New and Old #154

Friday roundup and commentary

The Untold Tale of the Artichoke Parm, the Most Mysterious Sandwich in Brooklyn, Bon Appetit, Katie Honan, June 7, 2023

I love a piece about some ultimately unimportant thing that’s kind of curious or interesting, and which nobody has ever really dived into. Here’s my favorite I’ve ever done, on a Pizza Hut that started life as a different restaurant that turned out to be a largely forgotten regional chain. Here’s one from someone else, about a pedestrian bridge whose placement seems to make little sense. This great piece about what sounds like a really tasty sub is another:

On my second bite, I tried to figure out exactly what else was in there with the trinity of artichoke hearts and sauce and cheese, how they managed to prepare it so the artichoke taste was present but not overpowering. I rapidly compared it to my decades of the other parms I’d eaten, stored in my memories. Sometimes a chicken parm is too chewy, an eggplant parm too oily, a meatball parm too big. But this parm was perfect—substantial and flavorful, and comforting while still offering something fresh. By my third bite, I had become obsessed.

It happens that unlike those others, this is not a typical hot sub variant that simply fell out of fashion. It was pretty much invented by a former owner of the one deli that serves it, and that recipe was passed on to a new owner and kept on the menu.

Human knowledge can decay and disappear in a similar way to biological extinction. I wonder how many other things like this—not necessarily obvious, things some restaurant or deli owner in the early or mid 20th century came up with—have simply been lost.

I don’t want to quote too much. If you like this general kind of story, you’ll love this one. Read the whole thing. (I think I also have to try making an artichoke parm sub.)

Rescuing Batman, Los Angeles Times, James Greenberg, May 8, 2005

Over the holidays, we watched the first two Batman movies in the previous franchise: Batman from 1989 and Batman Returns from 1992. (The next two are pretty widely considered to be terrible, and not in a good way, and we haven’t bothered with them.)

This is a really interesting article, from before the “cinematic universe” days, about the then-upcoming new Batman franchise, the Dark Knight Trilogy. It’s interesting that the now-common notion of a “reboot” was new enough in 2005 that it had to be explained to a general audience:

“After ‘Batman & Robin,’ it was necessary to do what we call in comic book terms ‘a reboot,’ ” says Goyer. “Say you’ve had 187 issues of ‘The Incredible Hulk’ and you decide you’re going to introduce a new Issue 1. You pretend like those first 187 issues never happened, and you start the story from the beginning and the slate is wiped clean, and no one blinks.

“One of the reasons they do that is after 10 years of telling the same story, it gets stale and times change. So we did the cinematic equivalent of a reboot, and by doing that, setting it at the beginning, you’re instantly distancing yourself from anything that’s come before.”

This is way before fans argued over which films were continuous with each other or belonged to the same universe or whatever. I can imagine it was more fun to be a casual fan back then, and just watch the damn movie.

Another really interesting thing about the piece is how it traces some of the ideas that ended up in Batman Begins from all the way back in the ’90s. You can see how all the seemingly wasted money and effort—all the different shelved projects, rejected scripts, etc.—all sort of end up being part of the process of getting to the “right” final result.

It reminds me of the old headline-brainstorming sessions we’d do at the college newspaper. Most of it was cringey jokes and stuff, but you couldn’t get to a good, clever headline without that process. (Once we settled on “What the Pub?” on an article about the closure of a 21+ campus beer joint, which was a good iteration of the initial “School Admin Says: Go Pub Yourself.”) Creative work is not something you can just arrive at. You have to get there.

Eating dirty, and the morals of weight, Notes from the Field, Katrina Gulliver, March 3, 2024

This is a really fascinating piece about the rise of various kinds of food preferences, the laundering of eating disorders through health-speak, and the use of therapeutic language by people who don’t actually have any allergy or health issues:

Aversion/allergy/avoidance/taboo all seem to be blurred. (for example: those avoiding gluten by choice are a much larger number than those who have an actual celiac disease or diagnosed intolerance).

This in particular is interesting:

Sometimes it seems like they don’t believe allergies are a real thing, and this can be cultural (in parts of the world where peanuts are in everything, peanut allergies don’t exist to the same extent as the do today in the West).

I lived for a time in Southeast Asia and regularly encountered “vegetarian” meals which I would then query and be told “It’s just a little bit of pork” (!!). Or worse, the dish rojak, which is fruit-based, would be listed as a “vegetarian” option, when it is made with a shrimp-based sauce. I’m not allergic to shellfish (fortunately) but this kind of flexible use of the term vegetarian is also the vagueness around allergen-free.

Thinking allergies are some kind of Western affectation (rather than something that could be fatal) seems to be one piece of what’s going on. People who have whole rafts of “dietary restrictions” that are more like preferences than actual allergies seems to muddy the waters.

The rise in allergies is one of those things that seems to send some folks down rabbit holes. It’s weird, and I don’t know what exactly explains it. It’s easy to see someone’s disability as an imposition on you: So nobody can eat peanut butter anymore because of a few supposedly allergic kids? The alternative, though—which could well be those children dying—is just not articulated. If that sounds like how some people talked about masks and COVID and vulnerable people, it’s because it’s the same psychology.

But there’s also a lot in this piece about the ideological stuff around weight loss. This is one of those issues that has become a big culture-war thing, but that probably creates more heat than light, as it usually does. Give this a read.

Fairfax Co. votes to permanently allow outdoor dining, WUSA9, Samantha Gilstrap, February 6, 2024

The proposed zoning ordinance will automatically allow restaurants, bars, and other food service establishments to set up temporary seating areas where patrons can eat and drink outside. Unless the area is in a parking lot, in which case an administrative permit will be needed. 

Good start. I think it’s rather nuts that this is not allowed absolutely everywhere, and even more nuts that we ever allowed normal commerce and socializing to be banned by governments in the first place.

To support businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic, an emergency ordinance was adopted by the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors on July 14, 2020, that allowed existing establishments to designate outdoor areas for dining and fitness activities without additional approvals. That temporary ordinance was set to expire on March 1, 2024. 

In other words, when the rubber really met the road, we allowed businesses to operate freely. Ordinarily, I think, we feel that we can “buy” a lot of “order” that is at odds with the kind of entrepreneurship we also claim to admire.

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Related Reading:

New and Old #151

New and Old #152

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