October 24, 2004

• The link?
• America done a poo
• Dan - I wouldn't suggest anyone secede for culinary reasons. Help us out, here.
• Yes! The "North" should secede! In a culinary sense!
• But, Nick, we'd have to give up BBQ, Cajun cooking, southern fried chicken, chicken fried steak, grits, tacos, tamales, chile verde. There's a lot of stuff that fall into the "South", depending on how you slice it. And I say "we", but I live in mid-to-southern California, so would I have to give up bagels, New England clam chowder, and lobster rolls? This is very confusing.
• The culinary sense was purely rhetorical, of course. Think about it, one time. Suppose the North and the South each had separate presidents. This is in answer to Path.
• I think I might be speaking for the room when I say: huh?
• Dan: I think the confusion is that it appears your link didn't take (hover over the link text in your post and you'll see). Therefore, none of us have read the link, alas. Could you please try it again as an in-line link in this thread?
• The culinary sense was purely rhetorical, of course. Think about it, one time. Suppose the North and the South each had separate presidents. This is in answer to Path.
• Dan, there is no friggin' link!
• To the bone: The link you couldn't reach was to: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=53574 The quote in the link is from from David beriss: "A friend of mine recently wrote a letter to the editor in the New Orleans Times Picayune suggesting that it was time for the city to secede from the South and rejoin the Union. He was writing about something other than food (decadence, relatively speaking), but I wonder if the question might not be raised about cuisine as well. I noticed in the rather long discussion thread about what is good about the southeast a particular concern with what I take to be authenticity. In one of the last postings, in fact, Holly Moore pointed out that she is suspicious of non-Southern food (she cites Italian, Asian, French) in the South. She adds that the cuisine of the South is as dominant there as the cuisine of Italy in Italy. I think this is an interesting point, especially when seen from New Orleans. There can be no doubt that we have a dominant cuisine here, in the manner of Italy or France. But we also have variety within some very specific parameters. Creole Italian, for instance. And I think that one important defining characteristic of New Orleans cuisine is that can be sophisticated haute cuisine. It aspires to be more than a regional cuisine; following the French model, New Orleans cuisine aspires to be a world cuisine. It is both unique to New Orleans and universal in its effort to define certain tastes. So does that mean New Orleans is not really of the South? Do we leap right up to the level of the universal? I am being deliberately provocative, so feel free to let fly with corrections." The (equally provative?) "rhetorical" question (of mine) would base a spring board upon this man's shoulders, but at what cost? Your soul? Only your soul. P.S. I tried the link again and found it good. If you might be using Yahoo, or some such, go to File: open location. The Yahoo filter, for example, won't even opon my own web page unless this work around is used. On the other hand, the choice may be as simple as brats, Samual Adams lager and New England clam chowder, versus Lone Star beer and chili. What?
• If this was plastic, I'd be a karma whore.
• A link to a forum thread about New Orlans cuisine. And not exactly an A+ thread. Dan: you need to put it in an anchor tag, like this: <a href="http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=53574">An interesting thread about something or other</a>
• Dan, sweetie, if you can click on the supposed link in the initial post and reach a web site, you must be Dan the Magic Man. One of the nice things about "preview" is that you can check whether your link worked or not - and correct it if it didn't. Ok, I'll go read the one you provided later.
• Oh, and could you explain what the relevance of this is, in the grand scheme of things? It seems to me like some guy, who I have never heard of, on a forum nobody ever told me about, is arguing wheter New Orleans is, culinary-speaking, REALLY part of the South. I'd say that it's pretty obvious that New Orleans is different from other cities in the south. French Heritage and all that. Cajun, Creole, Zydeco, Mardi Gras, whatever. And it seems that Cajun/Creole cuisine is different from what is generally thought of as Souther Cuisine. And that outside New Orleans, it's not all that successful. So yes, there are big differences food-wise in the US. Bratwurst in Wisconsin, Tex-Mex, etc. But that's hardly news. And now you want to discuss secession because of Bush? WTF Dude. Hey, my post is almost as confused as your!
• To Richer: thanks, I'll study some more. But in the grand scheme of things, we're all just monkeys, right? In it for fun, no? But I'll also admit that I should stick to strictly discussing the posted link, right? I liked it, but I may have gone astray because I had hoped to elicit some sort of horrible political or apolitical (what's the difference?) commentary. Sorry. Confused is a watch word with me.
• Dan: I am the kind of user Metafilter warned us about.
• Cool... I was tickled how people just started chatting up the subject even when the FPP included no link. I've always thought of cuisine as more of a regional thing than a North vs. South dichotomy.
• This is very strange post.
• We must have more links to URLs originating within other space-time continuums. Made for something different.
• Join the Friends of the Secession.
• A detailed description of the true nature of God
• This is one of the funniest threads I've seen in a while. I thought this was going to be about Cascadia, but it was much better. Keep 'em coming, Dan Folkus!