Elitist magazines and weird people even closer to home...

A cooking magazine comes to me each month, and it has really wonderful recipes...well, some of them are.  Lots of the ingredients are either unavailable here or are things nothing would induce me to place in my mouth--fish sauce, for example, pretty run-of-the-mill these days but still horrible.  I'm not nuts about fish in its fresh form, much less some kind of fermented extract of rotten fish.

That isn't why the magazine gets on my nerves, though.  It is an elitist magazine, filled with pictures of young folks at the height of their profession, rolling in money, enjoying a dinner party;  or at so-and-so restaurant you are assured that the clients are part of the "fashionable crowd", complete with a picture of someone fashionable: a gal with hair that may have been washed this year, but we aren't sure, and wearing something that could have come from a thrift shop.  Everything she has on probably costs more than my car, but my car sure looks better.  There is something repulsive in this too-cute groveling at the foot of money and expensive eats when people I know just a few blocks away are having a hard time buying healthy food for their kids.  The recipes from said magazine that get to my inbox are often very good, as long as you aren't put off by the silly, inane banter of whoever is responsable for the write-ups.  It isn't the dedication to good food and innovative recipes I object to, it is the self-congratulatory note about how sophisticated we are and the chef name-dropping.  One of the reason Bobby Flay (yes, I dropped his name!!) is so great is that he likes family-style serving in his own home, the kind that avoids the three strings of something green placed with geometric precision to the left of an unidentified sauce (three drops of it) in a main dish you suspect won't have enough calories to allow you to leave the restaurant with energy to spare.  (I have to admit, though, that even funnier than said main courses are t.v. shows that have the chef bending low over his plating, almost touching it with his nose, while with a pair of tweezers he puts a quarter-olive on top of an inch of meat that rests on a thimbleful of sauce.)

Dragging myself to the vet's today on foot to buy dog food, I encountered a running-park acquaintance who asked about my Spinone, who is going back to his breeder on Saturday due to an allergy which can't be successfully treated here.  I never should have opened my mouth--if "live and learn" is true, I'll be dead before that ever happens.  Turns out he is a homeopathic practitioner, and he launched into a speech about how he could cure my dog, how vets know nothing, how commercial dog food, even the specialized kind my dogs eat, is worse than dirt, and my dogs should be eating everything totally raw.  To say that this is controversial still is an understatement in spite of the current trend to give dogs raw meat and raw vegetables and raw bones and raw shoes. 

The guy then went on to say he could cure my fibromyalgia too.  I looked him up on Google once I got home but he does not appear.  He has no office, does homeopathic housecalls, and must make a mint.  I don't really know why these people surprise me again and again.  Considering that nine percent of surveyed folks think the disappeared Malaysian airliner was taken by aliens, and about half of Americans surveyed think the Ukraine is in the U.S., my little sugar pill proponent is on the low end of overall nuttiness. 

Maybe my problem is some kind of unsuspected, unconscious optimism about people that keeps popping up....I could have sworn I'm a realist.