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1101 East Pike St. Suite 300, Seattle, WA 98122
1101 East Pike St. Suite 300, Seattle, WA 98122
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eat my fuck for sounding like an asshole, chas.
and yeah, i'm a 'city guy'. glad you are making that big leap out there... fuck.
hell i'll say it again.
eat my fuck.
The rural places that do have good food usually have other urban features going for them – local theaters, hip cafes, bohemian artists and intellectuals, and less tv oriented small towns. But by Charles’s definition, those places don’t really qualify as rural.
Do not the country folk see the same cooking shows on their television that the city folk do?
Or are you comparing the local equivalent of Dick's Drive-In to your favourite upscale Thai fusion place?
There's a lot of rural flavor in urban environments.
If Seattle only had one restaurant, it wouldn't try that hard either.
Scott Walker for President!
There are people in this city who will pay out the ass for a meal prepared with local ingredients, and people trying to grow small vegetable gardens in barely hospitable locations. It's ass-backward, I tell ya!
Most small towns can't support such a place, and the unfortunate truth about the American food industry as a whole is that they have to be run as cheaply as possible, which is why Sysco crap is so prevalent. Charles would judge that as being the result of a "rural" viewpoint (one which is found in every city in this country), but I think that the all American value of wanting everything for virtually nothing is actually urban in its roots, and is the reason that most regular restaurants now have to be managed like Walmart in order to survive.
My mother learned most of her cooking technique from my grandmother, who learned her's from growing up in a logging camp: meat was either boiled or roasted it until it was the consistency of shoe-leather, or fried in bacon-grease (she still keeps a crock of congealed lard on the stove top); vegetables were boiled until they became a flavorless slush; and every meal included potatoes in some form. Except for rare forays into an actual sit-down restaurant, I didn't eat a really decent meal until I went to college.
And yes, my mom (and grandma, and aunts) had dozens of cookbooks: everything from the baseline "Joy of Cooking" to those little mimeographed collections that are sold at ladies auxiliary bake sales - but I can't recall many instances of my mom at least ever referring to one. No real need I guess, when your cooking "skills" are limited to a few rudimentary techniques, and you're not trying to impress anyone who's going to eat it anyway.
On the flip-side though, and to their credit, the women-folk in my family (and aside from the occasional outdoor BBQ it was ALWAYS the women doing the cooking, never the men), are all amazing bakers. Cookies, cakes, pies, kuchens, strudels, rosettes, brownies, fudge; if it's flour-and-sugar based they can bake that shit to perfection.
Weird how that works, but there it is...
one single baguette in france, with butter, is better than 80% of all food sold in restaurants in the USA.
You're talking BBQ & smoking - completely different from what Charles is talking about - and strangely, the only real type of food prep that is done almost exclusively by the men-folk, FWIW.
@10:
The horrible secret is that almost all of that delicious, fresh bounty you see in E. WA is grown on-contract for mass market processors like ConAgra, Pinnacle, Kraft, Kellogg, Cargill, Dole, Unilever, et al, who in turn process-and-freeze it, or turn it into ingredients for other, even more processed food products that end up on your plate at Olive Garden, Applebees, and every other major-chain restaurant franchise in the country, or at your nearest Wal*Mart, Costco, Albertsons, QFC or whatever grocery store.
fuck you chuckles. fuck you right up your smug urban tight asshole.
Some of the worst meals I've ever had were in New York City. It's the dreadful result of hype (in the case of popular restaurants that served flavorless mush) and foot traffic (which kept many terrible restaurants just barely hanging on by their fingernails). There's a reason why so many Kitchen Nightmares episodes are set in New York City and state.
But I don't spend my days bemoaning the economic system, the surpluses of which have an awful lot to do with making the high-quality foodways us city folk enjoy possible.
and in the country? well, i've had some fantastic meals north of new york city but i feel that was more the result of nyc's influence than anything else. i've also eaten well in st helena which is a small rural town north of sf, but it is in the heart of napa and home to the culinary institute of america. in truly rural california--central california all the way to the sierras--the food is exactly of the sort charles has encountered. we're talking insultingly bad, poorly prepared food that will cause you to choose hunger over it (as i did just last week).
I went to lots of church and grange potlucks, and yes, the baked goods were superior, compared to the casseroles. I remember lots of tasty cookies and cakes, too. Probably a Scandinavian influence.
Long ago at a Chinese restaurant in Coeur d'Alene, K and I determined halfway through our eggrolls, and suspicious from the first bite, that the meat used was bologna.
@10: Agreed, mostly. I noticed that when I visit family in the midwest, too, that they're surrounded by beautiful farmland and apparently sell all those great veggies off to other people. But that is *not* what Chas was arguing here, not really.
By the way, am I the only one who thinks that virtually every Charles Slog post fits into that New Yorker cartoon recaption theory from the Internets -- that most of them could just captioned "Christ, what an asshole!"
Just down I-5: Castle Rock & Kelso.
There are exceptions, of course. The most notable I can think of is Lockhart, TX (pop. 12K), which offers far better BBQ than you can get anywhere the density of Austin. Of course, almost all Lockhart's customers are Austin residents who take the 40 mile drive through the middle of nowhere to get there, so does that really count?
Everyone in this thread seems to be providing exceptions, which of course exist, but you completely nailed the norm.
But, until relatively recently it wasn't that great in Seattle either. Anybody recalls when it was quite difficult to buy decent bread or cup of coffee just to mention 2 common items?
Now, it's a different story. Well, I can't vouch for Coastal Kitchen since I've not been back, but CH is food heaven now.
Newflash: Rich people can afford better things!
For someone who claims to be a Marxist, you seem to have an unmitigated contempt for the proletariat.
The problem of course being that, technically-speaking, any sort of food thrown into a container and heated in some fashion constitutes "cooking". But there's no guarantee it's going to come through the process being anything more than merely palatable - if you're lucky.
And I did in fact learn to cook; partly by circumstance and partly by necessity. By the time I was 12 or 13 I was cooking most of the evening meals in my house, because my mom didn't get home from work until 5:30 or 6:00 p.m. and my stepfather was one of those "I want to get out of the car, walk in the door, and sit down to dinner with no waiting" types.
Since mom wasn't around to teach me, I learned from the cookbooks she never seemed to use, so that, by the time I left home for college, I knew my way around a kitchen with reasonable facility; a skill I've improved upon considerably over the years.
And here's the funny part: all those down-home, rural-folk recipes that we like to think of as quintessentially "American" can taste pretty damned good, if you actually follow the recipes (at least at first - I'm a firm believer in learning the rules BEFORE you start breaking them), and know what the hell you're doing.
So, Mr. Blackwell...when are you coming back to Seattle to prepare your annual list of the 10 worst dressed women?
Why do so many people hate you? Kind of strange.
Did you mean to insult rural people or are commenters taking your post the wrong way?
On what basis can you make the claim that in every home in the midwest, people are preparing horrible food? You are the most raging psuedo-intellectual I have ever seen.
You seem to have learned an awful lot from the car window, and from watching lots of television on your trip. You learned nothing, and did not want to.
That is not an indictment on a class of people, which would be anti-Marx. Poor people live in the city too, afterall, and can enjoy great food cheaply because their are so damned many of us buying and eating. Advocating for city life because a city is so economically collective is Marxist. Defending the unavoidable individualism of rural life is not. Saying that people should have their basic needs met (good food!) is Marxist. Denying the realities and limitations of living rurally is not. Charles is staying within his adopted philosophy.
YES. THIS.
Charles, have you ever explored why this may be? Because this is glaringly obvious to anyone who has read your writings over the years...
And of course it's not the only aspect of your work. You are capable of some amazingly beautiful, deep even, insights into nature and humanity.. But it always seems to come back to this contemptuous attitude towards those you deem less sophisticated than you. An odd position for a Marxist, to be sure...
Mudede is peddling ridiculous stereotypes.