Film Food, Ready for Its ‘Bon Appetit’

Although movies have long relied on half-cooked turkeys colored with motor oil, fruit made of plastic, and ice cream carved from Crisco, food in film is increasingly edible and even delicious.

“Everybody thinks it’s all shellacked,” said Colin Flynn, a New York-based chef and stylist who worked with food stylist Susan Spungen on the film "Julie and Julia."

“In the ’70s and ’80s it was more like that. Food looked more like Plasticine. Nowadays it’s almost always real food.”

For food stylists, most of whom began as cooks, it’s a welcome change. It’s also good for audiences, who have become more sophisticated about food and expect more realistic images. And directors believe that well-prepared food can improve the actors’ performances and the look of the final scene.

“The challenge always is making it seem delicious and hyper-real,” said John Lyons, president of production for Focus Features. “If it doesn’t look hyper-real, it doesn’t work in the movie.” That means a dish needs to be fresh-looking and well-prepared to begin with, and then enhanced with a bit of oil here and a little fake steam there.

There are a thousand little ways to make it easy on the actors.. Parsley needs to be used sparingly so it doesn’t get stuck in teeth. Toast can’t be so toasty that it crunches too loudly. Low-fat options like apple slices need to be tucked on top of a high-calorie dish that an actor has to nibble on repeatedly.

Of course, there are plenty of times a food stylist has to employ tricks. Cherry pies are filled with mashed potatoes, poultry is partly roasted and painted with Kitchen Bouquet, glycerin and water make beads of sweat on glasses, and ice cream is wrapped around dry-ice nuggets so it won’t melt.

When Amy Adams, who plays blogger Julie Powell in the movie, drops a fruit Bavarian on the sidewalk, she is actually dropping a special breakaway mold filled with whipped cream and raspberry purée. And the stuffing in a chicken that she drops on her kitchen floor had to be doused in heavy cream so it splatted properly.

On the set of “Julie & Julia,” the lobsters posed a special challenge. Ms. Adams appears to plunge two live lobsters into a pot of steaming water. The steam is actually a cool mist, and just off camera representatives from the American Humane Association monitored the creatures’ health.

All of the effort paid off, Ms. Powell said. “The food is so much prettier than anything I ever made,” she said. “It’s like other aspects of watching your stuff go into the movie. It’s all much prettier than me.”

NY Times Editorial: The Death of Sharks

Summer comes and all of the old fears and myths about sharks reappear as we hit the beaches. Shark attacks, thankfully, are very rare. What humans ought to be fearful about is the survival of an essential species.

Humans kill 73 million sharks every year, nearly all for consumption, mainly in shark fin soup. The fins are cut off and the bodies dumped overboard, a barbaric practice known as finning. Commercial fishermen are taking more and more sharks for their meat as well.

Nearly a third of shark species in the open oceans are threatened with extinction. Losing these top predators creates a cascading imbalance. The species whose numbers the sharks once controlled begin to explode; they then wipe out smaller fish, some of which humans depend on for food. Water quality suffers. Healthy oceans require sharks, and without healthy oceans, healthy fisheries are impossible.Though the appetite for shark fin soup is greatest in Asia, the carnage is global. There are no international limits on the numbers of sharks that may be taken. At a recent meeting in Spain, regional fishing organizations agreed to begin collecting data and considering measures to conserve sharks. That is barely a beginning. What is needed is a global agreement to establish serious catch limits and end finning.

Washington is beginning to get the message. The House has approved a bill that would close several loopholes in a 2000 law banning finning in American waters. A similar bill has been introduced in the Senate. Passing it would give the United States the credibility to press globally for shark conservation. Shark fin soup is no reason to decimate a species or ruin the oceans.

Going past Ghana: What Obama can do in Congo

The U.S. must look beyond stable, democratic Africa to the nations torn by poverty, war and corruption. In Congo, that means a special envoy, more aid and help with a deal with China.

Now that President Obama has made his visit to Ghana, which represents stable, democratic Africa, attention also must be paid to the rest of the story: the countries gripped in misery, suffering from the results of foreign misuse and national bungling.

While Ghana, having transformed into a democracy after decades of turmoil, symbolizes the hope springing up in quite a few countries of sub-Saharan Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo in the heart of the continent is the perfect example of that other Africa.

The eastern region of Congo has been beset by civil wars for a decade, a horrifying symptom of breakdown through the entire government. About 5 million people have died from the violence and its side effects of malnutrition and disease, while more than 1 million have been made refugees.

The undisciplined Congolese army and the various militias combating it use rape as a weapon of war. As many as 200,000 women and girls have been violated, some mutilated to the point of death, in what is described as the world's worst episode of sexual violence.

A tragic illustration of deficiencies in mental health care in our country

Danny Watt once leapt from a moving train. He hurtled through the windshield of a rolling car. Got pummeled by drug dealers. Overdosed. Swallowed rat poison. Tried to hang himself.

In his tumultuous 21 years, Danny Watt danced with death in the most amazing, horrible ways. In the end, two college students spotted him facedown in the cold, murky water of the C&O Canal one afternoon in April 2008. The medical examiner said Danny had drowned.

It was an end that Danny's parents, Bobby and Mary Watt of Reston, had struggled to stave off for many years. But after refinancing their house three times to put their son in every substance abuse and mental health program imaginable, after going to countless meetings and hearings and hospitals and jails, after badgering every possible person in Fairfax County who might help them, they could not save Danny.

"We just went through so much for so long," said Mary Watt, breaking into tears. "We tried and tried for so many years, fighting, only to lose."




Danny Watt was a walking symbol of a phenomenon called co-occurring disorders, or dual diagnosis, which is estimated to affect 7 million adults in the United States.

These people are both seriously mentally ill and abusing drugs or alcohol. About half of all adults who are seriously mentally ill are also thought to be addicted. The mental health community calls this "self-medication." The federal government estimates that 90 percent of people with co-occurring disorders do not get the treatment they need.

At 110, Bay State's oldest resident is a marvel of longevity

I laughed when this woman compared current fashion to years past, and she really got me choked up when she talked about how the only thing she'd change in her long life was to have had her husband live longer. Delightful:

*Sigh*....The Minimalist strikes again

101 Simple Salads for the Season

Such as:

"Mix wedges of tomatoes and peaches, add slivers of red onion, a few red-pepper flakes and cilantro. Dress with olive oil and lime or lemon juice. Astonishing."

"Let me school you about preppies"

As a rule, I love this type of "prep analysis." Though laughably far from my own upbringing, I can admit to a slight obsession with preppy culture: See my devotion to Yankee Magazine, J.Crew and downhill skiing. But the guy makes a really good point about the show "NYC Prep," which I'm also ashamed to admit having watched. It really is a bunch of tacky rich kids waxing philosphic about casual sex, parties and the Hamptons.



The Globe's Sam Allis writes:

"The show has nothing to do with preppies. Real preppies would have nothing to
do with it. They’d be laughed out of New Canaan at the mere thought of
participating in it. Their parents would disown them. The kids in the show are
nouveaux riche airheads who talk endlessly about shopping. Think Valley Girls
and Boys moved east. What they have none of is class. Worse, this Bravo mess
(which airs Tuesdays at 9) misses the essence of preppy culture. The name
“preppy,’’ lest we forget, comes from prep schools. And prep schools are, in the
cultural sense I’m talking about, boarding schools - not country day or Upper
East Side privates. Preppies are timeless. Wait long enough, and they’re in
vogue again. They have never changed. Everyone else has. This speaks to a sense
of security on their part rather than a lack of imagination. Preppies gave
America the sport coat - an advance on par with the wheel - and pioneered the
blue blazer. They gave us khakis - and they really are pronounced like “car
keys’’ in Southie - along with polo jerseys, the two-button suit, button-down
collars, the list goes on. To dismiss this as preppy is to miss the point."

Ministry dog comforts the sick, sad, and lonely

Daily News Transcript goes weekly in October

According to the Globe, citing an anonymous source:

The Daily News Transcript in Dedham is reducing the frequency of its print publication from five days a week to one on Oct. 1, according to a person briefed on the decision, who requested anonymity.

Declining circulation and an advertising slump led to the decision to go weekly, but GateHouse Media Inc.,which owns the newspaper, plans no immediate layoffs, according to the source. Managers were told about the decision yesterday, but advertisers and staff have yet to be formally notified.

In May, GateHouse temporarily cut salaries by an average of 7.75 percent for most of its 1,500 New England employees. At the time, Rick Daniels, chief executive of GateHouse Media New England, said the recession had hurt advertising revenue at newspapers in major metropolitian markets in the Bay State, forcing it to pare costs at its New England Unit.

GateHouse owns more than 100 newspapers in the state, including the Patriot Ledger of Quincy. The parent company, which has acquired 416 newspapers nationwide since 1998, has reduced its workforce by 10 percent since the beginning of the year.

According to an estimate, the company has slashed 25 percent of its total staff in the last two years.GateHouse Media New England also closed seven publications in May, including the Plymouth Bulletin.

(Why wouldnt they go digital instead of weekly? They're basically already rehashing/reprinting Metrowest Daily News stuff, so how does going weekly make them better at what they do? The news will be even MORE stale than it is in a daily print pub).

With Help, Conductor and Wife Ended Lives

The controversy over the ethical and legal issues surrounding assisted suicide for the terminally ill was thrown into stark relief on Tuesday with the announcement that one of Britain’s most distinguished orchestra conductors, Sir Edward Downes, had flown to Switzerland last week with his wife and joined her in drinking a lethal cocktail of barbiturates provided by an assisted-suicide clinic.

Although friends who spoke to the British news media said Sir Edward was not known to have been terminally ill, they said he wanted to die with his ailing wife, who had been his partner for more than half a century.

The couple’s children said in an interview with The London Evening Standard that on Tuesday of last week they accompanied their father, 85, and their mother, Joan, 74, on the flight to Zurich, where the Swiss group Dignitas helped arrange the suicides. On Friday, the children said, they watched, weeping, as their parents drank “a small quantity of clear liquid” before lying down on adjacent beds, holding hands.

“Within a couple of minutes they were asleep, and died within 10 minutes,” Caractacus Downes, the couple’s 41-year-old son, said in the interview after his return to Britain. “They wanted to be next to each other when they died.” He added, “It is a very civilized way to end your life, and I don’t understand why the legal position in this country doesn’t allow it.”

Thoughts on this?

Survivors of Attacks Sink Teeth Into Fight to Save Sharks

At least nine survivors plan to press the Senate to put new restrictions on fishing for sharks, some species of which are in deep decline.

Thirty-two percent of the sharks and rays that live in the open ocean were classified as "threatened" this year by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Scientists fear that ocean ecosystems could be knocked out of whack by the loss of their "apex" predators.

The nine shark survivors offer a wildly counterintuitive story. For them, the terrifying seconds they spent as prey have created a forgiving, even admiring, bond with the ocean's great hunters.

They are here to lobby for a Senate bill that would outlaw shark "finning" -- a practice in which fishermen slice off a shark's fin and toss the rest of its carcass overboard -- in U.S. waters.

The bill has already passed the House and has the support of federal fisheries managers, who say it would make existing shark protections easier to enforce.

It will not save the world's shark populations; scientists say finning is largely done by overseas fishing crews. In the United States, it is already outlawed in the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf, and is largely curtailed in the Pacific.

Mike DeGruy, 57, a marine biologist who was bitten by a grey reef shark while diving in the Pacific Ocean atoll of Enewetak in 197, said his experience gave him an appreciation of what it is like to be a shark -- seriously injured and left helpless in the water.

"We've been finned," he said of his injuries. "It's not a good thing."

Say it ain't so: Yolanda's closing??

The Boston Globe is reporting:

Dress diva Yolanda Cellucci is shutting the doors of her famed Waltham bridal shop next month, after 41 years in business.

Cellucci, 74, said she is selling the property to local developers and closing Yolanda's Bridal Salon to spend more time with her family. The Newton native launched the company in Belmont in 1968 with only seven dresses and a handful of wigs. She has grown the company to more than $5 million sales with a full beauty and health salon and event center.

"My family had been leaning on me to spend more time with them," said Cellucci, who is a cousin of former Massachusetts Governor Paul Cellucci. "I decided it was the right time."

Yolanda's closing sale is scheduled to start next week, with discounts of between 50 and 75 percent, and run until the store closes at the end of August.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg and a question of eugenics

After the Supreme Court justice's comments in a recent interview, I would like to know if she believes some populations are in need of shrinking through abortion.

Here's what Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in Sunday's New York Times Magazine: "Frankly I had thought that at the time [Roe vs. Wade] was decided," Ginsburg told her interviewer, Emily Bazelon, "there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of."

The comment, which bizarrely elicited no follow-up from Bazelon or any further coverage from the New York Times -- or any other major news outlet -- was in the context of Medicaid funding for abortion.

Ginsburg was surprised when the Supreme Court in 1980 barred taxpayer support for abortions for poor women. After all, if poverty partly described the population you had "too many" of, you would want to subsidize it in order to expedite the reduction of unwanted populations.

Left unclear is whether Ginsburg endorses the eugenic motivation she ascribed to the passage of Roe vs. Wade or whether she was merely objectively describing it. Regardless, Ginsburg's certainly right that abortion has very deep roots in the historic effort to "weed out" undesired groups.

For instance, Margaret Sanger, the revered feminist and founder of Planned Parenthood, was a racist eugenicist of the first order. Even more perplexing: She's become a champion of "reproductive freedom" even though she proposed a "Code to Stop Overproduction of Children," under which "no woman shall have a legal right to bear a child without a permit." (Poor blacks would have had a particularly hard time getting such licenses from Sanger.)

I for one would like to know whether Ginsburg believes there were -- or are -- some populations in need of shrinking through abortion and whether she thinks such considerations have any place at the Supreme Court.

And while we're at it, it would be interesting to know what Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor thinks about such things.