Tag Archives: food

Travel

What’s the Deal With Alaska Airlines Food?

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Enjoy! You can’t have either one. (Photo: MvB)

Is it just me, or has airline food service actually gotten worse since we’ve had to start paying for it à la carte? It’s an interesting proposition: “How about you pay us more money, or we let you starve? Ha ha, psych, here’s a pretzel.”

A few weeks ago, I’m flying back from Hawaii on Alaska Airlines, after spending a whole weekend eating in paradise, and the flight attendant says to me, “What would you like?”

The couple next to me has just gotten engaged that weekend, so I motion to them to go first. I like to do at least one courteous thing each year–I like to think I’m bringing civility back…just not in a rush.

They order, and the attendant pivots on her heel and leaves. I track her down in the galley and explain I’d like to order the Teriyaki Chicken. “We don’t have that,” she says. (Fine print: “Flights to Hawaii.”)

“Oh, Cashew Chicken, then.”

“We’re out of that.”

“What do you have?”

“Have you read the menu card, sir?”

For the record, that’s the precise moment my Hawaiian vacation ended. I’m just trying to buy dinner, and I feel like it’s some kind of practical joke. But the attendant’s forcing a smile, maybe she’s had a long day, so we compromise on the cheese and fruit.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” (Photo: MvB)

On a trip out back east to see family this past weekend, I order the Continental Breakfast (a bagel and fruit). Damn you fine print! Served on flights “2-3.5 hours long.”

“Hot breakfast?” checks the flight attendant, over the engine noise.

“Continental breakfast. With a bagel,” I clarify.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about”–she literally says this. “Would you like to look at the menu card?” I pull out the card and point to the bagel.

“Oh, that’s not served on this flight.”

I am no food-rocket scientist, but it seems to me that if you’re too cheap to print menus that actually go with the flight people are on, the least you could do is make the layout distinguish between flights.  Rather than create a “Breakfast” heading that contains three items you can’t get and one you can, you might break that down a little further. Again, not an expert, but I can impersonate a harried traveler. By now, I’m feeling like Alaska is building a file on me, like the one Elaine suspected her doctor had.

If you’re sitting in the rear of the plane on a long flight, there’s a good chance the one dinner option you have will be gone, and you’ll be stuck with “Something for Everyone.” I don’t want to pile on, but it seems to me that the “Something for Everyone” section lists a random assortment of food stuffs that Alaska snagged the low bid for on Ebay. It’s like you got to go crazy at the vending machine in a Greyhound terminal.

No dinner for you! (Photo: MvB)

On the flight back, I get a plastic cup of wine, which I nurse while waiting to order the fruit and cheese plate. It’s like a little picnic in the sky.

Eventually the attendants come by, pouring water, which they offer to me. “No thanks, ” I say, and wait for the promised dinner service.

I still don’t know what happened–I never saw anyone else get food, either–but I can tell you that no one asked me what I wanted for dinner on a five-and-a-half-hour flight.

Now, I can stand to lose the weight–No, no, it’s true!–but I was flying with my mom, who is no longer in her seventies, let’s put it like that, and no one asked her, either. (Nor did they offer a pillow, or a blanket.)

I think I handled discovering (some years ago) that Alaska wasn’t owned by a jolly Inuit man fairly well, but this latest set of customer service experiences has shattered the illusion that Alaska cares about me–despite, you know, them greeting me by name as I board. But on the other hand, it does level the playing field when you can get the same stressed, minimal service from your “local” airline as you can from established leaders in the field.

Arts & Entertainment, Eats, Food, Theatre

Café Nordo–Food Theatre? Victual Drama?–Sets Plates in Washington Hall

We need a new term. It is time, once again, for a production by Café Nordo, Seattle’s most prominent purveyor of a performance form that has become increasingly popular over the last decade or so. Café Nordo combines food and theatre in ways that serve one another rather than simply accompanying one another. These days there are enough people interested in combining food and theatre that there may be a genre in the offing, but how do we speak of it?

Dinner theatre, with its reputation for poor quality food and light entertainment is obviously not what’s going on here. To call it Food Theatre seems obvious but that suggests a Paul Zaloom puppet show, and besides, it’s not the food that’s important but the eating.

Many examples of these Victuals Dramas lean toward the avant-garde end of the world often using the food as a kind of secular Eucharist. Performances by Bread and Puppet Theatre end with cast and audience milling together eating hearty rye bread baked on site in a traditional clay or brick oven and served with powerful aioli. Ed Schmidt, a New York actor, created a show in which he cooked for his audience while talking about the people who made The Last Supper—the actual meal, not the Da Vinci painting. LA Poverty Department’s State of Incarceration project ended with actors and audience making and dining on a prison delicacy known as The Spread.

Closer to home a production by Portland, OR’s Sojourn Theatre called On The Table used a communal meal as the third act and central metaphor of an exploration of the relationship between Portland and its more conservative rural neighbors.

Sharing food is powerful stuff. As Sojourn Theatre’s Artistic Director, Michael Rohd, has noted, we tend to eat with people we know and like. Of course theatre is fairly self-selecting already so the chances of meeting the other beyond the price of admission for a theatre experiment are likely to be low—even when there’s eating. Nonetheless sharing a meal with people we don’t know is a radical act. Even while atomized in our diner booths, eating communally offers ample opportunity to see and be seen, to perform and to eavesdrop, in short, to participate in community.

The performance criticism community has taken notice of this Es Spiel trend from high-brow journals like TDR to more consumer-focused pieces in The Guardian. The Sojourn theatre show was even featured in a 2010 issue of American Theatre Magazine devoted entirely to these Es Spiel productions with food.

They’ve also noticed that food and theatre are moving closer to one another on the flipside as well. The New York Times even went so far as to suggest that dining is the dominant art form, supplanting visual art as the obsession of the NYC elite. In a world full of restaurants with visible kitchens that make the cooking part of the show one might argue that restaurants have become theaters. Certainly cooking has taken a major place in the entertainment sphere with the rise of the celebrity chefs like Rick Bayless—currently starring and cooking on a Chicago stage. Can it be that Café Nordo’s own celebrity chef, Nordo Lefesczki, served as inspiration for the more corporeal Bayless?

The Nosh Theatre of Café Nordo has been turning up in Seattle biannually since 2009 so they know what they’re doing. This year they’re extending their experiments to include an environmental staging approaching the scale of Punch Drunk Theatre—most famous for their Sleep No More adaptation of MacBeth.

Café Nordo will set up their peculiar restaurant/theater at Washington Hall in the Central District this week to perform Cafe Nordo’s Cabinet of Curiosities. The performance will combine food, theatre, and education into one unified evening. At $70-$80, tickets may seem steep for a show but they’re quite reasonable for dinner and a show and we’re in for quite a dinner. Rabbit confit, pickled fiddleheads, king salmon and a rhubarb and lemon curd trifle wait to be discovered in the maze of rooms at the venerable performance hall. So whether you call it a chow show, nosh theatre, victuals drama, es spiel, or just a food play Café Nordo promises an alimental performance like nothing else in Seattle.

Health, News, Science

Bellevue Man’s Long-Term Weight Loss Secret: Eat More & Exercise Less!

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I am just fascinated by Jonathan Bailor’s The Smarter Science of Slim. I love that this diet book, written by a Microsoft program manager, actually looks like a user’s manual of some kind. I’m terribly fond of the “cast of thousands” of graphs and charts that Bailor uses to present his research. And my ears always perk up when someone tells me I can eat more and exercise less, and still lose weight.

Yes, I’ve read The 4-Hour Body. Remember that part where Ferriss starts to weigh his own feces? That’s where I began to think that maybe it was more of a cry for help. WebMD has some concerns, too.

Bailor, in contrast, has docs from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and UCLA chiming in to support his approach–and why not, his bibliography runs from page 293 to 369, all in tiny type, making reference to research study after research study.

Let’s start with the less controversial part: Bailor advocates what he calls a SANE diet, and yes, that’s an acronym, but it’s also a philosophical position. He’s just telling you which foods are good to eat, and which are not, and sparing you obsessive calorie-counting and bizarre menus. On the whole, he sounds a bit like Michael Pollan-on-paleo. Avoid processed foods and sweeteners, and cut down on starches and grains. Feast on vegetables and fruits (especially berries), get plenty of protein, and fats aren’t terrible. (It turns out it’s worse to try to cover that “low-fat” taste with a multitude of hidden sweeteners.)

On exercise, Bailor mimics Pollan’s delivery: “Exercise forcefully. Not too often. Mostly eccentric.” Ten to twenty minutes a week should do it (for weight loss, obviously, not conditioning for sports).

Two elements of the book I drew my attention particularly. Early on, Bailor tackles the unsupported concept of one-calorie-equals-one-calorie, demonstrating that where you get your calories is important. But then he introduces the idea of metabolic “clogging,” which helps clarify the confusing history of weight loss. Two hormones, he says, insulin and leptin, work in tandem to manage our bodies’ energy stores. If our diets are out of whack, our hormonal balance gets skewed, too, with the result that whether we starve ourselves or gorge, we can pack pounds on while not feeling satiated.

Then he delivers a devastating critique of why our diets are out of whack to begin with, discussing the USDA’s “nutritionally unsound” food guides (with a raft of charts showing a host of obesity-related ills heading up and to the right after the guides are implemented), and correcting a bunch of misapprehensions about cholesterol, whole grains, and fat intake. High fructose corn syrup gets no free pass, and though I’ve seen it before, the list of almost 60 “hidden” sweeteners (the same, you’ll find, in candy bars and weight-loss bars) is still staggering.

We are not, he makes it clear, going to get much help from our co-opted government on obesity and diabetes and cardiovascular health; in fact, the war on obesity’s symptoms is likely to reinforce the entrenched positions that, say, soda companies have on official panels. All this is big business, especially diabetes.

In that sense, this is a necessary book, whether you have pounds to keep off or not. With apologies to William Carlos Williams, it is difficult to get the news from diet books, yet men and women die miserably every day for lack of what is found here.