Have New Yorkers no shame? And editors who endorse excess?
By Helen Abby Becker
One tries very hard not to be indignant over the extravagantly festive holiday goings-on reported daily in newspapers across the United States, when other headlined stories regularly feature details of the horrors of the war in Iraq, the genocide in Rwanda, the extraordinary cruelties of jihad extremists, and now the extraordinary cruelty of nature to an unprepared and poverty stricken Asian populace. The massive tidal wave that has sopped the energy of much of coastal Asia has caused more than 110,000 deaths and has left hundreds of thousands, millions, probably, in a desperate search for drinkable water, something to eat, clothing, and a place to sleep. The devastation is complete.
So "Sushi at Masa: It's a Zen Thing," a feature story about a new restaurant in yesterday's New York Times "Dining In" section (December 29, 2004) has me all in a tizzy. Like most everyone else, we spent two evenings watching in horrified silence as the TV screen unfolded horror after horror, huge black waves sweeping aside automobiles, cottages, garages ; here two men clinging to each other at the edge of what must have been a beautiful lanai, and then losing their balance and being swept out into the raging torrent, there three or four youngsters, clinging to a dismantled building, swept into the roaring tidal stream of water to disappear underneath the onrushing debris....the thousands of corpses...the suffering of the living, the threat of disease, the filth and the stench -- and here is a story, not on the front page, it's true...and we have a right to live our lives regardless of what goes on in the world and indeed, how would our not enjoying wonderful meals have prevented the tidal wave? We live in a world of great diversity; of immense wealth and dire poverty and it has always been like that.
But still...this article ticked me off. The timing is so dreadful...The sushi in question costs upwards of $300 per person. That¹s right...$300. I quote from the article, "Lunch or dinner can easily exceed $1,000. Justifiable? I leave that to ....ethicists..." and "yellow clam and red clam, squid and octopus, eel, cooked and brushed with a sweet reduction of its cooking liquids; needlefish, on which are drizzled purple shiso flowers. Some of this flesh was so luxurious it made me feel flushed, giving me a buzz that undulated across a meal and crested with the toro rolls; insanely dense, obscenely intense clumps of fatty red tuna surrounded by rice....dessert was a bowl of snowy grapefruit granite, as clean, pure and exquisite as the seafood before it."
Wasn¹t the reviewer embarrassed to write so orgiastically about food NOW? Well, maybe he wrote it last week. So, where was the editor living? Was he reading the rest of the paper? Couldn't this story have been published later on...say, next month? Wasn't the editor of the Dining-In section looking the wrong way when he or she approved the torrid copy? How many readers of The Times can afford to go to Masa, anyway? How many were revolted by the excess? Is this news? I guess the answer to that is, yes. But...
Is it fit to print?
(Helen Abby Becker is a senior contributor to Earthtimesonline.com)