. I would take deep breaths and try relax. I would have to forget the whole “marooned on a desert island with no hope of rescue” thing, which would probably be at odds with the “trying to relax” thing.

In the face of certain death by starvation, I don’t think it would be too difficult for anyone to eat the things one hates the most. I mean, people have drunk their own urine for survival!

Meet Stephanie in person and buy a copy of her book at one of these Bay Area events:

July 9, 2012
Reading & Signing
Omnivore Books
San Francisco, CA
6:00 PM

July 10, 2012
Reading & Signing
Book Passage San Francisco
San Francisco, CA
6:00 PM

July 26, 2012
Read-Along, Live Chat, and Raisin Bash Session
Tomato Nation
Online
5:30 PT/8:30 ET

August 26, 2012
Litquake Peninsula Mini-Fest
Oshman Family Jewish Community Center
Palo Alto, CA
5:00 PM

August 29, 2012
Reading & Signing
Kepler’s Books
Menlo Park, CA
7:00 PM

September 13, 2012
Reading & Signing
The Tyler Florence Shops
Mill Valley, CA
6:00 PM

“The Picky Years” BAB Posts:

It’s Easy Being Green on Halloween

Meghan Laslocky — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:17:56 +0000

Two Halloweens ago, I bashed baby costumes, and heaped quite specific vitriol on the infamous Martha Stewart lobster baby costume.

Little did I know that a year later, I’d be knocked up (the planned kind of knocked up), and that two years later (meaning now), I’d lie awake at night lactating and plotting my baby’s first truly public embarrassment: his 2009 Halloween costume.

I’ve actually hated Halloween for years — to me, it’s no more than excuse for otherwise pleasant adults to turn into masked assholes. The few times in the past 20 years that I’ve deigned to go out in costume on Halloween, I’ve resorted to my cactus get-up, which consists of green clothes + clothespins. The cactus get-up is perfect for those, like me, who are: 1) lazy, 2) cheap, and 3) open to the possibility of foreplay à la clothespin.

With the arrival of Henry, the erotic possibilities of clothespins have dramatically receded, and even I’m not mean enough to dress my child up as a cactus (imagine the “Oh, he’s a prick!” jokes). I am, however, still lazy and cheap. And I love to kill two birds with one stone.

So, here was the suite of conditions for Henry’s costume since he’s more fun to dress up than I am:

1) Food-related so it could be BAB’d

2) Super easy because I’m exhausted

3) Cheap because we’re in a recession

4) Handmade because I’m a snob

5) Green because it’s his color and my color, and because these days you just can’t go wrong with green

6) Wearable as a winter-layer long after Oct. 31 because I can’t find a winter jacket for a 12-month-old that I don’t think is horrid, and I’m sure as hell not going to sew TWO different things this fall when I could just sew ONE.

So, taking all of those factors into account, the only real solution was a poncho that could be interpreted as a costume. A fleece poncho. A green fleece poncho.

With this vague green fuzzy vision, Henry and I headed off to Stonemountain and Daughter Fabrics to cruise. And little by little, notion by notion, we assembled the materials that would prevent the erroneous perception of Henry as a Bolivian Kermit or a marijuana leaf fit for the Jolly Green Giant.

Photo and Photoshop by Wendy Goodfriend

Presto: A salad costume! Throw him around and he’s a tossed salad. If he’s tired, he’s a wilted salad. Put him on a horse and he’s a Cobb salad. Not only will this costume get a kid through the cold months, but it can also double as a Christmas tree blanket.

Ingredients: Fleece, buttons, rickrack, thread, brazen enthusiasm for humiliating your child.

The Infantivore’s Dilemma

Meghan Laslocky — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:17:35 +0000

Note: Don’t read this if you work for CPS or find my other posts disgusting or offensive. Move along now. I mean it.

Self-basting Henry preps for grilling

Tough times call for tough decisions. The California unemployment rate now stands at over 12 percent, and I’ve been underemployed since April. My cup of beans and rice runneth under, so I’m taking a cue from all those folks who have told me Henry is so cute they could just eat him. In short, I have a modest proposal.

Among carnivores and vegetarians alike, the mere sight of juicy baby leg — peeking out from the gap between the hem of Gymboree overalls and the top of the Robeez soft sole — is enough to trigger salivation of Pavlovian proportions. Breastfed Henry weighs about 23 pounds now, and I figure that whether stewed, roasted, baked or even boiled, in a fricassee or a ragout, he’d make a most delicious and nourishing wholesome food. In fact, I’m fairly certain I could get several meals out of him, not counting soup stock.

Babies are high in fat and must therefore be quite tasty. Think about it: the ratio of fat to muscle in babies, especially before they start walking, likely exceeds that of ducks, and we all know ducks are scrumptious. Ergo, babies must be even more scrumptious.

There’s also the convenience factor: babies make great, quick and easy weeknight suppers. Though this recipe suggests roasting, I’m a crock pot fan myself. Throw the baby in the crock pot in the morning with some carrots, celery, bay leaf, and water, and presto, by the time you get home from work, dinner’s ready.

But let’s put aside advantages of taste and convenience for a moment and focus on the most important thing: the planet. Eating my baby is the only environmentally responsible way in which I can address my pantry problem. If you too are a mom, a foodie, and a tree hugger, you can’t afford NOT to eat your baby.

First of all, when it comes to eating local, you can’t get much more local than your child’s nursery (or, for those of you without children, the family-based child care center around the corner). I can feel good knowing that a meal I prepare from my baby has virtually no carbon footprint: I have hauled him myself with a Baby Bjorn for nearly 11 months now, so the only energy expended has been courtesy of my own caloric intake.

Secondly, babies are free-range and cage-free (especially babies that co-sleep). I don’t have to worry that my meal never saw the light of day or felt green grass under its feet. I’ve taken my baby to the park at least three times a week since he was born. One could also argue that he’s grass fed, as he just ate grass while crawling toward the swings in Willard Park on Sunday. When you eat your own baby, you can rest assured knowing exactly what he ate and when, down to his last spoonful of organic squash from the farmer’s market that you steamed and pureed yourself. If you’re really careful about your baby’s diet, you can even rest assured that he, and therefore you, isn’t tainted by that heinous hydra of the industrial food complex: corn.

Babies are also available all year round, so say bye bye to what I call “out-of-season guilt,” the kind that garnishes lamb in November and tomatoes in January.

It’s actually hard to imagine a more sustainable food than baby, particularly breast-fed baby. If you eat only organic, local food, and your baby eats only breast milk and organic, local food, wears organic clothes (Think of it! No plastic grocery bags!) and G-diapers, as soon as you’ve thrown that kid in the crockpot, you’ve become a model sustainable eater. What other food can you create with your own body and feed with your own body? In food terms, it’s a perfect circle.

Save the planet: eat your baby.

End this barbecue season with a bang.

** Disclaimer: No babies were actually barbecued during the photoshoot for this post thanks to an Eye Candy Photoshop filter. Don’t try this at home…or anywhere else.

Photos and Photoshop by Wendy Goodfriend

I’ll have my baby with a side of placenta

Meghan Laslocky — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 16:08:00 +0000

Note: Don’t read this if you find my other posts disgusting or offensive. Move along now. I mean it.

I suspect that our doula saw my stash of pop tarts on top of the refrigerator. That would explain her hesitant tone when she called me after I had called her, hysterical, three weeks before my baby was due. Some women get post-partum depression; in my case, I had a whopper case of pre-partum depression, which, needless to say, did not bode well the post part of the partum.

“Um, Meghan, I know this might really not be your style, but maybe you’d like to think about something that I’ve read can help fend off post-partum,” she said.

“Anything, anything!” I would have freebased free range koala turds at that point if it meant I would okay after the birth.

“You could have your placenta, uh, processed,” she said.

“Processed?”

“Some studies have shown that consuming your placenta after the birth can prevent post-partum depression. And I know someone who can process it for you. Into pills.”

Pills, eh? Well now, I’m a fan of pills! And it’s not like I was a complete stranger to the notion of consuming placenta. In Thailand, one of my Thai friend’s favorite soups was made with buffalo placenta, and I’d certainly heard about women consuming their placentas in smoothies, omelets, etc. I did take birth classes in Berkeley, after all. (If you don’t believe me, there’s this thing called Google…)

Fast forward a couple of weeks…

I’ve just pushed out my kid. He’s across the room, getting meconium vacuumed off his schnozz, and the placenta (His? Mine? Ours?) is on its way.

“It’s in our birth plan to save the placenta, right? Save the placenta?” I called to the intern, who was busy between my legs. (A situation which can’t help but call to mind the classic Saturday Night Live skit with Dan Ackroyd playing Julia Child saving the chicken livers.

“Yep, we’ll save it, don’t worry. It will be in the fridge down the hall.”

Ah, really! In the fridge down the hall along with the Odwalla smoothies we have stocked there…and every other maternity ward mother’s snacks, too. Nice…

Fast forward two days…

Our newborn son is strapped into his car seat, and we’re headed home at three miles an hour.

“Shit, we forgot the placenta.”

Well, suffice it to say that much as we wanted our placenta, we weren’t really in the mood to turn back at three miles an hour. So, we called the hospital.

“Save our placenta! Please! Don’t throw it out! It’s in a Tupperware container in the fridge! Put a post-it on it that says, ‘Urgently needed placenta! DO NOT THROW AWAY!’”

Next phone call: the doula (not ours) whom we’d hired, for $250, to prepare our placenta. Bless her little organic soul, she agreed to go pick it up herself. (I had visions of our placenta, aging in its Tupperware, ready for a Manager’s Special markdown.)

Next phone call: back to the hospital. “Can you release our placenta to someone who isn’t us? Yes? GREAT!”

Fast forward another two days…

Post-partum depression has not, as of yet, struck. But I’m jonesing for my placenta pills, man. Big time. Because surely if I don’t get them THIS INSTANT my son will wind up in juvi hall in 15 years.

Panicked phone call to the placenta preparer: “Don’t worry,” she told me. “It’s all done. I’ll bring it over this afternoon.”

And voila:

129 pills of pure Laslocky placenta, steamed lightly with ginger, jalepeno and lemon, sliced thinly and dried in a dehydrator, then ground into a powder and put into capsules.

The label reads: “Placenta medicine. Dosage: Up to 2 caps 3x a day for 2 weeks postpartum. Take for immunity, menopause, and to augment the Chi and nourish the blood. Also for rites of passage: teething, walking, school, times of growth and separation.”

I could rub some powdered placenta on my boy’s gums, the preparer said, if I thought he’d ever lost his way.

Our placenta, she added, was a particularly beautiful one — so beautiful she dried some of the amniotic sack that was attached to it. Here it is:

Oh, and this?

This is a bit of the membrane and the umbilical cord. The umbilical cord, some say, makes a great teething ring.

Fast forward another two days…

You know how fish oil pills make you burp? There I was, dutifully downing two capsules three times a day, burping up placenta like there’s no tomorrow. And it was NOT pleasant. Gag-inducing belches, and no matter how I consumed them — with milk, with a sandwich, with an entire loaf of bread — there it was: the unmistakable piquant flavor of placenta.

My neighbor sniffed the jar. “Hmm. Smells like mushrooms,” she said, oh so helpfully.

Mushrooms STUFFED WITH PLACENTA, that is.

Fast forward four months…

Okay, so I cut back and took just one pill a day for…a day. The jar of pills sits in my cupboard, nestled with the honey and my great-grandmother’s circa 1915 Noritake soup bowls.

I’m not inclined to take it — fortunately I did not get post-partum depression — but I’m glad it’s there, and the truth is that when I give the open jar a good whiff now, it doesn’t smell nearly as horrible. It smells more of ginger now than it does of placenta. There’s something really sweet about having it, and I’m not saying that with snark. Plus it’s always good to have options: Early onset of menopause could be right around the corner, and my boy will be teething any day now.

And I do have delightful visions of sending him off to college, rubbing the contents of the 129th pill into his gums. “Don’t forget who’s your mommy, baby.”

Interview with Aaron Woolf, Director of "King Corn"

Meghan Laslocky — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 19:09:00 +0000

“King Corn“ is a new film that premiered in the Bay Area this past weekend. In it, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis –best friends from college — plant an acre of corn in Iowa and attempt to track its path into the food chain. I caught up with director Aaron Woolf, whom I knew of from our undergraduate years at a small college in Vermont.

Meghan Laslocky: Can you give us a “before starting the film/after starting the film” picture of your dietary habits?

Aaron Woolf: Before I started working on “King Corn”, I don’t think I really understood that there was a connection between the way we grow things and the fact that we aren’t eating well in this country, which seems pretty obvious now. I came from a family that always ate well, but the way people eat now, like Curt, my cousin [producer and on-screen talent in "King Corn"] who is a generation younger, versus how people ate when I was a kid, is so different. When I was a kid, we went to the wholesale seafood market, mussels were 17 cents a pound because Americans didn’t eat them, and we got our meat at a butcher, Mr. Olishefsky, who wore a white gown covered in blood. Behind him in the walk-in cooler were sides of beef. It wasn’t a mystery to me as a child where meat came from — I knew it was a cut-up animal. But I think if you grew up in Curt’s generation, the disconnect is pretty major. I think that’s one of the lessons of the film: that Curt and Ian are of the cornfed generation, and I am less so, and it took so little time — the sixteen years that separate us in age — for that major shift to happen.

Initially, when I started this film, when people asked me about how making the film has changed my eating habits, I’d say, “It’s changed the way I wish I ate.” But now that the film is done, it’s definitely changed the way I eat, and I don’t eat fast food. It’s instinctive now. What we choose to eat is such a combination of knowledge and religion and training. It’s hard to change your diet simply because it’s better to do x rather than y, but after seeing feedlots with 100,000 head of cattle — that’s something that’s hard to get out of your mind when you look at a hamburger.

Now I try to eat food that lived a life. I’m not a vegetarian, and I don’t make much of a distinction between an animal and a vegetable. We derive our life force from eating living things. It’s more the way that they lived. For example, I think that eating something that lived in an undignified setting, like pork in confinement that never saw the light of day, is spiritually unhealthy. But the same is true for an asparagus spear that was raised industrially. I wish I could just eat things that were raised in a dignified way that that we would want to incorporate into our own bodies.

ML: Knowing what you know now, what’s your take on the rising consciousness of where our food comes from?

AW: I see the benefits of having convenient things to eat, and I still think that’s true on some level. And there’s a lot of snobbery in the upscale movements, people make a lot of assumptions about other people’s ability to choose good and fresh food, even about if they have access to it.

ML: What came as a surprise to you as you did research for the film?

AW: It was a surprise to me how much we have almost consciously created a fast food society, in terms of the Farm Bill and the shift in policy in the 70s. I don’t think there is much true evil in the world. I don’t blame Earl [Earl Butz, President Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, whose policies supported large-scale agribusiness and who is interviewed in the film]. I don’t blame corporations, but we have gotten to a place where the idea of having more isn’t always the best thing.

ML: In the film, you use these great vintage Fisher Price farm toys and kernels of corn to illustrate how the Farm Bill works. What’s the back story there?

AW: We were looking for a way to describe obtuse concepts like agricultural subsidies. People are paying to see this film, so we had to come up with something that was at least palatable. We bought one of the Fisher Price barns at Chuck’s farm during the auction [see the film for a touching farm auction scene], and the other barn is one that Curtis played with as a child, and probably me as well. Part of the point was that children still play with those toys, but now they’re part of a perpetuation of a myth about farming that just doesn’t exist. Plus the Fisher Price toys look like food labels on processed foods — the idealized barn, the livestock — for a product that contains hog meat from an industrial farm. There was something poignant about that, toys perpetuating a notion about the American heartland that is less and less real.

ML: Has making this film changed your life?

AW: I’ve made a lot of films, but never before has a film that changed the course of my life as this one has. I’m opening a grocery store in, called Urban Rustic, that incorporates documentary into it, so buyers know where their food comes from. I’m doing this with my partners, Dan Cipriani and Luis Illadeas. On the shelves, there’s an LCD or a viewmaster, and you can see where everything comes from. Much in the same way in “King Corn” we’ve explored where our food comes from, in Urban Rustic, we want people to know where the food comes from. In the store, people even know where the wood flooring comes from — it’s from trees we cut down ourselves on my family’s land in the Adirondacks. It’s an attempt to take back what the industrial food system has obscured from us.

“King Corn” is currently playing at the Shattuck in Berkeley and at the Red Vic, and it will air on PBS’s Independent Lens in the Spring. It was produced with support from San Francisco-based Independent Television Service [ITVS].

Read a review of King Corn in KQED Arts & Culture

Son of Scary Food

Meghan Laslocky — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 18:48:00 +0000

Since I always start my posts with a warning, here goes: Don’t read this if you have an aversion to Sarah Silverman or food that resembles body parts or if you worship the ground that Martha Stewart stencils.

I mean it. Move along now.

Okay, for those of you who can hack it, my assignment for this Halloween was to write again about scary food, this time with the political incorrectness on the side. (It turns out that political incorrectness is not only very high in calories, but it’s also raised on corn in Burma and slaughtered by four-year-old orphans who have flies in their eyes and harelips and call out, “Angie! Angie!” during the two hours of sleep they get a night.)

Whoops.

Anyway, let’s start with a definition.

Scary [skair-ee] Adjective, scarier, scariest
1. Ridiculous
2. Tacky
3. Of or pertaining to Martha Stewart

Let’s start with the “Ghoulish Petit Fours.”

So, I just watched the Sarah Silverman Show last night, and these little numbers bring to mind a song she sang called “What happened to the white dog poop from the Seventies,” which I thought raised a very legitimate question. (Attempts at answers located here, though I tend to think the most likely culprit is CORN and no one says so expressly. Get Michael Pollan on that immediately, dammit.)

Anyway, as usual, I digress. In short, Martha’s Ghoulish Petit Fours made me thankful that poo doesn’t smile at you. (But what if it did?) Then I realized that it’s unclear if the lower dot on the Martha ghouls is supposed to be a mouth or a nose, which led me down the path of imagining some poor lackey at Martha HQ making these things and getting the face wrong the first time and getting strangled with the licorice “lace” that supposed to go around the base of the witches’ hats.

(Note, never accuse Martha of not recycling a great idea, as with these Mashed Boo-tatoes.)

Moving on, let’s take a look at I Scream Sandwiches. The salient quote? “For neat rounds of ice cream, snip away the carton with scissors, cut ice cream into 3/4-inch-thick slices, and make shapes with a 2 1/2-inch cookie cutter.”

Shoot me now.

And now, the Martha piece de resistance:

Ladies’ Fingers and Mens’ Toes, which the site calls “ghoulishly good”, a term that made me wonder just how much crack Martha’s editors smoke to get through the day. At first I thought these atrocities were pastries of some sort, but they are in fact pretzels. Pretzels with almonds? Martha, c’mon.

The part I liked the most about this recipe was the implied part: Notice that the last ingredient listed is “fried rosemary (optional, for toes)”. Not fingers, mind, just toes. Toe hair.

Good grief.

Before I wrap up Martha bashing, I did want to bring your attention to something else I found on Martha’s site, which while not food that can be eaten, I hope still qualifies to be on BAB.

Behold the lobster baby costume.

Who would do this to their child? Notice how it looks like either a) the lobster is pooping the child (so sorry, I’m channeling Sarah Silverman today), b) the lobster is giving birth to the child (at least it’s not breach), or c) the lobster and the baby are inter-species conjoined twins and appear to share a rectum. And note the evidence, yet again, of Martha’s editors smoking crack! “In the end, any costume you design will be memorable and guaranteed to be loved by your friends, family, and, of course, baby!” (My italics.) Since when do babies that age love anything but boob and Teletubbies?

Okay, I’m done with Martha, but lest you think I’m a horrid bundle of vitriol who deserves to be bound with licorice, gagged with hairy man’s toe, and tarred and feathered with a hot glue gun, let me leave you with two videos of Halloween recipes that didn’t make me want to slit my wrists.

Behold British mini-Martha, whose name is apparently Tilly. (Tilly! Tilly! And don’t you just want to eat up her accent?) I played this three times just for the sheer joy of hearing the mysterious braceleted Tilly say “lolly sticks.”

And now meet Pink of Perfection’s pumpkin soup, which is easy and I bet scrumptious. Oh, and I like her dress. “Her” being Sarah McColl, winsome talent/Juliet Binoche lookalike behind Pink of Perfection, “the thrifty girl’s guide to la dolce vita.”

Something tells me Ms. McColl would be great fun to go lingerie shopping with, then afterwards you’d stop by some chic tiny little restaurant at 3pm and wind up there until 6:30 when people start coming in for their dinner reservations and you’ve drunk four glasses of Beaujolais and have a horrid case of the giggles and start laughing about your vibrators and the bartender — who is very cute and you have been flirting with — has to cut you off.

So much more fun than Martha.

Shiksa Matzo Ball Soup

Meghan Laslocky — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 22:37:00 +0000

It’s that time of the month. The freezer is overflowing, and I’ve had it. Given that there are two post-roast chicken carcasses under the frozen mango and buffalo burgers, and to the left of the kaffir lime leaves, I’ve got what I need to deploy my famous three-step method for making space in the freezer:
1. Cook and eat half box of perogies. (I boiled them and then slathered them with onions sauteed in butter, then added parmesan, then sat down to watch Dr. Phil. Yum. I mean about the perogies, not Dr. Phil.).
2. Remove and drink half bottle of vodka. (No, Kim had nothing to do with this.)
3. Make my famous Shiksa Matzo Ball Soup.

And here are the steps to making Shiksa Matzo Ball Soup, aka Matzo Ball Soup a la Laslocky:

Step 1: Stock
Two chicken carcasses, carrots, a parsnip or two that had been hiding in the bottom of the vegetable drawer, an onion, some peppercorns, celery with leaves, bay leaf. Cover with water and simmer the hell out of it.

Now, before I get to the next part, let me tell you about my matzo ball soup history. For years, my dad has made it, and it was only when I was well into my twenties and decided to make it myself AND FOLLOW THE DIRECTIONS that I discovered that matzo balls are supposed to be soft. And fluffy. And really like a little slice of heaven. My dad is an impatient cook: the steak is always bloody, the eggs are always runny, and now, I know, the matzoh balls are always hard. Anyway, it was quite a revelation when I discovered (and later confirmed at a Jewish deli) that matzo balls are supposed to be like Barbie-sized down pillows, only round, not roughly the consistency of a chunk of parmesan cheese.

Anyway.

Step 2: Fry the bacon

Yep, you heard that right. Now usually I would dispense with that step because I would already have bacon fat on hand, in a tin next to the stove. I’m Hungarian, and that’s what we do, because bacon fat is love. But lately I’ve been a bad Hungarian and I don’t have a tin of bacon fat next to the stove. Needless to say, I’ve not had much love, either.

Once the bacon is fried, reserve the bacon for another occasion. Like Passover.

Or just eat it because it’s only four pieces.

Now you have a beautiful puddle of bacon fat — just about two tablespoons. But before you continue and give cardiac arrest to the nearest Jewish grandmother, let it cool.

Step 3: Make the matzo balls
The package directions are great, just replace the vegetable oil called for with bacon fat. Blend 2 T bacon fat, two lightly beaten eggs, half cup matzo meal, a little salt, and 2 T chicken stock.

Cover and place in the refrigerator for 15 minutes, and meanwhile bring a pot of water to a boil.

Make the matzo balls by rolling them in your palm — each one should be about one inch in diameter, so you should have a total of 8.

Cook them in the boiling water, covered, for 30-40 minutes. (Until they’re soft, Daddy, SOFT.)

Step 4: Combine balls and soup

Et voila. Matzo ball soup that increases your cholesterol and makes Jewish grandmas the world over roll over twice in their graves.

It’s that good!

P.S. In all fairness, I do have to give Papa Laslocky credit this recipe, even though he isn’t a shiksa. He still doesn’t cook the balls for long enough, but he did introduce the bacon fat idea, good Hungarian that he is.

Experimenting with the "Flavor Savor Pack": The Juicy Lube-Motion Lotion Taste-Off

Meghan Laslocky — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 02:40:00 +0000

Remember in my last post, I told you that I’ll always preamble with warning?

This time, the warning is: Do not read this if you have never wondered what Motion Lotion — yeah, I mean that kind of Motion and that kind of Lotion — tastes like.

But before we get to the lube groove, in the interest of those who confuse safe sex with fruit smoothies, let’s consider the flavored condom, purchased as part of a “Flavor Savor Pack“ for $15 from Good Vibes.

Paradise Strawberry: Artificial strawberry is never a good idea. Artificial strawberry a la latex is an even worse idea. But still, this is tolerable, sort of like a strawberry Starburst, but with far less charm.

Paradise Banana: Hands down revolting, chalky, and not even remotely banana-like, which you’d think someone could get right given the context.

Paradise Vanilla: Inoffensive but wilts in the face of two drawbacks: The flavor dissipates extremely quickly, and it comes in a rather alarming blue that seems to have no apparent connection to vanilla. I can only conclude that these were created for safe-sex conscious Smurfs who knew that the rest of the world didn’t want them to propagate.

Lifetyles Mint: The flavor lasts, and the cooling sensation remains on the palate. Definitely spearmint flavored, which tastes good but is unfortunate because then the condom couldn’t be paired with peppermint Altoids. Wait, is there a rule about that, sort of like Chardonnay+beef=private reservation in hell?

Bare with me a moment, I need to clear my palate with some jasmine tea…

…okay, now, for the bit you’ve all been waiting for, the Great Lube Taste-Off.

I tested two brands: Doc Johnson Motion Lotion, which is supposed to warm to the touch and heat when you blow on it and comes in a small sample size (probably about a little less than a tablespoon); and ID Juicy Lube, which my admittedly superficial research indicates is the world’s top selling edible lubricant and comes in a larger sample packet (about two tablespoons, which in my humble opinion, would make for a very sticky bed).

First, a word on method: Several I tried on a baguette, but most I tried by popping open the tube and squeezing onto my tongue, cocking my head thoughtfully, staring at the ceiling for a few minutes to search for the write words, then putting my lube-sticky little fingers to the keyboard.

Strawberry Motion Lotion/Hot Strawberry Motion Lotion: Fairly good, with slight but not intolerable hint of Robitussen. Unfortunately I don’t have any ice cream on hand, otherwise I would see if it would melt it.

Peach Juicy Lube: Very sweet and utterly nasty. Tastes like plastic. Reminds me of the smell of the butts of My Little Ponies.

Hot Cherry Motion Lotion: Now this was a surprise because I usually don’t like artificial cherry in any incarnation. Unfortunate tinge of Robitussen, but a nice little chili spunk that ignites the tongue. My favorite snack food in Thailand is fresh fruit dipped in sugar and chilli, so why not?

Watermelon Juicy Lube: Who knew watermelon was so bitter? Also un peu de Mon Petit Poney.

Wild Cherry Juicy Lube: More Little Pony butts stampeding across my palate, which I do not appreciate.

Bubblegum Blast Juicy Lube: Who on earth is this marketed to? Twelve-year-olds? I can’t even bring myself to taste it.

Ah, back to the Motion Lotion (ML). I feel safe.

Rasperry ML: Strangely not as good as Strawberry or Hot Cherry. In natural circumstances, I prefer raspberry over both strawberry and cherry, but apparently not in lubricant.

Passion Fruit ML/Hot Passion Fruit ML: All fruit, but not a hint of passion. Both versions taste of plastic.

Big Banana ML: The banana flavor is subtle, but discernable. But why “Big” Banana? I’ve never noticed a taste difference between large and small bananas, have you?

Good god, still have two more. Bay Area Bites is trying to kill me.

Lemon Lime ML: For the love of god! This tastes like cheap toilet bowl detergent, like the kind that made the bathroom in high school smell bad. Use this if you want to dump someone: How to lose a guy in one lick.

Coconut ML: Unfortunately, coconut, in this incarnation, is not strong enough to overcome the bitterness of the lube. Steer clear.

So, here I am, utterly nauseous left with a desk strewn with lube packets and lube on my keyboard, which in other circumstances and if I were a boy, would be incriminating.

But I hate leftovers…

And so I unveil the Berry Passion Slicker, which I am sure will soon be the rage at all the hip cocktail parties:

• one shot of vodka
• fresh passion-orange juice (straight orange juice will do, but that’s less fun)
• 1.5 packets Strawberry Motion Lotion (reserve remaining half-packet for lip gloss).

If anyone deserves a drink right now, I do.

And when you see the Berry Passion Slicker on Desperate Housewives or at your next pre-orgy mixer, remember: You saw it here first.

The Food-For-Sex Scandal: A Sampling of Good Vibrations’ Gastronomic Pleasures

Meghan Laslocky — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 00:52:00 +0000

My Bay Area Bites posts, dear reader, will often be preambled by a warning.

In this case, stop reading now if you have never wondered what edible underwear taste like and you don’t want to know. Ditto for revulsion to the very idea of honey, coconut, peppermint, strawberry and chocolate ever gracing your nether regions or those of a loved one, for what follows is a review of what I’ll call adult novelty fusion food, all procured at Good Vibrations, the Bay Area’s leading sex toy outlet.

Fasten your strap-ons: It’s going to be a bumpy blog post.

Kama Sutra Honey Dust

Let’s start with a fantasy.

Imagine that you’re a fabulously well-appointed Indian courtesan, and a happy one at that. Imagine the warm evening wind wisping through the transparent sunset-hued silk curtains that hang around your princess-and-the-pea bed, providing a sexy patina of privacy in the flickering candlelight. Savor the scent of jasmine drifting in from the balcony and the charmingly distant moo of water buffalo. Relish the well-fed child plucking a sitar just outside your door.

Are you with me?

Now, reach for your beautiful tin of Kama Sutra Honey Dust, pluck out the feather duster that it houses, and flicker a bit across the inside of your wrist, or maybe across your knee.

Inhale.

Lovely, isn’t it?

And now, taste: Equally lovely — sweet but not too sweet, perhaps even slightly reminiscent of the tastiest Indian dessert ever, gulab jamun.

Now, disembark from the fantasy and run, next time you have a spare $25 bucks and the urge to wear something sexy to work, to buy some Honey Dust. Never mind bedroom use: a surreptitious lick of your Honey-Dusted wrist — or knee — at two in the afternoon at your cubicle just might sutra your kama for the rest of the afternoon quite sweetly.

And keep in mind that Honey Dust, as its primary ingredient is cornstarch, can also thicken your gravy.

Extra Strong Sugar Free Peppermint Nipples

Pert Peppermint Nipples (“Fresh and Frisky”) cost $5 and come in a spunky black tin garnished by a brunette with a Jane Russell-esque body. The mints themselves are disk-shaped, a little less than an inch in diameter, with a tiny protrusion. While they are tasty — a gentler peppermint than Altoids — I like them even more because they’re relatively large, for a mint, and last a long time. In fact, I timed one: One peppermint nipple lasts for a lengthy 10 minutes of sucking.

My tin of Peppermint Nipples is stationed in my car, where it makes for a great conversation piece with friends riding shotgun, and the mints serve the perfect oral pick-me up.

Chocolate Body Painting

This product, whose awkward gerundified name I’ll chalk up to poor translation since it’s manufactured in Montreal, is nearly as well-packaged as Honey Dust: It’s as elegant as a perfume bottle, and you really have to peer closely at the label to see exactly what the kimono-clad couple are up to. It’s equipped with a neat little miniature spatula, but as the spatula was not sheathed in sanitary plastic wrap, I dispensed with it and opted for “au naturel” (which in my lingo means “on my finger”).

“Set your artistic side free. Paint a love story on your partner’s body,” the label advises. “It’s insanely delicious…”

My idea of “insanely delicious,” when it comes to spreadable chocolate, is Nutella — especially when “au naturel”, so I compared the two. Trust me, $12 peinture de corps chocolatée doesn’t qualify, but maybe that’s because I sampled it on on first my finger, then a baguette, instead of someone else’s thigh.

Rather, it is in the “C” range of Hershey’s syrup — thin, with a hint of plastic. But I won’t let it go to waste: I’ll remember it’s in the cupboard — the one in the kitchen — the next time I have an eight-year-old with a hankering for chocolate milk on my hands.

Toasted Coconut Lickable Oil

This product is just one in Good Vibration’s exclusive line of “body candy”. The label declares that it is “natural, non-sticky, edible, non-staining, and delicious!”. Oxymoronic though the labelling might be (which in addition to calling it ‘edible’ also stated that it was for ‘external use only’), this is a tasty $5 investment, calling to a mind a long hot afternoon on a deserted tropical beach, a pitcher of pina coladas, and a cabana boy.

One could easily drizzle Toasted Coconut Lickable Oil on top of dessert — a non-breathing one made of flour and sugar, I mean — and no one would know that it was meant for body part.

Edible Undies

Don’t even try and tell me that you have never ever once wondered about edible underwear. You’ve seen the package — the glossy red lipsticked mouth seemingly torpedoed by a chocolate-dipped strawberry — but have you ever read the copy, which the California manufacturer offers in both French and English, implying that Francophones and Anglophones are equally zealous consumers of “dessous mangeables”?

“Sensuellement Delicieux!”

“Licking well, body heat [and] moisture all enhance the flavour of your Edible Thong. Tie strings loosely to avoid breakages, tie back and enjoy…”

Enjoy before 12/20/2015, that is.

Yes, your $5 edible underwear will last ten years — likely longer than your non-edible underwear. Unless, of course, you wash it, take a bath with it, or otherwise expose it to an unspecified “forte humidite”: “Garment will dissolve in water or excessive moisture.”

But we haven’t even opened the box yet, never mind tasted its contents.

First, let me assure you, there’s a reason why there is no photograph of the edible thong on the package: It’s because le dessous mangeables — which I’m not sure even sounds sexy in French — resembles a jinormous pink transparent diaper, sexy perhaps if repurposed as a Playboy rain poncho for Barbie (assuming there is no rain, of course), but most decidedly unsexy for human couture, with or without “forte humidite”.

And then there was the taste — supposedly “fraise et chocolat” — which is about as sexy as the bottom of your kitchen garbage can two days after Thanksgiving when you still feel too fat to take out the trash.

Oh, the bitterness, of the type that launches one’s face into a thousand contortions!

Oh, the texture, which clings to the roof of one’s mouth and sticks to one’s molars like Krazy Glue!

For the love of God and foie gras, dear reader, don’t ever, ever let edible underwear cross your unsuspecting palate, nevermind your nether regions. Your tongue and other body parts will never, ever forgive you.

Tune in in two weeks for my next installment in the food-for-sex scandal: 101 uses for flavored lubricant, just in time for Valentine’s Day.