New York Times Critics

         The Sam Sifton articles were informative, and they will serve as a good example to look back to when it comes time to write my own restaurant review, but I didn’t find his restaurant reviews terribly interesting.  I feel it is similar reason as to why I didn’t like the French cuisine articles from last week.  I’m not the target audience.  If I were a New Yorker looking into finding a new place to eat, or maybe reading the review of a favorite restaurant, the article would have been useful, but because I’m not, it didn’t really hold my interest. 

         Sifton’s personal stories about the life a food critic on the other hand, were far more entertaining.  The first one, The Cheat: Salad Days, caught my attention early on, but then lost me at the end.  The inevitable problems that come with eating too much good food (admittedly a problem I wish I had) was something I’d never really considered before.  It seemed like a fascinating topic, and I wanted to hear all about it, until he trailed off and started talking about salads.  The most obvious issue I saw with this section was that the salads, he admits, are not very good for him because of what he puts on them.  So it didn’t really seem like a cheat, since it was still causing the same dilemma, and he actually tricks himself into thinking he’s being healthy.  It seems to just make matters worse. 

         I was pleased then, to see that the last set of articles we read were about the life of Sam Sifton and how a food critic stays healthy.  The numbers My Life In Food gave really were surprising.  It was a little tedious to read through a list of a week’s worth of food, but the totals at the bottom of the calories eaten verses calories burned by exercise really were amazing.  This left me with questions, like, how is he not gigantic?  Is he healthy?  What do doctors say about his diet?  Apparently many people shared my questions and pondered several more I hadn’t thought of which made the Q&A articles fun to read.  I liked learning about his exercise plans and his family life.  My favorite question though, was the one asking about the childhood foods he grew up with.  He answered with a wonderful response of all the foods he ate growing up in New York.  It painted a great picture of the character of the city through the food he enjoyed.    

The reading I found most enjoyable though was the Mark Bittman piece about McDonald’s oatmeal.  He has a very strong, cynical voice throughout the article, and is obviously disgusted by the food chain’s blatant disregard towards their consumer’s health.  “Why create a hideous concoction of 21 ingredients, many of them chemical and/or unnecessary? Why not try, for once, to keep it honest?”  It made me laugh at times to think that they would do something so unnecessary, that they would go through all this trouble “improving” it and yet make it so much worse for us.  It just seems so ridiculous.  But then I started to feel the same way I did after reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  Even knowing what I do now, so many more don’t, or don’t care, and will continue to buy their 300-calorie oatmeal.  And there’s really not much I can do about it.  Bittman ends on a funny, though cynical note, saying, “But they know that, once inside, you’ll probably opt for a sausage biscuit anyway.  And you won’t be much worse off.”