The Apocalyse Is At Hand Award Goes to:

Postscript: Apparently Piven has said since his story broke that the cause of his mercury sickness was fish twice a week for 20 years, not sushi twice a day. 

Maybe the strangest example yet of our celebrity-food culture: Actor Jeremy Piven bows out of a Broadway play because, his spokespeople say, he has a “crippling addiction” to sushi that has caused mercury poisoning. If this isn’t a perfect-for-our-times example of idiocy and pretension, I don’t know what is. Upon reading the story, I was put in mind of the more pretentious, self-satisfied strain of Whole Foods shopper.

Piven, according to the story, eats sushi twice a day. Is he hitting Whole Foods for his supply, with its McSushi, that is, with its sitting-too-long fish and rubbery rice?  (Sending an intern to a Japanese restaurant would be more in keeping it real with his celebrity, so he might go that way.) This would be beyond offensive. Of course, Whole Foods offers the hip and health-conscious brown, and more recently the ridiculous “multigrain,” rice (it’s apparently multiple rices, not multiple grains, and by the way, aren’t all rices the same grain?), and the opportunity to feel sophisticated and exotic. It is an astoundingly ripped-off group of people.  

So, Wayward Sushi Acolytes, It goes like this: Sushi should be made to order and by the way, should be made with white rice. (Texture is everything here, so you should be looking elsewhere for your whole grains.) Rather than hitting Whole Foods a few times a week and telling your co-workers how much you like sushi, save your money and go to a reputable sushi restaurant once in a while. It’s a much better value. Cheaper does not mean a better value. If you’ve only eaten sushi at Whole Foods, you’ve never eaten it. So there.

More recent food-world related silliness: Rachel Ray is marketing a sleek “garbage bowl” to save people the trip to the trash can while prepping food! This, presuming, I guess, that one can’t use nearly any receptacle in the kitchen for such a shortcut. This contribution is interestingly in line with her cooking abilities, but offensive nonetheless. She’s got around 20 books out at this point, which probably contain two books worth of recipes. How much money does she need? And who will buy such an insult? This should remain a mystery.

This entry was posted on 31. December 2008 at 18:00 and is filed under Sugar Plums Dancing In My Head. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.