Wednesday evening roundup with rant

India's loving the fast food. Happy Diwali, by the way. Whoa--"Diwali" raised no spell-check eyebrows. That's awesome.

This kind of thing--let me be specific--this very liberal interpretation of a study f*ing infuriates me. Of course obese people forced to subsist on 550 calories a day are going to be hungry and gain it back. Are you people insane? How dare you pretend journalistic integrity while trying to extrapolate that to a general inability of people to keep weight off?

But if that f*ing infuriates me, just wait, because here's something that really f*ing infuriates me. I don't even know where to start. Maybe it's the straw man/extreme contrast gimmick: Mark Bittman talks about real, homemade food, and Josh Ozersky equates that with overpriced ingredients only available at farmers' markets or Whole Foods. And I don't think Mr. Bittman said that all home-cooking, all the time, is the best solution for everyone. But wait, here's the kicker: "other foods, like, say, fish, won’t exist at all if they are not farmed and most likely will require more high-tech monitoring and government oversight in the future." What? What? What the f* is this douchebag smoking? If fish won't exist if they're not farmed, it's because of how fish are being farmed now. Okay. I need to breathe. Breathe. Okay, let's do it this way: you tell me what's wrong with this sentence: "If the barons of agriculture hadn’t engineered the monstrous phalanxes of corn that everyone is so aghast at, food would be more expensive, and a lot of poor people would be dying from starvation instead of courting diabetes." What about this paragraph:

The U.S. industrial-food machine, Mark Bittman’s disapproval notwithstanding, is a one of the most powerful, responsive, and imaginative entities in history. Its goals may be amoral, in the sense it is driven wholly by profit, with a predictably destructive effect, but it and it alone has the power to feed the future of America in a better, or at least less resource-intensive way. Because whatever the future holds, it isn’t going to be 300 million Americans feeding themselves with handmade tagliatelle from pristine Vermont CSAs, no matter how much one might wish otherwise.

This just hits all of it at the same time. I'm pretty sure Mark Bittman--the Minimalist--uses dry pasta. Actually, I've seen him do it. Also, for the f*ing gazillionth time, not only industrial agriculture can feed millions. It's just not f*ing true.

***
There was something similar to this in "Bossypants." Tina Fey talks about how when she was at Second City, she proposed a skit, and the director barked that no one wanted to see two women on stage, talking. Years later, she dedicated her and Amy Poehler's Sarah Palin/Hillary Clinton sketch to that foresighted genius. Well, I couldn't help but smile when I read this article about Jill Abramson. Here's an excerpt:

When Eileen Shanahan, who went on to become a well-respected economics reporter, arrived for an interview with Clifton Daniel, the assistant managing editor, in 1962, she hid her desire to become an editor. “All I ever want is to be a reporter on the best newspaper in the world,” she told him.

“That’s good,” Daniel responded, as Shanahan told the story, “because I can assure you no woman will ever be an editor at the New York Times.”

I love it.