Putting Lipstick On A Pig
Or Why People Really Love America (Usually To Death)

I've been driving around Barcelona on a motorcycle since I arrived. It's an idiotic thing to do. I have no health insurance and I hate pain. On Saturday I rode through drunken traffic at three in the morning while suffering from extreme exhaustion, jetlag, and a couple hours breathing the smoke from my friends' ever-burning tobacco-and-hash rollies. I weaved into other motocycles and scooters, careered past the flat grilles of blind and segmented city buses, and repeatedly confused Barcelona's 'Yield,' 'Stop,' and 'Do not enter' signs to comical effect. At one point I wobbled to a stoplight and stalled violently in front a policeman who shook his head balefully as if to say, "I could stop you now, but I have a feeling God has plans for you..."

But what was really ailing me that night was that I had just finished my first real Spanish meal. And like a nasty deja vu of childhood embarrassment, the regretful memories washed over me: An entire cuisine awash in oil, deadened by pork grease, adorned by funny-tasting canned tuna, laid on beds of undercooked rice, dappled by mysteriously mushy and oversalted olives. And pork, pork, everywhere pork. Where rice forms the foundation of most asian cuisines, and pasta (for example) the exported basis of Italian, a journey to the center of spanish food leads to the discovery of a Giant, Slightly Off-Tasting Pig. Indeed, should a Spaniard happen to dip his finger into a dish as he's preparing it and hazard to ask, "What is missing?" the answer, he finds, is almost always Pork. If it's a vegetable broth he's cooking for an emphatic convention of vegetarians, the answer is Pork, and if it's a piece of pork that said Spaniard is cooking, well then, he concludes, the solution must lie in another part of the Giant Pig of Spain, perhaps a part he hasn't yet explored.

And I'm a man who loves pork. In the United States, where it seems we eat just the right amount of pork (and the rest of the world senses this, and they hate us for it), I love me a pork chop or a pork tenderloin or bits of pork whatever in a stir-fry. Amazingly, when I moved to Barcelona just four days before September 11, 2001, I think that part of what compelled me to come here was the food. I mean, the city is beautiful. The architecture is utterly inspired and fearless, and it hits you in psychedelic bursts each time you turn onto another street. But that's only part of it. In those first days after the 9/11 attacks, amid the clutter and rattle of the Spanish reaction to 9/11 (I won't go into that now, but its sequential contours roughly mirrored the rest of Europe's: 1. Horror at the act, followed by 2. rage at the aggressors, and then 3. fear of the scope of America's reaction and finally a 4. visceral hatred of George W. Bush), amid all that I can recall clearly having the impression that Spanish Food Is Great.

But that's the biggest joke on a continent rife with them. Spanish food is horrendous, from top to bottom. In fact, when I visited this past summer, I arrived on the day the New York Time Magazine ran a dunderheaded cover story declaring Barcelona the new capitol of global cuisine. The irony here is breathtaking. (No less so since I'm here now on an assignment from the New York Times Magazine.) The vast, vast, vast majority of this cuisine is nearly inedible. Beyond their tired reliance on pork, Spaniards also love rubbery squid, called "pulpos", and "bravas", bits of hard fried potatoes meant to be dipped in tiny dishes of thick, warm mayonnaise. There are also "croquetas", "sepias," "cosas a la plancha", and hideous canned white asparagus stalks that resemble nothing so much as pickled penises and are a pessimistic staple of Spanish salads. And Paella? Forget it. Paella is like the punchline to an elaborate inside joke told to the world by the Ministry of Tourism.

It's a sad state of affairs, especially that now the weak dollar has made every meal so goddamn expensive. When I went to change my dollars into euros (the exchange rate is $1 : .62 euros), I felt like I was a refugee trading a buckboard full of coconuts for a pint of goat's milk. Thanks, George. The next time I bite into one of those cock-like asparaguses, I'm going to think of you.
- posted by The Long Shot @ Sunday, January 16, 2005