Appropriate material warning: In honor of the Supreme Court’s latest quagmire, off-color political comments and remarks on food preferences ahead. No actual body parts mentioned…well, not much. More implied than actually mentioned. Nor will you find much actual swearing, more’s the pity. Nobody, but nobody, gets called a dirty name such as the male equivalent of whatever might have been slung around on a certain talk show whose host contested female citizens’ rights to testify before Congressional committees. Or not much of a dirty name–though some might say it’s implied. And it is. To your healthcare!
Antonin Scalia–and I’m just saying it for what it’s worth, here–what an embarrassment to the United States. First he squats instead of recusing himself in a case where he clearly has a conflict of interest, namely that he went hunting and dining with the defendant (then-Vice President Dick “New Heart” Cheney), then he blames broccoli for the faults of an imperfect but workable health care plant. I mean plan.
I know this commentary is coming about 2 weeks after the fact, but it’s taken me the full two weeks–one of them Passover–to decide that it really was up to me to fight back. Against Scalia, against broccoli abuse, and apparently against my computer’s quirks, one of which was to eat the camera card and spit out a coupla bent socket pins. Because for a proper rebuttal to the broccoli question, I need incriminating evidence in the form of photos. Exhibit A, as it were.
Whether you think health insurance and the Affordable Care Act should be available to everyone in this country or not, or whether or not you think you personally need health coverage that doesn’t inspect you down to your toenails before charging you extra, the true question here is, why is broccoli always the Republican go-to monster under the bed? Perhaps because their leaders faithfully follow George Bush père‘s overwhelmingly whitebread fear of vegetables, particularly the dreaded broccoli, while adopting his stated preference for pork rinds?
Let’s put that under the microscope first, shall we? True story:
My first year at university, two of my sarcastic and adventurous dorm mates bought a packet of pork rinds to try out as political investigation material. This was in 1981, when GHW Bush was the new veep for Reagan, and he’d announced both his loathing for broccoli and his love of pork rinds, as though any of us needed to know that. Eyewatering. Anyway, my friends decided they had an obligation to test out Bush’s aesthetics personally before condemning him. So…they moseyed on down to the university district’s 7-11 store and purchased some test samples. Then they came back to our suite and conducted the (not double-blind, which I’m sure they quickly regretted) taste test with all the rest of us as an audience. About 30 witnesses in all.
Beth and Bill faced each other across our suite’s livingroom floor. Somebody counted down, and they ripped open the pork rind baggie. Next countdown–reach into the bag and select a pork rind at random. They shuddered briefly–the aroma had reached them–but regrouped. This was for the record. For science. For Truth and the American Way. They braced themselves.
On the count of three they each bit into their pork rind of choice. The reaction was instantaneous. The verdict unanimous.
“Wow, they really do taste exactly as fecal as they smell!” chirped Beth as her face went very, very red. It was clear she was trying not to skew the results by vomiting and giggling simultaneously. Bill didn’t hesitate to spit copiously into our trashcan for several minutes, and we couldn’t blame him. We just told him to take it with him and not leave the damning evidence with us. Chain of custody rules, you know.
Anyway, if Mr. Scalia’s broccophobic remarks are reflective of the officially sanctioned GOP line when it comes to vegetabalia and taste preferences, what our intrepid reporters discovered 31 years ago does suggest that we’d all be better off skipping their national convention banquet this summer.
Back to broccoli. What is so demonic here? It’s actually a popular vegetable these years (quirkily informative market statistic needed, desperately needed, because very, very few Food Network cookbooks contain any recipes for it).
Statistic, statistic, statistic–oh. Here! Average US per-person consumption of fresh broccoli has quadrupled since 1980. Outpacing frozen by a lot. And the total US market is worth upwards of half a billion dollars a year. And we supply most of Canada’s and Japan’s broccoli. And yet we still import from Mexico, Equador and so on for frozen because the labor’s cheaper. Demand for broccoli is actually pretty high.
So Scalia, and the rest of the GOP faithful, have really gotten hold of the wrong end of the stem with this broccoli blame game. And all the more surprising to wave it around like that since Scalia is Italian-American.
Somebody tell me when the Italians are supposed to have started fearing broccoli? Even its name is Italian–according to the agriculture info sites, they first brought it over to the States in 1923.
Maybe his parents were rotten cooks? Does he hate garlic too or something? The shame, the shame…
Anyway…
Broccoli–the regular, not the rabe–is, tell the truth and nothing but, easy to abuse culinarily. Mostly by overcooking and then dumping it on the dinner plates unflavored and unloved, graying, sulfurous, lukewarm. Foul color, worse odor, unbelievably bendy and dank. Not exactly a taste explosion.
But broccoli doesn’t have to taste like whatever you might remember from your high school cafeteria, if you’re old enough to remember when they actually served vegetables instead of pizza with a side of fries. And you don’t have to eat it raw either. You have choices. Options, as it were. Continue reading →
Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Food Politics, frugality, Odd food, Vegetabalia | Tagged: Affordable Care Act, Antonin Scalia, broccoli, GOP, healthcare, Obamacare, pork rinds, SCOTUS, vegetables | 6 Comments »
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