Back in December, I lamented that Tom “murder.murder.marcyville” Mylan’s great, incisive, meaty, and idiosyncratic blog, The Grocery Guy, had been taken down. The good news is that the site is accessible again, so you can read things like this review of the recipes in the Moro cookbook:
Even if they all tasted like throw-up I would still make myself a Moro t-shirt with a magic marker like it was 1992 and they were Fugazi. Why? because they are real recipes that I would enjoy making and moreover could make with nothing more complicated than a knife, an oven and some pots and pans. What’s better is that the cooking directions could be given to you over the phone by someone playing Buck Hunter and guzzling Wild Turkey.
The bad news is that this posting is from March, so it doesn’t seem like there will be much if any new content. Some of the same content and some new stuff is available on a second website, Tom the Butcher (the byline of which is “Why do I have to be the guy who tells you that you don’t need a fucking steak that big?”), but again the recent postings are slim.
When you’re blogging just for shits and giggles–sorry to burst anyone’s bubble, but there’s no $ in it–it all comes down to is what you get out of blogging. Unfortunately, what Tom felt like he was getting was a “crap-bath,” as his blog drew in “humorless stalkers” and “whackadoos trying to start fights with me.” After a mere nine months, I’m still such small potatoes that all I’ve attracted so far is one mild whackadoo calling me a “moron” and offering to serve me food samples with his “stink palm.” (Yawn.) I’m sure there are plenty more whackadoos out there, with nothing better to do than crash parties to which they’re not invited and tell everybody there how stupid and pointless it is to post stupid and pointless comments (Thanks for adding your tablespoon of manure to the pile!), but I’ll spare you. That’s what the comment editor is for.
At least Tom says that these blogging blues have driven him to start writing “a real cookbook” instead, so we have something to look forward to. And once he has a book to flog, then he might have a reason to blog again, as that’s just about the only way anyone has found to make money off free content like this: draw people to your site, then sell them other crap (food, a book, cooking classes, t-shirts, membership in a food-porn club, whatever).
As for why I write, there are a number of reasons, many of them obscure (even to me). Some days I fool myself that this tremendous time-sink could lead someday to a book or books. But let’s face it, Tom, how much room is there in the marketplace for “a real cookbook”? If you’re not a celebrity chef, if you’re not chasing the latest food fad, and if you start with a premise like all the meat in the supermarket is crap (often literally with crap in it), who’s going to publish your book? Slapping the racks of the cookbook section in my local bookstore, it’s hard to see space on the shelf for anything “real.” The market is a fantasy market: it’s all about selling unrealities (You can cook like Mario! You can put gourmet meals on the table in 30 seconds! You can buy Spain in a can! Eat all the meat you want and still lose weight!). Out of the 16,000 cookbooks that get published each year, if one of them is “real” that qualifies as a good year!
For me, the main reason to blog is to get in touch with a few other whackadoos out there who care about where their food came from, who are thinking ahead about where their food is going to come from when the oil runs out, who take pride and pleasure in breaking down a side of meat, curing their own bacon, or making their own pasta, and who get it that, ideally, food should be about feeding a hunger that is more than physical. –And not a hunger for moral oneupmanship, status, or celebrity, but a hunger for something really real, something really nourishing. (This animal that lived in the wild or that someone cared for is now meat in my kitchen, calling for my skill and attention to turn it into food that will become part of my own flesh…)
“Feeding a hunger” doesn’t just mean satisfying it, making it go away. Feeding something also means nourishing it, making it grow even more. If the world in which we live is going to continue to sustain us, then we need to feed our hunger for a real connection to it.
First, a full apology to the Go-Gos is in order.
Piggy Points going out to both Matt and Jay for bacon-related finds that they passed on. Curiously, they were from opposite sides of an emerging cultural divide.