Bite it!

I’ve noticed that many restaurants these days are emblazoning the word “sustainable” on their menus. It’s trendy, like “locally-sourced,” or “gluten-free,” or “chocolate-covered bacon,” so I decided to start saying it frequently. I hate to have a trendy word come and go before I even figure out how to use it in a sentence.

Wouldn’t it be great if there were still such a thing as a freshwater fish untainted by mercury? A fish that doesn’t carry any dire warnings for pregnant women and children? A fish that tastes as fresh as the fish you vaguely remember catching in your pristine childhood? Ladies and gentlemen, such a fish still exists, thanks to the decades-long efforts of an old hippie named Herby Radmann, in a place known as Bullfrog Farm, through an enterprise called Eat My Fish.

I recently found myself at a gathering of artistic luminaries in Minneapolis. (I was not one of them.) Someone posed a question to the group: Is New York still the cultural capital of the United States? A lot of presupposition went into that question, but the participants answered thoughtfully and judiciously. Some claimed that Minnesota was practically just as pretty darn good a cultural capital as New York City, darn it.

Easter and Passover occurred on the same weekend this year, resulting in the first spate of national overeating since Christmas and Chanukah coincided last December. There’s not a lot of crossover between what foods are eaten by whom, however -- no ham on the Passover table, for example, and no matzohs for Easter. Some tolerant, secular foods appear on the festive tables of both Christians and Jews, such as eggs, potatoes, lamb, and chocolate. Well, not “such as” -- that’s it, really. Maybe salad.