Here we have a prime example of Crybaby Liberals who will do anything to impugn the man who is now president-elect. The sad thing is that Trump has impugned himself so many times with his own behavior that we really don’t need to examine his tastes in steak. But behold the effluence of PuffHo (click on screenshot to go to the piece), from a piece published in March:
And we’re told that we’re supposed to hate Trump for this:
You may hate him for his lies or for his racism, but now you can hate him for how he takes his filet mignon. It’s almost as if he’s threatened by any possible life remaining in the meat. Trump wants everything he eats to be really, really, really dead.
Trump’s steak preference is considered offensive by most people who have an ounce of appreciation for food.
It’s one of the biggest crimes a person can commit while dining out. Steaks ordered “well-done” have been known to crinkle the noses of talented chefs.
“WHY! Why don’t you just eat a burger!“, is what Peter D’Antonio, the executive chef of The Westin Waltham-Boston wishes he could say to those who order steaks like Trump. The Daily Meal goes as far to say that anyone who like their steaks well-done is a “bad person.” In Trump’s case …
. . . .When you cast your vote for president this year, think about how the candidates interact with the world on a more intimate level. What would they do if they saw a stray dog on the side of the road? Would they be willing to let someone else take the last spot in the elevator, and wait for the next? How would they navigate a menu at a nice meal out?
This is the kind of over-the-top demonization that should embarrass all of us. The stray dog/elevator/steak analogy at the end is simply asinine. I happen to believe that a rare steak tastes better, but tastes differ, and I’d never try to say that anybody who wanted a well done steak (like my Dad used to, for instance) was a bad person.
At the end of this article, which appeared in the “Taste” section of PuffHo (the food section), we find the usual editor’s note appended to every PuffHo piece on Trump (it was clearly added after he was nominated). I’ve added the final bit.
Editor’s note: Donald Trump is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist, birther and bully who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S. And, he eats his steak in the worst possible way: well done!!!! That makes him even more of a bad person.
Maybe it was satire? I thought it was funny.
Indeed. Even if parts of the article are sincere, the steal thing is very likely tongue-in-cheek.
Godammit. What is with this inability to type what I mean?! Steak! Steak, steak, steak, steak, steak!!!
Well done!
Your fingers want to save their best for organ-ing.
I’m sure it was.
cr
I’m not so sure at all, and if it was satire, several of us were fooled by it, meaning that it wasn’t good satire. Look at the history of how HuffPo has gone after Trump, and you might want to rethink the satire bit.
It’s personal with Arianna Huffington. It started when her husband left her for a man. The Donald tweeted some nasty stuff about how he didn’t blame him for preferring a man to her etc.
For most of the primaries, stuff about Trump was put in the Entertainment section. That addendum has been on every article about Trump from day one.
As for liking steak well done, my father did too. It was a reaction to meat not being stored properly, then not cooked properly over and over again by his genuinely wicked stepmother, which he was forced to eat when he was a kid. He just couldn’t eat meat that wasn’t overcooked.
Well, the whole article screams ‘satire’ to me. (Sans the editorially-added nastybit at the end, of course). I think you could take ‘Huffpo’ off it and substitute ‘Onion’ and I think it would fit right in.
Maybe I have a more suspicious mind that suspects ‘hoax’ or ‘satire’ where others don’t. I seem to recall some ‘law’ of the Internet that says any sufficiently satirical parody of religion is indistinguishable from the real thing. This ain’t religion, exactly (though the phrase ‘holy war’ does come to mind) but maybe similar applies.
cr
If you hate Trump of course you think it’s satire, but after reading the article I don’t think it’s satire at all. I think the author believes that the way one eats a steak says a lot about the person. But think about it for a minute then ask yourself: Don’t liberal vegetarians think it’s disgusting to eat steak? Don’t you think if forced to eat a steak the vegetarian would find it even more gross to eat one rare? Has it ever occurred to you that those of us who eat steak well done do so because, whether we are aware of it or not, we really don’t like steak? From a liberal perspective isn’t it an admirable quality to not like steak?
If Huffiest can publish an article like this in seriousness, I can write a paragraph disagreeing while using the same basis of argument in seriousness. Trump haters have gone too far, they are refusing to notice that he has been behaving in a civilized, controlled manner since he won the election, and the Trump haters are beginning to look as ridiculous as this discussion about steak. How anyone can read Huffiest is beyond my comprehension.
I don’t know why “Huffpost” auto-corrects to “Huffiest”, but it just did it again. I changed it and it corrected it again. I finally got it to stay and nobody cares, especially me.
Yes, how anyone can read PuffHo is also beyond my comprehension. I wonder why PCC reads it. But I really do not see that rhetoric about ‘Trump-haters’, ‘butt-hurt liberals’, ‘liberal cry-babies’ and the various other epithets that people seem to enjoy throwing out are all that much different from the kind of rhetoric that PuffHo espouses, and really not fundamentally different from the quite extraordinarily throwing around of unpleasant epithets and charges that characterised the recent election – to the extent that the issues at stake were obscured. ‘Trump-haters’ – there are plenty of very good reasons why someone might object to what may well transpire under a Trump administration, particularly with people like Sessions, Bannon, Giuliani & Gingrich in it, and pretending that people who offer objections and criticism, and are for example against making torture an instrument of state, are merely ‘Trump-haters’ is yet another near-infantile way of diminishing or obscuring what is at stake.
I’m baffled as to how liking or hating Trump would influence whether we see the article as satire. (For the record, I think Trump was appalling during his campaign, I’m hoping for the best for his term in office. I don’t hate him nearly as much as many on this site).
I would imagine a vegetarian would find it equally objectionable to eat steak regardless of how it was cooked.
“Trump haters have gone too far, they are refusing to notice that he has been behaving in a civilized, controlled manner since he won the election”
That’s as may be, but that can hardly be applied to the article in question which was published in March.
cr
Published in March! I hadn’t noticed that. Then what is its real relevance now? Why draw attention to it?
Search me.
cr
As a corrective to all this bandying round of epithets I want to recommend a book called ‘East Street West Street’ by the British barrister and writer Philippe Sands, who has in the past written both passionately and responsibly on human rights and torture, and on the lies that were used to get our countries into the Iraq war. The book has just won Britain’s top prize for non-fiction. It is an analysis of the political developments that have issued in Brexit and the election of Trump, and uses as its frame of reference the destruction of European Jewry, and in particular of the destruction by nationalistic passions of the cosmopolitan nature of the city of Lviv in the Ukraine, where Sands’ family came from and where some of them were murdered by anti-Semites, German and Ukrainian. There is an interview with him in the Guardian – Google “Guardian – Philippe Sands: ‘Alarm bells are ringing in this country'”. It is always good to read discussions of political questions that are intelligent, passionate and responsible and do not resort to name-calling.
Just to add that I was delighted to learn that Mike Pence was roundly booed when he attended a performance of ‘Hamilton’ in New York and that afterwards the cast gave him a firm message. Good for all of them.
“Good for all of them.”
Agreed, but I suspect some people will characterize the cast as butthurt crybabies, and people like Gad Saad will laugh at the behavior of the “snowflakes”.
sub
It is really nice to see that Huff is concentrating on the important issues of life. To bundle a person’s attitude toward animals and kindness to them or to a section of the population with how they like their steak. Please, when did how you like your food become a character issue? If it is even vaguely important, that would not be a person you want to know.
“To bundle a person’s attitude toward animals [….] with how they like their steak”
Well, the steak *was* part of an animal, once.
So there’s definitely a link there. Kinda. Sorta.
cr
If he puts ketchup on a hot dog, I’m moving to Canada.
LOL!
Everybody puts ketchup on hotdogs here in Canada (French’s, not Heinz, after The Great Canadian Tomato Debacle). It’s an entry requirement.
Being a fan of the Maillard reaction, I rather like the taste of very well cooked meat, and on the very infrequent (see what I did?) occasions that I get to eat steak, my wife being a vegetarian, I order it well-done. Not bleu, not rare, not medium rare nor even medium. Well-done. I like it that way. Were I to cook a Trump, I should do it the same way.
I like the best of both worlds, ie my steak cooked rare-to-bleu, but seared in the process. Damn, now I’m drooling.
I do not put ketchup on my hotdogs and am Canadian. Ketchup on hotdogs is for children.
On my hotdogs I like mayo and XXX Melinda’s Habanero Pepper sauce. But I actually prefer a real sausage over a hotdog.
Me too – when I actually have hot dogs, which is admittedly pretty rarely.
Ketchup is one of those foods which has just a *little* taste, and so I find it annoying.
(That’s my problem with tea, too.)
Uh oh. Is there something wrong with that? Ketchup, spicy mustard, pickle relish, some finely chopped onions…Sounds good to me.
Hahahaha
I love ketchup on hot dogs. If Trump did that I would have to approve; but mustard too.
I’m with Kevin; plus a touch of sweet relish. Still a Hoosier at heart, I guess 🙂
The concept of a column on “taste” is pretty dubious in itself. Unless you’re talking about discussing the mechanics and genetics of taste in Drosophila maggots (cue Prof Cobb). The unwritten part of the subject is “what I think is good taste, and why you’re wrong”, but that would expose the utter impossibility of having any thing more than a one-on-one comparison with no general applicability. An absolute waste of time.
I happily support Trump being impugned in any way people wish to impugn him.
I wonder if he’s going to move the company that manages his hair into the white house? Maybe make it a new department, with the secretary of Trump’s hair as a cabinet position?
I encourage you to continue. I find it useful to know whose sense of fairness and honesty may be relied upon and whose may not. “Any way people wish” comprehends false and distorted accusations, and you happily support that.
You can always count on me to make silly comments that trigger you snowflake.
Yeah, me either, Mr Paps. I shall not be joining up with that man nor him minions (nearly stat now) in embracing his ideas and their other muckings. Millions not only voted for him and them but also now are pandering with, “Give him / them a chance, ya’ know ?! You, Blue, you should fall in line with us others and forgive him and give those thinkings of his a listen!”
Uh – uh. I well recall Dr J Safer’s y1999 advice, “Must You Forgive?”, re violators and abusers, particularly forgiving, or .not., by violated and abused women. http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199907/must-you-forgive.
No. I shall not normalize these people’s thoughts nor their enactments upon those thoughts. Such as now? One wee week later? A US Attorney General Jeff Sessions? No! For my environmental health and safety, Mr Trump and Counsel Seesions? They shall not be normalized nor receiving from me any sort of embrace.
No. No normalizing from me: “We have a new threshold for sexual predation coming from Senator Sessions.”
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2016/10/sen-jeff-sessions-trumps-sex-tape
Blue
The old normal? A woman going before a judge or an attorney general upon their high – up – above – her “benches” when those meb, the night before, have seen “her” in a film of thus ? http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1598516.Getting_Off. She to get “justice”, ya’ think ?
That will not be happening.
I would know. Decades of knowing, that is.
Through 24 only male Iowa judges.
Blue
How Trump eats his steak is likely the very least of our worries 🙂
I never realized that the amount of myoglobin a person eats is a direct reflection on their moral character and their ability to lead a nation. I sure hope this is the first question asked in the 2020 presidential debates. I may have been voting incorrectly all this time!
Thanks HuffPo!
Over cooking beef is the most dangerous brand of extremism. I’m currently coaching a team of freshman engineers to make me a sous vide cooker so I can have rare hamburgers. Trump would probably fail that project too, yet shockingly walk away with an A somehow.
I like to sous vide chicken thusly.
Cut boneless, skinless breasts across the grain into 3/4″ thick strips.
Place a single serving amount of chicken in a food safe, sealable plastic bag that can withstand 150* F + temps, along with enough very nice EVOO (something you would use for finishing) so that all of the chicken will end up being submerged once the bag is sealed and the air evacuated, fresh crushed garlic clove(s), a sprig of fresh rosemary and or thyme (bruised), salt & pepper to taste.
Seal the bag and evacuate as much air as possible. I prepare a bag for each person before hand. When it’s time to cook, heat a large pot of water, like a pasta pot, to about 150* F. Place the bags in the pot so that water can easily flow around all sides of each bag. Bring the temperature back up to 150* F, but don’t let it get significantly higher. Cook till done. Unless you let the temperature get to high you have a good bit of lee way to figure out when it is done.
A poor man’s sous vide. It’s easy and damn good.
For a little bit more effort you can add automated temperature control and water agitation, which are handy for very long cooking times if you don’t want to stand there the whole time. You need to cook a pretty long time at 150 and it’s hard to keep the water temperature from shooting up higher.
Oh yes, I’d purely love to have a real sous vide machine. But the way I do the chicken it doesn’t take long to cook at all. It is for just that reason that I cut it into relatively thin, and even, strips.
Gotcha. On the other hand, cooking at so low a temperature you’d have to be vigilant to keep it from dipping lower, and still follow the pasteurization charts just in case you get an infected chicken. There, now we’ve brought this topic around to biology.
Wait, what’s wrong with burgers and what’s wrong with well done steak? Other than the ridiculous prices? Everyone just eat pork until they bring down the beef prices.
Let’s say for example you’re having beef stew. Guess what? Its well done! QED, you’re welcome!
‘Cause it’s made out outta “stew meat.” QED
In the restaurant biz, “well-done steak” serves as metonymy for “a diner with déclassé tastes in cuisine.”
Sommelier: “How’s that four-top in your station?”
Waiter: “Well-done steaks all around.”
[Both roll eyes.]
People who make beef stew out of stew meat have no class!
“Hey how’s the stew going.”
“They want déclassé stew meat in their stew.”
Rolls eyes!
I disagree; there is nothing déclassé about using stew meat. Different cuts of beef are suited to different methods of cooking. A good steak is delicious if briefly seared but goes cardboardy if stewed for a long time. Shin or other less noble cuts are too tough to be good if cooked briefly like a steak but when stewed produce glorious, rich, deep-flavoured meals. Skillful chefs don’t turn their noses up at any cut of beef but use each in the way that best suits its attributes.
No problem. I was just foolin around though. I’ll stick with my baloney and Food Club American cheese slices thank you very much. Great with mustard and lettuce.
Nothing, really. It’s more like how I look at my FiL cockeyed when he eats bananas with mustard: “you like that?!”
Well done steak is tough and not very juicy. Medium or medium rare steak (if it’s a good cut) is like butter, and the “steak” flavor isn’t compromised.
There IS something to be said for a well-done cut of meat.
I don’t eat a lot of the red kind these days, but once in a while I’ll go for a slab of prime rib. If I can’t get a center slice rare, I’ll opt for the end-cut. It comes well-done, but unlike a well-done steak, it retains its moisture since it’s been steaming in the au jus. Plus, it’s tasty from caramelization (or, more technically, the “Maillard browning reaction”).
That’s kinda what I mean by well done. Cooked way too much until it’s tender haha. I get everyone’s point though.
Will it clog his alt-right arteries any faster?
Unfortunately, probably slower.
We’ll have to settle for carcinogenic heterocyclic amines.
Just what I was thinking.
Great minds…
Two words: “Mike” and “Pence”.
I wonder why the rather unimportant PuffHo should be considered so important a target? Or why an article like this, with its not very interesting attempt at humour, and other rather silly articles, should be thought worth commenting on. ‘Crybaby Liberals’… How representative is PuffHo? Well, I suppose the ‘liberals’, whoever they are, are not ‘butthurt’ this time.
I don’t think crybaby is ever, in any context, going to be an accurate characterization of people who are upset by the phrase President Donald Trump. In a couple months I imagine I’ll be “whining” about losing my health care, while Mexicans, and Muslims bitch about their families being deported.
Hey, it’s only until we figure out whats going on.
There has been an unfortunate effort to infantilize folks who are finding it (for good reason) difficult to process the election results, but only those who have embraced fearmongering and insecurity could so willingly support an incompetent demagogue. Nonetheless, HuffPo will certainly find ways to reinvigorate the crybaby stereotype thanks to their obsession with hipster sensationalism.
By all accounts, Trump’s taste in food is every bit as lousy as his gilded gold-leaf tastes in architecture and furnishings — which, as some wag recently put it, runs to “Bath Party Provincial.”
Retrograde Rococo with a splash of Reno Resort & Spa.
Lol. Somewhere I saw someone describe Trump’s taste this: he lives like poor people imagine rich people live.
*thus
Lotto-winner chic.
Nouveau Uday, gold-plated lamé.
parvenUday & Qusarriviste
I retract my criticism on a previous thread of Coyne’s use of “butthurt.” It is the phrase that leaps to mind here. So does infantile.
“I retract my criticism on a previous thread of Coyne’s use of “butthurt.” It is the phrase that leaps to mind here. So does infantile.”
Thank you for that because I found your civility in criticizing that in the last post out of character.
What is the etymology of “butthurt”? I’ve seen some claim that it refers to the pain of being spanked, but I’m not so sure it’s not a homophobic insult: “dude, you got fucked in the ass”.
I’m sure it is. Being the penetrated partner of a sex act is the basis for a lot of terms in common use – even terms that don’t start with F (e.g., screwed, hosed, sucks). OTOH, they’ve replaced ethnic slurs like gypped.
What it’s always meant to me is what you get when you google it. Which is “Overly annoyed, bothered or bugged because of a perceived insult; needlessly offended.” I hardly think most liberals reaction to Trump’s election, particularly those most affected by it, is overly annoyed, or needlessly offended, or that they are behaving like crybaby’s for that matter. I think it’s entirely justifiable. Maybe at some point in the future, if things don’t look as bleak, and Trump has backtracked on some of his promises, that might be the case.
Well, Urban Dictionary does include a definition that references “taking it in the ass”.
I agree with your point of view regarding Trump, I just also was wondering if my whincing at Jerry’s use of “butthurt” was completely off base or what.
“It’s always bottoms with you Americans”
— Basil Fawlty
Not at all. I’m with you and someone else mentioned it in another thread, too. But it’s not just Jerry, you know–it turns up frequently all over these days.
–a fellow wincer…
— Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
“leathery hunk of carbon”
Wasn’t that Trump’s nickname at the New York Military Academy?
Right, so now I know never to order steak in a restaurant. Not that I patronise restaurants much anyway, a good gas station mince’n’cheese pie is better value for money…
cr
“a good gas station mince’n’cheese pie is better value for money…”
in terms of calories per dollar perhaps…
Right. How else d’you measure it?
I should also add that I prefer a mince’n’cheese pie to steak, regardless of price. Particularly when I’m out in the country and am decently hungry and I want food ‘now’.
It’s also much quicker to eat, which in my world is a plus since I find almost anything else more interesting than eating per se. In culinary terms I’m an utter and unrepentant heathen.
cr
I like mine as well-done as possible (“leathery
hunk of carbon”), so, as an almost fanatical opponent of waste of all kinds, it pleases me no end to learn that I am helping limit modern humankind’s criminal habit of ditching perfectly edible food!
De gustibus non disputandum est.
I would have thought that in simplistic terms, the rarer the steak the more close to raw it is, the more actual ‘blood’ there is, the more animalistic the eater is.
Well done is further from ‘red in tooth and claw’, hence Trump is more civilized.
Well that must be certainly so, especially while I’m having Moroccan chicken (with sweet peppers, olives and lemon zest among others) where the flesh is falling from the bone. So my Islamic dish is not just delicious, but very civilised.
Nevertheles, I like my steak rare and my shasimi raw.
Is there a more civilised and evolved society than Japan? Yet much of their fish is not even rare, it is raw. [as are the Dutch maatjes (herring), the Norwegian Gravlax (salmon) or the Chilean Seviche (made from different kinds of fish)].
No it is not as simple as that, red maybe, but no teeth and claws.
Don’t care if tRump likes his steak well done or still quivering, so long as there is no one to apply a Heimlich, should he choke on one. But then we’d have the Dominionist and enemy of reproductive rights President Pence. It’s a lose-lose it seems to me.
Hey, I *like* my steak well done. Very well done. Cooked to buggery.
Though I actually much prefer a cheeseburger…
cr
(But it seems to me that the whole article was just being ironical).
I, also, found the article funny, and I hope that Donald Trump would as well. Mrs Thatcher’s spouse, Dennis, supposedly remarked that he didn’t want his meat to say “Moo” when he poked his fork into it, though I’ve come across more than one version of that quotation, so don’t take it as gospel.
Even if it’s satire, the headline conveys the very sense of cultural elitism that seems to have motivated many of his voters. It’s tone deaf satire.
Well I like my Steak well done, and the Chef is getting paid to prepare it, so if he has any qualms ,he can keep them to himself.
I go one better (which I can, since my livelihood does not depend on it): if you want to murder your steak by going any further than medium rare, you can do it yourself, I refuse to be an accomplice.
No, your steak has already been murdered (or at least we hope it has). We are now just discussing how to dispose of the corpse.
🙂
cr
So the ethical concern is how long the meat is cooked, rather than the slaughter of sentient creatures for food? I guess I just don’t understand the moral compass of the liberals that crank out Huffpo.
Note that I am not a vegetarian, and am not suggesting that everyone should be. I just think that if we are bringing steak consumption into a discussion of a person’s character, then the main ethical issue would be whether it is appropriate to eat cows, rather than the appropriate duration that the flesh of the slaughtered animal is to be heated up, or whether the person uses steak sauce (so insulting to many chefs), etc.
Some we love, some we hate, some we eat*. The problem is in the overlap.
[*There is an interesting and recommended book with that very title, but I forgot the author.]
The thing is not about a steak, but about you and me: how well done tha Trump will roast us. Carbonised?