Hypocrisy: Fancy 'plant-based' restaurant in New York has secret 'meat room' for the elites
Leftist elites, appalled by the mass-market luxuries in America, are obsessed with making the hoi polloi give up. COVID's been a useful shibboleth for it — to force us to give up our freedom of movement and body integrity. Global warming works even better. Based on satisfying that ravenous god, they'd like us to give up our cars, airline flights, single-family housing, income (to government taxes), and...meat. They proclaim all of this to the deplorables as saving the planet, but in each case, they always partake on the side.
This brings us to a fancy New York restaurant called Eleven Madison Park, which recently converted to a vegetarian menu.
According to PageSix:
Just call it Eleven Madison Pork: It emerges the city's most exalted vegan restaurant has a secret meat room for the mega-rich.
This May chef Daniel Humm had announced with much flowery fanfare that his Eleven Madison Park restaurant would reopen in June from its pandemic closure with a fully plant-based vegan menu. But not just any meager meatless menu: It's 12 courses for $335. ...
However, it seems those principles are off the plate in the restaurant’s private dining room ... [which] comes complete with a meat-heavy menu that includes foie gras, beef tenderloin, roasted chicken and pork. ...
Page Six has exclusively obtained the private dining room menu, which features dishes such as the highly controversial foie gras, beef carpaccio and butter-poached lobster with black truffle and celery root.
Plus, there is pork seared with red cabbage and cocoa beans, roasted chicken and beef, scallop, halibut, trout and sturgeon, which is listed as endangered in some areas. Not to mention a series of local cheeses.
This compares mightily skeezily to Humm's previous preachy statements. Here's more of what he told the food snobs at the New York Times last May:
"It became very clear to me that our idea of what luxury is had to change," Mr. Humm said. "We couldn't go back to doing what we did before."
While the restaurant's ingredient costs will go down, labor costs will go up as Mr. Humm and his chefs work to make vegan food live up to Eleven Madison Park's reputation. "It's a labor intensive and time consuming process," he said.
This is an odd thing to say, given that the $335 price tag, despite the absence of meat, will stay.
Such preaching, though, is a trend, among haute restaurateurs and in the foodie press:
The Bay Area chef Dominique Crenn made all of her restaurants meat-free in 2019. In January, the Michelin Guide gave its first star to a fully vegan establishment in France, ONA, a restaurant near Bordeaux. In February, the chef Ann Kim opened her new Minneapolis restaurant, Sooki & Mimi, with a vegetable and masa-based tasting menu
Cooking publications and websites have made similar bets about diners' priorities. Last month, Epicurious, the popular cooking website, said it would not publish new beef recipes and had been phasing them out for over a year over concerns about climate change. Epicurious cited data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations that said 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock.
It's also a show trend at least, among politically connected elites.
Former president Obama, recall, featured this kind of "plant-based" food at his 60th birthday party on Martha's Vineyard last month, the maskless affair that coincided with an unprecedented outbreak of COVID among the locals in the aftermath. According to Bloomberg:
Guests at the scaled-back affair will be able to choose from items like Spam Musubi made with Impossible's faux-beef and faux-pork and Eat Just's plant-based eggs, according to menu plans viewed by Bloomberg News. Other offerings include Questlove's Cheesesteak Eggrolls, made with Impossible "beef" and "cheese sauce" from Perfect Day Inc., a Berkeley, California-based startup making dairy proteins without animals.
Vegan food is becoming increasingly popular as awareness of the impact of animal agriculture on the environment grows. The 2020 Golden Globes featured a vegan menu, as will the 2021 Met Gala, a major fashion-industry event, Bon Appetit reported this week. Eleven Madison Park in New York City, one of the most famous restaurants in the world, is now completely plant-based.
It's also being foisted on schools, as "Meatless Mondays" depriving kids of critical nutrition to satisfy the elites and their bows to the god of global warming. Here's this crap:
What we eat has both a short-term and long-term effect on the environment, so when it comes to combating climate change, an easy way to make a difference is with your food choices. Eating more sustainable foods and plant-based ingredients is one way to make an impact, but composting, reducing food waste, and supporting sustainable/vegetarian-forward restaurants can also indirectly lower your own carbon footprint.
In honor of climate week, we've compiled a list of easy actions that you can take this Monday to make a positive impact on the environment.
Adopt Meatless Monday
Well, this is an easy one. Plant-based nutrition contributes to healthy, sustainable food practices. Shifting to a more plant-based diet has the potential to help decrease agricultural land use by as much as 80 percent. Plus, it's good for your health. Incorporating Meatless Monday into your diet is easy, and it can be a fun way to experiment with new ingredients, cuisines, and cooking techniques. Encourage your friends, family, and colleagues to get involved and schedule some events or dinner parties around meatless eating.
It goes on and on — the elites are obsessed with taking away your meat. No more "chicken in every pot," which dates from the days of France's King Henry IV. Veggies and fake meat for you in all those pricy chemical concoctions disguised as meat. Or, if the United Nations has its way — you can eat bugs.
But then, there's always the "meat room" for the elites. Everyone pays the same price at Humm-bug's restaurant — but only the elites get actual meat. Got it? It's like private jets to global warming conferences, capisce?
This restaurant in all its hectoring hypocrisy is very much a favored one of the political elites.
According to Robb Report, they got the max on Joe Biden's COVID restaurant bailout relief, known as the American Rescue Plan, while others, mostly small fry, got nothing:
The RRF allowed individual locations to recoup up to $5 million worth of lost revenue in 2020 compared to 2019 and $10 million max for restaurant groups operating multiple locations. The Michelin three-star restaurants that received the max $5 million award were all from New York: Eleven Madison Park (operating under Birth of the Cool, LLC), Le Bernardin and Masa. Fellow NYC three-stars Per Se and Chef's Table at Brooklyn Fare did not receive grants.
Like every solution for the masses that the elites propose — whether of mask-wearing, lockdowns, being forced into tightly packed urban rabbit warrens with crowded COVID-spreading public transport, all powered by unreliable "renewable" energy, the actual value of the vegetarianism they propose is highly questionable.
According to Nutrition.org, a vegetarian lifestyle can be pretty unhealthy:
The observation that vegetarians are unhealthy may actually be evident. Most will argue that they have been deficient in iron, zinc, calcium and B vitamins since they have eliminated animal products, leading to anemia(2). Not to mention that most vegetarians are women who are prone to anemia due to menstruation. The fatigue that follows leads to the snowball effect of fatigue, decreased exercise and depression. The point is, diet has a strong influence on health and well-being and it is dangerously easy to eat incorrectly, even if one's intentions may be pure. This is seen in all "types" of eaters alike.
About five percent of the U.S. population is vegetarian, many for good reasons — those of Hindu and Jain faiths practice it, as did Mother Teresa in order to be in solidarity with the poor. Others are animal-lovers, such as my little niece, who loves horses, and the great conservative historian Paul Johnson. Good vegetarian food done right can be spectacular, but to live a vegetarian lifestyle requires careful attention so as to not become deficient in critical nutrients. The low-carb, meat-loving Atkins diet, for one, requires that half a dieter's plate consist of good green vegetables.
That's because human beings weren't really designed for it. We are omnivores; it's in our bone and teeth structure — and it turns out we need a bit of everything nutrition-wise to be healthy. What's more, our capitalist system, our good jobs, and free international trade permit this, making our lives much healthier in that we have access to healthy food if we choose it. The elitist bid to foist vegetarianism on the masses is nothing but a potentially and almost certainly unhealthy hoax designed to shame us into giving up our meat and, when that doesn't work, take it away by force.
But there's always the "meat room" for the elites.
Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.
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