"Grass Fed-Up" courtesy of the NYT Style Magazine

This morning while I was "enjoying" my Val brunch (actually, to be fair, brunch at Val is not all that bad) and actually enjoying the New York Times Style Magazine, I stumbled over an article by Alexandra Jacobs titled "Grass Fed-Up."  The sub-title read: "Foodie fanaticism is giving the rest of us indigestion."  Well, it seemed only appropriate that I share.  From one probably-too-picky-an-eater-to-ever-actually-be-a-foodie to my fellow Jeff foodies, quasi-foodies, wanna-be-foodies, I'm-too-poor-to-be-a-foodies, and everything in between, enjoy.


(Article after jump)

Here is the link for the NYT website, but I'm also including the text below because sometimes the Times privatizes its articles after a week or so.

Grass Fed-Up

By ALEXANDRA JACOBS

Foodie fanaticism is giving the rest of us indigestion. 

A quarter-century ago, the term ‘‘foodie’’ denoted a small set of people who lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, lined up at the Silver Palate on weekends and occasionally roasted a chicken breast in a packet of aluminum foil with something peculiar, like raspberries. Now these people are everywhere in America, and they’re cooking anything they can get their hands on, around the clock — tutti foodie.

The farmers’ market in New York’s Union Square, once a sleepy little happening where restaurateurs foraged for chives to tie the tops of their beggar’s purses, is now a quad-weekly mob scene so dense you need a cleaver just to get out of the subway exit, let alone hack through the towering forests of purple cauliflower. Midwestern homemakers devote entire blogs to cupcakes. Your Republican father-in-law can pronounce ‘‘quinoa.’’

Things have reached a fever pitch in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Eric McDougall, a creative marketing consultant for the tech industry, prepares meals for his guests on a Blue Star range (‘‘what Julia Child used to use’’), has regular chicken cook-offs with a musician acquaintance, doesn’t like Chinese garlic (it has to be Gilroy garlic) and bragged to me about trips to a farm in West Marin County that supplies baby lettuce to the legendary Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse. ‘‘Their chefs get it Saturday. We get it Friday, before it’s even shipped,’’ McDougall said, adding without apparent irony: ‘‘Our salads are completely alive — moving around on the plate. They still have bugs on them.’’

Anyone else craving a nice refreshing wedge of iceberg lettuce from the local A&P?

Paralyzed hosts have always turned to takeout for succor, but even that now has its perils. One pal, so food-fatigued that she recently commenced a juice cleanse, told of a customer finding a pebble in the soup at the locavore restaurant Eat in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. (No relation to the proto-gourmet Eli Zabar’s E.A.T. on Madison Avenue, where a pint of seafood salad, origins uncertain, costs $45.) ‘‘It’s like we’re getting so close to the earth that we’re being forced to eat it,’’ she said despairingly. At the coyly named Peasant in SoHo, meanwhile, an editor took umbrage at the goat lasagna and organ meat. ‘‘I only like tongue-in-cheek when it’s humor,’’ she harrumphed. ‘‘I’m a hard-core carnivore, but I feel like things have gotten so extreme that it’s hard to have a simple roast chicken.’’ (Never mind doing something cute with raspberries!)

‘‘I can barely keep up with my friends in Napa,’’ said Alyssa Shelasky, 33, the fiancée of the ‘‘Top Chef’’ contestant Spike Mendelsohn, who blogs about her cooking (mis)adventures at Apronanxiety.com. ‘‘I do the best I can’’ was how she characterized her humble attempts at homemade pasta and herb-garden cultivation, which in another era would’ve been considered super-foodie but now — when some civilians are slaughtering antibiotic-free cattle with their bare hands — seem the bare minimum for entertaining. Mendelsohn lives in Washington, D.C. (and occasionally cooks for the first agronomist, Michelle Obama), while Shelasky commutes between there and Los Angeles, where, she said with an air of relief, ‘‘everyone wants a lighter meal or a kitschier meal — food trucks and Canter’s. As far as the pedigree of the food, it’s a much smaller conversation, more who was at the dinner party than what was at the dinner party.’’

Not so back East, where Shelasky’s younger sister Rachel had some trouble upholding the credo of her employer, Real Simple magazine, during a recent dinner party on Shelter Island, N.Y. ‘‘There were these two guys who made homemade ice cream on machines, and one of them had shipped special vanilla beans from Madagascar,’’ she said. ‘‘I’d have been perfectly content with even Häagen-Dazs vanilla.’’ (A fresh-faced 30, Rachel is too young to remember when Häagen-Dazs, which originated in the Bronx, was considered the absolute height of foodie snobbery.) ‘‘My contribution to dessert — this is so embarrassing,’’ she went on, ‘‘was the Toll House log. They were probably thinking, Oh, what a lame-o.’’

But really, what’s lamer than culinary one-upmanship at the expense of guests’ comfort? Like a backyard pig roast where the 200-pound animal is not cooked through. (‘‘People were slicing off raw pieces of pork and shoving them into their mouths,’’ one attendee said. ‘‘Several reported not feeling well the next day.’’)

Or the 20-course, Bouley-style tasting menu staged by a real estate developer in his Southampton mansion to woo a young belle of my acquaintance. ‘‘I guess he wanted to impress me,’’ she said, ‘‘but it was too fancy — gels and foams. Really elaborate, really awkward. And he kept jumping up from the table, leaving me sitting there all alone. Honestly, I’m not even sure if he liked me.’’ She’s now dating a lawyer who doesn’t cook. ‘‘Never, never, never,’’ she said. ‘‘He once made me frozen ravioli.’’ Total foodie-cide — but she sounded a bit relieved.