Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook by Anthony Bourdain Page B

“lesser” cuts of meat, like neck, shoulder, and shank—but a lot less meat altogether. A future scenario where meat and bone would be used more as flavoring agents than as the main event, Chang proposed, would not necessarily be a bad thing. That would be more affordable, and would force chefs to be more creative and less reliant on overkill, on bulk, to make their point—and it would be better for a population increasingly at risk of growing morbidly obese.
    Hard times, he seemed to be saying, might actually help push us in a direction we were already coming to think we wanted to go—or that we should be going but hadn’t yet actually gotten around to.
    Belt-tightening implies a bad thing. But it also means you’re getting thinner.
    Serendipitously enough, many chefs have been wanting to go in that direction for decades. They’d never loved selling salmon or halibut or snapper anyway—because they were boring. They’d always liked smaller, bonier, oilier fishes, for instance, not because they were cheaper but because they believed them to be good. Now, perhaps, was the time to strike. For every chef struggling to convince their restaurant’s owner to put mackerel or (God forbid) bluefish on the menu, now they had a very compelling, even unassailable argument: we just can’t afford to sell salmon. So, indeed, there was light, maybe, in the darkness.
    If ever a time called for braised beef shoulder or round or flank steak—this was it.
    Something else was happening, too. As young investment bankers moved from the banquette to the unemployment line, they were being replaced by a whole new breed of diner. Jonathan Gold, who’s right about everything (except the virtues of Oki Dog), said in an LA Times roundup of 2009 that there were “more high profile LA area restaurant openings in the last year or so than we saw in the previous five,” but “something truly new was going on that may fundamentally change the way we look at restaurants ” (italics mine).
    “While nobody was paying attention, food quietly assumed the place in youth culture that used to be occupied by rock ’n’ roll—individual, fierce and intensely political.” He points to the Kogi truck, which broadcasts its location on Twitter, and similar mobile operations, the advent of “pop-up” restaurants, and the general “hipness” now associated with street food, ethnic, “authentic,” or “extreme.” For a young man with indie aspirations and a modest disposable income, there is now a certain cachet involved in hunting down a shoebox-size Uiger noodle shop in the cellar of a Chinese mall in Flushing.
    It ain’t a counterculture, however, unless you’re “against” something. And the first thing to go, I hope, will be bullshit. Of that, there is so much to spare. Money may be less abundant but bullshit we’ve still got plenty of.
    It’s not that there will, or should, be a tearing down of everything old—as with many revolutions. If this is the advent of a “movement,” it will, unlike all previous movements, move in many different—even opposing—directions. It’s the Great Fragmentation, a reflection of what’s been happening with television audiences, the music business, and print media for some time. Hopefully, the restaurant business, unlike media conglomerates, will be better suited and faster on its feet to deal with these new historical imperatives. They will have to be.
    In the months following the crash, as restaurants were closing and belts tightening, there were a few ominous signs: sales of candy skyrocketed—as did sales at many fast-food chains. Fear and uncertainty, it appeared, led many to rush for the familiar—an infantile urge to grab some of what one knew : cheap, familiar tastes—in the same old wrapper. At least Twizzlers hadn’t changed. Old Ronald and the Colonel were still there. I wonder, though, how long that will last.
    Maybe people will have to start cooking again. To save money, and