Stomachs on legs are proud to present

Sitting in my inbox today an email from a dearest friend who joined me at this lunch a ways back.

Subject: TK!

I will send you photos of Thanksgiving, let me zip them up in a file. We brined the turkey for about 48 hours, including a bottle of white wine. It was the most moist and flavorful turkey we have had. Great!

Guess what??!! I flew from Indiana to San Francisco today and I am with John and Art now. I had to change plans in Chicago and get on the 777 to SF. While waiting to board the plane I saw this guy and knew right away who it was:

Thomas Keller! I was ready to go up and say hello and then they started boarding the plane and he was gone. Got to SF and met John and pointed out Thomas to him. He was looking for his driver but they guy was not there so he went to Starbucks to get something. We went to baggage claim and there was the driver with a sign for Thomas Keller. We told the driver where he was at Starbucks. Cool! I like him.

Bye,

M

Every president and first lady is different. Some, like Mamie Eisenhower, are intimately involved in choosing the menu for dinners while others, like Pat Nixon, want the chef to surprise them. After the first large Nixon dinner, Chef Henry Haller went to Chief Usher JB West. "The president came into the kitchen tonight and told me it was delicious. Can you imagine? The president himself. That never happened before."

Link

That zip-locked lentil salad from Metzgerei Schmitz went a ways, even when we gave half to Carmen & Demi: I guess I never need to eat it again.

I still didn't find out what that nice orange cheese was called (Edit: I found out today. It's 12-month old Mimolette, a cheese from North France, coloured with flower seeds and flavourized by an insect called the 'cheese mite'). It's fun to eat things in extreme colours.

By the way, we still didn't figure out what to do with all those extra champagne glasses from Ikea. I am currently gazing through a forest of them on our kitchen bench.

We thought of giving half to Carmen & Demi, but Demi doesn't drink.

Next time I am asked for money by one of Cologne's executive bums (pseudo-anarchist alcoholics who sit on the footpath beside ATMs and curse people, when not playing petanque in the park), maybe I should give him a box of champagne glasses. They would either sip 90% proof out of them, or smash them over their dogs' heads. Either way, it could suit their brand of punk-ethos to a tee.

Burger King in London has released a $200 dollar burger



Critics charge that the burger is gross, outrageous and with food prices soaring and hunger crisis threatening the lives of millions it is the wrong burger, with the wrong message at the wrong time. Maybe so, or with burger profit proceeds going to charity, is it better than the hunger cafes of Mumbai?

The golden Honda pulled over to the curb alongside the restaurant. A window rolled down. A 100-rupee note, worth about $2.30, popped out, courtesy of a woman in a head scarf who would identify herself only as Mrs. Abbas. Then, as quietly as it came, the car sped away.

Inside the Mahim Darbar restaurant, seven men sprang to their feet: gaunt, beleaguered men with pocked faces, men who appeared to have had their share of dashed hopes. But this was the moment they had been pining for. Mrs. Abbas had, in a quintessentially Mumbai way, bought them lunch.

The world is filled with eating houses of every kind. There are hamburger joints and caviar joints; there are places you drive through and places where you sit down; there is the New York steakhouse and the Paris bistro. But the world may be unfamiliar with a Mumbai variation on the theme: the hunger café.

It takes a city as frenetic, transactional and compassionate as Mumbai to erect eateries for the malnourished. They are not soup kitchens, for denizens of this city have little time to pour other people soup. In a city that never stops selling stocks and shooting movies, they prefer drive-by benevolence.

On a stretch of road in the Mahim neighborhood, the hunger cafés have stood for decades. Mumbai's broken, drifting men squat in neat rows in front of each establishment, waiting patiently. Vats full of food simmer behind them. What separates them from the food is the 25-cent-per-plate cost - a gulf harder to bridge than one might assume. But every so often, a car pulls up, donates, and the men dine....Consider an alternative way to feed these men. You could raise money in schools and temples; you could buy the food and serve it in the quiet of a shelter. You could at least let the men sit inside the restaurant, not on the edge of the sidewalk.

But in India, that may not work. Among the swelling middle class, the anonymous, checkbook-style charity has yet to catch on. Indians have shown scant enthusiasm for giving to abstract causes. Indian giving is feudal giving: giving to those below you in your household chain of command.

Source: International Herald Tribune June 16, 2008

What is better stuffing your face for the poor with $200 burgers or reducing your own consumption and redistributing the savings?

The first seems gross, but maybe pragmatic, the second ideal but possibly implausible?

Any way you look at it, it seems to me a sad state of affairs that Burger King is now the benevolent middle man pushing gross consumption in the name of charity.