Before I present my latest collection of nit-pickings (picked nits?)—including some less-than-ideal punctuation on our bottle of safflower oil—I want to begin with a statement similar to the one I wrote for my third post: I don't claim to be perfect, and the points I'm making here are given in a spirit of helpful criticism, not know-it-all-ness.
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The August issue of Bon Appétit—whose overall theme was simplicity, because BA was launching a new basic-cooking-skills website called basically—included a feature story that serves as a cultural study of avocado toast, the much-loved-but-much-mocked dish that's still a big hit in restaurants on both coasts. Writer John Birdsall gives the credit/blame for the somewhat-recent resurgence of avocado toast here in the States to Australian chefs, but he shows that Californians have been spreading mashed avocado on toasted bread since at least the 1930s.
Birdsall hangs out—and eats avocado toast—with Richard Parks III, "a 35-year-old food writer and filmmaker." RPIII is the son of Van Dyke Parks, a composer and music producer who was born in 1943. The younger Parks reminisces with Birdsall about being tasked with collecting the avocados that had fallen from the 100-year-old tree in his family's backyard "before the squirrels got to them." VDP would make "avocado toast on English muffins as a snack for Richard and his siblings." He would toast the muffins, spread on the avocado, sprinkle on some Cavender's All Purpose Greek Seasoning, and retoast the muffins under the broiler.
A couple more references to the younger Parks follow, and it's clear we're talking about him (and not his father) even though he's called only Parks because it had been established earlier in the story that Birdsall was hanging out with him at a restaurant in Los Angeles's Beverly Grove neighborhood called Goldie's and the writer is still there.
Birdsall later moves on to Sqirl in Silver Lake. "I'm meeting a couple of food people: the writer and producer Gillian Ferguson and Evan Kleiman, host of KCRW's Good Food radio show," he writes. "Like Parks, Kleiman knew avocado toast as the default after-school snack in the 1950s and '60s, not far from here, in the days when Silver Lake was strictly blue-collar."
Birdsall told us the younger Parks ate avocado toast as an after-school snack. But he was born in 1982, so he certainly didn't know it as his default snack during those two previously mentioned decades. Either the writer is now talking about Van Dyke Parks or, more likely, the writer and his editors have erred in lumping together Richard Parks and Kleiman not only in terms of what they did but also when they did it. I would have proposed the following simple fix: "Like Parks, Kleiman knew avocado toast as her default after-school snack. She ate it regularly in the 1950s and '60s, not from far here, in the days when Silver Lake was strictly blue-collar." (Yes, Kleiman is a woman with a traditionally male name.)
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I think the first line of this recipe found in that same issue of BA and also here online ...
... would be better as "strawberries, hulled and halved (or quartered if large), and ...." None of the berries in the photo is whole. At minimum, they should be halved, so let's make it clear to the reader she should cut them at least once. Then, parenthetically, tell her to cut them again if they were really big to start with. By the way, the online version is even less pleasing to me because the "or" has been eliminated.
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I'm not loving this headline in the August/September issue of The Advocate:
I'm fairly certain the editors' motivation for plainly stating you're about to read old news is the "JANUARY 2017" that's clearly visible in the photo above the headline. But I still think the head, which practically shrugs at the reader, does the short piece that follows it ...
... a disservice. The lede hangs on a new, or at least newer, angle than a months-old magazine, though the supporting evidence for its timeliness is presented only parenthetically: This documentary about gender you might be interested in is now broadly available for viewing.
I would have proposed something like "NAT GEO TACKLES GENDER," even though I realize GENDER looms large in the photo as well. I don't think there's a suitable synonym.
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There's a SPOILER about, well, an almost-two-decades-old work of fiction in the lines below.
I just finished reading John Irving's A Widow for One Year, and I mostly wish I hadn't bothered. I thought the ending was a major cop-out. Marion, the woman who had abandoned her daughter 37 years earlier, when Ruth was only four, gets to have the last line. And she's telling Ruth not to cry! I want to know what Ruth—the novel's main protagonist—has to say back to her mother after all these years. *creates my own conclusion in my own head, which I reckon is what Irving would tell me to do*
I have only two more things to say about this book: Irving is clearly wayyyy into boobs. And on p. 165, it should say "And the Gomezes' granddaughter," not "the Gomez's granddaughter," because the passage is referring to a husband and wife with the last name of Gomez, which would be made plural by adding es and made possessive by adding only an apostrophe.
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This label on our bottle of safflower oil presents an opportunity to riff on hyphenation—and I really love riffing on hyphenation. Almost as much as John Irving loves writing about boobs!
Is this oil a fat food that isn't hydrogenated? Or is it a food that consists of fat that isn't hydrogenated? The latter makes more sense, right? Because of that—and because all of the reference works I'm likely to consult when checking spelling say that words beginning with the prefix non are hyphenated only in rare cases1—I would have changed that phrase to "A NONHYDROGENATED-FAT FOOD." Some might say that "NON-HYDROGENATED-FAT FOOD" is more aesthetically pleasing. And I wouldn't argue they're wrong.
1Those cases are: when preceding a proper noun—for example, "non-American"—and, per the Associated Press Stylebook, when "awkward combinations, such as non-nuclear," occur. I don't think nonnuclear looks all that awkward, so I would be inclined to make that word hyphenless.