Another Freebie for the Clintons; Bill on Al; Nature's Beefy Revenge

It looks as though we'll all be footing the bill for the Clintons' place in Chappaqua, purchased by the First Couple for $1.7 million when Hillary had to demonstrate her New York roots. The Secret Service needs a place on the property to house its agents, and the Clintons have been so good as to make available a structure for their bodyguards. By an amazing coincidence the rent matches the monthly mortgage payment for the entire property.

Bill on Al

Attending the annual Texas Monthly bash, the putschist George W. was asked what he and Bill Clinton had talked about in their White House photo op. Bush described how he had asked Clinton why Al Gore was taking his defeat with such poor grace: "It's been eight years," the President genially replied, "and we still haven't figured out Al." Then Bill added hastily, "But he's been a great vice president."

Nature's Revenge

The sky is black with cows coming home to roost. In Germany it's the biggest crisis since 1945. In France ranchers and slaughterhouse workers are blocking all roads to Paris and traffic is backed up 100 kilometers. The reason is mad cow. Last month the health minister for Germany's largest state, Baerbel Hoehn in North-Rhine-Westphalia, told the Cologne Express: "Whoever wants to be totally certain shouldn't eat beef at the moment.'' Bavaria, where the second mad cow case was confirmed in mid-December, pledges to spend $9.1 million to research how to combat the disease.

On Dec. 30 Jon Henley laid out this desolate French gastro-chronology of 2000 in the British Guardian : "January: Oysters and other shellfish withdrawn after oil spill off Brittany coast; 23 cases of listeria including seven deaths from contaminated jellied tongue. April: Eighteen cases of mad cow disease in first three months of year compared with 30 in all 1999. July: 16,000 tonnes of doctored butter discovered. October: Cow intestines, traditionally used to make sausages and other charcuterie, banned over BSE [mad cow disease] fears. October: BSE-infected meat reaches three major hypermarket chains, sparking 40pct fall in consumption. November: Meat-and-bone meal banned in all animal feeds; beef ribs outlawed unless cut differently; 1,800 kg of rotting duck meat products found just before hitting shops. December: Two tonnes of out-of-date beef seized by Normandy farmers."

Alain Passard, who runs the three-star Arpege restaurant in Paris, is now cited by Henley as vowing to take beef off his menu altogether and offer only vegetables and some poultry. Passard admits that he personally hasn't eaten meat for years and is concerned by "the turn our food is taking." He says, "I want to become the first three-star chef to use only vegetables, a driving force in the field of vegetable and flower cuisine."

The 44-year-old Passard explains, "I can no longer stand the idea that we humans have turned herbivore ruminants into carnivores. But also, I can't get excited about a lump of barbecue meat. Vegetables are so much more colourful, more perfumed. You can play with the harmony of colors, everything is luminous." So soon we'll be getting Gallic gastronomes rushing over here to find out what good unhealthy hormone-injected beef tastes like.

Part of France's problem takes the unlovely form of inspectors from the European Union. These Brussels bureaucrats have issued reports denouncing French abattoirs, complaining about hygienic conditions and about the fact that the "animals were stabbed on a conveyor belt and blood was collected in an open system with high risk of contamination from unclean skin." Of course the beau ideal of these inspectors is a stainless-steel slaughtering and sausagemaking facility of the kind imposed here by the USDA, which has bankrupted small meat processors and engendered the worst charcuterie in the entire world, including "healthy" hotdogs able to survive 20 years in a garbage dump without visible impairment.

France was the country that pioneered the organization of the mass production line and modern methods of food preservation, a requirement imposed by the need to provision Napoleon's armies. In 1807 Napoleon approved designs for abattoirs and 60 years later these formed the basis for La Villette, which opened in 1867 and whose construction on the edge of Paris was supervised by Haussmann. Sigfried Giedion described it in his brilliant 1948 book, Mechanization Takes Command: "The whole installation bears witness to the care with which the individual animal was treated. The great lairages (bergeries), with their lofts under the high roofs and their careful design, might have stood in a farmyard; each ox had a stall to itself... In this curious symbiosis of handicraft with centrallization lies the peculiarity of this establishment...each ox had a separate booth in which it was felled. This is a survival of handicraft practices, to which the routine of mass slaughtering is unknown. The long houses in which the cattle were slaughtered consisted of rows of single cabins set side by side. Long since, technical installations and slaughtering in large halls have superseded them. It may well be that this treatment in separate booths expresses the deeply rooted experience that the beasts can be raised only at the cost of constant care and attention to the individual animal."

Giedion contrasted this French retrospect to peasant husbandry, to the birth of industrial slaughtering in Cincinnati ("Porkopolis," refining its processes since the mid-century) and the Chicago stockyards: "The Great Plains beyond the Mississippi, where free tracts of grassland can be dominated from horseback and where the herds grow up almost without care, are implicitly related to the assembly line."

Now we have industrial methods of beef production and slaughter on both sides of the Atlantic, a mode terrifying every meat-eater in Europe. It won't be long before the panic spreads here, whether provoked by mad cow or by other dangers such as nuclear irradiation finally sanctioned by the Clinton gang after decades of lobbying by the nuclear industry.

Back in the 1860s, just as Haussmann was opening La Villette, Marx jotted down in his notes the thought that "The nature that preceded human history no longer exists anywhere." Much in gastronomy and the sort of food writing in magazines like Saveur is sedate nostalgia for that lost nature. Food writers luxuriate in elegies for lost tastes and dwindling flavors, pursued as ardently by the high rollers.

"Tuna Sells for a Record $175,000," was a recent AP headline, relaying the news tthat he first auction of the year at Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market for a bluefin tuna set a record price of some $25 a mouthful, the fish selling for just over 20 million yen?some $175,000. And yes, they've also just discovered in Europe that fish out of the rivers and North Sea are severely contaminated with dioxin.

"On the vegetarian side," the AP writer continues, the Japanese "line up to buy such specialties as the very freshest 'matsutake,' or pine mushrooms, a toadstool-shaped fungus known for its imposing cap, delicate flavor and brief growing season."

Around this time of year I go looking for Armillaria ponderosa, or matsutakes, up on the ridges among the tan oaks and madrone. Until you've crawled through abandoned marijuana gardens rife with chicken wire, black pipe and slow-release nitrogen pellets you haven't lived. Aside from the woody point at the bottom of the stalk, one way you identify them is the cinnamon-like, peppery smell. According to David Arora, in his indispensable Mushrooms Demystified, the new official name for the white matsutake is Tricholoma magnivelare. I know when they're around by the constant rumble of the Federal Express van that comes by my door on what must be one of the longest daily routes in the U.S. Peering over the delivery person's shoulder I start seeing boxes from a mushroom hunter 30 miles south of me at the bottom of the King Range, addressed to a mushroom dealer in San Francisco, thence dispatched to Japan for vast sums. In the markets in California you see them going for around $30 to $50 a pound. "Delicate" is not the right word for the flavor of this beefy fungus. Sometimes I bake it in the oven.

If you want safe meat, come out here to Petrolia and order lamb grown by my neighbor Greg Smith. Last week Margie Smith told me that they'd just marked their flock and found they'd lost no lambs to bobcats and coyotes. The lambs' savior: a Great Pyrenees. These splendid dogs bond with sheep, live side by side with them and fight off predators, though not of course the humans who eventually bear the lambs off to our local Redwood Meat abattoir. Two Great Pyrenees can bring down a mountain lion.

Sometimes I see these fine white dogs down in the Bay Area, padding along at one end of a lead, with the other end complacently held by Yuppicus or Yuppica urbanensis, whose tender, pampered musculature is justly prized by gastronomes around the world, though food inspectors have been lately worried by the level of PCBs and other toxins in their bodies and have been calling for more stringent regulatory standards, and lethal injection rather than the traditional bludgeon or knife. It's sad to hear these newfangled challenges to traditional customs.