McPlaymate of the Month

In a review of Nancy Bauer’s How to Do Things With Pornography ("Non-existent thrills,"TLS, 4/7/16), Kate Manne, says the following: “One of Bauer’s main worries about pornography is that it instils false expectations in its consumers. She argues that the pornographic world is a distant sexual utopia – a 'pornutopia' – in which anyone is up for anything, and everyone’s desires are compatible with everybody else’s. The pornutopian world view therefore erases rape and incest. It provides a sexual miseducation.” Manne quotes Bauer to the effect that we don’t need a “a new politics of porn" so much as "a candid phenomenology of it," in order to understand its effect on us. When you were a kid your dentist probably showed you an animation about tooth decay which conceived of cavities in a medieval setting with the teeth as a fortress protected by white knights. If there are pornutopian experiences that are being had at the expense of women’s freedom and autonomy there’s a countervailing world of princesses in shining armor whose crusade can sometimes sound like an inquisition. One of these was the late Andrea Dworkin, a militant feminist who battled vociferously battled pornography. Only the other day a feminist spokesperson, with a lilting British accent, told NPR that women can do whatever they like with their bodies, but when naked pictures of women are appropriated to sell hamburgers, it’s exploitation. The problem with such forms of protest is that they can be contagious. You may never have heard of using nudity to sell hamburgers, but now that the idea has been inserted in your consciousness, you start to feel deprived when your Big Mac doesn’t include the image of a breast in its hefty architecture. McDonald’s throws everything but the kitchen sink into this now mythic confection. You’d think the least you could find when you opened up the bun was an old-fashioned nude centerfold (of the kind Playboy no longer features) with a fetching young Miss Mac of the Month.

Paris Journal IX: The Air France Business Class Lounge at CDG

Air France Business Class Lounge at Charles De Gaulle

One of the hidden jewels of France is the business class lounge at Charles de Gaulle. The lounge has a delicious selection of cheeses, including an excellent brie, potage au legumes, abundant cornichons, roast veal and Lay’s Chips a Ancienne, all served buffet style. Save up your frequent flier points and travel to Paris (the business class at JFK is no slouch either and makes Delta’s new addition look lame) and stay in the lounge if you want a taste of la vielle France. Then come right home, aller et retour en Francais. The truth is that the food and just about everything in Paris sucks. If you want to eat a casserole composed of beans, sausage and a fatty duck leg (confit de canard), then give them cassoulet but the City of Light is a far cry from the days when Hemingway marched down the Champs Elysee with victorious Allied troups and repaired to The Ritz.  L’Arc de Triomphe, Le Place de la Concorde  and Le Jardin deTuileries are all on the skids and have been hurting for quite some time. Today the municipal market off St Germain is the equivalent of your average suburban mall, with the Gap and other chains proliferating and the venerable old pomme fritte or French fry is nowhere to be found (with the exception of American fast food joints like Burger King and McDonald’s). OK, everyone is always going on about Le Louvre, the Louvre, the Louvre. Yet even the Louvre has been turned into a shopping mall. It’s not worth the 45 minute ride in from the airport.

Old Battleaxes

Nedick's, Longchamps, Schrafft's, Bickford's, Horn and Hardart’s are just a few of the headstones that grace the graveyard of once-proud New York eating establishments. Though in the words of L.P. Hartley, “the past is a foreign country,” and one that we tend to idealize, there is no doubt that these chains had a great deal more flair than the big national kahuna’s that have homogenized the culinary landscape, both in New York and elsewehere. Now we have Dunkin’ Donuts, Tim Horton’s, McDonald’s (whose golden arches have become no less a religious symbol than the soaring white church steeple), Burger King, Wendy’s, Arby’s, KFC, Popeye’s, Domino’s, Pizza Hut, Little Caesar’s, TGIF, Chili’s, Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Outback Steakhouse, Dallas BBQ and the egregiously American Applebee’s.  Nedick’s was the most modest of the old-school establishments, but its hot dogs were truly hot, and fat, spewing forth boiling fluids that derived from a unique rotisserie process. Bickford’s was a modest cafeteria that specialized in dishes like Chicken à la King, a dish that could also be found at the singular Belmore Cafeteria on Park Avenue South (popular with taxi drivers and immortalized in the Martin Scorsese classic). And then there was Horn and Hardart’s, the famed automat where coins dropped into slots opened magic doors leading to baked beans and hot dog casseroles and crocks of mac and cheese. Schrafft’s catered to a more aristocratic clientele, providing daintily cut sandwiches served by waitresses in black uniforms with doily aprons. Longchamps, an establishment popular with advertising types, furnished a cool darkness, ideal for camouflaging the surfeit of martinis quaffed down by account executives over lunch. Of all these old battleaxes, God chose to grant a second life to only one, and that was Chock Full o'Nuts, a metropolitan-area classic once proudly associated with the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Jackie Robinson. The brand, which had been kept alive through its “heavenly coffee,” recently opened a satellite location on West 23rd Street, which serves the old donuts, cream cheese on date-nut bread sandwiches and clam chowder that were its specialties in the days of yore. Remember the Chock Full o'Nuts jingle? “Better coffee a millionaire’s money can’t buy.”

Diasporic Dining XX: The Potato Wars

Wendy’s recently introduced a new form of French fry aimed obviously at competing with McDonald’s French fries, which have long dominated the market. As you may remember, the old Wendy’s French fry was a rather flaccid affair, larger and less crispy than its rival and with no real reason for being. The only reason to buy the old Wendy’s French fries was because you were there, marooned, eating one of their assez bien burgers, which made up in texture what it lacked in taste. It’s an axiom of fast food dining that one doesn’t order one element of a meal in one place and another element somewhere else (even in a food court, where opportunities for promiscuity are everywhere). If one is going to buy a cheeseburger at Wendy’s, then why not get the special, which includes a drink and fries. Ditto McDonald’s. So what is the significance of Wendy’s new foray into the French fry fray? The answer is that the world has changed. Despite McDonald’s famous fries, the Big Mac was always the main attraction, and the lines were drawn according to who liked Big Macs and who didn’t. Now, with Americans becoming increasingly calorie-conscious and meat-averse, the potato is the driving force. Wendy’s execs have made a brilliant move in putting the potato at the top of the food chain. Their new fry, made with sea salt and russets with skins, hearkens back to the Woodstock era, with its appeal to natural ingredients. And if they are going to make love not war with their new product, they have, at the same time, created a world-class adversary in the upcoming potato wars.

Diasporic Dining XIX: Bulimia for Idiots

The IHOP in Englewood Cliffs, NJ—the pancake special offering unlimited stacks for $4.99, assorted syrups including but not limited to maple, the rack of Smucker’s jellies, thick New England Clam chowder, the club sandwich sitting on a mountain of soggy fries—is a recipe for vomiting, a paradise for bulimics who don’t even have to bother putting their fingers down their throats. Add to this a discussion of Chuck Palahniuk’s "Guts," a gastrointestinal story if there ever was one, and you have the perfect setting for literary deconstruction, or, in medical terms, triage. In the intimacy occasioned by the overcrowded seating area, the text becomes the menu, in which the very ingredients that create our sense of good and bad, right and wrong, sacred and profane, Levi-Strauss’s “raw and cooked,” come into question. Fast food restaurant chains like IHOP, Denny’s, and naturally Burger King, Wendy’s and McDonald’s are much maligned because of the poisonous nature of the food. But few realize the value they serve as metaphoric Petrie dishes for the process of ingestion and regurgitation. The presuppositions of culture coalesce in a windswept parking lot, with the harsh but inviting white light and the cheerily uniformed servers with their mechanized first-person-plural responses. Here, like in the Large Hadron Collider, the initial conditions of longing for what anxious Americans call comfort food are recreated, one day at a time.