In the past few weeks, I’ve had several occasions where I’ve tweeted the existence of a post and someone has shot back critical comment with some degree of indignation. This is always startling to me because blogging, unlike Tweeting, had until recently been fairly anonymous; if I did get feedback, it was rare and calm and usually well after the fact, a missive delivered with the relaxedness of snail mail. Where Twitter is like your phone ringing two minutes later— “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU THINKING?”

In this case it had to do with my post on The Purple Pig and Ceres’ Table on Monday. Someone who is in the biz, if not at a restaurant, shot back thusly:

How can u call this a resto review after (A) visiting the resto once & (B) only trying 3 very small plates–4% of the menu?

I sent back this response, within the 140 character limit of Twitter:

Because it’s not only upfront about those facts but incorporates them into my views. Welcome to the post-Vettel world.

To which she responded:

It’s one thing to write about your experience, but another to call it a Restaurant Review!?

There’s an important point to get out of the way first, I think. If you object to the idea of a review after one visit and three dishes (though I’d guess they represent more like 10% of the menu, by the way), you certainly can’t say I hid those circumstances in the piece:

…after my interview at Crain’s I popped in there for lunch and had three things…

Now, admittedly, maybe I just didn’t have a large enough sample— if one thing wowed me on a typical visit to Avec, say, it was probably one out of six or seven things ordered. Three may not have been enough candy bars to get a golden ticket….

So disclosure is not the issue— the issue is whether the title “Restaurant Review” carries with it the assumption of certain time-honored dead-tree-media responsibilities on my part. (Actually, the only place the actual phrase “Restaurant Review” appears is in the tags, but I’ll accept that given their placement in the format, this piece is, indeed, labeled a “Restaurant Review.”) I’m sure we can all recite what those responsibilities are— multiple visits, anonymous dining, pay my own way, and so on. At this point I’d like to show you a building:

That is what Sky Full of Bacon does not have: a big-ass media institution behind it. Nor does my opinion have the imprimatur and represent the august opinion of a large media institution. And I’m pretty sure people are in no illusion about either one of those.

They also know that the world of media is changing.  So I just don’t see, in that changing world, why the thing that’s replacing something, or at least growing up as an alternative with its own rules, is required to adopt all the characteristics of the thing it’s replacing/alternative to.  Why would what’s coming up want to copy what’s going down?

Which is not to say that some of the old values shouldn’t be maintained, either. I do believe in those values to some extent— I’m not always anonymous and I don’t always pay, but I am scrupulous about disclosing those things because you shouldn’t have to wonder about that as you read. But if you’re going to think it’s unfair that pipsqueaks like me get to pipe up about a restaurant after one visit, I think it’s important to recognize that something else has always been unfair in some ways: the fact that the Trib or Chicago Magazine gets to issue one opinion carved in stone, based on a mere two or three visits, which will hang around the neck of a restaurant for years.

The flip side of pipsqueak reviewing is that reviewing has become this constant fluid thing. A thread at a site like LTHForum, or even Yelp, may be made up of single visits by nobodies with less expertise and experience than one name reviewer (I said “may”), but it almost certainly represents more visits over more nights by more people with different life experiences eating a wider variety of what the restaurant has to offer over many seasons and many evolutions of the menu. And I for one think that’s a pretty great improvement; but even if you don’t, it’s not obviously and grossly inferior to the old way. (Well, unless you’re used to the old way only throwing softballs.)

It’s a little less obvious when it comes to a blog where there’s only one voice, but still, I just don’t believe there’s anybody coming here thinking of it having the officialness of a big media dining guide.  It’s a diary of one guy’s adventures in food, as random in what gets talked about as my own life seems to be to the guy living it. And I’m going to write about what I eat, right after I eat it (and I’m going to do so frankly, I’m not interested in boosting the scene, or any restaurant, though there are plainly some I like and encourage). Then— this is the benefit— if I go there again, I’ll write about it again, unlike a newspaper reviewer. And if that gets labeled “restaurant review,” I wouldn’t take it to mean that in the same way that the Tribune or Chicago Magazine or The Boonesville Picayune-Troubadour means it.

Well, that’s my take on it, anyway. But maybe you think the words “restaurant review” do come freighted with all those old media things, and I’d be better off deleting the tag and making “Mike’s freeform diary of occasional dining” be more clearly that. If you have an opinion, put it in the comments, and if you have a long and involved enough opinion that you think it should get rebuttal time above the fold here, then let me know and I will… probably… give you equal time and space to tell me I’m full of it. (How often does a newspaper do that, I ask? Depends how many lawyers you bring to the meeting, I’d say.)

* * *

And we have a passionate opposing view:

You can call your posts whatever you like, but I don’t think it’s fair and certainly not a comprehensive “review” if you only visit a restaurant once and only sample a small percentage of the dishes available. That, to me, is more a snapshot of a restaurant than a fully informed appraisal of a restaurant and its consistency over time. It shouldn’t matter if, in this snapshot, you say positive things (if that’s your response to criticism) – you still only got a limited perspective of a restaurant with one visit. I don’t think stating that “things are changing” exempts you from attempting to be fair and as objective as possible when writing about any business, and I think that excuse is a cop out.

If I were blogging about a restaurant based on only one visit, I personally don’t think it would be ethical to call it a “review,” with the comprehensiveness that title implies. I guess you can make up your own rules if you like, but be prepared to take hits if people disagree with the way you pick and choose how to apply said rules as you see fit. This isn’t about “old media” versus “new media,” or being tied to old school ideas or what have you, it’s about basic fairness and how your voice, as a well known persona on the Chicago food scene, is seen as authoritative. With that comes a certain responsibility. It’s on you if you reject that just because you enjoy ranting against print reviewers or whatever. You absolutely have an obligation to try and be as fair as possible in any review you give, no matter who is paying (and I honestly don’t care about that), and I don’t think you can do that based on a single visit.

So I was invited down to Crain’s Chicago Business last week to comment about the food scene or something. I had actually just bought a couple of new dress shirts so I put on a nice green one. Which turned out to be a bad choice, since they were planning on shooting green screen, which means, anything green would vanish and be replaced by the background. Personally, I’d have gone for the floating Cheshire Cat head effect, me looming over the city as a literal sky full of bacon-devotee, but they didn’t like that idea, so they dug out a sweater. A sweater with a big ribbed collar that looked like it came from an 80s Star Trek movie:

The sweater was also twelve sizes too small, so I wound up having to sit completely immobile so as not to pop the snaps, which has the cheering effect of making me look like The Food Blogger With The Tiny Head Who’s Too Fat To Get Up From His Chair. Which, honestly, I am not. Though I did go to The Purple Pig afterwards.

Anyway, some nice plugs for Sky Full of Bacon in the piece, as well as rare footage of me on camera, as I’d look if I were being swallowed by a giant mollusk. Check the piece out here; I’m only in the video at top.

Yes, that’s right, I’m guest waffle-blogger at the justly lauded Waffleizer this week. Check out my creation— waffle iron-fried chicken and waffles, a dish so powerful it cures vegetarianism— and my never-before-told tale of Waffle Day at my dot-com job in the late 90s by going here. (He has some awfully nice things to say about the new video, too.)

Tomorrow, I go to a major business publication to talk blogs and the restaurant scene, or some such thing. Watch for the guy with the extremely square haircut (maybe it will grow out in the next 24 hours). Anyway, more on that coming soon.

Also with awfully nice words: Helen at Grub Street.

Continued from here and here.

And so we come to our last two nominees— both of them pretty straightforward.

Breadtopia

Breadtopia is a site devoted to demonstrating and teaching how to make bread, run by a guy named Eric who looks (and dresses) like Clint Eastwood, but thankfully seems more easygoing as a teacher. There’s no great entertainment value here, it’s just solid as hell at teaching you breadmaking techniques; he speaks well and to the point, and the simple videos show what to do clearly and at some length. You can also buy a lot of the tools he uses from the site. Nobody will watch these for fun, but as someone who makes bread, I’m glad to have found them.

* * *

Crash Test Kitchen

Husband and wife from former British colony nation who make oddball snacks in their kitchen on video— haven’t we done this once already? Crash Test Kitchen has an Australian couple rather than a Canadian one, and in the video above they’re making an Australian monstrosity called a sausage roll rather than an American one (Frito pie), but otherwise, the similarities are striking. The filmmaking is noticeably more fluid; the couple is less adorable (nothing against them, but they’re not as cute as the Food Tease pair). They do a nice job of showing the details you really need to see to do things right, as in this Christmas duck video:

* * *

So who would I vote for? Maangchi is still my favorite, with runner-up honors going to Breadtopia for the high quality of its instruction, and Food Tease because the people are charming, although it’s only fair as an instructional video per se. That said, I know I’ve seen many other fascinating videos out there beyond the cooking instructional genre, more colorful in their depiction of our food world than these mostly kitchen-based videos; and even given its focus on regional cuisine, it’d be great to see Saveur push the boundaries next year and take in wider turf… maybe even a video series devoted to the variety and culture of a specific region, say. If only I could think of one!

Continued from here.

Food 52

From obscure folks working in middle America, we go to the media big leagues with Food 52. Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs are two women who write for the New York Times and various other publications… including, in Hesser’s case at least, Saveur, hmm. Even more indicative of their place of privilege in the bloggy world is the list of folks helping them on their blog, which is longer than Beyonce’s entourage— including two videographers who recently graduated from NYU.

So this better be good.

Your Best Bread Pudding from Food52 on Vimeo.

Oh my, bread pudding made with stale baguette and $30 bourbon in a copper pot— yes, we are in New York now.

There’s this thing that happens these days where a newspaper or magazine, who puts out a dignified and thoroughly professional product, decides to let its people dabble in other media online— and the result is not nearly so professional. Hesser and Stubbs (sounds like a cop show) are pretty good presenters, they speak articulately and with a little media training they’d learn how to talk to the camera more than each other. But the videography keeps them at too great a distance, it shoots the sides of bowls when one of them is trying to show what’s inside, or can barely see a pan over the edge of a counter. Not to mention a use of shakicam bordering on tidalwavecam. (The point of handheld cameras is that you get in close, so you put up with the jitters. This gives us jitters without actually getting the shot.)  I’m not saying it’s terrible, but on a site where everything bespeaks an image of genteel upscale professionalism, the videography is the thing that lets the rest down and seems very homemade.

The strength here is that Hesser and Stubbs show obvious comfort with sophisticated recipes, and you believe you can do it because they do it so relaxedly. In the end, the recipes are contemporary and appealing, so the technical shortcomings that are obvious to me (look how dark the still image in the Vimeo window is! That takes two seconds to fix with a levels filter!) may seem unimportant to you.

Here’s another video, about mashed potatoes, which had a different director— let’s just pause to savor that notion; this blog post had a different director— and it seems to solve many of my issues with the one above; the two-camera setup makes it livelier visually and we actually get to see the food in this one. (Nine minutes seems loooong, though, for such a simple subject.)

* * *

Maangchi

If I had one personal issue with the blogs so far, it’s that I don’t really need a video to teach me to make most of what I’ve looked at. That changes with Maangchi, devoted to Korean food.

What makes this such great web video is that it’s a solid cooking show about genuinely novel (to me) dishes, and yet at the same time it has a kind of unintentionally daffy edge that comes from the star’s perky personality and her big false eyelashes and the fact that half the time, you can’t understand what she’s saying; she’s like a Korean Zsa Zsa, or Andrea Martin doing a foreign cooking show on SCTV. But even if you didn’t catch what she just said or did, you know she’s excited about it all the same (and thankfully, the important info is on screen).

Production is fairly rudimentary (it’s all shot from one position, for instance, like 50s TV) but you can see the food fine, and the editing keeps it moving briskly. Here’s another one, about a soybean stew. I don’t have any further points to make from it; but I like watching these more than any of the ones so far.

Tomorrow: the last two nominees, and who I’d vote for.

So one of the weird things that happens when you do this kind of thing is that you have the rollercoaster-drop sensation of first learning about an award in your field… at the same moment you learn you’re not up for it. I had no idea Saveur was giving out Saveur blog awards for the first time this year, including a video blog category, but as soon as I did find it out, I found out that I wasn’t one of them. No reason to think I should have been, especially, but rationality has little to do with the Cyclone in your head at such moments; I’m sure the instant the Oscar nominees for Best Actor were announced, everyone from Jason Statham (Crank II: High Voltage) to Shia Lebeouf (Transformers 3) was wondering, why not me? Couldn’t they see? (Or, in Jason Statham’s case, Couldn’t they fookin’ see?)

Actually, truth be told, it looks like they are mainly interested in recipe-driven video blogs anyway, so I wouldn’t really have fit the bill. But in the meantime, I’m always interested in quality food video online, and don’t necessarily run across it as frequently as I wish, so taking Saveur’s six nominees, I thought it might be interesting to watch a couple of their videos and see how they stack up. Who knows; we might just learn something, and it seems quite likely we’ll find a new blog or two worth following. The first two will be today; more to come in the next few days.

Food Wishes

“Chef John” writes and does videos demoing pretty straightforwardly all-American food. I watched two, one about smothered pork chops and the one above about “King Ranch Casserole,” which is the sort of recipe that involves not only tortillas but two different kinds of Campbell’s cream-of soup (mushroom, of course, and chicken). Given that he brings up not wanting to use sodium-heavy commercial soup, I wish he’d taken it further and figured out a recipe that actually didn’t, but no, we get the pure, authentically middle-American recipe in all its glory.

The videos are admirably clear, you definitely will not screw these dishes up after watching his simple, step by step cooking. That said, I found them a bit generic; more of his personality comes out in the posts:

I love posting about these regional culinary favorites, especially when no one knows for sure where the name came from. It allows me to put forth my own, often ridiculous, theory. There is indeed a King Ranch in Texas – they say it’s one of the most famous ranches in the world, but as far as claiming credit for inventing this casserole goes, they’re not interested. You can’t really blame them…a legendary cattle ranch the birthplace of a famous chicken recipe? I don’t think so.

Here’s what I bet happened. You don’t build a cattle ranch without making a few enemies along the way. To get revenge, someone invented this dish and called it the King Ranch casserole just to annoy them. It was a brilliant plan. Without firing a shot, or bloodying a knuckle, they inflicted the ultimate cattleman humiliation.

Without compromising the usefulness of a short, simple instructional video, I’d like to see a little more of that voice and personality slip into it. That said, a well done, useful series— if this very middle-American food is something you’d actually want to make.

* * *

Food Tease

Well, and after King Ranch Casserole, how could I not watch a video recipe for Frito Pie? Food Tease is done by a Canadian couple living in Dallas, so you can imagine how exotic this seemed (think of it as Mexican poutine, I guess). “They serve it right oot of the bag!”

Actually the first video I watched was one chronicling their trip to Chicago to eat at Alinea and other famous spots. Their enthusiasm is admirable but I have to admit I only got as far as a shakicam inventory of dinner at Topolobampo, course by shaky course, before deciding that this probably wasn’t a fair example of their best work.

The Frito Pie recipe actually uses Rick Bayless’ ancho paste, so it was interesting to see them do a recipe I’ve actually made— though it looks like they failed to split and clean the seeds out of the anchos like you’re supposed to. (The husband does say it’s really hot at the end.) This is very homemade video, not nearly so well paced and certainly not as slickly presented as Food Wishes; I suspect if you’re charmed by their somewhat shy and awkward Canadianness, you’ll find it useful and very sweet (they do seem very happy together, exploring the strange world they’ve moved to), and if you aren’t, you’ll be watching the timer.

Frito Pie hardly being a culinary challenge, even if Baylessfied, I gave them another chance with a video involving a subject dear to my heart— a pig head:

Partly because it’s more of a stretch and more exotic than Frito Pie, this one communicates their enthusiasm better, and seems better paced; there’s also more dry humor in their sweetly earnest cooking of something that, to judge by the comments at their blog, grossed out much of their readership.  I’m kind of torn about this blog; the people are likable as heck, but the shooting and editing is amateurish enough that it doesn’t always serve them as well as it could.  (Mike’s film school in a sentence: take the time to get nice shots of the food, so you can use them to cover edits and make everything smoother. Don’t shoot every shot from eye level, either.)

A tighter version of this, that got more of their chemistry without going to Food Network levels of cutesiness, would be better— but it would require a third person in the kitchen, I suspect, and this is very much a blog between two people.

More to come…

I wasn’t planning to blog but a bunch of stuff has happened that warrants a comment, so away we go:

I’ve been nominated for an award! Out of the blue, a nomination for the Time Out Eating Out Award for Best Indie Restaurant Blog, alongside some fine competition— Audarshia, tireless newshound behind 312DiningDiva; the hilariously filthy Chicago Gluttons; and the yummy, soothing-when-you’re-hungover Chicago BrunchBlog. Many other places I strongly approve of are nominated too, so why not go there and vote up and down the list (my category is third from the bottom).  Thanks to Fruitslinger/Waffleizer for alerting me.

My latest collaboration with David Hammond will, as noted, be up Monday, but in the meantime, check out his hilarious Valentine’s Day sex-and-food radio piece at the 848 page, or listen to the rebroadcast tonight.

The greatest butcher shop in the universe, Paulina Meat Market, alerts me that they’ll be having an in-store event involving meatloaf, Saturday, February 27th from 10 to 2.  Author Connie Fairbanks will be cooking meatloaf from her book Scratch That (an admirable sentiment) and selling and signing copies.

Another event you might want to check out, if you want to hobknob with bigtime chefs and do some good for an arts school (Chicago Academy for the Arts): A Taste for the Arts, Thursday February 18, with chefs including Rick Bayless, Rodelio Aglibot (Sunda), Bill Kim, Tony Priolo (Piccolo Sogno) and David Schneider (Taxim) cooking… what surely must include Tallgrass Beef, since Bill Kurtis will be there.  More here.

This is slightly less than new news, but I keep forgetting to mention that FOB (Friend of Bacon) Art Jackson (SFOB #7) and his wife Chelsea are featured on the cover, no less, of this month’s issue of Dwell for their way cool, spare and white Pilsen condo and how well it works for their cooking lives.  See it here, and check out the slideshow linked as well.

Finally, the above photo is my new Twitter icon. I loved the Pan-Am-Stratoliner 1962 feel of the package; just spotted it at a Dominick’s the other day. Anyway, follow me on Twitter here.

Back in the day, when the “auteur theory” stressing the director as the primary creator of a movie was a hot topic, film buffs squared off into two camps, the auteurists (or “Sarrisites,” named for Andrew Sarris of the Village Voice) and the anti-auteurists or Paulettes, named for Pauline Kael, who had made both herself and Sarris well known by attacking him in a lengthy essay. A story Kael told summed up the difference in their attitudes: an auteurist said to her “I can’t imagine Howard Hawks making a bad film!” to which Kael replied, “Go see Red Line 7000,” which was Hawks’ latest picture and playing at that moment in theaters. Kael was clearly sensitive to directors and the degree to which producer-directors like Hawks shaped their films; she certainly would have agreed with any discussion which focused on, say, the consistent role of strong women in Hawks’ films, from Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday to Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep to Angie Dickinson in Rio Bravo, for instance, as evidence that there was such a thing as A Film By Howard Hawks.

But what she didn’t believe was that having a strong personality in filmmaking guaranteed that your next movie would be any good. Hawks made a number of movies which are clearly his but which simply don’t measure up, every artist does. Kael was a great resister of orthodoxy, of anyone telling her that she had to like something because she ought to like it, and for her, being told that you had to like a movie because it was a Douglas Sirk or an Otto Preminger was no better than being told you had to like it because it was about an important dogooder subject like race relations. Every movie was up for judgement on its own, to either please you or not by itself.

What prompted all this was a thread at LTHForum about Jimmy’s Red Hots, a kind of ratty, somewhat scary (the countermen are rumored to pack heat) hot dog stand on the west side that is undeniably full of character— they’re rabidly anti-ketchup (they don’t carry the stuff), food is served in whatever paper bags they got cheap (which may well mean Burger King bags, say), there are guys selling bootleg CDs and DVDs out front, and so on. Now, all this is charming as hell to us connoisseurs of urban decay, but I’m sure it won’t surprise anyone that a business that is ramshackle physically can also be inconsistent in the product it turns out.

Oh, but wait, it does surprise some, so much in fact that it’s unimaginable. Never mind the reports of overboiled, inferior skinless dogs at times, or flavorless fries at other times, not fried in the claimed beef tallow, all from respected posters (including myself). One could never imagine that a place using Chicken Delite bags that fell off a truck would ever use a lower grade of hot dog for a week or two because they got a deal! The Jimmy’s partisans, having declared what Jimmy’s should be, then insist that that is what it always is, who do you believe, me or your lying tastebuds, and go so far as to question the basic intelligence of the people who went to Jimmy’s as to whether they even went to the right place.

I suppose there’s something to savor in the fact that this degree of orthodoxy is being established not to protect a Trotter or a Bayless but on behalf of something as lowly as a ghetto hot dog stand. Still, orthodoxy is the enemy of open minds, now and always, and never so much as in discussions of something as mutable as restaurants. There should never be untouchable restaurants, restaurants that, because you liked them in 1998, must still be good today— especially if you, personally, are no longer out there tasting as widely and knowledgeably as you once were. Set up a shelf of your favorite places that are untouchable, and you make it impossible for others to see new things that might well be better. If George Stevens is unquestionably a great director and Shane established forever as the great western, you keep people from seeing Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher, who each made at least two or three greater westerns than Shane in the same decade.

And that’s antithetical in every way to the spirit of open inquiry. It’s like a reporter being on the take; he’s no longer capable of seeing and reporting things clearly. And The Untouchables knew what fate lay in store for reporters who don’t report on the level.

As for me, if I want a great hot dog and fries and real Chicago atmosphere, I go to 35th St. Red Hots. It’s always good, you can count on it. Trust me.

35th St. Red Hots
500 W 35th St
Chicago, IL
60616-3508
(773) 624-9866

The spat between Atlantic writer Caitlin Flanagan and the Empress of Organic Food, legendary chef Alice Waters, came to an end pretty quickly with all sorts of people running to the defense of Waters and declaring Flanagan anathema.  Not since Christopher Hitchens attacked Mother Teresa has the civilized literary world reacted with such a unanimous cry of “Oooh, who farted?”

I think Flanagan raises, snarkily (it’s undoubtedly a fun read), some issues worth thinking about apart from the near-universal adulation that Waters enjoys, and I think Corby Kummer and others refute them to a considerable extent.  But I think there’s an issue beyond that that no one has quite touched on— which, in the end, puts Waters in some very surprising company for an old Berkeley lefty.

Flanagan’s argument basically comes down to a single incredulous observation: So a rich white lady is telling Mexican kids they need to spend less time in the classroom and more time harvesting crops?  And people think this is progress for them? She portrays Waters’ Edible Schoolyards project as a crackpot idea out of Rousseau, an anti-intellectual Cultural Revolution which is cutting into the class time they really need and wasting it on hippie notions of getting back to nature:

What evidence do we have that participation in one of these programs—so enthusiastically supported, so uncritically championed—improves a child’s chances of doing well on the state tests that will determine his or her future (especially the all-important high-school exit exam) and passing Algebra I, which is becoming the make-or-break class for California high-school students?

Now, as it happens my kids go to a so-called “hippie school” (Chicago Waldorf School), which indeed has a garden.  And where they also learn things like knitting, painting, music, all that non-book stuff that there’s no room for in modern public schools.  Do I send my kids there because I want them to be macrame-making airheads who don’t know which century the Civil War took place in?  No, I send them there because despite spending a good portion of the day on non-academic subjects, I see that these kids, my own and their classmates, are far more engaged with the world, interested in history and politics, passionate about reading, curious about science and math, than the typical Chicago public school student.  In a very real sense, they get more out of four hours of that a day than most kids get out of seven in a public school.  (Kummer points out how the whole program comes out of Waters’ long-ago experience as a Montessori teacher; Montessori and Waldorf are, if not twins, certainly cousins.)

Knitting, what the school calls handwork, is the one that’s inevitably the hardest sell for parents considering Waldorf.  It seems like the school day is being wasted on occupational therapy.  But as the teachers patiently explain, it has all kinds of value for the rest of the curriculum, developing hand-eye coordination, inculcating self-discipline, nurturing a sense of accomplishment (people are blown away when they tell a second-grader “Nice hat” and the kid nonchalantly replies “Yeah, I made it”), even teaching math (you have to count rows and so on).

Likewise, gardening isn’t taking time from science class, it is biology.  And so on.  The focus and ability to concentrate and think things through and follow through till they’re done— all these things are crucial to academic subjects, and they’re developed in these non-academic pursuits.  The unchallenged assumptions in Flanagan’s piece are that more and more class time in algebra would get everybody through the tests on algebra— and that the tests on algebra have real meaning in terms of future achievement, indeed, they’re the only way you’ll get there.  Only if you think that the only place learning happens is a lecture hall, can you believe that it’s that simple.

Flanagan’s argument comes down attempting to paint Waters’ solution as run-amok 60s big government liberalism, what you might expect from a Berkeley free-speech lefty type:

Waters calls for a new federal program based on an old one [the Presidents’ Council on Physical Fitness], but the new one is necessary only because the old one has obviously failed: American kids are fatter and sicker than ever…

The suicidal dietary choices of so many poor people are the result of a problem, not the problem itself. The solution lies in an education that will propel students into a higher economic class, where they will live better and therefore eat better.

But if Waters is applying the Wahington-money-fits-all-problems approach, Flanagan is hardly a Hayekian herself; she simply wants a different federal program with different classroom priorities to make good middle class taxpayers out of all those kids.  And is there any evidence her kinds of government programs are working in inner city schools at a notably higher rate of success than gardening is?

At the same time I was reading this, I read a piece on minority Chicago schools by Heather MacDonald in City Journal, which is published by a conservative think tank; okay, I know many people checked out right there, but there’s some solid, if grim, reporting in the piece that will leave you better informed about how something like the Derrion Albert beating death happened.  (There’s also, admittedly, quite a lot of use of it to bludgeon the record of the area’s most famous ex-community organizer.)  The argument here is that Chicago social programs are very much focused on defeating social pathologies by raising the kids economically to the middle class with government spending.  Their (decidedly conservative) argument is that this has it backwards— middle-class responsibility will be achieved not when it’s handed to those unprepared for it, but when they have it inside themselves and raise themselves to the middle class:

Now, perhaps if [school superintendant Ron] Huberman’s proposed youth “advocates” provided their charges with opportunities to learn self-discipline and perseverance, fired their imaginations with manly virtues, and spoke to them about honesty, courtesy, and right and wrong—if they functioned, in other words, like Scoutmasters—they might make some progress in reversing the South Side’s social breakdown. But the outfit that Huberman has picked to provide “advocacy” to the teens, at a reported cost of $5 million a year, couldn’t be more mired in the assiduously nonjudgmental ethic of contemporary social work.

Talking about Boy Scouts in the context of schools run by gangs may seem like a joke— but it’s no moreso than talking about gardening, surely.  Gad!  Does this mean Alice Waters is a closet conservative, using gardening to infiltrate her sneaky rightwing ideas (like honesty and perseverance) into the school system?

Well, no, not exactly.  But it might mean that Waters’ idea of liberalism is a broader and more thoughtful thing than Flanagan’s big-government-by-experts version.  The hippie left of the 60s is usually portrayed as impractical and druggy, but it also had powerful strains of libertarian self-reliance within it— certainly within Waters’ world, it meant back-to-the-land types who ate or starved based on their own willingness to work, and who became her suppliers by assiduously seeking to produce the best possible produce for her restaurant.

And that’s what Flanagan just doesn’t get— gardening isn’t menial labor to Waters, it’s the pursuit of excellence.  Waters wants kids to learn the self-reliance and discipline that farming teaches— and if that’s conservative, well then so is my kids’ hippie school and so are Thoreau and Jefferson, and liberalism has just given up some very important home ground for bad reasons, it seems to me.  Flanagan is ultimately on the side of tests and credentialism and knowledge being dispensed from on high; Waters is ultimately on the side of developing the individual so they can achieve, and will want to.  And that’s why Waters is more right than Flanagan about the value of getting the kids out of the classroom for an hour a day and cultivating their own gardens.

Our conversation (see parts one, two, three and four) concludes:

MICHAEL GEBERT: One of the things that was interesting to me back when I ran LTHForum was that people, given a chance to talk about whatever they wanted to talk about, tended not to want to talk about the things that were hot in food media.  Sure, there was some degree of interest in the hot new restaurants, and TV shows, and so on, but there was twice as much interest in how to make good fried chicken, or some old place that everybody loves, or whatever.  And we too have mostly ignored the obvious year-end subjects in favor of more personal reflections on the state of food-dom in 2009 and beyond.

Well, enough of that!  Let’s conclude with a bout of sheer hackdom, talking about the same things everybody else is talking about in year-end pieces.  I’ll throw out three (one of which is clearly more interesting to me than the others), and through the magic of cut-and-paste, juxtapose your takes after mine. Batter up:

Gourmet Magazine Closing. My feeling is it’s a mistake to view Gourmet as the business.  The business is Conde Nast’s food magazine business, and Gourmet was one tactic for capturing a chunk of the available dollars in that space, Bon Appetit is another.  And as soon as any tactic stops paying out, you kill it, unsentimentally.  Personally, I will be amazed if Gourmet is not revived at some future date in some form, because I strongly suspect that killing it was a way of getting rid of a bloated, boom-year-sized payroll, but they’ll find a use for the brand after a suitable interval.  In any case, although I’m certainly sorry to see a good-paying outlet vanish, it wasn’t a magazine that meant that much to me today, or seemed that different from all the other food magazines all offering the same tips over and over (10 Aussie wines to pair with quick and easy frazzablazzit) in a way that, frankly, makes it hard for me to read anything in any of them without feeling I must have read it before.  If Saveur closed, then I’d cry a little.

MICHAEL NAGRANT: I agree with you regarding the reasons why Gourmet closed.  It was a pure Bob’s from Office Space consultant killing of a redundancy.  Or if you want to be really nefarious, I suspect that maybe there was some serious entitled bloat going on at high editorial levels that pissed someone off.  Then again, as long as Ann Wintour reigns supreme at Vogue and Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair, Conde Nast seems to love paying for spendthrift behavior.

I don’t agree however about the magazine degenerating to a retail pamphlet edited by starfucking editors who dream about designer cupcakes and spritzers while subsisting on a starvation diet 90 percent of the year.  I think Gourmet was one of the last bastions (Saveur of course still lives) of good storytelling in food writing.  Francis Lam’s stories where he’d go hang out with some old school Chinese chef for a few weeks were some of my favorite pieces published anywhere in the last few years.  Interestingly his tenure shepherding the new Salon, save for a piece here and there has not featured his strength, but rather focused on more newsy short bloggy stuff.  I’m guessing that’s a function of resources as much as anything, i.e. he doesn’t have the budget or the luxury to go disappear wherever he wants for weeks at a time to get a story, rather he needs to stay behind and feed the daily internet monster, lest Salon disappear like the old Victorian and French intellectual gathering spots for which the site is named.

GEBERT: Top Chef. Okay, it’s television and therefore hypey and hokey.  We concede that point, your honor.  But you know, the world has a lot of astrophysicists who got interested in space because of Star Wars, and to me it’s pretty amazing that there’s a pop culture phenomenon bringing the most avant-garde cooking of our time into a lot of homes.  I made the comparison with music earlier and said that people who think everyone should know Barenboim should know Achatz, too; but classical music would kill to be getting that kind of exposure right now, and I have to think that’s going to produce some long-running effects, that kids in a small town where the best restaurant is a Village Inn are seeing Thomas Keller on TV and thinking, I could be him when I grow up!

NAGRANT: As is already the case now, those kids are more likely getting hoodwinked in to spending $30,000 for a generally worthless vocational education at culinary school all in the pursuit of rare and elusive celebrity. That being said, Top Chef is good. Tom Colicchio protects the integrity of the culinary profession as much as he can and Gail Simmons completes me. So that’s good enough for me. However, what I find is that the last five weeks are always the most compelling part of the show. The first 10 weeks are so are always populated with a bunch of vaudevillian jokers and racial stereotypes who don’t know how to salt properly. I know casting is tough, but the show would be that much better if they insisted on only casting say 10 really talented folks.

GEBERT: Twitter. Both bigger and smaller than the hype machine has portrayed it this year.  Smaller in itself, but as one popular tool, it’s one very good example of where I think the media as a whole have to go.

There was a telling moment in one of those back-and-forths on Twitter this year where people (I name no names) were ragging on Phil Vettel, why doesn’t he get with it, tune in turn on and tweet out, and Kevin Pang said “Phil’s plenty big without Twitter.”  Which, despite its vague echo of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (“I am big, it’s the tweets that got cut to 140 characters!”), is surely true— but only a tiny handful of people at any given paper have that level of brand identity.  And if you’re at all smart and have initiative— like Mr. Pang— you’re looking for ways to extend your brand beyond the corners of your newspaper, which for all you know may not be here tomorrow (or at least you may not be at it tomorrow).

And Twitter is one way you can do that, though far, far from the only one (you might, for instance, do a show about cheeseburgers), or even maybe a typical one.  But the fundamental change in how we should view media is that we’re no longer pretending that a million people read every single word in the paper every day.  We now have clicks and meters to tell us that the numbers for any given piece are far smaller— but they’re the ones who are hyper-interested, who take the paper or seek you out online precisely because they really are interested.  And your future lies in, on some level, engaging those people, the ones who really care.  Cluing them into the process, into what you just ate, making your life a bit of a public spectacle, is a natural way to inculcate their loyalty, make them feel a little bit like insiders which is always seductive.  And Twitter has proven to be a great tool for that.  (If you’re in the media and you feel like you’re clueless about how to do this, here’s simple advice: do whatever Roger Ebert does.  Nobody has been savvier, by like a factor of 10, about building a personal brand over the last 40 years, to the point where I’m convinced his brand is worth substantially more than his paper’s is.)

Now Twitter’s weird status between two worlds— it’s not quite media, but it’s a lot more public than instant messaging your actual, real-world friends— has been a source of controversy.  You went after Steve Dolinsky for tweeting opening night impressions of Big Star, in violation of the reviewer’s gentleman’s agreement not to review until a month has passed.  I mostly came down on the side that an opening tweet is not a review, but that’s not because I don’t think that Dolinsky was breaking that agreement by sending out an opinion, however brief, to basically the whole world.  I think he was, and I think he was perfectly fine to do so, because it’s passe.  The food media world is now about ongoing impressions, not one impressively final review, for all those reasons I talked about the other day.  But I understand that not everyone agrees that they got that memo.

Even more interesting to ponder is the recent dustup where the publicist Ellen Malloy sent out a tweet about one of the restaurants she reps (The Bristol) being named a top restaurant of the year by GQ magazine.  The only thing was, a bunch of places promptly announced that The Bristol had won this honor… without realizing that The Bristol wasn’t the only one in Chicago honored in that issue.  It was merely the only one that was a client of Ellen’s.  And some people suggested she had violated journalistic ethics in omitting the others— as if Ellen Malloy’s Twitter account, with a couple of thousand followers, was now a fully accredited media news source alongside the Tribune and CBS and obligated to follow certain rules (which, needless to say, conflict flagrantly with her intended career).  That would come as news to a lot of teenagers using Twitter to moon over the guy who plays Edward in Twilight, I suspect.  So it’s dubious to go that far, but can you absolutely say that someone sending out news to four digits of people clearly is not a news source?  She is… just a new kind, who cut out the press middleman, which is something people aren’t entirely used to, yet.

So there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on, and Twitter was at the heart of a good amount of it.  Something else may be next year, and Twitter may soon be as dead as the big media food blogs which now frequently go silent for a week at a time.  But it’s this year’s example of a phenomenon that’s far-reaching and transformative.

NAGRANT: I didn’t take issue with Dolinsky for reviewing on opening day. In fact, at one point, I expressed my admiration that he was using the medium so well. What I took issue with was how he pretended like he was surprised that what he Tweeted would have any influence. He knew full well that it would, and that’s why he was doing it in the first place. I just wanted him to own it.

As for branding, etc. I can appreciate business people like Ellen who make it it an important part of what they do. She’s in it to grow her business, and that’s what she’s doing. But, she’s not a journalist. She’s a promoter of the people who pay her to promote. She happens to be paid by some of the most interesting, talented, and high quality people around, and thus you won’t go terribly wrong by following her lead, nor does she need to be Don King and fluff up the facts as some PR folks do. However, you should understand you also won’t always get the full picture.

As for journalists focused on “branding”, I’m a little more suspect. I’m not sure Ebert was focused on branding as much as he organically grew his reputation based on the quality of his work. As his following grew in relation to his talent, he took advantage of the opportunities that afforded, i.e. a broader television platform and a branded website, and was savvy enough to explore those opportunities. My sense is that he came to Twitter because he is first and foremost a rabid writer. It’s his drug, and Twitter is just one more fix, especially for the short form thought, which he has no lack of.

I know I came to Twitter not as a means of branding as much as another place to share and explore my passions and also for the community. As a freelancer whose only daily colleague is my blue couch, I appreciate the ability to talk to my fellow writers and food enthusiasts as if I were at the water cooler, albiet a much more engaging one where I can drink the occasional whiskey if I choose. I don’t discount the value of being able to send a link out to followers and have a way of sharing my work. I appreciate and use that. However I’m not sitting around tracking Twitter keyword searches for my name, or “chicago food” or whatever and engaging people to build my follower base as I’m sure many are and as I would if I was really worried about branding.

Furthermore, once you start worrying about branding too much, I think you’re tempted once again to compromise your integrity. I mean if I was really interested in my brand, I wouldn’t have spent three or four days tracking what I was interested and inspired by i.e. following Rob and Allison Levitt as they opened Mado or dining at the tiny Senegalese joint on the north side that maybe two people will eat at when they read my piece. I’d be focused on only covering guys like Bayless, Kahan, and Izard more often because they have the ability to move eyeballs.

That being said if I worked for an organization like the Trib and I thought my valuable institution as well as my health care and living wage and those of my friends around me were in jeopardy, I would like Ebert has with the Sun Times try to lift all ships, even if that meant being agressive about branding. If I were an editor or manager I’d compel competition and creative social media approaches like using Twitter as a measurement of the quality of job you were doing no matter who you were.

GEBERT: Well, like a lot of things it comes down to a matter of taste; Ebert knows the value of having his name and mugshot big and bold on his book covers, but he also knows the value of not diluting the brand by taking easy money and doing commercials for microwave popcorn or whatever.  It takes vigilance to become a pop culture figure without becoming a walking joke, and some cartoonization of yourself is probably inevitable.  But more to the point, given that he’s been interactive with his readers online since the world was connected by Compuserve, that’s why I see him as a model for engagement with your core audience.  (I once made an offhand crack about his readers writing one of his books— the movie cliches one— for him, in a freakin’ Usenet group, about as obscure a spot as you could get, and within three days he was in my email inbox, letting me know in no uncertain terms that he was the hardest workin’ man in show business.  Impressive, in a mildly alarming way.)

As for the thing about publicists, I still feel you’re talking like there was something mildly shifty going on there.  I guess the way I see it, ultimately, is— there’s news and there are journalists.  Journalists used to be where news mainly came from (although there’s always been a category of news that everyone knew despite no journalist ever reporting it).  Now news can come from people who aren’t journalists.  It can come from people connected to the biz professionally.  It can come from protesters in the streets of Tehran.  It can come from somebody who served a famous food critic and can’t believe what a douchebag he was.  And none of those people have a responsibility for meeting the ethical rules of a profession they never joined; we have that responsibility if we turn news into journalism, and readers, all readers, have the responsibility of evaluating what they read for themselves.  But more news, from all directions, is a great thing.

NAGRANT: I don’t think anything shifty is going on.  I trust Ellen Malloy.  That being said, maybe it’s semantical or whatever, but I would call what she does information sharing or news sharing, but not necessarily journalism.  Also, I totally agree, folks can operate on any level they want in terms of ethics and they’re not bound by some institutional rules.  However, what I do believe is there are basic laws, unwritten, of course, about how we act as humans, the social contract if you will.  Certainly that contract is fluid, however, I think when we’re brutally honest with ourselves and think about what really feels right and how we should be operating, we generally all come to very similar conclusions about what that contract looks like.

Mostly I’m arguing that instead of throwing out red herrings or constructing exceptions that justify behaviors as is the current state of affairs, I would wish for people to think more about how they really should act as journalists, citizen or otherwise, when they’re sharing news or gathering it.  At the end of the day, if you operate under that level of thinking and are dilligent about your actions and you still say: I need to take that trip to Italy paid for by the Reggiano Parmagiano distributors Association and I know I can tell a good story and it’s a worthwhile story, then I can respect that.

GEBERT: All right, since we got off on media again, let’s end on a food note.  Tell me something I should go out and eat right now.

NAGRANT: Despite my earlier suspicion about Dale Levitski not getting his stuff together for three years, I had a chance to try Sprout this week, and while it wasn’t perfect, that dude has some serious chops. Don’t know if you can score his “grilled cheese” which is basicaly a frico kinda thing stuffed with granny smith apples, caramelized onion, and served with a side of mustard, a la carte, but if so, you should. I gotta say after my meal, it’s too bad Henry Adaniya (former owner Trio) fled to Hawaii, because that dude had the golden palate having picked Tramonto/Gand, Shawn McClain, Grant Achatz, and Levitski to head up his kitchens back in the day.

Also, because I can never just say one thing, the carbonara at Kith and Kin made with housemade spaghetti a la chittara, house cured guanciale, and parsley topped with a raw (or very slightly cooked – no fact check on this) yolk will have you yellin’ bada bing faster than a mob hit.

GEBERT: Well, for me there’s no better response to the cold and snow than some hearty Mexican soul food.  Go have a big bowl of consomme de chivo, goat consomme, weekends only, at the taqueria inside the Los Potrillos grocery, 3624 W. Belmont.

With that, we’ll call it a week.  Thank you, Michael N., for joining me all week, and thanks to everyone who found our bloviating worth a visit.  Eat early and often, it’s Chicago.