Me, pork shoulder.  Photo by David Hammond.

The story so far: David Hammond bought his wife one of the mulefoot pigs featured in the “There Will Be Pork” podcasts.  He agreed to let me try to make coppa out of part of the shoulders, and I also agreed to make him bacon.  Here’s Hammond’s account of the first step of that process, with pictures of me cutting out the coppa muscle and salting/spicing it for a couple of weeks of curing in the fridge.

I was rather proud of the process of removing the coppa muscle. (Think of it as sort of a roll of meat, running roughly parallel to the spine on the shoulder.) Every time I’ve had any interaction with a pork shoulder lately, I’ve poked and prodded it to try to figure this out, and had some guidance from both Nathan Sears at Vie and especially Rob Levitt at Mado, who let me photograph it step by step. Still, I can’t say I was sure where it was…

Then we unwrapped David’s mulefoot shoulder and… hey! There it was, a perfect little cylinder of meat tucked in next to the blade. (If you look at the picture with the laptop in it, look at the end of the shoulder nearest the edge of the computer, and you’ll see an area where it’s sort of round on one end, and then you see meat and fat running long and straight along the body of the shoulder. That’s the cylindrical coppa, basically.)

I’m starting to think, actually, that when you get something that’s been naturally raised, you’re more likely to find its parts in the proper places and proportions, like on the charts, and it’s only when you get meat that’s been raised by some more artificial process that it seems kind of jumbled, irregular, like way too thin bellies or pork shoulders that each look like some different jumble of hunks of meat. So it was really a breeze cutting the coppa out to produce a nice little roll of meat and, just as importantly, a remainder of the shoulder that wasn’t mangled and abused and would make a nice barbecued pork shoulder, as it did. [Note: Rob Levitt has a more prosaic theory: it was simply butchered with a lot more skill than the stuff that gets hacked and shipped to Peoria or wherever.  Still, I think there’s something to the idea that better raised meat is better proportioned, neater, more like it should be than something that was grown unnaturally quickly.]

*  *  *

So it’s a little over two weeks later and time to hang and dry the coppa.  Here’s how it looked when it came out of the plastic bag in the fridge, like a Stuckey’s pecan roll’s fantasy of transcendence:

30 minutes of rinsing the salt off (that was Rob Levitt’s advice) and then wrapped in cheesecloth and tied off (if Ariane of Top Chef needs any tips on how to tie up meat, have her call me).  Rob recommends cheesecloth as opposed to some kind of casing because you can remove it if it gets bad mold, wash the meat, and replace it.  I also liked the fact that I didn’t have to buy 100 feet of it at a cost of about $30 plus shipping, as was the case with the 65mm casing.

Then hang it in my wine fridge— that’s the lardo hanging above it— and wait a month or so.

Mates, acquaintances, etc. who have done something cool this week:

Michael Morowitz was on 848 today talking about The Local Beet, for which I’ve written.

David Hammond (who’s on 848 a lot) has a piece on Albawadi at The Food Chain this week. (True: they actually asked if I wanted to write about it, and I said, sheesh, I wrote about it at Time Out, LTHForum and here, maybe not EVERY opinion about it available online should come from the same guy? So they got Hammond— but of course, I was there at the lunch when he went. Anyway, I’ll be doing one on a place I’ve never been or written about, probably next week.)

And Kenny Z, who was part of the tasting panel in the Mado/headcheese podcast, took 3rd place, the highest prize taken by a non-professional chef in this mac n’ cheese cookoff.

So, I got two invites from PR folks recently to events. One a meet and greet with a winemaker, one a dinner at a steak house I’d barely heard of before. I’ve gotten them before, but somehow a sports bar in Downer’s Grove was a resistible temptation. These, I’m a little less resistant to, but at the same time, I wouldn’t mind hearing anybody’s feedback as to whether or not I should do these things.

PROS:
• Could be fun (and one is a definite networking with other food bloggers thing).
• It’s not like I’m getting paid any other way.
• I don’t feel I have to follow newspaper-biz standards of anonymity/objectivity, obviously I’m already compromised to an extent Phil Vettel couldn’t tolerate whenever I make a video about somebody, I figure you’re smart enough to get that I’m not exactly purely objective on a place like Mado or Blackbird, but at the same time, my enthusiasm is clearly sincere to anyone who watches my videos which are plainly sympathetic to how they approach cooking. As long as I don’t write about these places for some publication that demands higher standards, it shouldn’t be a problem.

CONS:
• Won’t my midwestern good manners make me want to say something ever so slightly nice even about a place I hated, hated, hated? Can I be objective, or am I a bit too much of a conciliator (yes, I often am that in life, no matter how I may seem to be riding a momentum of snark sometimes in my writing).
• Some bloggers have already demonstrated they can be bought very, very cheaply at these things. Maybe it’s better to just steer clear of the whole thing, avoid the taint.
• I’m not really a steakhouse guy. I will probably be ennh. Then I’ll piss off the PR person, who won’t invite to something I’d at least like better. (In other words, don’t sell out now, save doing so for something really good!)

Anyone have any thoughts?

Mark Bittman is a New York Times writer and the author of some highly useful cookbooks which bridge the gap between real cooking and modern lifestyles. So Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating seems at first as if it might be a more practical (“With More Than 75 Recipes!”) version of Michael Pollan’s food-system polemics like The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food (the cover of which it especially resembles):

It certainly starts out like the work of a New York Times writer:

Two years ago, a report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) landed on my desk. Called Livestock’s Long Shadow, it revealed a stunning statistic: global livestock production is responsible for about one-fifth of all greenhouse gases—more than transportation.

Unfortunately, the New York Times writer this mainly sounds like is Thomas Friedman, whose standard breathless lead-in was mocked recently by Matt Taibbi: “I was in Dubai with the general counsel of BP last year, watching 500 Balinese textile workers get on a train, when suddenly I said to myself, ‘We need better headlights for our tri-plane.'” Everything about this paragraph throbs with self-importance: the report didn’t come in the mail, it landed on his desk at the Times, with an urgent thud (“Bittman! Friedman! I need global greenhouse gas statistics— that means now, ladies!”) The report doesn’t contain, it reveals a statistic, which stuns Bittman (though it shouldn’t be that surprising to a leading food writer that modern agriculture uses a lot of fossil fuels). And all that’s just in the opening paragraph. At this rate, by the third chapter he’ll be spraying cranial fluid every time a carrot arrives in his inbox, demanding action.

Indeed Bittman soon reveals that his is no mere feelbad meditation on food, but an actionable diet plan with truly planetary consequences. And not just in the sense that yo’ mama so big, when she rubs her legs together, it makes global warming:

If I told you that a simple lifestyle choice could help you lose weight, reduce your risk of many long-term or chronic diseases, save you real money, and help stop global warming, I imagine you’d be intrigued. If I also told you that this change would be easier and more pleasant than any diet you’ve ever tried, would take less time and effort than your exercise routine, and would require no sacrifice, I would think you’d want to read more.

He might think that. You might be thinking, how do I get away from this relentless huckster before I wind up with a timeshare in Florida and a complete set of ShamWow?

Cutting through the hype, Bittman’s basic premise is that if we eat less meat and more greens, the pounds (and the planet) will take care of themselves. Eating less meat may seem a simple choice, but only in the sense that “Stop drinking” and “Relate to hot girls as people” are simple choices, too, which often prove devilishly difficult to carry out. Eating less meat is no sacrifice only if you find Pan-Cooked Greens With Tofu and Garlic (p. 211) every bit as satisfying as steak. The change is easier and more pleasant only if you have the time to devote to learning new ways of meal-planning. And so on. It’s not that these things aren’t true, possible or undeniably beneficial, it’s that Prof. Harold Hill keeps selling us on all the fabulous benefits of having a band while gliding over any mention of the need to practice.

Most of all, there’s that reference to global warming. I expect publishers have been trying for years now to find a way to make global warming into a diet book, thus bringing two of today’s hottest trends together, and Bittman does valiant work in connecting the dots between industrial agriculture and global warming. Again, it’s not that any of this isn’t true, necessarily, it’s that it’s hyped so breathlessly to make this the most important, most impactful, most earthsaving diet book in the history of mankind:

Could improved health for people and planet be as simple as eating fewer animals, and less junk food and super-refined carbohydrates?
Yes.

Helpful tip: never answer “no” to the question “Is it really this simple?” in Bittman’s book. For baby boomers, who can turn any personal choice into an issue of planet-sized portent, it’s no longer enough to lose weight to save your arteries or your sex appeal; only the prospect of rescuing an entire celestial body will keep you away from the donut cart.

To be fair, having pounded the podium into organic mulch in his first few chapters, Bittman does tone it down in in the next 100 pages or so, with a more temperate run-through of our present food system that will be familiar to Pollan readers, especially those of In Defense of Food. Familiar, that is, but not comparable in its impact or interest— Bittman does essentially none of the reporting Pollan does, never taking us to meet food scientists or feedlot operators; he’s saving the planet without leaving his desk. (He even explicitly prefaces a section on factory farming by saying he’s going to “skip most of the deplorable stuff,” as if dramatization would get in the way of self-dramatization.)

Nor is his account as well organized as Pollan’s critique, flitting about semi-randomly from topic to topic as long as every factoid he flings supports his general thesis.  That opening statistic about agricultural greenhouse gases returns at the end of chapter 2 as if we’d never heard it before; every activity is reduced to its measure in fossil fuels consumed—as if efficiency alone weren’t a numbers game that industrial agriculture is destined to win.

And not to sound like I’m shilling for the American Michael Pollan Council, but in contrast to Pollan’s coolly incisive dissection of the problems, Bittman’s anger often runs ahead of his grasp on logic:

It doesn’t take a genius to see that an ever-growing population cannot continue to devote limited resources to produce ever-increasing amounts of meat, which takes roughly 10 times more energy to produce than plants.  Nor can you possibly be “nice” to animals, or respectful of them, when you’re raising and killing them by the billions.

Like a soy burger, this looks like it has the meaty fiber of an argument, but crumbles at the first touch of a fork. Set aside the sloppy writing (that first “produce” should surely be “producing”), and it’s a logical muddle: how much meat is taking 10 times more energy to produce than what plants, the meat we eat now or the ever-increasing amounts? And is it the killing or the numbers that make raising meat not nice? Are we talking my individual niceness (hence the second person), or society’s (hence the billions), which are presumably two different forms of niceness? A fiery but confused paragraph like this doesn’t exist to inform, it exists to keep you wound up enough to keep turning the page. Bittman is to Pollan on nutritionism what Dan Brown is to Graham Greene on Catholicism.

Okay, but even if Bittman’s book is a clip job, doesn’t it serve a purpose if it calls more attention to the very real problems in our food chain? I think not, because the lack of nuance in Bittman’s account extends not only to the problems but to the solutions. Because ultimately he’s writing a diet book, which is to say a book preaching hope and salvation for those who follow the one true path, he ignores and even flatly contradicts himself on the sticky dilemmas that Pollan wrestles with.

Pollan recognizes that food prices will have to go up to support better forms of agriculture. But Bittman preaches that you’ll be saving money in no time (and his factoids have food prices shooting up in one chapter and falling, thanks to industrial efficiency, in the next). Bittman pushes buying less meat as a way to reduce the impact of meat on the planet, but never considers the irony that that’s likely in the short term to increase the market share of industrial meat, as the conscientious people support their local farmers less and the unconscientious ones buy 48-packs of lamb chops at Sam’s Club.

Which leaves only the second half of the book, the recipes. How are they? They look all right, in a Mediterranean-diet-with-a-touch-of-Asian kind of way. The breakfast and lunch ones are simple and pretty attractive; there’s no question that Bittman has a genuine knack for idiot-proofing contemporary flavors so that the harried, not-all-that-culinarily-skilled yuppie can turn out something respectable that matches modern tastes in a fairly short amount of time.

The dinner ones are more problematic, because they look less like a change from anything anyway (when Bittman suggests a 40-minute cassoulet containing a pound of sausage or pork chops, he’s not making a healthful cassoulet, he’s just mucking up a classic dish with bad technique), and because many of them are too vague to really help the cook who has no clue what to do with a kohlrabi or a squash. Telling people they can use any old vegetables they want in a stir-fry isn’t likely to be news to them, and it isn’t likely to lead to terribly good stir-fries, either.

And that’s the problem with what ought to be the most useful part of this book: there’s not enough depth to it. Are 77 recipes, even ones that teach basic skills, enough to put my family and the planet on an entirely new basis for eating? It seems unlikely.

To put the comparison in Bittmanesquely reductive terms, at a shipping weight of 1.2 pounds per book, a case of Food Matters uses as much fuel (according to calculations that just landed on my desk) as a 733-mile road trip.  Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone weighs in at a much heftier 4.3 pounds, which is as much oil as 3.6 sperm whales, but it contains over 1400 recipes, making it approximately 20 times as efficient to take those sperm whales on a road trip. Can it really be this simple, that if you want to take Bittman’s advice, you can get all you really need of it from this review and then spend your money more wisely on a comprehensive vegetarian cookbook like Madison’s— or, indeed, Bittman’s own How To Cook Everything Vegetarian? Yes.

One thing that bugs me about foodie films is when the world revolves around food so completely that it seems unnatural. That may seem odd coming from someone whose world plainly does revolve around food, but in some of these movies it just seems forced, when food is so completely the music of love. I want to see the role food plays in life, not a life in which food seems to be playing every role.

There’s an excellent example of the kind of foodie film I like in theaters right now, though you’d never guess it: Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino. As you may know, it’s basically Clint’s version of The Karate Kid, grouchy, bigoted old Korean War vet living in neighborhood surrounded by Hmong becomes something of a father figure and something of a protector to the Hmong kid next door. And what was striking and completely believable to me is that food is the thing that first breaks down the barriers between Clint and his neighbors (who are initially no more fond of the last white guy in their neighborhood than he is of all the Asians taking over his neighborhood).

The movie begins with gatherings at both houses, in which food plays a natural role— and you can almost see him thinking theirs looks better than his. When he scares off some toughs threatening them, they bring him gifts of food, which he initially tries to reject but soon has to admit smells and tastes better than the single-guy dinners (a pack of beef jerky and a six pack) he’s living on. At a party, he breaks down their barriers by being a cheerful and appreciative guest for the clearly competitive ladies pushing their food on him in the kitchen. And so on.

There are no extravagant poetics about food here, indeed the role food plays is hardly even discussed explicitly, but it proves to be a natural and realistic picture of how food is almost always the first avenue of communication and exchange between strange cultures.

Left to right: Louisa Chu, coon dinner, Peter Engler.

1. So Anthony Bourdain did his Chicago show, and after the obligatory “Hey, you’re no Second City!” pat on the head every New Yorker seems compelled to offer, it was plenty good, full of weird stuff mostly brought to media prominence by LTHForum foodies.  So a big bow for creating a Chicago defined by, not Pizzeria Uno, Al’s Italian Beef, and Lou Mitchell’s, but Hot Doug’s, Moto and Calumet Fisheries. (As Samuel Goldwyn once said, “I’m tired of the old cliches. Let’s have some new cliches!”)  The only thing I found weird about it was… how green the backgrounds of the driving-around shots were.  It’s like they drove around Bensenville to show us what’s between L2O and Hot Doug’s.

And the Mother-in-Law!  It cracked me up no end to see a TV star dragged on one of Peter (Rene G) Engler’s expeditions to eat the fascinatingly awful Mother-in-Law, cheap Depression food extraordinaire.  Now, how plugged into the zeitgeist is your faithful Sky Full of Bacon correspondent?  Saturday night, I was shooting at a certain dinner in Wisconsin, and two of my dining companions were… Bourdain on-screen guides Louisa Chu and Peter Engler.  And what dinner was it?  The raccoon dinner in Delafield, WI… where Cathy Lambrecht got the raccoon, which she gave to Homaro Cantu of Moto, thus inspiring him to create on the spot the very “road kill” dish seen in last night’s episode (now made with duck, alas).

So prepare to learn more than you could ever hope to about le cuisine raccoon in an upcoming Sky Full of Bacon next month or so.

2. Here’s the most interesting link the foraging podcast has gotten to date:

those aren’t just distasteful shrines to opulence piled up in places like Mountain Village — those are also resources held in reserve for a day not far away when we’ll need all that stored wood, all those spare parts, all that housing space. Just think: that single-family tens-of-thousands-of-square-foot weekend getaway spot my friend squatted in could one day be … a hostel for dozens of trekkers … an indoor village for some future self-styled traveling-buddha-like career-bumming class of wayfarers … or a series of studio apartments for the future dwellers in some Rewilded West.

3. Remember all those stories during the Olympics about how Michael Phelps ate 26 eggs and two rashers of bacon for breakfast every morning, and all that.  Because he was so hungry from… swimming. Riiiiiight.

4. I read that John Robbins, one of the big proponents of veganism going back to his 1998 book Diet For a New America, lost his fortune in the Madoff scandal. I find this weirdly satisfying.  Not that I think there’s an exact analogy between being a pious preacher of radical nutritionism and being a Ponzi scheme operator promising financial miracles, but read this and see if you don’t think Robbins was ripe pickings for a pyramid scheme:

He said that he had a few words for those of us who might be concerned that what we were doing on the planet was not important. He held his hands in a V-form with just the tips of his fingers touching and told us that our job was simply to stand and smile, that each of us who could stand and smile would be holding the wedge open for 10 more vegans behind us and 10 more behind each of them and so on until the wedge could grow big enough and strong enough to move over the face of the earth and help heal the earth.

Just sign here!  As it happens, I’m reading a book which I plan to rip into shortly for exactly this sort of Elmer Gantryesque approach to nutrition, so stay tuned.

The great thing about food versus something like music is that if you imitate something great in music for a cheaper price, you wind up with a cheesy musical like Beatlemania for the bused-in matinee crowd (“Mash Hit— the incredible true story of Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett and the making of an American Halloween classic!  Tickets now on sale at the Cadillac Theater box office!”)  But if you imitate a meal by Thomas Keller and Grant Achatz for a cheaper price, you get publicity like this and this.

When I read these pieces, though, I thought— $300 may be a big markdown from $1500, but that’s still putting Achatz and Keller’s cuisine way out of the average American.  And is that kind of elitism what the Age of Obama is about?  Hell no.  If I’m going to feed my family a fancy dinner, I don’t want to have to get a government bailout to make it happen, I want to be able to get everything at my local Aldi, and still have enough change from my $20 to buy a pack of unfiltered Luckies, or some crack.

I knew there was only one American who had the culinary skills, the day and a half of training at Cordon Bleu, the dysfunctional childhood spent binging and purging to share my vision and make the Achatz-Keller meal happen at a price that’s truly family-friendly.  Yes, it’s none other than Sandra Lee, of Semi-Homemade With Sandra Lee.  Luckily, because of the global reach and reputation of Sky Full of Bacon, I was able to contact her and get her exclusive advice on how to make a meal every bit as beautiful as the one Keller and Achatz made with a fraction of the effort, expense, or knowledge of food.  Here are some of her suggestions, which are sure to delight the whole family.  To see the original dishes, go here.

Cornet of Salmon: “This is basically an ice cream cone with fish in it.  Well, who has time to fish for salmon?  Fish sticks are a family favorite, just put them on a vanilla wafer with a dash of onion powder.  I call it Jaws On a Surfboard.  Doesn’t that sound like more fun to eat?”

Prawn with yuba, miso and orange peel: “It’s too hard threading shrimp onto one of Alinea’s fancy little pieces of metal, and then wrapping orange peel around it.  I just take an Orange Dreamsicle and then stick shrimp onto it with frosting from a tube.  Sprinkle with seasoned salt and your family will love the presentation and the taste!”

Caviar on lemon gelee with califlower: “Caviar!  Who has time for that?  Just wet some instant mashed potato flakes and roll Lemonheads in them.  Everybody will get a big kick out of discovering what’s inside.”

Black Truffle Explosion: “My chocolate truffles work great in this.  Just stick in the microwave and boom!”

Hot Potato/Cold Potato: “This is where smart shopping can save you money and time.  You’ve already got the instant mashed potato flakes, so follow the instructions on the box to prepare a cup’s worth.  Then just stir in some T.G.I.Friday’s Potato Skins– they’re from the freezer section so they’re already cold!  That’s precious time you can spend with your family instead of slaving in the kitchen all day, cooling things.”

Hen Egg Custard With Ragout Of Black Winter Truffles: “I have news for those fancypants chefs— eggs only come from hens!  So if you paid extra for that, you got gypped!  (No offense to Gyp-Americans.)  A Jell-O pudding cup with one of my truffles in it works just fine.  I loved those pudding commercials with Bill Cosby, didn’t you?”

Wild Striped Bass with camomile, shellfish, ginger: “Kids love fish sticks— and they’ll double-love them when they’re striped with peanut butter and jelly.  To save time, buy the kind that has the peanut butter and the jelly in the same jar!  That’s how you let your family know you really care about their happiness.”

1. Please remove your “1.20.09” bumpersticker now. You don’t want to be as bad as the car I saw on election day 2008 bearing a (weirdly pristine) Kerry/Edwards bumpersticker.

2. Just saw that Michael Nagrant kindly posted this in a year-end roundup type thing at New City:

Top 5 Culinary Things to be Thankful For
Any dessert Elizabeth Dahl makes at Boka
Green City Market and the late Abby Mandel
Mike Gebert’s culinary videos at Sky Full of Bacon
Mike Sula’s thoughtful food writing—especially the Mulefoot project at the Chicago Reader
Ryan Poli is back in town at Perennial

3. The ChiTrib has a great story on Jennifer McLagan (of Fat fame, no not her personally, her book of that title which I talked about here.) A sample quote:

McLagan further believes that including good-quality animal fat in that meal will start us down the road to wellness. “Because fat is digested slowly,” she writes, “eating it leaves us feeling sated, and we’re less likely to snack between meals. Eat the right fats and you’ll probably lose weight.”

Take that, prosciutto-avoiders.

4. Kinda random masthead tagline at LTHForum right now:

So, from the ‘better late than never’ files, here is a photo recap of our meal . . .

Except it isn’t “here.” You have to dig through the site to find what it’s referring to.  Anyway, it’s far from the pithiest, cleverest thing I can remember being said there lately… not that I can remember any of them offhand, of course.

5. My friend Wyatt Mitchell (thanked at the end of several podcasts for various technical reasons) passed along this fun story under the heading “Sky Full of Bacon Goes To Tokyo.” I wish…

This is going to be new media talk, if that bores you, there will be more food talk soon enough.

My foraging video has passed 4000 views at Vimeo. And as I mentioned in the post below, my total viewings to date are now well over 10,000 (over 11,000 at Vimeo plus hundreds more via iTunes and my own server).

This is starting to be real media. That may seem like a vainglorious claim—how can I say that when TV shows draw millions—but the reality is that there are lots of things that sell or get watched or listened to in the five figures, or even four, that we treat as “real” media. The book I wrote about a dozen years ago sold 14,000 copies—which may not sound like much, but impressed the hell out of folks published by universities, who knew their sales were in the hundreds. The run of a classic film on DVD from a small distributor like Kino might only be a few thousand. Even TV—many cable network shows draw non-primetime audiences in the five or low six figures.

And certainly compared to other attempts at similar online media, these numbers are strong. Okay, not as strong as Chad Vader or similar goofiness on YouTube, but as I mentioned before, there’s a vaguely similar series of videos produced in Chicago that’s also on Vimeo, and their last one has been viewed all of a couple of hundred times. Not to get all Seth Godin or Jeff Jarvisy here, but it’s really a textbook example of the old versus the new media playbook. Here’s their tactical approach to getting viewers in a few Powerpoint-style bullets:
• Existing brand name
• Built-in subscriber base
• Magazine-style subject with proven audience appeal (how to videos with name chefs)

And they get a couple of hundred views. I have no name, no built-in base (maybe LTHForum would count as one, but it amounts maybe 75-150 views each time, not that big). But what I do have is:
• Personal approach that makes my stuff feel like it comes from a real person
• The determination to go out and schmooze for links all over the landscape (which paid off hugely this time)
• “Sticky” subjects (that is, the kind of subjects where you feel like telling somebody “Hey, check this out!” and putting it up on your site)

These are the things that matter in the new media landscape. There’s nothing brilliant about how I’m doing it, and there are at least hundreds, maybe thousands doing it better than me on a million topics all over the web. But my relative success with somewhat esoteric, longform regional foodie documentaries is a perfect example of where our media landscape is going, toward homemade media that can genuinely compete in the same media landscape for a sliver of the audience, if they work hard at it.

And more and more our media landscape is becoming about slivers. The mass audience is vanishing. The media are facing rough times (everybody talks about newspapers, but I wouldn’t bet on fat times for magazines, radio or local TV stations any time soon, either). And slowly, slooooowly, the realization is dawning that all numbers are not equal—that the person who had a TV show about food on while they were surfing the web, eating a sandwich and sorting the laundry maybe isn’t an equal prospect to the foodie who sat and watched a 17-minute video on the computer of their own choice, from beginning to end. That one of the latter is maybe worth ten of the former. Or 100… if you can find the medium that reaches them.

I left for a few hours, and the total number of people who had watched the foraging podcast at Vimeo was something like 142.

Came back and the number who’ve been added today is over 1,500 2,000 2,500.  So far. That’s over 100 times the number who watched it the previous day.  (The nice thing, too, is that all the old ones always get some additional viewing as a consequence, too.  It’s great that they’re not dead after a few days, like so much on the web.) UPDATE: And a friend points out that I’m up over 10,000 views total at Vimeo as well.

So big thanks to Boing Boing for producing this hitstorm, and to a blog called Homegrown Evolution for being kind enough to post it where Boing Boing would see it! Also thanks for linkage to Martha Bayne (for whom I’ll be making soup soon), Chicago Metblogs, Planted Paradise, and TakePart. And it’s featured at The Local Beet, too.

Also, my article on Middle Eastern in Bridgeview is indeed in the new Time Out, where it looks fantastic (p. 34), also note that it rates a mention on the cover and a full-page shot of Albawadi serves as the beginning of the food section.  You can read the reviews here that led to me writing it, of Al-Basha (which didn’t make the final article because it’s too far from the others) and Albawadi (which, of course, did).