The admirable Fruitslinger, blogger of fruit-growing and Green City Market selling, has an appeal for funds for better hosting and a better camera. His blog is worth it; check it out here and then make a pledge here.

UPDATE: Twitter fun, source will remain nameless: “Sat next to food writer last night. Level of douchbagery astonished me. Had recipe on the back of their card for the bartender to reproduce.” Of course, we don’t really know it was Mariani. Or do we? (At least the bar where he pulled this was not The Violet Hour— it was a little north of there on Damen….)

* * *

My arch-nemesis, the bounteously expense-accounted and ethically challenged food writer John Mariani, the epitome of the parachute-in-to-four-star-meals food writer, a man who sees America as a vast black hole of pizza with high points only on the edges, a man who once wrote an article on Texas bbq without ever venturing more than 20 miles from an international airport, will be eating at Graham Elliott tonight, reports Helen at Menu Pages.

Here’s where I’ve railed against him in the past. First, on pizza:

…the main point is just that usual old coastal snobbery toward Chicago-style deep dish pizza. I mean, a list that can take in the 80s trend toward froufrou duck sausage pizzas with hoisin sauce but completely looks down its nose at an exuberantly over the top indigenous American art form like the Chicago deep dish– it’s like an interview with Andre Previn I read once where, pressed, he acknowledged that Stephen Sondheim perhaps proved that music hadn’t completely died as an art form after about 1960. Thanks, Andre, we’ll let you crawl back into your crypt now, and you try to hum the opening number from “Assassins” while John Mariani surveys the vast pizza wasteland from coast to coast.

Then there was the time Mariani tried to decide what his last meal would be, an exercise in jawdropping pretension:

“Nope, I don’t want the overwrought pièce de côte de boeuf Simmental au feu de bois, vert et côtes de blettes, os à moelle, jus corsé from Alain Ducasse’s Le Louis XV in Monaco. But I will order the Prime Illinois corn-fed 21-day-aged bone-in rib eye at Wolfgang Puck’s stunning new steak house, Cut, in Beverly Hills, Calif.,” scribbles Mariani in the grip of his obsession, like a sociopath who still imagines he has the power to pass judgements of life and death upon his victims, rather than being about to have society’s judgement carried out upon him.

If he vanishes tonight and is found a few days later in a diner in Great Bend, Kansas, insensate in a plate of biscuits and gravy and wearing a Toby Keith T-shirt, I had nothing to do with it.

It’s been a busy month or so at the Sky Full of Bacon headquarters.  So I thought it might interest all two or three of you to know a little bit about what’s ahead.

The picture above is from what will be the next podcast.  Hey, those don’t look like fish, you say, if you remember that the raccoon dinner podcast ended with a preview for one about fish.  Well, you’re right.  Right as the raccoon podcast went up, I went to Norwalk, Iowa to shoot at La Quercia, makers of some of the best prosciutto in the world.  And as it happens, that one’s in better shape to be finished sooner, so it should be up within two weeks or so.

Sky Full of Bacon has gotten tagged with having a locavore bent, which I’m fine with, although to a certain extent that’s accidental— hey, you go and shoot producers in your area, the result is you’re doing a story on local food whether you meant to or not.  But La Quercia is the kind of midwest-foods story I really want to spread the word on: some folks in Iowa seeing the potential of making a traditional food (prosciutto) using Iowa pork, and as a result producing truly world-class product which has been hailed by chefs nationwide, not just in the midwest.  This isn’t a story about local being better because it traveled less, this is a story about local being better because it’s the best of its kind on the entire planet.  (Arguably, of course, but you’ll hear from prominent chefs who feel that way.)  California has lots of stories like that, but the midwest is just starting to create them.  So that’s what’s coming next.

At 5:45 this morning, I was standing on a dock in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, waiting to ride 3-1/2 miles out onto Lake Michigan to catch whitefish.  This was something of the climax of a series of events that started when Carl Galvan of Supreme Lobster contacted me some months back about the possibility of shooting at their distribution center/big building kept cold and full of fish in Villa Park.  I shot out there a couple of times and interviewed him and a fish buyer without knowing exactly where the story was going— but I figured that was okay as long as I knew we’d have cool fish house visuals.  Then Carl came up with another possibility— going out with a whitefish boat.

Previous podcasts have mostly involved people whose stories I already knew.  These two are really examples of finding the stories as I shoot.  In the case of the fish house one, I’ve been interviewing chefs about what they and their customers want when they’re thinking about fish for dinner, and that’s provided a broader context that connects what we’ll see in the fish house with how we eat.  In the whitefish boat one, it quickly became clear that the fishermen have big issues with how they’re being managed by the various state agencies, and so part of it will be looking at how this profession, which some of these people have been in for generations, is changing today under regulatory pressure.  If that sounds like a simple story of overfishing fishermen versus purehearted conservationists, it’s not at all, far from it.

In both these cases, getting these additional interviews has taken up more time and, perhaps, slowed production on the next one a little, since the editor is still out shooting.  But still, it’s encouraging to me to know all the good stuff that I have in the can and the time I have to really pursue the fish stories and get all the pieces that will make them solid and thought-provoking videos.  (And I even have parts of a fourth in the can— about an ethnic deli/restaurant in an old-time suburb.  I shot interview footage out there but need to go back and shoot them making food.  And then I need to figure out if it’s a standalone piece, or if I need a second segment on the same theme within the same video, something I haven’t actually done since the very first one.)  So, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in the works here— watch for it.

David Hammond’s latest thoughtful and interesting 848 piece is on a subject dear to my heart full of bacon, why better pig raising is better for humans, pigs and chefs alike— especially in this moment of swine flu worries. Among those he talks to is Mado chef Rob Levitt. Go here and play it on the pop out player which, unfortunately, I can’t embed.

Ruth Reichl and Gourmet won the James Beard Foundation Award for Food Journalism: Multimedia, defeating Ruth Reichl and Gourmet, and also… where is it, I have it here somewhere… ah yes, The Whole Hog Project from Mike Sula at the Chicago Reader and, representing the multi part of multimedia, Sky Full of Bacon. (See them here and here if, somehow by now, you haven’t.)

It was, in any case, a great thing to be nominated along with the Reader, and I thank them for the opportunity which I hope they feel I rose to, and which has afforded me entree to top chefs and national attention at an earlier stage than I could have done on my own. Big thanks to Mike Sula for inviting me along on the last stage of his adventure, and to Kate Schmidt, his editor, for supporting this in-depth project in so many ways, my part included.

Winners are now indicated in the posts with links to the Beard journalism so you can read it for yourself:

Newspaper
Magazines
Miscellaneous print/online
Broadcast

A food blogger code of ethics has been proposed.  To examine both sides of the weighty issues it raises, I thought I’d invite two noncorporeal beings who live with me to discuss the text by annotating it.  Angelic comments are in blue.  Luciferian comments are in, what else, red.

1. We will be accountable

• We will write about the culinary world with the care of a professional. I thought we were gonna be interesting! Already with the snarky attitude. Well, this is getting off on the wrong hoof to me. If I wanted to be a professional, um, I’d save all this material and sucker some editor into letting me blow it up into a big expense account piece.  Blogging was supposed to be fun, casual, racy, snarky, assuming that the reader could catch up and didn’t need everything carefully and laboriously explained.  Already this is sounding like work. We will not use the power of our blog as a weapon. Aw, c’mon. Some things out there need a good skewering with the ol’ trident. And besides, isn’t “power of our blog” right up there with “Vatican Offensive Combat Capability”? We will stand behind our claims. If what we say or show could potentially affect someone’s reputation or livelihood, we will post with the utmost thought and due diligence. Unless I think of a good nasty one-liner, then I’m going with it.

• We will not hide behind total anonymity. Even if we choose to write anonymously for our own personal or professional safety, we will not post anything that we wouldn’t feel comfortable putting our name on and owning up to.  You can’t object to that.  Nobody wants to blog as a coward. You’re right.  Especially since the practical difference between “blogger’s real name” and “total anonymity” is what, four people?

• If we review a restaurant, product or culinary resource we will hold ourselves to a standard set of guidelines as offered by the Association of Food Journalists.  Hey, a code isn’t supposed to reference another code! Well, journalists have long wrestled with these issues. Yeah, and plumbers wrestle with the building code, doesn’t make their answers mine.  I followed the link and basically they’re saying I have to eat at a place twice before I write about it and all that other standard daily paper stuff. What’s wrong with that?  Any place can have an off night, is it fair to attack them for that? Helloooo, 1974, is that you?  There’s no recognition that blogging is not the same as publishing The Daily Grandiosity.  Again, the point of blogging is to be personal, catty, sarcastic, whatever you want to be.  Why do I have to eat at a place twice when a hundred bloggers will, between them, have a hundred meals there?  This is still stuck in the mindset of monopoly dailies that there is one final word to be passed on every restaurant and we have to pass it, like a kidney stone.  It’s a new world in which opinion is fluid, cumulative, comin’ at ya from every direction, like a host of flies.

2. We will be civil

• We whole-heartedly believe in freedom of speech, but we also acknowledge that our experiences with food are subjective. We promise to be mindful—regardless of how passionate we are—that we will forthright, but will refrain from personal attacks. I can’t see anything to object to in this. You wouldn’t.  Who made them Anti-Pope, to dictate to everyone what the tone of blogging should be?  The Heaven with that!

3. We will reveal bias

• If we are writing about something or someone we are emotionally connected to, we will be up front about it.  Wow, this is really a problem?  Bloggers are actually getting laid?  It’s beneath my dignity to answer.

4. We will disclose gifts, comps and samples

• When something is given to us or offered at a deep discount because of our blog, we will disclose that information.  As bloggers, most of us do not have the budgets of large publications, and we recognize the value of samples, review copies of books, donated giveaway items and culinary event, but it’s import to disclose freebies to avoid accusations of conflicts of interest.  This seems very responsible to me. It seems to me again like it’s drawing the line right where journalism decided it long ago belonged, for their convenience— here’s a profession where food has to be paid for, yet every book reviewer sells the free books he’s reviewed and keeps the money.  I see no reason bloggers can’t decide to draw it somewhere else… and readers, who are not idiots, can judge for themselves whether or not someone’s been bought.  Of course readers have long understood what those in my profession have always known— the real temptations are not in gold or jewels but in flattery, in access, in the illusion of collegiality.  I’ve bought many a journalist’s soul with a few words suggesting that he was the equal in importance of the subject he was covering.  (Thomas Friedman, he’s one of mine.)  A comped plate of scallops is angel kids’ stuff by comparison.  Mmm, those do look good, maybe I’ll just have— no, best not.

5. We will follow the rules of good journalism

We will not plagiarize or use images from others without attribution. Yeah, that would be like journalists gleaning ideas from bloggers without attribution, except we all know that that’s never happened in the history of mankind. We will research. We will attribute quotes and offer link backs to original sources whenever possible. We will do our best to make sure that the information we are posting about is accurate. We will factcheck. Very good principles. I trust you agree. In other words, we will practice good journalism.  Except when we feel like doing something else.  Even I may not object to most of this in practice, but I do object to the overall feel of this thing, which seeks to lay out the terms on which I write about food and force me into a format replicating journalism’s current state.  But shouldn’t there be certain principles we all live by? Well, last I checked I was paying for my web hosting, not the National Association of Inkstained Humbugs, and it seems awfully early in the history of blogging to be saying so many things so firmly about what can and can’t be done in a new medium.  Yeah, most of these are good guiding principles (some get a little schoolteacherish) but given a choice between a catechism and the freedom to experiment and evolve, I’ll take free will every time— and trust the readers to make their own choice.  I’m all about choice, it’s paid off very well in my line of work.  Go on, try a scallop.

The local CBS station does a piece on eating local featuring two people who’ve been in Sky Full of Bacons: Cassie Green of Green Grocer and Rob Gardner, Vital Information/Local Beet, procurer of pig heads.

Of course, for the in-depth version, you know where you have to go!

Meryl Streep looks like fun. Amy Adams, unfortunately, looks drippy as she does kitchen slapstick (eek! a lobster) we’ve seen a million times before:

Mike Sula, boss hog on The Whole Hog Project which has also made Sky Full of Bacon a Beard co-nominee or whatever (soon to become inevitable co-loser to Ruth Reichl; it’s like being up against Daniel Day-Lewis for Best Actor) at the James Beard awards, which I believe I may have mentioned here once or twice, is interviewed by Menu Pages about all that and scatters lies, utter damnable lies about Sky Full of Bacon. (He knows the actual percentage is 37.5%, not a third.)

Thanks also to Monica Eng, who gave SFOB a shoutout in her and Phil Vettel’s interview piece the other day.

So Kevin Pang emailed me to say that I had it all wrong about suspecting bureaucratic sloth in The Cheeseburger Show’s long gestation.

The real reason, he says, is that he was so coked up he didn’t even realize he had a TV show until he read it at Menu Pages.

No, wait, that was why there wasn’t a new Guns N Roses album for 17 years. The real reason, Kevin (who only gets high on well-seared ground beef) says, is simply that they’ve been working on it all along like they should be, getting a sponsor, getting a promotional push together, getting feedback from local food media savants (which confirms that we are, as long suspected, chopped liver) and that just because the first iteration went up on Vimeo in January, doesn’t mean it wasn’t tweaked and refined and made into the fabulous thing it is today while Vimeo continued to show the original upload date of that first crude version, edited with flint spears and bison fat.

Oh, and the site, allowing comments, will be up shortly, he swears.

We’re still all for the internet virtues of doing stuff fast and failing in public (“That’s obvious,” a voice shouts from the back row), but the process Kevin describes does not meet our previous definition of corporate sloth in the face of internet-based innovation, which believe us, we acquired through actual experience in certain large advertising agencies we prefer to forget the names of.

Here, once again, is episode 2:

The Cheeseburger Show, Ep. 2 from The Cheeseburger Show on Vimeo.

And remember, I’m interested in linking to, embedding, and making unsourced speculation about any food video being done in the Chicago area, so if you make some, let me know! (A certain magazine recently sent me three copies of their magazine to tell me about some awards they gave out, but never once mentioned the video that’s all over their site. That’s what I’d be linking to and talking about, if you told me about it!)