It was 1 a.m., and I was sipping from the ever-full pitcher of That '70s Show, but then a commercial came on that by some bit of late-night laziness I didn't mute:

"Scott, I want you to do something."

"Not doing that again. Got burned."

What!? My cultural gaydar  -- infinitely more accurate than my personal one, and we won't go there -- started the beat beat beat of its tom-tom. Then as I watched, my socks, which were still on, got knocked off, and you will see why when you click on the ad above. Here's the spot's soft-porn dialogue (which I painstakingly copied, but then found already typed on the Seattle food blog The C Is for Cocina, one of two that also picked this up):

Toaster: Scott, I want you to do something.
Scott: Not doing that again. Got burned.
Toaster: We both enjoyed that. Now I want you to introduce my greatest creation: the new Toasty Torpedo.
Scott: The new Toasty Torpedo?
Toaster: Yes, Scott. You make one.
Scott: Me?
Toaster: Put it in me, Scott. It's over a foot of flavor on a slim, sleek ciabatta for only four dollars. Say it, Scott.
Scott: Only four dollars?
Toaster: Say it sexy.
Scott: Only four dollars.
Toaster: Sexier...
Scott (sexy voice): Only four dollars. 

Put it in me, Scott?

My oh my. Beam me up, Scottie!

Nitro Group's Quiznos ads are often what was once called "edgy"; you may remember the lady who devoured the $5 bill. Here, though, we've crossed a more significant line. The oven's Hal voice takes the neurotic, ultimately evil homo vibe between that pre-Stonewall male mainframe and cosmic trade Keir Dullea and inverts it to effective popcult humor without a shred of nasty effeminizing or butch Superbowl payback. 

Of course, queer progress is hard to come by, or even measure. Just yesterday, the governor of Vermont said that he would veto any gay-marriage bill brought to his desk -- let's hope the lame duck is overridden. Yet some of the most optimistic evidence that bigotry is going down can be found not in the courts or even on the streets, but in the common language of commerce.

Now, should I do my duty and buy a Torpedo sub? It's only four bucks, which is less than two new New York subway fares (if that obscene increase goes through). 

Let me see who's selling them....

I thought this was old news. The link to the report from Deutsche Welle I'm adding here is dated March 10. But the story hasn't been widely seen.

In short, a frozen product called "Obama Fingers" has appeared in German freezer cases: just pieces of fried chicken (with curry sauce, yikes). When asked if anyone was aware that a racial, uh, problem arises when you link an African American "brand," even a presidential one, to a fried-chicken product, the Fingers spokeswoman basically shrugged her shoulders and said, "Warum?"

We Germans don't pay attention to such things.

Now, it could be that such non-culinary distractions are easy to overlook -- if you believe that food doesn't have meaning. But it does.There's no such thing as value-neutral food. Food and race, for example, go together like ... rice and beans, gefilte fish and horseradish?

"They could have made a full Obama Finger dinner if they added Wassermelone, lol." 

It's not exactly a secret that blacks have borne the brunt of Aunt Jemima Uncle Ben advertising as well as wildly racist food "humor" for decades and decades -- you may know what "alligator bait" is. And that hasn't been limited to the U.S.: guess what some folks call Cadbury bars (phrase starts with an N).

Nasty fingers will poke everywhere, so it's smart to poke back.

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I was fascinated with his "nicotine-stained" fingers -- that's what everyone called them then, even though the chemical is colorless -- as he plucked saltines one by one from the box and crumbled them into the soup. Campbell's Chicken Gumbo, Beef Noodle, or Cream of Anything, made no difference, in they went.

At my childhood table, we never knew from croutons; those were French, and even though she was born in the Bordeaux region (she never said exactly where), my mother treated all recipes from her native country -- even a sordid ladies-magazine soupe gratinee a l'oignon on which you threw toasted Wonder Bread and rubbery scrapings of Velveeta -- as if they had dropped from Mars.

She also disliked her husband's way with crackers. I can't recall that I ever saw Mom eat plain saltines. A Ritz cracker, sure, if something had been spread upon it. She set her sights higher.

Crackertime

As dream homes become vacant nightmares, and every month twice the population of Cincinnati joins the nation's unemployed, in this period of upper- and lower-case depression, I have started to eat saltines again.

It's not just because they're affordable. They can be found for about $1.50 to $3 a pound, which is a penny to two cents per cracker. Eating pennies, pennies you find in the street. But if you scout a market and look at prices in a per-pound and not per-item way, you'd be surprised at the cheapness of corporate chicken or factory pork compared to ordinary celery or all-natural potato chips. Saltines on one side of the scale balance pork chops on the other. That's agribusiness justice.

Oops, I fell into the ever-growing Slow Food hole. It'll take me a second to crawl out.

The Saltine Paradox

What do saltines mean? I'd like to suggest that they embrace a paradox, simultaneously signifying poverty on the one hand, and succor and comfort on the other. These routine crackers are often given to the queasy, the sick, sometimes paired with inoffensive broth. I don't find them bland, though. In fact, saltines possess a powerful identity: an assembly-line look, a pick-me-up size, then a slight sandpaper feel on one side -- do you eat yours salt up or salt down? -- with a crunch that surrenders immediately to saliva.

That is when the actual flavor appears, and also when the saltine promise collapses. What you now taste is the zeroness of "enriched" wheat flour, chemistry-set soda, and mollifying corn syrup. The saltine is a simple, dead thing. In 2004, organic saltines hit the shelves, the very idea of which shoots itself in the culinary foot.

It is claimed that crackers were invented in 1792 by a Massachusetts citizen named John Pearson. He used flour and water only and called the durable result not matzo but "pilot bread." The shipboard treat was then upped by another Bay Stater when Josiah Bent burnt some biscuits till they "cracked" -- invention-myth date 1801 --  and began marketing "water biscuits." His company sold "hardtack" during the Civil War, and its remnant brand still offers the stuff, plus the "common cracker" and "water cracker," to fussy battlefield reenactors and those curious souls who wonder what exactly their forebears had to swallow.

Saltines, originally called soda crackers, came later in the century and are leavened. First sold loose in barrels, they took off when packaged and distributed in decorated tins and paper cartons, becoming at once an early mass-produced unit of consumption and their own symbol or sign. Those perforated squares -- so many of them baked by the National Biscuit Company, later Nabisco -- were little Model Ts of American food.

Depression Tales

My long-deceased father takes control of my hands in front of a bowl of chili; I resist him over soup. As a boy, I asked him why he did what he did with saltines, and here's what he said:

You know, in the '30s, some luncheonettes and diners used to give out free saltines if you ordered something. They weren't wrapped in packets, they were piled in bowls on the counter.

 

Were they dirty?

 

How, dirty? Crackers don't get dirty. But you had to pay for something in order to take them. So your uncle Jack and I would sit down and ask for one, just one, of the cheapest possible things on the board: pea soup, maybe baked beans. Then we would grab as many saltines as we could and keep crumbling them in, stirring, passing the spoon back and forth and eating, crumbling, sneaking saltines into our pockets as we did. We got caught a few times, but there were always plenty of other places to go.

 

We had to be careful not to smash our jackets, or there'd be nothing but crumbs when we got home. But we'd dig into the pockets and eat the crumbs.

 

 

Oooo.

We were no doubt imagining how the red clot floated around before it was stirred.

Can we make some now?

At that, our father didn't say anything, but put on an odd expression, got up from the table, and went outside.

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