Best of 2010
The year in food
A look at the biggest food stories of 2010: We are one nation of eating extremes ... and extreme eating
By Francis LamTopics: Best of 2010, Food, Food Business, Food fights, Health
I’ll start off with a naked admission: it is a fool’s errand to recap the year in food. I mean, it’s food. It’s like trying to recap the year in breathing, or the year in being protected from the elements. But that’s also exactly why we have to try — food is so fundamental, so vital to our lives and culture that what and how we eat tells us so much about ourselves. And looking at the biggest stories of 2010 tells us that we’re a people of passionate extremes, of trends that go off the rails and food fights for which we arm ourselves to the teeth. We go from being vegetarians to butchers, from prim fat-gram-counters to devourers of burgers that pack more calories than an Energon cube. And we drink Four Loko. And so, Salon presents: the food stories that made 2010 so hot, so tasty and so very, very greasy.
9. Food politics, and we don’t mean Michael Pollan
If the 2008 campaign nano-scandal of Obama’s choice of hamburger mustard — can you believe that elitist snob asked for Kraft-made Dijon? — showed us anything, it’s that the 2004 rubbing of John Kerry’s nose in his Swiss cheesesteak wasn’t an aberration. Rather, two years on, we have fully descended into the what-you-eat-is-who-you-are era of identity politics, as no matter big or small can escape the ever-politicized culture wars. Rush Limbaugh is out there touting the fact that a man lost weight eating only Twinkies as evidence that all nutrition science is hooey, because, as he said, “I know liberals, and I know liberals lie, and if Michelle Obama’s gonna be out there ripping into ‘food deserts’ and saying, ‘This is why people are fat,’ I know it’s not true.” Sarah Palin tried, clumsily at best, to show us her every-gal workin’ lady side by pretending to be a diner waitress on her TV show. And Glenn Beck tried to call Michelle Obama’s campaign for healthier kids a communist plot to take away his … oh God, I don’t even want to finish this stupid sentence.
On the other hand, the most productive / maligned Congress in history passed the biggest boost to child nutrition and school lunch funding in 30 years. So, hey: win!
8. The year in beverage: Raw milk and the one and only Four Loko
And in more socialist fascist American government news … You wouldn’t think there would be a lot in common between back-to-the-lander favorite, unpasteurized (“raw”) milk and the insanely cheap, sweet, caffeinated and boozy Four Loko. But both of these found themselves in the crosshairs of authorities: raw milk for killing babies, and Four Loko for killing college-age babies’ brain cells.
Despite supposed health benefits, small-farm-goodness, etc., fans of raw milk fight an uphill battle; the stuff is only legally for sale in 28 states. Four Loko, on the other hand, was widely available and marketed largely to urban (read: minority) young people but enjoyed by jackasses of all colors. Nicknamed “Blackout in a Can,” it could make you feel hyper enough to rip the toilet out of the wall while you prayed to it, and it found consummate displeasure in state liquor boards. In an unusual move, authorities in New York, Washington, Michigan, Utah and Oklahoma banned this specific product, amid criticism of discrimination, unfair targeting, and just plain old waste-of-taxpayer-money weirdness. Interestingly, it was time for the young, liberal and reckless to rail against the Nanny State.
7. The Heart Attack Grill sued the Heart Stoppers Grill
No, seriously, that really happened. A restaurant with a cardiac arrest theme sued another restaurant with a cardiac arrest theme, because they both offer 8,000-calorie burgers (yes, four days worth of calories). Apparently the last straw was when the shameless cheater cardiac arrest themed restaurant also copied the idea of giving these burgers for free to customers who weigh over 350 pounds. The suit is still in the courts, but, I mean, we all know Death is the big winner here. I tell ya, when ya see stuff like this, this country’s goin’ ta going to Hell in a hamburgerbasket. Which brings us to …
6. The KFC Double Down: The sandwich that launched a thousand defibrillators
2010 was the year we saw cynical blog-to-book sensation This is Why You’re Fat — which calls on readers to send in photos of outlandish food like bacon-wrapped cheesecake-stuffed fried chickens — become reality. Corporate mainstream, find-it-on-any-corner reality.
But with all the entries to the gross-out food sweepstakes — the Carl’s Jr. foot-long burger, the IHOP cream cheese pancake stackers, the Burger King 9-inch Pizza Whopper — one reigned supreme in its ability to get everyone in food media talking. The KFC Double Down, the cheese-and-bacon sandwich with fried chicken as the bread, blew everyone away with its brashness, its enthusiastic offensiveness, its gleeful thumb-in-the-eye to every doctor and chiding mother in America — and even inspired a heart-stunning column of taste tests here on Salon. Yet, brilliantly, it wasn’t anywhere near the highest calorie or fattiest fast food abomination in the land. And no one seemed to notice that, had they added a bun to it, no one would think anything of this new ho-hum double chicken sandwich. For that stroke of genius, we bow our heads in respect, if not for the fact that eating it was like getting beaten and left for dead in a salt mine.
Francis Lam
5. Salt will kill you (kind of). Sugar will kill you (kind of). But we might have killed corn syrup.
And speaking of salt … after years of doomsday health warnings about low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and hydrogenated trans-fats, 2010′s eat-this-and-you-die hoopla was mostly about … salt and sugar. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg started off the year with fanfare, unveiling an official city list of guidelines on how much sodium food should contain. Cue the industry freakouts, the chefs daring the guv’mint to pry their salt out of their cold, dead, tattooed hands. But what people didn’t notice, necessarily, was that 80 percent of the salt we eat comes from processed foods. So chill out, eat real food, and go ahead and learn to be friends with your salt shaker at home.
I would have started this next paragraph by saying, “Moving on to dessert, studies this year have also shown that our sweet tooth has now grown to Bugs Bunny-type proportions.” But that would be wrong, because Americans now like everything sweeter than before, including their pizza, as Domino’s found out by replacing their sauce with something just north of ketchup and finding millions of happy customers.
But are all sweeteners equal? Yes or no, the war on the ubiquitous-in-processed-food high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) looks like it might be a done deal at this point, with ginormous soda and food manufacturers catching consumers’ drift and touting their new REAL SUGAR products. While we’re no big fans of the syrup for its creepy environmental impacts, it is a little sad that what might be the nail in HFCS’s coffin is a widely-misread study showing that fructose is particularly tasty and nutritious to cancer cells. (Technically, high fructose corn syrup has pretty much the same amount of fructose as regular sugar.) Score one for the earth and the humans, but not for the humans of earth to know the right way to use science … or for them to actually eat sugar in moderation.
4. Cupcakes and their spawn
Moderation? But cupcakes are cute! How cute are cupcakes? They’re so cute the English call them fairy cakes. They’re so cute that 2010 marked something like the decade-long reign of cupcakes on the culinary scene brought about by, of all things, Sex and the City. (Yes, the longest-lasting food fad in recorded history was brought to you by a show about shoes.) But after 10 years on top, you could feel a revolution brewing; people are ready for the Next Great Cute Craze. And so we trotted out cake balls, which are what happen when you take a cake and frosting and squish them together and pretend like you just made something different. We turned to the French, with all their refinement, to love on their brightly-colored and myriad-flavored macarons. And we (like, four of us) tried to man up the cupcake with, er, “manly” flavors at the Butch Bakery like Rum and Coke, Mojito, and the tellingly-named “Driller.” But try, try again, folks. Word on the street is that D’Iberville, Miss., just got its third cupcake shop. This train just keeps on running away in high heels.
3. Food trucks! People are selling food from trucks! Some of these people have culinary and even college degrees, unlike all the working class immigrant people who have been doing this for decades! Also: Twitter!
OK, are we done talking about this yet?
2. Meat is good! Meat is bad! Meat is sexxxy!
For the better part of a century, Americans have reveled in the easy availability of meat, once reserved for when times are flush. But then came nofun-niks like … doctors and animal lovers and people who think that whole climate change thing isn’t a conspiracy made up by liberal scientists. OK, well, I guess we should rethink how much and what kind of meat we eat, and 2010 saw intense wrangling from all sides, but with a new character — sexy hip butchers. Some are sustainable-meat advocates, some are throwback craftspeople, some are beardos, some observe Meatless Mondays, and some are even vegetarians. Almost all of them, though, preach the culinary, environmental and ethical importance of eating less meat but better meat, and some of them will even invite you to a butchering party to get their point across.
Here on Salon, we also considered and wrestled with our own relationships to meat, from strong and strange desires to eat horse to my killing a chicken for your amusement. (I wasn’t so glib at the time.) But it’s a complicated world for ethical omnivorism, and it turns out that it’s not just politics and religion that get people fired up to argue at the table. Whether or not to eat the beef does, too — especially if you were a vegetarian seduced, sexually and carnivorously, into the carnal pleasures.
1. Gulf seafood, on the ropes
And in the year’s most painful story, barely-hanging-on Gulf fishermen watched their livelihood and, for many, their lives, get coated in a shiny slick of poison. I remember watching TV footage of the Deepwater Horizon on fire, thinking, “Boy, that looks nasty.” Then it sank. Then the oil bubbled up. And then we were in for months of bleeding.
In May, we ran a piece on whether or not you should avoid Gulf seafood — the word then was that the product was still fine, but that the fishermen feared that panic would set in, collapsing their market, already fragile from cheap imported seafood. A month after, we found ourselves writing on the collapse of P&J Oysters in New Orleans, losing our nation’s oldest oyster shucker and an integral part of that city’s culture. And now, a million years of news cycles later, no one talks about the spill, no one talks about the seafood, no one talks about these fine people. Through the misery, New Orleans lived up to its reputation for fun and humor, with grocery stores baking BP thank-you cakes. And as for the poor shrimp… well, can you blame them for going on Prozac?
And finally … God, man, lighten up a little!
So if you made it this far, thank you. And now looking back over our little year-in-food retrospective, it does seem awfully heavy on the, well, heavy. Conflicts and arguments and this’ll kill you and that’ll kill all of us. Well, as my high school English teacher told me, you always need conflict for a good story.
But let’s not walk away from this little exercise thinking only of alimentary disaster. How was your year in food? What did you learn, what did you love, what did you make, what did you share? For me, 2010 was wonderful at table, filled with meals with friends and loves, sharing flavors and cultures, eating Chinese American food made by Italians and Italian food made by Chinese. I found a new favorite fish, I conquered a fear of baking bread, and a master taught me how — and more importantly, why — he fries chicken. I hope you have stories and meals you can cherish the same way. And I hope you’ll spend 2011 eating, cooking and thinking joyfully. Even if you are slugging down bacon cupcake burgers at a food truck.
Francis Lam is Features Editor at Gilt Taste, provides color commentary for the Cooking Channel show Food(ography), and tweets at @francis_lam. More Francis Lam.
My top 5 Web picks of 2010
From the cleverest blog to the best use for an iPad, here are the five things that became habits for me this year
By Karen TemplerTopics: Best of 2010
As a person whose job it is to develop digital products, I’m online nearly every moment I’m awake (whether I’m looking at my phone, my iPad or a laptop), and I’m often asked for recommendations. Frankly, every year it gets tougher to be in-the-know. Just like there’s more and more content published on the Web every year, there are new technologies, sites, apps and devices rolling out at a breathless pace. But you don’t need me to tell you this; it’s a problem we all face on some level.
Given that, I tend to gravitate toward things that are either curatorial in nature — offering me new ways to skip past the chaff (of whatever variety) and get straight to the wheat — or that make it easier for me to do things I’ve always done. So while this is by no means a definitive list, what follows are the five things that elbowed their way out of the crowd and onto my pinned tabs or my home screen in the past year.
Karen Templer is the director of product development and design at Salon. Follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/karentempler. More Karen Templer.
The most memorable images of 2010
From the shocking to the hilarious to the utterly heartbreaking, our favorite photos of the year
ByTopics: Best of 2010, Slide Shows, The Week in Pictures
To say 2010 was an eventful year would be quite the understatement. It was an election year, of course. Also a year of plane crashes, landmark legislation, meat dresses, flash mobs, Tea Party protests, faux scandals, Wikileaks and more devastating floods, earthquakes, landslides, volcano eruptions, factory explosions, mine collapses, oil spills and forest fires than we could even begin to count. The world cheered the Olympics, the World Cup and the return of Tiger Woods, and mourned the death of Paul the Octopus. Election disputes turned bloody. The Roma were driven out of France. Celebrities posed for their mug shots. And through it all, the situation in Haiti — which began with an earthquake on January 12 — went from bad to worse to indescribably tragic.
Many of these events yielded striking images. Others made for great stories but not such great photos. Every week (or nearly so), in putting together The Week in Pictures, we sorted through thousands of images — riot police, baby animals, rising waters, red carpet appearances — and narrowed them down to a group that attempted to tell the story of what it was like to be in the world that week. But here at the end of the year, we won’t try to recap the news. What we’ve gathered instead are the 50 images that have stuck with us — the most beautiful, shocking, wacky or haunting scenes we published throughout the year — which still tell a story of the year that was.
For our cover art, above, we’ve chosen the image you all found by far the most compelling, judging by clicks — the lovely Dita Von Teese.
These are our favorites. We hope you’ll tell us about yours.
10 from 2010: Our favorite Salon stories
One final look back at our own work, and what we liked best
By Kerry LauermanTopics: Best of 2010, Inside Salon
Don’t worry — the tsunami of Best Of lists is almost over. I think we’re all looking forward to the fresh mystery of the new year. And right now, our necks ache from looking back so much; we’re particularly sick of the forced remembering of Christine O’Donnell and the Trololo guy. To the annals of footnoted history, we banish ye!
But we did want to highlight the pieces in Salon that — through an unscientific staff poll — we decided we liked the best this year. None of these should be a huge surprise to Salon readers; they were all big hits with you, too. From Glenn Greenwald’s incisive exploration of WikiLeaks, to Mary Elizabeth Williams’ gripping accounts of her cancer diagnosis and treatment, our favorite stories this year run a familiar Salon gamut of world-changing importance to the expressly, meaningfully personal.
And with no more fanfare than that, in chronological order, our 10 staff favorites:
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Hipsters on Food Stamps
They’re young, they’re broke, and they pay for organic salmon with government subsidies. Got a problem with that?
By Jennifer Bleyer
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The Tina Fey Backlash
The “30 Rock” star’s pathetic single girl shtick is getting criticism from an unlikely source: Women who love her
By Rebecca Traister
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The Civil Rights Heroism of Charles Sherrod
Andrew Breitbart sure picked the wrong people to symbolize black “racism.” Taylor Branch and Clay Carson weigh in
By Joan Walsh
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The Strange and Consequential Case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks
By Glenn Greenwald
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My Cancer Diagnosis
Until last week, it was the best summer of my life. Then my doctor gave me the news I dreaded
By Mary Elizabeth Williams
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How the “Ground Zero Mosque” Fear Mongering Began
A viciously anti-Muslim blogger, the New York Post and the right-wing media machine: How it all went down
By Justin Elliott
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My Relentless Pursuit of the Guy Who Robbed Me
A thief broke into my car. I used Craigslist, a dating site, MySpace and a fast food joint to track him down
By Amanda Enayati
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“Sopranos” Family Tree: Edith Bunker to Don Draper
We chart the ancestors of the groundbreaking show — and how it continues to shape American TV
By Matt Zoller Seitz
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Better Yet, DON’T Write That Novel
Why National Novel Writing Month is a waste of time and energy
By Laura Miller
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The War Room Hack Thirty
By Alex Pareene
And 10 more honorable mentions: David Rakoff’s wonderfully moving “Made” essay on his distinct craft; Andrew O’Hehir’s vivid takedowns of “Secretariat” and “Sex and the City 2″; mighty intern Emma Mustich’s gotcha on Sarah Palin’s desecration of the flag; our inside scoop on the biggest Oscar story of the year; Tracy Clark-Flory’s wonderful, moving piece about her mother and Christmas; Glenn Greenwald’s searing look at how Americans have been trained to think about Afghanistan; Francis Lam’s first time killing a chicken and his illuminating history lesson on General Tso’s chicken; and on Open Salon, Nelle Engoron’s intensely thought-out coverage of “Mad Men.”
Now, on to 2011!
Kerry Lauerman is Salon's Editor in Chief. Follow him on Twitter: @kerrylauerman. More Kerry Lauerman.
1. “Let Me In”
The scene of the year is a squirm-inducing stunner that manages to make us sympathize with a would-be murderer
By Matt Zoller SeitzTopics: Best Film Scenes of 2010, Best of 2010, Film Salon, Movies
I’m reluctant to use the word “remake” to describe strong new versions of material that was great the first time around. The directors of such films sometimes call them “cover versions.” That’s a somewhat defensive term — “I liked the original, too! This is just my version!” — but it’s more palatable and in some ways more accurate. The filmmakers aren’t presumptuously trying to fix what wasn’t broken but trying to bask in the success of a beloved work while putting their own (hopefully unique) spin on it. Any music buff will tell you that cover versions of a great recording sometimes end up being different from but equal to the original. Not always, but sometimes.
Such is the case with “Let Me In,” American writer-director Matt Reeves’ adaptation of the 2008 Swedish vampire love story “Let the Right One In.”
The original filmmakers — director Tomas Alfredson and writer John Ajvide Lindqvist (adapting his own novel) — made a classic the first time out, a vampire picture with all the hallmarks of recent-vintage northern European genre cinema: naturalistic-seeming performances, unfussy camerawork, a pervasive red/gold/brown color scheme suggesting that the whole movie was shot through a glass of rye whiskey. The differences between the films are legion, starting with the change of locale to 1980s Albuquerque and Reeves’ decision to make the young vampire more identifiably female (even though she tells the hero she’s without gender).
But what’s even more striking is Reeves’ forceful yet elegant visual style, which is so different from his work on the 2008 documentary-styled, shaky-cam monster epic “Cloverfield” that it takes a moment to register that the two movies were made by the same director. Every shot in “Let Me In” has a clearly defined narrative purpose and is gorgeous, too. Like Steven Spielberg and Brian DePalma in the 1970s and early ’80s — the last American masters of pre-digital blockbuster moviemaking, and clearly Reeves’ main visual inspirations — the director pushes right up to the edge of vainglorious cleverness, but never succumbs. When the movie abandons its go-to mode, muted efficiency, and becomes boldly emotional or visually arresting, it’s never superimposing spectacle on top of a story that doesn’t need it. Both the flourishes and fleeting grace notes amplify emotions that were present in the script.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the aborted kidnapping sequence highlighted here. Shot for shot, beat for beat, it’s the scene of the year, laying a foundation of succinct but meaningful shots and then building a madhouse on top of it. The pièce de résistance — you’ll know it when you see it — is one of the great recent examples of show-off filmmaking in service of story. The universe has been turned upside-down.
2. “Toy Story 3″
The merciless suspense of this fateful action sequence shows why the movie franchise is so beloved
By Matt Zoller SeitzTopics: Best Film Scenes of 2010, Best of 2010, Film Salon, Movies
Oh, come on! They wouldn’t kill off Cowboy Woody and Buzz and Jessie and Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head and Hamm and Rex and Slinky Dog!
Would they?
Page 1 of 5 in Best of 2010
