Barbara's Blog

Roaches in the World’s Most Expensive Dessert

Can you spare a tear for the ultra-rich? One week after achieving the Guinness World record for the world’s most expensive dessert – a $25,000 “Frrozen Haute Chocolate” containing 5 grams of edible 23-karat gold – the New York restaurant Serendipity 3 was shut down by the health department. It turns out that in addition to truffle shavings and other Haute Chocolate ingredients, the restaurant’s kitchen contained "a live mouse, mouse droppings in multiple areas of the restaurant, fruit flies, house flies, and more than 100 live cockroaches," according to the inspectors.

The Haute Chocolate story is already exciting the usual populist outrage drizzled with references to Marie Antoinette. In the Detroit News, Brian O’Connor notes that for the price of two dozen of these confections all the food banks in his city would be able to meet the Thanksgiving demand instead of facing the holiday with empty shelves. He recommends guillotining the Haute Chocolate eaters, “Then we could treat the needy to a helping of my favorite dessert: ladyfingers.”

But there could be all kinds of reasons for needing a $25,000 Haute Chocolate. What about the chocolate addict who freely chooses to blow his or her life savings on a single dessert? And we mustn’t rule out those who suffer from a rare gold deficiency disorder and have already consumed their fillings and wedding rings. All of these worthy people now face a shuttered Serendipity when they go for their fix.

No, this isn’t just another story about gluttony. It’s a story about the inevitability of cockroaches in a world divided between rich and poor and served by a public sector in a state of bad decay. In this situation, even the rich get ripped off, and should live in fear that those truffle shavings are actually maggots in cross-section. As Robert Frank, the author of Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich, observed of the cockroach finding: "It goes to show that in today's mass luxury world, just because something is expensive doesn't mean something's good or high-quality."

I discovered this when a recent move put me within striking distance of two high-end food markets, Whole Foods and Balducci’s. Ah, was my thought, no more cooking! For dinners at least, I would eat nothing but their tasty deli offerings. How disillusioning then to discover that the items that look so delightful behind the counter are little better than the take-out at Safeway. Balducci’s fresh mozzarella-topped lamb burgers require a steak knife; their shrimp-and-caper concoction, at $26 a pound, seems to involve a preparatory stage of fossilization. You can do slightly better at Whole Foods, but only if you avoid anything with a sauce, which is likely to be a super-saturated solution of sodium chloride.

Yes, over-salting and over-cooking have a preservative effect, perhaps allowing the same items to be displayed for days at a time. But there could be something else behind the consistently bad prepared food at these upscale sources: Many, if not all, of the people doing the cooking behind the scenes are making foods they are unlikely ever to confront in real life. Ask a Salvadoran immigrant to whip up chicken masala and he or she will no doubt follow directions, but in complete ignorance of the desired taste. One of the women working at the Balduccis I have patronized has only one visible tooth in her mouth, which in addition to speaking ill of the store’s dental benefits, means she can never have bitten into one of the lamb burgers she sells.

And what about the kitchen workers at Serendipity 3? Like most underpaid New Yorkers, they probably went home to vermin-infested apartments, and thought nothing of a cockroach or two.

What this means is that even the very rich cannot escape into their own little bubble of purity and excellence, of “haute” this and “haute” that. Ride around in a limo and you still have to sit in traffic created by ordinary people who can’t afford to live near where they work. Fly in a private jet and you’re still dependent on archaic, underfinanced, systems of air traffic control. Travel first class on the Acela train and you still have to stare out at the rotting environs of Philadelphia and Newark. Oh, and you lobbied against higher taxes and regulations on business? Then think twice before you sink your teeth into that chocolate and gold dessert. The vermin are always with you.

Writers Strike, Silence Falls

In solidarity with the striking screenwriters there will be no laugh lines in this blog, no stunning metaphors, and not many adjectives. Also, in solidarity with the striking Broadway stage-hands, no theatrics, special effects or sing-along refrains.

Yes, I realize the strike could deprive millions of Americans of news as Jay Leno, Jon Stewart, and the rest of them are forced into re-runs. If the strike and the re-runs go on long enough, the same millions of Americans will be condemned to living in the past and writing in Kerry for president in 08. But are re-runs really such a bad thing? After opening night, every Broadway show is a re-run in perpetuity, yet people have been known to fly from Fargo to see “Mamma Mia.”

And yes, it’s a crying shame that so many laugh-worthy news items will go unnoted on the late night talk shows:  The discovery of Chinese toys coated with the date rape drug. The news that pot-smoking Swiss teenagers are as academically successful as abstainers and better socially adjusted. Bush’s repeated requests for Musharraf to take off his uniform. Could there be a simple explanation for the powerful affinity between these two men?

True, a screenwriters’ strike is not as emotionally compelling as a strike by janitors or farm-workers. Screenwriters are often well-paid – when they are paid. All it takes is for a show to get cancelled or reconceptualized, and they’re back on the streets again, hustling for work. I know a couple of them – smart, funny women who clamber nimbly from one short-lived job to another, struggling to keep up their health insurance and self-respect.

But my selfish hope here is that the screenwriters’ action will call attention to the plight of writers in general. Since I started in the freelancing business about 30 years ago, the per-word payment for print articles has remained exactly the same in actual, non-inflation-adjusted, dollars. Three dollars a word was pretty much top of the line, and it hasn’t gone up by a penny. More commonly in the old days, I made a dollar a word, requiring me to write three or four 1000-word pieces a month to supply the children with their bagels and pizza. One for Mademoiselle on “The Heartbreak Diet.” One for Ms. on “The Bright Side of the Man Shortage.” One for Mother Jones on pharmaceutical sales scams, and probably a book review thrown in.

There was a perk, of course – the occasional free lunch on an editor’s expense account. These would occur in up-market restaurants where the price of lunch for two would easily exceed my family’s weekly food budget, but I realized it would be gauche to bring a plastic baggie for the rolls. My job was to pitch story ideas over the field greens and tuna tartare, all the while marveling at the wealth that my writing helped generate, which, except for the food on my plate, went largely to someone other than me.

For print writers, things have gone steadily downhill. The number of traditional outlets—magazines and newspapers – is shrinking. Ms., for example, publishes only quarterly now, Mother Jones every two months, and Mademoiselle has long since said au revoir. You can blog on the Web of course, but that pays exactly zero. As for benefits: once the National Writers’ Union offered health insurance, but Aetna dropped it and then Unicare found writers too sickly to cover. (You can still find health insurance, however, at www.freelancersunion.org)

So, you may be thinking, who needs writers anyway? The truth is, no one needs any particular writer, just as no one needs any particular auto worker, stage-hand, or janitor. But take us all away and TV’s funny men will be struck mute, soap opera actors will be reduced to sighing and grunting, CNN anchors will have to fill the whole hour with chit chat about the weather, all greeting cards will be blank. Newspapers will consist of advertisements and movie listings; the Web will collapse into YouTube. A sad, bewildered, silence will come over the land.

Besides, anyone who’s willing to stand up to greedy bosses deserves our support. A victory for one group, from Ford workers to stage-hands, raises the prospects for everyone else. Who knows? If the screenwriters win, maybe some tiny measure of respect will eventually trickle down even to bloggers. So in further solidarity with striking writers, I’m going to shut up right now.