Wonkette lady Robyn Pennacchia is a national treasure. I sent the OP link to all my friends and relations yesterday, grandpa-style.
Years ago when I was the meat/poultry buyer for the Park Slope Food Coop (“the world’s most annoying grocery store”) I met the customer who absolutely had to have the free-range organic chicken…to feed her CAT. The woman, of course, was a strict vegan.
Her real name is Karen. She changed it because there’s no K in organic.
As long as they weren’t a dick about it, I’d give someone a pass on feeding their pampered pet on free-range organic … after all, a lot of the point of that stuff is that you’re using your dollars to promote decent living conditions for the animal that’s ultimately going to get its throat cut for your sake, and that works just as well no matter what you’re doing with the meat. (Also, for not trying to feed her cat a vegan diet, which some very dumb people have been known to do)
Caren, on the other hand, IS being a dick, and the mocking is well-deserved
I can empathize a little bit. At my grocery, the sliced-bread shelves are overflowing, so nobody NEEDS to make bread. Meanwhile, those of us who bake and cook as part of our normal life can’t pick up our normal bag of flour every couple of weeks.
Starvation isn’t driving this. It’s just a goddamn Facebook fad like Bacon Salt or fidget spinners or whatever. People are making shitty bread and they’ll probably give up the hobby as soon as normal life resumes, or when they discover baking is often not easy.
Meanwhile, fruit & vegetable prices are collapsing, farmers are having a hard time making a living. If people want a fad hobby to virtue-signal traditionalism and homey comforts, why not do something with fruits and vegetables? Canning, drying, jellies, jams, chutneys, etc.
Absolutely agree with you.
In this woman’s case though “dick” would be the operative word. She wanted her Fluffy to have the BEST, and didn’t give a rat’s ass about the well-being of some stupid chicken.
This cat would have probably been named something like Athena or Salammbo, come to think of it.
Hey, I just got some sourdough starter! So there!
Facebook here I come!
I have a couple of pounds of flour if anyone wants it. I have developed a gluten sensitivity since I bought it.
Because growing enough wheat is space and water intensive, and if you want to do the whole hippster make everything you need several types of wheat to get the right results [yes, the protein content is important to get the right results]
Look, basic bread - 1000 square feet of land will grow just about 1 bushel of wheat, enough for about 30 loaves of bread. Not sure how much land Karen has, but I wouldn’t bother trying to grow my own wheat [though I did once grow a patch large enough to make one loaf, harvested with a hand sickle bronze age style.
I will either buy the classic 5 pound sack at a grocery or order 50 pounds specialty flour, depending on what I need. And all I need is a packet of yeast to start sourdough so I am not dependent on the store for that.
Yup. This is an entertaining story.
My vegan SIL tried that for a while, but wisely recognized it was a bad idea.
Bread is bulky, and doesn’t keep very well unless you freeze it. We’ve been mostly making our own bread (boring bread machine bread, not for instagram) since the lockdown because it’s easy to store 4 weeks of flour, but we don’t really have space to store 4 weeks of frozen bread. I’ve also been making a lot of quick-breads (corn bread, biscuits) since they are quick and easy and give me something that tastes fresh.
People are stuck home with their kids, and a lot of them are out of work and looking for something to do. Baking is soothing and fun. As a dilettante baker myself (but one who is still working, so too busy to do a lot of it now) I can assure you my pastries and hand-made bread are delicious when I actually make them, I think you are vastly over-estimating the difficulty of baking for those with some experience (which is a large fraction of the population.) Yeah, people are looking for a fun, productive activity while they are locked it.
As for making chutney… how much chutney do you actually eat? Or jam? Your kids will eat that cake in two days, and enjoy it. And we are still finding canned goods and frozen veggies. I am eating a little less fresh veggies (bulky, don’t keep) but why would I make my own inferior frozen veggies instead of buying flash-frozen stuff at the supermarket? My parents used to can some home-grown produce (mostly in the form of tomato soup and cucumber pickles) and it’s a PITA. Also, there are real health concerns with canning your own produce. No one gets botulism from carelessly baking dinner rolls.
aruvqan @28: Potatoes, that’s the ticket! Before the Great Famine, an Irishman could raise enough potatoes on an acre of land to feed a family of eight. Pick some wild ramps and check the brook trap for an errant trout, for “garnish,” in case the priest drops by at dinner time.
Then you will have some dickhead whinging because all the fruit and veg is gone and they needed it for whatever wankery crap they do to try and make themselves feel unique.
Speaking of growing her own, Caren should be raising quinoa instead of Entitled Western Flour and making quinoa bread from it. What a dilettante.
And how does she know the disappearing flour is all going to bake bread? Don’t the quarantined make cake and brownies too? And the yeast could be vanishing because home brewers are snapping it up.
I am mildly pissed about the spaghetti shortage. Early on I grabbed one of the last packages, only to get home and find out it was “gluten free”. Blurgggh.
You can’t fool me, brother. Everybody knows cake and brownie mix comes out of the box.
Just reading the name “Caren” makes me want to slap her parents. Our last governor’s squeeze’s name was Cylvia Hayes, which also makes me grind my teeth. I always read it as “Killvia”, which is appropriate, as she helped tank his career for him.
You are assuming Caren thinks about anyone outside the outside of her own skin, an assumption of dubious accuracy.
We got about 3 lbs of spaghetti before the lockdown. We’re saving it for now in case we need it … and it’s pretty shelf-stable.
Yum. Taters is good no matter what Gollum says =)
I would love to see a ‘subsistence’ hunting tag - I would gladly take a goose a week, a deer every second month and a couple bunnies, a pheasant or two and various fish every month … all year around. Geese are a plague around any city, and deer overpopulation is an issue in many states. I am sad that our roomie is deathly allergic to fish, or we would have gotten our fishing tags for the spring [season started April 1st.]
We seasoned gardeners who absolutely must grow our own tomatoes are already coping with new dilettante gardeners who’ve bought up most of the tomato seeds and plants.
Thanks, Caren! :smack:
Maybe not in your neighborhood, but for a couple weeks in my location the sliced-bread shelves, actually, ALL of our bread shelves, actually were stripped. So the run on flour and yeast started with that.
Then we put limits on both flour and bread - oh, lord, the howling!
The best bit was the Big Manly Dude and the Little WIC Lady.
We had (and still have) a limit of two sliced loaves per customer at my store (thank you global pandemic). The one exception was the people on WIC - they were allowed as many loaves as their WIC benefits permitted (assuming there were any such left on the shelves when they were shopping).
So, this lady was purchasing groceries with her WIC benefits, which allowed her four loaves. This upset the Big Manly Dude in line behind her - “Hey, how come she gets four loaves? I only get two!”
Me: "She has WIC benefits, sir.
BMD: “Sweet! How do I get WIC?”
Me: “Get pregnant and have a kid.”*
BMD: “No, really, how do I get WIC?”
Little WIC Lady “Get pregnant and have a kid.”
The look on his face when he realized we weren’t kidding was priceless.
Somewhere on the internet, in an eerily silent waiting room, Caren takes a seat next to Cook’s Source.