"When Mr. Heiman, 72, began his career in the 1960s, whey was pumped down a river, spread on a field or fed to pigs."

"In other words, it was waste, and the only goal was to get rid of it as cheaply as possible. Times have changed. 'In the last decade or so, there are times when cheese is the byproduct of cheese production, and the cheese plants make more money off the whey production,' said Mike McCully, a dairy industry consultant...."

From "America’s Protein Obsession Is Transforming the Dairy Industry/Whey, the liquid byproduct of cheese making, was once considered waste. Now it is a key ingredient in the protein powders that Ozempic users and weight lifters are downing in ever-greater amounts" (NYT).

As Jesus said, "The first shall be last, and the last shall be first."

"Flannery O’Connor’s favorite meal at the Sanford House restaurant in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she lunched regularly with her mother..."

"... was fried shrimp and peppermint chiffon pie.... Every morning started with Catholic Mass followed by cornflakes and a thermos of coffee in her spinster bedroom while she wrote for three hours. The writing time, she said, was her 'filet mignon.'... [O'Connor's biographer] told me that 'you wouldn’t want to eat what O’Connor ate' and described the cuisine she ate at home with her mother as a 'curdled, dry, dyspeptic kind of fare.' At home, O’Connor and her mother rarely had their meals in the dining room. Left to her own devices, O’Connor might eat a tin of sardines for lunch. Once, during the brief time in which O’Connor lived alone in New York City, she served her friend Lyman Fulton nothing but 'goat’s milk cheese and faucet water'—which later became a running joke between them.... [T]he restaurant’s recipe for the peppermint chiffon pie... looked unappetizingly dour. It called for evaporated milk, gelatin, and a premade Keebler’s Chocolate Ready Crust crust. The peppermint flavor and pink color came from melted peppermint hard candy...."

Writes Valerie Stivers, in "Cooking Peppermint Chiffon Pie with Flannery O’Connor" (Paris Review).

The recipe refers to the candy as "Starlight," and they are still sold under that name. Here's an Amazon Associates link to the product, in case you're yearning to relive old-timey hard-candydom. And here's the Keebler chocolate crust. Now all you need is a can of evaporated milk and some packaged gelatin and you can figure out how the restaurant did it. Stivers makes a posher version of the antiquated treat. She makes the crust from scratch... if you consider Oreos scratch. 

"You can go to your camper and do whatever you want. I even get television in there.... The camper taught me how to watch TV.... I go to YouTube."

"Anything. And everything. There’s so many things on YouTube. You’ve got Ibsen, you got Chekhov, you got Strindberg. All on the internet. I even like TikTok when I see it from time to time.... TikTok. Yeah. I saw, like, a 14-year-old girl who was deaf, her whole life, and they do something with her, and she actually starts to hear for the first time! How 'bout that? And sometimes the dogs, they rescue them. You watch the guy go in there and bring this beautiful, sad dog back to, uh, being somewhat — aware of things.... Well, I love that stuff!"

Said Al Pacino, quoted in "The Interview/Al Pacino Is Still Going Big" (NYT).

I'm quoting from the recording. The transcript is edited down a bit and it misses some of the feeling. I thought the interviewer, David Marchese, rushed by some of the best material Pacino seemed to want to hand him. For example, when Pacino spoke of the beautiful, sad dog becoming aware, Marchese intruded with "You're such a softy," categorizing Pacino's feeling as shallow sentimentality as opposed to some more subtle existentialism.

And one of the topics was Pacino's nearly dying of of Covid.

"... a curiously undersung regional delicacy: the cold-cheese slice, whereupon a giant fistful of uncooked mozzarella is added to a plain slice..."

"... just as it emerges hot from the oven. Local legend has it that Little Vincent’s developed this innovation as a way to help overeager patrons, unwilling or unable to wait for their pizza’s heat to dissipate, avoid burning their mouths; whatever its true origins, it is perplexing that nobody else has thought to copy the idea.... A cold-cheese slice offers the thermal and textural contrasts that define the best kind of street eating...."

From "33 Eating Adventures/A Turkish feast among jet-skiers in Sheepshead Bay, dosas worth a drive to Jersey, and carnitas in someone’s Woodside backyard" (NY Magazine).

"The sliding doors of a supermarket open into a dilemma: Though one may find comfort in the grocery store’s order and abundance..."

"... its high stakes can also provoke anxiety—after all, this is the place where we trade hard-earned money for sustenance. 'Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip,' Don DeLillo’s narrator Jack Gladney observes in White Noise, commenting on the structure that supermarkets, with their rows of neatly ordered products, impose on his chaotic life. Thirty years later, Halle Butler’s protagonist in the novel Jillian enters a gourmet grocery store on a whim.... The prices are so out of her budget that she has to give herself a pep talk before buying anything. 'I mean, I work all the time,' she mutters. 'This is why I work, isn’t it? I’m a hard worker. I can buy this cheese. It’s just cheese, I guess.' But it’s not just cheese...."

Writes J. Howard Rosier in "The Indignity of Grocery Shopping/In her latest work to be translated into English, Annie Ernaux examines the malaise of the modern supermarket" (The Atlantic).

"This sudden enthusiasm for cottage cheese has been attributed partly to a new generation focused on protein and nutrients and also madly keen on 'bowl' meals..."

"... filled with grains, vegetables and fruit. 'All of these ingredients together make for a super nutrient dense cottage cheese bowl that will have you full for literally hours'...."

From "Why is cottage cheese trending again?" (London Times).

We're told there are blogs and TikToks devoted to re-popularizing cottage cheese. One suggestion is to whip it (in a blender, I think) to change the oft-disliked consistency and make it more like the substance that — over the last 50 years — replaced it: yogurt.

"Grief reigns in the kingdom of loss. I refer to not only the loss of a loved one but also the loss of a hope, a dream, or love itself."

"It seems we don’t finish grieving, but merely finish for now; we process it in layers. One day (not today) I’m going to write a short story about a vending machine that serves up Just the Right Amount of Grief. You know, the perfect amount that you can handle in a moment to move yourself along, but not so much that you’ll be caught in an undertow."

That's item #13 on "MONICA LEWINSKY: 25 'RANDOMS' ON THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BILL CLINTON CALAMITY/My name became public 25 years ago this week. What have I observed and learned in the quarter century since? Oh, plenty" (Vanity Fair).

Okay, let me try to write 25 "Randoms" on the text printed above:

Oh, my! I've got 14 tonight! Let me know which TikTok videos won you over this time.

1. The mouse is going to eat your food, so why not embrace reality and construct a cheeseboard for the little darling.

2. Painting the one who says "I am too ugly to be painted."

3. So you say girls don't have hobbies?

4. The awesome high dive.

5. "Michigan is the Texas of the Midwest," etc.

6. How to deflect passive aggression.

7. The Jesus miracle nobody talks about.

8. The little girl has serious problems with the family dog and the family decor.

9. Sticker review suddenly becomes a phone-camera review.

10. The scar experiment.

11. Stand in awe of your ability to retain fat.

12. When you're in the mood to eat a wicker chair, what should you eat?

13. How exactly did kale become a thing?

14. Instant Karma Karen.

"The Dutch like to say, 'Acting normal is crazy enough.' And we think that rich people are not acting normal."

"Here in Holland, we don’t believe that everybody can be rich the way people do in America, where the sky is the limit. We think 'Be average.' That’s good enough...”

Said Ellen Verkoelen, "a City Council member and Rotterdam leader of the 50Plus Party, which works on behalf of pensioners," quoted in "The Country That Wants to ‘Be Average’ vs. Jeff Bezos and His $500 Million Yacht/Why did Rotterdam stand between one of the world’s richest men and his boat? The furious response is rooted in Dutch values" (NYT).

“When I was about 11 years old, we had an American boy stay with us for a week, an exchange student,” she recalled. “And my mother told him, just make your own sandwich like you do in America. Instead of putting one sausage on his bread, he put on five. My mother was too polite to say anything to him, but to me she said in Dutch, ‘We will never eat like that in this house.’” 

At school, Ms. Verkoelen learned from friends that the American children in their homes all ate the same way. They were stunned and a little jealous. At the time, it was said in the Netherlands that putting both butter and cheese on your bread was “the devil’s sandwich.”...

I've got 5 TikToks for you tonight. Let me know what you like best.

1. A way of planting potatoes.

2. A way of slicing apples.

3. Camping... and terrorized by ducks.

4. A song about thinking of what you wanted to say long after it's too late.

5. Coming upon a sandwich station that someone else did.

"British workers 'lead the world' in refusing to return to the office five days a week.... Well, it’s nice to lead the world in something."

And the good news doesn’t end there. Even criminals are now being allowed to 'work from home,' completing their community service not by picking up litter but making facemasks and greetings cards from bed. Which is fair enough if you think about it. After all, the WFH culture has decimated the burglary industry. How are they expected to break into Clive’s house when there’s Clive right there on the sofa, curtains closed, rewarding himself with ten minutes of Baywatch because he managed to answer an email between 10am and 10.03? It’s the least we can do to let burglars serve their sentence in their Y-fronts. But seriously, it seems WFH is not good for you and it wasn’t good for Boris Johnson. The prime minister said that when he did it 'you spend an awful lot of time making another cup of coffee... getting up, walking very slowly to the fridge, hacking off a small piece of cheese, then walking very slowly back to your laptop and then forgetting what it is you’re doing.'"

From "The real reasons British workers like WFH — and it’s not cheese, Boris" by Carol Midgely (London Times)(the "real reason" is the expense of living in London).

"A British drug dealer was busted after he shared a photo of his hand holding a block of cheese — and police were able to analyze his fingerprints."

"Carl Stewart, 39, of Liverpool in northwest England, sent a picture of a block of mature blue Stilton he picked up in the upscale British retail chain, Marks & Spencer, Merseyside police said. He had sent the photo on an encrypted messaging service called EncroChat — where he used the handle 'Toffeeforce' to peddle cocaine, heroin, DMA and ketamine, cops said."

The NY Post reports.

Interesting that a drug dealer would buy mature cheese at an upscale store.

"[W]hen an alleged rapist writes a book about a brilliant but problematic novelist, and when that book is lauded and celebrated up until..."

"... the moment two women say the author assaulted them — when all that happens, you wonder how the 900-page tome reads in hindsight." 

Writes Monica Hesse (in WaPo). She bought the book after the publisher withdrew it. You can still download the Kindle version. [ADDED: You can even buy the hardcover book at that link. Amazon has its stock to ship. But the publisher, Norton, isn't shipping any more books, and it's not doing publicity.]

That takes some of the heat out of the argument that the book has been censored. I stand by my opinion — expressed here — that the book should be sold no matter what the author, Blake Bailey, may have done. The book is not doing any sort of active harm — where we might have a real debate about censorship. It's just the argument that the author is a bad person, and these are only allegations. I would support publishing the book even if Bailey had shot a man on 5th Avenue in broad daylight. Roth is an overwhelmingly important writer, and this was the biographer he authorized, which caused many people to give interviews to Bailey. It's unfair to the Roth to deprive him of the story of himself that he chose Bailey to tell, and it's unfair to keep that story from us.

But we can get the Kindle version. And maybe we're more interested in it now. Monica Hesse got interested — interested in reading the book with "hindsight." I guess that means that all the time she's reading about Roth, she's thinking about how she's hearing the story of this "problematic" man as analyzed by another problematic man. Let's see what Hesse makes out of her assigned task of perceiving the problematic through an extra layer of problematizing:

You find yourself scrolling to a random page and reading a description of Roth’s first marriage: “Maggie’s sinuses were, of course, the least of their problems. Even at the best of times she couldn’t resist interrupting his work on the thinnest of pretexts (‘Could you go out and get half a pound of Parmesan cheese?’).” One could write a whole essay unpacking the premises propping up this sentence. Why is it unreasonable for Philip Roth to be asked to purchase an ingredient for the dinner he is presumably going to eat? Who purchased the rest of the groceries? One assumes it was Maggie. Was her day not “interrupted” when she shopped for and prepared the meal? What is the difference between a “thin pretext” and a valid request, other than whether the asker is Philip Roth or his shrewish, sinus-clogged wife? 

Ha ha ha. That is rich. That's some really good feminist writing. Bailey is damned by his "thinnest of pretexts." He assumes Maggie just wanted to interrupt Roth, that there couldn't possibly be a legitimate reason for the person cooking dinner to ask the other person in the house to go out and buy a missing ingredient. Bailey seems to think that a person in a house with a Genius at Work must know not even to ask for help with mundane household matters.

Here — if you're going to Amazon to download the Kindle of the Roth bio (or anything else) — why not buy this sign to tack onto your study door and see how it works out with your stuffed-up spouse:

"The Capitol complex is a place where Americans can go to watch their representatives, to speak with those representatives, to petition for the redress of grievances."

"The building and its grounds also are part of the fabric of the city. Streams of bikers pass through on morning and evening commutes. Tourists gather for concerts on the lawn. When it snows, the front face of Capitol Hill becomes a popular sledding spot, with neighborhood children sometimes transforming discarded protest signs into makeshift sleds. This is not just an amenity for neighbors and visitors. It is the tangible manifestation of the idea that the government is a part of American life, rather than something separate and apart." 

From "The Capitol Attack Was a Failure of Policing, Not Architecture/Building a permanent fence around the Capitol is not the right approach" by the Editorial Board of the NYT. 

They're reacting to the statement by the acting chief of the Capitol Police, Yogananda Pittman: "In light of recent events, I can unequivocally say that vast improvements to the physical security infrastructure must be made to include permanent fencing...." 

The NYT description of the Capitol grounds makes me think of our state capitol grounds here in Madison. Such an important gathering spot. To lose it to fencing would sacrifice a lot and send a terrible message about the accessibility of government and the ineffectuality of the police. It feels like giving up.

But, you know, you used to be able to walk around on the White House lawn. From a 2014 WaPo article:

"Smell can never truly be understood through science, Muchembled argues, because it is always vulnerable to the whims of popular taste."

"In sixteenth-century France, amid religious moralizing and the pervasive fear of witchcraft, the scent of a woman’s undercarriage, once considered an ambrosial ideal, became synonymous with the occult. The stigma was worse for aging women, who became seen as olfactory ogres; Muchembled quotes the poet Joachim du Bellay’s disgust at an 'old woman older than the world / older yet than squalid filth.' Our own experience confirms that smells are subject not just to major cultural changes but also to minor shifts in context: the same smell that greets you at the door of a cheesemonger has a very different effect when confronted at the door of a porta-potty."

From "How to Make Sense of Scents/Can language ever capture the mysterious world of smells?" by Rachel Syme (in The New Yorker)(discussing "Smells: A Cultural History of Odours in Early Modern Times" by Robert Muchembled).

"Tasty Hoon, a popular South Korean food blogger, was shooting a mukbang video involving barbecue chicken and melted cheese."

"Mukbang videos involve the host of the video just eating things while talking into the camera. To make his fondue, Hoon put melted cheese inside a device used to make a chocolate fountain...."

 

Via The Indian Express which documents the "meme" status of Hoon's video.

"Rotting penis not pictured."

That's at Gizmodo, where I knew that wasn't a picture of a rotting penis and where they are wrong that I "might like" something about Yoda.

CORRECTION: That says I "may also like" that thing about Yoda. As if I liked the rotting penis! I am sick of these insinuations from Gizmodo. It thinks it knows me, but it does not know me.

Trump ruins everything!

From "California’s Luxury Dining Circuit: Delicious and Dull/The French Laundry, the Restaurant at Meadowood and SingleThread have much in common: amazing precision, sky-high prices and a sedating sort of predictability" (NYT):

The macaroni and cheese in the golden egg, served as part of the tasting menu at the French Laundry, was absurdly delicious. The short noodles, cut by hand, had a tender spring. They were bound in a light, melting cloud of Parmesan. The result was simple, built on the retro American dishes that the chef, Thomas Keller, once wittily reimagined as high culture and maxed out to total extravagance....

[T]he dishes, and the ways they were delivered, reminded me of what’s possible when both the kitchen and the wait staff are operating at the highest level: sustained indulgence in an atmosphere of total comfort. The servers brought the gold-rimmed dish sets out and placed them down in unison. After lifting the egg tops and revealing the macaroni, they rained down a messy shower of black truffles, half on the food and half on the table, filling the air with perfume.

It was a stunning production. But the oversize golden egg on a series of gold plates did seem archaic — and not just because the French Laundry has used this presentation, for various dishes, for years. In the Trump era, gold seems a bit too eager to assert its value.....

The second-highest-rated comment:

This might be the most depressing article I have read recently. The image of these uber wealthy couples sitting in silence waiting for course after course of beautifully crafted art posing as food only reinforces my belief that all the money in the world cannot buy class. Am I right about that, Donald?

If this is the most depressing article you've read recently, you ought to be thanking the President of the United States. I'm sure the NYT would serve bad news stories about Trump if they had them. Their reporters would bring that news out on gray-rimmed dish sets and place them down in unison each morning and rain down a messy shower of dark opinions filling your breakfast-table air with stench. But the supplier isn't cooperating, so your hunger for the depressing will be met with the news that some expensive restaurants are too boringly perfect. And the day before, the NYT served, "Women Poop...." What a world of starvation for badness!

"While some commenters feel that tossing cheese at a child’s face and posting the video online without their consent humiliates them and is akin to bullying..."

"... others insist that it’s ultimately harmless and the kids are having fun. One mother, responding to criticism on Instagram, fired back, 'Maybe you could try smiling or heaven forbid laughing one day! You might like it!'"

From "'Humanity is doomed': People keep throwing cheese on babies’ faces for social media likes" (WaPo).

And here I thought it was the Era of That's Not Funny. Or is this the perversion that emerges from an excess of not-funnyism?

"We have chosen the word ‘void’ and nothing else because we don’t know what this void is."

"We don’t know if it’s a chamber, a tunnel, a big gallery or things like that," said the co-director of the ScanPyramids project, which used cosmic-ray collisions to detect a 100-foot long "void" inside the Great Pyramid, reported in the NYT.

Big deal?

Mark Lehner, an Egyptologist from Ancient Egypt Research Associates, said that previous work had shown that the ancient Egyptians most likely constructed gaps in their pyramids and that the voids the team found are nothing special, or new.

“The great pyramid of Khufu is more Swiss cheese than cheddar,” he said. He added that the steep incline of the void also casts doubts on whether it was some sort of room. “At that angle, it doesn’t make much sense for it to be a chamber that would contain artifacts, burials and objects and that sort of thing.”

By the way, did the ancient Egyptians have cheese?

The manufacture of cheese is depicted in murals in Egyptian tombs from 2,000 BC. Two alabaster jars found at Saqqara, dating from the First Dynasty of Egypt, contained cheese. These were placed in the tomb about 3,000 BC. They were likely fresh cheeses coagulated with acid or a combination of acid and heat. An earlier tomb, that of King Hor-Aha may also have contained cheese which, based on the hieroglyphic inscriptions on the two jars, appear to be from Upper and Lower Egypt. The pots are similar to those used today when preparing mish.