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Elitist food? Cindy McCain’s Passion Fruit Mousse

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Perhaps if McCain shared the free ride he gets from the press, it would help out with gas prices. (Hat tip Media Matters)

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  2. i guess they’re trying to appeal to the sexy set. now that they know they’ve lost the xtian righties by spurning hagee and parsley, guess they might as well go all the way in the opposite direction.  next up:  John’s Jellineck Clam Bake!  it takes buy a sprig of parsley to garnish…

  3. stick a passion fruit or 4 in a blender and hit the puree button?  

    <

    p>Full disclosure:  I’m not much of a cook.

    • then you get lots of little seeds blended in.  Joe that just isn’t done, daaahling.

    • I had to visit three markets before finding at Whole Foods the small, purple Australian variety of the exotic fruit. Only after returning home with the produce did I learn, via an Internet search, that pureeing seed-heavy passion fruits should not be left to amateurs such as me.

      • “such as I”?  amateur indeed!  anyone who has to root around retail outlets clearly isn’t qualified in life, let alone the culinary arts, daahling!  breeding does tell!

        • It shouldn’t be left to people such as me or it shouldn’t be left to me.

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          p>People overuse “I” in an ungrammatical attempt to sound elegant.

            • Myself continues to dominate me

              If you were someone such as myself, wouldn’t you, too, wish to dominate someone like me?  Why let the beast rule the beauty?  And whither grammaticalisciousness?

              <

              p>Let us try a few test sentences:
              ‘Rage is difficult to contain in someone such as myself’, said John.

              <

              p>’People like me don’t like people like me’, mused Cindy.

              <

              p>I see merit to both modes of expression, don’t you?

          • to sound elegant is to be elegant.  what are they teaching in the schools these days?!

  5. These are recipes by Cindy, Michelle and Hillary.  Why did Bill contribute something?  I’m sure he’s got a knockout roofie coolata.  

    • I was about to tut-tut Sabutai for the joke about McCain’s age, but you reminded me why I don’t do that anymore.

      • Were they making the assumption that only women do the cooking?   Isn’t this race supposed to break the old social models?  If they wanted to have the recipes of the would-be first spouses, Bill should have contributed.

  6. I googled for 10 seconds and found that a place called Perfect Puree of Napa Valley makes and ships this stuff, in California.

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    p>Whole Foods might be a good place to buy exepnsive, organic food, but isn’t necessarily a good place to buy fancy food.  I expect that this would be on the shelf at Savenor’s on Beacon Hill.  In any event, I’m pretty sure that I have seen passion fruit concentrate frozen at Whole Foods, and you might be able to fudge a substitute.

    <

    p>_______________________________________

    <

    p>In any event, it amazes me how often simply miss the point of why and how elitism is offensive.  They always, always think that wealth and class = elitism.  I guess it is, as elitism is defined by liberals, but this just demonstrates why liberals live somewhere other than Planet America.

    <

    p>On Planet America, nobody cares that some people are wealthy, and act accordingly.  Maybe one day we’ll be wealthy, or our kids will, and we’ll act that way too.  Meanwhile, let’s take junior out to shoot his first buck.  What ticks them off is when someone wealthy sneers at them for their own culture, for example, because they cling dully to their guns and religion…

    <

    p>Liberals seem to cling to a European “labor” sense of class, in which the working class seethes with bitter resentment at all things toff.

    <

    p>Thus, there are repeated attempts at Gotcha! See that rich elitist Republican! that fall utterly and completely flat.
    Likewise, they’re frustrated when their protests that Politician X can’t be elitist because his mom was on food stamps are met with blank stares and incomprehension.

    <

    p>_______________________________________

    <

    p>It might be the case that liberals offer policies that are in the financial interests of Middle America, but the sad fact is that liberals have allowed a vast cultural chasm to open between many of themselves and much of middle America.

    <

    p>Indeed, I think the rift that these primaries have exposed has more to do with this cultural chasm than it does with either race or gender.  This isn’t a new problem in the Democratic Party, but it seems particularly acute this cycle.  To the extent that one can reduce liberal Democrats to stereotypes, the Whole Foods shopping folks from Cambridge/Marin County/Ann Arbor have gone for Obama, and the families that spend their free time paint balling, riding ATVs, or teaching the kids how to hunt have gone for Hillary.

    <

    p>Obama is the presumptive nominee, and he is going to need to find a way to reach across that chasm if he is going to be anything more than a candidate.  That is going to be hard to do.  If he really is as advertised, and can come up with a way of building permanent bridges across that divide, he will have done his party a great service.

    • The point though is that we have no evidence of Obama looking down his nose at anyone. The media and Republican operatives use these preferences (orange juice and arugula) as signs that liberals are sneering or will sneering — or maybe will think about sneering when alone in the shower.

      <

      p>So ingrained is this narrative that it doesn’t require actual sneering to gain confirmation. All it takes is an order for green tea.

      • I don’t disagree with that, but this narrative doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but has been cultivated carefully at least since 1968.

        <

        p>Pretty sure I saw a sneer though.

        • (I could have mentioned David Brooks’ Applebee mistake too.)

          <

          p>To my mind what this narrative seems to miss is some of the cultural change that has happened quietly in the U.S. In the 1950s, no guy would be seen eating a salad for lunch. That was ladies’ food! Chinese food was somewhat exotic. Even Italian food was perceptibly “foreign”.

          <

          p>Now we have a great explosion of taste and a big relaxation of the pressure to conform, to be some kind of “normal” American.  There are Americans from every social stratum now who drink green tea — for its health benefits or because they have some special association with Japan. Americans have tried all sorts of diets. It has become normal to do so. Passion fruit puree may be difficult to find at Stop & Shop, but a huge variety of Americans enjoy sushi.

          <

          p>So it seems very odd to me that these food choices are being taken up by the media as a coded sign of sneering. Why aren’t they instead signs of being an American in the post-cellphone era?

          • and the backlash reaction thereto.

            <

            p>I don’t think it is a secret or a myth that there is a cultural divide between coastal, campus liberals and churchgoing middle America, and that it had its beginnings in the over-reactions and counter-over-reactions of the 60s.  Media loves conflict, and will be ready to pounce on Democrats on this “issue” at any time.  The problem is that-despite protestations to the contrary– it is not a myth, but has a grain of truth, and therefore gains traction easily.  Dems would do better to stop complaining about the phenomenon and just trim sail accordingly.

            <

            p>I don’t think the phenomenon afflicts Democrats exclsuively.  Romney was killed on elitist grounds.  Remember when he tried to talk about hunting varmints?  George H.W. Bush was as well: think pork rinds.  Poeple can sniff out a faker from either party.  I do think it afflicts Democrats more because Republicans don’t have– at least to date– such a large cultural divide within their party.  (This may be about to change if they catch an old fashioned beating this November).

            <

            p>Politicians from either party who possess that rare gift of pure political skill are almost entirely immune from the charge:  see Reagan and Bill Clinton.  

            • Your last comment lends confirmation that this stuff is just theater criticism and doesn’t reflect anything substantial — not absence or presence of sneering, of empathy, or of ability.

              • Always was, always will be.

                <

                p>POliticians who are unwilling or unable to understand that politics is like 99.5% theater are ineffective politicians.

                <

                p>See, Carter, James, or, far more relevantly, Patrick, Deval, thoroughly stalled over “insubstantial” issues.

                <

                p>Failed politicians don’t get their superduper policies enacted, no matter how wonderful they might be.

                • I might be wrong about you, but I pick up that you want politicians to provide you good theater, i.e., theater that you, CentralMassDad, enjoy. That’s a difficult matter given your frequent aversion to how liberals talk or to anything reminiscent of 1968.

                  <

                  p>But there are two other questions:

                  1. What kind of theater appeals to public opinion, i.e. where N > 1? Does the Reagan era disdain for the sixties persist?
                  2. Is the theater and our perception of it being distorted? Recent revelations indicate is a fair question. One is reminded of NBC’s policy (!) of allowing no lone, uncontested liberals to appear on the Donahue show before its demise. There’s evidence of there being a lot of hands on the scales.

            • In the 60s, men wearing their hair long was this really rebellious thing. Now its just one of many ways men cut their hair. Lots of Disney movies about how non-conforming cuties expressed their true selves in the face of disapproval and became successes have undercut a lot of the cultural divisions. That’s the new narrative now.

              <

              p>Enjoy your green tea.

      • Where the hell did that one come from? How can good ol’ American orange juice be “elitist”?

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