Last
week some 200 people experienced that special Cronut feeling: nausea, vomiting,
and stomach cramps. It came with the condiment that goes on top of Cronut
burgers: Maple bacon jam. Yup, it’s exactly what it sounds like: a mush of
bacon, syrup, and sugar. According to the Wikipedia, a condiment is an edible
substance that adds flavor to food. Time to update that definition. It’s an
inedible substance that adds flab to your body.
Of
course you can’t expect Wikipedia to keep up with the newest trend in monster
foods. For that you have to go to Bizarre Foods America on travelchannel.com,
and Andrew Zimmern will make sure you are up on goat dumplings and bleeding
stones. No, I’m not talking about the state of your kidneys after eating Cronut
burgers. I’m talking about Chilean seafood, Pyura Chilensis. Check out this bottom-feeder
on scientificamerican.com. It looks like
a bleeding stone but the edible part is Pyurean snot made up of digested micro
algae. Lost your appetite? Ready for a special diet?
If
you want to lose both weight and money, visit the Ray & Stark Bar in Los
Angeles and study their elegant water menu, curated by Martin Riese. For $ 12
you can sip a selection of waters from tiny tasting glasses. Or you can fork
over $ 20 for a bottle of Berg – harvested from the glacial waters of Greenland
under the strictest standards of purity. Or you can pay $ 15 for California’s
own Beverly Hills 90H20, a designer water produced in a limited edition and served
in individually numbered bottles.
I
just hope that Ray & Stark will open a branch bar on the Champs-Elysees –
no, not the one in Paris, but its namesake on the main drag of Za-atari, a
refugee camp in Jordan (NYer 26 August).
The shops on the boulevard already offer shawarma, chicken, pizza,
coffee and tea, but they are missing the big thing: western decadence. How can they ever become first-world citizens
without designer water?