Neoliberalism Is a Political Project

Eleven years ago, David Harvey published A Brief History of Neoliberalism, now one of the most cited books on the subject. The years since have seen new economic and financial crises, but also of new waves of resistance, which themselves often target “neoliberalism” in their critique of contemporary society.

Cornel West speaks of the Black Lives Matter movement as “an indictment of neoliberal power”; the late Hugo Chávez called neoliberalism a “path to hell”; and labor leaders are increasingly using the term to describe the larger environment in which workplace struggles occur. The mainstream press has also picked up the term, if only to argue that neoliberalism doesn’t actually exist.

But what, exactly, are we talking about when we talk about neoliberalism? Is it a useful target for socialists? And how has it changed since its genesis in the late twentieth century?

Bjarke Skærlund Risager, a PhD fellow at the Department of Philosophy and History of Ideas at Aarhus University, sat down with David Harvey to discuss the political nature of neoliberalism, how it has transformed modes of resistance, and why the Left still needs to be serious about ending capitalism.

Neoliberalism is a widely used term today. However, it is often unclear what people refer to when they use it. In its most systematic usage it might refer to a theory, a set of ideas, a political strategy, or a historical period. Could you begin by explaining how you understand neoliberalism?

I’ve always treated neoliberalism as a political project carried out by the corporate capitalist class as they felt intensely threatened both politically and economically towards the end of the 1960s into the 1970s. They desperately wanted to launch a political project that would curb the power of labor.

In many respects the project was a counterrevolutionary project. It would nip in the bud what, at that time, were revolutionary movements in much of the developing world — Mozambique, Angola, China etc. — but also a rising tide of communist influences in countries like Italy and France and, to a lesser degree, the threat of a revival of that in Spain.

Even in the United States, trade unions had produced a Democratic Congress that was quite radical in its intent. In the early 1970s they, along with other social movements, forced a slew of reforms and reformist initiatives which were anti-corporate: the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, consumer protections, and a whole set of things around empowering labor even more than it had been empowered before.

So in that situation there was, in effect, a global threat to the power of the corporate capitalist class and therefore the question was, “What to do?”. The ruling class wasn’t omniscient but they recognized that there were a number of fronts on which they had to struggle: the ideological front, the political front, and above all they had to struggle to curb the power of labor by whatever means possible. Out of this there emerged a political project which I would call neoliberalism.

Can you talk a bit about the ideological and political fronts and the attacks on labor?

The ideological front amounted to following the advice of a guy named Lewis Powell. He wrote a memo saying that things had gone too far, that capital needed a collective project. The memo helped mobilize the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable.

Ideas were also important to the ideological front. The judgement at that time was that universities were impossible to organize because the student movement was too strong and the faculty too liberal-minded, so they set up all of these think tanks like the Manhattan Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Ohlin Foundation. These think tanks brought in the ideas of Freidrich Hayek and Milton Friedman and supply-side economics.

The idea was to have these think tanks do serious research and some of them did — for instance, the National Bureau of Economic Research was a privately funded institution that did extremely good and thorough research. This research would then be published independently and it would influence the press and bit by bit it would surround and infiltrate the universities.

This process took a long time. I think now we’ve reached a point where you don’t need something like the Heritage Foundation anymore. Universities have pretty much been taken over by the neoliberal projects surrounding them.

With respect to labor, the challenge was to make domestic labor competitive with global labor. One way was to open up immigration. In the 1960s, for example, Germans were importing Turkish labor, the French Maghrebian labor, the British colonial labor. But this created a great deal of dissatisfaction and unrest.

Instead they chose the other way — to take capital to where the low-wage labor forces were. But for globalization to work you had to reduce tariffs and empower finance capital, because finance capital is the most mobile form of capital. So finance capital and things like floating currencies became critical to curbing labor.

At the same time, ideological projects to privatize and deregulate created unemployment. So, unemployment at home and offshoring taking the jobs abroad, and a third component: technological change, deindustrialization through automation and robotization. That was the strategy to squash labor.

It was an ideological assault but also an economic assault. To me this is what neoliberalism was about: it was that political project, and I think the bourgeoisie or the corporate capitalist class put it into motion bit by bit.

I don’t think they started out by reading Hayek or anything, I think they just intuitively said, “We gotta crush labor, how do we do it?” And they found that there was a legitimizing theory out there, which would support that.

by David Harvey, Jacobin |  Read more:

Image: Direitos Urbanos

Fitz and the Tantrums

Vetements and the Cult of the Fashion Victim

There is a common element in a lot of the street style photos over the past couple of seasons or so: Vetements. The Paris-based brand, which was launched in 2014 by brothers Demna and Guram Gvasalia and friends, is undeniably the “it” brand at the moment amongst industry insiders (or wannabe insiders or “fashion victims” as fashion blogger, BryanBoy aptly coined them recently) with $1000 to spend on a sweatshirt. The sweatshirts that say Thrasher on them are Vetements. The yellow DHL-logoed t-shirts are Vetements. The poncho-like rain jackets that say Vetements on the back of them are obviously Vetements, as well.

Maybe more interesting than the rapid proliferation of Vetements fans (read: fashion victims) is what these $1000+ sweatshirts (which are made of 80% cotton, 20% polyester) and $330+ DHL t-shirts stand for. As we all know, fashion is in a weird, unstable place at the moment. The future of the fashion calendar is up in the air. Sales growth is low. Consumer fatigue is growing, and widespread economic woes certainly do not help. With this in mind, we have seen an array of attempts by brands to weather the storm. Speeding up the runway-to-retail timeline and making collections shoppable instantaneously is one way brands are coping. Playing on consumers’ desires to own “it” items – a longstanding principle in luxury fashion – is another. And this is where Vetements plays a role (in addition to falling in the former camp, as the brand recently announced that it is changing up its own runway show schedule).

Status Matters

Status matters to consumers. It is the reason fashion houses can charge $2000 for a basic nylon or laminated canvas bag that is covered in logos or $100+ for a licensed fragrance. Sure, Vetements does not sell bags or fragrances but it does fit neatly into this same notion, nonetheless, as its garments have risen to industry “it” items. And its founders appear to understand what drives luxury shopping to an extent: "In order to make people want something, you need to make scarcity. The real definition of luxury is something that is scarce. Every single piece in our collection is going to be a limited item... We don't restock and we don't reproduce -- if it's sold out, it's sold out,” the brothers recently noted.

As Vogue’s Sarah Mower wrote of the brand last October, “Demna Gvasalia himself learned the ropes at Maison Martin Margiela, before setting up Vetements and getting on with proving that there can be a different way of doing things.” Yet, if we consider the aforementioned notion, Vetements is not actually doing anything completely revolutionary. At its core, the brand is tapping into fashion fans’ desires to show that they are worthy, that they are in the know, that they have something exclusive, that they are cool. These individuals are essentially taking the coveted “it” bag of the season and wearing it as a sweatshirt. In this way, the Vetements’ method (at least when it comes to the brand’s most coveted items) and the resulting fan fury over those garments is not anything new.

The statement sweatshirt is not coming completely out of left field. In some circles, statements sweatshirts or t-shirts rival the “it” bag. Ask Supreme die-hards. Or look at the Givenchy fans, who were walking around in Rottweiler sweatshirts not too long ago. (Note: such garments really helped Givenchy, which was for many, many decades known primarily for couture, make its mark in the ready-to-wear market and to up profits and visibility).

With this in mind, it is not surprising that we see the offering for sale of Thrasher sweatshirts for $1,000 by Vetements and more importantly, it is not surprising to see people actually buying them. And let’s be clear: we are not talking about die-hard skateboarders here - they probably already own the $35.95 version from Tactics Boardshop that predates the Vetements one. No, we are talking primarily about fashion girls and Kanye West clones, who are happy to spend $1k on a trendy sweatshirt that will send a message to their friends and to other fashion insiders/fans. (...)

I’ll spare you the bit about the sped up fashion cycle because by now I am sure you have read at least 12 articles dissecting the rapidity of the current fashion model. There is one very interesting aspect to the recurring discussion about the sped-up nature of fashion, however: The argument that the speed of it all has left designers with less time to be as creative as they’d like and the result is fashion that lacks depth (Raf Simons, for instance, has sounded off on this exact point. "There is no more thinking time," he said this past fall). But not just limited to designers, the cycle has created a larger feeling that fashion is simply more superficial. It's not personal. It's just business. And in many cases, it really does go both ways.

In theory, this should not be a problem, as the majority of consumers (and of course, there are exceptions!) are not necessarily interested in fashion in anything more than a purely superficial way. Most are not buying based on cut or construction or a deep love or appreciation for the brand – this is true even for high fashion shoppers. They are buying into a brand’s image at the present moment, buying based on what makes them look good - both in a physical way but probably more significantly, in a status type of way. With this in mind, many fashion fans – from the Vetements-wearing fashion victims to our fast fashion-shopping friends – are not buying based on quality. They are buying to keep up with appearances. They are buying to cement themselves into the zeitgeist. This is not a novel concept. It is just happening with more rapidity than before.

Buying – regardless of a garment’s price point – is one of the easiest ways to gain status. It does not require learning or accomplishing anything. It allows the buyer to be part of something cool without expending anything more than money. And that is convenient because in the current landscape of things, which can be probably be aptly categorized by the fact that most people don’t want to read anything longer than a text, ease reigns supreme. So, why wouldn’t that tide over into the fashion industry? It is, after all, one of the most immediate reflections of the time in which we are living.

In short: Shoppers now – just like shoppers in the past – aim to maintain the appearance of status, and a Vetements sweatshirt will give them that for a few seasons.

The Upside of All of This

What does this say about the state of the fashion industry at the moment? A number of things.

by TFL, The Fashion Law |  Read more:
Image: Le21eme.com

Diana Rigg’s Enduring Appeal

[ed. Sometimes you fall down a rabbit hole doing this blog stuff. I don't get HBO so wasn't aware that Diana Rigg is still going strong on Game of Thrones. When I was young, Mrs. Peel in The Avengers was the first woman to make me realize that the other sex might have qualities that (for some strange reason) seemed irresistably and uncomfortably interesting.]

To me, she was and always will be Emma Peel, the brainy, fiercely courageous, impossibly sexy, black-leather clad British secret agent she portrayed in the popular 1960s TV show, “The Avengers,” who captivated and haunted me from the time I first watched her as a little girl in Brooklyn and could never outgrow or forget or leave behind.

“Mrs. Peel, we’re needed.”

How I lived for those words each week. They were a staple of the show, that moment when her partner, the dapper John Steed, would turn to her for help in solving a chilling crime, or to confront a sinister set of bad guys. She would appear, ever so elegant in her Mod outfits—form-fitting hip-huggers, white boots, topped with a jaunty beret or Carnaby hat, the newsboy cap that was all the rage.

Most often, she wore her hair loose—it was thick and lustrous, a deep shade of auburn, and she was constantly brushing it off her face, one of her many gestures I sought to emulate.

Mine was no garden-variety girlhood crush. It was a full-fledged obsession.

by Lucette Lagnado, WSJ |  Read more:
Images via: here and here

Kookaburra
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Joanna Lumley and the New Ab Fab

[ed. I went to a conference once where Joanna Lumley was the keynote speaker (an Oil Industry and Science conference no less!). She was/is an ardent and articulate advocate for the environment. Who'd have known? I've been (even more of) a fan ever since.]

Back in 1992, a certain Bill Clinton was about to become president, the world’s first text message was sent, the Queen suffered her famed annus horribilis and Absolutely Fabulous aired for the first time, giving us Brits our very own big-haired, fast-living icon in a time when big-haired and fast-living was only permitted if you were a middle-aged man. Fast forward to today, a different Clinton is hoping to return to the White House and Absolutely Fabulous is preparing its comeback, this time to the big screen, with her majesty Patsy Stone, staggering on, still drinking, swearing, smoking, and unable to remember her real age. It almost makes one wonder if the last quarter of a century actually happened.

Stone’s arrival in the world was a revelation. A hilarious, satirical icon who accurately represented Generation Y. A sexually free, Harvey Nicks-addicted, Stoli-Bolly legend, clutched to the nation’s heart. To get a sense of just how much has happened since Patsy was presented to us, bear in mind that computers were the size of houses, there was no Tinder, email was confined to academics and a woman enjoying a pint was deemed radical enough to earn the nickname “ladette”. If Jennifer Saunders’ Eddie was loved, Pats was adored. No less the woman who embodied her, Joanna Lumley – already a great British acting stalwart.

And, 24 years on, here she is sitting before me in a Soho hotel room in a pair of her granddaughter’s baby-blue Converse. (“They’ve been passed on to me because she’s grown out of them,” confesses Lumley.) The only reason I’m not blown away by her glamour and velvet voice is because both are already so very familiar. For Lumley is a renaissance woman with legions of what she terms “parallel lives”. Her CV encompasses actor, model, Bond girl, TV presenter, journalist, traveller, political campaigner and advocate for over 80 charities. She has become a national treasure here in the UK, where she is currently attempting to change the face of the capital with her controversial pedestrian Garden Bridge across the Thames, and a “daughter of Nepal” after her stalwart championing of Gurkha rights. (Born in Kashmir, her father was a major in the 6th Gurkha Rifles.)

Under normal circumstances, I pride myself on being the voice of objective journalism. However, in this case, I feel honour-bound to report that 70-year-old Ms Lumley kicks ass. There is a Joanna Lumley Research Fellowship at Oxford, while Woman’s Hour named her as one of its 100 most powerful women in Britain. She is basically saving the world, while refusing to make a song and dance about it.

Lumley is, in short, ab fab – which is, of course, why we’re here. Saunders’ hotly awaited Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie is released next week. As I write, no-one has seen it, but I suspect it will delight existing fans of the show while also appealing to a new generation of milliennials.

If Ms Clinton needs help taking on Donald Trump, I’m starting to think she could do worse than putting in a call to Ms Lumley…

Everyone idolises Pats. Do you?

I adore Patsy. I think what people, particularly women, see in Ab Fab is that women have friends, they stick with friendships and have the same sort of worries. Eddie worries about whether she’s going to look right, be out of fashion or not be recognised. And women – particularly professional women – have anxieties. Patsy doesn’t have any worries. She doesn’t really care. Most of us mind whether we’ve behaved properly or hurt anybody’s feelings. Patsy never thinks about these things ever, almost like a child. If it doesn’t work, let it go.

Is that liberating?

I like doing her, but I’m really not like her. Well, obviously it’s the same carcass that contains us both. So she’s mine, but I’m not hers, if you know what I mean?

How old is Patsy now?

I just pick ages out because she doesn’t really know how old she is. But Edina is about 65, and I think Patsy is easily 80. She’s pickled, she’s in formaldehyde, and she’s also smoked like a kipper, so she’s kind of undieable.

I hear she was very much your creation.

Well, she didn’t exist. When Jennifer wrote the pilot, she was thinking of maybe a Fleet Street hack, but I didn’t know that. I went along with just lines on the page. I didn’t know Edina’s character. I’d never met Jennifer. So it was suck it and see. We invented a backstory where I could bring in things I knew about, like modelling in the Sixties.

The original series was so much about the Nineties. How did you update it for 2016?

The world has changed and strangely enough caught up with the Ab Fab women because in those days, it was shocking – women drinking too much, staying out, not caring, doing stuff like that. Social media didn’t exist. Hello! had only just started [in 1988]. And now the world is much more sensitive. People take offence at the smallest things, which in those days were just funny. In the future, it’s going to be harder to write anything. And this idea of casting: you’ve got to be the character or you shouldn’t be cast as it. In the old days, we could all dress up and be anybody, but now, you have to be that person, which means a gay person has to be played by a gay actor. You go, “Well, this is the whole point of acting kicked out the window. We all pretend to be other people. We pretend to be older, we pretend to be this or that, we pretend to be different nationalities, we put on accents.” (...)

Do you care about the film’s reception?

A lot of people feel they own Ab Fab and know what they want it to be. And so they might say, “What I wanted was…” What I want this film to be is like a glass of champagne on a summer evening. Just go in, laugh, see who’s in it. It’s a fabulous story made by stunning people. It’s funny! It’s divine!

by Hannah Betts, The Stylist | Read more:
Image: Tony Wilson

Verizon to Pay $4.8 Billion for Yahoo’s Core Business

[ed. Great. Verizon... who's plans are apparently to "combine Yahoo's operations with AOL".  Sounds like a winning strategy to me, how about you? Too bad we didn't get Comcast or AT&T.  And how about that Marissa Mayer? Talk about failing up. This might be of no consequence to most people but I hope to hell they don't screw up Tumblr (wishful thinking, I know). Seems like the best of the web always devolves into the worst possible (corporate) outcome.]

Yahoo was the front door to the web for an early generation of internet users, and its services still attract a billion visitors a month.

But the internet is an unforgiving place for yesterday’s great idea, and on Sunday, Yahoo reached the end of the line as an independent company.

The board of the Silicon Valley company agreed to sell Yahoo’s core internet operations and land holdings to Verizon for $4.8 billion, according to people briefed on the matter, who were not authorized to speak about the deal before the planned announcement on Monday morning.

After the sale, Yahoo shareholders will be left with about $41 billion in investments in the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, as well as Yahoo Japan and a small portfolio of patents.

That’s a pittance compared with Yahoo’s peak value of more than $125 billion, reached in January 2000.

Verizon and Yahoo declined to comment about the deal.

Founded in 1994, Yahoo was one of the last independently operated pioneers of the web. Many of those groundbreaking companies, like the maker of the web browser Netscape, never made it to the end of the first dot-com boom.

But Yahoo, despite constant management turmoil, kept growing. Started as a directory of websites, the company was soon doing much more, offering searches, email, shopping and news. Those services, which were free to consumers, were supported by advertising displayed on its various pages.

For a long time, the model worked. It seemed like every company in America — and across much of the world — wanted to reach people using the new medium, and ad revenue poured in to Yahoo.

In the end, the company was done in by Google and Facebook, two younger behemoths that figured out that survival was a continuous process of reinvention and staying ahead of the next big thing. Yahoo, which flirted with buying both companies in their infancy, watched its fortunes sink as users moved on to apps and social networks.

Verizon, one of the nation’s biggest telecommunications companies, plans to combine Yahoo’s operations with AOL, a longtime Yahoo competitor acquired by Verizon last year. The idea is to use Yahoo’s vast array of content and its advertising technology to offer more robust services to Verizon customers and advertisers. Bloomberg first reported the price of the Verizon deal.

Marissa Mayer, who was hired as Yahoo’s chief executive four years ago but failed to turn around the company, is not expected to stay after the deal closes. But she is due to receive severance worth about $57 million, according to Equilar, a compensation research firm. All told, she will have received cash and stock compensation worth about $218 million during her time at Yahoo, according to Equilar’s calculations.

by Vindu Goel and Michael J. de la Merced, NY Times |  Read more: 

Image: Paul Sakuma/Associated Press

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ExxonMobil Vows Lenient Treatment For Any Species That Surrenders Voluntarily

IRVING, TX—Addressing the world’s plant and animal life directly during a press event Friday, officials from ExxonMobil vowed to bestow lenient treatment on any species that surrendered to the corporation voluntarily. “I want every bird, fish, marine mammal, and all other flora and fauna to know that any among them who willingly submit to us now without putting up further resistance can expect to be shown a degree of mercy,” said company CEO Rex Tillerson, who added that wildlife will be given a 60-day window to accept the multinational energy conglomerate’s terms and turn themselves in at one of ExxonMobil’s corporate offices. “It is important you understand that your situation is completely hopeless. However, if you end this struggle now and give yourself up to us of your own will, I guarantee you will be spared and treated with a level of dignity, with only a modest punishment. This is far more than I can say for those species who refuse our generous proposal.” Tillerson also offered a substantial reward to any species who provides information about other remaining holdouts.

via: The Onion

Pushing and Pulling Goals

This is a distinction I’ve always found helpful.

A pulling goal is when you want to achieve something, so you come up with a plan and a structure. For example, you want to cure cancer, so you become a biologist and set up a lab and do cancer research. Or you want to get rich, so you go to business school and send out your resume.

A pushing goal is when you have a plan and a structure, and you’re trying to figure out what to do with it. For example, you’re studying biology in college, your professor says you need to do a research project to graduate, and so you start looking for research to do. You already know the plan – you’re going to get books, maybe use a lab, do biology-ish things, and end up with a finished report which is twenty pages double-spaced. All you need to figure out is what you’re going to select as the nominal point of the activity. There’s something perversely backwards about this – most people would expect that the point of a research project is to research some topic in particular. But from your perspective the actual subject you’re researching is almost beside the point. The point is to have a twenty page double-spaced report on something.

School and business are obvious ways to end up with pushing goals, but not every pushing goal is about satisfying somebody else’s requirements. I remember in college some friends set up an Atheist Club. There was a Christian Club, and a Buddhist Club, so why shouldn’t the atheists get a club too? So they wrote the charter, they set a meeting time, and then we realized none of us knew what exactly the Atheist Club was supposed to do. The Christian Club prayed and did Bible study; the Buddhist club meditated, the atheist club…sat around and tried to brainstorm Atheist Club activities. Occasionally we came up with some, like watching movies relevant to atheism, or having speakers come in and talk about how creationism was really bad. But we weren’t doing this because we really wanted to watch movies relevant to atheism, or because we were interested in what speakers had to say about creationism. We were doing this because we’d started an Atheist Club and now we had to come up with a purpose for it.

Sometimes on Reddit’s /r/writing I see people asking “How do you come up with ideas for things to write about?” and I feel a sort of horror. So you want to write a novel, but…you don’t have anything to write about? And you just sit there thinking “Maybe it should be about romance…no, war…no, the ennui of the working classes…or maybe hobbits.” I can understand this in theory – you want to be A Writer – but it still weirds me out.

You may have noticed I don’t really like pushing goals. Part of it is an irrational intuition that they’re dishonest in some way that’s hard to explain. It usually ends up with me trying to figure out what to do my biology research project on, and I think “well, I can’t think of anything I really want to research, so maybe I should just do whatever is easiest”. But if I do whatever is easiest, I feel really bad, and worry maybe I have some kind of obligation to research something important that I care about. So I get my brain tangled up trying to figure out how much easiness I can get away with, then feeling bad for asking the question, then trying to come up with something important I honestly want to do, which doesn’t exist since I wasn’t doing a biology research project the month before my professor assigned it to me and so clearly I am only doing it to satisfy the requirement.

Another part of it is that it’s often a sign something has gone wrong somewhere. In the example of the Atheist Club, that thing might have been starting the club in the first place. But assuming that we genuinely want to start the club, then the presence of a pushing goal means we don’t understand why we wanted to start the club. If we wanted to start it because we wanted to hang out with other atheists, then that offers a blueprint for a solution to the problem – instead of planning all these movies and speakers, we should just hang out. If we did it because we thought it was important for atheism to be more visible on campus, then again, that offers a blueprint for a solution – spend our sessions trying to improve atheism’s campus visibility. If we just sit there saying “I guess we have an Atheist Club now, better think of something to do at meetings”, then it seems like something important hasn’t been fully examined.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Image: none

Beth Hart

The Substitute

An email blast goes out from the director of composition to all the adjuncts, graduate students, and temporary-contract full-time instructors who teach writing at a large state university. The director of composition is chipper about a professional development opportunity at a neighboring institution and he’ll reserve space for any of the teacher-persons who want to go, the fee paid by the English Department. The invitation is for a workshop with a nationally recognized composition scholar, and the teachers can carpool. For teachers, professional development means a day without teaching, but a day spent talking about teaching, and this is a welcome and often productive change. Almost as an afterthought, the director of composition ends the email by saying anyone who would like to attend the workshop who teaches on that day should arrange for a substitute to teach their classes.

If you’ve never heard of substitute teachers for college classes, that’s because they don’t exist. A substitute is a teacher-person who goes from school to school, and from class to class, to sit in when the regular teacher has taken a day off. Since the students who attend high school, middle school, or elementary school are required by law to sit in those classrooms, the job of the substitute is to watch the kids, end of story. The teacher calls their principal and says they won’t be coming in that day and the principal goes down the list until someone agrees to substitute. It’s never been the teacher’s responsibility.

Professional development is important for teachers: professors go to conferences to stay relevant and to make contacts. It used to be that the university would pay for this, and that’s still mostly true, though it’s almost never the case for the kinds of teacher-persons who received the director of composition’s email. The director of composition recognized that these were teacher-persons who needed professional development for different reasons. The adjuncts, the graduate students, and the temporary-contract full-time instructors were all in the same boat, valued for their semi-pro status, and the director of composition would escort them to the nationally recognized scholar like Scouts on their first camping trip. No one believes that the workshop attendees will ever achieve the heights of the national scholar, no matter what their potential, and in the meantime, they’re still expected to adhere to university policy and to be sure the classes are being taught.

The director of composition should have known more than anyone that it would be next to impossible for composition teachers to get substitutes for their classes, due to the number of them attending the workshop and the number of classes those teachers regularly taught. You see, there’s no substitute pool for them to draw from, so they have to ask unpaid favors of each other, because they certainly can’t ask the tenured professors, who have minimal contact with contingent faculty as they come and go from year to year. Despite the good intentions of the director of composition, the contingent teachers have been reminded that they can’t pretend to claim the perks taken for granted by tenured professors and also do their jobs effectively. (...)

When a student tells me they want to be a teacher I suggest they try substitute teaching. It doesn’t cost anything, one doesn’t need a license, and there’s no prep. They only work the days they want to work and if they are even semi-competent, the schools will keep calling them back. For my own part, I had good experiences as a substitute teacher. It let me know that I was able to go into a classroom where I was greeted with extremely low expectations, yet I could trick the students into learning despite themselves. Anyone who thinks they want to teach will get a pretty quick sense of whether they still want to teach after they’ve tried substituting.

As sensible as this sounds, this suggestion, that a student should try substituting is almost always greeted by the student with disdain. We tend to think of ourselves as better than substitutes, even those with no teaching experience. And so asking someone to be a substitute for a college class only works if that teacher is already in a position that comes with a degree of disrespect. By comparison, instead of asking “Will you be the substitute for my classes?” a contingent teacher might try out some of these equivalent phrases on their colleagues: “Will you babysit my child? Will you be a server at my wedding? Will you pick up my mom from the airport?” The only reason I need a substitute for my classes is because the director of composition told me I did, and the only reason the director of composition told me I did was because the university administration, a.k.a. the numbers people, told the director that I did.

I’m in a position that comes with disrespect, though my students don’t really know it, because whether I go to a workshop for faculty development or not, I’m a professional. Sometimes, the students who turn their noses up at the suggestion that they try substitute teaching will say, “I don’t want to teach high school. I want to do what you do. I want to teach college.”

I tell them that if they teach in the public secondary or elementary schools they’ll have better job security and will likely be paid more. They might have to deal with student discipline or with standardized tests, but maybe that’s not such a big deal. Maybe it just is. It’s teaching after all. It’s a calling.

Blind faith in the capitalist meritocracy makes it surprising for a student to hear that a professor with a Ph.D. can make less than a teacher with a bachelor’s degree, someone they might think of as more like a smart mom than a scholar. But at the end of the school year that teacher won’t be let go simply because her contract has run out. She’ll almost automatically be kept on the payroll, and she’ll be given a raise. At public secondary or elementary schools it’s easier to keep someone around than to do a new job search, so even without tenure there’s almost always job security. At institutions of higher education, however, they pretty much always run job searches, even when they have someone they want to keep around. A professor on a temporary contract might be asked to reapply for the job they already have, or their renewable contract could be replaced with one that is nonrenewable, because the rules can change without warning.

by John Minichillo, McSweeny's |  Read more:

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The Unified Theory of Deliciousness

My first restaurant, Momofuku Noodle Bar, had an open kitchen. This wasn’t by choice—I didn’t have enough money or space to put it farther away from the diners. But cooking in front of my customers changed the way I look at food. In the early years, around 2004, we were improvising new recipes every day, and I could instantly tell what was working and what wasn’t by watching people eat. A great dish hits you like a Whip-It: There’s momentary elation, a brief ripple of pure pleasure in the spacetime continuum. That’s what I was chasing, that split second when someone tastes something so delicious that their conversation suddenly derails and they blurt out something guttural like they stubbed their toe.

The Momofuku Pork Bun was our first dish that consistently got this kind of reaction. It was an 11th-hour addition, a slapped-together thing. I took some pork belly, topped it with hoisin sauce, scallions, and cucumbers, and put it inside some steamed bread. I was just making a version of my favorite Peking duck buns, with pork belly where the duck used to be. But people went crazy for them. Their faces melted. Word spread, and soon people were lining up for these buns.

That became my yardstick: I’d ask, “Is this dish good enough to come downtown and wait in line for? If not, it’s not what we’re after.” A chef can go years before getting another dish like that. We’ve been lucky: Hits have come at the least expected time and place. I’ve spent weeks on one dish that ultimately very few people would care about. And then I’ve spent 15 minutes on something that ends up flooring people like the pork bun.

Believe me, nobody is more surprised about this than I am. Cooking, as a physical activity, doesn’t come naturally to me. It never has. To compensate for my lack of dexterity, speed, and technique, I think about food constantly. In fact, I’m much stronger at thinking about food than I am at cooking it. And recently I started seeing patterns in our most successful dishes that suggested our hits weren’t entirely random; there’s a set of underlying laws that links them together. I’ve struggled to put this into words, and I haven’t talked to my fellow chefs about it, because I worry they’ll think I’m crazy. But I think there’s something to it, and so I’m sharing it now for the first time. I call it the Unified Theory of Deliciousness.

This probably sounds absolutely ridiculous, but the theory is rooted in a class I took in college called Advanced Logic. A philosopher named Howard DeLong taught it; he wrote one of the books that directly inspired Douglas Hofstadter to write Gödel, Escher, Bach. The first day, he said, “This class will change your life,” and I was like, “What kind of asshole is this?” But he was right. I would never pretend to be an expert in logic, and I never made it all the way through Gödel, Escher, Bach. But the ideas and concepts I took away from that class have haunted me ever since.

DeLong and Hofstadter both found great beauty in what the latter called strange loops—occasions when mathematical systems or works of art or pieces of music fold back upon themselves. M. C. Escher’s drawings are a great, overt example of this. Take his famous picture of two hands drawing each other; it’s impossible to say where it starts or ends. When you hit a strange loop like this, it shifts your point of view: Suddenly you aren’t just thinking about what’s happening inside the picture; you’re thinking about the system it represents and your response to it.

It was only recently that I had a realization: Maybe it’s possible to express some of these ideas in food as well. I may never be able to hear them or draw them or turn them into math. But I’ll bet I can taste them. In fact, looking back over the years, I think a version of those concepts has helped guide me to some of our most popular dishes.

My first breakthrough on this idea was with salt. It’s the most basic ingredient, but it can also be hellishly complex. A chef can go crazy figuring out how much salt to add to a dish. But I believe there is an objectively correct amount of salt, and it is rooted in a counterintuitive idea. Normally we think of a balanced dish as being neither too salty nor undersalted. I think that’s wrong. When a dish is perfectly seasoned, it will taste simultaneously like it has too much salt and too little salt. It is fully committed to being both at the same time.

Try it for yourself. Set out a few glasses of water with varying amounts of salt in them. As you taste them, think hard about whether there is too much or too little salt. If you keep experimenting, you’ll eventually hit this sweet spot. You’ll think that it’s too bland, but as soon as you form that thought, you’ll suddenly find it tastes too salty. It teeters. And once you experience that sensation, I guarantee it will be in your head any time you taste anything for the rest of your life.

It’s a little bit like the famous liar’s paradox, which we studied in DeLong’s class. Here’s one version of it: “The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence is false.” As soon as you accept the first sentence, you validate the second sentence, which invalidates the first sentence, which invalidates the second, which validates the first, and on and on.

Most people won’t ever notice this sensation; they’ll just appreciate that the food tastes good. But under the surface, the saltiness paradox has a very powerful effect, because it makes you very aware of what you’re eating and your own reaction to it. It nags at you, and it keeps you in the moment, thinking about what you’re tasting. And that’s what makes it delicious.

This was an important realization for me, because it seemed like I’d discovered an unequivocal law. And I figured if I could find one, there had to be more—a set of base patterns that people inherently respond to. So then the challenge became discovering those patterns and replicating them in dish after dish. If you could do that, you’d be like the Berry Gordy of cooking; you’d be able to crank out the hits.

by David Chang, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Kiernan Monaghan & Theo Vamvounakis

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Move Managers

In her long career as a psychiatrist, Dr. Phyllis Harrison-Ross has been described by friends and colleagues as practical and calm. But two other traits, humor and patience, went right out the window when she decided to downsize.

“You ask yourself what you want to keep, and the answer is ‘everything,’ ” said Dr. Harrison-Ross, who turns 80 next month. “It’s an emotional roller coaster that takes a toll on you. It’s very tiring.

“I thought I could get down to the bare essence of things myself,” she said. “But that proved to be very difficult, much more than I had expected.”

Her solution: Dr. Harrison-Ross hired a senior move manager.

Moving is stressful at any age, but for those who have lived in one place for many years, getting rid of things that have accumulated over decades is a large barrier to overcome.

As people get older, said David J. Ekerdt, a professor of sociology and gerontology at the University of Kansas, cognitive and physical issues hamper divestment. “It’s also a very emotional task. It’s hard to quantify the attachment one has to certain possessions,” he said, adding that the probability of people divesting themselves of their belongings decreases each decade after age 50.

Senior move managers specialize in the issues that comes with downsizing, including donating and selling items and hiring movers. In New York, these managers maneuver through the often stringent moving and trash-disposal rules adopted by co-ops and condominium buildings. They also deal with out-of-town family members who may want items sent to them. They pack and unpack; they call the cable company. Most also help with decluttering and organizing the homes of seniors who wish to stay put.

The specialty is new, so no one can estimate just how many senior move managers there might be in the United States. But Mary Kay Buysse, the executive director of the National Association of Senior Move Managers, said: “Our membership has grown from 22 members in 2002 to nearly 1,000 members today. Though most of our current data is anecdotal, we know members managed over 100,000 senior moves last year.” She added that total revenue among the members was about $150 million last year.

Dr. Harrison-Ross, a commissioner of the New York State Commission of Correction and chairwoman of the commission’s medical review board, said she first thought about moving from her four-bedroom co-op on the Upper West Side about five years ago, but didn’t start looking for a smaller place until health issues took a toll about two years ago.

“There were rooms I didn’t go into for days,” said Dr. Harrison-Ross, who has lived in the apartment for 48 years.

She found a spot in an apartment building for seniors on the Upper West Side, but knew she was in trouble when her first impulse was to “stick everything I had into storage and forget about it unless I needed something.”

She asked a friend to help her get organized. But the two puzzled over how to get rid of large items or whom to call to sell furniture and artwork.

Then Dr. Harrison-Ross’s real estate agent referred her to Katie Hustead, who with her husband, Joseph Weston, runs Paper Moon Moves, a Brooklyn company specializing in seniors. She talked to Ms. Hustead on the phone and met with her in person before she signed on.

“It’s very important to hire someone that you can trust, because the decisions you’re making are very emotional,” Dr. Harrison-Ross said. “Once I knew I could trust Katie, things started to move forward, because any suggestion she would make, I knew she had thought about what was important to me.”

Most senior move managers in New York charge about $100 per hour, higher than the national average. In a 2014 survey conducted by the National Association of Senior Move Managers, 50 percent of the respondents said they charged between $41 and $60 per hour. (...)

Move managers also have a long list of contacts for specific tasks, Ms. Buysse said. For example, a good move manager will know not to call a top-tier auctioneer for something worth a few thousand dollars, and know which estate liquidators or junk haulers work well with seniors.

Move managers can also step in when adult children don’t live near their parents or don’t have time to help sort through belongings. Judith Kahn, who owns Judith Moves You, a Manhattan company that specializes in senior moves, said most seniors can handle an organizational task for only about three hours a day, which can frustrate adult children who have flown in for the weekend and want to get things done quickly.

“Kids often have a different idea of how their parents should move, so it’s better if a move manager can be that understanding, neutral person,” Ms. Kahn said.

by Kaya Laterman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Emon Hassan

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love,” artist Louise Bourgeoise wrote in her diary at the end of a long and illustrious life as she contemplated how solitude enriches creative work. It’s a lovely sentiment, but as empowering as it may be to those willing to embrace solitude, it can be tremendously lonesome-making to those for whom loneliness has contracted the space of trust and love into a suffocating penitentiary. For if in solitude, as Wendell Berry memorably wrote, “one’s inner voices become audible [and] one responds more clearly to other lives,” in loneliness one’s inner scream becomes deafening, deadening, severing any thread of connection to other lives.

How to break free of that prison and reinhabit the space of trust and love is what Olivia Laing explores in The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (public library) — an extraordinary more-than-memoir; a sort of memoir-plus-plus, partway between Helen MacDonald’s H Is for Hawk and the diary of Virginia Woolf; a lyrical account of wading through a period of self-expatriation, both physical and psychological, in which Laing paints an intimate portrait of loneliness as “a populated place: a city in itself.”

After the sudden collapse of a romance marked by extreme elation, Laing left her native England and took her shattered heart to New York, “that teeming island of gneiss and concrete and glass.” The daily, bone-deep loneliness she experienced there was both paralyzing in its all-consuming potency and, paradoxically, a strange invitation to aliveness. Indeed, her choice to leave home and wander a foreign city is itself a rich metaphor for the paradoxical nature of loneliness, animated by equal parts restlessness and stupor, capable of turning one into a voluntary vagabond and a catatonic recluse all at once, yet somehow a vitalizing laboratory for self-discovery. The pit of loneliness, she found, could “drive one to consider some of the larger questions of what it is to be alive.”

She writes:

There were things that burned away at me, not only as a private individual, but also as a citizen of our century, our pixelated age. What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we’re not intimately engaged with another human being? How do we connect with other people, particularly if we don’t find speaking easy? Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or unblessed with beauty? And is technology helping with these things? Does it draw us closer together, or trap us behind screens? (...)

There is, of course, a universe of difference between solitude and loneliness — two radically different interior orientations toward the same exterior circumstance of lacking companionship. We speak of “fertile solitude” as a developmental achievement essential for our creative capacity, but loneliness is barren and destructive; it cottons in apathy the will to create. More than that, it seems to signal an existential failing — a social stigma the nuances of which Laing addresses beautifully:

Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person, as much a part of one’s being as laughing easily or having red hair. Then again, it can be transient, lapping in and out in reaction to external circumstance, like the loneliness that follows on the heels of a bereavement, break-up or change in social circles. 

Like depression, like melancholy or restlessness, it is subject too to pathologisation, to being considered a disease. It has been said emphatically that loneliness serves no purpose… Perhaps I’m wrong, but I don’t think any experience so much a part of our common shared lives can be entirely devoid of meaning, without a richness and a value of some kind.

It was in the lacuna between self-forgetfulness and self-discovery that Laing found herself drawn to the artists who became her companions in a journey both toward and away from loneliness. There is Edward Hopper with his iconic Nighthawks aglow in eerie jade, of which Laing writes:

There is no colour in existence that so powerfully communicates urban alienation, the atomisation of human beings inside the edifices they create, as this noxious pallid green, which only came into being with the advent of electricity, and which is inextricably associated with the nocturnal city, the city of glass towers, of empty illuminated offices and neon signs.   […] 

The diner was a place of refuge, absolutely, but there was no visible entrance, no way to get in or out. There was a cartoonish, ochre-coloured door at the back of the painting, leading perhaps into a grimy kitchen. But from the street, the room was sealed: an urban aquarium, a glass cell.   […] 

Green on green, glass on glass, a mood that expanded the longer I lingered, breeding disquiet.

Hopper himself had a conflicted relationship with the common interpretation that loneliness was a central theme of his work. Although he often denied that it was a deliberate creative choice, he once conceded in an interview: “I probably am a lonely one.” Laing, whose attention and sensitivity to even the subtlest texture of experience are what make the book so wonderful, considers how Hopper’s choice of language captures the essence of loneliness:

It’s an unusual formulation, a lonely one; not at all the same thing as admitting one is lonely. Instead, it suggests with that a, that unassuming indefinite article, a fact that loneliness by its nature resists. Though it feels entirely isolating, a private burden no one else could possibly experience or share, it is in reality a communal state, inhabited by many people. In fact, current studies suggest that more than a quarter of American adults suffers from loneliness, independent of race, education and ethnicity, while 45 per cent of British adults report feeling lonely either often or sometimes. Marriage and high income serve as mild deterrents, but the truth is that few of us are absolutely immune to feeling a greater longing for connection than we find ourselves able to satisfy. The lonely ones, a hundred million strong. Hardly any wonder Hopper’s paintings remain so popular, and so endlessly reproduced. 

Reading his halting confession, one begins to see why his work is not just compelling but also consoling, especially when viewed en masse. It’s true that he painted, not once but many times, the loneliness of a large city, where the possibilities of connection are repeatedly defeated by the dehumanising apparatus of urban life. But didn’t he also paint loneliness as a large city, revealing it as a shared, democratic place, inhabited, whether willingly or not, by many souls?  […]

What Hopper captures is beautiful as well as frightening. They aren’t sentimental, his pictures, but there is an extraordinary attentiveness to them… As if loneliness was something worth looking at. More than that, as if looking itself was an antidote, a way to defeat loneliness’s strange, estranging spell. 

by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings | Read more:
Image:Edward Hopper: Nighthawks (1942)

Mikael Jansson
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Being Honest About Trump

[ed. Whatever you think of Donald Trump's chances in November it says a lot about our country that he's achieved what he has so far. In the end, it's not enough to say... oh, I made a mistake, or, I thought we just needed a change (Brexit, anyone?). Even if you're not fully aware, you're still fully culpable. See also: The Beginning of the End.]

...We walk out of the beautiful museum and find ourselves back in a uniquely frightening moment in American life. A candidate for President who is the announced enemy of the openness that America has traditionally stood for and that drew persecuted émigrés like Moholy-Nagy to America as to a golden land, a candidate who embraces the mottos and rhetoric of the pro-fascist groups of that same wretched time, has taken over one of our most venerable political parties, and he seems still in the ascendancy. His language remains not merely sloppy or incendiary but openly hostile to the simplest standards of truth and decency that have governed American politics. Most recently, just this week, he has repeated the lie that there has been a call for “a moment of silence” in honor of the murderer of five policemen in Dallas.

This ought to be, as people said quaintly just four or five months ago, “disqualifying.” Nonetheless, his takeover of the Republican Party is complete, and, in various postures of spinelessness, its authorities accede to his authority, or else opportunistically posture for a place in the wake of it. Many of them doubtless assume that he will lose and are hoping for a better position afterward—still, the very small show of backbone that would be required to resist his takeover seems unavailable. Even those who clearly fear and despise him, like the Bush family, seem able to register their opposition only in veiled language and cautiously equivocal formulations; Jeb Bush knows what Trump is, but still feels obliged to say that he would “feel sad” if Trump lost.

What is genuinely alarming is the urge, however human it may be, to normalize the abnormal by turning toward emotions and attitudes that are familiar. To their great credit, the editors of most of the leading conservative publications in America have recognized Trump for what he is, and have opposed his rise to power. Yet the habit of hatred is so ingrained in their psyches that even those who recognize at some level that Trump is a horror, when given the dangling bait of another chance to hate Hillary still leap at it, insisting on her “criminality” at the very moment when it’s officially rejected, and attempting to equate this normal politician with an abnormal threat to political life itself. They do this, in part, to placate their readership. In the so-called mainstream (call it liberal) media, meanwhile, the election is treated with blithe inconsequence, as another occasion for strategy-weighing. The Times, to take one example, ran a front-page analysis criticizing Trump for being insufficiently able to exploit a political opening given by the investigation into Clinton’s e-mail, with the complaint seeming to be that Trump just isn’t clever enough to give us a good fight—to be the fun opponent we want. If only he had some more skill at this! While the habits of hatred get the better of the right, the habits of self-approval through the fiction of being above it all contaminate the center.

A certain number of the disengaged insist that Trump isn’t really as bad as all that. And there may indeed be another universe in which Donald Trump is one more blowhard billionaire with mixed-up politics but a basically benevolent heart, a Ross Perot type, or perhaps more like Arnold Schwarzenegger, preaching some confused combination of populism and self-help and doomed to flounder when he comes to power. This would not be the worst thing imaginable. Unfortunately, that universe is not this one. Trump is unstable, a liar, narcissistic, contemptuous of the basic norms of political life, and deeply embedded among the most paranoid and irrational of conspiracy theorists. There may indeed be a pathos to his followers’ dreams of some populist rescue for their plights. But he did not come to political attention as a “populist”; he came to politics as a racist, a proponent of birtherism.

As I have written before, to call him a fascist of some variety is simply to use a historical label that fits. The arguments about whether he meets every point in some static fascism matrix show a misunderstanding of what that ideology involves. It is the essence of fascism to have no single fixed form—an attenuated form of nationalism in its basic nature, it naturally takes on the colors and practices of each nation it infects. In Italy, it is bombastic and neoclassical in form; in Spain, Catholic and religious; in Germany, violent and romantic. It took forms still crazier and more feverishly sinister, if one can imagine, in Romania, whereas under Oswald Mosley, in England, its manner was predictably paternalistic and aristocratic. It is no surprise that the American face of fascism would take on the forms of celebrity television and the casino greeter’s come-on, since that is as much our symbolic scene as nostalgic re-creations of Roman splendors once were Italy’s.

What all forms of fascism have in common is the glorification of the nation, and the exaggeration of its humiliations, with violence promised to its enemies, at home and abroad; the worship of power wherever it appears and whoever holds it; contempt for the rule of law and for reason; unashamed employment of repeated lies as a rhetorical strategy; and a promise of vengeance for those who feel themselves disempowered by history. It promises to turn back time and take no prisoners. That it can appeal to those who do not understand its consequences is doubtless true. But the first job of those who do understand is to state what those consequences invariably are. Those who think that the underlying institutions of American government are immunized against it fail to understand history. In every historical situation where a leader of Trump’s kind comes to power, normal safeguards collapse. Ours are older and therefore stronger? Watching the rapid collapse of the Republican Party is not an encouraging rehearsal. Donald Trump has a chance to seize power.

Hillary Clinton is an ordinary liberal politician. She has her faults, easily described, often documented—though, for the most part, the worst accusations against her have turned out to be fiction. No reasonable person, no matter how opposed to her politics, can believe for a second that Clinton’s accession to power would be a threat to the Constitution or the continuation of American democracy. No reasonable person can believe that Trump’s accession to power would not be.

By Adam Gopnik , New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Spencer Platt/Getty

Val Archer (b. 1946), Pearl
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How to Avoid the Most Common Fake Foods on Restaurant Menus

Traditionally, food fraud scandals have involved supermarket staples like domestic Parmesan cut with high levels of cellulose, extra-virgin olive oil that failed to meet the extra-virgin standard, honey diluted with corn syrup, or dried spices "extended" with chopped weeds.

But lately the media focus has turned to restaurant menus. Inside Edition reported that Red Lobster’s namesake bisque and Nathan’s Famous’ lobster salad both missed a crucial ingredient — lobster. A scathing Tampa Bay Times report bashed self-proclaimed "farm-to-table" restaurants for lying about almost everything down to the names of local farmer purveyors, and serving farmed Asian pollock as Alaskan wild-caught, drug-addled feedlot cattle as grass-fed, and, worst of all for those following Jewish or Muslim dietary customs, swapping cheaper pork for veal.

Food fraud is a sophisticated $50 billion annual industry, according to Michigan State University's Food Fraud Initiative, and while many of the nation's scams occur in grocery store aisles and retail shops, what has surprised many readers of my new book Real Food/Fake Food the most is the Wild West of restaurant menus. There’s a perception that spending more or visiting "name" chefs is an insurance policy against counterfeits, but that’s not really true. Food deceptions are institutionalized in the food-service industry: Some occur further up the supply chain, and many are in fact perfectly legal, even if morally outrageous.

Reading the menu and the waiter is as much art as science, so here are the top three fake food flags — keep an eye out especially for red snapper, Kobe, or the use of truffle oil — that should impact your evaluation of all claims on a restaurant’s menu.

1. Where’s the beef? USDA Prime, Kobe, and "Dry-Aged"

It is important to understand that menus and restaurant food claims are largely unregulated, exempt from Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Department of Agriculture rules for retail. Label a "Choice" steak "USDA Prime" in the supermarket and you’ll likely get fined; label it "USDA Prime" on a menu and you just significantly enhanced your margin. Diners take it for granted that 28-day dry-aged beef was actually aged, that heirloom breed pork is not the standard Sysco version, and that organic produce is organic. They should not. If investigations like the Tampa Bay Times' have shown one thing, it’s that the more "value added" tasty-sounding adjectives adorn a menu, the more likely there are lies. This is especially true in the highest-priced sections of most restaurant menus, meat and seafood.

The single biggest menu red flag, regardless of the price level of the establishment, is the use of the words "Kobe beef." When Inside Edition confronted New York’s Old Homestead steakhouse about serving $350 Kobe steak that was not from Kobe, the spokesman basically dismissed their finding as semantics. The supply of the real thing is so scarce that individual restaurants are licensed by Kobe’s marketing council to buy it, and you can literally count the restaurants in this country serving the real thing on your fingers. The nine such places in the country proudly display golden steer plaques, usually at the front counter. The other 99+ percent of Kobe claims are lies, including all for burgers, sliders, hot dogs, and anything cheap — the real thing sells for well over$20 an ounce.

Other beef claims are much harder to evaluate. But as a rule of thumb, the vast majority of beef produced in this country is not of high quality — it is industrial feedlot beef, reared on drugs and silage, a fermented corn stew, as well as animal by-products. Yet there are a lot of restaurants serving steak, many of them upscale. Less than two percent of the beef produced in the country grades USDA Prime (the USDA’s numbers report they declare four percent of American beef "Prime," but that only reflects the percentage of beef that’s actually submitted to be graded; lower-quality beef often isn’t graded at all). Only a small percentage of our beef is truly grass fed and even less is also raised drug- and animal-byproduct free. There are just a handful of established steakhouses like Keens in New York and Bern’s in Tampa that dry-age their own meat in house. And only a tiny handful of wholesalers like New York’s DeBragga distribute Japanese beef.

In all these cases, the question you should be asking your waiter is "where does your meat come from?" If they can unflinchingly name a specialty distributor, a growers’ cooperative like Niman Ranch, or a particular farm such as Colorado’s 7X ranch, it’s a good sign. If they can’t answer this question specifically and without hesitation, it’s a terrible sign — all these meats are highly specialized and need to be carefully sourced.

2. Red snapper = red flags

Seafood is even worse. In the largest nationwide study conducted by Oceana in 2013, 38 percent of all restaurants — and a staggering 74 percent of all sushi eateries — mislabeled the species of fish served. While businesses inevitably blamed distributors and wholesalers, it was no accident — the substitute was always less expensive than the one claimed on the menu.

How to avoid that upcharge? Rockefeller University's Dr. Mark Stoeckle, involved in DNA species testing for the Barcode of Life project, gave me this tip: "Just don’t ever order red snapper." The poster child for fraud, the real thing is served up less than six percent of the time. At New York sushi temple Sushi Nakazawa, often rated the Big Apple’s best, the fraud risk is so high they simply they won’t serve red snapper — ever. Eat this fish out every night for a week and odds are you still won’t have tasted it, and just seeing it on a menu at anything less than one of the country’s top seafood restaurants makes me immediately suspect of everything else.

But it’s not just red snapper: cod, halibut, flounder, and grouper are commonly faked, often by Cambodian ponga, a catfish mass-produced in Asian fish farms under suspect conditions that have included banned drugs. In sushi restaurants, white tuna, widely used in rolls, did almost as poorly as red snapper, and the primary substitute is escolar, known in the trade as the "Ex-Lax fish" due to the digestive distress it can cause — it used to be banned on our shores. The reason seafood is so widely and easily faked is because most diners are so disconnected from it: If you don’t fish, you have no idea what most fish look like. In any case, in restaurants it is almost always entirely prepared, already cut into filets — which with white fishes, are largely indistinguishable, especially under a mound of sauce or in cioppino.

by Larry Olmsted, Eater | Read more:
Image: Alena Haurylik/Shutterstock