Parade Magazine’s new chef serves up a Superbowl party feast that’s more than 1,300 calories before the beer.

Parade Magazine’s new chef, Bobby Flay, from the Food Channel, is thin and buff, very photogenic. 

He must not be eating the Superbowl party menu he is proposing in last Sunday’s Parade, which as a Sunday magazine supplement is delivered to more people than any other publication in the United States.

In Bobby’s first monthly article as Parade’s new food columnist, Bobby cooks up three Latin-inspired party treats:

  • Cuban sandwich crostini, which is pork, ham, cheese, pickles and mayo on a baguette.  260 calories each, but it’s a baguette, so you know most people will have two.  That’s 520 calories.
  • Adobo-seasoned baked chicken wings, which are wings, dipped in honey, mango nectar and various spices.  340 calories a serving (5 wings). 
  • Hot cumin-scented potato chips with blue cheese sauce, which are potato chips you buy in a package tricked out with cumin and then dipped into a sauce of blue cheese, butter and milk.  An arbitrary 480 calories, since Flay does not tell us how many calories are in the average dipped chip.

It’s easy to see that Flay’s Superbowl party is a nutritional atom bomb.  If you have two crostini, we’re talking 1,340 calories before the beer.  That leaves the average person about 600 calories for the rest of the day to lose two pounds a week; from 900-1,100 calories left to eat if the average person wants to maintain her/his weight.  Add in two beers and you know you’re blowing your diet that day.

Not only does Flay’s Superbowl feast load up on the calories, but it breaks just about every consensus rule of good eating:

  • Eat more vegetables:  The only vegetables are pickles and herbs.  He actually avoids the chance to add vegetables by proposing a cheese-butter dip instead of a vegetable-based salsa.
  • Eat more whole grains:  There are no whole grains in Bobby’s spread, but plenty of processed ones.
  • Eat less meat and cheese:  Flay goes out of his way to load us up with fat and protein.  One dish has two kinds of pork plus cheese.  The chicken wings have skins on.  And then there’s that dip!
  • Use scratch ingredients and not processed foods:  Where do we start?  The potato chips.  The pickles.  The mango nectar and mayonnaise, which I assume most won’t be making from scratch.  The onion powder!!  Bobby, at least let us peal and grate an onion!

Here’s why I take such a petulantly sarcastic tone with this party spread:  Parade Magazine presents itself as the family and consumer’s best friend.  There’s a “Stay healthy” column and the publication frequently gets behind national causes, including fitness.  The “Intelligence Report” typically presents issues such as capital punishment and environmental change or gives news-you-can-use consumer advice and information.  Virtually all issues of the pub feature an uplifting story of a celebrity who has learned a lifetime lesson that would help all of us to put to use.

One would thus hope that Parade would charge its new cooking columnist with helping address the most pressing health challenge we face as a nation: the inordinately high number of people who are obese or overweight, and therefore more prone to heart diseases, diabetes and some kinds of cancer.  One would thus hope that Parade’s chef would present a Superbowl party that was delicious, nutritionally balanced with lots of veggies and fruit, and low in calories.

Flay says that because the Superbowl is in Miami, the center of Cuban cuisine in the country, he decided to “create some festive Latin finger foods.”  First let’s note that he should have said “Latin-themed” foods (and I carefully selected the phrase “Latin-theme” which its theme park implications, as opposed to “Latin-styled”).

Something I learned from being a public relations consultant to a major regional supermarket company for 19 years is that supermarkets sell more Mexican and Mexican-styled food products in January than in any other month of the year and that the growth in the sales of Mexican food has been remarkable over the past two decades.  There is therefore a lot of advertising and special sales in supermarkets of Mexican food products during the week before the Superbowl.  It seems as if for some reason, Mexican cuisine, or Latin or Hispanic if you prefer, has become associated with Superbowl parties.   It would be interesting to learn why.  Did it start from an ad campaign that worked and so was repeated?  Was it some kind of social virus spreading at the grassroots, as people sampled nachos and tortillas at one Superbowl party, liked it and then served it at their own?

Another survey serves as a platform for praising suburbs, automobiles, malls and segregation.

Business Week’s Venessa Wong has written an article about a new study that shows that Texas leads in number of high-growth cities, those places that are seeing population increases and rising prices for houses.

Here are the leading high-growth areas across the country, according to this new piece of research:

  • Braselton, Georgia (Atlanta suburb)
  • Atascocita, Texas (Houston suburb)
  • Spring Hill, Tennessee (Nashville suburb)
  • Lincoln, California (Sacramento suburb)
  • Katy, Texas (Houston suburb)
  • Wake Forest, North Carolina (in the Raleigh-Durham triangle)
  • Mansfield, Texas (Dallas suburb)
  • Wylie, Texas (Dallas suburb)
  • Buckeye, Arizona (Phoenix suburb)

Note that in all cases, these high-growth areas are all the newest furthest upscale suburbs of fairly new cities in the south and west.  Atascocita is 20 miles from Houston, Wake Forrest is 23 miles from Durham and 10 miles from Raleigh—you get the idea.

Now what is this survey supposed to prove exactly?  All it does is measure a thing that proves itself.  In good times and bad, what area should show the most household income growth and real estate price growth other than the very newest area for the wealthiest among us?  In Latin, it’s res ipso loquitor, which means “a thing that proves itself.”  Maybe some readers will prefer a translation into American slang, “Duh, no-brainer!”

But what the survey, the news release by the company that conducted it, Gadberry Group and the Business Week coverage all do is use the survey as proof of the superiority of a way of life that depends upon driving great distances on a daily basis to conduct most commercial activity in enclosed, privatized places and which the only people you encounter are all upscale like you and overwhelmingly white.  In short, the way of life that has helped us choke the environment, the way of life has led to the misallocation of resources away from mass transit and already developed areas, the way of life built firmly on the politics of selfishness.

And what is the Gadberry Group exactly.  Here is its description via mission statement on the homepage of this Little Rock, Arkansas research firm’s website: “The Gadberry Group provides location-based services and information data products, for clients who demand the most current, accurate, and precise household and population data for their site location analysis.”

Translated into English, that means Gadberry provides research to the real estate industry.  The best thing for the real estate industry, of course, is for people to want to move to new areas (thus creating high growth) where property recently purchased cheaply suddenly becomes much more expensive.  Those areas by definition are in these distant suburbs that come out on top in Gadberry’s study.

I’m not saying that Gadberry fixed the survey.  What I’m saying is that it doesn’t tell us anything that we don’t already know, while it helps to provide intellectual support for a debatable point about where people can achieve the highest quality of life.  The survey and others like it through the decades have created a body of knowledge that overtly, or in the ideological subtext behind the facts and figures, supports the suburban lifestyle.  Supporting this lifestyle, which helps the automobile and real estate industries, has been one of the basic tenets of the U.S. mass media for more than a century. 

Why did we impeach a President for lying about an affair, but won’t prosecute those who created our torture gulag?

Someone in the Obama administration has leaked the main findings of a government ethics report about the Bush II attorneys who wrote and published the memos that in various places stated the legal justification behind the following views: 1) waterboarding is not torture; 2) that the legal definition of tortured permitted a number of techniques that the common person would consider to be torture; and 3) that if the president orders it, it is by definition not torture.  All these views by the way came in John Yoo and Jay Bybee’s infamous 2002 memo to Alberto Gonzales.

The original draft of the report said that Yoo and Bybee had “had violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted the memos that allowed the use of harsh interrogation tactics,” as yesterday’s Associated Press story puts it.

But a senior Justice Department official David Margolis reduced the charge to “using poor judgment,” which of course can’t lead to disbarment or other professional sanctions.  By the way, A.P. released its story at 2:00 a.m., Sunday morning, I guess in an effort to make sure the news got the coverage it deserves (that’s sarcasm!).

At least the Obama administration has been consistent when it comes to saying that we should let bygones be bygones and not prosecute the people who created the torture gulag that has shamed us and ruined our reputation in the world.  Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Gonzales, Yoo, Bybee and the dozens of henchmen who actually constructed our torture chambers—all are getting off scot free.  They won’t even receive the proper public venting provided by the Clinton impeachment for lying about an affair. 

But then there’s the matter of the shameful hypocrisy that the Obama administration has demonstrated about ending torture itself: Obama said he would end torture and close the Guantánamo facility.  Neither has happened. 

Those who voted for Obama who want to masochistically revel in betrayal should read Roger D. Hodge’s article titled “The Mendacity of Hope” in the February issue of Harper’s.  (FYI, The New York Times reported just this morning that Harper’s has fired Hodges.) The third and fourth paragraphs present a litany of disappointment and horror:

“Obama promised to end the war in Iraq, end torture, close Guantánamo, restore the constitution, heal our wounds, wash our feet. None of these things has come to pass. As president, with few exceptions, Obama either has embraced the unconstitutional war powers claimed by his predecessor or has left the door open for their quiet adoption at some later date. Leon Panetta, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has declared that the kidnapping and rendition of foreigners will continue, and the Bush Administration’s expansive doctrine of state secrets continues to be used in court against those wrongfully detained and tortured by our security forces and allies. Obama has adopted military commissions, once an unpardonable offense against our best traditions, to prosecute terrorism cases in which legitimate convictions cannot be obtained; when even such mock trials provide too much justice, he will make do with indefinite detention. If, by some slim chance, a defendant were to be found not guilty, we have been assured that the president’s “post-acquittal” detention powers would then come into play.

The principle of habeas corpus, sacred to candidate Obama as ‘the essence of who we are,’ no longer seems so essential, and reports continue to surface of secret prisons hidden from due process and the Red Cross. Waterboarding has been banned, but other “soft” forms of torture, such as sleep deprivation and force-feeding, continue—as do the practices, which once seemed so terribly important to opponents of the Bush regime, of presidential signing statements and warrantless surveillance. In at least one respect, the Obama Justice Department has produced an innovation: a claim of “sovereign immunity” in response to a lawsuit seeking damages for illegal spying. Not even the minions of George W. Bush, with their fanciful notions of the unitary executive, made use of this constitutionally suspect doctrine, derived from the ancient common-law assumption that ‘the King can do no wrong,’ to defend their clear violations of the federal surveillance statute.”

The right-wing, military contractors and the news media have conspired to strike enough fear in the hearts of many U.S. citizens that they are happy—perhaps relieved is a better choice of words—to give up their freedom  and to have immoral, illegal and obscene acts committed in their names.  So let’s review again what’s wrong with torture:

  • It is against both U.S. and international law.
  • It is universally perceived as barbaric and immoral, an act that reduces the actor and those sponsoring the actor to the level of unethical bestiality.
  • It doesn’t work, at least according to most experts and studies.  (But as with those who don’t believe our earth is getting warmer because of human interventions and those who believe that capital punishment serves as a deterrent to crime, the believers will take the word of a tiny minority of experts, who usually are in the employ or pay of the some faction of the believers).
  • It puts our own combatants at risk, because once we torture we give de facto approval to our enemies to do the same.

We thus have something that’s illegal and immoral, makes people hate us, puts our own people at risk and doesn’t even work, and the Obama administration can’t summon up the courage to end it.  Truly shameful and disappointing.