I never expected this.

All my life I thought of Australian males as icons of masculinity.

You know what I mean. They could always perform. In bars. In bed. For all we knew, in scrums.

Now we find out it isn't so.

An Australian oyster farmer in the village of Patonga Beach, located just north of Sydney, has started feeding Viagra to his oysters.

Among his patented names for them is Sydney Rock Hard Oysters—and he's not talking about the shell.

And I always thought that men living down under never needed help getting it up.

Got a beef with Alan Richman?
In need of food-and-wine advice? E-mail him at AlanRichman@GQ.com. He’ll respond each week right here on ‘Forked’

Floyd Norris, the well-regarded financial writer for The New York Times, made a fascinating—and totally weird—point in his column recently.

He claimed that fashionable clubs charging as much as $1,600 for a bottle of Champagne, and grossing as much as $12,000 per night from a single table of revelers, are in effect helping to redistribute the wealth in America.

In the old days, he pointed out, the U.S. Government assumed that task with confiscatory federal income taxes that took as much as 91 percent of the money that the very rich earned.

Today, the tax rate is way down. So, he says, money that went from the rich to the general public by means of taxes now has to make its way down through the efforts of private enterprise. Interesting idea.

He wrote that "outrageously priced drinks at fancy clubs can be seen as simply taking money from those with too much of it, and passing it on to others."

I swear, this was not tongue-in-cheek. I looked for tongue-in-cheek. I know that tongue-in-cheek isn't what New York Times columnists do best, but I was hoping he wasn't serious.

I think he was.

He never did say who gets this redistributed income. He simply said that those are who receive it "may not be the most deserving."

Unfortunately, his column stopped there. If he had continued, he might have revealed a fundamental truth about life in modern America. Let's carry on from where he left off.

It is the club owners who benefit? To some extent, yes, but the ridiculous establishments they operate are notoriously short-lived, and it's more likely the owners are in it for notoriety rather than profit.

Is it the staff? Are you kidding? Nobody cares about the working man today. The waiters and busboys might earn a few extra dollars in gratuities when swells buy those $1000 bottles of wine, but we all know that club owners have come up with all manner of ugly schemes to retain a great deal of the tip money for themselves.

Who is left?

You should know. Who hangs out in these clubs? Who shows shows up trailing a posse of freeloaders? Who expects to pay nothing?

Celebrities, of course. Britney. Paris. So many others.

More and more, it is celebrities who benefit from all of our largesse. They get all that America has to offer.

Redistribution of wealth to them is only one of a multitude of perks that come their way. After all, Lindsay Lohan can't be spending her own money on booze—she needs it to pay for rehab.

Got a beef with Alan Richman?
In need of food-and-wine advice? E-mail him at AlanRichman@GQ.com. He’ll respond each week right here on ‘Forked’

An Irish pub in Florida did what Irish pubs always do—pulled a silly gag. It got in trouble with (1) the law, and (2) women. Hard to know which is less merciful.

At McGuire's Irish Pub in Destin, the signs on the bathroom are deliberately misleading. The one for the men's room reads LADIES in big type and then something tiny underneath, saying they shouldn't enter because it's actually the men's room. (The converse joke is posted on the men's room door.)

For many years, nobody complained. Some folks even smiled, but perhaps all of them were drunk at the time.

One day recently, according to reports, a 15-year old girl mistakenly entered the men's room and a young fellow walked in shortly afterward. She exited the restaurant crying. A man who claimed to be her father filed a complaint with Florida's Department of Business and Professional Regulation, and the joke signs were ordered down. (Later a compromise was reached, so the signs could be put back up.)

Women like to say there is no difference between the sexes, that we should all be treated alike.

They're wrong. I cannot think of a single man who would be horrified if a woman entered a public bathroom while he was in there, regardless of what he was doing.

I admit that I'm not the savviest guy where women are concerned. I don't know much about them. I don't even understand what there was about this experience that would make a woman, even a teenager, cry.

I asked some female friends.

One wrote back to me, "Obviously it is not a modesty issue, since all the practical stuff happens behind closed doors. I suspect the real reason is that we're all in there talking about the men we're having dinner with."

Another said, "Because men pee on the floor and leave the seat up. And, you know, there's the weird way that men pee—women don't get that."

And, a third: "In general, ladies' rooms are more like a sanctuary, whereas for men they're utilitarian. It's where pairs of women go mid-dinner to discuss dates and effect necessary cosmetic repairs. Nobody likes to get caught in deshabile, physical or emotional, by a bumbling and usually drunk intruder."

In summation, this is what I discovered: Women think of men as inconsiderate alcoholics who relieve themselves in an incomprehensible and clumsy manner.

They may be right, but I don't like their attitude. Come to think of it, I don't want them in our bathrooms. Men are sensitive, too, and we have our own rituals, the most sacred of which is standing side-by-side at urinals. If women are going to feel that way, I don't want them peeing next to me.

Got a beef with Alan Richman?
In need of food-and-wine advice? E-mail him at AlanRichman@GQ.com. He’ll respond each week right here on ‘Forked’

The parents of an eight-year-old girl who found a bag of marijuana, a pipe, and a lighter in a McDonald's Happy Meal have threatened to sue.

To their credit as parents, it appears the child did not understand what she had found.

According to her mother, she said, "Mom, I have a lighter in my Happy Meal." Later she told her father she found two other "toys" in the box.

The parents were unhappy, as they should have been.

Then the mother went too far. She said, "That could have changed our entire lives."

They said they were bothered by having to deal with their daughter's confusion, and with the possibility of getting pulled over by the police while they carried the drug in their car to school.

What nonsense.

Here's what they should have done, step by step. (Sometimes parents need help with the difficult business of child-rearing.)

1. They should have said to their seemingly darling child, "Oh, that shouldn't be in there, sweetie. Let me get you another Happy Meal."

2. Either tossed the whole Happy Meal in the garbage or taken it to the manager and quietly turned it over to him.

Instead, the police and television stations got involved. And their lives indeed were changed.

It seems the paraphernalia was placed in the box by 17-year-old Brandon Scott, an employee. He admitted that he had done something wrong.

There's a kid whose parents brought him up right.

Sam is a 17-year old kid I've known forever, at least as far as he's concerned. He's the rarest of all human beings, a rational teenager, and he works summers as a supermarket clerk, an occupation that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, which is what I consider most of them. I would never patronize supermarkets, except that I have this nagging need to eat.

Sam and I sit around now and then, swapping supermarket stories, like a couple of coots around a pot-bellied stove in Maine. Just last week he was telling me about the guy who made him go outside three times because he needed help with a balky bottle-redemption machine. After he finally got his 15 cents, he drove away in a Jaguar.

I live in New York's Westchester Country, where the two supermarkets closest to me are an A&P and a Stop & Shop. My latest moments of supermarket torment came at the so-called courtesy desks of these emporiums of evil.

At the A&P, the Entenmann's loaf cakes were on sale. High up was a sign that gave the sale price and an indication that it referred to "assorted" varieties. Under the sign was a shelf of loaf cakes, including the Ultimate Sour Cream Chocolate Chunk Loaf. The Entenmann's Company refers to this as an "ultimate delight." How could anyone in the mood for junk food resist?

I took one. At the check-out line, it rang up full price. I took it to the "courtesy desk," where the fellow in charge insisted this particular loaf cake didn't qualify. He said "assorted" meant that only some of them were on sale. It was such a stupid comment I stupidly got into an argument with him. I couldn't help myself.

I asked the manager what he thought. He stood there dumbfounded, this leader of men, unable to come to a decision. I gave up and left the Ultimate Sour Cream Chocolate Chunk Loaf behind. At least my cardiologist would have been pleased.

A few days later I was in Stop & Shop. Strip steaks were on sale, but there were no strip steaks. I bought something in their place, and stopped at the courtesy desk on the way out for one of those so-called rain checks. In theory, I'd get the steaks another day at the sale price.

The clerk called the meat department. She was told the strip steaks were now in the meat case. She refused to give me a rain check, saying that rules prohibited giving a rain check for an item that was available. I told her I'd already checked out and purchased something else. No good. She refused to give me a rain check.

Again I talked to the manager. This guy at least agreed with me that his rule was dumb, although I never did get the rain check.

I asked Sam, defender of supermarkets, what he thought.

He took my side, although he thought the problem was about people, not the places where they work.

He said, wisely, "I don't think people want to admit that other people are right."

I've given up on the A&P, which is a pretty crummy store, anyway. I admit I still go there now and then to pick up Tastykakes, the ultimate treat of my Philadelphia childhood. I now shop at Stop & Shop, where the odds are 50-50 that I won't have to deal with an idiot, instead of at A&P, where it's guaranteed.

A follow-up story on the death of St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Josh Hancock in an automobile accident mentioned that he had a blood-alcohol level of .157, almost twice the state of Missouri's limit of .08 percent for persons operating a vehicle.

The final paragraph in the Associated Press story read: "Last Friday, the team announced that it had banned alcohol from the clubhouse."

Am I the only person who thought, "Why would they allow alcohol in a baseball clubhouse in the first place?"

Maybe steroids aren't the most dangerous problem in the major leagues.

I've known Sam since he was a baby. I wheeled him through New York's Upper West Side when he was a toddler. I treated him to his first restaurant hamburger.

He's 17 now, old enough to make smart decisions.

So you might understand my disappointment when he told me he had just gotten a part-time job as a supermarket cashier.

All I could do was sputter. "Why? Why? Why?" It's terrible when the children you love go bad.

Some people cross the street on dark nights when they see gangs of youths carrying semi-automatic weapons walking their way. As for me, I'll do anything to avoid getting in a checkout line at a supermarket.

I've started going to a local Stop & Shop because it has a few self-service checkout lines. They don't work particularly well. They have mechanical voices that criticize me constantly. I'm not scanning quickly enough. I've caused a bottleneck at the end of the belt. I haven't put my coupon in the used coupon slot. (Yes I have!)

Still, I prefer mechanized cashiers to the real ones. They never smile. They snap if you slide your credit card in those little scanning devises the wrong way, which I always do. They yell to hurry up and push the button that says "credit" or "debit." They carp if you lay your coupons on the moving belt. If you've saved $2.73 by buying specials-of-the-week, they humiliate you by saying as loud as they can, "Your savings today was two dollars and seventy-three cents." I'm always looking around to see if somebody I know is sneering at me.

I asked Sam if he was like every other supermarket cashier, intent only on tormenting hapless customers.

He said he always tried to smile, have fun, and chat. And he surprised me by saying that being a cashier was such a difficult job that he preferred being a bagger.

"The time goes faster," he said.

He told me that to be a cashier he had to undergo three weeks of training and take a two-hour test. For that he gets $8 an hour. (Even bloggers make more than that.)

He said he puts up with a lot. Monotony. Standing in one place. Customers trying to get something for free if they've had to wait too long in line. Customers yelling at him for not starting the conveyor belt moving at the perfect moment. Customers who don't bother using those little plastic dividers and then complain if part of their order gets confused with that of the person in front of them.

"They get mad and say, 'I thought you had the common sense to know that was part of my order, not hers.' It's stressful. Everybody is in a rush, and very seldom does everything go smoothly. Everything is so specific there's always something to throw off the checkout process. Something goes wrong. Always."

He said the worst customers were those who made a call on their cellphones when they got in line and continued to talk while checking out.

I countered.

"How about the cashiers who ignore customers and chat with the baggers?"

"I do that sometimes," he admitted. "I guess that could be annoying."

We finally got to the most essential point, the clash that inevitably occurs between teenage cashier and aging customer. I told him so much attitude was more than I could take.

"I think we know that as teenagers, we're supposed to be mean," he said. "It's the reputation teenagers have, so we think it's acceptable to be that way. We know we can get away with it—because we're teenagers, we're allowed to be pissed off all the time."

It's inevitable.

I imagine the title of the book will be something like, The Staff Ace Super Diet.

Appearances on The Today Show. A million copies in print. Gushing newspaper stories that begin, "After an 18-13 season in which he attributed his success to dining on pasta made 'with some kind of cheese or something,' pitcher Barry Zito of the San Francisco Giants reveals his secrets in a best-selling diet book."

Why is Barry Zito's new diet making news?

Because he has a $126 million contract, and in this country, anything that monied people say is considered newsworthy, even if they don't know what they're talking about.

Rich people on the subject of diets might not be quite as insignificant as celebrities on world peace, but it's close.

Zito's diet is prepared for him by Chris Talley, described as an aerospace physiologist. I'm not sure what a person has to do to call himself an aerospace physiologist, but if all an aerospace physiologist does is make fake pasta for pitchers, it can't be the most demanding job around. Remember that phrase, "it's not like rocket science"? I guess maybe being a rocket scientist isn't such a big deal after all.

Tally's company, Precision Food Works, sends boxes of precisely weighed, preservative-free, computerized meals to Zito. He says his favorite item is the chocolate cherry muffin. "So good," he exclaims.

Adds Zito, "There's this pasta he makes with spinach and some kind of cheese or something. It looks and tastes like pasta but it's actually not a carbohydrate. It's really good."

It contains egg whites and spinach powder.

Why, that's almost like food.

Tally also espouses an amino acid suppliment that he claims will enhance mental clarity. In effect, it makes your brain light up.

Remember when all the San Francisco Giants had to worry about was what Barry Bonds was putting in his body?

A coyote walked into a Quiznos sub shop in downtown Chicago last week and took a seat atop a stack of sodas.

(It was removed shortly afterward by animal control officers.)

It made me wonder about the habits of coyotes, and I looked to Wikipedia for answers.

Could it be that the coyote felt at home among typical fast food restaurant customers?

Unlikely. Says Wikipedia, "The coyote is an extremely lean animal and may appear underfed."

Maybe it was hoping to chat up some of the younger patrons.

That makes sense. Says Wikipedia, "The calls a coyote makes are high-pitched and variously described as howls, yips, yelps, and barks."

Could it have been a connoisseur of fast food?

Possibly. Says Wikipedia, "They commonly eat deer excrement during winter months in northern climates."

WCBSTV.com, the website of channel 2, the CBS affiliate in New York City, just labeled former New York mayor and probable presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani "out of touch" for not knowing the cost of bread or milk.

Yesterday, Giuliani said a gallon of milk cost about $1.50, and a loaf of bread about $1.25 or $1.30.

It proves almost conclusively that he does not shop for food.

Seeking out and reporting such alleged character flaws is apparently how one of our major news outlets intends to evaluate candidates for president.

Meanwhile, CBS did not label President George W. Bush "out of touch" for not knowing the cost of human life.

I'm not saying that Sergeant William Fritters—well, now he's ex-Sergeant Fritters—of the Evansville, Wisconsin, police department demonstrated the best possible judgment. Not as an officer or as a citizen. But it seems to me all he needs is a good lawyer and a sympathetic jury of his peers.

Ex-Sgt. Fritters, while off-duty, allegedly sold an alcoholic concoction he had personally prepared to a couple of local bars. He was charged with two counts of selling intoxicating liquor without a license, which is a misdemeanor, and resigned from the force.

According to police, ex-Sgt. Fritters made a home brew known as Apple Pie Everclear, almost certainly using apple cider, cinnamon, sugar, and either 151- or 190-proof unflavored grain alcohol, which is sold under the brand name Everclear. A 750 ML bottle of the 190-proof stuff—that's 95 percent ethyl alcohol—usually goes for less than $20.

Poor Ex-Sgt. Fritters. He bought the grain alcohol at a local store. He labored over a hot stove. He bottled his concoction himself. He delivered it to the back door of two local bars. He made a profit of about $3 per bottle.

He sold 24 bottles monthly, earning $72.

A hardworking, mostly honest man, wouldn't you agree?

The thing is that Ex-Sgt. Fritters didn't operate a still. He wasn't producing untaxed alcohol. He bought the alcohol legally, cooked up something with it, re-sold it. I figure the $72 a month he made didn't even pay his labor costs.

A good lawyer might argue that there is no real difference between an enterprising off-duty cop making a grain alcohol beverage and selling it to a bar and an devout granny making a rum-laden plum pudding and selling it at a church fair.

Most important, ex-Sgt. Fritters was desperate. The poor guy supposedly told the arresting officers that he had "just gone through a divorce and lost his house, car, and all his money."

His lawyer should insist on a trial, and demand a jury comprised entirely of other desperate divorced men.

Not only will they find him innocent, they should give him a commendation for selling the stuff instead of drinking it.

An eighth-grader who bought a bag of barbecue-flavored potato chips in a school lunch line ripped open the bag and found a dead mouse inside.

Good thing he looked before he ate, because I can't see how barbecue-flavored chips and barbecue-flavored rodent would taste much different.

The boy, apparently, was shaken up. "He was pale and lost his appetite," a spokesperson for Lewis-Palmer Middle School in Monument, Colorado, said.

The school is pretty sure it wasn't a prank thought up by the boy.

The Frito-Lay company said it would investigate, but that it has a rigorous quality control program.

So who might have done it?

I'd applaud if it turned out to be the school nutritionist.

Finally, the discovery of an effective way to wean kids off junk food.

You'll think I got this wrong, but I did not.

A recent story in the New York Times extolled the virtues of rats as dining companions, at least compared to other vermin.

To be fair, this was on the op-ed page, not the food pages, and the op-ed page is where newspapers bravely present alternative points of view. The story, by Steven A. Shaw, a respected food writer, makes the point that rats in restaurants are "more a distraction than a disaster for public health."

This story, of course, was in response to the recent widespread photographs of rats, overcome with nocturnal bliss, taking over a Taco Bell/KFC outlet in New York's Greenwich Village.

To me, it sounds as though Shaw has lost a little perspective. Maybe he likes those cheesy bean & rice burritos a little too much. Perhaps you would like to know a few of the dangers to public health that he feels are worse than rampaging rats:

Flies.
Pigs.
Sheep.
Cows.
Home cooking.

That last one, according to Shaw, seems to be the most hazardous of all. Next time you're invited home for dinner, tell mom to wash her hands, clean her cutting boards, roast her chicken to dryness, burn the meat loaf, and put that dripping steak she bought on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator so blood doesn't dribble onto her tuna casserole.

I get it now: Rats don't harm people. Mothers harm people.

Part of my job is to come up with interesting food descriptions, which is not as easy as it sounds. There simply aren't that many colorful ways to say "the chef drizzled aioli over the garbanzo beans."

So whenever I find an individual who is a master of food talk, I like to give him credit. Such a fellow is Chief Deputy Jimmy Apodaca of the El Paso County Sheriff's office.

A reporter for the El Paso Times, Daniel Borunda, was kind enough to pass along a press release consisting of a single quote from Apodaca. It concerned weevils found in noodles intended for inmates.

When any of us go out to eat in the lesser restaurants of New York and find weevils in our noodles, or, for that matter, cockroaches in our coq au vin, we're fortunate if the joint takes the dish back and doesn't charge us for it.

In the El Paso prison system, when such an event occurs, officials leap into action. The weevils were discovered as lunch was being prepared. According to the Chief Deputy, this is what happened next:

"When we learned of the discovery of the inferior food component we immediately took action and removed the food items."

That's what they call weevils down in tough-talking Texas, inferior food components.

I wonder what they've started calling gunshot wounds?

My guess: Aerated Human Exteriors.

Two ounces of pot and $200 was found in the mashed potatoes served to a jailer at the Leflore County Jail in Greenwood, Mississippi. He was suspected of having the marijuana smuggled in so he could distribute it to inmates.

Apparently, officials became suspicious after the jailer, Robert Earl Hannon, had a large serving of potatoes delivered to him after he said that he didn't eat potatoes.

More proof that Mississippi is not known for its criminal masterminds.

In a really dumb column, a writer for The New York Times failed to excoriate a woman who wants Girl Scout cookies banned as a threat to our national health.

He did say the woman was "slightly obsessed." Otherwise, he treated her with kindness and respect. He even said, "…is it really so nutty to ask if the Girl Scouts need to be in the business of selling 200 million boxes of cookies a year?…"

Yes, that is a nutty question to ask if you're a columnist for The New York Times.

The woman, who lives in New Jersey, has a website she calls National Action Against Obesity. Check it out.

There you'll find a cartoon of a Girl Scout pulling a wagon filled with cookies standing at the door of a house. The little girl looks like Chucky's sister.

That level of thoughtfulness got her a guest appearance on Bill O'Reilly's show. A guy like him I expect to pay attention to a nut like her.

Not The New York Times.

I will concede this: Girl Scouts sell a lot of cookies. The cookies might even make people fat.

But don't blame the Girl Scouts.

If that's the way we're going to go about solving America's obesity problem, lets lock up the Amish, who sell those greasy funnel cakes at county fairs. After that, we can slash the tires on Good Humor trucks.

I feel sorry for the Girl Scouts. Their motto: Be Prepared. I bet they weren't ready for this.

The crime: Armed robbery.

The mission: Bring the desperado to justice.

The reward: Coffee. In fact, a year's worth.

This is one posse I won't be joining any time soon.

I have sympathy for Troy Malchow, owner of Perfetto Espresso, located in Mountlake Terrace, just north of Seattle. A gunman described as a white man, about 5'8" and 140 pounds, took his money and ran. I have to say, from the description, the perpetrator doesn't sound that intimidating.

On the other hand, he does have a gun.

And I do not.

I don't want to sound gutless, but the reward that Malchow is offering, a year's worth of free coffee to anybody who can help police find the robber, doesn't sound particularly lucrative. Even with a slice of pound cake on the side, I wouldn't go after the guy.

I suspect Malchow is making a mistake, merely offering coffee. Having visited the area, I believe that residents of Washington state would gladly take a bullet for a free mocha macchiato.

It Isn't the Corn—It's You

So-called nutrition advocates are trashing high fructose corn syrup these days. I'm not a big fan, either, but that's because I believe soft drinks and ice cream taste better when they're made with cane sugar instead of corn syrup.

These nutrition advocates—"nutrition police" would depict them more accurately—believe that the proliferation of products containing corn syrup is the cause of obesity and type II diabetes.

I always like to stand up for the little guy, and corn syrup is an innocent bystander in our nation's nutritional decline. It's not to blame for America's carbohydrate crisis. Our eating habits are.

As my old pal, the Capitol Gourmet, recently pointed out, "All these folks are looking for simplistic answers to fatness, but they just can't accept the most basic one. People get fat because they eat too much. It's not what they eat; it's the quantity of calories in what they eat."

In the 1970s, I met a Norwegian-born Canadian named Herman "Jackrabbit" Johannsen, generally credited with introducing cross-country skiing to North America. He was 99 at the time, happily living alone in a small house in the Laurentian mountains, cooking for himself, doing well.

Just how old was 99 in the seventies? I saw his college diploma. He had graduated in the 19th century.

He told me that when he was 88 he attended a banquet at which guests, concerned that he looked a little frail, kept asking him if he was doing all right. He got so disgusted he walked across the table on his hands.

Johannsen lived to be 111, and he told me the secret of long life: Eat anything you want. Exercise. That's it. I'm proud to say that I adhere to fully 50 percent of his rules.

Half Caf, No Cash

Now and then, an American entrepreneur comes up with an idea so profitable he never has to worry about money.

Coffee houses are one such windfall—ever stop and think about the cost of the ingredients in one of those java chip frappucinos that sell for about five bucks? Pennies, at most.

Search engines are another—ever stop and think what it costs to publish information without having to pay for paper or printing? Nothing, at most.

That brings us to Ervin Peretz, a Google programmer who has opened a coffee shop just outside Seattle where customers are encouraged to can pay whatever they like, absolutely nothing if they so choose.

The menu lists no prices.

The staff demands no money.

What should we make of this? I think Peretz is either too nice or has too much money.

When contacted, he astutely pointed out that he doesn't have to pay a cashier, a significant savings. Nor is his office staff pricey, inasmuch as it consists of him.

Peretz says his coffee shop, the Terra Bite Lounge in Kirkland, will break even when he begins to attract 200 customers a day. It's like the old joke about the discount car dealer who claims he's losing $100 on every automobile he sells. Asked how he plans to make a profit, he replies, "Volume."

I have to admit I've always been curious about the economics of the coffee shop business. I notice how people spend afternoons in Starbucks, pounding away on their laptops, buying almost nothing, taking up tables that could be occupied by paying customers. I wonder how the place stays in business.

Now I know. The answer is simple. These days selling coffee is so profitable you don't have to charge people anything in order to get rich.

Why Stop There?

It seems that a scientist in North Carolina has devised a means of disguising the bitter taste of caffeine.

This is a wonderful scientific breakthrough. I pray that the genius behind the discovery will use it for the good of all mankind.

"I had the idea for caffeinated pastries several years ago," said Dr. Robert Bohannon, who wants to add the equivalent of the caffeine in one or two cups of coffee to pastry products.

Dr. Bohannon, obviously not a health-care provider, has approached several well-known chains, hoping that they will use his invention in donuts and bagels.

The Buzz Donut. The Buzzed Bagel. He's trademarked the names.

Dr. Bohannan, who holds a Ph.D in molecular virology from the Baylor College of Medicine, is now president of a biotechnology company, Environostics, Inc.

What I'd like to see next from this altruistic fellow is Buzz Beaujolais, which will enable drunks to remain alert enough to pass roadside sobriety tests.

The Trans Fat Did It

Headline, front page, this past Monday's New York Daily News: WHAT THEY FOUND IN ANNA NICOLE'S FRIDGE!

(It was methadone and Slim-Fast, by the way.)

These days, when a person dies, we immediately check out his or her eating habits.

Officially, the cause of Anna Nicole's death is still undetermined.

Not to me.

There's a pattern. It's not just Anna Nicole.

Anna Nicole's son is dead.

Anna Nicole's second husband is dead.

Anna Nicole's second husband's son is dead.

Anna Nicole's first husband was a fry cook. Suspicious, wouldn't you say?

McSpin

From reports I've read—most recently from the Associated Press—the struggle for quality at McDonald's never ceases.

In this latest story, we are told of years of research and "extensive testing" as McDonald's selflessly seeks ways to make the cooking oil for its fries healthier.

To be fair, fries are something McDonald's does seem to care about, maybe because it's one of the rare fast-food products that foodies have praised. Of course, that happened years ago, when McDonald's oil included a big dose of beef tallow, which is rendered beef fat, the bovine equivalent of lard. It's pretty clear that fries cooked in melted animal parts, whatever they happen to be, taste better than fries made any other way.

McDonald's got rid of the beef tallow during one of America's well-meaning witch-hunts against saturated fats. More recently, McDonald's was again forced to alter the formula for the oil in which fries are cooked, this time because the city of New York has banned trans-fat.

A spokesman for the company said the new cooking-oil formula had passed the test and the company was "very confident in what we're hearing back from our customers."

This is a farce beyond reason. McDonald's doesn't care what it feeds us. McDonald's customers don't care what they're eating. And McDonald's employees can't cook worth a damn.

Should McDonald's products be regulated? That's like asking if the nuclear industry should be regulated. Without guidelines, the company would happily send out food that would set fire to our insides. The only criteria for its products: Will customers buy them?

Please. No more stories about how McDonald's is saving the world through research.

Another thing: Have you ever taken a close look at Ronald McDonald's body? That's what you're going to look like if you keep eating that crap.

By Me It's Organic

The newest controversy in the ever-entertaining world of organic food is whether or not a cloned cow can be considered organic.

To summarize and simplify, those in favor say it should be permitted as long as the cloned animal is raised organically. Those opposed say a cloned cow is by its very nature artificial, conceived in a laboratory dish.

We should look to the Jews for an uncomplicated resolution.

In many situations that wouldn't be practical, we Jews being an argumentative people. But in this case we need only refer to Jewish law. It states that a person born of a Jewish mother is by definition Jewish, like it or not.

And so I say of cloned cows: If they come from an organic mother, they, too, are organic.

By the way, this doesn't answer the question of whether meat from a cloned cow can be considered kosher. I'm not getting myself involved in that one.

Price Check in Produce for the Guy in Funny Shorts

I don't know which of us started complaining first.

It must have been me. I tend to grumble a lot. Mario Batali does not.

I was interviewing him about pasta when he suddenly said to me, "I went to the store. Onions were $1.50 a pound. I'm thinking, 'What's going on?' I was mortified."

The store he was talking about was Whole Foods Market. Now, everybody knows Whole Foods isn't cheap. And even when you find something there that doesn't cost more than it does anywhere else, which can happen, there's always something to tempt you that's a little fancier and more expensive than what you went into the store to buy. In onions, for example, you might be able to find Maui, Vidalia, and Walla Walla, to name only the ones you know.

Batali says it was none of those. Nor was he shopping for lampascione, a wild onion from Italy you often see on the menu at Del Posto, the most elegant of his restaurants.

"I'm talking red onions. Not organic onions. Plain red onions," he said.

That got my attention. Cheap non-organic onions, regardless of color, are the kind I buy. (Actually, I prefer those small yellow onions that aren't particularly sweet, the kind my mother used in her recipes.)

"Two onions. Three bucks," he added.

I guess it's nice to know onion growers are doing well. It's also a pleasure to know that fabulous folks like Batali suffer at the grocery store, just like us.

Pesos for Pizza—The End of Civilization As We Know It?

A pizza chain with branches in five states is now accepting payment in pesos because 60 percent of its customers are Latino.

It's a private transaction. Legally, it cannot be stopped.

Nevertheless, opposition has formed. Some people think the chain is catering to illegal immigrants.

Should we assume that people with pesos in their pockets are here illegally? An interesting question. Here's a more important one: Should we permit illegal immigrants to live and work in this country?

Here's a question that shouldn't even be asked: Should we allow people to eat? That's a dumb one. Not allowing hungry people to purchase food is morally wrong. So I say good for the pizza people.

However, I would like to direct a question to all persons living in this nation, regardless of race, creed, or legal status: Do you really think it's a smart idea to spend your hard-earned money on franchise pizza?

We Do Concede That Texas Gave Us Our Dumbest President

The city of Athens, Texas, claims to have made America's first hamburger sandwich. When I spoke to the assistant chief of police, Rodney Williams, last week, he told me that there's even a plaque in the town square backing up that assertion.

Nobody really minded such presumptuousness until just last week, when a state legislator, Betty Brown, introduced a resolution making the claim official.

As all us Easterners know, the first hamburger sandwich was made at Louis' Lunch in New Haven, Connecticut. In fact, Louis' Lunch is still in the hamburger business, flame-broiling burgers in a weird vertical contraption and placing the cooked meat between two pieces of toast.

Life would have gone on nicely, everybody believing what they wanted to believe, if Brown hadn't made such a big deal over the Athens claim. I thought maybe it had to do with her being made chairman of budget oversight for the state's Agriculture & Livestock Committee, but her office said representatives of the city of Athens had come to her.

Now, it's pretty clear that nobody in this country invented the plain old hamburger patty. That goes back nearly a thousand years, to the creation of steak tartare.

And it's just as clear that nobody in this country cooked the first hamburger patty. Meat plus fire is a pretty basic concept, and somebody came up with the idea long before chopped meat found its way to North America.

So the best we can do in America is claim credit for the addition of bread. So which is it, Texas or Connecticut?

The answer: probably neither.

Most likely, the stupendous event occurred in the 1880s at either the Outagamie (Wisconsin) County Fair or the Erie (New York) County Fair—which, by the way, took place in Hamburg, New York.

Tulsa, Oklahoma, would like to us to believe that the first burger on a bun was prepared on a farm outside the city in 1891—it passed a state proclaimation to that effect, as a matter of fact.

Louis' Lunch didn't make its first burger sandwich until 1900. And it seems that Fletch Davis, who ran a lunch counter in Athens around the turn of the century, might also have come along a tad late. He's supposed to have created a sensation at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair by dishing out a burger between slices of bread. Indeed, a fellow with a stand did exactly that, but nobody is absolutely certain it was Fletch. And even if it were, it looks like he might not have been the first to come up with the idea.

It seems that neither Texas nor Connecticut is the home of the original hamburger sandwich.

By the way, if it's any comfort, it's clear that the first cheeseburger was made in California.

Coffee, Tea, or Envy

At last, the airline industry has figured out a way to make the in-flight meal seem highly desirable. The secret: Let us see it, but don't let us have it.I was the victim on a recent six-hour American Airlines flight from New York to San Francisco. The 767 aircraft had a first-class section, a business-class section, and a coach section, and food for the swells in business class was being prepared in a galley located in the coach section. My coach seat, 20B, was right outside the tiny kitchen.

The menu for business-class passengers: Warm mixed nuts (smelled great), seasonal mixed greens (okay, even desperate travelers don't want airline lettuce), assorted "gourmet" breads (yeah, I'm sure that's what they were), grilled chicken breast sandwich with barbecue sauce (more good smells), and "freshly baked on board" chocolate-chip cookies (I really resented not getting those).

The menu for starving coach-class passengers: Nothing. Not a cracker, a pretzel stick, or a leftover crumb from the "gourmet" breads. No solid food for the likes of us.

When I asked one of the attendants for a cup of hot tea—that, indeed, is free—she told me to go to the coach-class galley in the back of the plane and get it myself. I now know the meaning of a soft job: Become a flight attendant in the coach section of an aircraft on a six-hour flight. (Tasting note: Tea has never tasted more metallic.)

I have to say, this represents a new low in customer courtesy for the airline industry. Or maybe that came when American Airlines began selling its crackers and cheese in coach.

Where's the Surgeon General's Warning?

I've been awaiting an opportunity to warn of the perils of pomegranate juice, the snake-oil of our day.

Finally, my chance came. Recently, the dining section of The New York Times led with an article written by Pete Wells, the editor of the section. He endorsed the use of pomegranate juice in cocktails. It's heartrending when a journalist of his high standing makes a tragic error in judgment.

He had invented a drink, a kind of Pernod-and-pomegranate-juice Cosmopolitan.

He waxed euphoric, saying, "Its lush dose of pomegranate makes the regular Cosmopolitan seem vapid…"

He also conceded that nobody in the world liked his concoction, but he blamed it on the association with the Cosmopolitan, which is fading in popularity.

He should have blamed it on the association with pomegranate juice, which tastes like liquid tobacco to me. It's not an acquired taste. It's a toxic taste. It's astounding that anybody drinks this stuff, although I assume it's because of the exaggerated health claims made by bottlers in the tradition of those Western salesmen who peddled miracle cures from the back of buckboards.

I warned Wells that I was about to mock his cocktail. He asked me if I was going to actually make his cocktail. When I said I couldn't bear to, he accused me of under-reporting, the kind of highbrow stance I would expect from a New York Times employee.

Then he sent me a notice of what appeared to be a pomegranate festival taking place in Brooklyn. I told him I would not be driving all the way to Brooklyn in order to drink badly.

He replied, "Don't say I'm not giving you plenty of opportunities to confront your pomegranate prejudices with actual knowledge."

I have to say that stung. Truth is truth, even when it comes from pomegranate proselytizers.

I decided to make his cocktail, and I'm glad I did. His recipe calls for POM Wonderful brand pomegranate juice, so off I went to my local A&P, which, I shudder to say, has an actual pomegranate juice section. There I made a wonderful discovery. The POM Wonderful people must be getting desperate, because I found pomegranate-cherry juice, pomegranate-blueberry juice, pomegranate-tangerine juice and a bunch of pomegranate teas, including pomegranate peach passion white tea, but no pure pomegranate. It tells me that nobody will drink the stuff unless it's mixed with something else.

I also looked on the POM Wonderful website, where the company pretty much maintains that drinking POM Wonderful will cure cancer, slow aging, and improve cardiovascular health, everything but end illiteracy.

I ended up buying a different brand of pomegranate juice, something called Frützzo, with a little umlaut over the "u." They probably hired the same marketing guy who invented Häagen-Dazs ice cream.

Well, I made the cocktail. In addition to pomegranate juice, it contains Pernod, vodka, Cointreau, and lime juice. The best part of it was that I could taste everything but the pomegranate juice. It wasn't terrible, and the dash of Pernod was rather inspired.

I'd give you the recipe, but it is my duty to halt the spread of pomegranate juice, with its absurd health claims. Some day it will be forgotten, but in the meantime, well-meaning people like me must make a stand before pomegranate juice obtains the cult status that bran muffins used to have.

Do Restaurateurs Go to Heaven?

When a vehicle crashed through the front of Toto's Ristorante Italiano in Seattle this past Sunday morning, blasting through 30 feet of tables and chairs, leaving the place a wreck, guess what owner Tony Botchev said?

Not, "Hey, who's gonna pay for this?"

Not, "I had 500 pounds of prime beef in the freezer I'm gonna claim on my insurance."

Not even, "Doesn't that jerk who was driving know I had 50 reservations tonight?"

He said, "I'm just happy this didn't happen at night because we could have had many people hurt."

The job of a restaurant critic has rarely been simpler. To Toto's Ristorante Italiano, a posthumous four stars.

Annals of Confused Politicians

An attempt by concerned councilmen to change the name of the annual Turkey Testicle Festival in Fort Myers Beach, Florida, failed last week. It was voted down.

Two outraged members of the council argued that the name was inappropriate for a family island. They didn't want children hearing such a word.

The kids have to learn sometime. Were it not for testicles, there wouldn't be any families on the island in the first place.

Just Another Guy

Last week, at a ceremony to celebrate the opening of the International Culinary Center (a new umbrella group that incorporates New York's venerable French Culinary Institute), a rather ordinary-looking fellow showed up. It was Ferran Adrià. Yes, Elvis was in the building.

If you don't know the name Adrià, it means you're stuck with prehistoric dining habits, chomping coq au vin or beef bourguignon. (Hmmm. Sounds good. Anybody know where I still find those dishes in New York?)

That sort of classicism is finished. Done. It had a good run—a couple hundred years or so. Now Spain is the reigning food capital of the world, and Adrià is the mythical figure behind its emergence.

So when he showed up to give a little speech and presentation, the auditorium at the newly dedicated center was packed. The man who introduced him was José Andrés, a marvelous Washington, D.C., chef who once worked for Adrià. In speaking of Spanish cuisine, he said that a few years ago it was "buried in a sea of piquillo peppers." Now it is the most innovative and admired in the world.

How monumental was the appearance by Adrià? All of us non-Spanish speakers were provided with simultaneous translation—it felt like the United Nations field trip I took when I was a kid.

Adrià is the architect of 21st-century cuisine. He started the foam fad. He liquefies everything. His restaurant, El Bulli, is a place of pilgrimage. Also, his food scares the timid.

His talk seemed designed to prove that he's just another cook. It was comfort chat. He certainly has the look of a guy who can set you at ease. He's a bit chubby, with receding, curly hair. He could be the friendly proprietor of your neighborhood candy store, a fellow who would surely allow you a few lottery tickets on credit.

His primary point was that he was a student of history, not an extremist. He said that almost every dish he prepared had precedents. At one point he called himself "a child of nouvelle cuisine," the French food trend of the seventies and eighties that emphasized lighter sauces, colorful presentations, and appeals to all the senses. He said he loved nothing more than bringing out the pure flavors of perfect ingredients, "clams that taste like clams." He added, "They say El Bulli is high technology. It is not. If it was, why would we have 40 chefs for 40 people (customers)? If it was high technology, we would only use machines."

He said he was present when Jacques Torres, a famous pastry chef and one of the deans of the French Culinary Institute, first made asparagus ice cream, about 20 years ago. "The first time I bring a blender to make asparagus juice," he said, "they look at me like I am from another planet. This is in 1990." He countered criticism that his food is too high-tech by bringing out the cheap plastic syringes he uses to create Parmesan spaghetti. "This is not high technology. C'mon."

It was a very effective presentation in which he succeeded in demystifying himself. Now, if anybody asks me if I know anything about Ferran Adrià, I'll just say he's an everyday guy who is probably home flipping burgers on the grill.

What It Means to Be an American

In Palm Harbor, Florida, a retired air force lieutenant colonel dining at an Italian restaurant called Angellino's refused to pay for his $15.99 Shrimp & Scallops Verdura, claiming insufficient shrimp and scallops. He sent it back after eating all five of the shrimp and all five of the bay scallops. He was arrested and charged with defrauding the restaurant. He went to trial. The jury found him not guilty.

The colonel explained that he lives by a code of honor learned while flying fighter planes. He said he would have been pleased whether he had he won or lost, because he stood up for his beliefs. I have no doubt of his integrity or that he thought he was right. I bet he was a hell of a pilot.

There's only one word for a man like him: Guilty. He should not have eaten the scallops and the shrimp before sending the dish back.

Just as an aside, it wasn't like he was ripped off by Angellino's. He was there with his girlfriend, who ate an entrée of mussels. They had coffee and dessert. The bill came to $46. Here in New York City, when two people go out for an Italian dinner, we usually refer to $46 as the tip.

When he sent the dish back after eating all the scallops and shrimp plus a little of the pasta and a few bites of vegetables, he demanded it be taken off his bill. The restaurant rightfully refused. He and the manager argued. He finally said he would pay for the seafood but not the pasta or vegetables. The restaurant said this would not do. His offer impressed the jury. Not me.

Nobody gets to go to a restaurant, order a dish, and pay for only that portion of it that he likes. If we could do that, I'd never again spend a nickel on mixed vegetables. What was the colonel thinking? He had two options: (1) Eat it. (2) Send it back untouched—or after one exploratory bite. He argued that the dish hadn't been listed with the pasta dishes on the menu, and what was put before him was mostly pasta. Fine. Send it back. Don't eat the shrimp and the scallops. Not even one.

It's clear that he felt as though he was behaving in a manner that would have been endorsed by our founding fathers (I suspect they didn't much care for pasta, either). The colonel even brought in a fancy New York lawyer to argue his case. What failed here was one of those great American principles the pilot fought for—trial by jury.

We always hear how our jury system has performed inappropriately because of an imbalance of whites or blacks, rich or poor, males or females. I'm guessing this particular jury had a different shortcoming. I'll bet everybody on the jury was a restaurant customer and not one was a restaurant owner.

But How Do You Define Hospitality?

I recently spent a night in Philadelphia's Radisson Plaza-Warwick Hotel, one of the city's finest properties when I was growing up there. Of course, that was so long ago that mountains, to say nothing of hotels, could have crumbled in that amount of time.

I reserved a "deluxe guest room" online. The confirmation notice I received referred to it as "spacious." As soon as I walked into the room, I called the front desk and asked for an explanation of "spacious." I was certain the room was one of the smallest in the place.

The clerk at the desk contacted the manager on duty, who chose to give me a vocabulary lesson instead of a better room. She told the clerk to inform me that "spacious is a subjective term."

To tell you the truth, I was proud of her. It proves that the Philadelphia school system, which has been going to hell even longer than the Warwick, isn't as terrible as everybody thinks.

My "spacious" room had a rusty air-conditioner, two chips in the bureau, and peeling wallpaper in the bathroom. The base of the tub, originally white, was mostly grey. At this point I am speaking objectively.

I know I am supposed to be writing about food, so allow me to describe breakfast at the Warwick. It stunk. "Stunk" is a subjective term.